courtyard with Brenda.
Bob didn’t have the guidebook. “I thought you had it.”
“No, I gave it to you, remember? Right before we left the hotel?” she said, but after digging some more, she found it and got it open to the section on Oxford, and he showed her where the museum was and went back to the steps. Just in time to see the business-suited woman disappear up them and inside, which meant the doors must be open. But when he tried them, they were still locked, and there were still no cars pulling in to the car park. And it was beginning to rain.
He turned his collar up and ducked under the cover of the doorway, and Brenda came scampering up the steps, holding the guidebook open over her head, her husband behind her, saying, “I told you we needed to bring an umbrella.”
“I can’t get used to how much it rains here, Calvin,” Brenda said. “It said on the sign down by the anti-aircraft gun that it had been in Kensington Gardens. That’s not the same Kensington Gardens where they have the Peter Pan statue, is it?”
“Yes, it is,” he said.
“Oh, I want to go there. I love Peter Pan,” she said, and began leafing through the guidebook again. “And to the house where Barrie lived as a child in Scotland.”
“We’re only here for ten days,” Bob said, “not six months.”
“Oh, I know, it’s just that there are so many things I’m dying to see. There just isn’t enough time.”
You’re right, Calvin thought, looking at the door. There isn’t.
“Is that the museum schedule?” Bob asked, pointing at the brochure he was holding.
“Yes.” He handed it to him, and he and Brenda pored over it.
“ ‘The Battle of Britain’ looks good,” she said. “Oh, dear, it doesn’t open till July first. We won’t be here. ‘The Secret That Won the War,’ ” she read aloud.
“What’s that one about?”
“I don’t know,” Bob said impatiently.
“I believe it’s about Ultra and Bletchley Park,” Calvin said.
“Ultra?”
“The secret project to decode the Nazis’ coded messages,” he said.
“Oh.” Brenda turned to her husband. “I thought you said the American forces were what won the war.”
Bob had the good grace to look embarrassed.
“There were all kinds of things that won the war,” Bob said. “Radar and the atom bomb and Hitler’s deciding to invade Russia—”
“And the evacuation from Dunkirk,” Calvin said, “and the Battle of Britain, and the way Londoners stood up to the Blitz—”
Brenda beamed at him. “You’re obviously as big a fan of World War Two as my husband is.”
A fan. Of World War II. “Actually, I’m a journalist,” he said. “I’m here to cover the opening of the Blitz exhibit.”
“Really?” she said. “Our daughter Stephanie teaches journalism. You’d be perfect for each other. Are you married?”
“Brenda,” her husband said. “It’s none of our business—”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said. “Are you?”
He shook his head.
“Girlfriend?”
“Not yet.”
“You see?” she said, turning triumphantly to her husband and then back to him. “How old are you? Thirty?”
“Brenda! This young man is not interested in—”
“Stephanie’s twenty-six,” she said. “She teaches at—”
“Let’s go look at the tank,” Bob said, and took her arm.
“It’s raining—” she began.
“It’s stopped,” Bob said firmly.
“Oh, all right,” she said, starting down the steps, and then said to Calvin, “Would you mind taking our picture in front of the tank?”
She handed him her camera, and he went down with them and took their picture in front of the anti-aircraft gun and the boat. “The Lily Maid,” she said. “It’s not a very warlike name, is it?”
“They didn’t know they were going into a war,” Bob said impatiently. “Did they, Calvin?”
No, he thought. They didn’t know they were going into a war.
We didn’t know where we were going, so we just scribbled little notes and flung them out at stations as we passed.
—SERGEANT MAJOR MARTIN MCLANE,
