They told him what they’d found there and that they planned to visit other camps. They would make a quick assessment, then begin the process of contacting and organizing this army of the dispossessed.
Their report was quite thorough, Danforth thought, but as they gave it, it seemed to him that Anna was unsettled, like water slowly beginning to simmer. In the early days of her training, she had viewed the prospect of living undercover, perhaps for a very extended period, as an integral part of the Project. But since Gurs, she’d seemed uneasy and perhaps even anxious; Danforth felt she was now running on a different, and more rapid, timetable than he or Clayton, and this he found disturbing. Surely at this point, the Project required patience.
“All right,” Clayton said at the end of their briefing. “So we will move forward according to plan.” He took a long draw on the cigarette, then snapped up the menu with what struck Danforth as his old, youthful energy. “For your information, my dear friends, the Savoy is said to have the best steak Diane in London.”
There was no more talk of spies and conspiracies, of hundreds who might be sacrificed in the east, and anyone watching the three of them for the remainder of that evening would have seen nothing beyond friends enjoying themselves. Clayton spoke of his new job in London; he was working at the British Museum, a post he had gotten on his own merit, he said, rather than through his family’s name or money, a feat of which he seemed quite proud. He had always had it easy, he said, and so had yearned for what he called “some hard slogging” through which he might prove himself.
During it all, Anna seemed guarded. She watched Clayton as if she were unsure he was the man he seemed to be, and the attitude caused Danforth to wonder if his earlier sense that everyone’s trust had been renewed had been premature.
It was a look that urged Danforth to feel the same, and so after Anna went up to her room, he suggested that he and Clayton have drinks at the bar. Clayton immediately agreed, and for the next two hours Danforth tried to get Clayton drunk without getting drunk himself. Clayton had ultimately noticed that Danforth wasn’t holding up his end, however, and he had stopped drinking.
Was that suspicious? Danforth asked himself. Was it suspicious, or was Clayton just a man who didn’t want to get sloshed while his friend was quite obviously staying sober?
Danforth didn’t know, and thought he would never know, and so at around midnight he returned to his room, slept the sleep of wolves, and the next morning had breakfast in the stately hotel dining room and then took a stroll around London that took him to Trafalgar Square, then across it and down Whitehall all the way to Parliament, a route he would take many times in the years to come, always with an eye to encountering something that might shed light on the mystery that both illuminated and darkened the middle years of his life, a time when, as he later reminded himself, he might have been making money and establishing a family, as Clayton had.
Back at the hotel around noon, he went directly to Anna’s room.
She opened the door to him; she’d just showered, and her body was wrapped in a loose-fitting robe, her hair in a towel.
“Tom, come in.”
She padded barefoot across the floor to the bathroom, and Danforth suddenly imagined her dangling those same feet off the side of an iron bed at Ellis Island, and with that thought, he felt something tragic at the heart of things, that life was dark and entangling, everyone struggling helplessly in its invisible web.
“When are we going back to Paris?” Anna called from behind her bathroom door.
“Whenever you want,” Danforth answered.
“Tomorrow then,” Anna said.
A moment passed before the door opened and she came out, dressed in a white blouse and long black skirt, into the tiny living room.
“You look . . . beautiful,” he said.
She glanced away, almost shyly, as if this were a remark to which she could find no way to respond. “Did you have lunch?”
“No,” Danforth said. “Shall we go down?”
She shook her head. “No, let’s eat here.”
With that she retrieved a bag from a nearby table.
“There was a little market,” she said. “I bought some things.”
They were modest, the items she’d purchased: a loaf of bread, some local cheese, a few squares of chocolate whose sweetness he would — along with a thousand other sensations ineffably joined with her —all his life remember.
While he ate he spoke of his long walk through London, the bookstalls of Charing Cross, the whirling traffic of Trafalgar. She had clearly made no effort to see the city, and he wondered why this was, and even suggested that they remain a day or two in London before returning to France.
“No,” she said, “I’ll go back tomorrow.”
She clearly meant that she would do this with or without Danforth, and because of that, he felt himself at a remove from any possibility of her affection; he was a man who had a specific purpose and who was, beyond that purpose, expendable.
“Then we’ll leave for Dover tomorrow,” he said.
Which they did, then crossed the Channel on a peaceful sea. On the crossing, Danforth thought of the Spanish armada, and spoke of it to Anna, how the grand ambitions of a Spanish king had sunk beneath these very waves. From this observation, he had gone on to wonder if Germany might one day hazard such a crossing and perhaps, luckily for the British, meet the same fate.
She had listened to all of this attentively, and he finally decided that she did not consider him pedantic, as Cecilia probably had, though she’d made a valiant effort to conceal it.
Still he said, “I’m going on. You should stop me.”
“I would if I wanted to,” she told him, then asked if he’d ever heard of the Divine Wind.
