Flowers From Berlin

TWELVE

In the county of Wiltshire, it was the coldest, rainiest summer since 1912. The rain was implacable when Laura arrived at the Salisbury railway terminal and it only heightened when she boarded the public omnibus that took her out to Friars Lane, where her father still resided.

With the rain there was the dense creeping, crawling smoky ground fog that engulfed lorries and automobiles, pedestrians, dogs in the street, the spire of the cathedral, entire sections of the town, and, for that matter, most of Salisbury itself. July of 1939 set hardly an auspicious mood for Laura's homecoming.

She disembarked from the bus at the end of its line. She felt the swamp beneath her feet as she walked past the modest detached houses, each with its own small garden before it, until she came to Friars Lane. She passed a small thatched cottage in which two sisters, Joelle and Pauline Markham, had resided alone since Laura's girlhood. The doddering Markham sisters were elderly when Laura was young and, as she spotted them through their paned windows, seemed equally elderly now. Minutes later Laura arrived before the iron gate that she had envisioned so many times over the last year. Oddly, it was ajar. There was no sign and no name: the occupant had a penchant for both privacy and anonymity. Then Laura was before the large front door. The dark blue paint was peeling. Soaking, she sounded the bell.

Nigel Worthington came to the door himself, opened it, and asked, "Yes?" Then recognition was upon him. He gave a start and almost jumped, seeing a ghost of his late Victoria.

"Papa!" Laura said, her beautiful face radiant with a smile.

"Oh, my God! My angel!" he exclaimed, holding open his seventy-year-old arms.

They embraced and he lifted her off the ground. It was only moments later when he felt her tremble slightly with what seemed to be a sob, and when he did not see her husband, that he knew something was very wrong.

The lines in Nigel Worthington's face had furrowed more deeply since Laura had last seen him, and he made his way around the house and his office with a mildly arthritic limp.

But the three-story house was rich with memories, almost all of them of youth and happiness; so Laura's spirits were greatly buoyed in her first days home. She saw an old friend or two and wore a brave face in public. She visited the antiquarian bookshops-Stennett's and Forsythe's-in Greencroft Street near the cathedral and she spent countless nostalgic hours rummaging through the print and map shops in High Street.

In the afternoons, when the heavens abated the downpour for a few hours, she often stopped by Lumly's Tea Room, a shop with the eternally steamy front window facing Gravesend Place, and consumed jasmine or Irish tea. Very occasionally, she indulged her lingering girlhood passion for Mrs. Lumly's very own home-baked shortbread. From time to time, she thought of her collapsed marriage.

But as the days passed, the specter of Stephen Fowler haunted her. Was his coldness his way of telling her that he did not-could not-love her anymore? What had happened to the joyous life of the young newlyweds in New Haven, the divinity student and his wife who had entertained mirthfully, explored the celebration of foliage in the autumn, and attended at least one new musical and one new drama each season in New York?

Where did it fail? And why? The answers were in neither the jasmine nor the Irish tea leaves.

It was all cruelly unjust, yet bitterly ironic. Laura had turned down a man, Edward Shawcross, whom she surely could have learned to love, for a man who from all evidence already did. Where one love could have flourished and grown, the other had asphyxiated itself. It was confounding.

Once Laura went to a public call box, pumped a king's ransom in six-pence and shilling pieces into the machine, and dialed the number of Edward Shawcross in Bristol. She heard him answer. She heard Edward say "Hello" and "Are you there?" three times in his brisk, highly expectant manner. But something caught in Laura's throat. She hung up and did not call back.

She walked home from the center of town and the rains momentarily had mercy upon her. At home, she cheerfully did her father's laundry and mended the pipe burns in two of his favorite cashmere pullovers. She sorted out his sock drawer, stitched some upholstery that had worn thin, and, in effect, mastered all the simple household tasks that escape the humble capabilities of any man living alone. In the evenings, Laura read or played the piano and her father smoked his pipe and contemplated the evening's programming on the BBC. For ten full days, they stayed carefully away from any serious discussions.

Then Nigel Worthington confronted his daughter's moods. When she pulled the cover over the piano keyboard one evening, having done reasonable justice to a brooding sonata by Franz Liszt, she saw that her father stood in the doorway to the music room. He had probably been there for several minutes, she realized, inclined against the doorframe, puffing his pipe, and watching her with unconcealed affection and admiration.

"I didn't know you were there," she said.

He gently exhaled a long, disintegrating cloud of smoke. "Whenever you're ready to talk about it," he suggested, "I'm ready to listen."

Laura's gaze traveled slowly through the room. "Stephen doesn't love me anymore," she said. Her voice was unwavering. She had rehearsed the line for many days. "In certain respects," she added, "I suspect he never did."

"I cannot believe that, Laura," Nigel Worthington answered.

"Neither can I," she said soberly. And then, over port from 11 P.M. until two in the morning, she went through the whole story.

*

For the next two weeks, Laura behaved much in the way that she had in the months after her mother's death. She spent a great deal of time concentrating on little things: tuning the A above high C on the antique piano and seeing that all the edges of the windowpanes in her father's study were freshly caulked for winter. Outside, she pulled up the tiny weeds that grew between the flagstones, and one afternoon she put a ladder to the side of the house and removed from the eaves the empty rooks' nest that had hung there all summer.

Her walks in Salisbury took on a strikingly aimless quality. She ignored some of her favorite shops and eschewed her favorite table by the steamy front window of Lumley's. She still took occasional jasmine tea, but only in tea rooms where she was not known. And more of her hours were spent on the bench in the public square before the cathedral or even out on the plain itself where, wearing a bulky French impermeable against the rain -- which was incessant -- a heavy tweed sweater against the wind, and boots against the mud, she strolled for the better part of many afternoons.

She cut a solitary figure with a walking stick. Sometimes she was slightly bent, as if the weight of some ponderous emotion hung invisibly upon her. From a distance, she appeared to be a woman of twice or even three times her age.

In the home, there was little mystery. Nigel Worthington knew the sadness of a young woman resigned to falling out of love. He came to her one evening in the parlor and set a firm hand on her shoulder as she buried herself in a newly published volume of T. S. Eliot.

She looked upward from her reading and searched his eyes. Then her hand drifted to his.

"You know, Laura," he said, "the door to this house is always open to you. But you've a husband and a life somewhere else."

"Do I?” she asked.

Nigel Worthington nodded. "You did once. You will again. A man doesn't fall out of love quite so quickly. Not if there was anything there in the first place."

"Papa," she said. "I don't know if there ever was anything."

"Only one way to know for certain, Laura."

Laura was crying quietly now. She avoided her father's gaze, the tears trickling down her rain- and wind-reddened cheeks.

"Go back to Stephen," her father said. "Try to find what was there. Build on it."

Her grasp tightened on her father's hand.

"Do you think a good marriage doesn't take dedication and work?" he asked. "Do you think it just happens? Do you think your mother and I never had a bad moment?"

"I don't know."

"I do," he insisted. "A marriage is something two people build. I want you to go home and try to make it work again. If Stephen Fowler is such a bullheaded, insensitive, stupid young man, then you'll find someone else. But try to repair what you have before you look for something new."

The tears were steadier now. She knew her father, as usual, spoke both from reason and experience.

"Is your doddering old Papa making any sense?" he asked.

She nodded, not speaking for fear that her voice would break. Then, in one motion, she was standing and reaching for him, hugging him as if she would never let him get away. And Dr. Worthington was patting his grown daughter on her shoulders and along the back of her head. He embraced her, saying inconsequential things like, "There, there, my dear," and he let the affection pour out with her tears.

"I love you, Papa," she said.

"I love you, too, angel," he answered.

Although it went unspoken, this was one of those moments in life that was comprised of more emotion than could be fully lived. It occurred to Laura that men like her father did not exist within her own generation. And it further occurred to Dr. Worthington that a young man like Fowler who could cause such misery to such a lovely young lady must be carrying something very small and mean at his core, rather than Christian theology.

But then, just as quickly as the thought had been upon him, Worthington dismissed it. He had after all met Laura's husband upon several occasions, knew the young man's family, and instinctively had liked him. Why else would he send his only daughter back to him?

"There's one other item to discuss," Nigel Worthington said at length. "I haven't brought it up until now. I didn't think the time was right."

Laura waited.

"Peter Whiteside insists upon seeing you," he said. "Says it's vitally important."

Laura drew a long sigh. "Tell him," she answered, "that he knows where he can find me."

*

Thirty-six hundred miles away, in the county and city of Baltimore, there was general consternation at the F.B.I.'s local outpost. Cochrane's recall papers to Washington had landed with a loud thump. Idle gossip concerning Bureau affairs was definitely against handbook regulations: an employee would have to be mad to murmur even the slightest syllable of hearsay. So naturally, rumors abounded madly concerning why Cochrane, formerly the Bureau's number one leper, had been summoned to grace by none other than the Chief himself. Such drastic turnabouts were never without reason.

The clerical employees held that Cochrane had once been involved in a dodgy operation in New York in which the give and take with local racketeers had included a little too much of both on Bill Cochrane's part. He was subsequently returning to Washington to face a federal indictment.

Among the field agents, however, an entirely different account was common currency. There was a major scandal brewing at Treasury, the stories maintained, and Cochrane was being called in to blow the Democrats out of the White House in November of 1940. What the Roosevelt administration lacked most with an election year coming, the Republican field agents suggested hopefully, was a good Teapot Dome-style scandal, complete with soiled money and soiled laundry. Cochrane eventually heard both rumors and broke out laughing at each. Meanwhile, he spent three days turning over his own investigative work-in-progress to two younger agents.

Late on his final evening in Maryland, Bill Cochrane had two suitcases jammed shut and a third one, nearing completion, on his bed. He had packed the clothing and personal articles he would need on his extended transfer back to the home office. Just before closing the third, his eye settled upon the picture of Heather that rested in its frame on his night table. It was August again, almost the twentieth. Bill Cochrane's nerves were always steadier after the anniversary of the accident. Each August, more times that he cared to admit, he saw the fuel truck jumping the divider on a dark Tennessee highway. And then there was always the sound and moment of impact…

It was all in the past now, more distant with each day. When she had died, he had been a simple banker.

Fragments of fantasy conversation came to mind as Heather listened:

I've begun a new career. They sent me to Berlin… There is another war coming. I think we will all be in it…

I've missed you horribly sometimes… but I'm trying to live my life again…

Perhaps all those things, not necessarily in that order. His eyes drifted from the photograph.

He was tired and tried to sleep. Rest, however, came with considerable difficulty.