Pantheon

Chapter Fourteen

London

She had turned her back on him now, the clear signal that at last she was sated. He looked closely at her skin, paler than he was used to in the American girls he had had. Not that she was a girl; twenty years too late for that. Lady was not quite right either, though that would be the word most would use for the wife of an eminent Tory MP. But during the last hour and a half she had behaved like the most outlandish whore.

Taylor Hastings let his eye rest on a dark spot beneath her right shoulder blade. What was that? A birthmark? A mole? A beauty spot? It was far from the only one. In fact, now that he looked closely, there were little imperfections all over. The skin on her arms was not taut; the traces of past pregnancies were visible on her hips and thighs. Very different to the young flesh he was used to. And yet he didn’t mind. The opposite: her age excited him, somehow confirming with every caress that he was sleeping with another man’s wife.

She was breathing heavily now, falling into a deep, exhausted sleep. She had tired his body, as always, but she had not been able to still his mind. The dinner had ended more than three hours ago but the thrill of it remained fresh.

Back in the States they always liked to talk about big names and he had grown up among plenty of them at St Albans and Princeton. But no names as big as this. He smiled at the thought of who had steered the evening’s conversation, acting as informal chairman: only the fifth Duke of Wellington! How do you like that, Pa? That beats the Deputy Undersecretary of State for Near-East Paperclips?

He had sat next to a Lord Redesdale, father of the famous Mitford girls. ‘You ought to meet my daughter,’ he had said to Taylor within minutes of shaking hands. ‘Not Decca, she’s mad of course. Red as a bullfighter’s cape. But Diana. She’s sound.’

He had counted several other lords — though, he had learned tonight, you were meant to call them ‘peers’. There was a Galloway and an Agnew, though he suspected one of them was a ‘sir’. Or rather a knight.

Who cared if it was confusing? It was magnificent. Such lustre gathered in one room: newspaper writers and publishers of pamphlets trading ideas with aristocrats and eminent industrialists. This, Taylor reflected, must be how a London salon in the eighteenth century would have been: men of stature seated around a fine polished table, the room heavy with wealth and pedigree.

But not, Taylor Hastings noticed, confidence. Anna’s husband, Reginald Rawls Murray, member of parliament for some far-off part of Scotland and animating genius behind the Right Club, was energetic in his efforts to lift the spirits, but the faces gathered around him remained stubbornly sombre.

‘Churchill has us on the run,’ was a remark offered more than once. The arrival of the new prime minister and the departure of Chamberlain, humiliated over the failure in Norway, represented a grievous, perhaps terminal blow to their cause: the campaign for what they called ‘an honourable, negotiated peace’. Now the nation’s leading warmonger was in Downing Street, seizing on Hitler’s march through the Low Countries and recent conquest of France as proof positive of what he had said all along: that Germany was intent on global domination and could not be appeased, only defeated.

But Churchill’s threat was much more direct than that. He had wasted no time in rounding up and jailing suspected Nazi sympathizers under the dreaded Defence Regulation 18B, a move which had badly depleted the ranks of the Right Club. Around the table tonight were those whose status and rank made them harder fish to catch or who had been careful to present themselves as ‘anti-war’ rather than ‘pro-Hitler’. But tonight, in private and among friends, there had been no such need to conceal their true views.

Murray had set the tone early enough when, in a bid to lighten the mood, he had asked the assembled to join him in a chorus of the country’s much-loved, if unofficial, national anthem. He began humming the tune of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, but then, when it came time to sing, he bade the table hush while he could present his new, alternative lyric: ‘ Land of dope and Jewry Land that once was free All the Jew boys praise thee Whilst they plunder thee.’

There had been a roar of approval and a banging on the table, spreading a wide smile across Murray’s face. Encouraged, he went on: ‘ Land of Jewish finance Fooled by Jewish lies In press and books and movies While our birthright dies.’

That, though, was one of the few moments of good cheer. The consensus that night held that the Jews had won yet again, dragging the country into war — and that to suggest seeking peace while Churchill was hailing the country’s ‘finest hour’ and speaking of a ‘Battle of Britain’ was doomed, if not suicidal. The phoney war was over; the real war was on in earnest. To stand against it now was to be branded a traitor.

All of which contributed to a gloomy mood in the Russian Tea Room. Murray was the only man present who remained both jolly and overt in the expression of his views, confident both that the room contained only those who could be trusted and that the privilege of his seat in parliament would protect him from the loathsome Regulation 18B.

The rest threw out various general observations of disgust and despair. ‘For years, all that we value has been in peril,’ said one man with a title, who might have been an earl or a viscount, a word which Taylor remembered came with a silent ‘s’, but whose suit looked surprisingly shabby. He rattled off the list: the Empire, Christian beliefs, England as the land of freeborn Englishmen and of freeborn Englishmen alone. ‘All of that has long been under threat — from the Bolsheviks, from foreigners, from the masters of international finance.’ The last phrase delivered with a knowing look. ‘But this war will destroy it, once and for all.’

Why, then, had none of this gloominess infected him, Taylor wondered now, as the bedside clock nudged towards three in the morning. Partly it was the childish thrill of a young man allowed to sit at the grown-ups’ table: he had been decades younger than everyone else there. Partly it was the secret knowledge that, after the food and wine, he would be savouring the host’s wife, thanks to Murray’s midweek habit of staying overnight at his club.

But mainly it was a vague sense, one not fully formed until he articulated it now, that he was somehow immune from the pessimism around the table. He had great sympathy for these Brits; but he was an American and in America the game was all still to play for. In the US, unlike Britain, it was not yet — to use the two words that had come up again and again over dinner — too late.

Taylor shifted to a cooler patch of the bed, taking care to move stealthily so that Anna would not stir, wondering for a passing moment if Murray himself had ever done to his wife what Taylor had just done — wondering indeed if Murray had ever even slept in this bed. There certainly seemed to be a separate, gentleman’s bedroom on the other side of the landing. Maybe it was simply a condition of being an American that made him more upbeat than his fellow diners this evening. Wasn’t that what set most Americans, certainly those his age, apart from their British cousins: that sense that their best days were ahead, not behind them?

No, it was more personal than that. In the end, Taylor had been in a good mood when all around him were down in the mouth because he had the growing feeling — almost a premonition — that he was about to play a part in events of great import.

It had been budding even as he had slicked the brilliantine through his hair at Cadogan Square, this sense of imminence, but it had been confirmed by Murray several times through the evening. At intervals, the old man had winked in Taylor’s direction, sometimes offering opaque asides: ‘Not the same for you though, eh, Hastings?’ or ‘You’re in a rather different boat, wouldn’t you say?’ By the time the waiters cleared away the main course — beef in a gravy more luxurious than the thin brown liquid served up at these so-called British Restaurants around town — Murray had left no doubt in the mind of anyone in the room that he had seen something in young Taylor Hastings. This dinner was only their second meeting, the first being that introductory tea at the Savoy with Anna, and yet Murray was treating him like a trusted confidant. Once the room was clear of serving staff, the MP had tapped his glass with the side of a dessert spoon.

‘I hope you’ve all had a splendid dinner,’ Murray began, to a murmur of approval around the table. ‘As you know, we’ve already welcomed our guest, Taylor Hastings from the colonies.’ A polite smile from the American. ‘But I know you will agree with me in saying that we strongly hope young Mr Hastings will be more than a guest in our country and more than a guest in our cause.’ A couple of ‘hear, hears’, including, Taylor was glad to note, from the Duke of Wellington.

‘So, for that reason, it is my great honour to present Mr Hastings with membership of our little society. In accepting it, he joins us in the first rank of those fighting for England. For the real England, that is. And against the real enemy. Not our fellow Aryan, the great nation of Germany, but the race which has been at war with Christendom from the very beginning. So let me present Mr Hastings with the crest that marks him as a valued member of the Right Club.’

There was applause as Taylor rose from his chair and walked the three or four paces to where Murray stood waiting to greet him. The MP gave him a strong handshake and then passed him a metal badge.

Hastings looked at the dulled silver brooch. It showed an eagle killing a snake, beside two capital letters: ‘PJ’.

‘Who’s PJ?’ Taylor asked, without thinking.

‘My good fellow, you surely know the motto of the Right Club, conveying our purpose in its pithiest form. PJ stands for “Perish Judah”.’

Chapter Fifteen My darling Florence, I feel as if I am writing into a void. I know you are in America, I know you are at Yale. And yet I have no idea of your situation, of where or how you are living. The last time I knew this sensation was four years ago when I had been rash and stupid and knew only that you were in Berlin. Your decision was right then, though it took me some time to see it. I understand why you could not be straight and truthful with me then: we had only just met. But now we are man and wife and yet you still felt able to deceive me. It may be like Berlin again: that, in the end, I will see that you were right and I was wrong. But that is not how it feels at present. Not least because in Berlin it was only our romance — our fledgling romance, you might say — that was at stake. Now there is a child involved. Your child, yes. But mine too…

James screwed the piece of paper into a tight paper ball and put it in his pocket, to join the other letters to Florence he had drafted and aborted. Too angry, even if the anger was controlled. He wanted her back, didn’t he? Well, letters like that would never do the trick. He dashed off something shorter and simpler, telling Florence that he was looking for her and that he would not rest until they were back together, once again addressing the envelope ‘care of Yale University’, just as he had countless times before, whether from the dockside at Liverpool, the harbour at Quebec or Penn Station in New York City.

‘New Haven, New Haven! Next stop, New Haven.’

It was the third time the guard had marched through the carriage making that announcement in the last twenty minutes. James was ready, his bag packed and above his head. He took another look out of the window, taking in the American countryside. In the several days he had spent on trains, hopping from Quebec to Montreal to Boston and now, at last, New Haven, he had alternated between two conflicting impressions. Most often he was struck by the vastness, the sheer scale of North America, where everything was wider and taller than in little England. He was used to the odd grand old man of a tree — there was one in his college quad, after all — but here you could pass whole forests of thick-trunked trees, majestically scraping the sky. The clouds themselves seemed to loom larger in skies that stretched further to the north, east and west. In America, God seemed to paint on a bigger canvas.

And then, less often, would come an unexpected jolt of familiarity. Perhaps it was his expectations that were at fault. With some shame he realized that he had pictured a land of deserts, cactuses, saloon bars and fighting Indians, as you would see at the pictures. But in Boston there had been elegant buildings in solid grey stone that would have sat comfortably in Edinburgh or Manchester. The train had stopped at Providence and Mystic, names that might have come from a fairytale, but had also passed through New London. It made the place confusing: at once both utterly like and unlike England.

And of course the biggest difference was not in the physical details that caught his eye, the motor cars as big as boats — including one blue, wooden-sided monster he had spotted when the train was chugging alongside a road outside Boston and which a fellow passenger had identified as a ‘station-wagon’ — or the perennial chewing gum in the mouths of porters and ticket collectors. The biggest difference was the expressions on the faces of the people. They were not tight or drawn, as they were, constantly, in England but open and relaxed: mothers smiling at their children, businessmen doing the crossword puzzle in the morning paper, all of them going about their ordinary lives, worrying about paying the bills or cutting the back lawn, rather than fearing for their country’s very survival. Here, war was so far away, it might as well have been happening on another planet.

There was a bright sound of a whistle and the exhalation of a fresh cloud of white smoke. The rhythm of the pistons was slowing down, the train heaving itself to a halt, like an aged rower on the river running out of puff. Through the billowing steam he could see the name on the station platform: New Haven.

He felt his jaw clench three or four times in quick session, an involuntary move that used to precede every race on the river. During the long voyage from Liverpool and the journey south from Canada, he had not had to prepare himself: he could think about the past and concentrate on reaching his destination. But now, as he stepped off the train, he had arrived. New Haven was home to Yale, which meant she was here. It was quite possible he would run into her any moment now; she might even be at the station. He spotted a balloon, the string held by a boy around Harry’s age. Next to him was a woman buying something from a cart. (He squinted to read a sign that said ‘Pretzels’, a word he had never seen and could not pronounce.) She was not the right height for Florence — few women were — but the sight of a mother and child, and the possibility that, logically speaking, it could have been Florence and Harry, hit him hard. He looked away.

Only now did he notice the station itself, the ceiling almost as high as St Pancras in London. But where such places in England were permanently drab and dirty — the shabbiness exacerbated by nearly a year of war — this was clean and stylish, the ceilings, from which fancy chandeliers were suspended, elaborately decorated in a complex pattern of gold. Even the rooves of the tunnels leading from the platforms were clad in gleaming stainless steel. Not for the first time, he felt as if he had left England, the ageing mother country, for America, the vigorous young son.

Once he had popped his letter in a blue post-box, he looked down at the note he had scribbled in his book. 459 College Street. This was where Grey had arranged rooms for him, a late addition to the list of demands James had put to the college Master in return for his silence. He asked a porter for directions, struggling first to be understood and then to understand: divided by a common language indeed.

With just a single knapsack, picked up in Liverpool, he had travelled lightly enough to walk. The short journey up George Street took him to College Street, a right turn and then he was inside the university district. What he saw astounded him. He had been expecting a place bursting with 1940s modernity, a Flash Gordon landscape of shiny towers, strange shapes and clean lines.

True, the cars were once again something to behold. Vast, bulky machines that moved like mighty beasts of the jungle, hippos or rhinos who would trample over any creature reckless enough to stray into their path. But the university itself seemed as rooted in the ancient past as Oxford.

The streets were lined with faux-medieval arches and stone walls, punctuated by churches with steeples and Gothic spires, as if by the wave of a magician’s wand an entire thirteenth century English university town had been moved across the ocean and planted on this other continent. He peered inside one college building at random (it might have been called Calhoun though he was barely taking in the names). There was a quad, complete with a perfectly maintained lawn. Two tall, fair-haired men passed him, both carrying tennis rackets, just as their counterparts might do back home. He passed a grand entrance to a tower that clearly aspired to be a castle, bearing the motto Lux et Veritas, carved in a pale stone. Perhaps an expert would be able to see, on closer inspection, that the likes of Bingham Hall or the Battell Chapel belonged to the last or even the current century, rather than seven hundred years earlier. But to the layman’s eye, the illusion was complete.

He glanced across the street, spotting with relief the number 459 — attached not to the grand structure with pillared portico next door, but to a relatively modest colonial-style house, clad in pale clapboard. He had half-expected Grey to put him up in a college dormitory, like some of the younger fellows back home. The last thing James needed now was small-talk with scholars, eagerly making awkward inquiries about his precise ‘field of research’ at Yale. For the short time he hoped to be here, a room in an anonymous boarding house with regular meals would suit him fine.

But the comfort of that delusion was not allowed to persist for long. A knock on the door, answered by a butler — who, to James’s startled surprise, was a negro in late middle age — soon revealed that this was no boarding house but the Elizabethan Club. With its chairs in well-worn leather, the same shade as the elbow-patches Florence’s father had taken to wearing on his tweed jackets in a nod towards wartime thrift, and well-stocked fireplace, even now on a warm, humid day in high summer, it too might have been winched into the skies from Oxford, flown across the Atlantic then dropped, unaltered, on this street in New Haven, Connecticut.

The butler took his name and said that they had been anticipating his arrival. He apologized that Dr Zennor would have to make do with the steward’s quarters, since there was no other accommodation in ‘the Clubhouse’. It took James a moment to realize that the butler was referring not to some sporting pavilion, but this very building. As he huffed his way up the stairs, the servant delivered a potted lecture on ‘the Lizzie’, founded nearly thirty years earlier by a wealthy undergraduate who yearned for a little oasis of calm where literary-inclined students might speak about the arts and suchlike. He stopped on the middle landing to point out the vault where the club kept its priceless collection of Shakespeare Folios, including one of the three surviving copies of the 1604 Hamlet. James imagined the select membership of the Lizzie as the American counterparts of the effete, privileged young men at Christ Church or Magdalen whom he had gone to such lengths to avoid when he was a new undergraduate, nervous, naive and just off the train from Bournemouth. It had not been all that long ago, at the tail end of the 1920s; but it seemed like a different epoch.

The room, however, was monastic in its simplicity. There was a bed, a chair, a desk and a basin and not much else. The asceticism of it appealed to him, but he did fleetingly wonder about Grey’s motives. Was he punishing James with this garret room, or had he deliberately wanted him away from the heart of Yale life, where he might meet fewest people — so keeping his secrets to himself?

James sat on the bed and wondered where he should begin. It was a Sunday, which made it impossible simply to present himself at an administrative office and ask where he might find the Oxford families. If this were Oxford, he would select a college at random, pop in and ask a porter, who were, after all, the best-informed people in the university.

He splashed some water on his face then headed down the stairs, two at a time. He was striding down College Street, deciding that he would stop at the first college he saw — the butler had told him there were ten to choose from — when he heard it: a drifting melody from across the road, the universally familiar sound of a church choir.

Among those Oxford mothers, there was bound to be at least one woman pious enough to attend, maybe even to give thanks for their safe passage across the Atlantic. Not Florence of course; she wouldn’t be seen dead in church. But someone who, on hearing James identify himself, might smile warmly and say, ‘Oh yes, I saw young Harry just this morning. They’re staying two minutes from here; I’ll take you there myself if you would like.’

He ran up the few steps leading to the doorway and went inside. To his surprise, the church was packed, every space on the wooden benches taken. No church in Oxford would get a turnout like this on a warm Sunday in July. Perhaps this was what the experts meant when they said America was a country founded by ‘the Protestants of the Protestants’ — religious zealots whose zeal, it seemed, lived on.

He stood at the back, loitering by the door, suddenly self-conscious. Should he affect to be a churchgoer, late to arrive but here in earnest? Or pose as a tourist, come to admire the gold-inlaid walls and pillars and to gaze at the half-dome above the altar, an artful compromise between grandeur and modesty?

James did a quick scan of the faces before him and recognized none of them. Not that he could conclude from that that there was no one here from Oxford: there might well be several, he just didn’t know them. Inwardly, he cursed the habits he had fallen into since his return from Spain. He had been fairly sociable as a student, avoiding the aristocratic crowd, but jolly enough with everyone else. He was popular in the rowing club; Daisy’s friends had always liked him. But after his return, he had turned inward; could not be bothered remembering names, barely even noticed faces. And now, when he needed the help of someone familiar, he was paying the price.

The music had ended and a cleric had taken his place at the pulpit. White-haired and in his early sixties by James’s reckoning, he looked more earnest than forbidding. The man cleared his throat, then said in an unexpectedly strong voice, ‘My fellow members of Yale. I’m glad to see so many of you here — proof, I guess, that you’ve all had a week so full of sin that you’ve rushed here to repent.’ A ripple of gentle laughter. ‘Well, you’re all welcome. This is God’s house, which means it’s your house. Welcome, welcome.’

The man’s style of speech was a surprise too. He was much more informal than any vicar James had heard speak in England. Even the way he stood seemed to be looser, as if he were wearing more comfortable shoes.

‘Now you heard the lesson we read earlier. From Isaiah,’ — Eye-zay-ah — ‘chapter two, verse four.’ There was a rustling of tissue-thin pages, as many in the congregation consulted their bibles.

The vicar’s voice boomed out loud, the word of God delivered with an American accent: ‘“And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”’ He paused letting the words linger a while. Then he spoke again.

‘I do not believe we can argue with those words. I believe their meaning is as clear as a freshwater stream: “in the last days”, when we are on the brink of redemption, we will put aside the tools of war. They play no part in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ our Lord. If we are to be worthy of His return, if we are to live life as it is meant to be lived, then we should start now, making ploughshares from swords and pruning hooks from spears. We would grow food, instead of death. We would water the ground with God’s sweet rain, not with the blood of our fellow man.’

There was an emphatic ‘amen’ from some in the room and an unmistakable silence from the rest. James was slowly becoming aware that this was no ordinary Sunday service.

The preacher looked down at the lectern, a tiny gesture that suggested he was coming to a close. ‘I have been chaplain here for most of the last decade. You all know me well and you know my views. They are best summarized not with words, but by our Lord’s eloquent action. A small action, as it happens, but one that is still so radical, still so revolutionary. Struck on one side of his face, Jesus did not hit back. No, he did not. Instead he offered his other cheek. That’s right, he turned the other cheek. And that — that action that is so small but so large — is how we will abolish war. Even when we are provoked — and yes, our consciences are provoked by the violence in Europe — we will resist the urge to shed more blood. We will not fight war with war. As Isaiah says, “neither shall we learn war any more”.’

The words were very familiar to James. How many Quaker meetings had he sat through where the speaker, often his father, had repeated those same points, citing the same sources? The only difference this time, besides the accent and the charisma of the delivery, emanated from the congregation. James was used to hearing the case for pacifism presented to a room full of pacifists. Yet here was a man preaching to a crowd which, it was obvious, was anything but converted. The pastor had his supporters, but there was a low, unvoiced hum of discontent throughout that was undeniable. Now the preacher moved to address it.

‘As I say, you know my views. You don’t need to hear them again. And I know the Yale fellowship is not of one mind on this topic, that our community of scholars has been debating this question fiercely. That’s how it should be. And I want that debate to live here, in God’s house. For as the holy texts tell us, “These and these are the words of the living God.” These and these. There is always more than one view.

‘Which is why I’m sharing this pulpit today. I have invited Dr Ernest West from the Philosophy Department to speak about the theory of the just war. Not that I think there can be such thing-’ He stopped himself with a smile. ‘Forgive me, I’m used to having the floor all to myself. Dr West, please come and address the congregation.’

James watched as the room seemed to shift, a wave of energy rippling through it. Some sat forward in their seats, others pulled back and folded their arms into a posture of sullen disapproval.

The new man at the pulpit was younger and more uncertain. He was clasping a text, which shook slightly in his hands.

‘I’d like to thank Pastor Theodore Lowell for welcoming me here today,’ he began, as if addressing the wood of the lectern. ‘And I come before you humbled by the scale of the task. I want to persuade you that the right place for the United States of America is by the side of those Europeans fighting for their lives and against the tyranny of Herr Hitler and his Third Reich.’

‘America first!’

James swung around to his left in search of the heckler, but the acoustics had confused him. The voice could have come from any of the wooden benches on that side of the church. He looked up and saw that the speaker too was confused, thrown off balance by what he had heard. Dr West gathered himself and looked up to face his audience.

‘“America first”, you say and I understand that. I agree with it too. America should always put its interests first. But I tell you, this war is about our interests. Only Britain now stands between us and the Nazi menace. If Britain falls, then Germany will control the Atlantic. We could wake up any week now, any day now, with Nazi warships in Boston harbour and U-boat submarines off New York.’

The heckler was silenced by that and the hush of the church seemed to catch the speaker by surprise.

‘And let’s remember that Germany will not be alone in this part of the world. It has friends — in Mexico and Argentina and throughout Latin America. Just imagine what Hitler would be capable of with a network of military bases throughout that continent. I say to you, we would face the very same threat now faced by our British cousins: bombs. A Blitzkrieg could come from the south, German bombs landing on San Diego or Houston or Miami, even, who knows, Chicago. So I do put America first. I put American safety first.’

James noticed that the man’s voice was less nervy now; he was beginning to hit his stride. ‘That’s why we have a direct, vital interest in making sure Europe does not get swallowed up in Nazi tyranny. America cannot exist alone on this side of the Atlantic, hiding away from the world.’

‘Warmonger!’

The same heckler or a different one, James could not tell. Now there were a few cries in response: ‘Pipe down!’ ‘We came here to hear him, not you!’

James noticed that the pastor did nothing to impose order on his church, but was watching the unfolding scene with an indulgent smile.

Dr West chose to ignore the last interruption and press on. ‘We cannot hide ourselves away. We need Europe. Not just to buy our goods. Though I have to say America will only be the leading power of this twentieth century if we sell and trade with the rest of the world. And there will be no trade with Herr Hitler’s empire. No, we need a Europe that holds to the same ideals as we do.’

‘Our ideal should be peace!’

‘Of course it is. But you cannot make a pact with the Devil. And we should be clear what kind of enemy we face. “Know thine enemy”, that’s what the Bible tells us, doesn’t it, Pastor Lowell? And there can be no denying that we face a new and terrible enemy in Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party. America will not be able to live in a world where such brutality holds supreme. As President Roosevelt-’

‘Rosenfeld!’

‘As President Roosevelt has argued so forcefully, it is a delusion, a fantasy, to think that we can let America become, I quote, “a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force”. Our ideals as Americans, the very ideals set out by our founding fathers-’

‘“Beware of foreign entanglements”, that’s what Washington said!’

‘I know what he said: you don’t have to shout his words at me. But these are different times. There was no threat then equal to the threat we face today, a dictator bent on ruling the world.’

There was more commotion now, as a small group to James’s right attempted to start a chorus of ‘America first!’ James fought the urge to stand up, march over to the pulpit and deliver a speech of his own. Did these people have no idea what was happening across the sea? He had left a country already at war, its men either at the front or preparing to defend the homeland; a place plunged into unbroken darkness at night, where people, including him, were digging holes in their gardens to shelter from bombs; where even a two-year-old boy like Harry was told to carry a gas mark lest Hitler attempt to fill the air with poison; where the enemy was a matter of miles away, just twenty-two of them in fact, Dover to Calais.

Yet here in New Haven war was a debating topic, with arguments to be made for and against. This was how Britain itself had been three or four years ago, back when Chamberlain reckoned he could make peace with Hitler. There had been debates like this, plenty of them, at the Oxford Union and elsewhere, with young gentlemen making speeches about whether they would fight for ‘King and country’ and all that. But not any more. That argument was over.

In the United States, however, here in this chapel, the argument was just beginning. He was suddenly aware, more keenly than he had ever been before, that Britain truly did stand alone. Stalin and the Soviet Union had become Hitler’s allies; Italy had joined in, declaring war on Britain a matter of weeks ago; France, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg had fallen to the Germans. And America was still debating with itself.

It struck James with sudden, painful force. Britain was on the brink of extinction. If it were to survive, if its people were not to live under the boot-heel of the Gestapo, they would have to defeat the German menace with their own bare hands.

He didn’t wait for the speaker to finish, leaving him instead to take on the hecklers over whether Roosevelt was agitating for war as an excuse to build up the might of the federal government.

As he got up to leave, he caught sight of something that stopped him in his tracks. Someone he recognized. A face there, then gone. He scanned the congregation again only to see what he had seen before: the same sea of undifferentiated, unfamiliar faces. But the vague sense of recognition, someone spied in his peripheral vision, lingered. He craned slightly, to see around a pillar, but found nothing.

As quietly as he had entered, he retreated to the chapel door and left.