Pantheon

Chapter Twenty-four

‘All you have to do is provide a distraction,’ he said, after he had explained the plan for the first time.

‘At the administration building?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the Dean’s private office?’

‘No need to make it sound harder than it is. Not the Dean’s private office, his outer office. I am fully confident in your abilities, Miss Lake.’ When he saw that she was still not convinced, he decided to take a risk. ‘I can’t imagine any of the men on the Yale Daily News hesitating like this. Isn’t this the kind of thing intrepid reporters do all the time?’

Lake signalled for the bill then said, ‘If you talked to her like that, I’m not surprised your wife left you.’

James glared at her. ‘How dare you? My wife did not leave me. She evacuated our child to safety. That’s all she was doing.’ He could hear a catch in his own voice, like a dry, repressed cough, but he could not stop himself. ‘Because what none of you people seem to realize is that our country is fighting a war. You’d never know it here, with all your milkshakes and pizza and three-egg omelettes. Might as well be on another planet. But England is in danger, do you see? We might lose. We might be bloody well invaded. That’s what Florence was frightened of. She believed our child was in danger. She worried that he was not… safe. That was all. She came here to be safe. To be safe…’

He drew to a halt, avoiding her eyes. He hadn’t blubbed: he’d caught himself just in time and hoped she had not noticed. But he knew what had just happened — and he was ashamed of himself.

And yet when he eventually caught her eye, he was surprised by what he saw. He had imagined a gaze that was chilly or, at best, pitying. But this was neither. Instead, her eyes had welled up in sympathy. Then, ‘How old is Harry?’ she said, in a voice she had not used until then. ‘You never told me.’

Soon James was back where he had been twenty-four hours earlier, though this time he had a woman, rather than a newspaper, to hide behind. The administrative building was a matter of yards away. He thought he saw Dorothy Lake chewing her lower lip in anxiety.

‘Now remember,’ he was saying. ‘There are two entrances to that corridor. You have to do whatever you’re going to do at the far end, on the other side of the office. Are we clear?’

‘We’re clear.’

‘All right then. Best of luck.’

She straightened her blouse and was taking her first stride towards the front entrance when he spoke again. ‘Oh and Miss Lake-’

She turned around, a movement that briefly — in its suggestion of long, taut limbs beneath the clothing — reminded him of Florence; Florence how she used to be, when they had first met, before the weight of war and her shattered husband had borne down on her. ‘Thank you,’ he said. And she was gone.

He waited for about thirty seconds, as they had agreed. Then he approached the entrance, making sure to stay far enough away that the doorman would not see him. He counted ten more seconds and then, true to their script, he heard a yelp of pain coming from inside the building: Dorothy, far down the corridor, crying out in apparent agony.

The commissionaire did what they had expected him to do: he left his post and rushed to help. Now was James’s moment to slip inside.

From the hallway he craned his head round just long enough to see Dorothy sitting on the floor, clutching her leg. She had done as she was told, staging her fall at the far end of the corridor, well past the Dean’s office. James had a clear run from here to there. But it was still not safe to move.

Judging the moment perfectly, Dorothy ripped the air with another howl of pain. James stole another glimpse into the corridor, and saw her struggling to stand up. At last, people started emerging from their offices, among them, James was relieved to see, the secretary to the Dean.

He could hear voices now, Dorothy’s loudest. The echo made the words indistinct, but he got the gist. She was asking for someone to help her get to the bathroom, so that she could clean herself up.

Now. James began his walk down the corridor, affecting the gait of a man who was not visiting, but worked here. He took the five or six strides to reach the Dean’s office, then turned left.

The plan had worked: they had timed Dorothy’s little accident just right, the two secretaries’ desks were both empty. Instantly, James moved around them to the bank of filing cabinets behind. There were cards placed on the front of each drawer, starting at the top left: ‘Admissions — Disciplinary Code’.

His eye moved to the drawers below, picking out the subject headings, arranged alphabetically: Dwight Chapel, Endowment, Geography Faculty. He found a drawer labelled ‘Memorial — Saybrook College’. He tugged at it, surprised to see that it extended well over a yard. It must have contained several hundred files, each identified by a tab.

He went past the M’s — Memorial, Monroe, Montana — and overshot, landing in the P’s — Political Science, Posture Study, Professional Training — before tracking back to the O’s. His heart leapt when he saw a divider labelled ‘Oxford’, which preceded perhaps a dozen more files: ‘Oxford, Chancellor’, ‘Oxford, History faculty’ and ‘Oxford, Rhodes scholarships’. Not what he was looking for.

He went back, slower this time, and his heart jumped. Just after the ‘Chancellor’ file was a tab he had missed: ‘Oxford, children’. He pulled it out, only to discover that the tab was attached not to a file but a single sheet of card. On it was stuck a typed label: ‘See Yale Faculty Committee for Receiving Oxford and Cambridge University Children’.

James looked up. There was a sound outside: two voices. Instinctively, he straightened his back and took a pace back. He held still as, out of the corner of his eye, he saw two men deep in conversation pass the door. Neither of them looked his way. He wondered what bathroom theatrics Dorothy was engaging in to keep the Dean’s secretary busy: whatever she was doing, she would have to keep doing it a bit longer.

He now looked towards the floor, finding the drawer that would contain files labelled with a ‘Y’. There it was.

There must have been a thousand files crammed together: ‘Yale, Alumni Association’; ‘Yale, Divinity School’; ‘Yale, Faculty Committee’. He burrowed deep into the last category and found that too was subdivided into a score of files, one for the Faculty Committee on pay, another for the Faculty Committee on ethics, until finally he found what he was looking for: ‘Yale Faculty Committee for Receiving Oxford and Cambridge University Children’.

He pulled it out and rushed to the first sheet. A letter from the Dean, Preston McAndrew, to his opposite number at Oxford, inviting him to send Oxford’s children to Yale for the duration of the war. Behind it, the same letter, though this time addressed to Cambridge; letters of grateful reply from Oxford, then a response from Cambridge. James skimmed over it just long enough to see that Dorothy had been right: here was Sir Montague Butler, Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge declining Yale’s offer, explaining that no particular arrangements should be made for university children, ‘since this might be interpreted as privilege for a special class’. Then more letters, back and forth, to Oxford about dates, visas, shipping routes…

Then, at last, he had it: a list of participants, his eye motoring through them, rushing as it always did to the end of the page. There: Walsingham, Harry, two y.o. (accompanied by mother, Florence).

He turned to the next entry, a sheaf of papers held together by a bulldog clip. The first sheet was dedicated to three children by the name of Anderson, including their dates of birth and home address in Oxford, as well as details of their parents, alongside what James assumed was the address of the family who had taken them in — in this case the Mansfields of Prospect Street, New Haven. He turned to the next sheet: the Arnolds, brother and sister, children of a Fellow of Jesus College, a medieval historian, now relocated to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Why so far away, James wondered for the briefest of moments, but there was no time to think. These papers were arranged in alphabetical order which meant Harry and Florence — and their new address — would be at the back.

He went to the last sheet: Zander, a boy, evacuated to St Ronan Street, New Haven. He turned to the penultimate sheet: Wilson. The one before: Walton. His hands trembling now, he struggled to separate the next two pages that clung together, refusing to come apart. At last, they separated. This sheet, surely, would bring him back together with his family.

Hands shaking, he read the name: Victor, Ann.

There must be some mistake. His thumb and forefinger rubbed frantically at this sheet, praying for it to yield another page, the one that would tell him where he might find his wife and child. But it refused to separate.

He ran through them again: Victor, Walton, Wilson, Zander. No Walsingham. No Zennor.

It must have been filed wrongly. He started back through the whole sheaf, turning the pages as fast as his fingers could do it: Anderson, Arnold, Boston, Champion and on through the Falks, Macbeths and Somersets. No misplaced Walsingham, no randomly filed Zennor.

There was a clicking sound on the corridor, footsteps coming nearer. It must be someone else: Dorothy had promised she would keep the secretary busy in the ladies’ lavatory long enough to give James a clear five minutes among the filing cabinets, staging another fall or weeping about her good-for-nothing boyfriend if that’s what it took.

James went back to the first sheet he had found, the list of Oxford arrivals. He ran his finger down the names: Anderson, Arnold, Boston and on and on, ending with Walsingham and then Zander. This document mapped onto the bulldog-clipped set of papers perfectly, the same families listed in the same, alphabetical order. Except for Harry and Florence, who appeared on the first register but were missing from the next, the one that revealed where the Oxford children were now living.

He was about to go through the rest of the file when he sensed the change of light in the doorway. He hurriedly shoved the document back in the drawer, but it was too late. When he looked up he saw not one person watching him but two. He recognized the first figure as the secretary, Barbara, but he instantly worked out the identity of the other. He knew without being told that he had come face to face with Preston McAndrew, Dean of Yale University.