Pantheon

Chapter Twenty-nine

The butler might as well have slapped him in the face. The effect of Walters’s words was instant, as if he had been abruptly woken up. James stared at him for a while before speaking, then peppered him with questions.

‘When were they here?’

‘About four o’clock this afternoon, Dr Zennor.’

‘And how old was the child?’ He locked the butler with a gaze that did not waver.

‘I’m not good at these things. I’d guess he was-’

‘How tall was he? Show me how high he stood. Here? Or higher? And tell me again, what she said. Her exact words, please.’

‘I opened the door to her and she said she had heard an Englishman was staying here, a Dr James Zennor and she wondered if she could speak to him.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘Please Dr Zennor, you’re making me a little uncomfortable staring at me like this. Please. Let me tell you what happened my own way.’

James exhaled. He had to get a grip on himself, not to descend any further, not now. Florence and Harry here, in this very spot a matter of hours earlier: the very thought of it made him feel light-headed. He took a deep breath and followed Walters as he shuffled out of the hallway and into the first sitting room. Too agitated to sit, James grasped hold of the top of one of the high-backed leather chairs.

‘All right,’ Walters began. ‘There was a knock on the door just after four or so. A quiet one, kind of uncertain. I opened it and there was this lady there, holding her son’s hand. She looked kind of nervous. She didn’t even come in at first, just asked if you were here and if she could speak to you. I told her I was expecting you back later. I asked her in, but she said no. Just could I tell you she’d called. The little boy seemed shy: he kept staring at me from behind his mother. I don’t think he ever saw a black man before. Round-eyes, he had. Very quiet.’

‘Very quiet.’ Yes, thought James. That sounds like Harry. ‘And can you describe what she looked like, Walters?’

‘A tall lady, sir.’

‘Very beautiful, very straight-backed and upright? With smiling eyes?’

‘She looked very kind, sir.’

‘Kind, yes… ’

‘Though she looked worried too.’

‘Did she tell you how she knew I was here?’

‘Yes, sir. She did. She said she had seen you. In town.’

James felt himself unsteady again, as if his legs were about to give way. The thoughts were rushing into his brain so fast, they were falling on top of each other. If Florence had seen him, why hadn’t she rushed over to him immediately? Where exactly had she seen him? And when? Surely not today, when he was with Dorothy Lake? Had Florence seen the two of them just now… His stomach twisted. What if he had come all this way, if he had crossed the Atlantic, only to be rejected as a faithless husband now, here in America? He cursed himself and his weakness all over again.

It took a moment to compose himself. At last he said quietly, ‘And did she leave anything for me, a card or a letter?’

‘She just had me write down her details, so that you could get in touch with her. I’ll go get them.’

James watched the butler shuffle off to the backroom that seemed to serve as both his office and his home: there was certainly no other bedroom in evidence, and yet he seemed to be at the club day and night. James waited a while, pacing and clenching his fists. But even the thirty-second delay was too much. He walked out of the sitting room, meeting a returning Walters in the hallway.

‘Here it is, sir.’ The old man passed him a small square of paper.

It was as if a slab of stone had landed on James’s chest.

Elizabeth Goodwin, staying with Mr and Mrs Swanson, New Haven. Telephone number…

The words were swimming on the page, the disappointment clouding his vision. His head began to throb, the pain from banging it against the wall suddenly asserting itself.

The butler must have seen his desperation because he began muttering some kind of reassurance, the words lost and muffled in James’s ears.

What an idiot he had been, once again succumbing to foolish optimism. The warning sign was there in how Walters had described the appearance of the woman at the door: kind, he had said. Florence certainly could be kind and generous. But kind was not the first word any man used to describe her. If it had been Florence at the door, Walters would not have hesitated to have agreed that she was stunningly, heartbreakingly beautiful.

So this was one of the other Oxford mothers, who had somehow tracked him down to the Elizabethan Club. Where had she seen him? And would she be the one who would, at last, tell him where he could find his wife and child?

From up here, he had a clear view over the treetops towards New Haven harbour. For the first time he realized what a beautiful place this was, no doubt lush and green in the springtime, scenic even in the arid summer. And yet he was barely two miles away from Yale.

He had called Mrs Goodwin first thing this morning, just after seven — the moment he felt it socially acceptable to make a telephone call. Her American host, Mrs Swanson, had sounded wary, but Mrs Goodwin herself had been perfectly polite. She explained that her son was attending summer school during the daytime hours and that she would not have a chance to meet till 4.30pm at the earliest.

‘Why don’t I meet you at the school?’ James had suggested. To his surprise she had agreed, and so he had hired a taxi to take him up the winding, tree-lined road to Hopkins Grammar School for Boys. En route he had looked on in envy at the large family houses, with their lawns, an occasional tyre swinging from a tree or basketball hoop on a post. Such space compared with the cramped, ration-book England he had left behind. But it was not America’s prosperity he envied, typified by the sleek, curved black motor car now purring along behind the cab — a moving sculpture in metal, topped off by natty white rims painted on the tyres — no, it was not America’s wealth that made James pity his own country. It was the peace. The peace of that woman there, checking her roses, or of that old fellow in the house next door, oiling the garden gate. No Yale colleges were given over to organizing munitions or fish and potato stocks. No men here had to learn how to polish their boots like mirrors or clean a rifle. No mother in America had to fear her two-year-old son would die under a falling bomb or be crushed by a Nazi jackboot, as Florence had feared for Harry. How serene this summer morning seemed. And yet, under the same sky, even at this very moment, he knew there was a continent at war with Britain — and that shabby, grey Britain was fighting for its life.

Now, as the cab got closer, he could read the sign that announced Hopkins Grammar, dedicated to ‘The Breeding up of Hopeful Youths’.

They had arranged to meet at the school office, so he walked through the arched entrance, past the portrait of Hopkins’s seventeenth century founder, musing that this might have been any boarding school in the English countryside. He ran into a secretary who told him he needed to go to the playing fields and promptly offered to walk him over there.

She chatted away, explaining that the school had only moved from the centre of New Haven fifteen years earlier. ‘I’m afraid the city is not quite what it used to be. So crowded there now.’

‘Cramped?’ asked James, making conversation.

‘Well, we’ve had so many immigrants in recent years. It’s not the country your ancestors left behind any more.’

The words were neutral enough, but James detected a note of distaste and snobbery that he did not like. ‘I see.’

‘Not that we’re complaining about being here, gosh no. It’s wonderful here. So good for the boys to be outside in the countryside, away from all the dirt and grime of the city.’

She led him down a slope, and now a large lawn came into view. On it were perhaps three dozen early teenage boys, in white shorts and plimsolls but no shirts, engaged in physical jerks. As James approached, they were doing press-ups, in unison. Watching on the sidelines were five or six mothers kitted out in their own uniform of floral dress and sunhat.

‘Mrs Goodwin!’ the secretary called in a sing-song voice and the tallest of them turned around. In her early forties, she was just as Walters had described: not pretty, her hair mousy, but kindly.

They shook hands while the secretary politely excused herself. The lady gave a gentle smile. ‘Well, I’m glad my eyes didn’t deceive me.’

Just hearing the rhythm of those precise, enunciated words filled James with a rush of emotions. Until that moment he had not particularly registered that he had not heard an English accent in more than three weeks. Hearing it now evoked home, as if he had been transported with just those few cadences back to Oxford, to its stones, its bicycles, its scones, its afternoons. He realized in that instant just how far away he was. Above all, it made him want to be with Florence, to hold her and to feel her holding him.

He said none of this of course. He simply shook her hand and said, ‘And so am I, Mrs Goodwin, so am I. Where on earth did you see me?’

‘In church, Dr Zennor: the Battell Chapel. I was there with Thomas.’ She tilted her head in the direction of the boys, who were now extending their arms and legs in a series of rhythmic star jumps.

‘On Sunday? During that debate about joining the war?’

‘Quite so.’

So that explained that fleeting sensation he had had, the nagging feeling that somewhere in that congregation he had glimpsed a familiar face. He had thought it was a trick of the light, or exhaustion after his journey, but it had been real. Not that he had any idea where or when in Oxford he had seen Mrs Goodwin. Was she another friend of Florence’s he had all but ignored?

‘I must say, I found the event rather sobering,’ she went on. ‘It seems our little island is to fight this war all alone, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Joining the war hardly seems popular in America, if that’s what you mean.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Mrs Goodwin, I’ve come here to Yale to find my wife. Do you have any idea where she is?’

‘You mean, you don’t know?’

‘I’m afraid, I don’t.’

She looked away, embarrassed. ‘It’s odd, but I had an inkling that that was the case. When I saw what I thought was you in church, I dismissed it at first. I assumed I had just glimpsed someone who looked like you. Such things do happen, you know. But then I was buying some cigarettes at the Owl Shop and the young man there mentioned an Englishman on his own, looking for his wife, and I began to wonder. I called in at the Elizabethan Club really on the off-chance-’

‘Mrs Goodwin, do you know where she is?’

‘I did know. She was with the rest of us at the Divinity School when we arrived.’

‘The Divinity School?’

‘Yes, that was where we were first received. Before they allocated us to our respective host families.’

‘And where was Florence allocated?’

‘Well, that’s just it, you see. I don’t know. She was still there when I was picked up by the Swansons last Friday. They’ve been terribly nice. And settling in took a few days, inevitably, and before I knew it everyone had been scattered to the four winds. A few ladies are in Pennsylvania.’

‘Do you not know where any of the others are?’

‘I do know where some are staying. A few of us have made contact with each other. Plenty of our hosts know each other of course. Especially those of us who have been housed here in New Haven. But there’s not many in that position, you see. Others are with professors who live away from here, or else have summer houses in the country.’

‘I understand.’

‘But surely the university must have records, Dr Zennor? What about that committee that arranged everything for us, have you spoken to them?’

‘Not exactly. But I have… ’ James hesitated. ‘I have consulted their records, as it were. And Florence and Harry are the only ones about whom there is no information.’

‘What about the Dean, Preston something, I forget his name-’

‘Dr McAndrew?’

‘That’s it. He’s been perfectly wonderful. He was the driving force behind the whole scheme, I hear. He’s in charge, he must know.’

‘He’s drawn a blank too.’

The woman bit her lip. ‘That really is most odd.’

‘Can I ask, Mrs Goodwin, when is the last time you saw Florence?’

‘As I say, at the Divinity School. We were there together for the first day or so.’

‘And can you remember anything that happened there, anything my wife might have said, that could perhaps explain where she is?’

Just for a second, the woman looked at her feet, a fleeting aversion of the eyes that suggested — what? — guilt, embarrassment, James was not sure. ‘Anything at all, Mrs Goodwin.’

‘Well, it’s rather awkward but-’

At that moment she gave a slight jump, shaken by a sudden bellowed roar from the exercise ground as the boys shouted a slogan: ‘Straight backs and good posture are essential to good health!’ The instructor cupped his ear, a pantomime gesture suggesting they had shouted too quietly. They tried it again, this time at the tops of their just-broken voices.

‘They’re very serious about all matters physical here, I’ve noticed,’ Mrs Goodwin said with a smile. ‘If they’re not hiking, they’re wrestling or playing basketball. Thomas always enjoyed playing cricket, but this is-’

‘You were about to tell me something, Mrs Goodwin. About Florence at the Divinity School.’ He paused. ‘You said it was awkward.’

‘Yes, I did.’ She looked towards the boys, about to embark on a run around the perimeter. ‘It’s a question, really. Tell me, Dr Zennor, have you ever written to your wife?’

‘What? Yes, of course. Every day, as soon as I knew she had come to Yale. I sent several letters from Liverpool, then perhaps a dozen from Canada. I’d stored them up on the ship. I’ve sent some from here too, not that I’ve got an address. I’ve just been sending them “care of Yale University”.’

‘Oh I see.’ Her brow furrowed. ‘That confuses me rather.’

‘I don’t understand. Why?’

‘I don’t like to be rude, Dr Zennor. And this really is none of my business.’

‘What? Tell me.’

‘Well, my husband’s been doing the same. Addressing his letters “care of Yale”. And they’ve all arrived, every one of them. There were several items of post waiting for me and the children at the Divinity School. But I’m afraid… ’

‘Yes?’

‘Florence had nothing from you. Not even a card. She was quite distressed about it. We all sympathized as best we could. Now that I see you here, having travelled all this way, I realize we must have got the wrong end of the stick. But I’m afraid at the time we did think it a rather poor show.’