The Empire of Night

21

The sun was just vanishing when my taxi slipped along the lilac hedges of Hanover Square and stopped before a flat-roofed, brick town house half the width but just as tall as my hotel. It was a private residence but without apparent servants and without a clear owner, at least on this Sunday night, the door being answered by one of the other women from my mother’s dressing room, the one wide enough to be the cellist in that string quartet of suffragettes. She recognized me at once and led me up a single flight to the parlor and I was introduced at the door as Mr. Christopher Cobb to a dozen or so of Millicent’s colleagues, about half of whom had also invited men. Most of these guys struck me as dandies, though I didn’t look at them very closely, simply registering among them more than one frock coat, apricot tie, waistcoat the color of the Hanover Square hedges in bloom. The women murmured at me sweetly. The men displayed indifference.

Millicent presented herself before me.

“I’m sorry I’m a little late,” I said.

“I remember using the phrase ‘or thereabout’ with the time,” she said.

“So you did.”

“I will feed you now,” she said.

And she led me to a table set for high tea and I grazed a bit. Between the cucumber sandwiches and the dandies in the room I felt as if I’d been cast in an Oscar Wilde play.

Which made me appreciate Millicent Gibbs all the more intensely. She and I drank a pretty good red wine off in the corner. The men kept their distance, and the suffragettes made solitary, hope-I’m-not-intruding pilgrimages over to us to chat briefly, mostly about how they felt nothing short of adoration for my mother.

When the air raid whistle blew in the street, the room upswelled in conversation and bustle like a theater crowd responding to the call to seats at the end of an intermission. “To the basement,” a woman’s voice cried out, and the group made for the parlor door.

I had no real interest in joining them and merely shifted my weight in our standing position, but Millicent’s hand went straight to my forearm to keep me where I was. She had her own plan.

When everyone was out of sight and clattering down the stairs toward the cellar, Millicent took my hand and we left the parlor and approached the staircase. But she and I climbed upward.

Two flights more, in darkness. By my count this was the top floor, but she led me around the banister and toward the back of the house and onto a narrower staircase leading up still farther.

She had not spoken a word. She had not let go of my hand. We reached a small vestibule and she released her hold on me and opened the door.

We stepped out onto the roof.

She closed the door behind us and stood beside me, our arms touching, and she said, “I’ve been longing to do this. Your mother is intrepid. I know you must be as well.”

The warden’s whistle was still piping somewhere along the street.

And now the six-pounders began to pop off in futility, out east.

I felt a shudder run through her. My first thought was that she was afraid.

But before I could raise my arm to put around her and before I let the obvious thing back into my head — she couldn’t be afraid because she’d deliberately brought us up here — she said, “Come this way,” and she took my hand again. The rush in her voice and the firmness of her hand both spoke not of fear but of some sort of dark exhilaration.

We neared the front parapet of the roof and she stopped us. “Here,” she said and she knelt, pulling at my hand, bringing me down beside her, and she let go of me and lunged forward. My knees were resting on a soft thing. I put a hand down. A blanket. My eyes were seeing enough now, adjusting in the dark. A searchlight flashed overhead and away. I could see Millicent there, stretched out on her back on the blanket, looking up into the sky.

“Please lie beside me,” she said.

I did, placing myself so our bodies touched from shoulder to foot. She did not ease away. Indeed, she gently pressed her shoulder and her hip a little closer. But I sensed this wasn’t about sex. Not at the moment, at least.

I was right.

“Do you think they will pass over us?” she said, and she slipped her hand into mine, our fingers intertwining, our bundled hands coming to rest upon our joined hips.

“Do you think they will drop a bomb on us?” I replied.

It was the cue for us to turn our faces and look at each other in the dark, on this open roof, beneath a London sky, on a Zeppelin night.

This we did. And as soon as our eyes met, we laughed.

We turned our faces skyward again and we did not speak. We waited. We listened. The six-pounders soon stopped. I had lately been quite near a Zepp or two on a rooftop. I wasn’t looking forward to another. But I was quite happy to be tagging along in Millicent Gibbs’s journey to an intrepid self.

We strained to hear the hammer of the Maybachs. I would tell her about these fine engines if she would like. But all we heard were the distant blackout whistlings. A brief spatter of small arms fire. A siren somewhere. And then a long, persistent silence, underscored by the silent scan of a searchlight and another, showing, however, only clouds.

At last the lights stopped and so did the sounds.

She said, “They are elsewhere, I suppose.”

“Or perhaps they did not come tonight,” I said.

She sighed.

“It makes no difference,” I said. “Your courage is the same.”

“Thank you,” she said. “But I wanted more.”

This seemed another cue. Even if she hadn’t consciously intended it.

I turned to her on my side.

She looked at me.

I kissed her.

And we began.

She was strong and she did not mind my being strong and somewhere in the midst of the clutch and crash and cling I began to realize something that made me wish the Zepps had come and that they had been enough for her. I pushed the thing from my mind, but when this woman and I were done and lying side by side again and looking at the dark sky above, I could not help but think: Mother carefully chose this woman for me and arranged this very act, her being dead and her having that dark and ironic and utterly tormenting sense of drama that made her the actress and the mother that she was.

I kept my mouth shut.

But Millicent went straight there: “She said I’d like you.”

I was ready to bolt.

“And I do,” Millicent said.