The Golden Hour

by Beatriz Williams

  Not that Thorpe seems to have left much behind when he departed for Nassau, two and a half years ago. Other than the photograph, nothing remains atop the chest of drawers. The top two drawers are empty, and the bottom contains only a half-dozen mothballs and a couple of knitted sweaters. I pick them up anyway and bury my nose in the wool, but the smell of him is long gone, replaced by wood and camphor.

  Better luck in the wardrobe. Thorpe left his winter suits, neatly pressed, and when I stick my hand in the pockets, I retrieve a pair of theater tickets—Apple Sauce, the London Palladium, the fifteenth of August—and a piece of notepaper on which someone’s written a brief message, followed by what seems to be a telephone number. The handwriting doesn’t belong to Thorpe, and it takes me some time to decipher because of the dull light through the window and the small size of the letters. Still, my heart pumps violently in my chest, the way an archaeologist might feel at the discovery of some new artifact, some clue to a lost civilization. I consider it might be a woman, some lover of his, or else a colleague, a source, a contact. Somebody he knew before me, somebody who belonged to his life before I knew he existed. And now, at this very instant, Thorpe sits in a place I don’t know, surrounded by people I don’t know, and the details of his existence are beyond my knowledge, though not my imagination. So we live on faith, he and I. My faith in him, and his in me.

  As it turns out, the message is only a bill from a restaurant. 2 asparagus soup, 1 turbot, 1 sirloin rare, Stilton & pear, 1 bottle Margaux, 1 brandy, 1 anise. The number at the bottom is only the total, 18/6. Dinner for two, possibly before heading to the theater for Apple Sauce, a pleasant night out in wartime. I tuck it back in the pocket of Thorpe’s suit and sniff the collar. (Again, no hint of him.)

  There’s a small writing desk that offers no more than a couple of fountain pens and a pile of blank stationery, and a bookcase containing Trollope, Ovid, Goethe, and a couple of authors I don’t recognize, modern stuff. In the bedside table, another pen, a laundry list, a box of matches, half-full. The very faintest whiff of tobacco.

  As for the bed. The one on which I’m sitting, the one in which I slept last night like a corpse. The frame is narrow and made of iron, painted white, mattress hard, the kind of monastic bed suitable for a fellow who lives with his sister. Tuxedo curls in a ball atop the pillow. There are no ghosts in this bed, other than Thorpe, and for that small favor from the Almighty, I’m grateful.

  When Margaret returns home at five minutes to six, I’ve got dinner simmering in pots and a bottle of wine uncorked on the table. She sets her hat on the stand and stares at the plates, the glasses, the folded napkins. Tuxedo gallops down the hall and tangles himself around her legs, miiaaaaow.

  “You didn’t go out, did you?”

  “I would’ve gone nuts if I didn’t. I hope you like rabbit. Game isn’t rationed, apparently.”

  “You’re an idiot and lucky to be alive. Is that a Bordeaux?”

  “I couldn’t resist.”

  She casts me a withering look and heads down the little hallway into her bedroom, followed by the cat. The flat, if you’re curious, comprises a single floor of what might once have been a spacious family house. There’s a small kitchen with a gas range and an oven but no icebox, the parlor in which we sat and smoked last night, and the hallway leading to the two bedrooms and tiny bathroom. The entire place is immaculate, plain and polished, devoid of the usual knickknacks you find in the homes of spinsters. I’m just spooning the potatoes into a bowl when Margaret reappears, carrying a purring Tuxedo, wearing a housedress of navy serge and a thick cardigan, belted around her waist.

  “Nice rags,” I say. “Did you wear that to Apple Sauce?”

  She drops the cat and sits in her chair. “Apple Sauce? Is that a restaurant?”

  I set the potatoes on the table. “Never mind. Wine?”

  “What a terrible idea.”

  “Under the circumstances, I think it’s an excellent idea.” I lift the bottle and fill her glass, then mine. “It’s good for morale.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my morale.”

  I sit down and raise my glass. “To Thorpe.”

  “To Benedict.” She closes her eyes as she drinks and sets down the glass with a bit of a bang. “Speaking of which. The funniest thing. You’ll never guess who stopped by my desk this morning.”

  “Plain fellow, pockmarked, bump on the head?”

  “Exactly. Told me he’d heard the awful news about my brother, assured me they would do their best to negotiate some sort of release, which of course is absolute bollocks. Nobody gets released from Colditz, especially not intelligence agents.”

  “No?”

  “No. Political prisoners receive the worst possible treatment. The only reason they keep them alive is to get more information out of them.”

  “Thorpe won’t reveal anything.”

  “You don’t think so? Not even when they pull out his fingernails? Dunk him in water until he’s nearly drowned? Burn him with a hot—”

  Slam, goes my fist on the table.

  Margaret lifts her eyebrows. “I’m sorry to have to explain a few truths to you, my dear, but there it is. That’s what they do to men like Thorpe. Women too. Didn’t you know that?”

  “There’s no proof—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Lulu. Don’t be stupid. Anyway, even if they don’t torture him, or shoot him after some kangaroo trial, he won’t last the winter, not in Colditz. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be unkind, but it’s true. It’s where they send the worst prisoners, the incorrigibles. The escape artists. There’s no food left, no fuel to keep them warm. The guards are all brutes. He hasn’t a chance.”

  “Except for us.”

  “Us? What the devil are you talking about?”

  “I mean you and me, working to save him.”

  “Save him? What on earth?”

  “Yes. Since the War Office isn’t going to help us—this Special Operations of yours—we could join efforts and—”

  “Join efforts? Are you mad? What exactly do you plan to do, Mrs. Benedict Thorpe? Parachute into Germany and break down the gates with a siege gun?”

  “Of course not. I thought you’d have a much better plan than that.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “Because you work there, don’t you?”

  Margaret sets down her knife and fork. “My dear girl. I believe you’ve been laboring under what they call a misapprehension. I’ve already explained. My brother’s the chap in the field, not me. I sit at my desk and shuffle papers about. Take dictation and type up reports and translate things.”

  “But why? You’re brother and sister. You’re equally capable, I’m sure.”

  “It’s true, they recruited us both. An old childhood friend of ours was putting together this department in the War Office and called on us to join him, because we both spoke German fluently, you know, having spent our summers there at my brother’s estate. But I was deemed unsuitable for fieldwork. They never told me why, of course. I suppose I can guess.” She picks up the bottle and refills her glass. “But there it is. Not only am I not in a position to parachute into Germany—even if I were so inclined—I’m apparently unfit for the job to begin with.”

  “Nonsense. You’re exactly the kind of person—”

  “And there’s the plain fact that it’s against department policy. Don’t you see? I’d have to go against my own superiors.”

  “You’re already going against your superiors, hiding me here.”

  “That’s different. That’s for Benedict’s sake.”

  I lean forward. “Don’t you want to save him?”

  “What a thing to say. Of course I do.”

  “Then why won’t you do anything about it?”

  “Do what? Don’t you see? There’s nothing one can do. You’ve got no idea. Sunning yourself in the tropics. You don’t have the slightest clue what war’s like, you little fool. We’re trapped here, we’re rats in a cage, waiting our turn to d
ie. We’re no better off than Benedict.”

  “What if I refuse to wait?”

  “We already know the answer to that. You decided to take matters into your own hands—bold, clever girl that you are—and now look. Your little scheme of blackmail has failed, and now you’re in just as much danger as he is. Whatever it is you’ve got against them, it’s more than your own life is worth.” She busies herself with knife and fork, cutting the rabbit. I have the feeling she’s hiding her eyes from me. She chews for a bit, tremendous concentration. Drinks her wine like she’s dying of thirst.

  I push the meat around the plate. There is the music of cutlery, the damp, cramped smell of despair. A siren wails from far away. Margaret cocks her head to listen. Her eyes narrow with knowledge, with some ability to decode the keening. After a moment, she shrugs and returns her attention to her dinner.

  “This is really quite good. Where did you learn how to cook?”

  “My mother taught me. She’s Italian, it’s in her blood. And we didn’t have much money, so I learned to make do.”

  “Neither did we. All Mummy’s money went into trust, and I haven’t the slightest idea what became of it. Bad investments, I suppose. Whenever I asked Granny, she wouldn’t answer. She liked to pretend Mummy didn’t exist. The shame, you know.”

  “She was so beautiful.”

  “Yes. She was perfectly lovely. I used to think of her as an angel. She was always calm, always patient. She never raised her voice with me, not once. I always had the feeling . . . but then, I was only nine when she died.”

  “What feeling?”

  Margaret idles the stem of the wineglass in her fingers. It’s nearly empty, and the bottle’s nearly empty, and I’m tempted to open another. But oh, she’s balancing right there on the edge, and the slightest breath might topple her. We are sealed tight in this chilly room, in this chilly flat, windows blacked out, curtains closed, single bulb burning.

  “I don’t know. That she held some kind of deep sadness inside her. Some terrible loss. She was only ever really happy when Daddy was around.”

  “They were very much in love?”

  Margaret raises her head, and the softness of her expression shocks me. I see her mother on the riverbank in her halo of blondness, and for the first time I wonder who stood behind that camera, taking the photograph. “I was only nine,” she says, “but I’ll never forget the way she looked at him, and he at her. It was more than love. It was something spiritual, like a religion.”

  “What a comfort for you.”

  “A comfort?”

  “Knowing that such a love even existed in the world. Knowing your parents had it.”

  Margaret lifts the bottle and turns it almost vertical above her glass, so that not a single precious drop remains inside. Together we watch the drip, drip, drip, the shimmering of the surface, until there’s nothing left to give, no more wine outside Margaret’s glass, and she sets the empty bottle at the edge of the table.

  “Why do think I never married?” she says.

  When the dishes are washed and put away in the cupboard, Margaret turns to me and folds her arms, as if she’s considering what to do with me. We’re standing in the cramped little kitchen, on the floor of gray linoleum; there’s a window above the sink, but it’s tiny and blacked out, and the air’s still rank with the odor of cooked meat and grease.

  “You didn’t let me finish about B—,” she says.

  “I didn’t realize there was more.”

  “He was quite obviously trying to sound me out, to find out what I knew. Lucky I’ve got a straight face.” She taps her fingers against her arm. “He said nothing about you. He said it was terrible news about Thorpe, and I said yes, jolly awful, was there anything at all we could do? And he said they would alert any active agents in G section, any informants, to stand ready to offer aid and so on. All that rubbish.”

  “You don’t believe him?”

  We speak in that low, husky tone of voice just above a whisper, and the only light comes from the bulb in the parlor, around the corner. Margaret stares not at me, but at the curtain covering the kitchen window.

  “It seems to me,” she says, “that if B—’s decided it’s too dangerous to let you live with this information—whatever it is—he likely feels precisely the same way about Benedict.”

  “I see.”

  “I don’t mean to frighten you.”

  “In other words, he’s not going to do a damned thing to help Thorpe. The Germans are doing him a favor. And if Thorpe manages to escape . . .”

  From some floor below us comes the sound of a telephone ringing, the thump of footsteps. A cross, muffled voice. Margaret’s eyes are like discs, meeting mine. The voice drones on, a kettle whines.

  “You have to understand,” she says. “It’s war. It’s about the end, not the means. They have to be ruthless, it’s their job.”

  “And all this ruthlessness for the sake of that—that damned pair—”

  “Shh. Don’t say it.”

  I stare at my feet, which are clad in thick woolen stockings loaned to me by Margaret. I have the feeling she’s knitted them herself; they have that chunky, uneven texture with which I’m deeply familiar, from packing hundreds of boxes of same in the old Red Cross headquarters on George Street in Nassau. Ugly, serviceable socks distributed all over England by now, possibly all over Europe, possibly even Colditz.

  “So what did you say to B—?” I whisper.

  “What else could I say? I didn’t want to raise his suspicions. I said that I would of course keep my eye on the situation, here in German section, and that I stood ready to do whatever I could to help my brother. And he said . . .”

  “Yes?”

  I look up to find her watching me, arms still folded. At my look of inquiry, she levers away from the cupboard and stalks out of the kitchen to the parlor, where she takes the cigarettes and the matches from the mantel. She sticks a cigarette in her mouth and lights a match, and while she’s doing this, holding the cigarette in place with her lips, she says, “He said that if anyone should approach me about Benedict, anyone at all, I should come to him first. That he’d been engaged in some rather sensitive work in Nassau, and there were desperate people who might do anything to obtain that information.” She tosses the spent match atop the unlit coals in the fireplace and takes a long drag on the cigarette while she stares at me. “Who might attempt to win my trust in order to discover Benedict’s secrets.”

  “He said that?”

  “He said they would say anything, tell me all kinds of lies, and I should prevent any attempt by a stranger to insinuate himself.” She blows out a stream of smoke. “Or herself.”

  “He said that? Herself?”

  “His exact words.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  As I said, the light in here is feeble, because of the blackout and because we’re conserving, you know, for the war effort. And it’s cold and stuffy, and I feel as if I’m suffocating, and yet I can’t move, and neither can she. She’s folded her arms over her cardigan, and the end of the cigarette flares orange between her fingers. I think I see a twitch in the skin of her neck. Her pulse, thumping in the same rhythm as mine. I think of Thorpe, in his cold, damp cell made of stone, and whether his pulse makes this rhythm, whether this beat unites us, the three of us.

  She reaches out to flick ash into the fireplace.

  “I said I would be on my guard, of course. And then I took some castor oil and made myself vomit so I could take a few days off sick.”

  “You did what?”

  “We’ve got to get you out of London. He’ll be looking for you everywhere, and I daresay it won’t take him long to visit here.”

  “But where are we going?”

  “Somewhere safe,” she says. “Somewhere we can decide what’s to be done. Somewhere on a farm, so we can eat eggs and butter without having to register you for a damned ration card.”

  “And where’s that?”

 
; “Home.” Margaret tosses the cigarette in the fireplace. “Or rather, the house where Benedict and I were born.”

  Elfriede

  June 1905

  (Florida)

  On the day Wilfred returns to her, the weather dawns hot and auspicious, so Elfriede takes the children to the seashore while Charlotte stays home with a headache. Oh, a headache. A hangover, let’s call a spade a spade. Elfriede tells herself that’s how Charlotte copes with the grief.

  Anyway, she doesn’t mind. Let Charlotte have her elixirs of whiskey and grief, while Elfriede has the children all to herself. Johann loves the seashore. Already he knows how to swim in the surf without being swept away, though Elfriede’s careful to keep him on the sand when the waves are too rough. He’s big and sturdy, like his father was; in fact, he’s so big and so sturdy, so whitely blond and so loyal, he might almost be Gerhard himself. During the moments she holds her son in her arms, she doesn’t feel the loss of his father at all.

  The girls are more content to play on the shore, except for Ursula, the indomitable elder. Well, who could blame her? Like her father, like her brother, she’s built on a sturdy frame. Sometimes Elfriede looks at her and wonders where the devil they’re going to find a husband for her. Yes, there’s the stain of bastardy, but it’s more the size of her, the strength of Ursula. Only an unusually large, unusually strong man can cope with her. Or else a smaller man who wants to be coped with? Perhaps. Her younger sisters are more dainty. Blond and pinkish. Of course, the baby’s only eleven months old, so it’s hard to tell for certain. She sits on the edge of her blanket right now, under a new striped umbrella, eating sand in calm handfuls. Poor baby, Charlotte was seven months along with her when Gerhard’s appendix burst. She never saw her father’s face, heard his voice, felt his big hands cradling her as he had the others. These things happen. Life’s uncertain. Charlotte—convinced this tragedy was the retribution of a vengeful God—took to her bed when the peritonitis set in. Didn’t leave it until after Gertrud was born, one month later and four weeks early, and a little life returned to her eyes. Well, who wouldn’t perk up, producing a beautiful baby like that? The Lord giveth and taketh away, Charlotte said, putting the baby to her breast, naming her after her dead father, and Elfriede felt her own grief lifting as she gazed at the small, sad faces in the nursery, who now loved her and needed her more than ever.