“I say!” Nigel was impressed. “You don’t look like a mutinous sort.”
“I just wanted things to be fair,” Phoebe said, shrugging. “Anyway, I’m assuming that’s what got me fingered. That and voting for Roosevelt, probably.”
Nigel considered. “Maybe you signed the wrong petition sometime.”
“Sure,” Phoebe rejoined. “Or checked the wrong book out of the library!”
They snickered, shaking their heads. Then they looked at each other and fell silent. Phoebe sighed. In thirty-six hours, they would dock at Southampton and she would officially be an exile.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Nigel murmured. He took a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket and grimaced at it. “I ought to return to the gorgon. I can’t have her thinking I’m gallivanting during courtship.” He stood and Phoebe stood as well.
“Well, pleasure saving your life and all,” she said, extending her hand.
He laughed and produced a card, beautifully embossed in gold.
“Eternally grateful, dear girl, and truly charmed to meet you. If you land yourself on a television program in Britain, do drop a line and let me know. I can always receive post at my club.”
Phoebe suppressed a laugh. It was the snobbiest version of “write if you get work” she’d ever heard. She told herself to make the scene funnier in a script.
He was still looking at her thoughtfully.
“I say, will you take some friendly advice?” he asked.
“I’ll take almost anything, really.”
He leaned in close, whispering in her ear.
“When you’re interrogated by the border agents, don’t tell them you’re looking for work.”
“What?”
He frowned at her and spoke in the tones one uses with a dimwit. “You’re much more likely to get a decent residency permit if you’re not planning to take a job from a Briton. Simply say you’re doing research for a novel, and after that say as little as possible.” He shook her hand again. “It has been my genuine pleasure, Miss Adler.”
“Mine as well, Mr. Elliott,” she said, her politeness masking the roiling within her. Only a few weeks before, she had been so proud of her honesty, saving her illusions for the page. Now she was someone who had to spin the truth around like a top, just in the hopes of keeping herself free and fed.
If there was any justice in the world, someone, someday, was going to pay for all this.
* * *
• • •
They docked during a dawn that was as misty and gray as she’d ever been promised England would be.
“Isn’t there meant to be a heat wave on?” the man behind her grumbled. “Wouldn’t know it’s near-on August. Why did I come back?”
No one answered. Phoebe shuffled along, buffeted by the other blinking and bleary-eyed tourist-class passengers waiting to have their passports stamped. She held her head high and tried to look blank, even bored. Someone who was there on a lark, not on a desperate effort to save her life.
The queue moved at the sort of pace that made Phoebe certain the rest of her life would be spent standing right here. Everyone grew more cross, with some muttering gloomily about inefficiency and how none of this would be tolerated under some other sort of government. These were countered by strictures on not grumbling, which Phoebe was convinced were going to lead to broken bones. By the time she was next, she was past hunger, past exhaustion, past anything but her pounding heart and sweat-soaked hands. It wasn’t impossible that the immigration agent would take one look at her paperwork and call someone to arrest her for immediate shipment back to America. Maybe they would handcuff her right there, in front of everyone, who would all have an excellent story to tell for the rest of their lives. As would she, when she got out of prison. She almost smiled, entranced by the drama.
“Oi, wake up!” a man behind her shouted, giving her a sharp prod in the back. “Waiting half forever and Little Miss Typewriter here hangs about like she’s got all the time in the world.”
The typewriter in Little Miss Typewriter’s hand banged against her trembling legs as she walked the five short steps to the immigration agent, the longest part of her journey yet. She set the typewriter down between her legs, squeezing it tightly between her calves to stop their shaking. It was the last friend she had now, and its presence was reassuring as she watched the official open her passport. His lips were pursed in a manner that might have been disgust, boredom, or warding off a sneeze.
“Reason for traveling?” he barked.
“Well, they say it’s very broadening,” she said automatically. She could practically hear Mona and Anne’s hands smacking their foreheads in unison.
Now he looked up at her, and his eyes were cold.
“This is rather a serious business, Miss Adler.”
It was. She was appalled at herself for making a joke, though it seemed far preferable to telling a lie. But it was a time for lying.
“I’m writing a book. I came here to do research, and to write.”
He grunted, rolling his eyes as if to say, “Oh, another of those.”
“You have funds to live on for three months?” he asked.
“Yes,” she lied again, hoping he wouldn’t ask for proof. After the money she’d left for Mona and travel costs, she had barely a hundred dollars. It would yield maybe thirty-six pounds. She didn’t dare wonder how long that would last.
He looked her over and shrugged. “All right, I’ll grant you a residency permit of seven weeks—”
“Seven weeks! You just said three months!” Phoebe yelped.
The agent stamped her passport and handed it back.
“You may apply for an extension a week before expiry,” he instructed her. “Next!”
Phoebe wended her way out in a daze. Seven weeks. And even three months wouldn’t have been enough. Seven weeks. But I’m here. She was here! I’m free, I’m safe, I can do my work. Provided someone wants to buy my work. And then, surely, I can get a longer residency.
Here. Wherever “here” was. She gathered her suitcase along with the other admitted passengers and followed the throng into the main building, where everyone, whether preparing to sail or just arrived, looked a little lost.
Exhaustion swept over Phoebe. She gave herself a shake to dismiss the cobwebs, and followed the signs to the bureau de change, joining a snaking line of hunch-shouldered humans.
“All I’ve done since I’ve gotten here is wait in line,” she chattered to a bleary-eyed young mother behind her, trying to calm herself. “Already I’ve gone native.” The woman and her tiny daughter stared at her. “Tough crowd,” Phoebe muttered.
When she reached the desk, she emptied the cash from her handbag. The money sewn into her coat, and the twenty-dollar bill in her bra, would stay put for now. A few moments later, she was presented with a small stack of notes and coins in a variety of funny shapes. She blinked down at it.
“I don’t suppose you have some sort of a cipher that explains all this?”
“Move along, will you, we’ve not got all day!” someone snapped behind her.
Phoebe moved along, tucking the alien currency into her handbag. She didn’t dare lock herself in a toilet stall to figure out the denominations she needed for train fare, as she couldn’t risk leaving her suitcase unsupervised.
“I say, missus, I’d be honored to show you what coins are what, if you’d like?”
A young man, almost an adolescent, bobbed at her elbow. A round, sweet face that barely needed a razor. An accent like Laurence Olivier’s in Hamlet. An easy, friendly, even admiring smile. Phoebe smiled in warm relief and reached into her handbag. Then she looked into his eyes. The friendliness was too practiced, too perfect.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” she cried, snapping her bag shut. “I’ve just left New York and I almost don’t recognize a shyster when I
see one? Criminy. My father would turn in his grave if he hadn’t been cremated.”
She stormed off in search of a likely outlet for reporting confidence tricksters. By the time she found someone, there was no hope of finding the sweet-faced boy, and the officer scolded Phoebe for wasting his time.
Feeling betrayed by her supposed refuge only hours after arrival, Phoebe grudgingly trusted the ticket agent at the rail office to select the coins that added up to her fare to London.
“Got to just read them coins, hadn’t you?” he said. Or what she thought he said, it was hard to tell.
Silly me, thinking I spoke English. Anyway, I’m too tired to read.
She was slightly heartened to successfully trade what they called “tuppence” for a cup of hot brown liquid they insisted was “coffee.” Then she found a tobacconist. She scoured the shelves for Lucky Strikes.
“Not got them,” the tobacconist said when she asked. Phoebe sighed. Of course they didn’t. It was such a small thing, but she liked her brand. It tasted like New York. A taste diminishing by the minute.
“Want to try Woodbines, miss? Lots of ladies like them Woodbines.”
It sounded like “laddies lick them woofies,” which she would remember for Floyd and Leo when she got home. She selected a pack of Player’s.
“Thems preferred by sailors, miss,” the tobacconist said disapprovingly.
“Sailors, did you say?” Phoebe asked. “Well, we’re all just sailing through life, aren’t we?” The cost was “18d,” whatever that meant. The tobacconist, still frowning, held up a coin and told her it was a shilling, worth twelvepence. Phoebe read “sixpence” on another coin and triumphantly paid for her cigarettes. She smoked one, decided it was only okay, and headed for the train.
There, she sat squeezed between a man dressed in fear of British weather, in a mackintosh, galoshes, and rain hat, and a woman who held out her newspaper so wide, Phoebe had to clutch her glasses lest they get knocked off when the woman turned the page.
Outside the window, the world turned green. Phoebe turned to stare at it, ignoring the mac man’s harrumphs of protestation at being in her line of vision. It was so beautiful, so unlike anything she’d seen before. She looked harder and harder, until she could feel herself walking through that cool, rolling grass. She heard the hum of insects and the calls of birds, and a music that came from somewhere she couldn’t see, something ancient, even primal.
As they neared London, the green gave way to rows and rows of redbrick houses, then a sea of gray stone. And amid it all, bomb damage. Phoebe had seen the newsreels after the Blitz, of course, but she hadn’t expected in 1955 to still see whole streets of carved-out houses, portions of their fronts and backs still standing, interiors picked nearly clean. Homes. Full of busy, bustling life, now emptied and raw and cold. She owed it to those lives to look, but was relieved when the conductor called that they were arriving in Waterloo Station. She gathered her things and took a deep breath.
I am Wellington. Not Napoleon. She whispered it again and again as she made her way through the deafening crowd to the information desk.
Phoebe knew the names of some storied hotels in London. The Savoy. Claridge’s. Brown’s. The Ritz. Hotels for someday. For the person she would be when she had a velvet swing coat to slip over the Bonwit dress, a string of pearls, a diamanté comb in her hair. When she had a name that meant something, a name she was allowed to use without fear.
“Excuse me, could you recommend an inexpensive hotel near here?” Phoebe asked the uniformed man.
His tone was polite as he asked her a question, but Phoebe couldn’t understand him. It was like trying to talk to someone underwater. Nigel’s posh accent, and accents in the movies, were easy to grasp, but whether it was the rush of noise or her rumbling stomach and fuzzy head, she had to ask him to repeat himself, twice.
“Can you read?” he snapped at last, and she understood that all right. She gratefully accepted his scrawled directions and only got lost once before she stood before the Fairwood Arms. Phoebe saw no wood, no arms, and certainly nothing even remotely fair. Instead, she saw frayed curtains, cracked windows, and bricks nearly black with soot stains.
Don’t be a snob, she scolded herself. She tried not to think of the cheerful redbrick building on Perry Street and the way Mrs. Pocatelli’s glare would have scared off any soot that might have considered landing on those walls. But her house didn’t have to endure a war all around it, Phoebe reminded herself. And Mrs. Pocatelli is a lousy old bat. Except that’s an insult to bats. Phoebe got a fresh grip on her bags, ignored her aching muscles, and marched up the steps. What could be a front garden was just a patch of cracked cement, but the front window boasted a window box filled with flowers. Its perch was precarious, but the flowers were cheery and bore all the signs of loving care. She regarded that as a good sign and rang the bell.
A round-faced woman with silver hair in a neat roll answered and showed Phoebe into a sitting room full of furniture that, though shabby, was clean and neatly patched. She introduced herself as Mrs. Bream and smiled pleasantly as she asked what sort of room Phoebe wanted.
“Honestly, the sort with a bed and maybe a door sounds super right now,” Phoebe said, grinning. She bet Mrs. Bream was a wizard with a good thick soup.
“Oh, an American! Haven’t had one of your lot in ever so long,” Mrs. Bream said, smiling more broadly. “Now, I’ve got a room on the second floor, overlooking the garden, for nine-and-six a week, will that do?”
Phoebe had no idea what “nine-and-six” meant, but nodded fervently.
“Jolly good, jolly good,” Mrs. Bream said, settling herself at the desk and opening a large book. “May I have your name, miss?”
“Phoebe Adler.”
Mrs. Bream had gotten as far as writing a curvy P. Phoebe saw her fingers whiten around the pen. Her eyes shot up to meet Phoebe’s.
“Adler, did you say? Is that Jewish, by any chance?”
“It’s my name,” Phoebe said, her neck tingling.
“I see. I’m afraid that room was actually booked yesterday, so we’re full up.”
Phoebe stared, the tingle running down her back, seizing her spine.
“You can’t mean that?”
But Mrs. Bream very much did mean it. Her face was polite but closed. The flare of her nostrils said things Phoebe had thought she would never hear again. Not here. Not in what was supposed to be her sanctuary.
“Good afternoon,” said Mrs. Bream—a dismissal, not a pleasantry.
Phoebe swore she could hear bones and muscles cracking as she bent to pick up her bags. Tears stung her eyes—the worst sort of tears. Shame. She wanted to be angry, and all she could feel was utter mortification. Tell her you’re relieved! Tell her this place is a dump! Tell her people who think they’re better than anyone are usually lesser than everyone and they know it!
Instead she gave the woman a long, hard look, then turned and walked out as steadily as she could manage. As soon as the door was shut behind her, she glanced to her left and, without another thought, reached out and gave the window box a firm shove. It came loose and shattered on the cement beneath it, drowning all the flowers in a heap of dirt and clay.
Once she was around the corner and sure no one was following with an intent to prosecute a foul window box attacker, Phoebe sat down on her suitcase, right in the middle of the sidewalk. She knew she should flag down a taxi, ask the driver to take her to the nearest hotel, and hang the cost. A bath and a rest and she would have the energy to make a better start tomorrow. But sitting there on her battered American Tourister, she couldn’t make herself move. She was sweating, exhausted in the heat Mona had promised. Her head dropped into her hands. I’ll get up in a minute, she told herself every minute for the next ten.
“I say, everything all right, miss?” A police officer was standing over her.
Phoebe
blinked at him, and became aware of other people here and there around the street, most of them ignoring her just as she would probably have ignored herself, a few short weeks ago.
“Thank you, yes, I just needed to sit a minute,” she said.
“Well, you can’t stop here, miss, you need to be on your way.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, forcing herself upright. He wasn’t warm, but he wasn’t unfriendly either. “I’ve just arrived, and I’m a little lost. Can you find me a cab?”
The London constable lived up to the storied reputation. More quickly than she might have imagined, she was nestled in the plush seat of a black cab, and a few short minutes after that, the very decent cabbie deposited her at the door of a pub hotel and claimed, “This will do till you’ve found your way, miss.”
Inside, a gangly man in shirtsleeves jumped to help her with her things.
“Is it a room you’re needing, miss? Most certainly, miss. Call me Ernie, miss, everyone does. Mind the rough bits on the steps there, miss.”
The bubbly monologue continued till he showed her into a pocket-sized room whose sloped ceiling and exposed beams immediately answered her dream of an old England.
“Oh, this is wonderful!” Phoebe cried.
The smile took up almost the whole of Ernie’s thin face.
“All right, then, miss, very good, miss, glad to have you, very glad. No, no, no needs to pay now, miss, I’ll sort your bill by the day or week, whichever you like. Bath just down that way and only fourpence for hot water. Be you wanting a spot of something?”
He brought her an enormous bowl of meat and potatoes, along with a steaming cup of tea. Even with the warm weather, they were soothing.
“There you are, miss, eat up and enjoy it now, and I do hope you sleep well.”
The bed was narrow but the sheets were clean, and for the first time that never-ending day, Phoebe relaxed. She chuckled to herself as she fell asleep, thinking of how much Mona would enjoy this story of the adventure’s beginning.
Red Letter Days Page 9
