The London Restoration

by Rachel McMillan

  “In exchange for . . . ?”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “How dare you use my husband as part of your reasons. I thought you were my friend. Why not use Fisher Carne or Villiers? Why me? Why did you tell me your secret?”

  “I trust you.”

  “I was married just before I came here.”

  “You should never have told me about that bull’s-eye church.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it gave me an idea.”

  “What idea? Oh, right. Your reasons. How dare you sit there now tight-lipped?”

  “I need you, Diana Somerville.” His crisp voice used her surname emphatically. “And it looks like you need me too.”

  Diana looked at her cold tea. “You’re right, Simon. I don’t have a choice.”

  * * *

  One evening a week later, Simon clicked his tongue at Diana’s pale, thin face, the purple half-moons under her eyes. Villiers was watching her like a hawk and stabbed Simon with her gaze, mostly because she was annoyed, Diana was silent, and Simon was the easiest target.

  Fisher was pale, too, Diana noticed, often with a slight rim of perspiration at his blond hairline. She tried to bring up her concern for their friend, but Sophie and Simon were too busy staring each other down while tapping their cigarette ashes in a silent, angry conversation across the pub table.

  Fisher twisted a line of piano wire around his index finger.

  “Why do you always carry that with you?” she asked.

  “Never know when you might need it. It can slice through hard cheeses, it can measure, and seeing as no one has tuned the baby grand in the main house . . .”

  She hadn’t slept since Simon had shown her Brent’s folder. At night she looked over the sketch of the churches he had given her on the train platform and then at a picture of the two of them. She tried to recall the feel of his hair in her fingers and the way his green eyes looked near gold in the sunlight. But the moment she drifted and closed her eyes, the uncertainty of two wounded men’s conditions took over and she wondered if one of them was Brent. She tried to imagine how she would cope. Survive. Even live if it was without him.

  She tried not to resent Simon with his secrets and his MI6 power, but it was hard to take directions from him day in and day out knowing he was the keeper of the most important thing in her life.

  The next day he approached her at the kettle in the empty break room. His voice was soft. “This is the way I know how to do the right thing.”

  Diana could hardly speak. “Well, it’s the wrong way to do the right thing, Simon.”

  “I’m worried about you.” He squeezed her elbow. “You never eat. You never talk about Christopher Wren. When I first met you, you took everything in and you talked incessantly and tried so hard to reclaim the parts of your life before you came here.”

  “I had something to live for then. Simon . . . if you hear anything . . .” She blinked back tears.

  Simon studied her a long moment, and try as she might, Diana couldn’t read his clear blue eyes. “Brent Somerville is a lucky man.”

  So was Simon when it came to his relationship with Sophie Villiers. Then her eyes widened and her heart thudded, jolted to life again. Simon said “is.”

  He retracted something from his breast pocket. “So you’ll go to Vienna for me?” He quirked an eyebrow.

  “I’ll go to the moon,” she said, ready to lunge at him and rip the envelope from his hand.

  The smile he gave her lacked his usual mirth. “I’m very happy for you, Diana. Truly.”

  With shaking hands she opened the envelope. Inside was a telegram whose curt words filled her with joy.

  Barre. Ross killed. Stop. Somerville wounded in action. Stop. In hospital. Stop. Will fully recover.

  Diana let the telegram fall from her fingers and threw her arms around Simon’s neck, holding tightly as she dampened the shoulder of his shirt. When her knees began to give way under her, Simon took hold of her waist and led her to her chair.

  She couldn’t count the number of times she ran her finger over the telegram. Once she blinked away her joy that he was alive, she asked, “How wounded, Simon?”

  “One thing at a time.” Simon unfolded a piece of paper and placed it in her hand. “This is the name of the hospital where he’s being treated.”

  “I-I can talk to him?” Her voice squeaked, but she didn’t care.

  “Why don’t you take your lunch break now, Diana?” Simon’s eyes were oddly bright. He truly wanted this for her. “And write a letter.”

  Diana poured her heart and tears onto paper that was almost translucent by the time she folded it into an envelope. How did you tell the other half of yourself, wounded and alone, that you couldn’t be with him?

  Diana had prided herself on keeping a stiff upper lip in front of Villiers throughout the interminable wait for news, but somehow the dam opened the moment she arrived home that evening.

  “Whatever it is, Canary, it’s not half as bad as the pudding in the canteen today. Come join me and I’ll prove it.” Her usual crisp glass voice was temporarily softened and she even pressed a kiss to Diana’s head in a rare moment of affection. “It will all turn out. Things always do. Now let’s eat terrible things and toast the fact that when you hit absolute bottom, you can only go up.”

  “Have you ever been in love, Villiers?”

  When Sophie merely looked at her, Diana continued. “Because I was in love with Brent the moment I met him. And now, with all that is expected of me—and all that I have become—I sometimes wonder.”

  “If you’re still in love with him?”

  “No! Oh no. Not that. I sometimes wonder if I can be what he needs me to be. The man married a certain woman, and . . .”

  “Canary.” Villiers shook her head. “If he’s anything but impressed at who you’ve become, then he’s not worthy of you. You don’t need him. You can come home with me. My parents have eons of space. You can live in the garden shed.”

  Diana smiled. She knew what she wanted: the same man she saw sketching in a churchyard. She just wasn’t sure what she would have to do, say, or change about herself when this was all over to keep him.

  Chapter 20

  Diana met Brent at King’s and together they strolled to St. Paul’s for Evensong. Brent hadn’t been inside the cathedral since before the war. He supposed stepping through its doors would tug him to the past. For unlike the other churches they had seen, this one remained relatively unscathed. And yet, as they found empty seats and sat, Diana didn’t look at him like she had the first time they roamed the church together. She met his gaze straight on, shoulders slightly raised, and chin tilted upward.

  “Did you find anything at the college?” She leaned into him once they had settled.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary.” He rolled the bulletin over his knee. “Almost too ordinary now.”

  The music began and the first bars of Mozart’s Kyrie section of the Mass swelled. Diana was transfixed. But on closer inspection, he saw her eyes were glazed. Nostalgia for the church? For what they were the last time he crossed the threshold, when she was the girl in his sketches and he was light-headed as she hung on to him telling him every last thing about the church?

  The music stirred something he couldn’t translate through memory. At first Mozart took him back to the night he and Ross had heard “Ave Verum Corpus”: that snatch of beauty in otherwise ugly surroundings. But when he turned to focus on Diana, she had drifted from him. Her shoulder no longer brushed his and she was slightly turned.

  Perhaps it was unfair for him to expect her to let him in when he still tucked so much inside, but wasn’t this place sacred to their love story? At least as sacred as their flat and All Hallows?

  A new bar began and she slipped further. What was it about music and memory? He felt the need to comfort her. Let her know he was there.

  “You’re what my stupid heart will want always,” Brent said softly.

 
“Even though I’ve changed?”

  He looked around. “The church has changed, too, hasn’t it?”

  “But not too much. Just enough change to show what it lived through. To show it survived.”

  “Remember when you told me St. Paul’s occupies a space where once there was a shrine to the goddess Diana?” he whispered. “Maybe that’s why you love it so much.”

  “Maybe.” She chewed her lip, shifted in her seat, and the music drew her again.

  The piece was melancholy and reverent, certainly, but its effect on Diana left him at a loss. What did she hear in it? He was taking in the way the notes filled a sanctuary, familiar yet strange. From her body language and the light in her eyes, Brent imagined she was anticipating the next note. The next movement. All he knew was that she was experiencing a place she had once shared with him without him.

  “Are you alright?”

  “It just makes me think of someone. Of somewhere that . . .” She swallowed and folded her hands in her lap.

  The chords filled the rafters and the next movement began. Brent looked around to see if he recognized anyone from their previous church visits. Something they should report to Simon. Perhaps the man she recognized. Her friend.

  * * *

  An hour later, Evensong ended and the crowd spilled through the doors like an overturned vessel. The cathedral doors had seen coronations and funerals, had beckoned many. Now the throng moved single file past rows of chairs, curving slightly around the baptismal font and shuffling into the night.

  Mozart lingered in the sanctuary, beyond the last legato note and minor chords of the soloists and musicians who were, like Brent and Diana, funneling outside.

  Brent took a moment to look over his shoulder as they descended the steps of the church from Ludgate Hill and sloping down to Fleet Street, scarred but standing.

  It certainly wasn’t an opportune time to steal his arms around her and pull her in for a kiss. But he didn’t fancy being at St. Paul’s and not being completely in sync with her. So he embraced her tightly and pressed his lips to hers.

  She kissed him back. Kissed him as an intercession between their idealization of each other and the broken people they were now. When she opened her eyes, however, their world was still uneven.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I kept thinking there must be some message in the music. From Fisher. The man we saw. The man I know. He taught me all about Mozart, Brent. This music was a friend to him.” She stopped, reached into her handbag, and retrieved the program. “And when he introduced it to me, I began to look at it as a friend too. You see, Fisher loves numbers. He’s a mathematician. There’s a catalogue system that organizes Mozart’s pieces. The Köchel Catalogue. This piece is #427. I only know that because he told me so often. Told me the composer wrote it for his wife, Constanze, so she would have a truly beautiful solo.”

  She shook her head. “See? Why I am so terrible at doing what Simon expects? I get emotional and fall into the past. My past with you, yes, but also with Fisher. A friend.”

  “It truly bothers you that he’s connected in all of this, doesn’t it?”

  “Wouldn’t it bother you? If your friend Holt or Ross or Tibbs . . . if you found out—?”

  “It would. Funny, eh? The way we rely on people who share exactly the same experience?”

  “Because no one else will completely know. I can tell you and you can tell me. But, I speak his language, Brent.”

  “You’re not involved in what Simon is tracking. What he’s involving you in. You’re on opposite sides.”

  “And that pains me.”

  “Did you ever think that Simon needs you not for your impressive knowledge or your ability to connect patterns but because you are so emotionally involved? It must be nice for a man like that who has to work in hypotheses and patterns to know a woman who feels everything deeply.”

  They fell into pace silently.

  “You’re sure you were talking about Simon?” Diana said with a curve of a smile a moment later.

  * * *

  Spring 1945

  Italy

  “Could you find me pen and paper?”

  The nurse smiled in relief. He hadn’t asked for either before. “You’re finally going to write her,” she said in broken English. “Of course.”

  “It’s hard.” He accepted the pen and paper when she returned.

  “Everything’s hard.”

  So he wrote a letter and sent it to the address that at this point was little more than a void. And alongside the pain and morphine drip, Brent became accustomed to the daily knife slicing because he hadn’t spoken to Diana when week after week went by and his letter was never returned. One moment of self-preservation, of anger.

  There was a letter, however, waiting for him when he finally arrived at the Clerkenwell flat just as he was healed. Meeting his crumbled city alone through a stream of servicemen. Brent snatched at the envelope shoved halfway under the door. He lifted it shakily and made out Diana’s handwriting. He opened the door and found the flat much as they had left it—with a coat of dust, clean but stale air, still whole despite the bombs that fell throughout the Blitz and beyond.

  The furniture was the same. The sketches he had left. The books Diana had hastily married with his own the day he pledged himself to her forever. The day he gave her every last piece of himself.

  Brent set his rucksack on the floor and Diana’s letter on the table. He wandered into the bedroom. The comforter was tucked in the way he liked and the light from outside still filtered through the blinds as it had when he closed his eyes in a dark, damp trench and tried to imagine its comfort.

  The landlady had filled the larder when she learned he would return and there was tea in the cupboard. Brent opened the closet. Diana had taken much of her clothing, but her green dress hung next to his best suit. He slowly removed it and imagined how she filled it into life, how the fabric clung to her. He pressed it to him a moment and caught a whiff of her perfume and an undercurrent of a scent that was just her. She must still love him. She must.

  He gingerly opened the letter.

  Dear Brent,

  I have tried to write this letter a hundred times. We used to be able to start anywhere in a conversation, and how ironic I don’t know where to begin.

  Other than to tell you at the very beginning that I miss you so much it feels like I’ve lost a part of myself, and every day I wake up to this horrible ache. That it makes it hard to breathe or sleep or eat. That I wish I were with you. That I had been with you when you were injured.

  And other than to tell you that I love you. I love you. I love you. More than any word in any language. Seven or more.

  And I cannot come home to you yet, even though it is ripping me at the seams.

  Brent, I am begging you to trust me for all of the lost letters and all of the words I wanted to speak and haven’t. There is a reason that has little to do with you and all to do with the war that took me away from you.

  I need you to know that you are everything to me.

  Brent wiped his eyes and read the letter again before he straightened his shoulders and put the kettle on the hob. Routine frightened him. But he met it as one did the most commonplace of nightmares. He’d patch up his life again. He stood unflinching at the chill of the solitary life before him. There was a distinct possibility that Diana would be tugged back into his world. There was hope that his heart would settle and thrum with the certainty of her.

  But then there was all of the uncertainty too.

  There was Ross.

  Brent explored faith after Ross much as he did the mix-and-match tea bags in one of the patterned canisters Diana brought to his flat on their wedding day. Before Ross, he hadn’t believed he could be drained of Paul’s words recited to memory and sewn into revered theses. After Ross, he tried to reconcile the words that so confidently cut through his lecture halls with those that lay in the mud as his friend inhaled his last breath.
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br />   Brent spread his sketch pad on the kitchen table and pressed the tip of the charcoal so harshly he stabbed a hole in the paper.

  You don’t have time to think about Ross. You have no idea where Diana is.

  But what sort of cruel equilibrium measured the wife he missed against the friend who exacted the promise that Brent would return to a home and a wife and be happy? Ross believed Brent had something to return home to. A real home. Diana.

  A home beyond a few secrets or a possible betrayal. For what was Diana’s absence other than a kind of betrayal? Even if she was still true to him, she wasn’t here. He struggled to imagine how she would slip back into the current of his life, how she would suit the Brent Somerville scarred by war and unsettled by nightmares.

  Usually Brent looked over a blank page as a road map his imagination navigated with charcoal, lines, and sure shading. Now, his fingers worked with a pace and confidence he hadn’t felt since before the war. Though the subject matter was filled with things he had seen and couldn’t blink away, the images seared on his mind. He shouldn’t have to choose between them: Ross’s memory and Diana’s absence. But as the charcoal worked over the paper, it was not Diana’s silhouette that came to the forefront. Just shadows and contours of what he and Ross had seen.

  Even if he did know that he would rather risk a world in which he stepped into a churchyard on a sunny October afternoon. Even if it meant the loneliness upon his return, Diana’s absence made his guilt dig deeper.

  For the only thing that made Brent feel worthy of his friend’s sacrifice was Diana.

  He closed his eyes even as his fingers worked over the page. When he opened them, he had captured a fallen church bordered by a moat of stone. If he listened hard enough, he could even hear Mozart.

  * * *

  November 1945

  London

  Having long since burnt Brent’s breakfast and sent him out to his day, Diana spread the newspaper on her kitchen table and settled on a column speaking to women readjusting to the London they knew now the war was over. Women who assumed the roles of the men who fought far away and now were learning how to step back into their natural roles. A furtive look around the Clerkenwell flat and Diana was certain any talk of a woman’s natural role was a moot point.