The London Restoration

by Rachel McMillan

  “I want you to be happy. I want it to be like it was before the war.”

  “It can’t be. Because I am not the same man I was then. You aren’t the same either. It’s a good thing, Di. You’re finally given an opportunity to use gifts I bet you didn’t even know you had.” He quirked his lips in a smile. “You took a bullet for me. This is your call.”

  “That cannot be how we handle our decision making moving forward.”

  “But for this once . . . I’ve never taught Greek or Latin before. Or had ration-flour strudel. And there were moments, weren’t there?” He shrugged. “It sparked something. Maybe you can do your graduate studies there. What? What is it?”

  “I think Fisher made me realize how dangerous this ideology is. That it can grip men like Fisher who in turn lure men like Rick. What was it you told me once? That Simon needs my emotional perspective? Maybe that’s all I need to bring with me. Well, not all I need to bring with me.”

  Diana leaned forward and raised her chin for a kiss, which he was happy to give, gently cupping her face in his hands.

  “Did he almost ruin our marriage, Brent?” she asked several minutes later, not hiding the insecurity in her eyes. “Did I almost ruin our marriage?”

  “How can you ruin something with such a strong foundation?”

  “Simon means well.”

  “You want this, don’t you?”

  “The neighbor’s pet badger startled me by the rubbish bins again the other night. Might be a nice change of scenery. And the churches. Karlskirche! Those ellipsoid roofs!”

  “Then I suppose I’ll be taking you on a rather tardy honeymoon. Presumably with terrible rations. Wrecked churches . . .”

  “So, pretty much the same as here.”

  “Exactly.”

  Chapter 29

  January 1946

  London

  When Brent told Diana about Ross, he did so slowly. One night at a time and without her providing a story in exchange. A few nights he was too exhausted to speak. Other nights, he would drift to sleep, then wake with a vengeance and grab her wrists much as he had held Ross’s. But he was more easily roused now and she could more easily calm him.

  It seemed that with the last barrier that fell between them, he was more willing to recognize she was truly there with him. She was stronger too. One night she surprised him by nearly holding his hands at bay.

  Once, he had woken enough to apologize and gently kiss her hand and her lips and her temple and her chin, then he cracked a sly smile and kissed her right below the healed scar line near her temple.

  Another night in the flat after he nearly chipped a tooth on her attempt at cooking a pork chop, he refused tea. “I don’t fancy tea tonight.”

  She sought his eyes and held them. Then submitted to Brent’s inclination to sweep her up wholly. Legs bent over the crook of his elbow, and very much like the moment she had laughed giddily over their threshold years before, she smoothed his hair back and kissed the scar on his forehead.

  “There’s one Greek word for love we still haven’t spent enough time on.”

  Diana’s cheeks flushed. “I am thoroughly willing to be an attentive student.” She let her fingers hover over his lapel.

  He looked down at her bruised wrist, raised it to his lips, and brushed it with a gentle kiss. “I am so sick of hurting you.” He set her down.

  “You were hurt too.” She studied his two melded fingers, his touch featherlight on her wrist, then glanced at his left shoulder.

  “Just promise me you didn’t marry me for my looks.”

  “Oh, but I did.” She undid his top shirt button and let her finger linger at his collarbone. “For your stunning green-gold eyes and your smile.” She beamed. “And those freckles just at your forehead. Your aristocratic nose and your broad shoulders, of course.” Another button. “And I also married you for your lovely speaking voice.” She smoothed away a bit of fabric. “And because you are very smart and very kind.” Another button. Then another. Another. “I’ve run out of buttons.” Diana pouted as Brent held up his wrists.

  “Cuff links,” he said hoarsely.

  “Right.” She winced as she ran her hand over the scars on his shoulder and left arm and around his back.

  “No more of this.” He touched her cheek and wiped away her tears. “We’ve both apologized. We’ve no more secrets. It’s just a memory now.”

  “A bad memory.” She sniffed.

  “So we make better ones. Besides, you love scarred things. Great St. Bart’s for one.” Brent lowered his forehead to touch hers. “I’m sure you’ll make an exception for me too.”

  Over the next few days, Diana made several exceptions and several burnt dinners and several opportunities to help him with his shirt buttons.

  Brent arranged to lecture at the Universität Wien and was already several chapters into a new treatise on Timothy. He still woke at night, often with a gasp of breath, pressing away whatever vivid scene impressed his mind. Often Ross, but more recently a scene in the Lady Chapel of Great St. Bart’s with an outcome that didn’t find Diana breathing evenly beside him.

  He evened out his breathing and straightened his shoulders, blinking to focus in the dark. After pressing a kiss to her temple, he disappeared, often waking hours later on the sofa or returning to the bedroom and quietly pulling her into him for the last few hours before the sun—or more often the slate gray—announced morning through the blinds. She seemed deliriously happy.

  * * *

  Diana was packing when Brent appeared in the bedroom doorway.

  “There’s one more thing you should do before we leave.” Brent led her to the dining table where he arranged a fresh piece of paper in the typewriter. Beside was an envelope posted to the Royal Society of Architects.

  “What’s this?” Diana asked.

  “You’ve taken notes for two months now. I know part of them were just for show, but, Di, you can save your churches. That new grading system?”

  She registered the blank page. How could she capture centuries in a few words?

  One brick and another. Swiping through mortar, clearing debris. The churches, her sentinels, had tumbled into piles of rubble at her feet. The removal of felled planks and the designation of history. London would build and rebuild and rebuild again. Through zeppelins and blitzes and storms. St. Paul’s would remain the highest point in the skyline. Great Tom and Great Paul would peal, warring to create the music of the sky that set Londoners about their day. The churches would draw attention to the skyline and inspire a gasp of awe.

  London was beautiful because it had been broken. Not an eyelash batted before it forged itself again.

  To whom it may concern:

  She accepted a cup of tea from Brent and flexed her fingers over the keys.

  My name is Diana Somerville of King’s College, and I would like to take this opportunity to provide my notes on the reconstruction of the churches that suffered the tragedy of the Blitz. In my humble opinion you should focus your efforts on rebuilding the churches (especially the Wrens—personal preference) before any other property in the cities proper of London and Westminster. You should funnel them into your grading system to recognize them as architectural treasures.

  Doubtless you recognize their monumental impact. To build a church is to form a community and to stake a claim in history. What example of architecture more surely combines art, spirituality, and the beating heart of a people’s hope than a place of worship?

  Christopher Wren believed “all architecture aims at eternity.” Our churches are our eternity. As London is restored, let it be around the sentinel of steeples and may its gray skies frame the toll of bells—cast in iron—pealing citizens to their day.

  For as long as a populous finds its heart in the center of churches, so our nation will rise.

  Our churches are our heartbeat.

  A compass, just as her father had said.

  If she ever lost her way, Diana could look to a steeple, could l
isten for a bell chime.

  She almost wished Fisher Carne were there with her that moment as she erected her shoulders and set her life and mind toward him. Because while others may completely ignore churches’ history and the deft poetry that carved their columns and sloped their domes and spiraled and painted and buttressed their ceilings and showcased their light she would not. And she would reclaim them.

  Chapter 30

  January 1946

  Vienna

  It was hard to hear Diana over the propeller of the plane even though she was talking incessantly about cream-filled pastries and the Baroque façades of the same color. For a pitch-perfect moment the lights below were pinpricks like the dome in Stephen Walbrook. It wasn’t until they ascended over the spires and rubble that Brent could truly make out the voice beside him.

  She pressed her nose to the glass to stare at London below: Tower Bridge and the Tower and St. Paul’s standing sentinel, as it always had, above the maze of brick and upheaved stone. Churches sewed back together, the Thames a ribbon of gray through a city that would survive. Near what had been All Hallows-by-the-Tower and, of course, beyond his vantage, Great St. Bart’s. They weren’t as beautiful as they had been, but perhaps in some way their resiliency and survival made them more beautiful.

  Brent took her hand and drew it to his lips. “Pragma.” The engine roared through the dipping clouds.

  She turned toward him and batted her eyelashes. “And what, pragma tell me, is that?” Her eyes lit with humor.

  “Long lasting.”

  The plane proceeded through the afternoon sky, Brent unable to make out anything but a blur of clouds until the plane quickly dropped, along with his stomach. Suddenly the Danube sparkled below and in the distance waited the Baroque spires of the jewel of the Habsburg Empire for his discovery.

  They landed and wandered through the terminal to the tarmac, where a driver saw to their luggage. Diana straightened the skirt of her smart two-piece suit and Brent inhaled. He had stepped outside of himself before. He could step outside of himself again. Diana held tightly to his arm, her nose and chin turned down, her blonde hair a perfect wave over her shoulder.

  I need you like breath and sunlight and Paul’s letters to the Greeks, he thought.

  The driver said little as they wove their way from the airfield to the Innere Stadt to Domgasse: just behind the gothic spires where the zigzagged gingerbread roof of Stephansdom once towered over a street where Mozart spent the last of his florins and the last of his days.

  The city was scarred as London was, rebuilding after blasts of bombs at the thirteenth hour, recovering from the false optimism that it would somehow make it through unscathed. Brent rolled his shoulders, took Diana’s case, and surveyed the outside of a building still whole: tucked away, timeless, like the compositions of its famous resident.

  “They call it Figaro House.” Diana pointed to the building across the street from the flat Simon had arranged for them. “Because it’s where he wrote the famous opera. Maybe we’ll see his ghost.”

  “Maybe.” Brent gave a sad smile. “But I think I’ve had enough of ghosts.”

  * * *

  “Let’s go see a church.” Diana’s words were in sync with the heartbeat she could feel at her back, so close was Brent standing behind her. They abandoned their unpacking efforts and set off into the street.

  The ruins of what had been the Nazi-occupied Hotel Metropole would wait. The cigar butts of the Soviet soldiers encamped at Schloss Schönbrunn were swept under the carpet of her mind. She would see Vienna as it would be. It would rebuild like London and in a few years it would be as if nothing had marred it. The city still turned like a carousel around the famed Ringstrasse, and Diana blinked away the shadows of the blockades, the silhouettes of soldiers with rifles pointed toward the frosted rooftops.

  Brent steadied her over the cobblestones, and she beamed at the churches that had survived—many far more blessed than her Wrens—as they turned in the direction of the Café Mozart. The statue of mounted Emperor Josef II stood grand against the stones and she had a perfect vantage of the Staatsoper: like a cake with arches and grand windows.

  She stopped him in his tracks as they surveyed the scarred opera house. “I find it more beautiful now for the parts that have withstood everything. And for what I know it will become.”

  “How many architectural historians get to see everything rebuilt again from scratch?”

  “Wren,” she said with a smile just as they approached the Hotel Sacher, its opulence undiminished by occupation or war. Awnings with monogrammed initials stretched out like overlong eyelashes and offered the layered cream building a rich accent. Spit-shined windows like a hundred and one eyes peered down over the street below. While the Soviets in the quartered city had initially had reign of the hotel, it had recently been commandeered as headquarters by the British, and it was here that Diana would meet Simon’s elusive contact.

  “Is that you?” A clipped Mayfair voice was undercut by the purposeful rhythm of heels tapping out a pattern on the inlaid tiles. A woman, tall and regal, held herself like a baroness. Dark-chocolate hair framed a pale face; matching brown eyes were widely alert and countered by perfectly lined lipstick, the same intense red as the wallpaper. “Diana Somerville, née Foyle, like the bookshop on Charing Cross Road.”

  The wall sconces and chandeliers of Sacher’s interior masterpiece contributed to a canopy of made-up stars illuminating the blood-red wallpaper of the opulent hotel. Diana beamed at the woman’s outstretched hand.

  Diana flung her arms around Villiers and held so tight that her nostrils tingled with a wealthy rose scent. Strong arms squeezed her back. So Sophie was a former SOE agent? She had lived with the woman for four years and never knew. The war made great secret keepers of so many. When she disengaged, Diana swore she saw a flash of tenderness in her eyes. Because no one else knew. The war made quick work of solitary experiences.

  Diana looked at Brent. The expression on his face let her know he had read between the lines. He knew exactly who was standing in front of them. The only woman who could throw Simon Barre so off his guard he would show up uncontrolled on their doorstep when he thought she was in danger.

  But before she could make good on introductions, a soft footfall and shadow appeared and Simon arrived at Villiers’s side with a soft touch on her elbow to announce his presence. One simple touch and Diana saw it all, a certain spark between them, with Villiers still trying to hide it.

  “This is all very unofficial.” Simon led them from the foyer to the adjoining café where a table was waiting.

  Villiers turned to Brent and Diana and rolled her eyes. “As opposed to all of the official business you’ve been involved in. I shouldn’t even be here. You shouldn’t know any of this. But somehow Simon has made it alright. We’ll swap just enough government secrets.”

  Strong coffee was delivered. Simon talked about all he had planned. Gabriel Langer would show Brent the ropes. Diana would continue to teach him German. Villiers was on a new line of work altogether. She couldn’t speak about it in great detail. But she did give a hint.

  “Artifacts. Of financial but also moral interest.” She sipped her coffee. “That’s what you get when you find yourself moving into a war of minds. But no longer Fisher Carne’s mind. No, someone far more dangerous. Lout shot at you, didn’t he? I knew I didn’t like him.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Simon interjected, lighting a cigarette for himself and pressing its end to the one that Sophie lifted to her lips so hers ignited as well. The two set off bickering at each other for a few moments. It was like old times. Diana used their tangent to think of all the new beginnings she’d had since the war silenced her beloved church bells.

  Now a city of cream and gold was her canvas. She leaned into Brent, who was watching Simon and Villiers with interest.

  “Are they always like this?” he whispered, his crooked smile stretching wide.

  Diana sighed. “Yes. Isn’t
it wonderful?”

  She was pretty sure this was going to be her favorite beginning of all.

  Discussion Questions

  One of the reasons World War II fiction continues to resonate with the reading public is that many feel a personal connection to this relatively recent history, especially through familial ties. Do you know anyone who served in the war or lived through it? What are some of the stories from day to day life or the front that you are familiar with?

  For Diana, the loss of the churches she loves feels like a death. To this day, bomb strikes result in the loss of priceless, ancient buildings. Do you believe that architecture should be treated as a casualty of war?

  Committees established during the war in London discussed keeping the gutted churches in ruins as a monument to the war while others prevailed in ensuring that the historical churches were renovated to reflect the architect’s initial vision. A trip to London offers views of both rebuilt churches and those overrun by gardens and time like the Priory of St. John in Clerkenwell and Christ Church Greyfriars in Newgate Street. What are some of the ways you would defend the decision to leave them as monuments and markers to the past? What would you say in defense of the decision to restore the churches honoring the styles of the original structures?

  Diana and Brent feel an immediate affinity to one another when they meet at St. Bartholomew the Great. In many ways they are soul mates, best exemplified by the unique connection they have with the ancient church. Have you ever met someone and immediately known that they would be sewn into the fabric of your life?

  While Diana and Brent are both irrevocably changed during the war, they both find new ways to fall in love with one another. For Brent, this is best exemplified in his attraction to the chin tilt Diana has. Indeed, he thinks that in many ways the war has shaped Diana into the strong woman whose potential he always saw. What hints during the flashback sequences at the beginning of their relationship might Brent have drawn on in his imagining of a possibly more mature Diana?