by Sam Bourne
Why, then, had none of this gloominess infected him, Taylor wondered now, as the bedside clock nudged towards three in the morning. Partly it was the childish thrill of a young man allowed to sit at the grown-ups’ table: he had been decades younger than everyone else there. Partly it was the secret knowledge that, after the food and wine, he would be savouring the host’s wife, thanks to Murray’s midweek habit of staying overnight at his club.
But mainly it was a vague sense, one not fully formed until he articulated it now, that he was somehow immune from the pessimism around the table. He had great sympathy for these Brits; but he was an American and in America the game was all still to play for. In the US, unlike Britain, it was not yet — to use the two words that had come up again and again over dinner — too late.
Taylor shifted to a cooler patch of the bed, taking care to move stealthily so that Anna would not stir, wondering for a passing moment if Murray himself had ever done to his wife what Taylor had just done — wondering indeed if Murray had ever even slept in this bed. There certainly seemed to be a separate, gentleman’s bedroom on the other side of the landing. Maybe it was simply a condition of being an American that made him more upbeat than his fellow diners this evening. Wasn’t that what set most Americans, certainly those his age, apart from their British cousins: that sense that their best days were ahead, not behind them?
No, it was more personal than that. In the end, Taylor had been in a good mood when all around him were down in the mouth because he had the growing feeling — almost a premonition — that he was about to play a part in events of great import.
It had been budding even as he had slicked the brilliantine through his hair at Cadogan Square, this sense of imminence, but it had been confirmed by Murray several times through the evening. At intervals, the old man had winked in Taylor’s direction, sometimes offering opaque asides: ‘Not the same for you though, eh, Hastings?’ or ‘You’re in a rather different boat, wouldn’t you say?’ By the time the waiters cleared away the main course — beef in a gravy more luxurious than the thin brown liquid served up at these so-called British Restaurants around town — Murray had left no doubt in the mind of anyone in the room that he had seen something in young Taylor Hastings. This dinner was only their second meeting, the first being that introductory tea at the Savoy with Anna, and yet Murray was treating him like a trusted confidant. Once the room was clear of serving staff, the MP had tapped his glass with the side of a dessert spoon.
‘I hope you’ve all had a splendid dinner,’ Murray began, to a murmur of approval around the table. ‘As you know, we’ve already welcomed our guest, Taylor Hastings from the colonies.’ A polite smile from the American. ‘But I know you will agree with me in saying that we strongly hope young Mr Hastings will be more than a guest in our country and more than a guest in our cause.’ A couple of ‘hear, hears’, including, Taylor was glad to note, from the Duke of Wellington.
‘So, for that reason, it is my great honour to present Mr Hastings with membership of our little society. In accepting it, he joins us in the first rank of those fighting for England. For the real England, that is. And against the real enemy. Not our fellow Aryan, the great nation of Germany, but the race which has been at war with Christendom from the very beginning. So let me present Mr Hastings with the crest that marks him as a valued member of the Right Club.’
There was applause as Taylor rose from his chair and walked the three or four paces to where Murray stood waiting to greet him. The MP gave him a strong handshake and then passed him a metal badge.
Hastings looked at the dulled silver brooch. It showed an eagle killing a snake, beside two capital letters: ‘PJ’.
‘Who’s PJ?’ Taylor asked, without thinking.
‘My good fellow, you surely know the motto of the Right Club, conveying our purpose in its pithiest form. PJ stands for “Perish Judah”.’
Chapter Fifteen My darling Florence, I feel as if I am writing into a void. I know you are in America, I know you are at Yale. And yet I have no idea of your situation, of where or how you are living. The last time I knew this sensation was four years ago when I had been rash and stupid and knew only that you were in Berlin. Your decision was right then, though it took me some time to see it. I understand why you could not be straight and truthful with me then: we had only just met. But now we are man and wife and yet you still felt able to deceive me. It may be like Berlin again: that, in the end, I will see that you were right and I was wrong. But that is not how it feels at present. Not least because in Berlin it was only our romance — our fledgling romance, you might say — that was at stake. Now there is a child involved. Your child, yes. But mine too…
James screwed the piece of paper into a tight paper ball and put it in his pocket, to join the other letters to Florence he had drafted and aborted. Too angry, even if the anger was controlled. He wanted her back, didn’t he? Well, letters like that would never do the trick. He dashed off something shorter and simpler, telling Florence that he was looking for her and that he would not rest until they were back together, once again addressing the envelope ‘care of Yale University’, just as he had countless times before, whether from the dockside at Liverpool, the harbour at Quebec or Penn Station in New York City.
‘New Haven, New Haven! Next stop, New Haven.’
It was the third time the guard had marched through the carriage making that announcement in the last twenty minutes. James was ready, his bag packed and above his head. He took another look out of the window, taking in the American countryside. In the several days he had spent on trains, hopping from Quebec to Montreal to Boston and now, at last, New Haven, he had alternated between two conflicting impressions. Most often he was struck by the vastness, the sheer scale of North America, where everything was wider and taller than in little England. He was used to the odd grand old man of a tree — there was one in his college quad, after all — but here you could pass whole forests of thick-trunked trees, majestically scraping the sky. The clouds themselves seemed to loom larger in skies that stretched further to the north, east and west. In America, God seemed to paint on a bigger canvas.
And then, less often, would come an unexpected jolt of familiarity. Perhaps it was his expectations that were at fault. With some shame he realized that he had pictured a land of deserts, cactuses, saloon bars and fighting Indians, as you would see at the pictures. But in Boston there had been elegant buildings in solid grey stone that would have sat comfortably in Edinburgh or Manchester. The train had stopped at Providence and Mystic, names that might have come from a fairytale, but had also passed through New London. It made the place confusing: at once both utterly like and unlike England.
And of course the biggest difference was not in the physical details that caught his eye, the motor cars as big as boats — including one blue, wooden-sided monster he had spotted when the train was chugging alongside a road outside Boston and which a fellow passenger had identified as a ‘station-wagon’ — or the perennial chewing gum in the mouths of porters and ticket collectors. The biggest difference was the expressions on the faces of the people. They were not tight or drawn, as they were, constantly, in England but open and relaxed: mothers smiling at their children, businessmen doing the crossword puzzle in the morning paper, all of them going about their ordinary lives, worrying about paying the bills or cutting the back lawn, rather than fearing for their country’s very survival. Here, war was so far away, it might as well have been happening on another planet.
There was a bright sound of a whistle and the exhalation of a fresh cloud of white smoke. The rhythm of the pistons was slowing down, the train heaving itself to a halt, like an aged rower on the river running out of puff. Through the billowing steam he could see the name on the station platform: New Haven.
He felt his jaw clench three or four times in quick session, an involuntary move that used to precede every race on the river. During the long voyage from Liverpool and the journey south from Canada, he had not had
to prepare himself: he could think about the past and concentrate on reaching his destination. But now, as he stepped off the train, he had arrived. New Haven was home to Yale, which meant she was here. It was quite possible he would run into her any moment now; she might even be at the station. He spotted a balloon, the string held by a boy around Harry’s age. Next to him was a woman buying something from a cart. (He squinted to read a sign that said ‘Pretzels’, a word he had never seen and could not pronounce.) She was not the right height for Florence — few women were — but the sight of a mother and child, and the possibility that, logically speaking, it could have been Florence and Harry, hit him hard. He looked away.
Only now did he notice the station itself, the ceiling almost as high as St Pancras in London. But where such places in England were permanently drab and dirty — the shabbiness exacerbated by nearly a year of war — this was clean and stylish, the ceilings, from which fancy chandeliers were suspended, elaborately decorated in a complex pattern of gold. Even the rooves of the tunnels leading from the platforms were clad in gleaming stainless steel. Not for the first time, he felt as if he had left England, the ageing mother country, for America, the vigorous young son.
Once he had popped his letter in a blue post-box, he looked down at the note he had scribbled in his book. 459 College Street. This was where Grey had arranged rooms for him, a late addition to the list of demands James had put to the college Master in return for his silence. He asked a porter for directions, struggling first to be understood and then to understand: divided by a common language indeed.
With just a single knapsack, picked up in Liverpool, he had travelled lightly enough to walk. The short journey up George Street took him to College Street, a right turn and then he was inside the university district. What he saw astounded him. He had been expecting a place bursting with 1940s modernity, a Flash Gordon landscape of shiny towers, strange shapes and clean lines.
True, the cars were once again something to behold. Vast, bulky machines that moved like mighty beasts of the jungle, hippos or rhinos who would trample over any creature reckless enough to stray into their path. But the university itself seemed as rooted in the ancient past as Oxford.
The streets were lined with faux-medieval arches and stone walls, punctuated by churches with steeples and Gothic spires, as if by the wave of a magician’s wand an entire thirteenth century English university town had been moved across the ocean and planted on this other continent. He peered inside one college building at random (it might have been called Calhoun though he was barely taking in the names). There was a quad, complete with a perfectly maintained lawn. Two tall, fair-haired men passed him, both carrying tennis rackets, just as their counterparts might do back home. He passed a grand entrance to a tower that clearly aspired to be a castle, bearing the motto Lux et Veritas, carved in a pale stone. Perhaps an expert would be able to see, on closer inspection, that the likes of Bingham Hall or the Battell Chapel belonged to the last or even the current century, rather than seven hundred years earlier. But to the layman’s eye, the illusion was complete.
He glanced across the street, spotting with relief the number 459 — attached not to the grand structure with pillared portico next door, but to a relatively modest colonial-style house, clad in pale clapboard. He had half-expected Grey to put him up in a college dormitory, like some of the younger fellows back home. The last thing James needed now was small-talk with scholars, eagerly making awkward inquiries about his precise ‘field of research’ at Yale. For the short time he hoped to be here, a room in an anonymous boarding house with regular meals would suit him fine.
But the comfort of that delusion was not allowed to persist for long. A knock on the door, answered by a butler — who, to James’s startled surprise, was a negro in late middle age — soon revealed that this was no boarding house but the Elizabethan Club. With its chairs in well-worn leather, the same shade as the elbow-patches Florence’s father had taken to wearing on his tweed jackets in a nod towards wartime thrift, and well-stocked fireplace, even now on a warm, humid day in high summer, it too might have been winched into the skies from Oxford, flown across the Atlantic then dropped, unaltered, on this street in New Haven, Connecticut.
The butler took his name and said that they had been anticipating his arrival. He apologized that Dr Zennor would have to make do with the steward’s quarters, since there was no other accommodation in ‘the Clubhouse’. It took James a moment to realize that the butler was referring not to some sporting pavilion, but this very building. As he huffed his way up the stairs, the servant delivered a potted lecture on ‘the Lizzie’, founded nearly thirty years earlier by a wealthy undergraduate who yearned for a little oasis of calm where literary-inclined students might speak about the arts and suchlike. He stopped on the middle landing to point out the vault where the club kept its priceless collection of Shakespeare Folios, including one of the three surviving copies of the 1604 Hamlet. James imagined the select membership of the Lizzie as the American counterparts of the effete, privileged young men at Christ Church or Magdalen whom he had gone to such lengths to avoid when he was a new undergraduate, nervous, naive and just off the train from Bournemouth. It had not been all that long ago, at the tail end of the 1920s; but it seemed like a different epoch.
The room, however, was monastic in its simplicity. There was a bed, a chair, a desk and a basin and not much else. The asceticism of it appealed to him, but he did fleetingly wonder about Grey’s motives. Was he punishing James with this garret room, or had he deliberately wanted him away from the heart of Yale life, where he might meet fewest people — so keeping his secrets to himself?
James sat on the bed and wondered where he should begin. It was a Sunday, which made it impossible simply to present himself at an administrative office and ask where he might find the Oxford families. If this were Oxford, he would select a college at random, pop in and ask a porter, who were, after all, the best-informed people in the university.
He splashed some water on his face then headed down the stairs, two at a time. He was striding down College Street, deciding that he would stop at the first college he saw — the butler had told him there were ten to choose from — when he heard it: a drifting melody from across the road, the universally familiar sound of a church choir.
Among those Oxford mothers, there was bound to be at least one woman pious enough to attend, maybe even to give thanks for their safe passage across the Atlantic. Not Florence of course; she wouldn’t be seen dead in church. But someone who, on hearing James identify himself, might smile warmly and say, ‘Oh yes, I saw young Harry just this morning. They’re staying two minutes from here; I’ll take you there myself if you would like.’
He ran up the few steps leading to the doorway and went inside. To his surprise, the church was packed, every space on the wooden benches taken. No church in Oxford would get a turnout like this on a warm Sunday in July. Perhaps this was what the experts meant when they said America was a country founded by ‘the Protestants of the Protestants’ — religious zealots whose zeal, it seemed, lived on.
He stood at the back, loitering by the door, suddenly self-conscious. Should he affect to be a churchgoer, late to arrive but here in earnest? Or pose as a tourist, come to admire the gold-inlaid walls and pillars and to gaze at the half-dome above the altar, an artful compromise between grandeur and modesty?
James did a quick scan of the faces before him and recognized none of them. Not that he could conclude from that that there was no one here from Oxford: there might well be several, he just didn’t know them. Inwardly, he cursed the habits he had fallen into since his return from Spain. He had been fairly sociable as a student, avoiding the aristocratic crowd, but jolly enough with everyone else. He was popular in the rowing club; Daisy’s friends had always liked him. But after his return, he had turned inward; could not be bothered remembering names, barely even noticed faces. And now, when he needed the help of someone familiar, he was paying the price.
The man’s style of speech was a surprise too. He was much more informal than any vicar James had heard speak in England. Even the way he stood seemed to be looser, as if he were wearing more comfortable shoes.
‘Now you heard the lesson we read earlier. From Isaiah,’ — Eye-zay-ah — ‘chapter two, verse four.’ There was a rustling of tissue-thin pages, as many in the congregation consulted their bibles.
The vicar’s voice boomed out loud, the word of God delivered with an American accent: ‘“And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”’ He paused letting the words linger a while. Then he spoke again.
‘I do not believe we can argue with those words. I believe their meaning is as clear as a freshwater stream: “in the last days”, when we are on the brink of redemption, we will put aside the tools of war. They play no part in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ our Lord. If we are to be worthy of His return, if we are to live life as it is meant to be lived, then we should start now, making ploughshares from swords and pruning hooks from spears. We would grow food, instead of death. We would water the ground with God’s sweet rain, not with the blood of our fellow man.’
