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Page 69.

Acting on Billy Seward’s invitation—about a week later late on a Saturday afternoon as they were closing shop—Tim and Stan wandered to the Joint Command side, through sunken courtyards, amid long-dead lanterns in which birds nested ever since blackouts had become a way of life. It was an office tea and cookie munch sponsored by the American A.G. in this hybrid North American-European command of British, French, Polish, Canadian, and U.S. staffers. In a somber library, whose walls were studded with trophies and stag heads, Stan and Tim each politely hoisted a bracing dark porter while wind howled outside. Leaves blew against darkened windows. Window glass rattled in its frames. One was almost tempted to pull up the blinds because no Kraut would be out flying on such an afternoon. But rules were rules.

“Your friend looks so bleak,” Billy Seward said to Tim, with a glance at Stan Kehoe. Seward held a cup of tea laced with vodka, and a cigarette on which he puffed voraciously.

“His love life just went down the drain.”

“Ah. Poor guy. How’s the Polish beauty, what’s her—?

“Anna Stokowska.”

Seward shuddered, making his one eye tremble. “Even her name is gorgeous. D’jever notice how these Germans and Polacks and Russians have these horsy names like something that’s tough to chew, full of syllables like charf and shrauf and rowf-rowf and stuff, and they are all the more beautiful, like they want to go nuts and bite you while you make love to them?” Seward looked distressed, despite the humor.

Tim laughed. “She’s on duty at the hospital. Poor kid works hard.”

“You’ll ease her pain, I’m sure.” For a moment, Tim wondered if he were the Thing in Anna’s life, but decided not. They talked about other things.

The British were good hosts, amid their canvas-draped filing cabinets and locked library vitrines. Tim had a vague idea that they were in the same game, picking apart lost screws and radios and machine gun parts. In fact, Billy Seward introduced Tim to a senior colonel, saying “This is Lt. Commander Nordhall, Sir. He wrote the fascinating white-paper about assaying hardware to determine the enemy’s lot as we bomb them into the ground.”

Colonel Grimsby was a pale man with bushy gray eyebrows. He looked like a schoolmaster who smoked so much there were hints of yellow in his brows. Grimsby said: “ I read your paper, Nordhall. Nice work. Picking out clues from the purity of the alloys and so forth. We found traces of contaminants, using your method, suggesting the Krauts are mining inferior ores on their own land, which sets them back a good bit. Good sort of hip-pocket information to wow the top cigars at the weekly report luncheon.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

“Tim is a clockmaker and an engineer,” Seward said with easy social grace.

“Indeed.” The elderly man effused: “You should love London then. All we have here is clocks, if the damned Hun would stop bombing our churches.”

“I’m enjoying London very much,” Tim said.

A loose knot of happily glowing, gin-soaked faces were beginning to form around their elderly baron.

The old man noticed the ribbons on Tim’s chest. “Been through some shooting, have you?”

“Took a torpedo in the North Atlantic a while ago, Sir.” It was a standard story Crane had made up for him, at MI5 or MI6’s request.

“Oh? What ship?”

“Not allowed to say, Sir.”

“Of course. Of course. Top secret. Everything is top secret these days. A wonder we all remember the way home at night if that isn’t also secret.” Grimsby continued: “Too much of that these days. Too many fine lads. Took mine in the leg during the Great War.” He clapped himself on the left hip. “I walk funny when it’s cold. You and Seward here. Damn shame. Young men and all. You should be out squiring, not firing.” He burst into laughter, echoed by the barks of young officers around them.

“You are a poet, Sir,” Tim said.

The old man reddened. “Oh, what. Sunday school rhymes. I teach Latin when we aren’t living between sandbags. Small private school for boys in Devonshire. You ought to come up and visit some time, when you tire of London. But then, wasn’t it Boswell who said, if a man...”

“...Tires of London,” Seward said, “he is tired of living, for London offers all that life has to afford.”

More laughter. The party drifted hither and yon, as parties did. Stan tugged anxiously on Tim’s sleeve, and pointed to a particularly attractive young woman. “I’m in love, buddy.”

Tim used both hands, gripping Stan’s dark blue dress uniform by the padded shoulders, to position Stan in the line of vision so he could look from behind Stan, just past his ear, to examine the lady in question. “She is an angel indeed,” Tim said. “But she seems to be hovering around that guy with the gold ropes swinging from his uniform, or is that a detail you prefer to ignore?”

“Just look at her,” Stan whispered as if they were in a church looking at stained glass. “Her name is Claire Denby. Leftenant Clair Denby.” He said the woman’s name and rank as if lingering over a favorite dessert.

Tim looked, and sucked back a breath. The dark uniform, the white blouse, the tightly wrapped bun of dark reddish-brown hair, added that certain crispness. She had pale skin and a softly angular face that looked as though someone with great talent had carefully brushed her features in, making it look easy, making it look careless as her clean white smile, her lively dark eyes in pure white settings, like fine bone china. Whoever she was, she had a polished, perfect sort of insouciant grace that brightened the entire room. She was the woman for whom the WREN uniform had been designed. She was a lieutenant, with cute little cords and bangles of rank and decoration, and young officers hovered about like sullen magnets, like little planets soaking in the glow of her sunlight. They all knew she was Admiral Todd’s assistant in Naval Engineering. Tim wished Stan would figure that out. For a moment, Tim thought she must be American. Maybe a visiting movie star. Stan, for his part, seemed to think so too, and was having trouble swallowing. Then Tim heard, quite distinctly, her charming and well-tooled upper class British dialect. Immediately, he was conscious of the entire divide. Perhaps the Gilbert and Sullivan admiral standing nearby was her father, or her lover, or for that matter Jupiter to her Io. In any case, it was immediately clear that they were equestrians while the rest of the crowd were an array representing the plebs.

“Give it up,” Tim told Stan.

“I can’t,” Stan said. “I’ve fallen in love.”

“You’ve fallen out of your mind.” He was secretly glad, at least, that Stan was getting over the disaster with Connie Bruce or whatever it had been.

In the ensuing weeks, Stan’s infatuation for Claire Denby became a source of comment, amusement, and pity between Anna and Tim. They took Stan with them on the early halves of dates, just so he wouldn’t be alone. Eventually he’d drift off to go bar-hopping with some guys, apparently oblivious to the great city chock full of unattached young women away from home and looking for a kindly squeeze. Stan, who had seemed so happy with his Bruce or Bryce woman, had taken a hard fall. Anna leaned close, one evening. She and Tim sat in plush blood-leather chairs in a restaurant near Pall Mall. Stan had just spotted two of his drinking cronies and rushed off to be with them. Through the smoke and gloom, Anna told Tim in Polish-accented English: “He will find a woman for himself. But I don’t believe it will be Claire Denby.”