Chapter 53

FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, NOVEMBER 1943

Addressing the lovers who left a set of frilly knickers on the lakeshore after what one presumes was a tryst—for heaven’s sake, fake a marriage certificate and go to a hotel!

Again, ” Mab coached Beth.

“My fiancé is an airman stationed in Kent, ” Beth recited, standing in the icy street before the narrow front of the gynecologist’s office. All around them people pushed and hurried. “He has forty-eight hours’ leave to get married before Christmas. I’m not looking to have children until after the war—”

“Say it’s your fiancé who wants that, ” Mab corrected. Most doctors would only fit married women for a contraceptive device, but given the war, some would fit affianced women. Mab had come here herself almost exactly two years ago, before her wedding. Don’t think about that. “If you say you’re the one who doesn’t want babies yet, you’ll get a lecture. ”

“Right. ” Beth looked determined. She’d barely even blushed when Mab collared her, shortly after leaving sick bay, and said bluntly, I know what you and Harry are up to. I think you’re an idiot, but please tell me you’re taking precautions. Beth had mumbled something about using French letters, and Mab had sighed, There are safer options. Whoever would have guessed shy Beth would end up part of BP’s fast set, the ones who unabashedly worked off codebreaking stress in dark corners with any partner they could find? Though Beth didn’t seem to be sneaking off to dark corners with anyone but Harry. Mab had Beth go through her story again, then pulled off her left glove. “You’d—better borrow this. The doctor won’t believe you without a ring. ”

It hurt, taking Francis’s ruby off. Beth slipped it on, seeming to know what it cost Mab. “Thank you. I know you don’t approve—”

“It’s not my business, ” Mab said shortly. “You want to get mixed up with a married man, well, you already know what I think about that. ”

“I’m not ashamed. ” Beth’s chin went up. “And I’m not hurting anyone. ”

“Just yourself, if you think it’s going to end in wedding bells. ”

“I don’t want wedding bells. ”

Beth really had to be the oddest duck Mab had ever befriended. And now she’s about the only female friend I’ve got left. No Osla, no Wrens. . . most of the other women at BP didn’t seem to know how to talk to Mab anymore. Those like herself who had lost husbands, fiancé s, boyfriends, were so raw in their own grief that Mab avoided them, and the women who hadn’t suffered such a loss either were awkward in the face of the pain Mab couldn’t conceal, or flinched from her mourning black because they were afraid for their own loved ones. Whether they thought Mab was bad luck or bad company, they tended to avoid her now. All except Beth, who was looking up at the doors of the doctor’s office.

“Does it really work, this cap thing? Better than, you know. ” She blushed.

“It works. ” Mab bit the words off. Lately she’d been having dreams about children—never girls, all little girls were Lucy, but boys. Baby boys with Francis’s russet hair; boys of ten with Francis’s stocky build, running about with cricket bats. . . boys so real she could almost reach out and touch them before they dissolved into the dream’s mist. She’d wake up retching with longing.

Beth disappeared into the office, and Mab went on to her own meeting in Trafalgar Square. Even on a cold winter’s day it was thronged: lovers meeting under Nelson’s Column, children throwing crumbs to the pigeons.

“Tell me about your husband, Mrs. Gray. ” The journalist met her beside the great bronze lion on the south side of Nelson’s Column, as arranged. An exchange of names and pleasantries, and he was already pulling out his notepad. He’s rather a well-known correspondent, Francis’s publisher had said when he telephoned Mab. Doing a piece on Francis. Perhaps you might answer a few questions when you’re next in London? Mab would rather have chewed glass than rake over her memories for a stranger, but since she hadn’t given Francis a russet-haired son for a legacy, she’d force herself to talk about his poetry.

“What do you want to know, Mr. . . . ” His name had already slipped her memory. She couldn’t seem to keep anything fixed in her mind nowadays.

“Graham. Ian Graham. ” He had a beautiful baritone and public school vowels: a tall man, wire-lean in rumpled overcoat and battered fedora. “I’m writing a series on the role of art in wartime. First a piece on Dame Myra Hess and the National Gallery lunchtime concerts—what? ”

“My husband took me to one of those concerts. ” Mab huddled deeper into her black coat. “Our second date. ” She’d spent the performance scrutinizing the clothes of the women in the audience, while Francis sat transfixed by the music. Such a marvelous thing, he’d said afterward. You know how these concerts came about? The art was taken out of the gallery for safekeeping, then Dame Myra organized the most famous musicians in Britain to come play for the public among all the empty picture frames, just so blacked-out London has something beautiful to listen to.

Marvelous, Mab had said, eyeing an ivy-print silk frock in the next row.

“It won’t be a puff piece, Mrs. Gray. ” Ian Graham evidently took her silence for mistrust. “Francis Gray’s poetry helped define trench warfare to an oblivious generation. In war, art is a balm. ”

“Then ask what you’d like, ” Mab said brusquely.

“More about you first. . . I understand you’re billeted up in Buckinghamshire, doing war work. ”

“Yes, office work. Too boring for words. ” It really was, no fibbing required. Giles had got her a post filing and typing in the mansion; it was quiet and monotonous and Mab thought she could do it forever.

“Where in Buckinghamshire exactly? ” The pencil jotted.

“A little town hardly more than a railway depot. ”

“Really. . . You’re not the first person I’ve met who does something terribly boring and vague up in Bucks, in a little town with nothing but a railway depot. ”

“Is that so? ”

“Yes. Most of the others were—how shall I put it? Whitehall sorts, Foreign Office sorts. They’ll talk about their own work readily enough, especially with a scotch or two down the hatch, but they all clammed when it came to anything about Buckinghamshire. ”

Mab gave him a blank look. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. ”

Ian Graham grinned, a quick sunlight shaft of a smile. “Right, ” he said, and changed the subject. Routine questions: how long she and Francis had been married, where they had met. Mab’s nails bit into her palms as she made herself recount their dates, the hasty wedding. . .

“Your husband enjoyed music—what about art? Paintings, sculpture? ”

“I—I don’t know. ”

“Did he ever say anything about his war, Mrs. Gray? ”

“No. ”

“He took a rather well-known tour in 1919, collecting earth from battlefields for the families who hadn’t been able to bury their boys. His letter about it was published in the Times. Did he—”

“I—he didn’t tell me about that, ” Mab jerked.

Mr. Graham changed tack. “I don’t mean to pry, Mrs. Gray. It’s merely that you were Francis Gray’s wife—his publishers and readers can tell me about the poetry, but you can tell me about the man. A personal anecdote, perhaps? ”

Personal. Suddenly Mab couldn’t breathe. This wasn’t like the hysteria that had gripped her during her bombe demonstration. This was rage and despair, two emotions flaming up in red and black. Turning, she seized the surprised journalist by the sleeve. “I need a drink. ”

He bought her a gin at the nearest pub, not batting an eye as she slammed it back. The perfect place, dark and grimy, full of drinkers who didn’t want to be bothered. No one glanced over as the choked words began pouring out of Mab.

“You want a personal anecdote, Mr. Graham? ” She took her second drink, turning to the journalist. “The truth is, I don’t have any. Francis Gray was the best man I have ever known, and I was his wife less than one year. You know how many times we saw each other? Fourteen. He was always traveling, and I had a job we agreed was important, so we did our best. We had a forty-eight-hour wedding-and-honeymoon. We had two weekends in the Lake District. We had the odd meal in a railway café. We made love a total of fifteen times. ” She didn’t care if she was being indecent. She didn’t care she was saying it to a journalist. She had to say it to someone, after thinking it for so many nights, or she would burst. Ian Graham listened without interrupting, and that was all that mattered. “We loved each other by proxy, Mr. Graham. He loved me through a girl he saw once in Paris in 1918, and I loved him through his letters, but we hardly spent any time together. I don’t have any personal anecdotes about my husband. We didn’t have time to create any. ”

Her voice cracked. She bolted half the gin.

“I know he liked curry and dawn walks. I know he hated his own poetry and never slept the night through, because of the things he saw in the trenches. But I didn’t know him. You have to live with someone to know them. I’ve lived with my billet-mates for three and a half years; I know them inside and out. I loved Francis Gray, and to me he was perfect, and that’s proof I didn’t know him very well at all. I never got to realize all the ways he wasn’t perfect. I didn’t get to reach the point where the song he whistled while shaving drove me mad or learn how rainy days made him short tempered. He never got to realize that I’m not some great wartime love, just a shallow cow who lives for pretty shoes and library novels. We never got to quarrel over the milk bill or whether to buy strawberry jam or marmalade. . . ”

It was the thing that killed Mab every night. When she grieved Lucy, she grieved for the woman her daughter would never become—the young girl taking her exams, the coltish student heading off to university—but at least she had known the six-year-old Lucy of November 1942 to her very bones. So much of Francis had still been an unmapped continent, a man she was only beginning to truly know.

And he didn’t know me, she thought, or he wouldn’t have loved me the way he did. He would have realized I was a social-climbing tart who would marry a good man like him as a ticket up the ladder. He would have realized he deserved better than me.

“I don’t have one single photograph of the two of us together. ” Mab stared into her glass. “Not one. We couldn’t get a camera on our wedding day, it was short notice, and after that we were too busy cramming in time together to pose for a flash. An entire marriage gone, without one picture to commemorate it. ”

She looked up at the journalist’s grave face. “There’s something titillating for your story, ” she said, mocking. “Francis Gray’s drunken Shoreditch widow, slopping gin all over you in a pub. I don’t care if you print it. I don’t care what you say about me—”

“I’m a journalist, not a monster, ” said Ian Graham.

“—but I do care what you say about Francis. Do justice to him. He was a good poet and a great man. ” She finished her gin in a gulp.

“Is there anything I can do to help? ” the journalist asked, his voice quiet.

Mab turned sharply, nearly sliding off her stool. He caught her hand, steadying her, and Mab’s skin prickled. Oh, God, how she missed Francis’s hands. His fingers through hers, his palm on her waist. So much of her numbness had burned away in sick bay—at night, she now lay awake holding herself in her own arms, trying to pretend they were Francis’s arms, longing to be held again.

Stay with me, she started to say. The impulse went through her in a bolt of desperation: take this man she didn’t know up to some rented room and let him do anything he wanted, as long as she could keep her eyes shut and pretend he was Francis.

Then she shoved that away, so sick with shame she almost vomited.

Ian Graham got a glass of water and lemon from the barman and pushed it toward her. “Drink that down. ” He waited while she drank, then rose. “I have what I need. May I take you to catch your train, Mrs. Gray? ”

“I’m meeting a friend—we’re returning to Bucks together. ”

He hesitated, clearly not wanting to leave her alone, but Mab put out her hand. “Goodbye, Mr. Graham. I look forward to reading your piece. ”

He tipped his hat and departed. She wondered where he’d be sent next, what blood-laced beach or bombed-out town he’d report on, then she ordered another gin and thought only about Francis and Lucy.

Three drinks later, she was staggering. She nearly missed the doctor’s office when she went back to find it, and Beth almost had to carry her home.

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