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Page 71.

“Is there a game?” Tim was disappointed at that verdict, almost annoyed with Anna. How unworthy that such enchanting and lively beauty should be so easily written off.

“There usually is.” Anna betrayed a Byzantine side at that moment. She expressed no kindness toward Claire. To drive her point home, Anna said: “She is like broken rocks inside. A woman can tell a lot about another woman. She is hard, but something hurts.”

Tim could almost get a crush on Claire Denby himself. It seemed many of the Americans in particular did, though the Brits for some almost botanical reason seemed to shy away from her. They knew in their genes she was not of their class. He found himself fantasizing about her until one night, while walking an unfamiliar route on an errand to fetch medicine from a chemist shop that was open late, he saw the two of them come staggering out of a private home. She looked delectable in a tan and white outfit with high heels. Tim stood fascinated, capturing the near-erotic intensity of the moment. They were quite inebriated, and her skirt was hiked up in the back. Lord Humhaw had one hand up her behind and the other on his fly as they bounced from wall to wall on their way to his car. Apparently he was trying to urinate while walking, and at the same time clumsily fondle her, while she laughed like a braying horse. Tim glimpsed pale skin and gorgeous curvature, but her hat was crooked, and she laughed too loudly. She stopped abruptly and fire-hosed a gallon of dirty fluid from the mouth, several seconds of turbid high pressure discharge that momentarily hung like a sheet in the air before her, then loudly spattered down her front and all over the sidewalk. Her outfit had a large wet cone shape on its front. Tim turned away in distaste. She seemed cheap, her companion an incomprehensible match of old age and grossness.

A few evenings later, Stan had had a few drinks too many to drive safely. It was a rainy evening, and the Germans were momentarily quiet on their side of the Channel. War raged across Europe, and buzz bombs dropped randomly on Britain, but at the moment it was nothing like the nightly horror of the 1940 Blitz that people talked about. Britain was full of Americans, Free French, Free Poles, anyone who hated the Nazis, and there was a growing confidence now that the Krauts were getting a bloody nose. In that relaxed, almost excited atmosphere, Stan demanded that Tim drive him to a small village about forty miles north of London. Tim was tired and tried to demur, but Anna was working and Stan was insistent. So rather than stay home and catch up on his sleep, Tim found himself driving Stan along narrow country roads, trying to dodge among military convoys that tied up traffic everywhere.

“Would you mind explaining what this is all about?”

“Sorry,” Stan said, “maybe a bit later.” He looked about with an air of conspiracy. “The walls have ears.”

They rode in silence a while, Tim driving, Stan behaving rather smugly with an air of someone who has been desperate for so long that the most harebrained scheme begins to seem logical. “I’m telling you,” Stan said nursing a cigarette and a small bottle of whiskey in the passenger seat, “I am finally going to strike while the iron is hot.”

“Claire Denby?”

“Yes.”

“You’re still not on first base, and you never will be.”

“I am in love, Tim.”

“Don’t you get it?” He’d seen enough of the beautiful Claire to agree with Anna’s instant assessment. “You are American. She’s some sort of British snob. They look down on their own people. To people like her we are the colonial riffraff that come back to do our duty and help them out of a jam. Then they’ll want me and you to go back to our farms or wherever we came from, and they’ll want to get on with their empire.”

Stan shook his head. “Tim, my boy, you are getting cynical in your old age. Open your eyes, in the beauty of youth, and live what short span is our destiny before the snows close our petals softly and without pity or remorse, forever.”

“What’s that—John Donne? Shelley? Keats?”

“Stan Kehoe.”

“You’re kidding.”

“She drives me to poetry. Isn’t that insane?” Stan lounged dreamily back in his seat, forgetting his cigarette until it burned his fingertips and he threw it out the window, fumbling. “I’ve been spying on her. Hard act she is to follow. She’s got some kind of dark and unfortunate thing going with old Brigadier Brigadoon there, who is old enough to be her father. I can’t figure it out. But she has smiled at me more than once.”

“She hopes you’ll take a hint and go away,” Tim said.

“She wishes I would come and rescue her. And that I shall.”

“I have to save you from yourself,” Tim said. “That’s the only reasonable explanation for why I am driving you across England in the middle of a squalid night like this.”

“The rain has let up,” Stan said.

“But the fog is setting in, you dumb bastard.” Tim had to start rubbing the condensation off the inside of the windshield with an old rag, because the heater was out.

“We could stop for a dram or two,” Stan said, pointing to a tavern.

“Closed. They look up the liquor at all sorts of strange hours to keep the working people productive.”

“Too bad. Well, we’ll scare something up in Ledding Lyme. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, pal. You will forever be a hero to me.”

Tim shook his head. “Remind me to stay home and get drunk instead.”

“Now don’t be harsh. You’ve got Anna. She’s a beautiful young woman. You can afford to be patronizing.”

“I’m sorry. Don’t mean to be patronizing.” Tim pulled over and took a leak in a foggy field while thunder growled and lightning flashed someplace far away. What a mad night. When he got back in, he said: “Now either you explain, or I head back home.”

“Spoilsport. Okay.” Once he’d made sure Tim was headed to the town of Ledding Lyme, a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, Stan launched forth: “This babe, Claire, is a spy.”

“No.”

“Yeah. I’m sure of it. I was eavesdropping on her and Lord Haw Haw in a dark and dank murky cellar under the armorium where we toil, along the banks where once flowed the River Fleet. I kind of know where they meet, and I have been looking for an opening.”

“You are sick.”

“I know. Love makes one ill. Love makes one puke. Love makes one, well, crazy, so here I am. I’m not the only one. Half the building is in love with her. You know that guy with the pirate eye patch, Billy Sewage? He actually warned me off. He’s in love with her too! So I’m listening in on this argument she and Lord Scrimshaw are having. She is demanding some kind of document, and he is saying he can’t fork it over because ships will sink and planes will fall from the sky. England will be forever lost. He pleads with her to run away with him. They will settle in the Bahamas or some other faraway nook of the Empire, to raise roses and fuck night and day so she’ll forget he has a paunch. He’s got a couple of bluish jowls, older than she is, pickled in forty years of Bombay blue.”