Pantheon (20 page)

He washed and dressed quickly, taking directions for the old campus, a quadrangle of lawns and redbrick colonial buildings that were neither modern, nor ancient in the Oxford sense but rather of an eighteenth-century colonial style rarely glimpsed in England. He found the administrative building and went inside, following the signs.

The Dean’s office boasted an outer area roomy enough for two secretaries and which, James noted, was probably twice the size of Bernard Grey’s entire study. Clearing his throat, he announced himself.

‘Hello, my name is Dr James Zennor, here to take up a fellowship from Oxford,’ he began, attempting his most charming smile. ‘I’ve come about the Oxford children.’

To his great relief, the woman – in early middle age and with a wave of brunette hair so unmoving it appeared to be sculpted from rock – smiled back. Encouraged, he explained his situation, that his wife and child were among the evacuees and that he had come to join them. Having learned his lesson in Liverpool, he asked if she might check her files and let him know where a Miss Florence Walsingham or Mrs Florence Zennor was now resident.

The secretary’s relentlessly professional smile did not waver. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Dr Zennor. These records are strictly private and confidential.’

He had expected that. ‘Of course. I wouldn’t ask you to divulge the details of anyone but my own immediate family. Here’s my passport, just so there is no doubt as to my name. If my wife is here under her married name, it will be a simple matter of matching me with your records. I’m happy to wait.’ It was an effort to resist the urge he had to push past her and ransack the files himself, but he forced himself to take a couple of paces backward, deliberately relaxed.

‘Sir, perhaps I was not clear,’ the secretary said, her face still frozen into a rictus of apparent delight. ‘The Dean has left very specific instructions that the Oxford children and their parents are here as guests of Yale and, as such, we cannot divulge any private information.’

‘But I am one of the parents! I am Harry’s father. Harry Zennor. Just check your list.’ He gritted his teeth in an attempt to remain polite. ‘Please.’

‘Dr Zennor. If you would care to write to the Dean, I’m sure he will—’

‘Ah, you need him to give authorization. I understand. Well, perhaps I could see him now, if he’s available. The Dean, I mean.’

‘What I was going to say is that if you wrote to the Dean, he would explain to you what I have tried to explain.’

‘Could I speak to the Dean, please?’ The temperature in his bloodstream was rising, he could feel it beginning to bubble.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but the Dean is not available.’

He advanced again, menacing. ‘He’s behind that door, isn’t he?’

‘Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to step away from the desk.’

‘Now you listen to me,’ he said, leaning in. ‘I’ve just travelled across the Atlantic, and then from Canada all the way here. I want to see my wife and child. That’s all.’

‘Please sir, step back. Otherwise, I will have to have you removed.’

The woman stood up and moved rapidly to the empty desk behind her, where she reached for the telephone and, with her back to James, spoke hurriedly into it. She seemed genuinely frightened.

James retreated, aware that he had gone too far, that he had already made a hash of it. When the far door opened, he was not surprised to see a stocky man in a cheap uniform enter. Instinctively, James raised his hands, showing his palms in a gesture of surrender, and headed for the door.

Outside, in the sunshine, he wanted to howl with rage, to break a window with his fists, such was his frustration.

He walked briskly away, trying to formulate a plan. The silver lining was that he had clearly come to the right place; the secretary with the plastered-on smile had not looked at him blankly as she might have done: she knew about the Oxford children. The bad news was that her instructions had clearly been strict and unambiguous, as if he had asked her to breach a state secret. He wondered why.

He was pacing down College Street now, past the brick facades of the colleges and into a parade of modern-looking shops, as if he had stepped out of the eighteenth and into the twentieth century. He stopped by a ‘drugstore’ that advertised a ‘soda fountain’. He had seen one of those at the pictures, but could hardly believe it was real. He went inside.

The place was filled with students, sipping milkshakes or drinking coffee. James took a seat at a window table and looked at the options on the menu wedged between the salt and pepper pots: eggs fried, scrambled, boiled or poached; a three-egg omelette; buttermilk pancakes with blueberries optional; cheesecake, poundcake, pecan pie. On it went, promising a banquet, plates spilling over with food and glasses filled to the brim, enough to stuff the bellies of the greediest, most gluttonous diners. A three-egg omelette! Three! That was eleven days’ rations blown in a single breakfast. And what would it be like to eat a cake that was made from real butter? He could hardly remember how such a delicacy tasted.

By the door was a stack of newspapers: the
Yale Daily News
. The main story on the front page told of the imminent retirement of the university football coach; only lower down and far less prominent was an item related to the war. There had been a conference in Havana of all the governments of the western hemisphere, apparently to discuss their common interest in ‘neutrality’. Neutrality? The very word made him sick. The Nazis were on the rampage: to be neutral was simply to step out of their way. You saved your own skin and someone else got clobbered.

An unnerving thought came to him then: he was as alone in this country as Britain was alone in the world.

Though he was hungry, he ignored the waitress heading his way, got up and walked out, feeling disgusted. He kept walking until drawn by a sign promising ‘Imported Pipes, Tobaccos and Cigars’. It was called the Owl Shop, but it also appeared to have a bar. Even though it was not yet nine thirty in the morning, and he strongly doubted they would serve a real drink, he suddenly craved one. But a cigarette would be a decent consolation prize. He went in and bought a packet of Pall Malls.

He lit up straight away, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs, then, at the very moment he should have exhaled, breathed in deeper – a trick he had learned from Harry Knox and not forgotten – and gazed ahead, unseeing, as the nicotine snaked its way through his system.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

It was the man behind the counter. Without realizing it, James had been staring. Except only now did he see how young this bartender was. Slight and with bad skin, he looked like a schoolboy.

James forced himself out of his cigarette reverie and asked, ‘Do you work here?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Sorry. You just seem rather—’

‘Yes, sir. Gotta work my way through college. Three mornings, five evenings a week.’ James had not worked during term-time as an undergraduate at Oxford, but he had during the vacations: he had once sold ice-creams on Bournemouth beach. ‘Can I can get you something, sir?’

James shook his head. He picked up a copy of the
New Haven Evening Register
left discarded on the counter, scavenging hungrily for items of war news. There was a brief story about the Duke of Windsor, ‘formerly King Edward VIII of England’, was how the paper put it, taking up his new post as governor of the Bahamas. Good riddance to the appeasing bastard, James thought.

As the cigarette glowed its last, he admonished himself for falling at the very first hurdle, threatening the college secretary and keeper of the Oxford files that held the secret of his wife’s location. What an idiot. Rosemary Hyde was right: his temper had become a liability. He was unable to control himself, even when he desperately needed to. What on earth could he do now?

He looked up, inadvertently making eye contact again with the bar-boy. The lad smiled, then glanced up at the old clock, clad in tobacco-stained wood on the wall. Counting the hours till his shift ends, James thought, I know that feeling …

Hold on. James stared at the clock. It was worth a try at least.

He took up a position on a low wall on the opposite side of the street. That way, he reasoned, he could keep an eye on the entrance of the administrative building without being too obvious. He had his newspaper, but not much else by way of distraction. Even a park bench would have been helpful; that way, he could have at least pretended to be having a rest or taking a nap. He had no visible reason to be sitting there, just hanging about.

So he paced, contemplating the entrances to the other buildings nearby, waiting for the hours to pass – and never letting his gaze slip for more than a second from the doorway he had come to watch. At one point, the porter who had ejected him earlier came out carrying a box, as if on delivery duty. James rapidly turned his back and lifted his newspaper higher.

Perhaps forty-five minutes had passed when, just before twelve-thirty, the secretary herself emerged. She had the prim, purposeful walk of a woman who had taken lessons in posture. He remembered Eileen demonstrating it for him in her small Oxford rooms, exaggerating the upright back and small, demure steps, the pair of them laughing at the absurd demands of a ladies’ secretarial college.

She turned a sharp right down Elm Street but James waited till she was completely out of view. Never move too fast, that’s what Jorge had said.
Allow for the possibility that a subject might turn around for one last look; that they might even double back, believing they have forgotten something. Unless the urgency is too great, give yourself room for error.
So James watched the second hand of his watch sweep a complete circuit before folding his paper and striding confidently towards the entrance, approaching the Dean’s office as if for the first time. Once outside, to his great relief, he saw that his hunch had been right: now it was the second desk that was occupied, with a different secretary on duty. Just like the teenage bartender, they worked shifts.

He would try a different tack this time. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m a research fellow over at the Department of Psychology.’ He kept his eyes down, thinking of the likes of Magnus Hook, the socially inept, shuffling academics that were surely as common a species in Yale as they were in Oxford. He hoped even his accent would not be noticed, buried in the international scholars’ language of mumbling.

‘Yes? And how can I help?’

‘My department is keen to undertake research into the effects of,’ he hesitated, recalling the book he had found at the Bodleian, the one Florence had been reading. ‘We’re researching the effects on children of a long separation. This has been an area of interest for many years but we think we now have the ideal test subjects. Right here in Yale.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’ Instead of a rictus smile, this woman’s forehead was furrowed with a kind of puzzled concern.

‘My name is Zennor,’ he said, the mumble dipping, he hoped, into the positively inaudible. ‘We would like to approach the Oxford mothers about their children taking part in a study. We would interview the children at the start, then at later intervals—’

‘That sounds a very interesting idea.’

James brightened, lifting his chin to face the woman directly. He was about to give her his charming smile before remembering Magnus Hook; he instead resumed staring at the floor and mumbled something about consulting the files so that he might contact the children.

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. The Dean has given strict undertakings to the families concerned, to the British authorities and to the State Department, regarding confidentiality.’

‘Yes, I appreciate that—’

‘This is something you would have to discuss with the Dean directly.’

He was about to explain why the nature of the research project did not allow for delay, that it was vital to record the children’s sentiments at the very start of the period of separation, when instinct made him look up and meet her gaze. The second he did so, he knew it was a mistake. A thought passed across her face, as visible as a shadow. ‘Could you repeat your name for me, sir?’

‘It’s Zennor.’

‘Were you here earlier this morning, talking to my colleague?’

At that moment, a door from the inner office opened and a man – tall, long-faced, bespectacled and probably no older than James himself – stepped through. ‘What seems to be the trouble, Miss Rodgers?’

In desperation and knowing it was folly, James made a last attempt. ‘Are you the Dean?’ He extended his hand but the man ignored it. ‘I’m Dr James Zennor from Oxford. I believe my wife and son are here at Yale and I need to find them.’

‘Are you the man who threatened one of the secretaries here today?’

‘I’m begging you. Just tell me—’

‘Either leave this office now or I will have you forcibly removed.’

‘Just let me see the bloody file!’

With surprising speed, the man advanced towards him, grabbing him by the elbow, then placed his other hand on James’s left shoulder. Unavoidably, James howled in pain, a sound that made Miss Rodgers scream.

That did it. The man tightened his grip, swivelling James’s arm behind his back into an instant half-nelson, and frogmarched him back down the corridor.

The porter who had ejected James a few hours earlier appeared from the other end, looking aghast. ‘Assistant Dean, I’m right here.’

‘No need, Murphy. I have this under control.’ As if to prove his point, he raised James’s arm a further two inches, making him cry out in even sharper pain.

Through the agony, James assessed his torturer. The Assistant Dean. A fellow athlete, he reckoned. Maybe an American football player, though he looked too thin for that. Maybe a rower. Whatever his training, he was a bastard and a sadist to boot.

They had reached the front entrance by now, the blue sky of a summer afternoon visible. James could see people rushing by, cars gliding along the road, the bustle of a busy American city. But he was about to be cast out into the desert – into a land where he knew no one and no one knew him, where every path led nowhere.