Pantheon (46 page)

He caught Florence looking at him in a way he had not seen before. ‘What is it?’

She stepped closer. ‘When I planned this moment, seeing you again – which I did, a hundred times – I didn’t know how I would tell you all this. I worried that it would, that you
would—’

‘Fly into a rage?’

‘Yes. That you would be so hurt and so angry that you would lash out, that you would do something … terrible.’

‘A month ago, I’m sure I would have done. But I left that man behind in England, Florence. Just as you did.’

She let her eyes look into his, the two of them joined in a single gaze. Before his injury, they could do this for minutes on end, content to dive deep into each other. She spoke quietly. ‘I left because I didn’t know how to protect Harry any more. Not because I stopped loving you. I never stopped loving you, James.’

‘I understand why you did what you did. You wanted our child to be safe and I wouldn’t listen. I couldn’t listen to anything or anyone except myself, Florence. I see that now.’

‘But I shouldn’t have done it. It wasn’t fair. You’re Harry’s father. I shouldn’t have done it.’ He watched as she fought the tears. ‘But everyone around me said I had to, it was my responsibility. Virginia, Rosemary, Bernard, they were all so certain, I—’

‘Shhh,’ he said, stroking her hair. ‘You’re a good mother. You were doing what you thought was right.’

‘I won’t ever leave you again,’ she said. ‘Never.’ She turned her face up to him and their lips touched in a kiss that was tender, full of the melancholy and ache of the long, last month.

The moment was broken by the sound of Harry crying. Instinctively James went towards the back garden, but Florence realized the sound was coming from the front. She rushed towards the front-door and opened it, letting out a dry scream that made James’s blood freeze.

There at the door, holding a tearful Harry in an awkward grip, was Preston McAndrew.

‘What a nice surprise,’ the Dean said. ‘Here we all are, playing happy families.’

‘Put my child down,’ James said in a voice that was pure steel. ‘Now.’

Harry was writhing, weeping as he tried to wriggle free. But McAndrew would not let go. ‘Don’t give me orders in my own house, Zennor.’ He was, James noticed now, dishevelled, the usual smoothness gone. He looked what he was, a man on the run.

‘Put Harry down,’ James said again. ‘If you want to hurt someone, hurt me, not my child.’

‘All right,’ McAndrew said, that smirk returning to his lips. ‘As you wish.’ He discarded the boy the way a man might cast aside a used cigarette, throwing him casually to the floor. Florence caught him and comforted him, but over Harry’s bowed head her eyes were huge as they focused on what the Dean held in his other hand. A revolver.

‘Now, how about I get comfortable in my own house?’ McAndrew stepped inside, the gun trained now on James.

‘The police will be here soon, you must know that,’ James said. He looked over to Florence. ‘He’s on the run. He’s wanted for talking to the Nazis and taking stolen American secrets.’

‘Of course,’ said McAndrew, his upper lip clammy with sweat. ‘I knew it was you. It couldn’t be anyone else.’

‘Yes, I’m afraid your friend on the train failed to do his job – and kill me.’

Florence looked aghast and confused.

‘It’s quite true, Florence, dear,’ the Dean said. ‘For once your deranged husband is speaking the truth.’ He stared at James. ‘When are you going to realize you’re not wanted, Zennor? You don’t
fit.
I have plans for Florence and me and there’s no room in them for you.’

Florence, still holding Harry, was burning, her eyes wild. ‘I wouldn’t touch you if my life depended on it.’

‘Hush, Florence dear, this doesn’t concern you. Now, James. I’m going to be generous. Leave us now and I will let you go in peace, no need for me to use this.’ He waved the gun.

‘Listen to me, McAndrew. The police will find you eventually. And when they do you will go to jail for what you’ve done. But if you kill me, you won’t go to jail. You’ll go to the electric chair.’

‘Oh and what difference would that make to you? Don’t tell me you care whether I live or die.’

‘Personally, it would give me great pleasure to see you die right now, McAndrew. But you need to go on trial first and not only for the murder of George Lund. America also needs to hear what you were planning, who you were prepared to help to get what you wanted.’

‘What, so that they will be shocked into fighting for your washed-up old country? Forget it. Now, Zennor, I won’t repeat myself. I’m giving you the chance to save your life. Just agree to say no more about Lund and leave now. Leave me here with Florence and Harry.’

‘Never.’ He glanced to his right.

‘All right, then take the child. I don’t want him anyway. He’s not perfect: he’s a weakling like his father. Leave me and Florence to make some perfect babies.’

James bit down on the anger that rose at these words, for he could not allow himself to be diverted. He needed to act calmly and decisively – and now was the moment. In a single, swift motion he ducked and grabbed up Florence’s suitcase, then charged at McAndrew’s midriff. But he wasn’t fast enough. The Dean squeezed the trigger and the gun went off with a noise like thunder.

Florence screamed, while Harry – who had been crying steadily – stopped, frozen.

Where was the bullet? James felt no pain. No time to think about that. He slammed into McAndrew and felled him, then drew back his free arm – the damaged, weaker left arm he had despised for so long – and used it to deliver a smart left hook to the Dean’s jaw, knocking him out cold.

He looked down at himself, fearing that he would, for the second time in his life, see a stain of red blood, spreading and expanding like a deathly inkblot. But there was no blood.

His eyes darted to Florence and Harry. Thank God, they too were safe and unmarked. He looked around the room, and saw eventually that the bullet had plunged harmlessly downward and was lodged now in the hard wood floor.

James stood up, exhausted. He reached for Harry, pulling him up so that they were looking at each other eye to eye and said the only words he could think to say. ‘Daddy’s here, son. Daddy’s here.’

One week later

The crew made an absurd fuss of them. Not because they knew what James had done – though that was the only reason they were allowed on the ship at all – but because they were the only civilians on board, possibly the only civilians heading this way on the entire North Atlantic. They gave Harry a seaman’s beret that was too big for his little head and insisted on calling him captain.

James had Ed Harrison to thank. Or rather Ed’s contact in the White House. Once he learned that it had been an Englishman who had thwarted a plan to leak the stolen Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence – a plan involving a group of British fascists, German intelligence, their allies in the US and a mole inside the American Embassy in London – they were ready to grant his every wish. They offered all kinds of rewards; there was even talk of a presidential medal. James said no to it all. He just wanted to get home.

So they hitched a ride on board a small cargo ship, part of a large convoy taking war material from America to Britain. It had been Florence who insisted on sailing back immediately, whatever the risks.

‘If I could do my bit for Spain, then I can certainly do my bit for my own country. Our place is back home in England, on the right side in this bloody war.’

‘It may not be the winning side, Florence,’ James had said.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But it is right. And it’s where we belong.’ She paused. ‘We can pick up where we left off, can’t we?’

‘No, Florence. I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

‘Why?’ she asked, biting her lip in that familiar gesture of anguish.

‘I think we need to make a fresh start, you and me. No going back to old habits. Or rather,
I
need to make a fresh start.’

‘James, you—’

‘No, I mean it, Florence. I had become a bitter, angry old man. I wasn’t a good husband to you. I wasn’t a good father to Harry. My own son was frightened of me. Imagine that, my own son …’ His voice gave way and his wife put her hand on his shoulder. He pressed on. ‘I changed, Florence. I was no longer the man you married.’

‘You were shot, James. You saw your best friend killed. I’ve studied cases like yours. You’d suffered a great trauma.’

‘Yes, but I can’t keep blaming that. I
won’t
keep blaming that. Not any more. I was so busy with my bloody shoulder, I didn’t see there was a whole world out there – and my family right in front of me. I promise you, Florence, I changed once. For the worse, admittedly.’ She laughed. ‘And I can change again; for the better this time. I want to be a better man.’

‘We’ll both do things differently.’

‘We will. I can’t promise it will be perfect, but I will try. I promise.’

‘But that’s just it, James, don’t you see? I don’t want it to be perfect. I don’t want to live in a perfect world of machines and robots and straight lines, where no one feels a thing. That’s McAndrew’s world. I don’t want that. I want to live in the world of real people – with all their flaws and vices and stupid ways, with their crooked noses and funny voices and, yes, James, wonky shoulders. It’s the cracks that make us human, James, you must see that. That’s the world I want to live in. And I want to live in it with you.’

Pantheon
is a novel and James, Florence and Harry are fictional creations. And yet their story is rooted in the most extraordinary facts.

A ship packed with one hundred and twenty-five Oxford children and twenty-five of their mothers did indeed leave Liverpool for Yale University in the second week of July 1940. The organizers in Oxford did spend the previous weeks in hurried preparation, a process the historian AJP Taylor would later describe as ‘an unseemly scramble’. Once they had reached their temporary home, the local paper did indeed run the headline, ‘Refugees Find New Haven in Land Holding Promise of Peace’.

As for the larger mystery eventually uncovered by James Zennor, there is little direct evidence of any such plot. Those who sailed across the Atlantic on the liner
Antonia
, now in their seventies or older, take the same view James did: that the Yale families who opened their homes to strangers’ children, hosting them for nearly five years, did so out of altruism and kindness, nothing more. This much is lovingly recounted in two very touching books,
Havens Across the Sea
by Ann Spokes Symonds, herself one of the Oxford children, and
See You After the Duration
by Michael Henderson.

And yet, some of those who were rescued have long wondered about the motives, not of their hosts, but of the effort’s organizers: why were they singled out, was it perhaps their status as the offspring of the academic elite that made their plight particularly pressing? Tellingly, Dr John Fulton of Yale Medical School, a prime mover behind the effort, said that the Yale Faculty Committee for Receiving Oxford and Cambridge University Children hoped to save ‘at least some of the children of intellectuals before the storm breaks’. It is also the case, as James discovers in the novel, that Cambridge rejected Yale’s offer, fearing that, in the words of Sir Montague Butler, ‘this might be interpreted as privilege for a special class’.

If there is a hint of eugenics about all this, then it should not be too great a surprise. For the belief that society should encourage the strongest, fittest and brightest to have more children, while pushing, or even forcing, those deemed inferior or weak to produce fewer children or none at all, held great sway over the elites of pre-war Britain and America. In some, it fed dreams of a new breed of supermen, a pantheon of almost godlike people destined to rule over an ever-stronger human race. In others, it meant dangerous – and lethal – schemes to weed out those branded unfit for life.

The historical surprise is that the advocates of eugenics were not, as one might expect, right-wing cranks and racists. Enthusiasts included some of Britain’s greatest intellectuals, many of them on the left, all revered to this day. The quotations and arguments James comes across in the Sterling Library – from the great writer George Bernard Shaw, philosopher Bertrand Russell, the father of the welfare state William Beveridge, the lauded economist John Maynard Keynes and many others – are real and accurate. The pioneer of birth control, Marie Stopes, was so dedicated a eugenicist that she disinherited her son on the grounds that he had married a woman who wore glasses – thereby risking that his children would be short-sighted – preferring to leave much of her fortune to the Eugenics Society.

Across the Atlantic, the idea had an equally strong hold on the most privileged circles. Eugenics was particularly in vogue at Yale, as the genuine quotations cited by the fictional Dr Curtis in his evening seminar attest, including the one attributed to the former president of the university, James Angell, described by historians as ‘a fanatic eugenicist’. All the italicized passages and chapter headings from Leonard Darwin are quoted faithfully from his book
What is Eugenics?

Evidence of the extent to which eugenic theory ran deep in the American academy is to be found in the bizarre saga of the naked ‘posture photographs’. Two scholars did indeed dream of compiling an Atlas of Men and an Atlas of Women and, to that end, persuaded several Ivy League colleges to trick their undergraduates into posing nude, with pins taped to their back. The full story was revealed in ‘The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal’ by Ron Rosenbaum, published in the
New York Times
magazine in January 1995: the phrase ‘physique equals destiny’, uttered by Dr Curtis, should properly be credited to Rosenbaum. He discovered that among those snapped without clothes in this effort to establish a link between physical prowess and intellectual ability were the younger selves of the first President Bush, Hillary Clinton and Meryl Streep, along with the journalists Bob Woodward and Diane Sawyer.

The two authors of the initiative, one from Harvard, the other from Columbia, were apparently inspired by Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin’s, who was fascinated by questions of intelligence and inheritance, and who had earlier proposed a comprehensive photographic archive of the British population. His US heirs aimed to realize that dream in their own country, appropriating the already-existent practice of freshmen posture photographs as cover for the project.