He waited, and she had to put it into words.
‘He said you were a coward.’
‘Ah.’ Tapping ash from his cigarette, Deacon said, ‘Well, most people think that, I’ve told you. I’ve long since stopped letting it bother me.’
Georgie said, ‘It bothered me.’
He looked at her. ‘Why did it?’
She could only say, in her defence, that her reaction had been completely in character. ‘It would have bothered any wife, to hear someone say that about her husband.’
‘Yes,’ said Deacon, ‘I suppose it would.’ He looked at her again, and then looked down, his fingers pinching up a small fold of the tablecloth. After a moment he said conversationally, ‘I had rheumatic fever as a boy. I made a good recovery, but it leaves its mark, they say, upon the heart.’ He tapped his cigarette again and watched the ash fall with a hiss into the still-damp ashtray. ‘When Hitler sent his troops into Poland and we declared war, I did try to sign up, but I wasn’t accepted. My heart. Funny thing, really, that they won’t let you go and be killed if they think you’ll drop dead on the way. So they told me no, thank you. But then, one of the Embassy chaps in Brazil made it known he’d be grateful if I’d pass on anything I learnt that might be useful. A lot of fifth columnists, down there. One heard things, you know, on the street. So I kept him informed, as best I could. And that’s how it began,’ he told her. ‘That’s how I came to be here, doing this. Not the same thing, I’ll grant you, as wearing a uniform, but…’ He looked up, with a tight little smile. The pleat that he’d made on the tablecloth was very tidy, very crisp. ‘“They also serve, who only stand and wait,”’ he said.
Georgie wasn’t sure what astonished her more – the fact that he’d made such a long speech, or such a personal one.
‘It isn’t common knowledge,’ he went on. ‘I’m not supposed to talk about the things I do, to anyone.’ He paused, and smoothed the tablecloth again with his thumb, and then he added, very calmly, ‘But I didn’t want you thinking Bill was right.’
She looked at him – the quiet face, his gaze deliberately angled down, away from hers – and as she looked, she felt the weight of words unspoken pull between them, binding them, connecting them as surely as if they’d been holding hands across the table. It took time to find her voice. ‘I never thought he was,’ she said.
He raised his head at that, and met her eyes, and smiled a little. Crushing out the cigarette, he pushed his chair back. ‘Would you like to dance?’
The Royal Canadians had just begun playing a slower song, one that she recognised, one they’d made quite popular a few years back, from Showboat. The man who sang the words seemed to be singing straight to her, to them, the lyrics fit so perfectly with how she felt, tonight…
‘We could make believe I love you,
Only make believe that you love me.
Others find peace of mind in pretending;
Couldn’t you? Couldn’t I? Couldn’t we…?’
She stood, and took the hand that Deacon offered, and she followed where he led. She hadn’t danced with anyone since coming to New York. She had forgotten how it felt to be held by a man, to feel his hand heavy at her waist, and his fingers round hers, and the warmth of his jaw a hair’s-breadth from her cheek.
Time stopped. They didn’t speak. The room revolved, a swirl of dresses, faces, tables, dotted here and there with lights that seemed to dance, as they were dancing, to the music of the orchestra.
His hand shifted almost imperceptibly at her back, but she felt it and moved with it, letting him draw her in closer. And then his head moved as well, lowering slightly until his cheek rested on hers, and his long, exhaled breath brushed the side of her neck.
It felt so right, she thought…so comfortable, and right. She’d almost lost track of the words of the song but she focused her mind now and listened, not wanting to lose any part of the moment, no longer resisting the surge of emotion.
The mellow-voiced singer was crooning the chorus again for the last time, the swell of the music behind him a sign he was nearing the end:
‘Might as well make believe I love you,
For…’
They were no longer moving, Georgie noticed. Deacon raised his head and drew away so he could see her eyes. His own were blue in shadow; serious.
‘…to tell the truth,
I do.’
The music swelled again and stopped, and the dancers around them stopped, too, some returning to the tables while others remained on the dance floor and waited.
Georgie waited, too. Deacon tightened his grip on her hand, and drew a measured breath as though he was going to say something…but whatever it might have been she never heard it, because just then she became aware of someone standing close beside them. Someone tall, and wearing a dark overcoat.
‘I hate to spoil your evening,’ Jim’s voice said, apologetic, ‘but it’s time.’
Deacon dropped his hand, reluctantly, and let go of Georgie’s fingers.
Jim went on, ‘We have to get you to the wharf in less than half an hour. There’s a car outside, and your suitcase is already in it. Frank, here, will go with you.’
She hadn’t seen the second man. She barely saw him now.
‘Good luck,’ said Jim, and reached across her to shake Deacon’s hand.
‘Yes, I…thank you,’ Deacon said.
She saw him collect himself, and then the keen blue eyes came round to hers and he repeated, ‘Thank you.’
Georgie forced a half-smile. ‘It was nothing.’
‘No.’ He raised a hand to touch her cheek, a gesture of farewell, and then his fingers slid beneath her hair to gently cup her neck. He leant in close. ‘It wasn’t nothing,’ he said, just for her, and kissed her forehead. To the others, she knew, it would have looked very proper and innocent, but there was a kind of fierceness in that kiss that brought a stinging to her eyes and made her wish that…well, she wished…
‘Goodbye,’ he said.
‘Goodbye.’
She didn’t watch him go. She couldn’t.
Turning, she bit her lip hard as the colours and lights blurred and ran with a warmth that spilt over her lashes and onto her cheeks. She blinked, and the rough weave of a man’s dark overcoat shielded her view as the softness of a handkerchief was pressed into her hand.
‘Come on,’ said Jim, and he took hold of her shoulder in an understanding grasp. ‘I’ll take you home.’
* * *
My grandmother’s clock chimed its melody into the silence.
Outside, the evening darkness settled in around the forms of trees and fences at the lane behind the house, and the window glass reflected back the warm light of the kitchen, and my grandma’s face…her eyes…
You have her eyes, that’s what Deacon had said to me, that morning. His last words. His last thought, maybe. I couldn’t help but wonder if, when he’d stepped off that kerb, unseeing, he had been where she was now, in memory…standing on that dance floor at the Roosevelt Hotel.
My grandmother appeared to still be standing there. She wasn’t back with me, yet. So I waited, and I watched her face, and marvelled at how something so familiar could be foreign to me, too. Why was it, I wondered, that we so often saw old people as simply being old? Why had I never stopped to think, before, that she had once been young, like me – had fallen in and out of love, and laughed with friends, and had her dreams and disappointments, just as I did; that she hadn’t always been as she was now? Tonight, at least, the realisation hit me with the force of an epiphany.
We had much more in common than I’d known, more than just the red hair and the eyes. I’d seen some of myself in the young Georgie Murray, and I felt a new-found sense of closeness to her that I wanted to explore. There were, I thought, so many questions…
I was watching when she sighed, and blinked, returning to the present.
I asked, ‘Then what happened?’
‘Oh, well, that was that. He went away, and I was transferred to Washington
. I didn’t realise I’d been killed off,’ she said, using humour, as always, to regain her footing. ‘Though I suppose, now that I think of it, he couldn’t have kept up the fiction of having a wife for his whole life.’
He had done exactly that, as it happened, but I didn’t think raising that point would be helpful.
She said, ‘You say I’m supposed to have died in New York?’
‘I think so. Deacon’s nephew didn’t say for certain.’ She had me calling him Deacon, now, I noticed, only for me it seemed rather more personal than less so – it was almost a term of affection.
If Grandma had noticed, she didn’t say anything. ‘Well, I hope they gave Amelia an exciting end. Nothing too boring.’
I tried to steer her back to the main story, which, for me, still didn’t have a proper ending. ‘So you never saw Deacon again? Never heard from him?’
‘No. I knew he had made it to Lisbon all right,’ she admitted, ‘because for the first little while after he left they had me stay on in the apartment, and there was a letter that came, in his handwriting, so I knew he’d arrived there.’
‘And what did he say, in the letter?’
‘Oh, I wasn’t allowed to read it, Katie. I wasn’t even allowed to open it. I’d been given instructions to pass any letters that came on to my bosses, so I did. It wasn’t meant for me,’ she explained. ‘I was only his cover. It would probably have been all in code, anyway – I wouldn’t have been able to make sense of it.’ She interlaced her fingers round her empty glass and looked at them. ‘Anyway, they sent me to Washington soon after that, and I didn’t hear anything more. I left BSC that summer, when my brother Ronnie died. I came back here, to help my parents. And then, of course, your grandfather came home and…well, you know what happened, after that.’
I knew. She had married my grandfather, married her Kenneth, and after years of trying they had finally had a son, who’d been my father, and in time he’d married Mother and had me. The normal chronicle of family life. But, still…
‘You must have wondered…’ I began, then let the sentence hang unfinished.
Grandma looked at me, and must have seen the questions still unasked, unanswered, in my eyes, because she took a moment to consider, and then said, ‘Of course I did. Of course I wondered what became of him.’ She frowned a little, trying to explain, so I would understand. ‘I’ve had a happy life,’ she said. ‘A very happy life. I loved your grandfather, and he loved me. I don’t regret a minute of the time we had together. But yes, I often thought of Deacon. He was…well, sometimes when you’ve put a fire out there’s just a little ember burning in the ashes, still, beneath. He was like that,’ she said. ‘I never did forget him.’
She turned her head away and looked, unseeing, through the kitchen window to the darkness by the high back fence where she had planted the little rosebushes.
Her life, I thought, might have been different. So different. I tried to imagine her in Deacon’s house in Elderwel, sitting in his kitchen, looking over his back garden. He’d had roses, too, as I remembered…lovely tea roses.
She was gone again. I saw her eyes and knew that she’d been pulled into the past again the way a floating leaf is carried further from the shore by a retreating wave. I sat there, saying nothing, only watching her reflection in the night-black glass.
And then, as from a blow, the window shattered and her image shattered with it.
Someone screamed. Her chair fell. When I dived to try to catch it, something whined mosquito-like against my ear and struck the wall behind with force enough to send a shard of plaster spiking to the floor. Again, I heard somebody scream. A chilling sound. A primal sound of shock and fear and anguish.
Then I realised it was me. My voice.
Because there wasn’t anybody else.
I didn’t remember too much, after that. I remembered chaos. A confusion of ambulance lights and police cars and neighbours appearing from nowhere to stand on their porches, on lawns, on the sidewalks, in little groups, watching; the house and the yard and the lane being wrapped in a tangle of yellow police tape, and officers crawling round carefully, raking the ground with the beams of their flashlights. I remembered one officer looking upset when he’d first seen my grandmother’s body. I’d wanted to tell him that it was all right, that she hadn’t been there when it happened – she’d been somewhere else, and in far better company…only before I could tell him, they’d ushered me out of the kitchen, and after that, things got incredibly blurry.
I had some memory of an ambulance, and someone saying ‘Shock’, and ‘Better get her checked out, anyway’, and then to my own vague surprise I had found myself taking up space in the busy Emergency room of a huge downtown hospital.
I was trying hard to focus on the frenzy of activity around me when a pair of darkly uniformed shoulders moved into my line of vision.
Small shoulders. A female police officer. She had a sympathetic face – I imagined that’s why they had chosen her to do this kind of duty. ‘You OK?’ she asked.
From my slightly out-of-body vantage point, I thought that was an idiotic question. Of course I wasn’t OK. I’d just seen my grandmother killed for no reason by someone who’d taken a shot at me, too. I was a long way from being OK. But I knew the policewoman was only being kind, and so I nodded.
‘Good. It shouldn’t take much longer.’
Her radio squawked, and she gave my arm an encouraging squeeze before turning away.
I lost sight of her in the confusion of people arriving and leaving. Another blue uniform stepped into view, but the young woman wearing it wasn’t familiar – a different policewoman who, with her partner, was busy admitting a middle-aged man who appeared to be homeless, wild-haired and bare-footed in spite of the cold. A few minutes later, my gaze finally found my policewoman, standing just inside the big main glass doors. She was talking with two men, both fortyish, both dressed as though they’d come straight from an elegant dinner.
The policewoman said something; gestured my way, and the men looked, and nodded, and started towards me. I watched their approach with dull interest. They both walked like men of authority.
The taller one, silver-haired, spoke to me first. He had a nice voice, deep and pleasantly pitched, and my mind chose to focus on the sound of it instead of what he said. I didn’t catch his name. But then he introduced the man beside him. ‘Sergeant Metcalf, here, is visiting from England. He’s been speaking at our conference. Now, we’ll understand if you’re not up to talking at the moment, but…’
It was, I thought, as though the scene from last Sunday night in London were being played again. The Englishman, all sympathy and smoothness, took a step towards me as he showed me his credentials: Sergeant Robert Metcalf, Scotland Yard. ‘Miss Murray? I was wondering if I might have a word.’
Before I could frame a reply, there was a shout from the admitting desk, and everybody turned in that direction. The homeless man had pulled a knife. Hunching away from his police minders like a defensive animal, he let loose a chain of obscenities, randomly slicing the air with the weapon. They jumped him. When he struggled, my policemen – even Metcalf – sprang to help their fellow officers.
And that’s when I took off.
It wasn’t anything premeditated – I just wheeled and ran, on instinct, like an animal myself, in search of somewhere safe to hide.
Because the Sergeant Metcalf who’d been standing here in front of me was not the Sergeant Metcalf I had spoken to in London.
There was virtually no one around in the the Sentinel building at this time of night. It was past one o’clock, and the editors had all gone home, leaving only the cleaning staff and the odd dedicated reporter behind.
Our offices were spread out over two floors – arts and sports and marketing shared one level, news and business were on another, with the reference library taking up a block of space at my end. On the ground floor, at street level, was Security. I usually had to scan my photo pass to make it through. Tonight,
without my pass – still back at Grandma’s, in my briefcase – I’d relied on luck, persuasion, and the memory of the guard. He had remembered me, which, given that I hadn’t been around for several weeks, was quite impressive. And although he’d hesitated, still, at length he’d let me through. So here I was, safe for the moment, in my cubicle.
I hadn’t had any particular destination in mind when I had bolted from the hospital, but once I’d got outside and seen exactly where I was, my steps had turned in this direction on their own. I’d run the first two blocks, and then, to blend in better with the scattering of people, I had walked the final three, arriving pale and out of breath but full of the conviction that the office was the best place, temporarily, to go to ground.
It was. My cubicle upstairs, though not as sheltered as a rabbit hole, still shielded me from view. The cleaner had vacuumed her way past ten minutes ago without once looking up, and the only other person I could see was working clear across in Foreign, the back of his bent head barely visible above the top of his divider.
I was, for all intents and purposes, alone. Unseen.
I put my head down on my desk as though I were a child, and tried to think.
My first thought was that I had maybe made a big mistake, to run away like that. To run from the police. God only knew what they were thinking. If they questioned me right now, I didn’t know what I could say in my defence, except that this, for me, was not a normal day. I wasn’t thinking straight. The shooting had reduced me to a primal, almost paranoiac state, and when I’d met the second Sergeant Metcalf all that I had registered was that something was wrong. And I’d felt frightened. I’d felt threatened.
With my eyes closed, I tried hard right now to analyse that threat.
There were, as far as I could see, two possibilities, both troubling. The man I’d met tonight might not, in fact, be Sergeant Robert Metcalf. Which wasn’t good, because I couldn’t think of any useful reason why he’d say he was, or why he’d want to meet me.
If he wasn’t an imposter, but was really Sergeant Metcalf, that was worrying as well, because it meant the man I’d met in London had been lying, and again I couldn’t think of why he’d do that.