The Last Summer at Chelsea Beach

  “All clear,” he said a minute later when the noise had stopped. He straightened and returned the teacup which had fallen to his desk. Then he walked to the window and scanned up and down the street. “Must have been that unexploded shell that hit on Whitefriars a few nights back.”

  “But I thought the Blitz was over.”

  “It is. But the war rages on. The raids come at any time. Still keen to stay?” he asked, testing me.

  I thought back to my journey into the city, the rooftops which had been sheared off, their jagged wooden beams that pushed upward to the sky. Then I squared my shoulders. Danger came where one least expected it, on city streets lit for the holidays just blocks from home. I would not be daunted. I straightened. “Yes. More so than ever.”

  “Well, that’s all sorted.” His eyes crinkled a bit at the edges and a dimple appeared in his left cheek. Then his expression grew somber once more. “It’s been a bloody awful year.” He did not apologize for swearing. “The people here, well, they wear a stiff upper lip but inside they’re knackered.” I cocked my head at the unfamiliar term. “Shattered. Exhausted. You have a place yet?” He switched topics without warming. “There’s a boardinghouse in Maida Vale where some of the girls live.” He scribbled an address down on a piece of paper. “And there’s a reception tonight at the American ambassador’s residence. Early, you know, because of the curfew. But we should be there.” We. I started to protest that I was only a secretary, then thought better of it. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

  I had not even said yes. “Mr. White...”

  “Call me Teddy.”

  “Like the bear,” I blurted, instantly regretting it.

  He chuckled. “I suppose. Or the president. No one has ever put it quite that way before.”

  “I’ve only just arrived and I’m a bit weary for a party.”

  “Early dinner, then.” He smiled gamely, eyes dancing, cajoling me to say yes. I stared at him, incredulous. Even after everything with Charlie, I was still that gawky girl off the boat, unwilling to believe that a man might find me attractive.

  “But you just said you’ve got to be at the reception.” He waved his hand, dismissing the event that just seconds ago was so important. “And we’ve only just met,” I added.

  “Not quite. We met in the coffee shop earlier and I was terribly rude. I’d like to correct that.” But the intent of his words as he looked at me with sparkly blue eyes was undoubtedly something more.

  “All right,” I said, feeling my cheeks warm. I had not gone out with anyone since Charlie. In Washington, there had been dances and parties and invitations aplenty through the other girls at the paper. Despite the grimness of the war—or perhaps because of it—the thousands of workers who had come to the capital to help seemed to need the gaiety to shake off the long hours of toil. I went along when I could no longer refuse and even danced a few times. But it all felt wrong.

  I wondered again if the job was a mistake. I had come here to get away from things like this and it seemed important to set the boundaries from the start. “I’m just, as you said, knackered.” We both laughed. “Another time, okay?”

  “Another time, then,” he repeated. He reached out and shook my hand solemnly, his fingers warm around my own. Then he handed the refugee article back to me. “There’s still a story to be rewritten though.”

  “Me?” Even Mr. Steeves had not given me the chance to do substantive editing.

  “Yes, deadline is six if you think you can manage it.”

  “I can.” For that, I would muster the energy.

  “Then it’s all sorted.” An unexpected twinge of disappointment tugged at me as he released my hand and turned back to his desk. “Let’s get to work.”

  I sat alone at my small desk in the corner of Teddy’s office, wading through correspondence that he had let accumulate and sorting it into piles: matters that needed his attention, those that could be filed and those that could be discarded (or reused, if they were not confidential, for scrap paper; nothing was to be wasted). I set down the pencil I’d been chewing on and pulled back the blackout curtains to reveal the curving edge of the dome of St. Paul’s, set against the azure late morning sky, rows of broken chimneys beneath it. Smoke rose above the coal-dipped rooftops, mixing with fog and soot.

  I took a sip of the Earl Grey tea before me, now too cool. Then I leaned back, my eyes drifting downward to a photo of Teddy with former Prime Minister Chamberlain that sat on the windowsill. Teddy had been gone for two days on a trip, though he wouldn’t say where, just that he was following up with a lead. The office was quiet without him. I had grown accustomed to his dry humor and quick laugh, his constant movement these past several months, the way he chewed on his lip when he was concentrating, or paced back and forth when trying to get his head around an idea.

  Thankfully, my initial impressions of him had not borne out; though he was impatient and stubborn, Teddy was not a jerk. But he was the subject of endless speculation among the typists, I’d quickly learned after coming to work here.

  “They say he flew into occupied Poland just to get a story.”

  “They say he’s related to the Rockefellers.”

  “He’s never been seen with the same girl twice.” That last one irked me, though why I was not quite sure.

  I eyed the photo of Teddy with Chamberlain once more. It was the only picture in the office and I wondered as I had before about his family and the home in Kent where he had grown up. “I went to Eton, then uni at Oxford, read English at Magdalen College,” he’d explained once when I asked, reciting facts that I already knew from the diplomas that lined the walls. “I was meant to go into banking or law. My family is aghast at what I do. To them being a correspondent is dreadfully working-class. But I love it.” Teddy was something of an odd duck at the Post, the lone British correspondent at the American press. He’d been with the Times before that, but had left under circumstances that no one seemed to know—or was willing to discuss. “They pay better here,” he’d offered airily once, but there was no force behind the explanation.

  The cathedral bell chimed twelve and I set down the correspondence and put on my overcoat and scarf. I wove my way through the steno pool where the handful of typists clattered away on their machines, the BBC radio droning news of the war continuously in the background. A half dozen or so other offices lined the perimeter of the room, their lights off as the correspondents chased stories out in the field. I did not stop at the tea room where some of the other girls had surely clustered, gossiping over thin cheese sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. They’d treated me coldly in the months since I’d come. For a while I thought it was because I was the only American among the typists and other clerical staff. But they didn’t seem to hold that against the American correspondents whom they admired from a distance, or the GIs who took them dancing on the weekends. More likely they resented me for coming over and being immediately put a step above them working for Teddy. I tried not to mind. They reminded me of the girls back home who went all silly over boys, in a way that I could never be after growing up in a big pile of Connallys.

  I walked downstairs and stepped out onto Fleet Street, eyeing the gray late-April sky warily. The unsettled weather blew through so quickly here, clouds forming and starting a downpour seemingly from nowhere at all, then clearing again just as quickly.

  Three American GIs walked shoulder to shoulder down the pavement and I stepped sideways in order to avoid bumping into one of them. London was, even more so than Washington had been, a city under occupation—by the thousands of American soldiers who were stationed here, filling the pubs and prowling the seedy nightlife at Piccadilly Circus. “Excuse me,” the soldier nearest to me said, giving me a long sideways look. I averted my eyes, not answering. I had come to London to escape Charlie, but the boys in uniform were a constant reminder. Once as I transferred from one
double-decker bus to another in Trafalgar Square, I’d imagined that I’d seen him, an image so real I had disembarked, frantically searching the crowd. But it had been an illusion; Charlie, of course, was not here.

  I began to walk as I did each day at lunchtime, slipping into the crowd and moving with it. I loved winding through the back streets of the city, enjoying the freedom of life here, where no one knew me or my past.

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” Teddy had said more than once, his mouth pulling downward. “It’s dangerous.”

  “I’m just as likely to get hit by a bomb here as outside,” I’d protested. But in truth I walked because of the devastation, not in spite of it. It had started one day as I made my way home from the bureau to my flat, which was just north of Hyde Park. As I reached the northern edge of the park, I’d been stunned to see a giant crater in the middle of the street, an empty bus dangling precipitously from it. Had there been passengers? It seemed unlikely, or I would have heard about it at the paper. Bombings were so commonplace that only those with large-scale casualties seemed to be making the news these days. I pulled out Uncle Meyer’s camera from my bag and began snapping photos. After that, I walked every day, at lunch and on the weekends, too, wanting to capture it all in pictures. Most of all, I was struck by the ordinary life that persisted, like women queuing at the shops and the group of children (among the few that begun to return to the city) I’d seen playing soccer by a gaping patch in Notting Hill where a house once stood, so much like the games of our childhood.

  It was a childhood that despite my best efforts I could not forget. It had been months since I left Washington and nearly a year since I left Philadelphia, but the assaults of the past were nonstop on my mind, despite my best attempts to block them out. The memories, when I allowed myself to have them, were always bathed in a kind of gold—sunshine soaking the yard where we’d played, lifting the flecks of Charlie’s hair and magnifying them. Other times I imagined myself back on the Connallys’ worn sofa in the city, wedged into the corner where I always sat beside Jack, Robbie sprawled across the three of us despite his mother’s admonition to keep his feet down.

  Liam popped improbably into my mind now. Though I thought often of the others—Charlie, of course, and Jack and sweet, sweet Robbie—I missed Liam, too, in a way that I probably shouldn’t. It was the good Liam I saw, with his irreverent humor, before he had become so dark and troubled. He would know exactly how I felt among the other typists, as though I did not fit in at all.

  I walked east, stepping over the edge of a curb that had been painted a striped black and white to make it visible during the blackouts. Then I skirted around St. Paul’s churchyard, feeling my way south to the river. The street ended and I stepped into the full, cutting wind of the Thames. The air was sharply cool, winter not ready to cede to spring. I sat down on a bench to pull out my gloves. A couple walked down the pavement, holding hands. An unexpected pang of longing ran through me. Charlie appeared in my mind, large and unbidden, images cascading upon me like books falling from a shelf. I saw him now as I had at the State Department that day, tall and lovely in his uniform. Had he shipped out yet or was he still in training?

  I opened my purse and pulled out a letter. It had been waiting for me when I returned home from work the previous evening, addressed in Aunt Bess’s flowery script. Inside was another envelope, my name printed in what looked like Charlie’s blocky writing. My breath had caught. The postmark was weeks old, though whether Aunt Bess had delayed in sending it or it had been slowed by the wartime post, I did not know. I’d held up the still-sealed envelope with trembling hands. Was Charlie begging me to come back or cursing me for having left? Dangerous thoughts, the kind I had kept at bay for so long, leapt up at me, a flicker becoming a flame. If I opened the letter, I would know the truth and be forced to respond. No, better to leave the past alone. I’d dangled the letter over the fire in the grate. Then thinking better of it, I tucked it in my bag.

  I held it aloft now, edges flapping with the breeze. A bell rang out, signaling that my lunch hour was half over and so I returned the letter to my bag and began to make my way back to the bureau. Inside I scanned the office to see if Teddy had returned, and felt a mild pang of disappointment that he had not. I unwrapped the leftover toast and beans I had brought for lunch. I found English food bland, lots of breaded whitefish and shepherd’s pie filled with potatoes and little else; it reminded me of my aunt’s cooking back home. But thanks to Teddy, I had an extra book full of ration coupons and was able to get plenty of whatever there was to be purchased; I had no business complaining.

  I walked through the typing pool, where the air now hummed with chatter. But the conversation stopped abruptly as I entered, signaling something I was not meant to hear. “Is there any post?” I asked the secretary Joan, trying to act as though nothing was amiss.

  “I’m sure you can check for yourself.” She turned away.

  “Is that any way to treat a coworker?” a voice behind me rebuked sharply. I turned. Teddy was back. At the sight of him, I was filled with warmth. I had grown to appreciate his flaxen blond hair and eyes that crinkled when he laughed.

  But now his normally cheerful face was stormy. “No, of course not, Mr. White.” Joan turned and passed me the mail.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, when I had followed him into his office. He closed the door behind us. There was a heavy stubble across his cheeks and rings around his usually bright eyes. Teddy had always been a constant worker, but now the news flowed so fast even he couldn’t keep up.

  “I wish you wouldn’t say anything,” I fretted. “Your sticking up for me just makes them hate me more.”

  “Why should you care about that?’

  Because in some ways I would always be that new girl at Southern, looking for a friend. But I couldn’t tell him that. “You should have me sit out there with the others.”

  “I need you here.” I knew from the way his mouth set stubbornly that I would not win on the point. “It’s not personal to you, how the girls act,” he added. “Those girls have just been through a lot. Most of them are from the East End.” I nodded. The devastation had been so much worse in Stepney and Bethnal Green. “Midge, for example, lost almost her whole family in the Blitz.” The girls did not just resent me for my closeness to Teddy. I had not been here through the worst of the bombings, was not one of them. “And Edie’s husband is missing in North Africa.” I was surprised that Teddy, who scarcely seemed to speak to the other typists, knew so much about their personal hardships.

  No, simply changing the location of my desk would not make things better. But perhaps, understanding what all the other women had been through, I could try a bit harder to be friendly. I noticed then the fine coating of soot and ash on his jacket, which he had tried without success to brush off. “You’ve been over there, haven’t you?” As he poured two glasses of water from the pitcher on the windowsill, my concern grew. I’d suspected for months that Teddy had been making secret trips across the Channel to France, trying to learn what was coming.

  “Only as far as Guernsey this time. That’s still Britain.”

  “But it’s occupied. You could have been arrested by the Germans. What were you thinking?” But I already knew: Teddy’s doggedness went beyond good journalism; he was trying to prove himself. Part of him felt less than enough because he was not a soldier fighting.

  He waved his hand, brushing away my concerns. “There’s something coming, Adelia. I saw it, a build-up at the coast. The Americans are really going over.”

  Hope rose in me that someone might finally be able to stop the Germans. “How soon?”

  His brow wrinkled. “I couldn’t tell. Weeks or months maybe. I need to do some more digging.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.” How much farther into danger would he go next time?

  “Worried about me now, aren’t you?” His tone was more tha
n a little pleased. I turned slightly away, warmth creeping up from my neck. My affection for Teddy had grown these past few months, in spite of my determination to remain unattached. “Adelia, going to the story—that’s my job. I like you worrying about me, though.” His lone dimple appeared.

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. I do wish the photos were a bit better.” He had to rely on stock images from the Associated Press pool photographers.

  “I could show you how to take the photos,” I offered. Or go with you myself, I thought, though that was out of the question.

  But he shook his head. “I need my eyes on the story to digest it all and take notes. Anyway, there’s no time to worry about all that now. I need you to come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Eden’s called an urgent press conference without saying why. I want photos.” The correspondents usually worked alone, and Teddy did not have a colleague to ask for help—except for me. He started for the door. I hesitated. Teddy had never asked me to help him with a story before. “Come on!”

  I gestured to his clothing. “You can’t go like that.”

  He looked down blankly. “Oh, right. Meet you there, then.”

  Twenty minutes later I stood uneasily outside the massive Foreign Office, waiting for one of the guards to decide I did not belong and ask me to leave. Teddy soon arrived in a freshly pressed jacket and polished Oxfords, the aroma of steam and sandalwood soap rising from his collar. As I followed him through the stale marble corridor, I was reminded of the day Mr. Steeves had brought me along to the meeting at State, where I had run into Charlie. “What is it you want me to do?”