Paul had put on a tie and carried his story in a slim folder. He cast his eyes over Hannah, still dressed in a cardigan and a pair of his old tweed trousers.
“Don’t you think you should change, dear? These people, you know.”
“That’s exactly how they talk about us,” Hannah said with a laugh. She knew Paul meant a skirt, and a skirt meant a girdle. Hannah’s stomach and hips were still spongy from her last pregnancy, and she hadn’t yet decided if she cared. She presented herself smartly for business, but she was determined to be comfortable on a Sunday. “Anyway, it’s just the square.”
She saw the flicker across his face and changed her mind.
“Well, now that I think of it, why scandalize people if we don’t have to?”
Her gray-checked hiking skirt would do for a cool afternoon. It was a touch too short for the trends, but Paul’s smile was all she cared about.
The garden was full of neighboring families who thought it a good idea to brave the nippy air, bringing hoops and hobbyhorses and whatever else might encourage children to run mad outdoors, sparing the furniture another day. Hannah saw Rhoda was at the helm of a platoon poised to attack rival pirates.
“I don’t think pirates use horses much,” Paul observed, watching their daughter gallop around on her red-and-white hobbyhorse.
“Failure of imagination on their parts, if you ask me,” Hannah said. She could work anywhere, and she read Paul’s story—survivors of the Blitz in the East End remembering their neighbors as new houses were finally built—and listened to the children go wild with equal delight. The sun wasn’t warm but it was pleasant, and the birdsong, combined with the shouts of the children and murmurs among the adults, was relaxing. This was the world everyone had fought so hard to preserve during the war, and here it was, carrying on. Hannah glanced around at every father on every bench. Each, perhaps, thinking how lucky he was. She hoped they were happy. They deserved it.
She turned over a page, her mind now wandering to her own week ahead. There was casting to approve for an original play. Set designs to go over for the next episode of the police drama. Option meetings, accounts, script revisions, and time found for all the problems in different quarters that popped up more regularly than crabgrass. It wasn’t much different from working for a newspaper, really, and in its way, each day provided the same little zing of shocked delight she’d felt the first time she held her children in her arms.
But the story, the television series that would bear her name as executive producer and be a hit, that still felt like a rainbow she was chasing. They would fight about it tomorrow, she and Sidney—or rather, have a free exchange of thoughts—and this was always something to look forward to. Sidney was a clever, shrewd man, an excellent associate producer in the office and program producer on a set. Every day Hannah walked into the upstairs suite on Cadogan Square that was home to Sapphire Films, she thought how grateful she was, for Sidney, for Sapphire, for Paul, for the new life she’d been able to seize and the endless possibilities it offered. Liberal journalists she’d worked with in America had been summarily fired, and here she was, happy and thriving. She knew just how lucky she was.
She knew, too, that it was foolhardy to compromise that luck. But she couldn’t help herself.
CHAPTER THREE
* * *
Phoebe swayed, all her insides blown out of her, leaving her perfect-posture exterior. It was a joke, it had to be. Or Mr. Kelvin must mean to say he was taking her off At Your Service and hiring her for a better show. She was one of Hank’s handpicked writers. She could not be fired.
She looked to Hank for sense. His face was puce. She could see him struggling to speak without the sort of language that would get him fired as well. Except that she couldn’t be fired, so he might as well comment on this rotten joke with all the tools at his disposal.
“Mr. Kelvin, you’re kidding me,” he sputtered.
You tell ’em, Hank!
“Phoebe’s my writer. You swore I had total freedom over my writers.”
Mr. Kelvin’s avuncular face snapped closed. “And you swore you wouldn’t hire any Reds.”
He wasn’t loud, yet the word shot around the vast room, a pinball hitting every target with a piercing ring before it slipped between the levers and disappeared.
Reds. Reds were Communists, supposedly in league with the Soviets. Anyone called Red in entertainment was put on the blacklist—that list of people not allowed to work in the industry because they might be a “pinko traitor,” irrespective of truth or proof. It was the end of a career, the end of everything. And this man was suggesting she was one of those.
She shook her head wildly, a dog trying to rid its ears of fleas.
“I don’t understand,” she said in a squeaky voice that sounded nothing like her own. “I don’t understand.”
She seized Hank’s arm, certain he was the one sane person in the room. The doubt in his eyes made her recoil.
“Phoebe,” he began, and she could feel his mind working, wanting to ask the question carefully. “This is . . . just a misunderstanding. Isn’t it?”
“Of course it is! I’m not even political. I’d forget to vote if people didn’t remind me when it’s Election Day.”
“Listen, girlie,” Mr. Kelvin interjected. “You don’t look like much of a rabble-rouser to me, and I believe Hank wouldn’t have hired you if you were, but he obviously has a soft spot for you and didn’t do all he could to make sure you were okay. He’ll do better from now on, won’t he?”
His eyes twinkled as he gazed at Hank, but his intent was perfectly clear, and Hank paled. Mr. Kelvin turned back to Phoebe, and his tone was almost kind.
“I’ve got men to answer to and the show’s got the sponsors. Rules are rules. We can’t have any named Reds working here.”
Each sentence crashed over Phoebe like Dorothy’s house on the Wicked Witch of the East. She knew how this went—as apolitical as she was, the stories were hard to miss. A few distant acquaintances had ended up on the blacklist. But it was something that happened to other people, something that, until this moment, seemed as remote from her as Easter Island.
A named Red. My name! On a list! That’s just not possible. How . . . who? Her stomach lurched. There were any number of ways a person got blacklisted, she knew that well enough. They might have supported the freedom fighters in the Spanish Civil War, they might have signed a petition supporting European refugees, they might have expressed any sort of left-leaning opinion. Even people who touted the virtues of the New Deal were suspect. But most people on the blacklist got there because someone gave up their name. The idea that someone who knew her—a colleague, maybe even a friend—had spoken her name, out loud, to someone who added it to a list made the bile rise in her throat. It doesn’t make sense, though! I’m no Communist, everyone knows that. Heck, old Dolores Goldstein actually was one, registered and everything . . .