Lulu
December 1943
(London)
In the foyer of the Basil Hotel in Cadogan Gardens, atop the tea-colored wallpaper, a sign advises guests that blackout hours will be observed strictly. Another sign reminds us that enemy ears are listening. The wallpaper’s crowded with tiny orange flowers that seem to have started out life as pink, and they put me in mind of a story I once read about a woman who stares at the wallpaper in her room until she goes batty. Although that wallpaper was yellow, as I recall, so I may have some time to go.
I consult my watch. Three twenty-two.
Outside the windows, the air’s darkening fast. Some combination of coal smoke and December fog and the early hour at which the sun goes down at this latitude, as if the wallpaper and the signboards and the piles of rubble across the street aren’t enough to make you melancholy. I check the watch again—three twenty-three, impossible—and my gaze happens to catch that of the desk clerk. He’s examining me over the top of a rickety pair of reading glasses, because he hasn’t liked the look of me from the beginning. Why should he? A woman shows up at your London hotel in the middle of December, the middle of wartime, tanned skin, American accent, unmistakable scent of the foreign about her. She pays for her room in advance and carries only a small suitcase. Now she’s awaiting some no-good rendezvous, right in the middle of your dank, shabby, respectable foyer, and you ought to telephone the authorities, just to be on the safe side. In fact, you probably have telephoned the authorities.
The clerk’s gaze flicks to the window, and then to the clock above the mantel behind me. He steps away from the reception desk and goes to pull down the blackout shades, to close the heavy chintz curtains. His limbs are frail and stiff; his suit was tailored in maybe the previous century. When he moves, his white hair flies away from his skull, and I catch a whiff of cologne that reminds me of a barbershop. I consider whether I should rise and help him. I consider whether he’d kill me for it.
Well. Not kill me exactly, not the literal act of murder. It seems the killing of people has got inside my head somehow. War will do that. War will turn killing into a commonplace act, a thing men do to each other every day, every instant, for no particular reason except not to be killed yourself, so that you start to expect it everywhere, murder hangs darkly over you and around you like an atmosphere. The valley of the shadow of death, that’s war. Killing for no particular reason. At least in regular life, when somebody kills somebody else, he generally has a damned good reason, at least so far as the killer’s concerned. It’s personal, it’s singular. As I observe the feathery movement of the clerk’s hair in the draft, I wonder how much reason a fellow like that needed to kill someone. We all have our breaking points, you know.
A bell jingles. The front door opens. A blast of chill air whooshes inside, along with a pale woman in a worn coat and a brown fedora, almost like a man’s. She brushes the damp from her sleeves and looks around, spies the clerk, who’s just crossing the foyer on his way back to the desk.
“I beg your pardon, my good man,” she begins, in a brisk, quiet English voice, and the light from the lamp catches her hair, caught up in a blond knot just beneath the brim of her hat. She’s not wearing cosmetics, except maybe a touch of lipstick, and you might say she doesn’t need any. There’s something Nordic about her, something that doesn’t need ornament. Height and blondness, all those things my own Italian mother couldn’t give me, though she gave me plenty else. There’s also something familiar about her. I’ve seen that mouth before, haven’t I? Those straight, thick eyebrows soaring above a pair of blue eyes.
But no. Surely not. Surely I’m only imagining this, surely I’m only seeing a resemblance because I want to see one. After all, it’s impossible, isn’t it? Margaret Thorpe won’t receive my letter until this evening, when she arrives home from whatever government building she inhabits during working hours. So this woman can’t be her, cannot possibly be my husband’s sister, however much the sight of those eyebrows sets my heart stuttering. Anyway, her head’s now turned toward the clerk, and from this angle she looks nothing like Thorpe, not at all. Unless—
The bell jingles again, dragging my attention back to the entryway. Another draft follows, and a man shambles past the door in a damp overcoat of navy blue, a hat glittering with mist. His face is pockmarked, the only notable thing about him. He casts a slow, bland expression around the room, and it seems to me that he takes in every detail, every flock on the wallpaper and spot on the upholstery, until he arrives, quite by accident, on me.
The woman’s still addressing the clerk. No notice of us at all. I climb to my feet. “Mr. B—?”
He steps forward and holds out his hand. “You must be Mrs. Thorpe,” he says warmly, and he takes my fingers between his two palms, as if we are father and daughter, meeting for tea after a short absence.
Instead of remaining inside the Basil Hotel foyer (in which the enemy ears might or might not be listening, but the desk clerk certainly is) we head out into the gloom. I tend to step briskly as a matter of habit, but Mr. B— (I’m afraid I can’t reveal his real name) shuffles along at an awkward gait, and it’s a chore to keep my limbs in check. I tuck my hands inside my pockets and drum my fingers against my thighs. I feel as if he should speak first. He’s the professional, after all.
“Well, Mrs. Thorpe,” he says at last. “I must congratulate you on your resolve. To have made your way to London in wartime, to have approached my office with such an extraordinary request—why, it’s the most astonishing thing I’ve seen in some time.”
“I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind? Of course not. If there’s one thing we admire in this country, it’s dash. Dash and pluck, Mrs. Thorpe, which you appear to possess in abundance. How long had you two been married?”
“Since July.”
“This past July?”
“Yes. The seventh.”
“Ah. Just before he was captured, then. How dreadful.”
“It was months before I had any word at all. At first, I thought he’d been called out on another of his—whatever you call them—”
“Operations?”
“Yes, operations. But when he didn’t return . . .”
We pause to cross the street. I’ve allowed him to choose the route; I mean he’s the one who lives here, after all, the one who understands not just the map of London but the habits of the place. A couple of bicycles approach, one after the other, and while we wait for them to pass, Mr. B— speaks again.
“Mind you, it was quite against the rules.”
“What? What’s against the rules?”
Mr. B— stares not at my face, but along a line that passes right above my head, down the street to the approaching bicycles. “Marrying,” he says blandly.
The bicycles pass. We cross the street to enter a foggy square of red brick and white trim. Several of the houses are missing, simply not there, like teeth pulled from a jaw. Mr. B— leads me to the gardens in the middle, where we choose a wooden bench and sit about a foot apart, so that our arms and legs aren’t in any danger of touching, God forbid. The button at the wrist of my left-hand glove has come undone. I attempt to refasten it, but my fingers are too stiff.