Chapter Twenty-Eight
London
Doris
One look at the front of Number Five Belgrave Square and Doris knew Honor wasn’t there.
It was a feeling, she thought, walking up the three steps and in under the portico to ring the bell, rather than anything visible.
Something about the vast facade that turned itself away from her.
And the door wasn’t opened immediately, as it should have been.
She felt, suddenly, the full exhaustion of her journey.
The hours by train, through Germany and then France, watching the countryside flicker past. The Night Ferry from Paris, leaving the gloomy Gare du Nord and depositing her at Victoria Station that morning at five minutes past nine.
Her face felt tight and dirty. Inside her gloves, her hands were sticky.
Behind her, the taxi driver was removing her luggage from the boot and lining it up on the pavement. She wondered should she tell him to wait. If Honor wasn’t here, perhaps she should go to a hotel.
The door opened. Robert, the footman, stood there, not Andrews. Definitely Honor wasn’t here.
‘Miss Coates.’
‘Robert.’ The taxi was already gone. Now she would have to call for another one. She sighed.
‘Madame said to expect you.’ Robert stood aside, ushering her in. ‘They are at Kelvedon, where Mrs Channon hopes you will join them, but meanwhile your usual room is ready for you.’
Dear Honor. Doris felt her eyes prickly with grateful tears. How tired she must be. She never cried.
‘May I bring you some breakfast?’ Robert continued. ‘I will have your luggage brought up immediately.’
‘Thank you, Robert.’
After breakfast and a bath, she decided not to sleep but to go for a walk.
She was impatient to see how the city had changed – if at all – in the year since she had last been here.
Would the old woman who sold packets of bread crusts to feed to the pigeons still be at the corner of Green Park?
The same display of marbled writing paper in the stationery shop?
But first a phonecall. She dialled the number from Chips’ library, looking around at the walls of green-and-gold leather-bound books.
Anyone else, she would assume they had never been read, but with Chips, one never quite knew.
‘I’ve arrived,’ she said into the receiver when the phone was answered.
‘We’ll see you for tea,’ came the response.
Outside, she let herself luxuriate in the relief of walking without thought for who walked behind her.
Striding out on streets that knew nothing of her and were content to be that way.
She walked about as she wished, never looking over her shoulder, stopping to chat – the old lady with the crusts was indeed there – when she chose to, without a thought beyond what amused her.
Later, back at Number Five, with the man she knew to expect and two others who introduced themselves as ‘Mr White’, ‘Mr Black’ – so that she knew these were not their real names – she poured tea for herself, brought by Robert, and whiskey for them.
‘When do you leave?’ Mr White asked her.
‘Tomorrow. I’ll take the train and then a taxi. I am expected.’
‘Very good.’ He lit a cigar and settled back in his armchair.
They talked openly then, even bluntly, of what Doris had seen in Berlin – was von Arent still close to Hitler?
No, Doris thought not, there was an edge to him, a striving petulance that hadn’t been there before.
And what of Hans Fritzsche? The coming man, if Doris wasn’t mistaken; close with Goebbels.
As they spoke – plainly and without allusion, their voices discreet but not whispers – she became aware that something inside her unknotted and unwound and relaxed, and how that was the first time she had realised the coiled tension was there at all.
As though, she thought, it were like the snake in Berlin Zoo that was so perfectly camouflaged among the leaves and branches of its cage that it was only when it moved you saw it.
‘If you can do anything with the ambassador, do,’ Mr Black said. ‘Anything that you can tell him that will incline him to push our cause with Roosevelt would be useful, but that’s the least important part of what you’re there for. It’s the prince you’re to concentrate on.’
‘What, exactly?’
‘What kind of man is he? Where do his sympathies really lie? Can he be trusted? Will he answer the purpose? That sort of thing.’
‘That sort of thing,’ Doris echoed, nodding. She didn’t say anything about Hannah, even though the girl was who she thought of always. She had wondered would she, but knew it would do no good even as she wondered.
Doris did what was asked of her because it was the best way to help the people she wanted to help.
People like her aunt and cousins, Hannah and her family.
And even though she knew that the men who gave her instruction, this Mr White and Mr Black, cared far less about these people than she did – they cared for big things: England’s safety, Europe’s stability, the dismantling of the Reich – all the same their intentions and hers meshed at times, overlapped in ways that might help the people she cared about.
She didn’t tell them that she cared for their plans only in as much as they assisted hers, and they didn’t tell her that her plans – her people – were unimportant, except incidentally, to them.
She supposed that no one told each other the full truth anymore. That was a luxury for more settled times.
‘Only telephone if you need to,’ Mr Black told her as they left. ‘Better to have as little contact as possible.’ She closed the library door after them, then opened the window to let out the smell of cigar smoke. Within half an hour there was nothing to show they had been there.