Pantheon (45 page)

And now the pain in his heart returned, as he made the journey back to New York and from there to Greenwich, Connecticut, just as Dorothy had urged him to do last night. She had told him then that he had to go that very minute, that it could be his only chance.

I don’t know how much longer they’ll be there.

And yet he had not gone to them. He had put his family second. Florence had been right all those months – or was it weeks – ago, when she had condemned him for being ready to sacrifice his own two-year-old child, exposing him to bombing and invasion, out of his own misguided sense of duty.
You made your sacrifice, James. You don’t need to do any more.
And yet he had done it again.

If they were gone, he would not forgive himself. He would have condemned himself to a life of misery and loneliness. The glory of Harrison’s little encomium to him would be all he had to keep him warm at night. And it would not be enough.

At long last, the train pulled into Greenwich station. It was late, Harry’s ‘orangey time of day’. James walked over to the two cabs waiting for passengers coming off the New York train. Now that he was here, he felt his stomach knot at the finality that was looming. Up until this moment, he could always look forward, to the future possibility that he would see Florence and Harry again. But soon there would be certainty, a definite answer to the question of whether or not they were there. The idea of it terrified him.

He approached the first cab, the driver resting a tanned arm on the wound-down window.

‘Hope Farm, please.’

The man looked bemused. ‘Where?’

‘I’m looking for Hope Farm. I’m told it’s just outside Greenwich.’

‘OK, I know it. Get in.’

As James settled into the back seat, the driver eyed him in his rear-view mirror. ‘You a professor too, then?’

‘Sorry, I don’t think I understand.’

‘You did say Hope Farm, didn’t you? That’s the place that belongs to the Yale guy, right – you know, the Dean?’

James felt his insides dissolve, a physical sensation akin to nausea but somehow deeper, as if in the very base of his guts.

Each second passed like an hour. Had Florence and Harry been McAndrew’s prisoners, held on this farm since the day the Oxford mothers had been despatched from the Divinity School to their new foster homes? That, surely, was why their names had been expunged from the record, so that no one would know that the Dean had taken two of those Oxford refugees for himself.

Then suddenly, with horrible force, he remembered something. How could he have missed it? The garden at the Dean’s residence in New Haven. In the middle of the lawn, there had been a single child’s swing – on its own, surrounded by none of the other paraphernalia of childhood. Yet what had McAndrew said?
I don’t have kids myself, but if I did …

That lonely swing, freshly added to the garden, had been put there
for Harry.

The truth is, he had suspected this somewhere. The worm of this thought had formed in the darkest places of his mind, but he had not dared drag it into daylight. Now a more sickening thought took its place. What if they were not his prisoners? What if Florence had
chosen
to live in that house on St Ronan Street, then chosen to come here? Perhaps she had only escaped to the countryside once she had learned that James was in New Haven looking for her. Was that it? Had his wife fallen for Preston McAndrew, for his suave intelligence, his maturity, his body still intact, unbroken by war?

His skin was crawling, as if he were covered with insects; his nervous system seemed to be waging war on itself. He felt the familiar lava welling up inside him, a seething river of molten rage rising higher and higher. It had no clear target, but was ready to burst, drowning both McAndrew and his faithless, adulterous wife – she who after less than a month away had begun sleeping with another man, she who had been ready to give her body to the very man who was bent on destroying all she had once held dear …

He began pounding the side of the car door with his fist, only stopping when the driver braked suddenly and threatened to shove him out and make him walk.

That caught him. His right hand gripped his left wrist. He had to calm himself, he had to quell that fury. Reason, he told himself, reason. He did not know the truth; he needed to find out what had happened. The James Zennor Florence had left had been a slave to his rage; he could not be that man now. He could not be that man any more.

Finally, the car slowed. They were on a narrow lane, where a break in the hedge indicated a path leading to a house. James paid the driver and stared for a second, taking two long, deep breaths. He was bracing himself for a terror that surpassed anything war had thrown at him. What if the fear that had tortured him just now was about to be realized? What if there was something worse? What if they were not there?

He feared his legs might collapse beneath him as he took first one step and then another. In front of him was a beautiful farmhouse, the white clapboard glowing in the dipping evening sunshine. It was flanked on all sides by apple and pear trees, scenting the air with a sticky fragrance. It was, James understood, just the kind of place Florence loved.

Girding himself, he knocked on the door and waited. Silence at first and then the sound of footsteps on wooden floorboards, a woman’s. He knew instinctively it was not Florence: too heavy, too slow. The door opened to reveal a black woman wearing a maid’s uniform.

James said his name, though all that emerged was a croak. At that moment, he wondered if he would ever have the strength to speak again.

And then he heard the sound of wheels turning on the wooden floor, toy wheels, small and rattling. He looked behind the maid and saw it inch into view, emerging from a side corridor, a wooden truck pushed along by an infant hand. And then a face – the round face of a little boy, the hair the colour of English chestnuts, the eyes wide and deep.

‘Harry?’

The boy looked up, his brow furrowed for a second in confusion.

‘Harry, it’s Daddy!’

The two moved towards each other at such speed they nearly collided. James took his son in his arms, lifting him and enfolding him in a single motion, closing his eyes as he felt Harry’s hair tickling his skin, savouring the smell of him, the warmth of his solid little body. And when he felt a dampness on his cheeks, he held the boy apart from him so that he could stop the child’s tears. Only then did he realize that it was he, not his son, who was crying.

He kept his eyes closed, his head bent over Harry’s. How long he stood like this, he did not know. Then, as if in a dream, he heard someone say his name.

Just one word, but it flooded through him. Raising his head, he opened his eyes to see her there, in the centre of the hallway, as tall and proud as he had remembered her. Her skin was browner, her eyes older, but it was her.

Florence.

She looked as if a bomb had gone off, her face stunned and frozen. James moved towards her, with Harry in his arms. ‘Florence,’ he said. ‘I’m here.’

Florence did not come to him, but hesitated. She moved slowly, as if she were approaching a dangerous animal. James wondered if it was the way he looked, if the beating on the train, along with the pain of the last month, had turned him into an object of terror to his wife. She glanced to her side, ‘You can go home now, Ethel,’ she told the maid.

The woman collected her things, passed him, mumbling a goodbye – and still Florence stood there, watching him warily.

With Harry in the crook of his arm, James stepped forward and slid his free arm around her. Her body was stiff, uncertain. Still, he drank in long draughts of the smell of her, the scent taking him back in an instant to Norham Gardens, to the college gardens, to Madrid, to Barcelona, to every moment they had ever known together. He could feel them both, Harry and Florence, alive and in his arms.

And then, what seemed an eternity later, he felt her tremble, her body quaking quietly and gently. Her head buried in his chest, she was sobbing. Florence, who never cried. He moved to stroke her hair – but she sprung back from him.

‘When I heard the motor car outside, I thought it was him. I thought he had come back. I thought you were him.’ Her eyes were bright with fear. ‘But then you knocked. And why would he knock on the door of his own house?’

‘Florence. It’s all right.’ Suddenly he noticed a suitcase in the hall, the same one his wife had taken three weeks ago.

She saw him looking at it. ‘We were about to get away. Ethel was going to help me.’

‘You wanted to escape?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you weren’t here because—’ James put Harry down. ‘You weren’t here because you were … with him?’

She recoiled. ‘No, of course not. James, I could never—’

‘Because it’s taken me so long to find you, Florence. It’s been so hard to find you.’

‘But you never wrote to me. Not one letter. All the other mothers—’

‘He had my letters blocked. I wrote to you every day, sometimes three times a day. I wrote to you on the ship coming over here. He blocked them, Florence.’

Now she took Harry from him. ‘I thought you had decided to forget us, that you didn’t forgive me for leaving you like that. What else was I to think?’

James stepped forward, getting closer to his wife. ‘Why are you in this house, Florence? Why are you in his house?’

She blinked, a gesture of disbelief that her husband was actually there in front of her, that they were in the same room, hearing each other’s voices, no longer thousands of miles apart. ‘The day they allocated us to foster families, they said we would be rooming with the Dean’s elderly mother, at the official residence.’

‘On St Ronan Street?’

‘How do you …’ She regarded him curiously, then shook her head, dismissing the question, for now, at least. ‘But the mother never appeared.’

‘So you lived there with him?’

‘It wasn’t like that. The residence is enormous. There were staff living there. We had our own quarters; he respected our privacy. He bought a swing for Harry. As a temporary solution, I thought it would be all right.’

‘And when did you move here? Don’t tell me: I bet it was Monday.’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact. It was. How do—?’

‘Because that’s when I turned up at McAndrew’s office looking for you. Surely you suspected something, Florence?’

‘It was nearly August. Yale was almost deserted. It didn’t seem odd that the Dean would want to move to his summer-house. And I thought it would be good for Harry to be in the countryside.’

‘And were you together, the three of you? Like a little family?’

Florence looked at James, then lowered the child. ‘Harry, why don’t you show Snowy his favourite cherry tree?’ The boy turned to give his father a smile, then skipped off towards the garden.

She spoke quietly. ‘Preston started … taking an interest. Asking me about my research, having Ethel prepare dinner for us after Harry was in bed.’

‘Dinner? What, just the two of you?’

‘Yes. When he heard that I’d had no letters from you—’

‘“Heard”! I like that. He bloody
arranged
—’

‘I didn’t know that then. He came over so sympathetic. He started telling me that if he had a wife as “intelligent” and “radiant” as me, he would never let her out of his grasp.’

‘The bastard …’

‘Just listen. He told me he had never married because he had never found the right mate. That was the word he kept using.
Mate
.’

James knew where this was heading. His hatred of this man was growing harder and colder.

Florence went on. ‘Then something strange happened. He asked if I ever drank. I told him that I had the occasional glass of wine. He told me to stop. He said alcohol was disastrous, that it ruined the eggs of a woman and the sperm of a man.’

James suddenly had an image of the Dean in his study, pouring those full glasses of warming, amber whisky. He had been happy enough to drink then … Except now James could see it: McAndrew regularly raising the glass to his lips, but never actually drinking from it. He was keeping himself in impeccable condition, just waiting for the right ‘mate’.

Florence was still speaking. ‘Another evening, we were talking about science. He began speculating over what kind of children we – he and I – would have together. Hypothetically, of course. “We’re both so accomplished academically,” he kept saying. “We’re both in flawless physical health. I believe our offspring would be perfect.”’

The fury James felt on hearing those words was like a flood of lava he had to fight to keep dammed. But he knew he must. He needed Florence to see that he was in control of himself now, that he was his own master.

And yet precisely this had been his subterranean suspicion, the very thing James had imagined. That the Dean’s belief in eugenics did not apply only to the human race in general, but to himself in particular. He wanted to create a world of supermen, most certainly, but he also yearned to breed a family of physical and intellectual giants in his own image, a latter-day pantheon of the gods: mythical men and women who would be blessed with perfection of body and mind. And he, Preston McAndrew, along with Florence – the Oxford scholar gifted enough to have been an Olympic champion – would be their founding father and mother.

‘And what did you say?’

‘I was frightened, James. Really frightened.’

‘Did he touch you?’

‘He tried, once. But I never let him anywhere near me. Nowhere near.’

James closed his eyes briefly as he digested what he had just heard. It made sense to him that McAndrew would not force himself on a woman who was reluctant. His goal was not immediate pleasure. He had clearly waited so long for a ‘mate’ he deemed worthy of his seed, he would be nothing if not patient. Of course, once he had found as rare a genetic specimen as Florence, he would have wanted her to produce several children for him. And that, he would have known, required consent. McAndrew was playing the long game, waiting for the beautiful Englishwoman to accept at long last that her useless, crippled husband was dead or at least that he was never coming back.