The Last Summer at Chelsea Beach (19 page)

He raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Let’s see how you do with this piece.” He passed me a paper and pencil. His fingers were long with flat nails that said he might have been an artist. They reminded me of my father’s. I tried to recall my mother’s hands, but found that I could not. The little things faded with time, no matter how hard I tried to hold on to them.

I scanned the article about the displacement of the residents of a village in north France, making notes in the margins. “Well?” I handed it back to him and he scanned my corrections. “What else?”

I hesitated, smelling the minty pomade in his hair as I leaned in to point. “It’s not just the grammar, see? It’s about the voice. You need to put the reader in the shoes of the people, the families and children. Make them care.” I was going beyond the copyedits, I knew, and into the substance of the piece. Overstepping my place. But he had asked and I needed this job. “There’s a reference here to this family Reimbaud—what about the children, how this affected them? How long have they lived there and where will they go? I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job, but you should talk to the writer.”

“You already are.”

“Oh!” I felt my cheeks go crimson. Without realizing it, I had been criticizing his work.

But he waved his hand, not seeming to take offense. “Not at all. You’ve found exactly what the piece was missing. I’ll take another shot at it and show it to you again.”

“Are there photographs?”

He nodded, then handed me an envelope. “I didn’t take these. They’re from a stringer.”

I studied the images, which were a bit stiff and generic, capturing the scene the way a child might have drawn it. “I’m afraid the photos are all wrong, too. They’ve focused on the line, but look at the mother holding her child back from the police.” I traced it with my finger. “I would have centered here.”

“You’re a photographer, too?”

The word seemed somehow too big. “Just for fun. I like taking pictures.”

“We have a darkroom here at the paper. You’re welcome to use it in the off hours, though supplies are scarce so you’d have to find your own.” Though he had not formally made me a job offer, it sounded then as though he wanted me to come to work.

“Does that mean I can keep copyediting?”

“Yes, you’ve got the job. Steeves would kill me if I sent you back. You’ll be working for me.” He pointed to a tiny desk in the corner of his office. “You can start tomorrow and sit there.” I had imagined myself sitting with the typists like I had been in Washington, not working in such close quarters with him.

“I did some translating for Mr. Steeves also,” I added. “Some French, but mostly Italian.”

“You’re from Trieste,” he said, surprising me. I noticed then the telegram that sat open on his desk. So Mr. Steeves had written after all. Why couldn’t White have just said so, instead of playing games and leaving me to dangle? My annoyance at him grew.

“Yes. My parents sent me to America as a child.”

“Are they still in Italy?”

I shifted uncomfortably at the question, too intrusive for someone I had only just met, and now my boss. “I don’t know. They disappeared over a year ago and there’s been no word.”

“And you’re a Jew.” His bluntness surprised me. There was anti-Semitism here like back home, I was sure. I hadn’t mentioned my religion at the
Post
in Washington—my Italian surname had made it easy to avoid the subject. Mr. Steeves must have known, though, and told him. Would it would keep me from getting the job? Maybe I should deny it.

“Does that matter?”

“Not at all. My mum is Jewish,” Teddy said. “But I keep it quiet.” I nodded. “I’m not a bigot. I’m just surprised you’d return to Europe.” I held my breath, again waiting for him to ask why I had left Washington. He could not possibly know that, too. “It’s brave of you, coming here. Brave or stupid—the jury’s out on that one.” I looked for the smile that did not come.

I shrugged. “It’s just London.”

He eyed me levelly. “You think the city is safe?”

I hadn’t thought about it before leaving. But after all I’d seen since arriving that morning, I knew that it was not. “As much as anywhere else,” I lied. Nowhere would ever feel safe to me.

“There’s no halfway in with this war, Adelia. Here you’re in the thick of it. I was supposed to go,” he added quickly. Though we had only just met, he seemed to need to explain why he was not off fighting. “With the army, I mean. But on the third day of basic training, I broke my shoulder trying to climb a wall. It was a bad fracture and never quite healed properly.” His shoulders slumped with resignation. “Right, well, we’ll give it a try,” he said, jumping abruptly back to the topic of my employment. Then he stood up and began pacing the floor. There was a restlessness to him, a constant moving and tapping of the feet, as though there was music playing, even when there wasn’t. “So our work here is out in the street,” he began. A loud explosion cut him off, rattling the windows. He grabbed me and pulled me down under his desk. The sound came again, raining bits of plaster on top of my feet, which stuck out beyond the desk, exposed. This was not the train rumble I’d felt earlier on the street; it shook my insides like nothing I had ever experienced.

“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.