He was, she thought, a quiet man; a little shy with people, but not lacking in self-confidence. His smiles were swift but genuine – they always touched his eyes. And she thought that she’d detected, underneath the calm reserve, a rather wicked sense of humour that would make him fun to be around.
He noticed people; watched them, not suspiciously, but – so it seemed to her, at least – because he found them interesting. And it said a lot about him that he’d spoken to the waiter in the same way that he spoke to everybody else, with natural politeness and respect. He might be English, with an educated accent, but he wasn’t, to her great relief, a snob.
She hadn’t been told much about him. He lived in New York, she knew that. He had friends there, whom she would be meeting. He was an art dealer. That seemed as good a place to start as any, Georgie thought, and so she asked what sort of art he bought and sold.
His upward glance was friendly. ‘Paintings, mostly. Some sculpture. I have a particular interest in Spanish art.’
While they ate, between the comings and the goings of the waiter, Deacon talked about the shop he’d had in Rio de Janeiro, describing some of his more colourful customers in such detail she felt she would know them on sight if they ever passed by her. He didn’t say much about the dengue fever that had driven him out of Brazil, but she had the impression he must have been very ill indeed to have left a place he obviously loved so much. His second shop, in New York City, didn’t seem to hold the same appeal. ‘It’s still my business, but I hired a chap to manage it last spring,’ he said, ‘when I went up to Canada, and he’s done such a brilliant job that I intend to let him go on doing it.’
So he had been up at the Training Camp for several months, she thought. She didn’t ask him what he had been doing there, because she knew he couldn’t tell her that. She did know, though, from her time on the thirty-sixth floor, that South America was of special interest to BSC, so she reasoned his stay at The Farm might have somehow been linked to his time in Brazil.
The waiter came past and a family of four took the table beside them. They didn’t discuss much of anything after that; only concentrated on the meal, which was excellent.
It was snowing when they left the dining car. The heavy flakes turned instantly to water on the windows of the lurching narrow corridors as Deacon, with a hand at Georgie’s elbow, led the way towards the first-class sleeping coach. Georgie hadn’t given much thought to the implications of their having a private compartment before, but it occurred to her that, while they’d been at dinner, the compartment would have been made up for night-time, and the berths pulled down to sleep on, and the thought of that arrangement made her even more uncomfortable than she had been before.
There was no real alternative, she knew. Her job was to convince others that she was Deacon’s wife, and she’d never do that if she went to pieces every time they had to share a room.
Another couple pressed past in the corridor as Deacon stopped outside the door of their compartment. Stepping close to shield her, he reached down to put the key into her hand, and in a voice that wanted to be overheard, he said, ‘I’m not quite ready to turn in yet, darling. Think I’ll go and have a brandy. Do you mind?’
She said she didn’t, and the other couple passed by, out of hearing.
‘Right, then,’ Deacon said, and smiled. ‘Goodnight, Amelia.’
Her real name, unfamiliar, sounded pleasant in his accent. It was, after all, the name by which she had been introduced to him, but Georgie had a feeling that he wouldn’t use her nickname even if she tried correcting him. She didn’t mind. It helped to keep things formal, like her using just his surname.
So she said, ‘Goodnight,’ and watched him walk away along the corridor, then turning, fit the key into the lock of the compartment and went in to bed.
She woke to the feeling that something was not as it should be.
Deacon’s berth was empty. She hadn’t heard him come in, but she knew from the state of his blankets he’d been there at some point. The hands of the clock at her bedside read quarter to seven. They should be getting near New York now, she thought, wrapping herself in her robe as she got up to look out the window.
It was then, when her feet touched the floor, that she knew what was different. The train had stopped moving.
Outside, the snow had settled in high drifts around the tracks. The wind sheared thin curls from the tops of the drifts and whirled them up and round and past the windows with a hollow-sounding whistle. Georgie hugged her arms against the creeping early morning cold and hurried to dress before Deacon came back.
She needn’t have worried. It was another half an hour before he turned up. And he knocked.
‘Good morning,’ he said, as she opened the compartment door. He came in with a tray, and cups. ‘I’ve managed to scrounge us some tea.’
There was nothing else. The restaurant car, he told her, had been taken off at Buffalo, so there wouldn’t be a breakfast till they’d reached New York, and that, the way things were going, might not be for several hours yet.
She didn’t know how he had managed the tea, but she was grateful he had. Simply holding the cup in her hands made her warm. There was nowhere to sit but the edge of her berth, so she sat there, while Deacon remained by the door.
‘I could try to find someone to make up the compartment,’ he suggested.
‘Don’t be silly. Have a seat,’ she told him, shifting to make room. ‘We are supposed to be married, after all.’
Her father always said a good night’s sleep made any situation better, and in fact this morning Georgie felt more positive about her new assignment, more committed to get on with it and do the best job possible. She looked up as he sat beside her. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Why do you need a wife?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Well, you’ve lived in New York. You have friends there. Why do you need me?’
He hesitated, and she said, ‘If you can’t tell me, that’s all right. It’s only that I wondered what my purpose was.’
Another moment passed while he considered. ‘If I tell you it’s important that my friends believe I’m married, would that be enough?’
It would have to be, she knew. She told him, ‘Yes. But if we want to be convincing there are things I should know about you, and your family, and things you should know about me. In case somebody asks.’
He conceded the point. ‘All right. Where would you like to begin?’
‘With your family.’
She didn’t take notes. Georgie had a good memory, and Deacon, again, had that gift of description that let her see everyone clearly: His father, the schoolmaster, getting on now, but still stern in his habits; his mother, a gentle soul, pottering round in her garden; his sister, who had married young and aged too quickly, carrying too much upon her shoulders. ‘It can’t be easy for her, raising the boy on her own. Not that Jamie’s a difficult lad,’ he said. ‘Always a nice little boy, from what I remember, and I gather from her letters that he’s grown into a nice young man. Nearly twelve, he’d be. I likely wouldn’t know him. And I don’t expect he’d much want to know me.’ He gave a tight, small smile. ‘Understandable, really. His father behaved like a hero, while I’ve lived a comfortable life over here. I’m not even in uniform.’
He said that last lightly enough, but Georgie thought she heard a harder undertone, and, curious herself, she asked, ‘Why aren’t you?’
‘What?’
‘In uniform.’
‘The easy answer is I didn’t have to be, and anyway, I value my own skin too much to want to go and get shot at.’
Georgie studied him. ‘I don’t believe that.’
‘Oh? Why not?’
She didn’t know why not. ‘Because I don’t, that’s all.’
‘Well then,’ he said, with another small smile, ‘you’ve a higher opinion of me than most of my family. But what about your family, now? What are they
like?’
He’d turned the tables on purpose, she thought, but she willingly filled in her share of the blanks. ‘Well, my father’s a newspaperman. That’s how Mother and he met – she worked as a typist, before they got married.’ Her parents were well matched, in spite of their differences. ‘Dad likes to travel, keep busy, while Mother would rather stay home. But they do have a few things in common. They both like to read, and go fly-fishing…’
‘Fly-fishing?’ Both his eyebrows rose at that.
‘It’s a family obsession. I’m not very good at it,’ Georgie confessed. ‘I don’t have enough patience. My brothers are better.’
‘You have more than one brother?’
‘Yes,’ she said, first, and then, ‘No. Well, I did…my brother Mike died this past summer, in Sicily.’
‘Oh. I am sorry.’
She looked away. Drank her tea. ‘Yes, well. That happens in wartime, doesn’t it? He was always the leader, Mike. Always the one that we followed. It’s a little like losing the star that you steer by, you know, losing him. My parents feel it, too, I know. They haven’t been the same. And Ronnie – that’s my other brother – he’ll be taking it the hardest of any of us. They were inseparable, growing up, Ronnie and Kenneth and Mike. People called them the Three Musketeers.’
‘Who is Kenneth?’
She hadn’t intended to talk about Ken. It wasn’t a part of her life Deacon needed to know about, really, to keep up their married façade. So she said, ‘Just a boy from the neighbourhood. One of my brothers’ best friends.’ And then, turning the tables herself, she said, ‘Speaking of which, you should probably tell me a bit about your friends – the ones I might meet in New York.’
The tea was gone. He pulled a cigarette case from his pocket. ‘Do you smoke?’
It was comfortable being with Deacon like this, in the train, with the snow piled high round the car and the buffeting wind at the window glass making her feel as though they were cut off from the rest of the world for a time. She took a cigarette and settled back.
They sat and talked and smoked until the train began to move again, an hour later. To Georgie’s great relief, another restaurant car was sent to join their train at Albany, so she was able to have breakfast after all. She didn’t function well without a proper breakfast.
Deacon, she noticed, ate lightly. He liked honey on his toast instead of jam. He drank his coffee black and sweet. With tea, he’d added milk. These things, and others, she made note of in her memory. It was a lot, she thought, like studying for school examinations – feeling always that she should know more; that she was unprepared.
The feeling lingered as the train began to slow, on its final approach into Grand Central Station. She looked out the window. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, low, to herself, ‘here goes nothing.’
He had an apartment on 73rd Street – the Upper West Side, near the Park.
For such a fashionable address it was a strangely plain apartment, quiet in greys and greens, with a small but modern kitchen, gleaming chrome. It looked too clean to have been shut up all the time he’d been away. There was no dust, and the bathroom smelt strongly of soap and shampoo.
As if reading her mind, he said, ‘I had a friend watching the place for me, while I was gone.’ And then, with a glance round, he added, ‘She’s a much better housekeeper than I am, I’m afraid. You probably won’t see it looking this tidy, again.’
A woman friend, thought Georgie, and it struck her that, for all she’d been so focused on the inconvenience this assignment might be causing her, she’d never once stopped to consider what it might be costing Deacon.
Her own boyfriend, if he was even alive, was an ocean away, unaware of the role she was playing, and at any rate she only had to make believe for several days – two weeks, they’d told her, at the most – and then she’d have her life back, whereas Deacon had to move among his friends now as a married man, and, after her departure, as a man who had been married. There was no going back, for him. And if he’d had a girlfriend…
‘You can have the bedroom,’ Deacon offered. ‘I’ll clear you some space in the wardrobe.’ He would have gone on but the phone in the living room rang, interrupting. ‘Excuse me,’ he said.
Georgie gave him his privacy, sauntering back through the narrow front hall for a look at the paintings that hung there. She didn’t know much about art, only whether she liked it or not. These she liked. They were clean-lined and vibrant, of jazz singers, so full of life that, just standing in front of them, Georgie could conjure the pounding piano, the smoke of the nightclub…
A knock at the door broke the mood.
Georgie turned from the paintings, not sure what to do. She could hear Deacon still in the living room, talking, which meant he either hadn’t heard the door or had assumed that she would answer it. She was supposed to be his wife, and there could be no problem with his wife, she reasoned, opening the door to their apartment.
The problem lay in whom she might be opening the door to.
It might be nobody important, just a telegram delivery boy, or somebody like that. But then again, it might be one of Deacon’s closest friends, the first test of her acting out the part that she’d been given. It might even be the woman who’d been living here, at Deacon’s invitation, come to give him back her key.
Georgie took a steady breath and, shoulders squared, reached out to take a firm hold of the doorknob.
The man was young, a little older than herself, like Deacon; very tall and loosely jointed, with a quick, engaging smile. ‘Hello,’ he said. He was American. ‘You must be Andrew’s wife.’
It came quite naturally, in spite of all her worry, as she offered him her hand. ‘Amelia Deacon, yes.’
‘I’m Jim,’ he introduced himself, and, holding up a paper bag, announced, ‘I’ve brought you both some lunch.’
That was the beginning of a pattern that continued through their whole time in New York – each day, at lunchtime, Jim would arrive with a bag full of sandwiches, fresh from the drugstore on the corner, and Georgie would make coffee, and the three of them would eat together in the little kitchen.
She liked Jim. She never learnt his last name; never knew exactly who he was, or who he worked for. Being an American, he likely wouldn’t be with BSC. The FBI, perhaps, or maybe even OSS. He wasn’t one of Deacon’s crowd – she knew that much, at least, because the first day he had come to the apartment it had been obvious, to her, the two men hadn’t met before.
They talked of small things over lunch; then afterwards, the men retired to the living room while Georgie took a book into her bedroom, at the far end of the hall, and closed the door.
She couldn’t hear what they were saying. Didn’t want to hear. She stayed there for an hour or more, till Deacon came and knocked to let her know the coast was clear, and then the two of them would go out on their own somewhere.
He proved to be good company. She liked to walk beside him on the winter-barren paths of Central Park, or on the Boulevard, and look at all the grand expensive homes, and trade opinions of the ones they’d like to live in. Once they wandered clear across the park and came out somewhere on the Upper East Side, and he walked her past his gallery – an elegantly fronted place with large, old-fashioned windows – but he didn’t take her in. ‘It’s still my workplace,’ Deacon said, ‘and I refuse to go to work when on my honeymoon.’ They went other places – up the Chrysler Building, to enjoy the stunning view across Manhattan, and to the Museum of Modern Art for a new exhibition of works owned by oil tycoon Ivan Reynolds. She found it interesting, at the museum, to see Deacon more in his element – animated, even – as he tried to show her what he thought was wonderful, or not, about the paintings. But still, she liked their walks in Central Park the best.
Evenings they went out for dinner, often to the houses of his friends. He seemed to have no shortage of them, and the ones she’d met appeared quite pleased to have him back in New York City. She was meeting them in ones and twos –
a couple here, another couple there, a lone man stopping by their table at a restaurant – and so she found it not too hard to play her role convincingly, as long as she kept most of her attention on the meal and kept her mouth shut unless spoken to. It was Deacon who bore the brunt of these encounters…all the questions, and the agreed-upon explanations, how they’d met, and how long they’d been married, and why no one had heard from him in months.
He must have found it all exhausting, Georgie thought, and yet he never seemed to be as tired as she was at the evening’s end, when they came back to the apartment, said goodnight, and took their places in the bedroom and the living room respectively.
The pattern changed a little, on the ninth day. After lunch she went out shopping by herself. They had a cocktail party to attend that night, and she’d been told to buy a dress – a nice dress, not too plain and not too flashy. Something elegant. She found it in the window of the second shop she went to. It fit her as though she had been the model for the dressmaker. A black dress, with a close-fitting bodice, cut low, its sweetheart neckline squared with metal clips, and on the shoulders, epaulettes of glittering jet beads all hanging down to form a fringe. She bought it on the spot.
As she rustled through the door of the apartment, with the dress bag on her arm, it surprised her to hear Jim’s voice from the living room. She hadn’t thought he’d still be there. ‘It could be any day now,’ he was saying, ‘so you’ll have to be prepared. It all depends on when the Clipper leaves. There may not be much warning – they’ll just send me to come get you.’
‘And what happens to Amelia?’
A pause, as though he hadn’t thought of that; then, ‘I’ll take care of her, don’t worry.’
This was followed by a second pause, and Georgie took advantage of the fact to shut the door behind her, loud enough for them to hear, and call out from the hall to let them know that she was back. She had never liked listening at keyholes. ‘You usually hear things you don’t want to hear,’ so her father had told her a long time ago, and her father, as always, was right.