Claire took a breath. “Well, I’m in. They had me write and address a letter. Oh, it was innocuous enough—the weather and the horrible food and all, but there was code in it. Code about troops moving into Norway.”
“And, of course, you have a copy for me?”
“I memorized it and wrote it down as soon as I could after.” She pulled a piece of paper out of her handbag and slipped it under the grille. “Here it is.”
Murphy studied the paper intently. “Ah, I see it now. Good work. Devlin’ll be pleased.”
“Thank you,” Claire said. “They’re idiots, of course. Spoiled, pampered little Brits who think that glomming onto Fascism makes them more powerful. But after all …”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” they said in unison.
Murphy added, “Any friend of the Óglaigh na héireann is a friend indeed.”
Claire smiled. “I always love hearing that. It sounds so much better than IRA.”
“And we’ll need the Nazis’ help if we’re going to achieve our ultimate goal,” Murphy said. “The destruction of England.”
EIGHT
MAGGIE WALKED BACK up Regent Street, passing Oxford Street with all of the shops and the tall buildings with their uniform beaux arts façades, up to the less-fashionable Portland Place, just off Regent’s Park. But she couldn’t enjoy the scenery in the pearly morning light. She couldn’t get the word war out of her mind.
She went over it again. FDR and Mrs. Roosevelt were in the White House. The Golden Gate Bridge was finally finished. The syncopated sounds of Glenn Miller were playing on the wireless, Picasso’s cubism and Dalí’s surrealism were causing a sensation worldwide, and most of the girls she knew back in Boston had a crush on Errol Flynn. How did war figure into that scenario? It didn’t—and yet it was a reality. The reality. Any day now, the German Luftwaffe might turn its attentions from military to civilian targets. Meaning, of course, London.
Maggie tried to distract herself by noticing the contrast of the gray, almost monolithic buildings with their baroque architectural touches and the brilliant scarlet of the telephone booths and double-decker buses. She admired the easy elegance of the large black taxis and the colorful corner pubs. More than anything, though, she loved London’s layers upon layers of history—a rich background of poetry and plays, politics and palaces.
She remembered, with a prickle of shame, how originally she’d never even considered the possibility of England’s going to war. She was only dimly aware of Germany’s annexing Austria and then Sudetenland. Instead, she’d been thinking of herself, absolutely panicked about changing her carefully made plans for graduate school.
It had felt absolutely wrong to be in London when she’d arrived in the summer of ’37, instead of starting classes at M.I.T. It defied the very order of things, one of the reasons she was drawn to mathematics. “What is truth? What is beauty?” they were asked in English class—slippery, dangerous concepts. But in math, there was always an answer, and one could always be sure it was right. Truth was the correct answer, which could be proved. Beauty was in the elegance of the proof. As she worked through problem sets, numbers would arrange and rearrange themselves, unpacking their complexities, revealing their mysteries, until the final answer fell into place with the satisfying click of inevitability.
Math was elegant, logical, predictable—and preferable to the messy calculations of life. Through mathematics one could find harmony, stability, and order. And she desperately wanted that order. After all, her whole life had been forever changed when one car just happened to hit another on a random sunny afternoon, killing her parents instantly; it didn’t take a Freudian to understand why she so loved math.
As Maggie approached the house, she was struck by its faded grandeur. She tried to imagine her father and Aunt Edith walking home on this same street. She tried to imagine her grandmother—who she was, what her life was like. She had sudden pictures of Christmases in London, of long letters with British stamps, of stories of her father and mother—all that was lost when Aunt Edith made her decision to cut off contact with Grandmother Hope. Then the image came of her dying alone, and Maggie felt angry, angry with Aunt Edith for all she’d inadvertently denied her. Why had she? Maggie thought, and not for the first time.
She recognized that it must have been strange for Aunt Edith—overwhelming, even—to suddenly find herself sharing her cramped faculty housing with a small infant; yet somehow she managed. As Maggie grew older, they became genuinely fond of each other, perhaps not in a mother-daughter way but as two kindred spirits, captivated by the quiet pursuit of knowledge. Aunt Edith encouraged Maggie in her studies, saying that with a degree and a career she’d be “free.”