Snow has laced the mullions, and in the quad below her window June can see Potiphar, the illicit tomcat who prowls House as if he owns it, mincing carefully through the dusting that has stuck to the tired winter grass. His feathery fawn tail lashes against the weather as he stops to sniff something—a tiny bit of red in the white—a poppy left fallen from Remembrance Day, perhaps. June brushes idly at her own poppy, still pinned to the woolen folds of her muffler where she’s hung it near the gas-flame hearth to dry.
The flower makes her think of Alec more than usual; November 11 has been a hard day for him as long as she’s known him, because of his father’s service, and more recently because of his own history. Immersed at Oxford and surrounded by students roughly the age Alec was when he went to the RAF, June can’t help wondering what he would have become, if the war had not come and scooped him out of university. He had been flying already at Cambridge, but she can imagine him easily out of uniform, a regular undergraduate in the jaunty pullover and cap of a Cambridge sportsman with a full cricket Blue. Perhaps he would have given up the RAF. Or perhaps the skies would have been his home for longer, under his own terms, as the cricket pitch had been.
Alec’s particular interruption, infinitely more than her own, feels oppressive sometimes, and grossly unfair. As if any of it is fair to anyone. She looks back out at the cat, who is now emerging from beneath the hedge like a small blue-eyed lion, a perfect example of a life well-lived on one’s own terms. June envies him a bit, although she knows his life is rougher around the edges than she would ever wish for herself. Too, Potiphar reminds her of Box, not least when he appears in the evening with a gift for her—a mouse, sometimes, or a vole. Just as well it’s winter, or who knows what he might bring in. Potiphar stalks the quad and corridors alike, keeping order according to his nature—no wonder the students and scouts of Somerville College have named him for the captain of Pharaoh’s palace guard.
She gives him one last glance, then sits again and turns her attention back to the spread of papers strewn carefully about the table before her. June has spent the Michaelmas term studying Hodge manifolds with an eye toward connecting Kodaira and Calabi. It seems possible, nearly, although a proof for the Calabi conjecture hovers just out of reach. She can almost see it, the unfolding of those elegant lines of Calabi’s theory, the way they underpin something greater. But a proof doesn’t happen at speed, not unless one is prodigious indeed, and she will have to be patient. Next week she will give a lecture on bilinear forms and the Kähler manifold to whichever of Somerville’s girls wish to attend. She expects the audience to be slight, at best. Still, though, it’s a luxury to have the time to follow the threads of the proof she hopes to find.
It’s six weeks to Christmas, hardly a month until her time at Somerville ends. She will be glad to get back to Edinburgh in time to spend the holidays with Penny and Alec, the quiet traditions they’ve built over time. Although: this year will be different—it’s only the second Christmas in hundreds of years that the day itself will be a public holiday, although nothing like Hogmanay, a week later.
In Fenbourne, when she was small, they had hung holly and bunting round the vicarage, hosted carolers with mulled wine and tiny cakes. And the bells . . . The bells of St Anne’s had rung out at midnight every Christmas Eve to call the faithful to the midnight service. June’s father had rung the bells until that last Christmas, not long before the lethal bombing. The bells at St. Anne’s had been a constant. Every year they had broken the silence of midnight in the Fens on Christmas Eve in a ceremonial refrain she had loved. But that last year in Fenbourne, with Alec missing and her parents dead, the bells had been nearly unbearable.
On Shakespeare Close, as at the vicarage, there will be holly and bunting, a tree and a mound of parcels waiting beneath it, and Mrs. Nesbit, as she has every year, will prepare a Sowans Nicht meal for the family on Christmas Eve. For a moment, June can almost smell the acrid smoke of a rowan branch burning, someone in the neighborhood trying to turn their luck for the better. She almost laughs, though ruefully: perhaps when she gets back she should ask Alec to burn one for them this year.
She has missed them, although the idea of leaving Oxford brings with it a considerable measure of regret. At Oxford she’s doing something she loves, with people she likes; she has basked in the respect she’s found in this temporary post at Somerville, and all in all it gives her the sense she was right to step away from her post at the University of Edinburgh, however temporarily. Still, she wishes she had handled all of it more smoothly with Alec—she had tried to explain, when he returned from Halifax, to help him see how she was drowning, how the need to change the world around her became overwhelming and urgent. June had felt as though she might lose herself, and perhaps it had been a mistake to say so to Alec, given how he’d looked at her and looked at his hands, as though suggesting that he had suffered losses she could not imagine. When she goes home, she will try to mend the rift she caused between them.
Her choice to leave Alec and Penny in Edinburgh, no matter how necessary Oxford and this time would be to her own survival, has hurt them, Alec perhaps especially. He has sent perfunctory letters, almost entirely narrating Penny’s activities and endeavors, leaving his own daily life out of it. On the very rare occasions she’s been able to phone them, he has been pleasant enough, but that distance is always there. She had hoped he would come to terms with this better, or sooner. That after all these weeks there would have been a letter that felt right. But no. And soon she will be back in Edinburgh, where she will have to face her choices head-on—and how is it possible to know you made the right decision and still feel the taste of the wrong in the back of your throat?
But no matter her ambivalence about her return to Edinburgh and her increasingly unsatisfying work there, her sojourn in Oxford has given her an anchor for her sense of self. Perhaps that will help her be a better member of her family. Still, it’s impossible to look at the proof she’s developing and not know how much she will miss this sort of work, the focus on research rather than teaching. It lacks the life-or-death urgency of codebreaking, but there is something about the way the language of algebra unfolds that lights her mind, and her heart, the same way.
If only it were possible to have a real post at Oxford. Sybil has hinted that her own spot may be coming open in the not-distant future—not something she can talk about just now, all very hush-hush—which has served to light a fire in June’s imagination. Perhaps Sybil is going back to codes or one of the new, postwar, semi-secret intelligence offices? There’s no way to know, given Sybil’s discretion, and the curiosity niggles at June. She is intrigued by the idea of filling Sybil’s post if it becomes available—it’s more teaching than research, more like Edinburgh than this visiting research fellow post at Oxford, but still a continuation of her time at Somerville. Which, despite the occasional sniff of cronyism she feels about her position here, she loves.
Too, it has been a boon to see Sybil nearly every day. She hadn’t realized how tired she was of the secrets, and how lonely she’d grown within them, until suddenly she no longer had to keep them. Even if the endless reach of the Official Secrets Act kept them from telling each other what they’d done in the years after Bletchley Park, before the end of the war, it was enough to be able to talk about the work they’d had in common, and the people they’d known. About the ghastly old manor and the geese and all the rest of it. After all the years of quiet, it’s been almost too easy to fall into the habit of that connection again. And tonight it will only strengthen, with drinks planned for the evening with Portia Wallace, whom June hasn’t seen in nearly two decades. But Sybil and Portia have met up the Friday after Remembrance Day every year since the war ended to toast those they lost to the enemy, and tonight June will join them.
The next time she looks up, Oxford is well into the gloaming. It’s after five, and June is going to be late if she doesn’t leave soon. Sybil’s terraced Victorian house isn’t far, just off the Banbury Road, but although it’s stopped snowing, neither the temperature nor the slick surfaces are going to make it an easier walk. She makes sure she’s got the key to her room and a few pound notes in case of an emergency, then heads out into the cold.
Until Oxford, it had been a long time since June had had much time to herself, and still, after just more than two months, she is not quite accustomed to the raw relief of that freedom. She has no one to leave a note for, nobody who will wait up for her, except Scroggs, the Somerville porter. Nobody interrupts her when she’s head down in working through a proof or consolidating her notes. Sometimes she looks up from her papers and wonders, just for a moment, how the house is so quiet—where everyone has gone.
But crossing the lamplit quad, sharing space with undergraduates racing back to their rooms and then the dining hall, brings June a sense of peace. Somewhere out there is Potiphar, making his way through the evening, and against the low, dark sky she can hear the jackdaws that roost in the college’s smokestacks and chimney flues. Her joy, still fresh on these Oxford evenings, is a startlement of sorts.
She steps out through the porter’s lodge, nodding to Scroggs, and turns onto the Woodstock Road, shuddering at the wind coming down from the north. Ever since Sybil’s invitation to join her and Portia this evening, June has been mildly fretful—she and Portia hadn’t had all that much in common when they’d known each other at Bletchley Park; Portia had been much more caught up in her fiancé and her eventual return to her wealthy Mayfair lifestyle. Sybil has kept June up to date, over the years, as Portia has been widowed and remarried, her family growing in a postwar life in London, as far from their exciting past as possible.
Not for the first time, June wishes she could talk to either of them about her fracture with Alec, but Sybil has stayed away from domestic life, and Portia is too much in it. Besides, Sybil has already listened patiently to June’s screed about Edinburgh and Mark Larimer, the asinine thorn in her side. It would have been galling enough to be Larimer’s also-ran, but to be left out of it entirely . . . Well. That had hurt, and so she had asked for and been granted a short sabbatical.
And such a good respite it has been, too. Walking through the cold, letting the rhythm of her footsteps push away the endless annoyance at Larimer and his acolytes, she feels as at home in Oxford as Potiphar, and smiles to herself at the comparison. He is very much Kipling’s Cat that walked by himself, and she thinks again of Box, and reading “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” to Penny.
When she reaches Sybil’s house, she climbs the stairs and rings the bell.
Sybil throws open the door a moment later with a cheery “Attwell!”
“Darling June,” Portia says, coming up behind Sybil. “It’s been an age!” She embraces June, kissing her cheek.
June returns the embrace, handing her coat and muffler to Sybil, and follows them into the drawing room. She hadn’t quite realized how much the chill had got to her and settles herself in a chair near the fireplace.
Portia takes a seat on the sofa, neatly crossing her legs. “Tell me everything,” she says eagerly. “All about Alec and your daughter. Mine are all boys, of course, but little girls are such a delight.”
“Well,” June says, already feeling clumsy and insufficient in the face of Portia’s interest, and knowing she needs to express an interest of her own. “We live in Edinburgh, the three of us, where I’ve been at the university for some time.”
“Yes of course, Scotland,” Portia says, her eyes wide, as if it’s as exotic as Rhodesia or the Solomon Islands. “And how old is your daughter? Five?”
“Penny will be seven in January,” June says. The idea jolts her—seven sounds so different from six, perhaps because seven is what she herself had been just before Alec’s arrival.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Portia says, shaking her head. “I would absolutely die if I were away from my children for months.”
Portia’s words sting, although she can’t have meant it quite like that. Sybil goes to the bar at the corner, laughing. “Yes, but you’re a regular Mrs. Miniver. June’s an intellectual.”
Portia waves her off. “Even so. I mean, honestly, my eldest is at Eton now, and when I think about sending the others up after him . . .” She continues, and June listens, trying to see the girl she used to know behind this urbane, matronly face. She can’t imagine what it must be like to have four sons, but Portia was always good at keeping track of a lot of moving pieces, whether puzzles or people. Perhaps this is just how she has translated her skills from Bletchley Park.
Mixing drinks at the bar in the corner, Sybil says, “Oh, don’t let me forget, Mrs. Tisdale left a quiche Lorraine, I’m meant to pop it in the Aga at seven. She promised even I couldn’t cock it up, but I expect we’ll see.”
Portia rolls her eyes. “Darling, you’ll manage. I’m here to help.”
“As if your cook is any more likely than Mrs. Tisdale to let you in the kitchen,” Sybil says with a chuckle. She comes over with their drinks and joins Portia on the sofa. “Gin sours.”
“Marvelous,” Portia says, sniffing her glass with a smile. She turns to June, her face growing more serious. “I’m awfully glad you could join us this year.”
“I am, too,” June says. To Sybil she adds, “Thank you so much for asking me.”
“Nonsense,” Sybil says. “Wouldn’t hear of missing an opportunity to reunite Attwell, de Cler, and Wallace, especially tonight.”
“And anyway, I’ve missed you,” Portia adds.
June nods, moved and a bit surprised by the depth of feeling the reunion has brought her, and is relieved when Sybil clears her throat solemnly and raises her glass.
“To our dead,” she says quietly. “Captain John Fitzwilliam, killed in Rangoon.”
They drink, and June bows her head. The sad, reverent look on Portia’s face . . . Is that what she would have felt like, decades later, if Alec had been lost? For a moment she misses him terribly, staggered by the relief that he is not among the dead. That he is home and alive.
Portia, her face still tight, says, “First Officer Sarah Crossley, sunk off Madagascar.”
June had known Sarah had been killed by a U-boat, but it is different, hearing it like this. As Portia and Sybil offer up other names, June sits quietly with them, realizing how lucky she’s been. She’s known people killed in the war, just as they have, but she hasn’t lost a husband or a close friend to the battlefield. She raises her glass for the sailor who’d been killed at Anderson, and again for Alec’s lost friends, Charlie and Smasher. For valiant Lucy Kent, who had survived the Zero that day at Anderson only to die of a fever on the ship home after the war.
When their glasses are empty, Sybil goes to make a second round, her hand a bit heavier with the gin this time. Speaking of their dead has made June want to speak of the living, so she asks after other people they had known at Bletchley Park, and as their reminiscing grows less somber, so does the mood. Portia and Sybil chatter about their mutual past, time swirling around and through the year that June was with them, too. She doesn’t know everything the others talk about, but she can’t quantify the relief she feels to be able to talk about any of it.
She’s pleased to be reunited with Portia, but watching the two of them together she feels a stirring of envy—they had had more time together during the war than June had had with anyone, and more time since, as well. She should have stayed closer herself to the women she knew at Bletchley Park and elsewhere. And she had, for a time, but it had begun to chafe when so many of her old friends had wanted to talk more about their dinner parties and children than anything else, and the rest had gone off to have adventures that had left June feeling isolated and out of sorts. But imagine the relief, if she had been able to make it work, if she saw some of them more often.
They’re a few drinks in when June reminds Sybil about the quiche, which leads to the three of them poring over the detailed instructions Sybil’s housekeeper had left. Once the quiche is warming, Sybil opens a bottle of chilled Veuve Clicquot and pours it into tiny crystal glasses etched with translucent snowdrops.
They’re back in the drawing room, waiting on the quiche, when Portia brings up the entertainments that some of their colleagues put on. June had never been clear whether the goal was purely to keep up morale or if in fact the mostly public school men had set out to create an environment more like their university days. When she brings this up, Portia suggests it’s a meaningless distinction.
“Either way,” she says, gesturing with her glass, “it kept us distracted and occupied, didn’t it? Greased the mental wheels, such as they were.”
“All those posh actresses,” Sybil says.
June laughs. For such an urgent, staid place, Bletchley Park had had a finely honed sense of whimsy and endless resources—official and otherwise—for recreation. “I remember you flirting with that Randall fellow in the chess club, Sybil.”
Sybil snorts. “He turned out to be rather dull, in the end.”
“Gosh,” Portia says, “I had forgotten all about him. Do you remember when the chess team came here, to Oxford? Might have been after your time, June. It was the most absurd thing.”
Nodding earnestly, Sybil leans in. “Beat Oxford’s chess club badly, and ever since the boys here have wondered how a tiny village like Bletchley could field a team like that.”
June stares at them. “No, you can’t possibly be serious. What about the OSA?”
“They came to Oxford as if they were from the village,” Portia insists. “Whole article about it in a chess magazine a few months later.”
“And didn’t they get what for,” Sybil says, her tone dreamy. “But they’d won, and not let on who they actually were.”
“Astonishing,” June says. Such foolhardy behavior from men she’d known best for their caution. But they’d all been caught up in it at Bletchley Park, hadn’t they? It had been a world of extremes, the old lines of British society starting to crumble in the service to something grander. What a life it had been.
Across the table, Sybil jumps to her feet. “God, please tell me I haven’t burned the quiche. Mrs. Tisdale will positively murder me.”
But she has not, and so the three of them cluster together at one end of the dining table. Time becomes fluid, the three of them staying up much too late, drinking and playing cards and talking about the past. When it comes time that June is meant to go back to Somerville, Sybil shushes her goodbyes and asks her to stay the night. June ponders the idea for a moment, but why not? Nothing is calling her back there, and it’s cozy by Sybil’s fire. By the time she falls asleep, tucked under a soft blanket on Sybil’s sofa, she feels almost as if all the years since Bletchley Park had never passed. As if they were still the same girls they’d been that spring with their picnics beside the lake.
It’s an afternoon in late November when a student June doesn’t know appears at her door, knocking thunderously, and tells her she has a phone call waiting in the porter’s lodge. June’s heart sinks—there is no way this is good news, not with the expense and effort required to make a trunk call with the new direct system. She follows the girl to the office, takes the phone.
“June,” Alec says, his voice scratchy. “It’s Ursa.”
“Oh, no,” June says, her heart sinking as Alec explains that Ursa has died in her sleep during a nap on the hearth that morning. “My God, Alec, I’m so sorry.”
He clears his throat. “It was her time, I suppose, and I’m glad she went easily, but it feels awful nonetheless. Penny is beside herself.”
June leans against the wall. Bad enough that she’s not present when Alec needs her, but being gone when Penny is going through something like this feels dreadful. She should be there to help them with their grief.
“I wish . . .” She trails off uncertainly. “She was such a grand dog.”
Alec makes a small sound, as if he’s trying to quash a flood of emotions. Through all the layers of distance she wants to comfort him. After a while she asks if he can put Penny on, and Alec asks her to wait, the phone clunking to the hall table. When he comes back, he sounds even worse. “I’m sorry,” he says raggedly. “She’s not up for it just now.” June closes her eyes against the sting of it. In the background, she hears the wracking sound of her daughter’s sobs, and her guilt expands like a spill of wine across a table.
When she hangs up the phone, June lets herself cry. Ursa had been such a good dog for so long, part of their family in ways June had not expected in the beginning. And as the afternoon stretches on after the call, and she can’t stop thinking about Alec and Penny sitting in the house in Edinburgh mourning their grand old dog, June feels worse. It was not her fault that she couldn’t be there to help him in the war; even in the worst of her guilty feelings, she knows that. But this time? This time the fault is hers, and whatever her absence has meant for them during this sorrowful time can be laid square at her feet. And, to her shame, there is part of her that understands that this will serve to bond Alec and Penny closer still, and in some way she envies them. But she had loved that dog too, ever since she’d first laid eyes upon the litter of tiny brown pups, and she’d been grateful to Ursa for everything she’d done to bring Alec back. When she thinks about how Shakespeare Close will be without Ursa, it’s almost impossible to comprehend. Ursa has never not been there.
She stares morosely out the window, hoping for the comforting appearance of Potiphar from beneath the bushes, but the world is quiet of cats. She can’t help but think of Alec’s unhappy, somewhat resigned response to her news last summer that she wanted to take a leave from the University of Edinburgh and accept this post, however temporary, in Oxford.
Edinburgh seems like another life, in many ways. But unless something happens with that hint Sybil floated weeks ago, June can’t stay here. Staying here would mean another wound to Alec and Penny as well, although there would be good schools for Penny, and places Alec might find work he likes as well as Livingstone & Gray. But wondering about how her life will be in the spring is too complicated—there are too many unknowns.
The rest of the month passes too quickly, and suddenly it’s December, and time for her to speak before the undergraduates. It’s funny, at Edinburgh she had never been nervous, lecturing. But here, wearing the black gown of a don, it’s different. She stands at the lectern and looks around the hall, conscious of all the bright young faces of girls who were only children during the war, and behind them, lounging in seats at the rear of the hall, Sybil and Floss. She’s known Floss was coming—they’ll have dinner after the lecture—but it’s been long enough since they’ve seen each other that he seems more out of place than she’s used to. And it’s jarring to see Floss and Sybil together; obviously they’ve known each other for years, but seeing them rubbing shoulders feels new. They’ve been in different strands of June’s world, however connected, and now the warp and weft have brought them together. She has never been more grateful for the peculiar song of algebraic varieties in which she can immerse herself.
After, a cluster of students approaches June. They’re bursting with questions about the Calabi conjecture, and June warms to their enthusiasm and confidence. One, to June’s bemusement, has brought with her a copy of June’s most recent article for the Journal of Algebraic Inequalities, and asks, shaking, if June can sign it.
When the girls disperse, Floss makes his way forward, Sybil at his side.
“Hullo, darling,” he says, smiling warmly. “Marvelous lecture, that. Love what you’re doing with cohomology and all that.”
“Thank you,” June says. “I’m awfully glad you were able to come up for it.”
“Wouldn’t have missed it,” he says.
“Brilliant talk,” Sybil says. “Wish I could stay and join you, but I’m already late for a prior engagement.”
“Another time, then, and thank you, Sybil,” June says. “This term . . . I’ve had a wonderful time. And I’ll see you Tuesday at the faculty luncheon, yes?”
“Quite,” Sybil says. “Perhaps they’ll break out the good sherry this time.” They laugh and say their goodbyes, and June walks with Floss to his car, waiting with its driver in the mews behind the building.
At dinner, she tells Floss about her term at Oxford. It’s gratifying to be able to share with him again, and to let herself warm to his careful listening. It feels right, sitting with him in the controlled chaos of a restaurant, their conversation cloaked by the low racket of people dining, the scent of his gigot of lamb rising between them. When she slows and asks him what he’s been up to, he talks about his work in Vienna, in terms more vague than June would like. She doesn’t need further reminding that her own tenure in the secret world Floss inhabits has run its course, that most of his life is stamped top secret, while hers is not. Still, he draws her in, the old city of Floss’s half stories coming together in a pointillist haze across the maps of Vienna that June carries in her head.
“What I really need,” he says after a while, pushing away his plate, “is someone who can go do actual work in mathematics and education at the British Council, our outreach group. Third secretary of education under the deputy minister of international outreach, or what have you.” He laughs. “Obviously I can neither confirm nor deny any stories you may have seen in the press or popular fiction about the clever lads and the messages they bring over from Prague and Budapest, but if they did exist, I would be on the lookout for someone to turn those messages, however imaginary and unconfirmed, into new messages to be sent back to Whitehall.”
June nods uncertainly, trying to ignore the frisson between her shoulders. There is no reason on Earth for him to be telling her this. Unless.
“Someone who won’t cock it up, or turn traitor, like that piker Burgess.”
“No,” June says, “I should think not.” If Floss is concerned about a new round of treachery on the scale of Guy Burgess and his circle, who had betrayed England for the Russians time and again, no wonder he’s talking about needing help. She folds her hands together, the nervous electricity still coursing through her, trying to sort through her questions to find the right one to ask first.
“Just between us,” Floss says, leaning close, “I’ve been eyeing Sybil for the post. Awfully keen, knows her codes . . . Fluent in German, even, but I expect you remember that from before.”
June nods, but she’s gone cold. Sybil had been one of the smart set at Bletchley Park, educated in Switzerland, vacations in Biarritz and Gstaad, fluent in German and French, which had made her invaluable to the translation work. But Floss can’t be telling her she’s effectively been replaced, can he?
As if he can read her thoughts, Floss says, “Ideally, of course it would be you. You’re bloody June Attwell.” He shrugs. “But you’ve made it clear over the years that your family must come first.”
June looks down at her plate, noting every detail of the crest in the silverware, the infinitesimal traces of sauce and parsley left from her fish. What he’s talking about, if she can get past this new wrinkle of Sybil, is a return to the meaningful work that had meant so much. Not to mention codes upon codes. Layers upon layers. She can almost see them laid out before her. She does not wish in the slightest to wound Sybil, but her own timer is running out, in more ways than she can count. She is almost through her term at Oxford, and in a few weeks she will go back to Edinburgh, where the chair will continue to take her work for granted. The idea of being passed over again is galling, to say the least. Sybil had suggested she might be leaving her post—is this what she’d meant?
God, the idea of building those messages, working for England again . . . It doesn’t matter that Sybil speaks German; June is nearly fluent as well, and in any case the codes will be in Russian, which June has a vague grounding in already. And it certainly isn’t harder than the Japanese characters and syntactic puzzles she had had to learn for the Y service. She thinks of Alec and Penny, tries to push away the knot of new guilt already budding in her stomach although she has said nothing, done nothing. There is nothing about this idea Alec will like, but she is already thinking ahead, as if this is a real possibility, starting to structure her argument about the opportunities for Penny, a fresh start for them all.
“Don’t count me out,” she says softly. Floss looks puzzled, and she continues. “I need to think about it, but . . . I’m not out of it.”
His face clears into a delighted grin. “You take the time you need.”
That night, lying awake in her rooms as the stars and moon shift across the firmament, June hears Potiphar meowing in the corridor. When she goes to let him in, he jumps up on the foot of her bed, washes himself, and gradually curls into a sleek tawny block against her hip. She lays her fingers against his shoulders, pets him gently. The future is terrifying still, but in a way she understands—there is a threshold before her, a liminal moment in which she could change her entire world. She can save herself, do her duty for Queen and Country. She doesn’t let herself think about the new layer of secrets or wonder what the cover might be for where she goes to work or what she does there. As exciting as this future seems, she is not quite ready yet to face those particular consequences, inevitable though she knows them to be.
She’s too restless to sleep, and sits up, trying not to disturb the cat. After a moment she lights the gas fire and flicks on a light, then sits down at the table with a sheet of paper and a pencil, going back to the old childhood tools she’d used to soothe herself, building lists and maps. Her father had bought her an immense atlas of the world, its pages wide and perfectly smooth, the whole world laid out before her. She had been six, perhaps, or seven. Before Alec. She had fallen into it then too, page after colorful page of the loops of road and rail, the legends full of symbols, the pink of Siam and the pale yellow of Argentina. Her mother had regarded the sprawling maps without much comfort, as if she’d wondered even then what such an interest might suggest in her young daughter. But decades later, concentrating on those images is the same balm for June it had always been.
Austria had been a pale blue, and Vienna had sat on a page of its own, a splash of city with the Danube winding across like a ribbon. Another ancient city, wrecked by bombs and the loss of generations of its men, and perhaps, suddenly, astonishingly, a new place in which she can make a difference.
By the time she’s ready to fall asleep, the cat curled quietly beside her, she wishes she had some kind of equation to help her find her answers—a map, as it were, for finding her way through the questions. Still and all, she feels a shivery silver hope somewhere deep inside her, and perhaps that is enough.