September 2, 2016
Heather would never forget her afternoon at Buckingham Palace with Miriam and Daniel. They passed through something like twenty state rooms on their tour, each one bigger and richer and grander than the last. They took their time because Miriam, though steady on her feet, didn’t walk very fast. She was also full of interesting anecdotes about the times she and Walter had been invited to dinners there, and of course the occasion twenty-five years earlier when she had been made a dame.
“Do you remember what the queen said to you?” Heather asked excitedly.
“Would you believe I do not? I was terribly nervous, so it all went by in a blur. I do remember how very blue her eyes were, and also how very enormous the diamonds were in her brooch. One of them was as big as an egg yolk.”
They were in the White Drawing Room when Miriam turned to her with a mischievous smile.
“So? What do you think?”
“Is it wrong to think it’s a bit much? I mean, everything is really beautiful, but it’s all so overwhelming.”
“I do not disagree. But this is not meant to be a home. At least, not this part of the palace. This is the queen’s place of business, I suppose you could say. I imagine their private homes—Balmoral, for instance—are much less formal.”
“The sort of places where a corgi wouldn’t get in trouble for jumping on the furniture?”
“Precisely.”
Before long they had arrived at the beginning of the Fashioning a Reign exhibition, and though Heather was keen to go straight to the queen’s wedding gown, she didn’t feel comfortable in rushing Miriam along. By the time they reached the ballroom, where the wedding and coronation gowns were on display, as well as the most spectacular of the queen’s many formal gowns, Heather’s heart was racing in anticipation.
Of course there were a ton of people just planted in front of the glass case that held the wedding gown and train, and despite the barrage of death glares Heather aimed at their backs, they took their sweet time in moving on. When a space finally did open up, Daniel caught Heather’s eye. Together they moved forward and installed themselves directly in front of the display case, leaving ample room between them for Miriam.
Heather was surprised, now that she was able to see the gown, to find that it had been arranged on a slanted backdrop, the folds of its skirts propped up by invisible supports. The train, too, had been laid flat, with the nearest part of it only inches away from the edge of the case.
“Did you and Nan do all of that?” she asked.
“Oh, no. We were responsible for the bodice and sleeves, but for the embroidery of the skirt panels there were four of us, and the train itself had six or eight embroiderers. Perhaps more—my memory is not as clear as it ought to be. What do you think of it all?”
“I think it’s amazing. I’m a little overwhelmed, to be honest.” The gown was so close that she could make out even the smallest details, many of them already familiar from her careful study of Nan’s embroidered samples. “Which is your favorite part?” she asked Miriam.
“That is a very good question, and one I have not been asked before. I suppose it would be the heather.”
“Like Scottish heather?”
“Yes. It was Ann’s idea. Two small sprigs of white heather, and no one apart from us, Mr. Hartnell, and Miss Duley knew about them. If you count up from the bottom center of the train, they are just between the fourth and fifth of the central roses. Can you see them? Yes? She added them at the very last, and I doubt that anyone else in the world knows of their significance. I am not sure if even the queen herself knows they are there.”
They remained in the ballroom for close to another hour, spending long minutes in front of nearly every other gown, and by the time they came to the exit Heather was ready to fall over. Daniel seemed to feel the same way, for he directed them to the refreshment tent, found them a table with a terrific view of the lawn and gardens, and promised to return with something delicious. “I can’t promise they’ll have decent coffee, Mimi, but they might run to a glass of champagne.”
At this Miriam brightened visibly. “Wouldn’t that be a treat?”
Unfortunately, there was no champagne to be had, but Daniel did buy coffee for himself and Miriam, a tea for Heather, and plates of éclairs and scones for them to share.
“I can’t believe I’m sitting in the private gardens at Buckingham Palace having a cup of tea. And with you, Miriam. I’m not sure if Nan believed in heaven, but if she could see us now I bet she’d be happy.”
“I am certain of it, ma belle. Now, I must ask before I forget—are you coming to the reception on Sunday evening? I told Daniel that he must invite you.”
“I told you, Mimi—Heather is going home that morning.”
“Of course. Yes, you did tell me. Such a shame.”
“I could change my flight home,” Heather said impulsively, and only after the words were out did she decide she absolutely would change her flight. It would probably cost a bomb, and she would have the mother of all credit-card bills next month, but she was going to do it. “I’ll sort it out as soon as I get back to the hotel.”
They set off for a walk through the gardens as soon as Miriam had finished her coffee, and although Heather would have loved to visit the gift shop, it was clear the older woman was running out of steam. Daniel flagged down a taxi as soon as they passed through the exit gates, one of the big black ones that seemed to have room for about ten people inside, and they set off for Hampstead.
“Are you sure?” Daniel whispered in her ear after a few minutes had passed. “About your flight, I mean.”
“Of course I’m sure. I’ll probably only have to pay a change fee. It really isn’t a big deal.”
“If you say so. I will warn you that most of the guests at the reception will be members of my family. Cousins galore, and Mimi is insisting that everyone bring their children. It’ll be a miracle if the reception ends without some sort of alarm being triggered.”
They saw Miriam upstairs, and after ensuring she was comfortable in her chair, Daniel prepared her a coffee, steadfastly ignoring his grandmother’s insistence that he overlook the canister marked décaféiné.
“It’s decaf or nothing, Mimi,” he insisted. “Otherwise you’ll be up half the night.”
Heather approached Miriam so she might say good night and have her cheeks kissed, promising again that she would change her flight home, and then she retreated to the far side of the room so Daniel might speak to Miriam. He crouched beside her, and he let her fuss with his hair, smoothing it off his brow, and the look of love on his face was enough to crack Heather’s heart in two.
“Si t’as besoin de quoi que ce soit, tu dois m’appeler,” he said. “Tu connais mon numéro.” Call me if you need anything. You know my number.
“Oui, oui. Et maintenant, je veux que tu ailles dîner avec Heather. Ton intelligence va l’épater—” Yes, yes. Now go and take Heather to dinner. Wow her with your intelligence—
“Ça suffit, Mimi—” Enough, Mimi—
“—et ton charme.” —and your charm.
“Tu sais que je t’aime. Même si tu me gênes devant Heather.” You know I love you. Even though you’re embarrassing me in front of Heather.
Heather tried not to listen, but they weren’t lowering their voices, and short of walking out the door or putting her fingers in her ears there wasn’t much she could do. All the same, she had to tell him that she’d heard and understood. She waited until they were outside and walking up the hill to the Tube station, having agreed on the way downstairs that a cab would take forever that late in the afternoon.
“I guess I should tell you that my stereotypical Canadian-ness extends to speaking French. I’d have said something, but I didn’t want to intrude.”
“You weren’t intruding. I just hope you didn’t mind being talked about as if you weren’t there. Normally I’d have switched to English, but when she gets tired she prefers French.”
“I didn’t mind at all. And I do find you charming and intelligent. Just so you know.”
“I’ll file that away for future reference. Before we go much farther, though, where would you like to eat? Are you in the mood for anything in particular?”
“Anything at all.”
“I’ve a place in mind. Italian food, hasn’t changed in years, and not so very far from your hotel.”
It was hard to talk much on the Tube, which was packed tight for rush hour. Daniel took hold of her hand as he led them from one train to another, and in far less time than she’d have thought possible they were emerging into the early evening sunshine.
“Where are we?” she asked, blinking in the golden light.
“A bit south of Clerkenwell. That’s where we’ll find the Victory Café.”
Had Heather been on her own, she’d never have found the restaurant; and had she happened to walk by, she’d probably have dismissed it out of hand. The sign was faded and hard to read, the front window was steamy and disguised the interior, and the menu, posted outside, was handwritten and of a haiku-like simplicity. But the smells drifting out the door were divine.
Daniel ushered them inside and, waving a hello to someone at the back, led them to the only unoccupied table.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“It’s perfect. Much more my kind of place than one of those trendy fusion spots where everything is layered in little piles, and they put a dot of foam on the plate and insist it’s one of the vegetables.”
“I’d never dream of doing such a thing to you,” he said, grinning. “Now let’s decide on what we’re eating. I’m starving.”
It wasn’t a first date, of course it wasn’t, but it felt like one, and Heather’s nerves insisted on thrumming with excitement the whole time they were ordering their meal and deciding on a bottle of wine. The impulse only deepened when he rolled back his sleeves and she caught sight of the tattoo on his wrist.
“When I first saw it, I thought you’d written a note to yourself,” she said. “Your to-do list, maybe.”
“Milk, eggs, bread? There’s an idea.”
He flattened his arm upon the table so she could see the lines of script that ran parallel to the tendons of his inner wrist.
I would have poured my spirit without stint.
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
“It’s familiar, somehow . . .”
“Wilfred Owen. From one of his long poems. ‘Strange Meeting.’ You might have read it in school.”
“Is that your handwriting?”
He shook his head. “Owen’s. Taken from the manuscript of the poem. Mine is illegible.”
“I like it,” she said. “You don’t regret it, do you?”
“Not precisely. The sentiment is the same, but I doubt I’d choose to immortalize it in the same way today. I was nineteen when I got it, which is about the same age as many of my students.”
“What do they think of it?”
“When they notice they’re usually gobsmacked. At least one per term is brave enough to ask me about it.”
“What do you say?”
“I tell them my grandmother’s family had tattoos forced upon them before they were murdered at Auschwitz, but I was able to choose the one I wear. I tell them it reminds me why I teach the history of the world wars.”
“Did you always want to be a history professor?” she asked.
“Not at first. I wanted to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps. He was a journalist, a rather famous one, at least in this country, and I idolized him.”
“What changed your mind?”
“The summer I was eighteen, just before I went up to Oxford, he took me out to lunch, and at some point we began to talk about what I’d been studying and what interested me and so forth. The same conversation we’d been having for years, but that day it felt rather more serious. More momentous, I suppose. He told me that he’d read history as an undergraduate, and while he’d been very happy with the direction his professional life had taken, he did regret that he hadn’t become a historian. He felt it would have helped him to better understand the war he had lived through and written about. And then he died a few weeks later, and if there’d been room on my arms I’d have tattoos of every word he said that day.”
“But instead you picked the poetry.”
“I did. And I can’t say I regret it.”
“So you became a historian because of your grandfather.”
“Yes, but also because of Mimi and the murder of her family. My family. I’ve been studying and writing about the Holocaust in France for close to twenty years, and even if I keep on for another century I’ll still have questions to ask. I’ll still be searching for answers.”
“Isn’t it depressing?”
“At times, yes, but that’s true of a lot of jobs. And I only live with the shadow of what happened, whereas Mimi’s entire life has been marked by it. Scarred, if I’m honest. So I cannot bring myself to turn away.”
Their food arrived, and their talk turned to lighter, softer, easier things. Daniel’s students and the courses he was teaching. Heather’s little apartment, her cat, her friends. Places they’d been on vacation and dream destinations they aspired to visit. Nothing to make the food in her mouth grow tasteless, or the wine she swallowed turn to vinegar. Nothing to make her worry about what was to come when she went home to Toronto and what she would do with her life.
They cleared their plates and Daniel refilled their glasses, and the silence between them was comfortable, and for the first time in her life she didn’t mind that a man was staring at her, since she was doing exactly the same to him.
“You,” he said finally. “I can tell you’re a journalist because you keep asking me questions. But I want to know more about you.”
“I’m game. Ask away.”
“Did you always want to be a journalist?”
She shook her head. “Historian.”
“Really?” He was leaning across the table now, his plate pushed aside, his arms folded in front of him. His wrist and its compelling lines of script were so close to her hand.
“Really. It was my favorite subject in school, and university, too. But I didn’t want to teach, and my marks weren’t high enough for graduate school. So I did a postgraduate diploma in journalism. I found a job right away, and that was ten years ago, and in all that time I never really took a moment to stop and ask myself if I loved my work. Until a few weeks ago, that is.”
“What happened?”
“I was made redundant, and I probably should have jumped into a job search right away. That would have been the smart thing to do. But I felt like I had to come here first.”
“To find your nan. And now? What will you do when you return home?”
She was leaning forward, and their heads were all but touching. They were whispering to one another.
“I have no idea,” she admitted. “I hope that doesn’t sound pathetic.”
“Not at all.”
“I know I can keep the wolf from the door. I can pick up work as a copywriter, or I can go the public relations route. Except I can’t stand the idea of writing puff pieces that I don’t care about. I want to write stories that interest me. Stories that keep me up half the night because I can’t turn off my brain. Does that ever happen to you?”
“All the time.”
“I want that, too.”
“Then do it. Tell me, now—what would you write about if you could choose any topic at all? Don’t think—just say it.”
“I’d write about the gown. Nan and Miriam. What it was like to work at Hartnell and create a wedding dress for a princess. How it felt to make such beautiful things and never be acknowledged in any way. I remember thinking that after William and Kate’s wedding. Everyone was talking about her dress and the designer and I don’t think I saw a single article on the people who made it. How hard they must have worked on that dress, and how they couldn’t breathe a word to anyone, not even their best friends.”
“If I were a magazine editor I’d be interested.”
“It needs a hook, though. I wish I were brave enough to ask Miriam. No editor in the world would turn down an interview with her.”
“Why don’t you ask?” he suggested. As if it would be no big deal.
“You told me she hates to talk about herself. I don’t want to upset her.”
“It won’t. She avoids publicity because she tends to attract the attention of hatemongers, to use a polite term for an especially loathsome group of people. That’s why she has no email address or website, and that’s why everyone who knows her is so evasive.”
“Oh, God. I feel like an idiot for not thinking of that before.”
“If you hadn’t included your grandmother’s name in the message you left with my former student, I probably wouldn’t have emailed you back. God knows I get enough of that shit in my own in-box because of my own work. But compared to the vitriol that’s been aimed at Mimi over the years? It’s nothing.”
“I’m sure it’s awful.”
“I’m sorry. I’m ruining our dinner. Once I get started, though—”
“Talk about it as much as you like. I’m happy to listen.”
“Another time, maybe.”
“Sure. Maybe when you’re in New York? Miriam was telling me all about it.”
He looked down and began to fiddle with the stem of his wineglass. “I expect she made it sound as if they’ve decided to award me the inaugural Nobel Prize for history.”
“More or less. When do you leave?”
“In a fortnight.” His eyes caught hers, and she was surprised by how apprehensive he seemed. “Perhaps I might come up to Toronto for a visit? Or you could visit me there?”
“I would love that. I haven’t been to New York in years.”
“Good,” he said, and his accompanying grin made her heart do a little somersault. “But back to the subject at hand—your interviewing Mimi.”
“You make it sound so certain. You’re sure she won’t be upset?”
“I’m sure. I can’t guarantee she’ll agree to speak with you on the record, but she won’t be angry if you ask. That I can promise.”
They had zabaglione and strawberries for dessert, and then he walked her back to the hotel. A longish walk, he warned her, but she didn’t care. It meant more time in his company. As they were crossing Tottenham Court Road he took hold of her hand, correctly sensing that she was about to walk into traffic yet again, but even after they were safely across the street he held on, and they continued like that, hand in hand, block after block.
He came into the hotel lobby with her and waited as she fetched her key, and then, since Dermot was at the desk, she led Daniel down the hall and around the corner to the bottom of the stairs.
“Sorry,” she explained. “It’s just that I didn’t feel like saying good night in front of an audience.”
“I feel the same way,” he whispered, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. And then he kissed her, his mouth fitting just so against hers, and it made her wonder if there was anything that Daniel Friedman didn’t do well.
“I meant what I said earlier,” he said, his words a whisper across her brow. “I want you to come and see me in New York. Or you can invite me to Toronto. Either way, I want to continue this conversation.”
“So do I.”
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Sightseeing?” She hadn’t meant for it to come out as a question.
“Would you like to meet up in the afternoon? Let me show you around a little more?”
Heather nodded, not trusting her voice.
“Good. I’ll come by at two o’clock. Fais des beaux rêves.”