“Those men, at the FBI, in Congress, they all extol the American family,” Phoebe said at last. It made Joan laugh. A bitter laugh, but a laugh.
“Yes, and the home, and good, hard work,” she added. “What a terrific joke.”
Now she allowed Phoebe to take her hand.
“We have each other,” Joan said, meaning Charlie and the boys. “And everyone here is our family now. Don’t think we don’t value that.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Phoebe. “I swear.”
Joan still wouldn’t meet her eye.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
* * *
Sidney bounced into Hannah’s office, rubbing his hands.
“Spring has sprung!” he cried. “Haven’t I just gotten off the phone with a fine lad at the Spectator, of all the things, and whom do they wish to interview but your own fine self! Marvelous way to trick us into buying copies.”
“Those devils!” Hannah laughed, but shared Sidney’s enthusiasm. The Spectator was an important magazine. Its politics were too conservative for her or Sidney’s taste, but it was known for witty essays and meaty discussions of culture and literature. If they wanted to interview her, it meant they considered Robin Hood to be of real cultural significance. And her to be respectable. “Who else do they want to interview?”
“Just you, boss!” Sidney bounced harder.
Hannah was surprised. Magazines usually liked to interview stars.
“Why me?” she asked.
“Same reason Sight and Sound wanted an exclusive with you,” Sidney said, surprised in turn. “You’re a bit of a wonder. American, a woman, creator of the most popular show on telly and that’s mostly for boys. You are a star, my dear!”
Hannah scoffed, but she couldn’t help feeling pleased. Sight and Sound, after all, was a magazine for the industry. The Spectator would capture far more readers. She really was becoming somebody.
Which could be why she was being followed.
* * *
• • •
Hannah came home early to tell Paul the news. He was far more cheerful these days, having sold an idea to Harper’s Magazine about performers at the edges of London’s nightclub scene. Neither she nor Paul were so petty as to mention that this had been one of Hannah’s off-the-cuff suggestions. It was useful, having good news. It was an excuse for a glass or two of champagne before dinner, which could ease the way into mentioning the man who had tagged after her and Rhoda. Paul would be upset, of course, but he would also have something helpful to say. He liked getting outraged—it made him feel young.
“The Spectator? Wants to interview you?” Paul studied her to be sure she wasn’t joking.
“It’s the novelty of it all,” Hannah said. “I’m American and a woman and yet making a success here. Perhaps I’m a cautionary tale!”
“I won’t be surprised if that’s how they frame it,” Paul said, in the tones of the wise old journalist who Knows How These Things Are. Hannah didn’t remind him that she’d been a journalist too.
“Oh well, most of our audience are Beano readers anyway,” she said airily.
“Sure, it might offer a free packet of Jelly Babies,” Paul agreed. “Anyway, good work, honey. And I hate to skip out on you like this, but I’ve got to conduct my own interview with these sad sacks. I’m buying the drinks, obviously. Probably dinner too. I’ll be late, don’t wait up.” He kissed her on the forehead and left.
Hannah glanced at the clock. Not quite four. Gemma had taken Julie to pick up Rhoda at school and then go shopping for supper things. Here was Hannah, home early to have a drink with her husband, and there he was, off for drinks with someone else. She was glad for him to be busy and productive. She knew it made him feel important. She just wished she could rearrange time.
The children’s bedroom was clean—Gemma deserved a raise—and Hannah moved around it with the same respectful quiet she might a medieval cathedral. Without them in it, it felt like a place where time stopped, waiting for real life to begin again. She ran a hand over the stuffed bookshelves, the overflowing toy chest. On the little craft table was a cartoon of Rhoda as Robin Hood, saving a man from the noose. She’d written in her laborious printing: Rhoda loves Daddy!
Hannah pressed her hand to her mouth, bursting with love for her family. Usually, she would ask Rhoda what she wanted to share and how, but she decided Paul had to see this as soon as he came home tonight. On the way to their bedroom, she changed course. Paul would go to his office first.
The mess in Paul’s office was comfortingly familiar. Hannah straightened a pile of papers covered with red and blue corrections and notes, and set the cartoon down on top of them. She hadn’t been in this room in a while. It got the best light in the flat. Had he noticed that when they moved in, or had she? It didn’t matter. He had claimed it, expressed his desire, and he had already agreed to upend their lives. She would never have denied him this, even though it would have made a lovely playroom.
The room was dusty—he didn’t trust anyone else to clean, but did little himself. Hannah should be tending to that. She looked around at the piles of papers and books on the shelves, facing all different directions. Dog-eared, or scribbled in the margins. Paul was no great respecter of things. Hannah hoped the girls wouldn’t inherit this trait.
There was one small blank patch on the windowsill, a space covered in dust but not detritus. Hannah wrote, Love you, Sloppy with her finger. She grinned, feeling adolescent and illicit.
A flicker of blue and red caught her eye. She knelt to look under the shabby footstool, sagging with the weight of magazines, and found Rhoda’s kazoo. She blew into it—the bzzrt! that blared from it echoed in a sort of rustle, as though the books were offended by the noise. Paul certainly had been. Hannah suspected he had confiscated the kazoo during one of Rhoda’s rare permitted visits to the sanctum. She scanned the shelves, looking for where it must have been laid before it dropped. A box filled with matchbooks seemed the likely spot. She pulled out a few matchbooks so she could hide the kazoo—time without listening to a kazoo was good time, indeed—and started to replace the matchbooks when she noticed the painting on one. It was for an establishment called Elysium Gardens, and if the illustration was anything to go by, it had nothing to do with Greek mythology. Paul hadn’t mentioned that this was the sort of nightclub included in his story. Hannah laughed. How many men would give how many eyeteeth to insist that watching women dance in various states of undress was all part of their work?
Well, there’s no harm in looking, she thought as she idly opened the matchbook. As she expected, the matches inside were illustrated with painted women, who wore little more than beckoning smiles. What Hannah hadn’t expected to see was the name Doris written in a woman’s loopy handwriting, with a phone number underneath. She could just be an interview subject, telling Paul how to contact her for a long meeting before a show. Innocent, aboveboard, completely professional, and Hannah had no business snooping anyway.
But her own journalist senses tingled with a near radioactivity. Whatever Paul felt, about her, about the children, about their lives together, she couldn’t say and wouldn’t try. But Doris was more than a source, or a story, and it wasn’t just the little heart that she used to dot the i that gave her away. She was someone knitted into a private corner of Paul’s life, a place Hannah wasn’t meant to venture.
She replaced all the matchbooks. She crossed to the note she’d written in the dust and wiped it off with her handkerchief. He wouldn’t notice it was clean any more than he’d noticed the dust.
In their bedroom, she studied herself in the mirror. As a young woman, she’d been called attractive. “Pretty” was the wrong word—she’d been far too pugnacious for that, and it showed even in her resting face. What was she now? She hadn’t bothered to think about it for a long time. She supposed that, with makeup and a cheerful expression, she might be considere
d “handsome.” That was the word for women who had achieved a sort of stateliness, which might itself be a polite word for having grown plump but being able to dress well enough to turn it to some advantage. Her hair was faded but her good haircut and shampoo kept it looking nice enough. Her skin was paler and drier than she remembered, but it really wasn’t bad at all. Her eyes, she was pleased to note, still sparkled and snapped.
She turned away from her eyes and considered what to do. What was the best course for a woman on discovering her husband might be wandering? Some would say to do nothing, that this was what men were and it was to be expected. Some would suggest suing for divorce, taking him for every last farthing. Maid Marian might suggest arranging an accident. Simpler times.
Hannah stalked out of the bedroom, snatched her coat, and went out. Gemma and the girls wouldn’t be back for half an hour. She didn’t want to stay in their home, festering, letting her shock and rage and hurt leak from her pores and seep into every corner, where the girls might find it.
She walked with her arms wrapped around herself, hands digging into her elbows. She was vaguely aware of the pain and liked it. The afternoon was drizzly and she liked that too. The chill stung her eyes, air-drying the tears she didn’t want to shed in public, but couldn’t allow anywhere else either. A woman didn’t just need a room of her own for work; she needed it for all the emotions she couldn’t afford to let anyone see.
She came to a park far enough away from her square that she was in no danger of being seen by any of her neighbors. She sat in the middle of a bench to discourage anyone from joining her and scrunched down into her coat.
Another time, Hannah would have enjoyed observing how many people lingered around a park in such weather. Frazzled nannies, desperately hoping to wear children out enough so that they’d sleep through the night. Teenage couples, seizing a moment of pretending to be sophisticated adults swept up in a romance before returning to their parents’ homes. And men. Two elderly men played chess, their only concession to the weather a large umbrella that covered the chessboard, rather than themselves. It was their day to play and they were going to do so and that was that. They had probably played through the Blitz too. Those were the sort of men who made Britain what it was.
These others, though, the younger men, Hannah wasn’t sure about them. Some were smoking, bored expressions on their faces, no doubt killing time until they couldn’t avoid going home. Hannah despised them. Even if home meant a snappish, weary wife, and squalling children, the wife might be less snappish and the children less squally if the man spent more time there. Other men might have been looking for company, and Hannah hoped for the sake of her rage they were unmarried. Possibly they were trying to settle their troubled souls, just like her. One or two looked sad, lost. She hoped that wasn’t the look on her own face. If so, the man with his hat tilted like Bogart’s, gazing at her through the corner of what looked to be a very handsome eye, was being most inappropriate. Those few dangerous years, when she was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, she would have been thrilled to be looked at by someone like him. Now she saw the way his gaze slid from her and lingered instead on the prettiest of the nannies, wrapping up her charges and packing the smallest into a pram. A man of leisure, who came just to look. Nothing unusual in that. It was very likely all the men looking and lingering meant no more harm than an overfed cat lolling before the locked henhouse. Nevertheless, at the moment she would have been very pleased to break their noses, one after the other.
By the time she returned home, with windblown hair and a nose pink with cold, she was weary and thirsty, and still had no idea what she wanted to say to Paul, if anything. But she was able to sit down to supper with the girls and laugh when they expected her to. For now, it would have to be enough.
* * *
• • •
Over the next few days, Hannah forced herself to decide she was imagining things.
Doris was one of the featured characters in Paul’s story, and it was exactly his style to tell the simple truth of the life of a woman society dismissed as disreputable. Assuming anything else must be the effect of reading scripts every day. Hannah was immersed in drama. Of course she would leap to the most dramatic conclusion when faced with something so inherently dramatic in her actual life.
“Are you well, boss?” Sidney asked. “You seem a wee down in the mouth.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” she said. “Just the news from America—more prosecutions, more former radicals deciding to name names and protect themselves and go on to bigger successes. It’s discouraging.”
“Hardly ‘news’ anymore now, is it?”
Hannah flared up. “Maybe not, but the day I stop feeling something about it is the day I shrug it off as ‘normal,’ and it’s not, it can’t be, it mustn’t ever be.”
“Didn’t mean to vex you,” Sidney said, looking wounded. Hannah so rarely showed temper, certainly not at her staff. “So long as you’re all right to do the interview with your fellow from the Spectator today.”
“Yes, of course, looking forward to it,” Hannah said automatically. She knew she ought to apologize for snapping, but wasn’t in the mood. The blacklist and Communist witch hunt weren’t the cause of today’s temper, but they always lurked somewhere. It was the witch-hunting that had sent her family abroad. And Paul into the arms of a broad? No, no, don’t think about it. Not here, not now. The day any of them shrugged over the stories of the American government persecuting its citizens in this way was the day they might as well say it was right. Any number of Americans agreed with it, but any number of Germans had once agreed that Germany should persecute Jewish people. “Oh, but Communists are different,” came the argument. “It’s a dangerous political movement. They’re aligned with Soviets, they’re determined to quash democracy.” But the Nazis had said the Jews wanted to rule the world. Facts, evidence, reason—none of that mattered. Hannah stabbed her pen into the blotter. She had to stay vigilant.
“We’ll do the interview in the outer office,” Hannah announced.
“Why not in your office?” Sidney was surprised.
“I don’t want journalists in there.” She didn’t elaborate, and Sidney asked nothing further. A good journalist had a way of seeing things in a space you didn’t realize were visible. Everything that had happened since Robin Hood began—Hedda Hopper, Phoebe’s threatening letter, being followed—none of it was a coincidence. Her own name was safe because she’d been prescient and lucky, but who knew if that could change? The less anyone saw of her private space, the better.
The journalist from the Spectator had a round face, round glasses, and shy smile. He looked like he could be an adolescent fan playing a ruse, but Hannah, ever the watchful journalist herself, knew from some sleuthing that he’d gone to Queen Mary’s Grammar School and Cambridge University, interned at the Express, and had come up reviewing theater. They spent a very happy twenty minutes discussing the intelligence of the scripts and the way some episodes seemed to include pleas for social justice and warnings about a world without it. Hannah was almost relaxed when he flipped to a fresh sheet in his pad.
“I’m given to understand you are not only married, but have children,” he said, smiling brightly. “Two little girls?”
“That’s right,” Hannah said, her scalp tingling.
“Awfully unusual, isn’t it, a wife with two small children working such a monumental job? What does your husband say?”
“If you like, I can arrange for you to interview him directly,” Hannah offered in a generous, helpful tone, grinning so it looked like a joke. She couldn’t decide if she was more outraged or disappointed by this man’s presumption. She would deputize Sidney to view a draft of the article before it was printed and make sure it didn’t paint her as some monster who neglected her family.
“Oh, gosh no,” he said. “That’s all right.”
Hannah nodded and flashed her most disa
rming smile—the one that had worked so effectively when she herself conducted interviews. It was an easy way of changing the course of the story, because wasn’t it surprising that such a soft, sweet mama was also the mother of this adventure program so beloved by young boys?
“I’ve been given to understand that a good deal of the scripts originate in America,” he said. “Is that down to you being American yourself?”
“Your information isn’t entirely accurate,” Hannah said, smiling as sweetly as ever. “Some scripts do come from abroad, but that’s because I like to guarantee a wide range of views.”
“And it certainly gets you a wide range of viewers,” he said admiringly before returning to protocol. “What’s your favorite part of the job?”
Now Hannah’s smile was real.
“Whatever part I’m working on the moment I’m doing it.”
The journalist smiled too. He knew a top-drawer quote when he heard it.
“Beg pardon, Miss Wolfson.” Beryl was suddenly looming. “Only it’s time to go out for the table read.”
It wasn’t, but the attentive Beryl sensed the interview had gone on long enough and wanted no further forays into dangerous waters, however adept Hannah might be at navigating them. Besides, they all knew that a mention of the Glaswegian story editor in the menswear and monocle would add color to the piece.
But Hannah still told Sidney to follow up. She wasn’t taking any chances.
She knew Beryl and Sidney were discussing her, comparing notes as to whether she was quite herself this week. She frowned out the window. “Herself” was, among so many things, a woman beloved and respected by her husband. But maybe that part of her had slipped away, had been slipping away for a long time, possibly since the day she’d realized she was likely to be targeted by the FBI and HUAC, and it was better to clear out from their line of sight. Maybe she’d known it for years now, and had been too busy becoming other people—a mother, a producer, a savior (or lawbreaker, depending on how you looked at it)—to pay attention to what was happening within the relationship with the man she loved.
Red Letter Days Page 27