The London Restoration

by Rachel McMillan

  “There’s no word, Greek or otherwise, for this awkwardness,” he muttered, pulling away.

  “Pardon?”

  Brent straightened and took her hand. “Diana, how have you been?” Her blonde hair was half hidden by her red hat and though she was pale, her blue eyes sparkled.

  She let out a nervous laugh. “How have I been?”

  “I’m sorry . . . I just . . .”

  “I left my cases in a locker inside the station. I was dying for a cup of tea. And I’m famished. I was determined we could find something to eat before setting off for home. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Brent hated small talk. “Not in the least. The larder is in a rather dismal state.”

  He wanted to say a thousand things. Ask a thousand questions. Instead, he said, “Tea?”

  * * *

  It was always tea. On their wedding night. Tea. At learning he would ship out as the church towers crumbled beneath German bombs unhindered by the searchlights and barrage balloons. Tea. For any insecurity she had about their reconciliation, three letters in a small word and she felt safe. And more tea.

  She was almost surprised at how easily he gave in to the suggestion that they return to a common meeting place. To Brent’s credit, he didn’t wonder why she hadn’t taken a taxi from the airport directly home. Then she remembered she hadn’t told him how she was getting to London, just that she would be there. The longer she could put off the flat familiar to her only from a few dinners during their courtship and the first excited hours of their wedding night before the sirens drove them out the door and into a cold Tube station shelter, the better.

  She shouldn’t be nervous to see her husband. She should be elated. But the years apart had taken away all the well-meaning shoulds and left nothing but mere survival in their stead. She shouldn’t have noticed the garish scar he carefully tried to hide, but she did. She shouldn’t have let her eyes dart immediately to his damaged left hand either. So much for shoulds and shouldn’ts. There was always tea.

  Here now on neutral ground, she couldn’t see the flashes of whatever horrors were branded on his mind any more than she could decode a fuzzy radio signal on a stormy Bletchley night.

  Diana cleared her throat. “I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to be home. I know that . . . Was it arduous to get back?”

  “I was still in hospital, as you know, and then the demobilization efforts took a blasted long time. And you know from my letter that I started back at King’s a fortnight ago.”

  He could command entire lecture halls with that voice, disseminating his perspectives on Scripture. Could command her whole heart.

  From across the table in the tea shop, the sun played with Brent’s features as a particularly stubborn cloud stole away beyond the pane. A few gray strands at his temples offset his tawny hair, and it rippled reddish gold when the sun struck it a certain way. His green eyes were flecked a little with gold, and amber rimmed their irises. The creases at the corners of his eyes seemed caused by exhaustion rather than laughter.

  “I bet the routine is a nice change,” Diana said stupidly when no other words formed, turning the end of the sentence up as if in question. But he didn’t answer.

  She flicked her gaze down at his left hand. He hadn’t told her the extent of his injuries. The sight of his index and middle fingers sewn together into one big digit in the middle of his long hand hurt her as if she had felt their pain. He noticed her stare and tucked his hand under the table.

  She wanted to close the years between them. To tell him that she had met a man who would outdo even Brent at crossword puzzles. That she had . . . It would be too easy for the secrets to spill out.

  The tea arrived with a plate of sandwiches and tarts. Despite her growling stomach she was nervous to pinch a sandwich before he helped himself.

  “King’s. Yes,” he said finally. “I think they’re enjoying the classes.”

  She didn’t recognize this strange shell of herself, so why should she expect him to take the reins? Sure, he had served at the Front, bearing stretchers across unthinkable atrocities while she was tucked safely in a hut away from the bombs. Was it the truth about her time away from him that kept her so formal? Diana folded her hands in her lap, unsure of what to say.

  For all he knew she merely sat in the Foreign Office and translated. No intercepted Luftwaffe codes. No Vienna. It was the secrets she was forced to keep from him that held her back. In the same way she assumed his scars and experiences kept him from meeting her halfway.

  Brent gingerly tilted the plate toward her. She took a sandwich and a tart, then arranged them on her plate. Their eyes met over the tiered tray. For a moment she found the Brent she knew and her heart raced at the familiarity. But he pulled away, reaching for a sandwich.

  He seemed more interested in chasing a crumb around his plate than he was in eating. “The students are finding it hard to readjust.”

  Diana’s stomach growled again as a reminder she had been too nervous to eat that morning, or even the night before.

  “Do you . . . do you have what you need?” Brent’s brow furrowed. “Did you get enough to eat?”

  “You know I can’t eat when I’m nervous.” Diana shoved a triangle of sandwich in her mouth. Who was she to sit here fingering delicacies and taking dainty bites? They were married, for heaven’s sake. She spun the tier and selected an egg-and-cress sandwich.

  Brent straightened his shoulders and made long work of eating a cheese sandwich. “Strange we should be nervous around each other.”

  Diana swallowed as a memory formed: his finger brushing her cheek and over her collarbone, catching the lace collar of her nightgown. She lingered in the past a moment before blinking back to a cold table of strangers enjoying a simple repast. She wanted to curve into his side and sob into his neck and learn every horrible thing he had experienced. They had always fallen so easily into each other. “Talking as if we didn’t know each other?”

  “I don’t know where you were the past five weeks.” Brent tried to be stern but sounded merely hurt instead. “And now you’re back. I thought you would be here when I returned.”

  “I was doing a favor for a friend.”

  “A friend I don’t know.”

  “We lived very different lives the past four years, Brent, and we met new people.” Diana sighed. It was one thing for her to present her Simon-assigned role to strangers in Austria, quite another when sitting across from her husband. “There are a few committees—even one formed by the Royal Institute of Architects—now dedicated to ensuring our architectural treasures and history are preserved. They began when the bombs started to fall. There will be a new grading system to classify the importance and heritage of each building, even as some modern adjustments are made. And I thought that, well, with the Wren churches I can provide notes that account for the obvious changes that need to take place but also ensure they are true to Wren’s original vision.”

  “Some will see a crack. A bombed building.” The right side of his mouth twitched into a small smile. “You will see a map and imagine the potential in the rubble.”

  “I have carte blanche access and compensation even to those places blockaded by city work crews because . . . a friend gave me a special letter. So I can provide aesthetic and historical notes to use in the meetings for their new designation.” She sipped her tea. “I will take notes and pair them with my knowledge of the churches as they were as well as how they might function in the future. Right now, they’re a huge puzzle and it’s a monumental undertaking.”

  She scratched the tablecloth with her thumbnail. “It’s what I want to focus on, Brent. Now that I’m back.”

  “You should be finishing your degree . . . ,” Brent started but didn’t get far as she warmed to her subject.

  “Just like Christopher Wren and his stonemasons after the Great Fire. Walls and windows and pews! All of those tombstones worked into the walls and floors. I’ve missed my churches, Brent. And if you come with me,
you can give me a spiritual perspective! Even the churches that were bombed are still holding services and concerts and weddings.”

  “You’re starting to sound like yourself.” His hands clasped the edges of the table.

  “Like myself?” She arched her right eyebrow.

  “Give the girl a chance to talk about Wren churches and . . .”

  She smiled at her plate before she snatched up another sandwich. “You told me that architecture is as sure a form of worship as a hymn, psalm, or prayer.”

  A smile toyed with his lips. “I clearly have to stop telling you things.”

  Diana sank into his teasing tone as she might an old cardigan, and her shoulders relaxed. “You know their stories. You know their symbols. You know why the quires are in the shapes of crosses and why the baptismal fonts are near the back doors, and the significance of the high altar catching the eastern sun.”

  “So do you, Diana. You hammered me with those facts endlessly before your exams. I didn’t even know what a quire was before I met you.”

  “And you the vicar’s nephew,” Diana said before clearing her throat. “The quire is the area of a church providing seating for the clergy and church choir located between the nave and the chancel,” she recited, mimicking her most studious sessions.

  “Remember those cards?” Brent said. “I would write a definition on one side . . .”

  “And I would write the name of the church on the other.” The memory warmed her. “I tried to draw steeples.”

  “I stopped you, thank heavens. Especially when you insisted that every illustration for our immediate purpose required a parish cat.”

  Diana laughed. “I never had your artistic talent. It was one of the reasons I fell in love with you.”

  She watched for his response and exhaled at his softening features. The singe of his lips before at Charing Cross, the slight tremor when their mouths first met, the hitch in his breath when he pulled away, the rest of the kiss lying dormant in his eyes. All the promise she needed was right there.

  “Come, let’s leave my cases in the locker for a while. We’ll go to All Hallows. You pledged your life and soul to me there. It’s a perfect place to start rebuilding.” She crossed her palm over her heart. “I don’t want to go in and take notes just about stone.”

  “And now with all these dramatic pleas . . .”

  “But what’s more”—she laid down her trump card—“do you really want me roaming around a bombed church alone at night?” She gazed out the window, the sky gray and heavy with rain clouds. Evening was tugging fast at its heels.

  She compelled him with slightly pouting lips and raised eyebrows.

  Brent’s eyes softened when she covered his forearm with her newly manicured fingernails, leaned over the table, and widened her eyes after seeing the desired effect reflected in his own. “You never could resist that look.”

  “Turns out I can’t resist you after all.” He shrugged, his lips creased in a partial smile.

  Diana smoothed her skirt. “What does that mean? You want to resist me?”

  “What other choice did my pride have, Diana? I wondered if you had changed your mind since it took you so long to come back. See, when you spend enough nights pacing, your mind makes up all sorts of things. Especially after so long apart. About a marriage that took place just before our worlds drove us apart. About a girl you thought you knew and certainly loved until she went missing for five weeks just as you were sorting out how you could possibly return to life again. After where you had been. After all you had seen.”

  His injured hand was on the table and no longer hidden in his lap. She grabbed his hand and gave it a gentle squeeze, the wedding ring on his fourth, still-whole finger pressing into her palm. “I will never change my mind.”

  Chapter 3

  Brent led Diana out the door of the tea shop, keeping his hand at the small of her back. As their teatime had overlapped with the heaviest barrage of early evening traffic, they should have been able to find a taxi, but the sky had opened again in a sudden downpour and they sought shelter under the awning of an adjacent store. Brent suggested they use the opportunity to see to her luggage, but Diana assured him they could collect her cases later.

  He turned to study her profile. They used to be so in sync he could anticipate her next breath, sigh, or sentence. A favor for a friend? What favor took five weeks? Translation work? What was left to translate? What friend? He thought he knew all of her friends. She wrote about some of them. A woman named Sophie Villiers who insisted on being called by her surname. A man named Simon Barre who tried to teach her chess. All of the questions Brent had tucked under the café table with his injured hand barreled through his brain.

  But he wanted her. He wanted to make good on every frantic promise he’d muttered at the first shrill whiz of artillery fire. If I can just get home. If I can just see her again. That was before his mind could conjure a silence of five weeks. He tugged at his collar as a car swerved to splash a small wall of rain against the curb.

  The tightness in his chest had loosened the longer their conversation echoed who they had been before. That had to count for something. Besides, there was no sense beginning a row as they waited out the rain. “So, these church consultations of yours. We’ll just cross through barricades and around city workers and construction and visit churches that have survived the bombings?” He watched another occupied taxi pass.

  Diana shrugged. “Perhaps. But we can also attend concerts and Evensong and Communion. They all continued during the war, you know. And I’d like to think they continued even during Wren’s time when they were deciding which parishes to rebuild after the Great Fire and which ones to consolidate . . .”

  That was his Diana. Fixated on the stamp of Christopher Wren’s distinctive vision, his ingenuity and motifs. Her passion for the subject was captivating. Brent’s gaze traced the curve of her cheek and wandered to the hourglass curves of her figure against the canvas of a London they both knew well. Had known well. Now, it was their blueprint back to each other. They had the same reference points for the shops and street corners around which black taxicabs veered, and the buses like tiered red cakes bumbled around moats and holes of buildings blasted by German bombs.

  He flexed his good hand, finding confidence in the consistency: marred but similar, broken yet recognizable. After several ticks of silence, he asked, “What did you imagine saying when you saw me again?”

  Diana smiled, wrinkling her nose, not looking straight at him but at a man shaking out his umbrella. “That I wish we would have gone on a honeymoon. A real one. Where would we have gone?”

  Brent took a beat. “You would’ve picked some city with a thousand cathedrals and just dragged me around to churches for days on end.”

  “And you?” She raised an eyebrow, inclining her head. “What did you imagine saying to me?”

  “Do you really want to know?” He waited for her assent, which came in the form of a slight nod. “On good days there was some rather awful poetry. Something about your sparkling blue eyes, the lustrous strands of gold in your hair. The way your curves . . . well . . . ahem. We won’t get into the pages about moonlight, because by the time I got to the curve of your cheek under a bomb shelter light, my senses returned. Utter rubbish, of course. But romantic rubbish. The sort I excel at.” He winked and waited for her smile.

  “And on bad days?” she whispered.

  Brent cleared his throat. “There were too many bad days, weren’t there?” His shoulder brushed hers and a sure flame flickered through the sinews of his arm. On the front in Belgium and later in Italy through treacherous and rainy nights, he found solace in the memory of their last consuming kiss, of enfolding her in his arms.

  He looked up, startled, as if his sensual thoughts were so pressing and immediate she might feel the heat through him.

  He had imagined so much about their reunion. That they would melt into each other as they had before and pick up where they left off, as if
the war were a few ellipses interrupting the sentence of their life together. That the taste and feel and scent of her he had only just grown accustomed to would be a certainty he woke up to every morning. Yet something Holt had told him took Brent aback.

  Of course, he shouldn’t have listened to his friend when the man set into a tirade about the opposite sex. Holt had recently received a letter from his fiancée, whom he’d met over a previous weekend in a pub. Said fiancée had ended their engagement as quickly as it had begun, and thereafter Holt considered himself a standing authority on all things nuptial.

  Holt talked a lot. Too much. And he had several theories that physical conversation in a reunited marriage was not primed to last. His theories were patched up from a few too many with a stranger at a pub, newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, and advice columns. All were laced with his own belief that a hurried tumble after quick vows before one shipped out did not a lasting marriage make.

  But that wasn’t Brent and Diana’s story. They had been together long before that. He certainly had intended to marry her nearly from the moment he saw her. He shoved his injured hand more deeply into his pocket. It was only the insecurity talking.

  Five weeks. A favor for a friend.

  She hadn’t been able to keep the slightest secret from him before. They never made it to Christmas before she excitedly let slip what his present was. Yet the last four years had added a new maturity to her bearing and confidence in the way she held her head. Her chin was turned up to watch the sky break with London’s inimitable magic and the sun peer through almost as quickly as the downpour had started.

  Diana tugged him out from under the awning. “Oh look! There’s a taxi!” She raised her arm to signal.

  * * *

  Sometimes when missing Brent was too much, Diana had focused on every last thing the war had taken from her. A taste of birthday cake, a robust and fully steeped cup of tea, the luxurious feel of silk stockings, the lights in Piccadilly and Leicester Square. If she squeezed her eyes shut tightly enough, she was almost in London again, tracing the familiar route to King’s from the flat she shared in Paddington before their wedding or skipping to Foyle’s Bookstore on a rainy afternoon.