The London Restoration

by Rachel McMillan

  Sure, their promise to God and eternity was sacred, but Diana wanted to love him beyond the words she said before he shipped out. She wanted to love him as the Diana she had become.

  Diana felt something click and settle in her chest. He hadn’t driven Simon to the curb. Brent—her Brent—had invited him in for tea.

  * * *

  Brent realized that the war had made the woman standing here now, removing the tea accessories from the coffee table, into someone else. Simon Barre’s revelation sent Brent reeling because he was certain that he didn’t know Diana at all.

  As she took the teacups to the kitchen, he noticed her coat was slung over the armchair and not hung on the rack. Doubtless she was surprised to see her friend, but it frustrated him nonetheless. A more reasonable Brent would recognize he was funneling his confusion into recognizing her limitations. An emotional Brent—who had kept himself in check while receiving her intoxicated friend—immediately leapt to her faults.

  For one, she was a horrible housekeeper. Something he couldn’t have fully anticipated when he proposed. Of course, there were the little things his mind tucked away in exchange for the attributes he missed. No matter how many times he explained the rubrics of the Hebrew alphabet, she never understood. And he hated the way she wrinkled her nose for other men when she giggled. Sure, she had told him it was a defense mechanism for when she wasn’t comfortable with new people, but it clashed with her approaching him at St. Bart’s, and in the middle of a spat he saw it as a slight rather than another sign that she held him above all.

  Somehow their resonant problems—the secrets and her time away—crept under his collar again. He could focus on the attributes he chose to remember while she was far away. Diana was bright. Intelligent. Curious. So why was he focusing on a water ring on the table? Other than it hadn’t been there before she moved back.

  She had a lingering effect but only on those who knew what to look for. Most men would maneuver their transient glances over her curves and pretty face and turn—remembering the point of attraction while underestimating the woman. Instinctively he was proud of her. Humanly, it just allowed for more doubt to trickle in.

  “Is it worth risking your life?” he said. “This thing you’re doing for that man?”

  “Yes.”

  He took a breath. “Is it worth risking mine?”

  “No.” No blink or beat. “Nothing is worth that.”

  “But that’s what you’re doing. By taking me with you. By doing this. Something you say men would kill for.”

  She was a breath from him with her chin slightly upturned. As infuriated as he was, that chin tilt stirred something in him.

  Diana’s gaze settled on Brent. Desperation and vulnerability warred in her eyes. He wasn’t sure what she saw in his. Confusion? When she inched nearer, he reciprocated. He wanted to protect her. He wanted to connect with her beyond this man and this strange, unexpected twist in her story.

  When she reached to touch his cheek, he slipped his arm around her waist. Her lips parted, and her eyes searched his. They met in the middle. He wanted to find the Diana of the churchyard they had explored together. Not this new Diana with her Simon Barre and her secrets.

  She pressed into him so tightly he could feel her lines and curves. His palm followed the curve above her hip bone. The hourglass figure of the Diana who appeared in his lecture all those years ago showed the lean years of war. Brent readjusted his recollection so the woman he explored was not a vision stored for a bloody dawn in a trench or an air raid but his wife, here and now.

  Brent kissed her. His uninjured hand maneuvered from her shoulder to the slope of her waist. He kissed her again, starting at her temple, then skimming his lips over the curve of her cheek. Their lips met and their breath mingled as well. He savored the scent of her hair and the perfume she dabbed behind her ears. In this way they picked up exactly where they had left off: he could easily cross the t’s and dot the i’s.

  He pursued her fervently until he felt her fingers beneath his shirt and over the buttons of his collar, slowly unfastening them. She moved to deftly pull back the fabric of his shirt.

  Brent made a noise of protest against her mouth and nudged her hands away from him. “No.” He disengaged and stepped back, her breath warm on his cheek and the feel of her fingers branded on the curve of his neck.

  “I don’t understand you.” Her eyes radiated the full measure of her hurt. “I don’t even know how badly you’re injured. Or what happened to you.” She tugged at the loose end of his collar. “For all that you tell me about the secrets I’ve kept from you, you are keeping several to yourself. If you need time, I’m patient, Brent, but I need you to tell me.”

  “This isn’t about me.”

  “So this means we’re back to where we started.”

  “How so?”

  “Because you said you trusted me, and now you know I’ve had a very good reason for all of this. I had no choice.” She leaned in again.

  “Di, stop. Just stop.”

  “You know everything about me that matters. You trust me and you love me.”

  “You can love a person and still wonder who she is. This explains things, yes. But that man knows more about you than I do.”

  “You know everything that matters.”

  “So you say, but you are willing to go to great lengths for him. Danger. All of these secrets you trade. The lies you tell for him, and I couldn’t even find you for a simple phone call.” Brent took a step back and rebuttoned his collar.

  He strode into the bathroom to get away from her for a moment, finding the tube of tooth cream snaked on the counter, leaving a mess in its wake, and a rolled-up towel beside it. He caught his reflection in the mirror. His eyes were stormy and his nostrils flared. He gritted his teeth for control.

  The right part of his brain told him to shut the door, lean on the sink, and take several deep breaths. But he couldn’t stop himself from hearing Simon say, “Foyle. Like the bookshop on Charing Cross Road.” And he thought of the months when Diana’s letters stopped while she was talking and laughing with Simon Barre.

  Jealousy is for cowards. He wasn’t jealous of her relationship but of the time Simon spent with her. Four years of an eternity pledged to his wife that Brent had lost. But the wrong part of his brain focused on her not being able to adhere in the slightest to who he was, what he had seen, what he expected.

  He had promised he would trust her.

  He held up the tooth cream. “I know you are a terrible housekeeper and that Mrs. Ratchet’s pet badger two doors over is probably more competent in the kitchen, but for the love of God, Diana, you don’t even try.” He walked into the bedroom and snatched his pillow. “But I’m tired of our fight. It’s been too long a day.”

  “Our fight?” Diana called after him. “Our fight? This is very much your fight. It isn’t my fault if I am not the girl you sketched before you left. You could smooth out all of my lines and capture me exactly how you wanted. Is that my fault or yours? I changed, yes. We all did.”

  Brent returned to the living room and chucked the pillow at the sofa. He looked to Diana. Part of him wanted her to retaliate for his outburst. And by the fists bunched at her hips, the rapid breaths and the flush on her cheeks, he could tell she was thinking about it. He primed himself for her to rail at him.

  Instead, her voice gentled. “Until the moment you tell me, until the moment you finally let me back in, you will wake up every night and grab my wrists when we share a bed. And relive it over and over. Because right now it is all just bottled up inside you. In the things you aren’t telling me, right under your shirt collar. You can’t do it alone, Brent. You can’t carry that horror alone. Whatever it is.”

  Diana blew a strand of blonde hair from her face, then leaned in and kissed his cheek. “I’ll get you a warmer quilt for the sofa.”

  * * *

  Diana woke the next morning, alone, to sun streaming through the blinds and a nonburnt smell wafting th
rough the slightly open door. She stretched and grabbed her robe.

  When she stood in the kitchen doorway, Brent turned to smile at her. He looked far better rested than he did most mornings. She smiled at the rashers of bacon hissing in the pan and at sliced bread on the counter.

  “Get the marmalade, would you?”

  Diana collected napkins and cutlery and marmalade.

  “Di?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll try harder.” He set his plate on the table and looked directly at her, eyes softening while he painted her face. “I will. I’m sorry.”

  “I know this is not what you expected.”

  “But the best moments of my entire existence have been unexpected, haven’t they? I never expected you in that churchyard, for one.”

  She set the items on the table. “I feel guilty when it seems that . . . parts of me are not what they were. That I would want to keep anything from you.”

  He lifted a forkful of eggs to his mouth, stopped, and nodded. “You’re different, Diana.”

  “For better or worse?”

  “For different. Just like you said. But I spent a long time staring at the ceiling wondering how I could expect you to accept how I’ve changed without accepting how you have. I was wrong.”

  Diana turned her fork over. “It seems like I am just feeling around in the dark. I don’t even think Simon knows how this will turn out. But if we can stop these traitors . . . The stakes are higher than I am able to tell you.”

  * * *

  They set out to meet Simon as planned, and while to Diana, the city exposed its potential, to Brent it was purgatory: buses waylaid around construction sites, roads and thoroughfares uprooted with bricks and barriers. In some cases Brent had to reroute his favorite shortcuts from Clerkenwell to King’s and every last church they pursued in between.

  Brent didn’t say a lot to Diana en route to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, just off Fleet Street in Wine Office Court, for their appointed meeting with Simon, but the ease with which she brushed his arm and the fluid way he kept stride with her felt as natural as breathing. The silence between them settled as easily as it did when they roamed the city in its wholeness.

  The tucked-away tavern was crammed with literary history. Twain, Dickens, and Chesterton were once deemed regulars. The pub had three levels, but it was the bottom floor into which she and Brent descended, the smell of old wood and sawdust permeating the air and ancient tables stained with liquid rings filling the room. In the main-floor chophouse, Sydney Carton had once dined with Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities.

  Exposed beams, soot-swept floors, and grated fireplaces met the dank chill that only just kept the November wind from gnawing at them inside. Simon arrived in a smart navy wool suit, tugging at his tie, blue eyes unreadable behind their gold-rimmed glasses.

  “A far cry from The Savoy,” Simon said as Brent and Diana rose to shake his hand.

  “It was rebuilt after the Great Fire,” Diana replied as they sat. “Almost immediately.” She stretched her arms out and looked around happily.

  Everything made her happy this morning, Brent noticed. She had torn down a wall and in the process let him into her world. One that included Simon Barre.

  “I’ll see to the drinks, shall I? A pint, Mr. Barre?”

  “Coffee.”

  Brent returned a moment later with a pint of dark lager, a coffee, and a precariously balanced lemonade for Diana.

  “So it worked out then?” Diana smiled at Brent, accepting her glass. She lowered her voice. “And you made contact with your SOE agent?”

  “Langer has been helpful.” Simon took his coffee with an apologetic look. “I am very sorry for my abysmal behavior last evening, Professor Somerville. I have been intoxicated precisely two times in the whole of my sorry existence, the first at my college graduation party and subsequently last evening.” He stared at his coffee ruefully. “What’s more, it was highly unprofessional of me.”

  “You’re human, Simon,” Diana said softly. “We all make mistakes.”

  “We’re living in times that don’t allow us to be human, Diana. Humanity costs lives.”

  Brent took a long sip of beer, trying not to choke it down at the irony of Simon’s statement. He was handsome and poised and Diana was completely at ease with him. He didn’t recognize any attraction or flirtation between the two, rather watched two friends reunited in a new space and sharing a common interest.

  “You know Brent teaches at King’s, Simon. You can use him.”

  “Hold up.” Brent set his pint down and flicked a look at the foamy rim left in its wake. “Use me for what?”

  “What have you told him?” Simon narrowed his eyes at Diana.

  “Everything I could without compromising either of us.”

  “I want to know how dangerous this is. What you’re asking her—us—to do. I didn’t fancy the man with a gun at All Hallows that first night, and I very much hated the one who grabbed her at Walbrook,” Brent said. “And that first night, I thought I saw someone else too.”

  “You never said anything,” Diana said.

  “I thought it might be a figment of my imagination. Or a premonition.”

  “I have my own premonition,” Simon said. “That what I am pursuing might be connected to King’s. It’s not the first time that academics have proven useful in Soviet causes.” He looked between Brent and Diana. “You’re safer together. As a pair. I can see that.” Simon inclined his coffee mug. Really, the man was night and day from the figure Brent had encountered slurring his speech the evening before. “Are you aware of any Communist sympathizers at King’s?”

  Brent shook his head. “But I’ve only just returned. I’ve been rather preoccupied with classes, and it seems that politics and the like are second priority to just trying to keep our heads above water.” He rimmed his pint glass with his finger. “The students have changed. Before . . . Well . . .”

  He sensed Diana’s gaze on him and concluded the thought with a shake of his head. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have Diana working for you in some capacity. And I won’t risk her safety. So what do you need?”

  “Rick Mariner is having a party.” Diana broke the thread of their gaze and veered her attention back to Simon. “Brent can keep an eye and ear out at King’s, sure, but what better way to see? I think that Rick might be involved. I wasn’t going to say anything until I had something . . . anything, but now . . .”

  Brent groaned. “I loathe Mariner’s parties.” He paused, pint in midair. “Or perhaps I merely loathe Mariner.” He took a swig of his beer. “How did you know about Mariner’s party?”

  “He called the other afternoon. I plumb forgot to tell you. Because I hadn’t thought about attending until now.”

  Simon sipped his coffee, his lips curved in a smile. “But you’re the sort who can make do, Somerville? At a party?”

  “Completely the sort.” Diana raised her lemonade glass in Brent’s direction, pride shining from her eyes.

  “You can take a peek around.” Simon looked to Brent. “Diana will tell you that I prefer to work on intuition.”

  “Hunches,” Diana translated.

  Simon nodded. “So, anything.”

  “Is everything alright, then?” Brent asked Simon pointedly. Simon mightn’t have remembered his inebriated speech, but Brent did. To the letter.

  “I don’t even know what alright means anymore, Professor Somerville.”

  * * *

  Two evenings later, preparing for Rick’s party, Brent had the distinct feeling he was stepping into the past yet as a stranger. Before the war Rick Mariner’s faculty parties were a quarterly mainstay of his academic year. Everyone knew Mariner taught as a lark. Alongside his family money he had pawned a valuable artifact to afford his Mayfair town house. Money slipped through his fingers and paid for the charm that hung around his shoulders like a bespoke suit. More often than not after a few dances, he would retreat to the drawing room for ci
gars and unending debates with Silas Henderson, a history professor who eventually became Diana’s supervisor.

  As a rule students weren’t invited, but not long after Brent had met Diana, she and a giggling friend of hers appeared. Brent asked her to dance and quickly learned that she was as talented on the floor as she was holding a tune. The posh band Mariner had hired was making “The Way You Look Tonight” hover on a wistful sigh: half melancholy, half longing. Brent had danced with several girls before Diana and wondered why previous songs were just a puddle of notes. He was so far gone on the soft silk of her dress and the smell of her and the way she tucked a long strand of blonde hair behind her ear. She got a little nervous with him. A blush flamed her cheeks, her nose wrinkled a little, and she fell back on Christopher Wren.

  “It only took Wren ten days to present his plan for the rebuilding of London to King Charles the Second.” She went on and on about his mathematical precision while Brent, dizzy with the feel and smell of her, was finding it hard to keep his instincts in check.

  Tonight, the years pulled back with the damask curtain leading to Rick’s salon. Fabric rations and a lack of sewing skill prevented Diana from wearing anything new, but the claret dress she wore might as well have been new, as long as it had been since he’d seen it on her.

  Rick foisted a drink on Brent the moment he spotted him. “It’s a ’27.” His voice directed them to look at the brandy label. “A very good year.”

  Brent smiled and raised his glass. “Thank you.”

  “And for you, Mrs. Somerville? Champagne?”

  At Diana’s nod Rick went to retrieve her drink.

  “If you need me to sniff around, then you’d better dance with Rick.” Brent looked at her plainly. “You know you can get anything out of him. He’s clearly already been into that decanter a few times.”

  Diana seemed unsure. She perused the faculty members, some new, some she certainly recognized from King’s corridors and Brent’s faculty luncheons. “But what will people say?”

  “If you were going to run off with Mariner, wouldn’t you have done it by now?” He winked at her. “I don’t care what people say, Diana.” He kissed her cheek and let his lips linger at her ear. “I’m all in.” He pulled away to revel in her spreading smile. “Besides, you’re a terrible dancer. It might rid you of him once and for all.”