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"Oh." Coming right after thoughts about insanity, this topic was an uncomfortable one; perhaps the older man could be deflected to some other. "Well, I didn't have any dreams last night, certainly," he said with a forced laugh, "being chained in a chair. Did you know they chained-"
"Not in September, of course not," snapped Theodora, abruptly impatient. "You're nineteen now-has puberty occluded you? Even so, you must remember, nineteen winters, you must know what I'm talking about. What dreams have you had at the shift of the year, say on the last night of the year, any year?"
Hale took two long steps away from Theodora, his face suddenly stinging, and he had to force himself to keep breathing normally. He waved the older man back, not looking at him. What else did this man know about him, what could he not know, if he was already aware of so intimate and disturbing a secret? "Why," Hale said carefully, if a little too loudly, "did you ap-apparently want me to be-bebe arrested by the police?" He frowned, for usually he was only afflicted with a stutter right after Christmas, around the...around the time of the new year. "Sent down from college-disgrace, you said! And now you've been t-talking about an OBE!-for God's sake!-What's all this about, what are your-plans for m-me?"
The older man was laughing, his eyes wide open. "Oh my! He is touchy about his dreams, after all, isn't he! Allahumma! But we can put that off for a while, for a few hundred yards here." He had resumed picking his way over the canted pavement fragments, walking toward the sun that shone way out there over the bombed docks, and Hale exhaled and then plodded along beside him.
"Plans," Theodora went on, "for you. It's not so much our plans that are at issue." He was staring at the ground as he walked, and he held up a hand to forestall interruption. "I don't think I'll say much more than this: you speak and read German, you've subscribed to technical wireless magazines, and you've been arrested at a Communist Party meeting. I believe I can promise you that you'll soon be approached by-well, by a recruiter. We want you to be persuaded by this person. Don't act, that is don't pretend to hate England or anything of that sort; just be what you seem genuinely to be, a politically ignorant young man who's drifted into communism because it's the fashion, resentful now at being detained by the police and expelled from college for what strikes you as a trivial offense." He was looking away from Hale, squinting toward the rising sun. "Probably you'll be leaving the country illegally. There will in that case be a warrant issued for your arrest, charges of treason and whatnot. We'll see that it's all dismissed, afterward."
"I'm to be...a spy?" Having grasped the concept and come up with the word, Hale was too exhausted to go on and make a judgment about it.
"Would it upset you to be?"
"Ask me after I've had about twelve hours of sleep," said Hale absently, "and a big plate of eggs and bacon and grilled tomatoes, and a couple-or-three pints." Then he blinked around at the craters and the outlines of foundations, the rectangular pits of forlorn cellars, and his yawn was more from sudden nervousness than from exhaustion. This broken city was London, this besieged country was his own England, the England of Malory and More and Kipling and Chesterton-of lamplit nights with the rain thrashing down beyond the leaded-glass windows over miles of dark Cotswold hills, of sunny canoeing on the placid Windrush, the England his poor Tory mother had loved-and he couldn't pretend that he didn't ache to defend it against any further injury.
"No, actually," he said then. "No, I don't think it would upset me, working for the Crown."
Theodora had crouched beside a bush dotted with pale-yellow flowers. "All these flowers are supposed to be extinct," he said, "grown from seeds that were preserved under the old floors, freed at last and thrown onto plowed ground, rich now with ash." His gaze was oddly intent when he squinted up at Hale. "Do you know what this flower is? Sisymbrium irio, known as the London Rocket. It bloomed all over the City right after the Great Fire of 1666." He picked two of the little flowers and handed one to Hale after he straightened up.
" London recovered from that," observed Hale, dutifully sniffing the thing. "They rebuilt her."
"Perhaps it was the flowers that sustained her life. Some can do that, I think." Theodora glanced back, so Hale did too-the four surveillance men were following them at a distance. "Of course," said Theodora, "you won't say anything to this recruiter about me, nor about having been to that building where we met. You're a very clean player-your mother was admirably thorough, for an amateur, about leaving no tracks; even 'Hale' isn't the name under which she joined her religious order. Oh I say, you did know about that, didn't you?" When Hale smiled wanly and nodded, the older man went on, "Well, we've advanced a pawn here, and it's Red's turn to move. You won't see me again for a while, after this morning; they can't possibly be aware of you yet, which is why I'm able to talk to you face-to-face. Whenever you come back, we'll meet again and I'll have a lot of questions for you."
"'Come back,'" echoed Hale. "From where?"
Theodora gave him an irritable look. "From wherever they send you, where did you think? You'll know when it's time to make your way back to England, and if you're clever you'll even find a way. I will almost certainly be aware of it when you return, and meet you; but if I can't meet you, wait for me-that is, don't tell anyone about me, nor about your secret purposes. Not even Churchill."
Perhaps from memory, Hale heard in his head a young woman's voice say, in French, You were born to this-and he shivered, not entirely in alarm. "What are my...'secret purposes'?"
"Tell me about your dreams."
Hale sighed, then deliberately tucked the stem of his little London Rocket into the buttonhole of his lapel. "All right." This seemed to be a morning outside of time, in which anything at all could be said, no matter how crazy-sounding, without immediacy nor fear of skepticism or judgment. "Do you remember the 'wheels within wheels' in Ezekiel...?"
Two mornings later Hale's trunk was packed and stowed in the porter's lodge at Magdalen; the lorry that was to take him and his things back to Chipping Campden wasn't due for half an hour, and as he paced the sunny Broad Street pavement he was careful not to meet the eyes of any of the apparently carefree students who strolled past. The formal letter of dismissal from his tutor was tucked in his coat pocket-what use now had been all his study of the Caxton Morte d'Arthur, the pageantry in The Faerie Queene?
When he did inadvertently glance at one of the passing faces, it was because he had noticed that a slim woman in a plaid skirt with a leather purse was for the second time walking past where he stood-and he found himself meeting a pair of brown eyes over high slanted cheekbones in a face framed with short dark hair. Her gaze was coldly quizzical, and he looked away instantly, certain that she must somehow know of his disgrace.
He exhaled and impulsively strode across the street, hoping he appeared to have some purpose besides hiding from the disapproving public view. On the far side of the street he walked under the Roman arch into the Botanical Gardens, bright green ranks of shrubs and midget trees spread across four acres under the empty blue sky, and he crouched by one of the flowering herbs beside the footpath as though to read the description on the little sign in front of it, though in fact he couldn't focus on the letters.
Andrew Hale, barrister, he thought in bitter bewilderment; foreign correspondent Hale of the Times; the great Oxford dons Lewis, Tolkien, Bowra, Hale. Sweet fuck-all seems more like it.
He straightened abruptly and took several deep breaths, not wanting anyone to see tears in his eyes here.
Eyes; those were Slavic eyes, he thought, in the instant before someone behind him touched his elbow; and when he turned around without surprise it was the woman in the plaid skirt standing there, still with the look of a dubious purchaser. She appeared to be in her thirties.
"I've seen you in the Party meetings," she said.
He was fairly sure she had never been to a meeting he had attended, but he nodded. "Not unlikely," he said. His heart was thumping under the expulsion papers in his coat pocket. "I'd advise you not to go to any in London."
"I heard of your misfortune," she said with a nod, gripping his elbow and leading him along the crushed-stone path. "We are all allies against the monster Germany. How strange that cooperation should be called espionage, and a crime! We're all working for world peace." She spoke with no accent, but he thought he detected the spiky cadence of eastern Europe.
"I-wasn't even doing espionage," Hale stammered.
"To belong to the International Workers' Party is implicitly to commit what they call espionage," she told him sternly. "We're citizens of a bigger thing than any nineteenth-century empires, aren't we?"
We want you to be persuaded by this person. But Don't act. "I've hoped to be," he said. "Things look unpromising right now."
"Knowing the danger now, are you still with us?" She had stopped walking and was staring intently into his eyes. "Now?"
