* * *
—
London was blackness against the taxi windows. On the train from Bristol a steward had come around as the evening faded and closed the curtains. The lights inside the train were dim and blue, as were the lights in the station, and once they were outside, it seemed as though Britain had disappeared entirely.
Marian was crammed in one taxi with Ruth and Sylvie and their handbags and train cases. The larger luggage rode behind with Zip in another. The driver slowed, making a turn, and something greenish white slid by outside, glowing: a conical apparition with two orbiting moons.
“What was that?” Sylvie said.
“A ghost!” said Ruth.
“Don’t say that,” said Sylvie.
“Only a copper,” said the driver. “They paint their capes and gloves with phosphorescence.”
Peering out, Marian began to see the blackness was less total than it had first seemed. Downward-angled slits in the covers on the taxi’s headlights allowed a faint glow out onto the road, and here and there the white-painted bumpers of other cars came and went. Traffic signals, reduced to small floating crosses of red or green, hung in the dark. When they stopped at one, Marian could make out the passing shapes of pedestrians and a handsome set of steps leading to a jumble of rubble. “It’s the underworld out there, isn’t it?” said Ruth. “The kingdom of the shades.”
“Get yourself some white gloves, that’s my advice,” said the driver. “Some bit of white to wave around is what you want for hailing taxis.”
“Or for hailing the boatman,” Ruth said. “To take us across the River Styx.”
“Don’t be spooky,” said Sylvie. “I’m afraid of the dark.”
“If you’d been here for the Blitz,” the driver said, “you’d know there’s worse things than dark.” He stopped short behind a bus that had loomed up suddenly and cliff-like, a large white circle painted on its blunt end.
“Like what?” said Sylvie.
“Sylvie,” warned Ruth.
“Like fire,” said the driver.
The lobby of the hotel was a bubble of noise and light, crisscrossed by uniforms, insulated from the darkness by a shell of sandbags and heavy curtains. There was a note from Jackie Cochran, wishing them welcome and saying she would meet them for breakfast. Sylvie and Zip had a double on the fifth floor, and Ruth and Marian were on the sixth in singles with a shared bathroom.
Marian, lying fully dressed on the bed, realized she hadn’t been able to close a door behind herself, to be fully alone anywhere other than in the toilet, since Montreal. She shut her eyes and pressed her hands against them. Auroras traveled across her lids. Behind the door, running water and gentle splashes signaled that Ruth was taking a bath. A memory of the woman in the hotel in Cordova came to Marian, but she pushed the thought away. She got up and turned out the light, slid in between the window and its heavy velvet curtain. In the time since they’d arrived, the thick cloud had broken apart into gliding silver rafts. A bright half-moon hung high over the blacked-out city. Beyond the ink spill she knew to be Hyde Park, roofs and chimneys and towers rambled into the distance, moonlight glinting off them as though off ice on mountaintops.
Missoula
August 1942
Not long after Marian arrived in London
Caleb was sitting on a stump he used for chopping wood. Jamie, standing behind him, lifted the same heavy scissors Caleb had used on Marian’s hair long ago and cut off his braid. The long severed black weight of it flopped dead and glossy in Jamie’s fist. “What should I do with this?” he said.
“Keep it as a memento.”
Jamie dropped the braid in Caleb’s lap. “No, thanks. It’s all yours.” He did his best to snip the rest short. “It’s a little patchy.”
Caleb ran a hand over his scalp. “I’m sure the army won’t mind finishing the job.”
“Poetic justice for the way Marian used to look.”
“I never said I was any good at cutting hair. I was just the only one who’d do it.”
“Do you hear from her?”
“No.”
Something in Caleb’s voice precluded further questions. Jamie said, “She’s in London.”
“Good for her.”
Speculatively, Jamie snipped at a bit of hair behind Caleb’s ear and winced at the result. He said, “Are you still seeing the teacher?”
“No. I couldn’t quite get to the slippers and pipe.”
Jamie thought Caleb might be using some kind of euphemism. “What does that mean?”