Page 43 of The Gathering Storm

They walked a little, wrapped in each other’s arms. They walked to Washington Square, where other lovers were, and drunks. The grass smelt of the warmth of the day. The fountain had been turned off, and two ducks were resting on the water, the female asleep with her beak tucked into her back, the male keeping one eye open, guarding her. ‘I know how he feels,’ Erich said. ‘I have longed for five years to watch you sleep again.’

The next day she went back to the Plaza to pack her things and pay her bill. Erich waited across 59th Street on the edge of the Park. While she was in her room Freda rang.

‘Well, well, you and Eric Chapel!’ she said archly. ‘I’d forgotten you knew him from before. I suppose we won’t be seeing much of you for the rest of the week.’

‘How—?’

‘Dolly Armitage passed you in the doorway, darling. She said you and Eric were running away and laughing like a couple of naughty kids on a prank. Are you staying on at the Plaza?’

‘No, at his apartment,’ Polly said, feeling awkward at having her private idyll pawed over.

‘That poky place? It’s a bachelor hole, not suitable for a lady. Let me ring round and find somewhere else.’

‘No, please, I’m happy there.’

‘Well,’ Freda said doubtfully, ‘you’ve got my number, if you change your mind. What are you doing with your baggage? It’ll never all fit into that hole.’

‘I’ve packed a valise, and the Plaza is going to store the trunk for me in their baggage room. Freda, I must go. Thank you for all your kindness.’

Freda sighed. ‘I’ll tell everyone you have the grippe. But you must at least go to the Cornfelds’ party – you can’t miss that. I’ll find a girl for Eric, if you don’t want to be seen arriving together. Not that everyone won’t know by then, because Dolly Armitage is like the town crier.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Polly said, knowing she would not be going. ‘Goodbye, Freda, and thanks for everything.’ She put the phone down before there could be any more argument.

Erich didn’t seem at all disturbed that they had been found out. ‘It was bound to happen. Don’t look so troubled. Last time was different – we were married to other people. Now we are both single. We are not harming anyone.’ He ran a finger across her brow. ‘No frowns – it will spoil your beauty.’

At his touch, desire for him sprang up, and she saw his eyes change as he felt it too. ‘Let’s get home quickly. I want you,’ he said.

After the first frenzied slaking of their long thirst for each other, they didn’t need to spend every moment in bed. Everything they did together was satisfying. He had a fancy to draw her, and she posed for him, happy to watch him work. Sometimes he drew her face. ‘But I can’t do you justice,’ he said. ‘Your beauty is elusive, like all true beauty. I can only catch its shadow. It’s frustrating.’

They had to leave the apartment from time to time to eat. And sometimes they went for walks, arms twined round each other. They wandered along the streets, or strolled in Central Park. Once they went down to Battery Park, more of a park now they’d removed the Els – the elevated train lines that had blighted it – but it still needed improvement. ‘It should be the green toe of New York, welcoming the world,’ Erich said. ‘You do green spaces much better in London.’

‘We’ve had longer to learn how,’ Polly said. The river was busy with boats and ferries, barges and tugs, and across the water she could see Liberty on her little island, looking out to sea. A sadness came over her, remembering that her time was almost up. As so often, Erich felt her mood, and came closer, putting an arm round her waist and kissing her ear.

‘Home?’ he murmured.

She knew he meant the apartment.

‘Home,’ she said.

But it was not her home, was it?

He leaned up on one elbow, looking down at her, with his free hand brushed away the hair that had stuck to her cheek, damp with sweat. ‘I thought I would never see you again,’ he said. ‘That day when you left me at the cottage – it was like having a piece torn out of me. I didn’t know how I could face a life without you in it.’

‘But you didn’t come and find me when – when your wife died.’ She didn’t like mentioning his wife. She never spoke of Ren to him.

‘You had gone to England,’ he said. ‘And not just to England – to Morland Place, where people would recognise me and know who I was. You were in the one place on earth where I could not follow you.’

She felt the cold weight of those words in her stomach. Would people really mind? But it was not a question. She knew they would. Mrs Bellerby at White House Farm, where he had lodged and worked as a prisoner of war, had approved of his clean habits, good manners and helpfulness, but how could that weigh against her three fine sons who had perished in the mud of the Western Front? At Huntsham Farm, Joe Walton had a patch over one eye and half his left leg missing; his brother Matt had fallen at Passchendaele to German artillery fire. Younger people, who didn’t remember the war, and sophisticated people, who travelled and read and thought objectively, might be minded now to forget, or to say that the Germans had suffered enough and should be taken back into the fold. But the older people who had lived through it, and the simpler people, would never be able to get past the horror of it, would never forgive. To them, the Germans were a pariah race, and they would hate them with a visceral hatred until life ended.

In Paris, in London, even, Eric Chapel was a man without a past. But the people of the Morland Place Estate would recognise him, and they would never accept him. Yes, it was true: she lived in the one place he could not follow her.

The place to which she would be returning tomorrow when Queen Mary set sail from Pier 90. This was their last day together. Her throat closed up with tears.

‘Stay with me,’ he said abruptly. ‘Don’t go back.’

‘Stay in New York?’ she said. Her voice sounded strange to her.

‘It need not be New York. We can go anywhere in the world.’