Bristol House (54 page)

“Come inside,” Geoff said. “Please.”

They went into the house, and he closed the door and leaned against it. He was, Annie noted, very pale. “I thought . . .” He could not seem to speak the words.

“You thought Emma,” she said.

“No, I didn’t. I thought Annie. I thought this time, because of my big mouth, I’d lost Annie, my best shot at . . .”

“At what?”

“At being happy.”

“But you want a family. I’m thirty-three. It may not happen.”

He shook his head. “I want the possibility of a family. But only because I want you. I heard those brakes squeal, and I knew. I want Annie. The rest, if it happens, great. But it’s a bonus, not the main event.”

“Before,” she said, “with Ari—I wasn’t a very good mother, Geoff. I have to make that right. Whatever happens, Ari must be my first priority.”

He took a few seconds over that, then led her to the couch. “I know he must. I’m not trying to shut your son out of your life, Annie. Out of our lives. Far from it. I’ll do everything I can to help you make it okay. But you told me once that the past did not have to determine the future. You said you had an investment in believing that was true.”

“A big investment. Yes.”

He jerked his head to indicate the upstairs, the room with walls. “The stuff in my rather silly little safe . . . The mementos of Maggie’s life, my family’s past.”

“The mezuzah and her Kindertransport papers.
”

“Yes. And the other things as well. Your drawings. This whole experience . . . I’ve been thinking about it since my mother died. Looking for a word. I think I’ve got it now. Your monk, the provisioner with the quail eggs, all the rest of it . . . I think I’m ready to believe in the forgiveness of sin. So the word is absolution. You for Ari. Me for Emma. Is that too Christian a notion for the son of Maggie Silber?”

“You’ll have to ask Rabbi Cohen, but I think that’s what Yom Kippur is about. The Day of Atonement. There’s not much point in atoning if you don’t believe in forgiveness.”

“Point taken, Dr. Kendall.”

“Geoff, are you sure?”

“If you mean about your Higher Power, or Rabbi Cohen’s God of the ‘Jewish enough,’ or the Catholic version that makes men—including perhaps some ancestor of mine—become penitential hermits—no, I’m not sure. But if you mean us, you and me and Ari and perhaps a child of our own, whether we’re worth a shot, whether we deserve another roll of the dice—yeah, I’m sure.”

Annie smiled.

Afterword

Pace supporters of Portsmouth and Tottenham Hotspurs, I tell stories—I do not have a crystal ball. The teams win and lose and face relegation in a reality that exists only in these pages. And if I could actually dictate results, Liverpool would win every game in every competition.

The tunnels beneath the Holborn section of London, on the other hand, exist both in this book and in the parallel universe we call reality. The story of how and why those tunnels were built and used during World War II—down to the onetime restaurant and the old telephone system—is accurate. I made up the five-a-side football pitch, but I’d bet a fair sum that if someone somewhere had chronicled absolutely everything about those heroic and terrifying long-ago days, the odd game of indoor soccer might occur in the record. For those wanting to know more about the spy tunnels, at the time of writing this URL will get you to an article in the
Guardian
newspaper that details much of the story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/oct/18/london-underground -secret-tunnels.

Finally, the out-of-print book about the London Carthusians that Annie downloads from Google Books really exists. It’s
The London Charterhouse: Its Monks and Its Martyrs,
by Lawrence Hendriks (K. Paul, Trench and Co., 1889). Dom Lawrence was himself a Carthusian and he includes in his history a story apparently well-known in the order: how the quarter part of the carcass of the martyred Venerable Father was tacked up over the Charterhouse gates by Henry’s soldiers in 1535, and how, once they fell, those precious bones were so well hidden by the monks that they have never been found.

Acknowledgments

This story could not have become the book in your hands without the help of many people. I am enormously indebted to: the real Waltons, Margaret and Jennet and Tim and Anna, who years ago introduced me to number eight Bristol House, and have always made me welcome there; to Karen Ross, who allowed me to riff on her mother’s story, met Annie and Geoff when they were shadows on the horizon, and was clever enough to buy a flat on Sharpleshall Street; to Marly Rusoff, Michael Radulescu, Danny Baron, and Heather Baron-Shapiro, literary agents extraordinaire whose belief made it happen; to my editors at Viking Penguin, Carole DeSanti, who pushed me to the edge of the cliff and insisted I jump, and Beena Kamlani, who wields an editing emery board with the delicacy of a brain surgeon’s scalpel; to David Halperin, whose expertise in Judaica and Jewish mysticism is matched only by his writerly generosity; to Elizabeth Statmore, true Renaissance woman, who combined her Latin skills with the imagination of a novelist to produce one of the key elements of the Speckled Egg code; to Shymala Dason, who repaired a broken link and fitted Annie for running shoes; and finally to Audrey Von Balluseck, my favorite Parisienne. Heartfelt thanks to all.