Perhaps because he had grown up knowing that he had been born abroad in a perennially insecure region, this abrupt prospect of the invasion of his homeland galvanized Andrew Hale. He was eighteen now, and he was suddenly determined to enlist in the Royal Air Force at once, without waiting to finish school and the Officers’ Training Corps program. He wrote to Corliss in Cirencester, demanding his birth certificate, but when the lawyer finally wrote back it was to say that that document was in the hands of the uncle, who was some sort of secretary in Whitehall. Corliss was willing to give Andrew what little information he himself had: a Post Office box number, a telephone number, and a name-James Theodora.
Andrew remembered the one-legged old colonel telling him to remember his dreams-One day Theodora will ask you about them-and though the prospect of recounting some of his dreams made him uncomfortable, he knew he was on the right track.
The telephone number had been a challenge; Andrew had had to get permission to use the instrument in the Haslemere College warden’s office during a study hour, with the cost laboriously calculated and added onto his tuition balance. And the trunk line to London had been slow to connect numbers even before the bombing began, and now, though the service still worked, calls were frequently cut off, or interrupted with abrupt bursts of static, or even shifted somehow among startled parties, implicit testimony to the reported hundreds of high-explosive bombs that were hammering the City every night. After interrupting several calls, and even breaking in on what sounded like a military radio transmission, Andrew heard a woman answer, “Hullo?”
“I need to speak with James Theodora,” Andrew had said, sweating under the warden’s by now impatient stare. “He’s my-my uncle-I met him at his office, and his Chief, who had a wooden-”
“-Indian out in front of his tobacconist shop in Boston, I daresay,” the woman interrupted breezily. “Nobody cares about any of that. If we’ve got a James Theodora at the firm here, I’ll have him call you. What’s the number there?”
Andrew nervously asked the warden, and then gave her the office telephone number. “It’s about my-”
“No use telling me, my good man. And what’s your first name? Don’t give me your last name.” Andrew told her. “Right, very well, Andrew. If we’ve got this fellow here, I’ll see he gets the message.” Abruptly Andrew was holding a dead telephone.
He hung it up, humbly thanked the warden, and left the office; but an hour later the warden had him summoned back from class. The telephone earpiece sat waiting for him like an upside-down black teacup on the desktop, with the warden staring as if these City boys must all be W.1 district plutocrats. Andrew picked it up and said hello.
“Andrew,” came a man’s impatient voice. “What’s the trouble?”
“Uh, is this-who I called-”
“Yes, this is who you called. The odor o’ sanctity should be detectable even over the line.”
“Oh, heh, yes. Well-no trouble, sir, it’s just that I want to-” Peripherally he saw the warden still staring at him. “It occurred to me that I don’t have all my personal records in my possession here at the school; you know, medical records, birth certificate…”
“You want to enlist, you bloody little fool, don’t you? No, put it out of your mind. The Crown will call for you in good season, and it’s not for you to…volunteer your own suggestions, your invaluable suggestions. Your mother once said that you owe obedience, do you recall that? ‘On our rolls’ cuts both ways. We also serve who only stand and wait, boy.”
Again Andrew was holding a dead telephone receiver. “Thank you, sir,” he told the warden as he set it back down on the table.
That had been on a Friday in early October of 1940. After his last class he had skipped dinner, packed a bag, and hiked to the railway station in town, determined to catch a train to London or to whatever station-Battersea? Wimbledon?-might be as close to the city as the railway line extended these days. He would tell the RAF recruiters that he was a London resident, which had been true until only a year ago, and that his birth certificate had been burned up in the bombing. They would surely take him-he had read that they were in desperate need of air crews.
But as he pushed open the heavy glass-paneled doors of the Haslemere railway station lobby, a moustached man in a tweed cap and heavy coat had stood up from a bench, smiling at him, and walked across the tiled floor to hook his strong left arm around Andrew’s shoulders.
“Andrew Hale,” the man had said fondly as he forced him to walk toward a row of empty benches at the far end of the lobby, “what have I got here?” His right hand was inside his coat, and Andrew saw the silvery point of a knife blade appear from behind the lapel and then withdraw. “Rhetorical question, lad. You’re on the strength, you know, on the rolls; and you were given an order, is what that was, today. Do you know what the penalty is for disobeying orders during wartime?”
Andrew was sure he had not yet irretrievably disobeyed the order; he was still in Haslemere. But he couldn’t help glancing into the man’s eyes, and the utter, almost vacant remoteness of the returned gaze was so at odds with the man’s affected cheer that Andrew felt diminished and sick. In the months to come, on crisp sunny days in the rural Surrey winter, he would sometimes doubt it; but on this gold-lit late autumn evening he had been convinced that the terrible finality of his own death was as casually possible, and could be achieved as indifferently, as the lighting of a cigarette or the clearing of a throat.
“I-hadn’t realized,” he said hoarsely, not looking at the man and trying to lob the words out into the lobby, as if they weren’t addressed specifically to him. “I won’t do it again.”
“You’ll do what you’re told?” The voice was jovial.
“Yes,” Andrew whispered.
“Then happily no exertions are called for. I’ve got a car in the yard-I’ll drive you back to your school. Come along.”
“No. Please.” Andrew’s forehead was sweaty, and his mouth was full of salty saliva. “Let me walk back.” How could the man imagine that Andrew would willingly sit in a car with him, or prolong this intolerable proximity for one moment more than he had to?
The man-the agent? the domestic assassin?-shrugged and strode away, and Andrew left the station and trudged back to the college. Generally he only suffered what he thought of as his “Arabian Nightmares” in the week after Christmas, but that night in a dream he was suspended over a moonlit ocean, watching, or perhaps even propelling, horizontal beams of light that moved across the dark face of the waters like spokes of a vast turning wheel; and when he convulsed awake before dawn, clammy with sweat, he was muttering feverishly in a language he did not understand. He had not been able to get back to sleep, and he’d kept remembering the voice, eleven years earlier, of the man who had turned out to be Theodora: Herod is no longer in the service of the Raj-and he’s doing any harrying of Nazrani children in Jidda nowadays, for an Arab king.