“I—he didn’t tell me about that,” Mab jerked.
Mr. Graham changed tack. “I don’t mean to pry, Mrs. Gray. It’s merely that you were Francis Gray’s wife—his publishers and readers can tell me about the poetry, but you can tell me about the man. A personal anecdote, perhaps?” Personal. Suddenly Mab couldn’t breathe. This wasn’t like the hysteria that had gripped her during her bombe demonstration. This was rage and despair, two emotions flaming up in red and black. Turning, she seized the surprised journalist by the sleeve. “I need a drink.” He bought her a gin at the nearest pub, not batting an eye as she slammed it back. The perfect place, dark and grimy, full of drinkers who didn’t want to be bothered. No one glanced over as the choked words began pouring out of Mab. “You want a personal anecdote, Mr. Graham?” She took her second drink, turning to the journalist. “The truth is, I don’t have any. Francis Gray was the best man I have ever known, and I was his wife less than one year. You know how many times we saw each other? Fourteen. He was always traveling, and I had a job we agreed was important, so we did our best. We had a forty-eight-hour wedding-and-honeymoon. We had two weekends in the Lake District. We had the odd meal in a railway café. We made love a total of fifteen times.” She didn’t care if she was being indecent. She didn’t care she was saying it to a journalist. She had to say it to someone, after thinking it for so many nights, or she would burst. Ian Graham listened without interrupting, and that was all that mattered. “We loved each other by proxy, Mr. Graham. He loved me through a girl he saw once in Paris in 1918, and I loved him through his letters, but we hardly spent any time together. I don’t have any personal anecdotes about my husband. We didn’t have time to create any.” Her voice cracked. She bolted half the gin. “I know he liked curry and dawn walks. I know he hated his own poetry and never slept the night through, because of the things he saw in the trenches. But I didn’t know him. You have to live with someone to know them. I’ve lived with my billet-mates for three and a half years; I know them inside and out. I loved Francis Gray, and to me he was perfect, and that’s proof I didn’t know him very well at all. I never got to realize all the ways he wasn’t perfect. I didn’t get to reach the point where the song he whistled while shaving drove me mad or learn how rainy days made him short tempered. He never got to realize that I’m not some great wartime love, just a shallow cow who lives for pretty shoes and library novels. We never got to quarrel over the milk bill or whether to buy strawberry jam or marmalade . . .” It was the thing that killed Mab every night. When she grieved Lucy, she grieved for the woman her daughter would never become—the young girl taking her exams, the coltish student heading off to university—but at least she had known the six-year-old Lucy of November 1942 to her very bones. So much of Francis had still been an unmapped continent, a man she was only beginning to truly know. And he didn’t know me, she thought, or he wouldn’t have loved me the way he did. He would have realized I was a social-climbing tart who would marry a good man like him as a ticket up the ladder. He would have realized he deserved better than me. “I don’t have one single photograph of the two of us together.” Mab stared into her glass. “Not one. We couldn’t get a camera on our wedding day, it was short notice, and after that we were too busy cramming in time together to pose for a flash. An entire marriage gone, without one picture to commemorate it.” She looked up at the journalist’s grave face. “There’s something titillating for your story,” she said, mocking. “Francis Gray’s drunken Shoreditch widow, slopping gin all over you in a pub. I don’t care if you print it. I don’t care what you say about me—” “I’m a journalist, not a monster,” said Ian Graham. “—but I do care what you say about Francis. Do justice to him. He was a good poet and a great man.” She finished her gin in a gulp. “Is there anything I can do to help?” the journalist asked, his voice quiet. Mab turned sharply, nearly sliding off her stool. He caught her hand, steadying her, and Mab’s skin prickled. Oh, God, how she missed Francis’s hands. His fingers through hers, his palm on her waist. So much of her numbness had burned away in sick bay—at night, she now lay awake holding herself in her own arms, trying to pretend they were Francis’s arms, longing to be held again. Stay with me, she started to say. The impulse went through her in a bolt of desperation: take this man she didn’t know up to some rented room and let him do anything he wanted, as long as she could keep her eyes shut and pretend he was Francis. Then she shoved that away, so sick with shame she almost vomited. Ian Graham got a glass of water and lemon from the barman and pushed it toward her. “Drink that down.” He waited while she drank, then rose. “I have what I need. May I take you to catch your train, Mrs. Gray?” “I’m meeting a friend—we’re returning to Bucks together.” He hesitated, clearly not wanting to leave her alone, but Mab put out her hand. “Goodbye, Mr. Graham. I look forward to reading your piece.” He tipped his hat and departed. She wondered where he’d be sent next, what blood-laced beach or bombed-out town he’d report on, then she ordered another gin and thought only about Francis and Lucy. Three drinks later, she was staggering. She nearly missed the doctor’s office when she went back to find it, and Beth almost had to carry her home.