Tea at the Lyons Corner House

The Lyons Corner House did have sugar, two grains of it, ceremonially, and a window taped against blast in a pattern of diamonds, and a waitress who called them both *love* with the flat tenderness the city had developed for everyone in it. They talked for two hours. Iris had meant to stay for ten minutes. The remarkable thing — the thing she turned over afterwards, walking back through the dark to the bus — was how much could be said by two people who were each forbidden to say what they did. They never once discussed their work. They could not. And so they discussed everything else, and the everything else turned out to be enormous. Daniel Roth had been born in Vienna and brought to London as a boy in 1934, when his father, a printer, had read the politics correctly some years before it became fashionable to do so. He had a sister still in England and an aunt who was simply *not spoken of now*, and he said that last part lightly, the way the city had taught everyone to set down their unbearable things lightly, and Iris did not probe, because she knew the weight under a light voice when she heard it. She told him about Cornwall, where she had grown up — the real Cornwall, the cliffs and the chapel and the particular green of the sea before rain — and she found she could give him all of that freely, because her childhood was not classified. It was a strange and lovely discovery. There was a whole country of herself she was still allowed to hand to another person. She had begun to think the wall ran through everything. It did not. It ran through the present tense only. The past was still hers to give. "You have a way of stopping," Daniel said, near the end of the second hour, "when a sentence gets close to now. I've been watching it. You'll be telling me about Cornwall and you're entirely there, and then I ask what brought you to London and you — " he made a small gesture, a shutter closing — "go behind glass." Iris looked at her cooling tea. She could lie. She had a good lie ready, polished by fourteen months of use: the ministry, the tinned goods, the tedium of forms. It would close the subject. It always closed the subject. "I do go behind glass," she said instead. "I'm sorry. It isn't you. There is a thing I am not permitted to discuss — not allowed to, Daniel, by a document I signed — and the difficulty is that it is not a small corner of my life. It is most of my waking hours. So when you ask me what I do, you are asking me the one question I have promised the King I will not answer, and I have not yet learned how to refuse it without seeming to refuse *you*." She had not meant to say so much. She watched it land, and braced. But Daniel Roth only sat back, and looked at her with that thorough photographer's attention, and then he smiled the rueful smile again, the recognising one. "Iris," he said — it was the first time he had used her Christian name, and she noticed, and he noticed her notice — "I have spent two years in a building where my best work is locked in a censor's drawer. I have an aunt I cannot speak of and a homeland I cannot go back to. I am the last man in England who will think less of you for having a locked room. We all have the locked room now. The whole city is locked rooms." He turned his cup a quarter-turn on its saucer, an unconscious tidy gesture she would come to know very well. "Here is what I propose. We do not ask each other the now questions. Not the work, not the war. We meet, when the raids and the shifts allow it, and we give each other only the parts that aren't behind glass — Cornwall, and Vienna, and what we'd eat if there were anything to eat. It won't be the whole of either of us. But Iris, in this city, in this year — a person who knows even half of you, freely and gladly, and never once makes you lie. That is not a small thing. I think it might be the largest thing on offer." Outside, somewhere south of the river, the sirens began their slow climbing wail, and the waitress called *down to the shelter, loves, no rush*, and Iris Penhale looked across a taped window at a man she had known for two hours, and understood that she had just been offered, in the most roundabout way imaginable, the beginning of something. "Half of me," she said. "Freely and gladly." "And never a lie," said Daniel. "Only the dark we agree to keep." It was, Iris would think later, going down into the shelter with his hand briefly at her elbow, the strangest courtship in London. It was conducted entirely in the parts of two people that the war had not yet classified. And it was, against every probability, real.