Dreamers of the Day (15 page)

His tone of voice made his meaning clear, for the child shot him a look of purest hatred, then aimed liquid eyes full of pleading at me.

Thompson trotted back to the car, glancing repeatedly over his shoulder at Churchill, who stood immobile, apparently absorbed in artistic rapture. The sergeant gave Davis orders to “haul out those damned boxes—pardon my French, miss.” This Davis did, muttering in the same Gallic dialect. “I’ll find something for the dog. Just give me a moment, miss,” Thompson pleaded, gathering the rest of the equipment. With that, he and Davis scuffed profanely through sand and scrubby weeds toward Mr. Churchill, who awaited delivery without moving a muscle.

Rosie looked close to prostration. After tapping my lips for silence, I motioned to the tea boy and held up a coin. In an instant, I was surrounded by a half-pint mob of children waving their pitiable wares and crying,
“Baksheesh! Baksheesh!”

Dropping the easel and a box of paints, Thompson sprinted back to run the children off. “Buggy little beggars,” he snarled. “I told you, miss! Don’t buy from them! If you give them anything at all, they’re all over you.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but Rosie’s thirsty! Look at her! And I hardly think lemonade is something dogs should—”

“There’s milk for the tea,” Thompson said, rummaging through a picnic basket in the trunk of the car. With a tense courtesy that said,
Please, don’t make my job any harder than it is,
he handed over a thermos. I opened it and poured a drink into the cap for Rosie, refusing to feel guilty.

Ten yards away, Davis was setting up a large umbrella. With his easel erected, Mr. Churchill had begun to work, and this was inevitably a matter of professional concern to his bodyguard, for any public painter will naturally attract a crowd. There is something magical about the process of turning blank canvas and blobs of color into something recognizable and pleasing. Presently, a group of blue-jacketed British airmen came along, off duty and nonchalant. When they stopped to watch, Sergeant Thompson relaxed slightly and returned to my side. “That lot can handle trouble if it’s offered. Mind if I smoke, miss?”

“No, but I mind if I’m lied to,” I said. “
See
the pyramids, indeed.”

“There they are,” Thompson replied, all innocence. He lit a cigarette, pulled in, and coughed. “I used to smoke a pipe, but—” He jerked his chin in the direction of his charge and mimicked Churchill’s stuffy sonorities. “‘Put that beastly thing out! If you must smoke, smoke a cigarette, and make it a Turkish one.’ Pretty rich, coming from him, with those endless foul cigars.”

Sitting with his back to the gawking airmen, Mr. Churchill dabbed at the canvas with a paintbrush in one hand and a stogie in the other. Smoke curled upward and began to pool beneath the green sunshade that rendered his own color bilious.

“Looks like an upholstered toad,” Thompson observed with deadpan venom, “slowly incinerating itself.”

The assembled airmen were no more respectful, delivering artistic appraisals in stage whispers that we could hear from where we stood. It wasn’t until one of them suggested that the gentleman might be better employed painting the outside of a blimp hangar that Mr. Churchill turned to look at him.

“Gawd! It’s Winston,” the young man cried.

Appalled by the discovery that they’d been “razzing” such an important personage, the airmen backed away. Churchill grinned and motioned them nearer, happily criticizing his own work, detailing what he thought was still missing, and set about trying to put it in.

For all the artistic paraphernalia Mr. Churchill had for himself, there was nowhere for us to sit, apart from the car, which would have roasted Rosie alive. Years of teaching had made me tolerant of standing, but for heat and flies, summer in Ohio couldn’t compete with a spring day in Egypt.

“How long do these painting sessions last?” I asked Thompson. He just rolled his eyes.

Churchill shouted another stream of peremptory orders, this time for Thompson and Davis to unpack the picnic hamper and share its delicacies out among the airmen. While the boys ate sandwiches and slurped tea, the great man painted and chatted about his plans to put additional air force installations in Egypt. If the Sudan and Mesopotamia could be policed from the air by flyboys like themselves, it would represent a great savings to the empire. “Trenchard agrees,” Churchill told them. “What do
you
think?”

The airmen were voluble on that topic and a variety of others. Mr. Churchill seemed particularly interested in their canteen and barracks. When a sergeant mentioned that the married quarters assigned to noncommissioned officers were abominable, Churchill promised to look into the problem personally.

“They don’t realize it, but they’re giving him a report on their morale and readiness for combat,” Thompson remarked, waving flies away from his face. “You’re watching His Majesty’s secretary of state for air at his best. Do anything for those boys, he would, but with his own staff?” Thompson shook his head. “Thoughtless, selfish, rude. That’s his class: casual tyranny. Treating the help like menials.”

“Including professionals who deserve better,” I surmised, scratching as discreetly as I could at an insect bite on my ankle.

“We’ve had a few short, sharp discussions,” Thompson admitted. “End of the day, I’ll be walking out the door to go home to my supper—he’ll announce we’re off to inspect some military base on the coast, or we’re going back to his London office. I’ve got kiddies, same as him, and a wife who expects to see her husband from time to time, same as his! I doubt he remembers that. Keeps insane hours and assumes I’ve nothing better to do than stand behind him and watch. But he’s mad for his airmen. Do anything for them, and they can tell. Good balance for their real commander. Trenchard. Block of ice, that one. ‘Boom’ Trenchard, they call him. ‘Bomb it!’ That’s his solution to everything. I’ve never known a man less able to reach people or be reached. Good match for the Sphinx, I’d say. Sorry, miss. I don’t usually blather.”

“I imagine you build up a conversational head of steam, listening to him all day.” I pressed the hankie against my neck and thought of murder. “Why don’t you ask for a transfer?”

“I tried, miss. This assignment was supposed to last two weeks. Marched into my chief’s office at the end of it and said, ‘Sir, I’d like very much to be relieved of this protection duty.’ Chief just laughed. ‘Well, it’s yours whether you want it or not,’ said he. ‘Winston’s asked for you to be with him permanently.’ It’s this or quit the Yard.”

“And you have a family to feed.”

“I help my brothers and sisters out, as well. I’m one of thirteen.”

“Gracious! Is your family Catholic, Sergeant Thompson?”

“Methodist.” He shrugged as if to say,
No excuses.

“Your mother must have had…great stamina.”

“I worked it out once. She was preggers for one hundred and seventeen months.” The sheer scale of the feat lingered while he tossed the cigarette butt into the sand and lit another. “I’ve seen my Kate go through it four times.” He blew smoke high into the air and vowed, “No more for us!”

His own story was a familiar one. Like many of my students, he’d had no difficulty learning whatever he was taught, but he’d worked from the age of nine, helping to provide a bare living for his family. Mornings, he told me, he’d run three miles from home to a draper’s, where he took down two dozen big wooden shutters and carried them to a storage cellar. He’d clean the windows, polish the brass, and then run to school. He’d return at lunchtime to deliver parcels for an hour, and return again late in the evening to haul the shutters out and replace them for the night.

“Heavy work, even for a big, strong boy,” I said. “How did you keep your eyes open in class?”

“I didn’t, often enough. And I was caned for it. Justice in this matter was not served, from my point of view. You cane your students, miss?”

If I had, I wouldn’t have admitted it to a giant with a long memory. “No,” I said honestly, “but my classroom was notoriously undisciplined. Cost me more than one reprimand from the principal.”

“Good job you didn’t,” Thompson said. “Caning eats at a boy.” He dug out another thermos and two small glasses. “Have some lemonade to drink, miss. This heat.”

I hesitated initially to drink all that he urged on me that afternoon, but the bone-dry air pulled moisture from me so quickly that I never felt the need to relieve myself. My skin, on the other hand, gradually took on the color of sunset, despite my best efforts to stay in Thompson’s considerable shadow. “So how did you get into police work?” I asked, to pass the time and because I really was interested.

“Suffragettes,” he said.

By 1913, British suffragettes had moved on from merely disrupting political meetings with acts of public disorder to staging full-scale riots and burning down churches. The shift in tactics horrified women like Clementine Churchill, who was a suffragist. I imagine everyone’s forgotten the difference between suffragists and suffragettes after all these years, but believe me, it was significant. Anyone who favored votes for women was a suffragist, whether male or female. Suffragettes were women only, radicals determined to wrest their rights from the patriarchy by any means necessary, including the occasional plot to push a government official or two under the odd locomotive.

In response to their campaign of violence, Scotland Yard was ordered to expand the Special Branch. Thompson was working in a factory that made shirts and collars at the time. “Wasn’t enough money to marry Kate on, though. Neighbor of hers said, ‘Big strong lad like you! You could join the police force.’ Took the written exam. Week later, I’m a detective, loitering in Kingsway, tailing suffragettes to their meetings. Arrested Emmeline Pankhurst once. Never knew a woman to speak so!”

“French?” I guessed.

He chuckled grimly. “But they weren’t all like her,” he said. “One lass—pretty little thing—she knew I was tailing her. When it started to rain, she waited for me, and we shared her umbrella the rest of the way.”

For the next hour, Thompson told story after story of the undercover work he’d done. Wartime London was a hotbed of anarchists, Irish rebels, and German spies, all of whom “had a go” at Mr. Churchill, who seemed to invite both hatred and attack.

“I never thought I’d be working for him,” Thompson said. He poured each of us another glass of lemonade, and when I had accepted mine, he asked out of the blue, “How long have you known Karl Weilbacher, miss?”

“We just met,” I said, surprised. “He had a dachshund just like Rosie when he was young. When I checked into the Continental, he—”

“Weilbacher’s not interested in you,” Thompson said bluntly. I must have looked stunned and confused. Thompson cleared his throat. “He’s the kind who is more likely to be interested in Colonel Lawrence, miss.”

To cover my surprise, I poured some more milk for Rosie, hoping it hadn’t gone bad in the heat.
I knew it all along,
I could hear Mumma say.
That German’s just using you to get near important people.

That’s not fair!
Mildred cried.
Colonel Lawrence is a celebrity. Everyone’s interested in him.

“Everyone’s interested in Colonel Lawrence,” I said, straightening. “He’s a celebrity!”

“Did Weilbacher tell you about Carchemish, miss?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, he did,” I said. “Karl is German,” I admitted freely. “I understand that he was your enemy. Well, the war is over.” And America never should have been involved with it anyway, I thought. Karl isn’t my enemy!

“Funny, though, wouldn’t you say, miss? A German agent who knew Lawrence before the war suddenly shows up now?” Thompson’s gaze was level. I looked toward the Sphinx, feigning indifference, but Thompson went on: “It may be a question of blackmail, miss. Breach of security.”

“Well! I’m sure I wouldn’t know anything about that!”

Thompson waited.

“Being suspicious is your job,” I pointed out.
And it’s none of his business,
Mildred whispered. “And in any case,” I said huffily, “my friendships are none of your business, Sergeant.”

“Just be careful,” Thompson said with such mildness that I was disarmed. “My job, miss. I don’t like to see people hurt.”

“Well, put your mind at rest. Herr Weilbacher has been a perfect gentleman.”

“I’m sure, miss.”

“Is that why I was invited to come along today? So you could quiz me about my social life?”

Thompson’s eyes were on his boss, who was shouting again. “No, miss,” said the sergeant with a sigh. “You were invited because that man cannot stand to be without an audience for more than ten minutes, and he knows I’ve stopped listening. You’ll excuse me? Duty bellows.”

Off he went, leaving me alone with my thoughts and my discomfort. Without Thompson’s conversation, there was nothing to distract me from the accumulating facts: the sun felt like an open flame against my face; my feet ached; the biting insects of the Nile Valley were many and various. Rosie began to scratch as well. Worried about fleas, and scorpions, I toppled decisively into a foul mood.

“Rosie,” I said, “what on earth are we doing out here?”

Glaring across the scrubby sand, I rehearsed what I would say: Mr. Churchill, I am neither a paid member of your staff nor an adoring wife hanging on your every word. I am not a colonial subject, and I am not a British airman on duty, and I am not charmed by you, your slutty mother, or your theories on painting. I prefer watercolors, which require subtle skill, and I have had just about enough of standing out here in the broiling sun while you talk yourself blue, thanks all the same!

“Mr. Churchill!” I called loudly. “I—I’m afraid I may miss a dinner engagement. Will we be leaving soon?”

There was no response and I grew angrier by the moment at him, at the bugs, and at my own cravenly courteous white lie. Just as I was imagining the satisfaction of gaining his attention by dumping half a thermos of heat-curdled milk on his head, His Majesty’s secretary for the colonies and air stood to announce that the light no longer served his artistic purposes.