The Gown(90)

“Oui, oui. Et maintenant, je veux que tu ailles d?ner avec Heather. Ton intelligence va l’épater—” Yes, yes. Now go and take Heather to dinner. Wow her with your intelligence—

“?a suffit, Mimi—” Enough, Mimi—

“—et ton charme.” —and your charm.

“Tu sais que je t’aime. Même si tu me gênes devant Heather.” You know I love you. Even though you’re embarrassing me in front of Heather.

Heather tried not to listen, but they weren’t lowering their voices, and short of walking out the door or putting her fingers in her ears there wasn’t much she could do. All the same, she had to tell him that she’d heard and understood. She waited until they were outside and walking up the hill to the Tube station, having agreed on the way downstairs that a cab would take forever that late in the afternoon.

“I guess I should tell you that my stereotypical Canadian-ness extends to speaking French. I’d have said something, but I didn’t want to intrude.”

“You weren’t intruding. I just hope you didn’t mind being talked about as if you weren’t there. Normally I’d have switched to English, but when she gets tired she prefers French.”

“I didn’t mind at all. And I do find you charming and intelligent. Just so you know.”

“I’ll file that away for future reference. Before we go much farther, though, where would you like to eat? Are you in the mood for anything in particular?”

“Anything at all.”

“I’ve a place in mind. Italian food, hasn’t changed in years, and not so very far from your hotel.”

It was hard to talk much on the Tube, which was packed tight for rush hour. Daniel took hold of her hand as he led them from one train to another, and in far less time than she’d have thought possible they were emerging into the early evening sunshine.

“Where are we?” she asked, blinking in the golden light.

“A bit south of Clerkenwell. That’s where we’ll find the Victory Café.”

Had Heather been on her own, she’d never have found the restaurant; and had she happened to walk by, she’d probably have dismissed it out of hand. The sign was faded and hard to read, the front window was steamy and disguised the interior, and the menu, posted outside, was handwritten and of a haiku-like simplicity. But the smells drifting out the door were divine.

Daniel ushered them inside and, waving a hello to someone at the back, led them to the only unoccupied table.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“It’s perfect. Much more my kind of place than one of those trendy fusion spots where everything is layered in little piles, and they put a dot of foam on the plate and insist it’s one of the vegetables.”

“I’d never dream of doing such a thing to you,” he said, grinning. “Now let’s decide on what we’re eating. I’m starving.”

It wasn’t a first date, of course it wasn’t, but it felt like one, and Heather’s nerves insisted on thrumming with excitement the whole time they were ordering their meal and deciding on a bottle of wine. The impulse only deepened when he rolled back his sleeves and she caught sight of the tattoo on his wrist.

“When I first saw it, I thought you’d written a note to yourself,” she said. “Your to-do list, maybe.”

“Milk, eggs, bread? There’s an idea.”

He flattened his arm upon the table so she could see the lines of script that ran parallel to the tendons of his inner wrist.

I would have poured my spirit without stint.

But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.

Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

“It’s familiar, somehow . . .”

“Wilfred Owen. From one of his long poems. ‘Strange Meeting.’ You might have read it in school.”

“Is that your handwriting?”

He shook his head. “Owen’s. Taken from the manuscript of the poem. Mine is illegible.”

“I like it,” she said. “You don’t regret it, do you?”

“Not precisely. The sentiment is the same, but I doubt I’d choose to immortalize it in the same way today. I was nineteen when I got it, which is about the same age as many of my students.”

“What do they think of it?”

“When they notice they’re usually gobsmacked. At least one per term is brave enough to ask me about it.”

“What do you say?”

“I tell them my grandmother’s family had tattoos forced upon them before they were murdered at Auschwitz, but I was able to choose the one I wear. I tell them it reminds me why I teach the history of the world wars.”

“Did you always want to be a history professor?” she asked.

“Not at first. I wanted to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps. He was a journalist, a rather famous one, at least in this country, and I idolized him.”

“What changed your mind?”

“The summer I was eighteen, just before I went up to Oxford, he took me out to lunch, and at some point we began to talk about what I’d been studying and what interested me and so forth. The same conversation we’d been having for years, but that day it felt rather more serious. More momentous, I suppose. He told me that he’d read history as an undergraduate, and while he’d been very happy with the direction his professional life had taken, he did regret that he hadn’t become a historian. He felt it would have helped him to better understand the war he had lived through and written about. And then he died a few weeks later, and if there’d been room on my arms I’d have tattoos of every word he said that day.”