“Yes, please,” I said. “And… would it be all right with you if you called me Lori? Bill’s father is the only person in the world who calls me Miss Shepherd.”
“Of course.” Miss Kingsley summoned a porter to carry my bags and led the way, explaining that she would be at my disposal while I was in London. If I had any questions, problems, or special requests, I should feel free to contact her. She couldn’t have been friendlier, but I found myself restraining the urge to curtsy when she left.
The suite consisted of a sitting room, bathroom, and bedroom, with windows that opened on to a courtyard garden. It was charming, but I was pooped. After a brief tour, I made a beeline for the bedroom, peeled off my clothes, dumped them in a heap on the floor, and fell into bed. The last thing that passed through my mind was the memory of my mother’s voice telling me that the best way to deal with jet lag was to fight it. “Good idea, Mom,” I murmured. Then I faded into sleep.
I awoke at three in the morning, of course, wide-awake and raring to go. Miss Kingsley, or some of her elves, had visited the room while I slept. The heap of clothes had vanished and a fluffy white robe had been placed on a chair near the bed. I slipped it on and noticed that my bags had been unpacked and my gear stowed in the wardrobe.
Wandering into the sitting room, I saw a tray of sandwiches on the table near the windows. Beside it was a lovely, floral-patterned tea service, complete with an electric kettle. And next to that was a guidebook, several London maps, and the current issue of Time Out. “Good grief,” I muttered. “They could have ridden the Horse Guard through here and I wouldn’t have noticed.”
I thumbed through the guidebook and saw that someone had marked it in red ink. A handwritten list, keyed to the page numbers in the book, had been taped to the inside of the front cover. The list had been written on a page torn from a small notebook. Just like Bill’s.
*
He was waiting in the lobby at ten o’clock, along with Miss Kingsley and a small, white-haired man in a dark blue uniform, whom Bill introduced as Paul.
“Paul will be our driver while we’re in London,” Bill explained, “and I can testify that he knows the city inside out.”
“That’s very kind of you, sir,” said Paul. “And you, miss—young Mr. Willis here tells me that you’d like to see places having to do with the Second World War. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Did you know that you’re standing in one?”
“The Flamborough?” I looked around the lobby with renewed interest.
“Paul is quite right,” said Miss Kingsley. “The Flamborough was a famous watering hole in those days, or so I’ve been told. The young airmen thought of it as their unofficial headquarters. They used to come here to relax, to have a drink, to dance with their wives and girlfriends—”
“They came here to gossip,” Paul put in with an authoritative nod. “Talked like there was no tomorrow, they did, miss, bragging and poking fun at one another. If there was any news to spread, it came to the Flamborough first. The Flamborough Telegraph, they used to call it.”
“Please, come with me,” said Miss Kingsley. “I think you might find this interesting.”
She took us into the hotel lounge, a large, rectangular room with wine-red banquettes along the walls and a small dance floor. The focal point was a glorious traditional English bar, with mahogany framework that went right up to the ceiling. The bar was ornamented from top to bottom with carved scrollwork and brass fixtures, and an oval mirror etched with fruit and flowers stretched across the back of it. The room was dim and silent, not yet open for business.
“The Flamborough was fortunate to escape the Blitz,” Miss Kingsley said, “and the nature of our clientele precludes extensive renovations. The room appears now very much as it did during the war. Here, this is what I wished to show you.”
The walls at the far end of the room were hung with photographs. They were snapshots rather than professional portraits; framed, black-and-white pictures of men in uniform or in flying gear, standing beside their aircraft or sitting at camp tables, grinning.
“They’re so young,” I said, looking from face to face.
“And they stayed that way,” said Paul.
Miss Kingsley frowned slightly at him, then turned to me. “These are the boys who didn’t come back,” she explained. “Their comrades put the pictures here, in tribute. We keep them here, to remember.”
The faces of those boys remained with me throughout my time in London. My mother had always spoken of the war as a great adventure, a time of unforgettable sights and sounds, of strong friendships quickly made. She had never mentioned the friendships that had been even more quickly ended.