“Corporal Leonard Bauer. Lon Sue, 1968. Dead.” Nick looked up, startled. He had been to Lon Sue, before he’d been transferred back from the field, a semicircle of huts and scratching chickens steaming in a hot clearing. But who was Bauer? There’d been a little boy, killed when the bomb he’d been hiding–for whom?–went off, taking a few soldiers with him. Maybe Bauer. Afterward they had shot the parents, who never said a word, grateful perhaps not to have to live through the grieving. The huts were torched. Maybe Bauer had been one of these, shooting flames and yelling, hit later by a sniper. Maybe they were honoring a monster. And maybe he hadn’t been there at all, just a jungle casualty, and someone in the office had looked at a map and picked a place of death for his tag. Now he was another piece of evidence, a name for the Fulbright scholars and draft evaders and movie stars to drop in a box as the line moved on. Who could sort it out? Larry was on his way to Paris to negotiate, which made him the enemy to Miss Redgrave’s friend. And maybe he was.

“You go first,” the girl said, and he saw that they were coming up to the microphones, a few steps above the young faces and careful policemen. He must have been drifting again, because she was looking at him curiously, as if she were trying to read his thoughts. Odd, the dark eyes in the blond face, unless there were hints of green that only showed in the light. He tilted his head a little to see and suddenly wished they could go for a walk in the park, away from the confusion and mixed motives of a rally that wouldn’t matter anyway. A blanket on Hampstead Heath, an afternoon of absolute nothing. Talking idly. The image was so real that he wanted to laugh, surprised to be thinking in song lyrics. Instead he nodded, back in the raw, damp morning, and felt guilty. He was here for the names. He read his card and stepped away from the microphone.

“Private Leonard Prochazka. Hue, 1968. Dead.” She read the name perfectly, so that he wondered whether she had needed his help at all. Or had that been playing up too?

The steady line of readers coming down the steps pushed him farther back into the formless crowd, and for a minute he thought he’d lost her. Then he saw her craning her head near the curb, obviously looking for him, and made his way over.

“Spoken like a native,” he said easily.

“Thanks.”

“Pani Prochazkova would be pleased,” he said, testing her, but her face was blank. “His mother,” he explained.

“Oh.” She looked around at the crowd. “Now what happens?”

“Speeches.”

“Do you want to get some coffee?”

“I can’t. Really. I’m meeting somebody.” He fingered his tie. “Remember?”

“One tie. One meal.” She nodded. “Look, it’s not what you think,” she said, suddenly hesitant.

“It’s not?”

She met his look, debating, then gave it up. “Screw it,” she said. “As if you’d believe me now anyway. Look, I didn’t do this right. I just wanted to see—” She stopped. “One of my bright ideas. Not exactly the best place, though, was it?” she said, extending her hand toward the steps, where the names were still being read. “You probably think–well, I know what you think.”

“Take it easy,” he said, smiling. “Want to start this over?”

She smiled. “I thought you had to go.”

“I do. Can I call you?”

“I don’t want you to think–oh, what’s the difference? You probably wouldn’t call otherwise. Anyway, we can’t talk here.”

He watched her, intrigued, feeling that he was eavesdropping on a conversation she was having with herself. “So can I call you?”

She looked at him again, the same appraising once-over. “Flaxman, double-oh two nine,” she said carefully. “Better write it down.”

“I’ll say it three times. Then it’s mine for life.”

But this seemed to throw her.

“Like the game,” he said. “You know, for new vocabulary words.”

“Does that really work?” she said, genuinely curious.

“Usually. Flaxman, double-oh two nine,” he repeated. “Chisholm, with an l.”

She smiled at him. “Molly. Two l’s,” she said, extending her hand to shake his, just introduced.

“And I’m Nick.” He held her hand for a moment. “I’ll call,” he said, wondering if he would.

He watched her cape as she worked her way through the crowd. When she turned to look back, he felt caught and she laughed at his expression, then wiggled her fingers in a wave and was gone.

“What was that about?” he said to Henry, still staring after her.

“I don’t know. She asked if you were around.”

“Really? By name?” Nick said, puzzled again.

Henry grinned. “Maybe you were recommended. They talk, you know.”

He looked for the cape, but it had disappeared, taking the answer with it. A girl at a rally. He grinned back. “Yeah, right,” he said, the locker-room answer Henry expected. If he really wanted to know, all he had to do was call.

“I told you. Demonstrations are the best,” Henry said.

Nick listened to a few of the speeches. Wiseman, the historian, who had served Churchill in the great days, spoke of the folly of imperial adventures. Then an expatriate writer spoke on the criminality of the bombing, the tear in the social fabric at home. Nobody talked about the Lon Sue boy’s parents, bowing their heads to the inevitable. But what was there to say to that? Nobody here had pulled the trigger. They weren’t the problem. They were the good guys, even Henry, who only pretended to be frivolous, and Annie, in her white makeup and Twiggy eye shadow, listening hard. It was easy to dismiss them and their tie-dyed politics, but what about the others, who used the dead soldiers to justify sending more? Because otherwise what had been the point? Private Bauer had to be redeemed. Nick had the same sense of futile dislocation he’d felt at the other rallies. They were here to talk to themselves, but the war had taken on a momentum of its own, killing everything. Who cared why it was crazy if it couldn’t be stopped? As if he was doing anything about it either, dropping a name in a box.

Nick slipped away to the edge of the crowd, not even bothering to say goodbye. There was nothing worth hearing, and he was already late. He headed toward the Brook Street end of the square, then turned right, down past the bright flags on the Connaught to Mount Street, past the antique shops and the smart butcher where dressed fowl hung in the window like pieces of rare furniture. The crowd had been yelling back responses to one of the speakers, but even that had disappeared by the time he got to Berkeley Square, drowned out by the traffic zipping around the auto showrooms and the old plane trees that had survived the blitz.

It was a different London here, window boxes and polished brass, gleaming with privilege. With each block he felt he was leaving his own life for the smooth deep pile of his mother’s world, where every step was cushioned and even the light was soft, filtered through trees in the park. In New York her windows looked out over the reservoir, and here, he suspected, she would be high over Green Park, exchanging one eyrie for another without bothering to come down to earth.

When he reached the Ritz he hesitated, reluctant to go in, and instead walked over to the park to have a cigarette. They’d still be groggy from a jet-lag nap, grateful for the delay. But Larry never napped. It was Nick who wanted the few minutes, to clear his head.

Aside from a few dog-walkers, he had the park to himself. He sat looking at the canvas lawn chairs scattered on the grass, hoping for sun, then glanced toward the hotel windows. Of course they’d be up. What did they talk about? After all these years, their life was still a mystery to him. He knew he should be grateful. Larry had rescued his mother from the bad time when she sleepwalked through the days and had made her happy. But she’d become someone else. There were moments still when she met Nick’s eyes and he felt they were back in their old life, but then the phone would ring or the flowers would arrive and she would turn away, literally facing forward as if, like Lot’s wife, the past would kill, turn her into a pillar of salt. Instead she seemed to spin in a circle of dinners and fittings and weekends and museum committees until, exhausted, she was too tired to think of anything else.