I’ve never known quite what to say when someone says I have a lovely family. It’s nothing I can take credit for, so saying thank you seems silly. But that’s what I say as I smile and slip the phone back inside my bag.
“Now, then,” Isabel says, and I sense she is at last shifting the focus from me. “Charles tells me this interview is more than just for an essay for a class.”
It takes me a second to make the connection that Charles is Professor Briswell. “Yes. The seventieth anniversary of VE Day is next month. The professor for one of my other classes has made an arrangement with a London newspaper. The five best term papers will be published in the paper the week of May eighth.”
I watch her face carefully to see whether this additional information is going to spell trouble for me.
“So what you write will be read widely?’
“Only if mine is one of those chosen. And I don’t know that it will be. Is that okay with you if it is?”
“You will write to win one of those spots, yes? You’ll be happy if yours is chosen.”
“Well, yes.”
“This other professor, he is friends with Charles? Can you count on him to judge your essay on the strength of your writing alone? Be a shame if he discounted yours because a fellow professor assisted in helping you secure an interview.”
I am still not sure whether it is helping me or hindering me that this paper I am to write might be published in a London paper. “I don’t know that they are friends. I suppose they are since they teach at the same college. I happened to mention to Professor Briswell that I was in a bind for another class. He was nice enough to want to help me.”
Isabel leans back and I can see she is satisfied with my answer. “What did Charles tell you about me?” she says.
I’d done all the research on the effect of the Blitz on London’s female population and had needed only the interview to write the paper and be done with it. When the woman I was to interview died, it was too late to change the subject matter without setting myself so far back that I would never finish the paper on time. I had mentioned as much to Professor Briswell, just in passing, and he had told me that an elderly friend in his family might be convinced to help me out. This person was one to decline interviews, though, even regarding her watercolors forwhich she was known throughout the southwest of England. He’d ask her anyway and tell her I was in a tight spot. But he said I should expect her to say no.
“He told me that you typically decline interviews,” I say.
She smiles. “That’s all?”
“He said you are known for your watercolors. I love your work, by the way.”
“Ah, yes. My Umbrella Girls.”
I turn my head in the direction of one of the more prominent paintings in the room: A young girl in a pink dress is walking through a field of glistening-wet daisies and holding the trademark red-and-white polka-dot umbrella. A brave sun is peeking through clouds that are plump with purpose. “Have you always painted girls with umbrellas?”
“No. Not always.” Her answer is swift and without hesitation. But the way she elongates the last word tells me there is more behind the answer. She doesn’t offer more even though I wait for it.
“Tell me, Kendra,” Isabel says after a pause. “What is it about the Blitz that you would like to know? I should think there are dozens of books out there. What information do you lack that you cannot read in a book?”
I fumble for an answer. “Well, uh, aside from that I’m required to interview someone, I think... I think information is only half of any story about people. Personal experience is the other part. I can’t ask a book what it was like to survive the bombs.”
Isabel cocks her head to one side. “Is that what you want to ask me? What it was like to have my home bombed?”
It occurs to me that I posed a rather elementaryquestion with surely an equally elementary answer. I am suddenly superbly underconfident about all my questions. I glance at the notepad in my lap and every bulleted sentence looks superficial to me.
What was it like in the shelter night after night?
Were you afraid?
Did you lose someone you loved or cared about?
Did you wonder if it would ever end?
“Are you going to turn that thing on?”
I snap my head up. Isabel is pointing to my little voice recorder on the coffee table. “Do you mind?”
“You may as well, seeing as you brought it.”
As I lean toward the table to press theRECORDbutton, the notepad falls off my lap and onto the thick Persian carpet at my feet.
