APRIL 1952

She stepped off the bus and looked around. Bank. The beating heart of the City, of the Empire, if not the world. Not much had changed since her day. The Bank of England loomed like the prow of a vast stone battleship rammed into the end of Threadneedle Street. The Greek portico of The Royal Exchange soared above her and its shadow enveloped her. It was all familiar, but it did not comfort her. These stone, soot-stained temples to money and trade loomed, she felt, like ancient sarsen stones around the site of a ritual sacrifice and she the lamb to the slaughter. She no longer belonged here.

She clasped her bag to her stomach, feeling the hard edges of the photograph frame through the worn brown leather. Another bus drew up right behind hers. It was almost empty and, for a moment, she thought she should step onto it and let it take her away from here, from her past. She should have.

The bus moved off before she had a chance to change her mind. Just up the road, she could see the doors to her destination, above them the windows of the office where both her past and her future lay.

Apart from the photograph she carried in her handbag and the devastation and death it would bring, there was nothing remarkable about Dorothy Gordon and, as she walked up Cornhill, no one paid her any attention. Just another middle-aged woman. Every step towards the bank seemed to last a lifetime. Her lifetime. Happiness, loneliness, sadness and lost opportunity. She paused at the foot of the three stone steps up to the double glass doors and read the brass name plate beside them. Buchanan Brown. Est. 1767. Almost 200 years of history. Dorothy was about to add another chapter.

The lobby was as she remembered. Daylight from the ornate cupola four stories above reflected dully on the mahogany-panelled walls. Her footsteps clacked across the marble floor to the desk at the foot of the sweeping staircase. The place reeked of history, wealth and privilege. It fuelled her apprehension. The porter raised his eyebrows. He didn’t need to speak. She knew she wasn’t the sort of person to patronise this particular bank. Any woman who worked there used the side door, just like she used to.

“I would like to see Mr Buchanan, Andrew Buchanan.” He smiled. Politely, tolerantly, not a smile of welcome.

“Do you have an appointment, Madam?”
“No, but ...”
“I’m sorry, but Mr Buchanan is very busy ...”
“Just tell him that Dorothy Gordon, no, I mean Dorothy Stride would like to see him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Just tell him.” The force of her demand surprised her. She wasn’t this sort of person at all. “I’ll wait.” She sat down on the bench by the desk, her handbag firmly on her lap. “I’ll wait.”

DOROTHY

It doesn’t take long; the secretary comes for me within five minutes. I’m perched on the edge of a chair in her office – his anteroom. Nothing’s changed. It’s all stuck in the past – where I should be perhaps. The secretary clicks away at her typewriter, banging back the carriage return with exaggerated efficiency. She’s watching me though and I can feel her hostility pulsing across the room. I pick up my bag and rise. I’m going. I can’t face it. It was a mistake.

She stops typing and raises her eyes as if to say, “Oh yes. What now?”

But before I can speak, the inner door opens. And there he is. We look at each other. My heart starts to hammer, my throat fills with saliva, but I can’t seem to swallow. He’s so pale, washed out; his hair, once thick and blond, now the colour of old hay. His eyes are still the wonderful pale blue, like the reflection of the summer sky in a calm sea, but the eyelids droop like a dog’s and it makes him look sad.

“Hello.” I never called him Andrew. It was “Sir,” of course, at work. Otherwise we were always alone.

“This is a surprise.”
I smile. He frowns. “It’s been a long time,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Er, come in.” He stands aside. Tentatively I let go of the back of the chair which I now realise I have been gripping fiercely. I’m not sure that my legs will hold me, let alone propel me into his office. They do. I pass close to him. He still smells the same – it’s the stuff he puts on his hair to smooth it down. The room smells the same too. Furniture polish, old paper, slightly dusty. We haven’t shaken hands, haven’t touched. I sit in the upright chair in front of his huge partners desk. The last time I was in this room I was on the desk. And so was he. And we certainly touched then. He smiles and I see anguish in his eyes which, even after all these years, tugs at my heart and makes me lean imperceptibly towards him.

“What a surprise,” he says again.

I’ve rehearsed this scene for years. Twenty-one to be exact. I take a deep breath.

Silence descends on his fine office, panelled in old, mellow, honey-coloured pine. A fly is buzzing at the window, the clock ticks on the mantlepiece. Dust swirls in the shaft of sunlight streaming through the window behind him. I swallow. Andrew clearly doesn’t want to sit in his chair across the desk, but there is no chair beside mine. He hovers. I look up at him. He raises his eyebrows – they are much bushier now, I notice – and then he smiles. He’s wary of course. What the hell am I doing here, he’s thinking, but his smile is genuine. I can see that there’s a dreadful vulnerability there.

“Gosh,” he says at last. “You haven’t changed.”

He has. I am looking at a shell. The spontaneity, the innocence, that wonderful exuberance of youth have all gone and it seems that nothing has replaced it.  “Oh yes I have,” I hear myself talking, “very much so.” All the while thinking that maybe I haven’t changed at all.

My eye falls on the two photographs in matching silver frames, that rest on the desktop. A stiff studio portrait of a sophisticated young woman, an engagement photograph perhaps. She is wearing a black sleeveless dress and a single strand of pearls around her long and elegant neck. She is very beautiful.

“My wife, Jane.” I catch the warning in his voice. He turns the other frame around to show me a young girl, perhaps eighteen, sitting on some stone steps, her arm around a black labrador. “And this is Susan.” He smiles as he says her name. She’s fair haired and freckled and her curls are clearly natural. She’s looking straight at the camera and laughing. “She’s my daughter.”

“Very pretty.”
“Yes she is,” he replies. “She’s lovely.”
And now we pause. I know it’s up to me to speak.

The clock ticks on; a telephone rings somewhere in the background. This is a scene I have envisioned on countless sleepless night. I realise too late that it has become so much part of me that I don’t want to let it go. I don’t know where to start. Instead, I open my handbag, pull out the photograph in its simple wooden frame and hand it to him. The tension drops away from me like melting snow sliding off a warming roof. He takes the photo with a slight frown on his face. He sees a black-and-white photo of a young man in army uniform. He studies it for a few seconds. He raises his eyebrows, but not his head and looks at me for a moment, his face impassive. I am calm, though my heart is beating fast; I am calm. We look at each other for a long minute. I think I nod slightly. What little colour there was drains from his face. He turns and walks over to the window and stands there motionless, staring out onto the street below.