16, Woburn Mansions had not been hit, although the limestone facade had been darkened by the furious fires that had raged down the street on both sides; and there was plywood nailed over what once had been beveled glass windows in the entrance door.
But inside, it was much as it had always been, a quietly elegant building holding five large, floor-size apartments. The basement apartment and the one on the top floor were smaller than the three main apartments, but they all had large, high-ceilinged rooms and central heating, which was an uncommon luxury.
The first-floor flat, which would have been the second-floor flat in America, was occupied by Miss Ann Chambers. Technically, it was assigned to the Chambers News Service and intended to house all Chambers News Service female employees in London. The SHAEP billeting officer had been informed that the Chambers News Service ultimately planned to have six to eight female employees with correspondent status stationed in London. That would effectively fill the three bedrooms with the regulation two officer-equivalent persons per room.
The SHAEF billeting officer had not been told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, which was that the Chambers News Service had no plans at all to station any additional female correspondents in London. Brandon Chambers, Chairman of the Board of the Chambers Publishing Company, did not believe that women should go to war as correspondents or anything else. The rule was bent only in the case of his daughter, and that was not really nepotism. Rather, Brandon Chambers had believed his daughter when she told him that either he send her to London as a war correspondent, or she would go to work for Gardiner Cowles–the publisher of, among other things, Look magazine–with whom he had carried on a running feud for twenty years, and who -was just the kind of a sonofabitch to give Ann a job just because he knew it would annoy her father.
Ann Chambers had had the London bureau chief tell the billeting officer the story of the five to seven soon-to-arrive female accredited correspondents not because she was the spoiled daughter of a very rich man who considered herself entitled to private quarters (in fact, the other two bedrooms were more often than not occupied by room less journalists of both sexes), but because Ann intended to share her own bed, whenever possible, with Richard Canidy, and she didn’t want anybody around when that might happen.
If she had a permanent roommate, or roommates, it would not have been possible, for example, to do what she and Richard Canidy were doing now, which was recovering from an enthusiastic, wholly satisfying roll in the hay (actually a roll on a dozen large pillows covered with Chinese silk) at quarter to six in the evening before the fireplace in the sitting room.
“I don’t suppose,” Ann said, her face against his chest, “that I will have to ask if you have been a good boy while I was gone, will I?”
“If you don’t ask, I won’t have to lie about it,” Canidy said.
“You bastard!” she said, and jerked a hair from his chest.
“Two can play at that game,” he warned.
“And you would, too,” she said, shifting her midsection to avoid his searching hand. She failed.
“You’ve heard the expression ‘by the short hairs’?” he asked.
“Let go,” she said.
“I’ll be good.”
“Who wants good?” he asked.
“Wicked?” she asked.
“You got it,” he said, and let her go.
She got to her feet and walked out of the room, with an exaggerated shake of her tail. In a moment she was back. She tossed him a dressing gown and shrugged into a sheepskin high-altitude flyer’s jacket. It was far too large for her, but it was warm.
“You look like you should be painted on the fuselage of a B-17,” Canidy said. ‘”Dick’s Delight’ or something like that.”
“Is that a compliment or a complaint?” she asked.
“Compliment,” he said.
“You like me to wear it because when I bend over you can see my fanny,” she said.
“And everything else,” he said.
“That’s why you wear it, to excite me.”