Historical Interlude : In the Shadow of the Flag

Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, London. The home-from-home of America in England. The Embassy of the United States of America to the Court of Saint James.

Grosvenor Square, historically, has always seen a powerful American presence since John Adams established the first American mission to the Court of Saint James in 1785. While the Second World War raged in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower established a military headquarters at 20 Grosvenor Square, and during this time the Square was nicknamed Eisenhower Platz. Even today, the United States Navy continues to use this same building as its command center for Europe and West Africa.

The Square itself is much like any other in London – iron-fenced, grass-plated, with pathways of old stone. It falls under the jurisdiction of the Royal Parks, and a long set of bylaws and regulations is posted at the main entrance on the north-western corner. The houses around the Square – as is common for much of London – are not as old as they might appear; most were demolished in the early twentieth century and rebuilt as neo-Georgian flats.

On the west side of the Square the ugly gray bulk of the American Embassy rears itself in a wall of 1950s glass and concrete, guarded by lynx-eyed Metropolitan police in black hardshell armor. A gilded eagle – its wings spreading ten yards or more – looks casually over the park, past the memorials to the airmen and Eisenhower and Roosevelt, at the Canadian High Commission on the eastern side. One could be forgiven for thinking that the park itself has desires to be considered in the same light as the 49th parallel.

But – since September 11th 2003 – the eagle has not looked further than the easternmost edge of the park that is the iron-fenced center of the Square; for since that day there has been something to arrest its golden gaze. Carved in heavy Roman capitals on a lintel of English oak of railroad sleeper girth, the following words demand attention and respect for their simple stark truth;

GRIEF IS THE PRICE WE PAY FOR LOVE

These words surmount and perhaps overshadow the first memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attacks outside the United States. Built by Her Majesty's Government to honor the British citizens and others killed during the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001, this monument is designed to stand for six centuries against whatever weather England can throw at it. It is certainly proof against the tears and floral tributes that press against it.

To the south of Grosvenor Square is found Farm Street, an unprepossessing thoroughfare on which a small but beautiful Jesuit Church sits; the Church of the Immaculate Conception. Since 1849, this has provided daily masses and confessions for the people of Mayfair, and the Jesuit Priests and Brothers there have provided spiritual guidance and academic education to generations of Londoners and not a few visiting Americans.

I know Grosvenor Square well – for Elizabeth has her flat near there, and the offices of the company that she founded in 2001, White Witch Enterprises, overlook the park. More than once I have walked the pathways of the park, or stood under the memorials to fallen heroes and victims – and watched demonstrations that try to paint each as the other. I have knelt before God in the Church and confessed offenses against the King of the Universe in silent darkness and then walked out into warm sunlight again. I have walked the halls of the Embassy and received the rarest of documents that allow a son of the Kingdom to marry a daughter of the Union.

But it is to the memorial to the victims of 9/11 that my eye is always drawn – for Thomas Studdock was my friend, and there is no grave, no plot of land, no marker to remind me to pray for his soul. No body was recovered – all that remains of his physicality is the echoes and memories in Elizabeth's flesh, and the young boy that she raises alone.

In the center of the monument, there is an oval plaque upon which are carved words which I have read a thousand times and which are taken from Henry Jackson van Dyke's poem “Katrina's Sundial”;

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is not

There is something about those words and, each and every time I read them, I cannot help but think of Elizabeth and the way in which she and her family have intersected time in and around that little Square – one of hundreds like it in London – and of how she has progressed through each of those emotions, eventually arriving at the eternal point she now occupies.

It was at the beginning of the 1960s that Giovanni Agnoli came to Mayfair. Giovanni's father – Marco Angoli - had served in the Italian armies of North Africa in World War II and, captured by the British during Operation Compass, became a prisoner of war almost without firing a shot in anger. He lived out the years of the War on a Norfolk farm, sowing and reaping and harvesting.

The daughter of that farm was Gwendoline Bailey – a young, impressionable girl with no real grasp of worldly matters. Innocent and beautifully fertile, and perhaps a little naive, the tales she heard of chivalrous servicemen brought a flush to her cheeks. It was, perhaps, inevitable that this blushing English rose would be plucked by the dashing Italian stallion that came to work for her father.

To his credit, Marco did not attempt anything more than the village lads had tried before they went off to the War – a cynical man (and there were many of them, holding their dimpled pint mugs of beer in corn-calloused hands in the local pub) might have said that he knew the way the wind was blowing, and that a marriage to an English girl would allow him to stay in a country which was clearly superior to that greasy nation of spaghetti-eating Wops. The few boys who had not gone to war – remaining behind to work the farms – tended to think of Marco as an opportunist; for why would someone as wonderful as Gwendoline choose an Itie like him unless their elder brothers and friends were away fighting the Jerries?

But the village women were more impressed – Marco was tall and handsome, well-spoken and polite. He worked hard, too – even though he earned no wages, and slept in the hayloft. He spoke against the Fascists, explaining how – as best he could – his country had allowed them to get into power. A devout Catholic, he explained how Mussolini and his ilk were an aberration on the history of the Italian and Roman people.

And, all the while, he courted Gwendoline. Her father – a widower, and with no sons of his own – recognized the value of the hard-working Marco, who doted on his daughter. His encouragement was not necessary, but it may have cemented her decision to marry the charming Italian. A year after Operation Compass, Gwendoline Bailey became Mrs Marco Agnoli – her wedding dress made from the parachute-silk of a downed German pilot.

It was a little less than a year after this that the couple had their first child; a strapping young lad who took after his father more than his mother. They called him Giovanni, after Marco's elder brother. Other children soon followed, some taking more after their mother than father, and Farmer Bailey rejoiced when he saw that his family line was secure.

As Giovanni grew, he decided that he did not wish to spend his life tilling the soil, married to a girl from the village. As the fifties turned to sixties, he cast his eye outwards and beyond Norfolk until – one day – he simply decided that it was London that was calling him.

Perhaps he chaffed against the pastoral idyll which his parents said he should be content with? Perhaps the wind of change blowing from the revolutions of that decade stirred against the flaps of the orthodox tent that was his family's theology? Perhaps it was all of these and none of them – Giovanni Angoli packed his bags and, kissing his mother and father goodbye, went to London.

In Mayfair, he signed on as a junior clerk for an accountancy firm by day and – by night – plunged into the swinging heart of London in the early sixties. He did well in the firm, rising quickly thanks to natural acumen and a willingness to say the right things to the right people. Still a Catholic, at least in name, the Jesuits of the Immaculate Conception would – perhaps – have grown tired of hearing the same sins of the flesh, week after week.

It is certainly true that Elizabeth Agnoli was the result of a drunken tryst between Giovanni and Vanessa Scott on New Year's Day 1964. It was never confirmed that she was conceived on the grass of the Royal Park of Grosvenor Square, but in the heady days of the early 1960s, it is certainly possible.

Giovanni Agnoli married the impressionable girl in the spring – his father had to have the English phrase “shotgun wedding” explained to him, but that may have been unfair. Giovanni and Vanessa did love each other – or at least that is the word they used to describe it. It is entirely likely that they each meant different things by the word. When Marco was told by Vanessa's father that his boy had “got my daughter in trouble”, Marco hung his head and said, very contritely, “I think he's got himself in trouble too.”

Elizabeth Maria Agnoli was born not far from Grosvenor Square, on Michaelmas 1964 and was baptized the same day – not in Immaculate Conception, for prior to 1966 it was simply a Jesuit Church open to the public, but not the center of worship for a parish – but by one of the Jesuit priests attached to it. As soon as she was old enough, she attended the Jesuit-run school there – by this time, Giovanni Agnoli was a partner in the firm and was making good money.

Educated by Sisters and taught by the Brothers, Elizabeth – dark and beautiful like an icon of the woman caught in adultery even at that age – received her first communion and was confirmed at Immaculate Conception in the early 1970s. But, by this stage, cracks were beginning to show in her parents' marriage.

It was probably not Vanessa's fault – for, although she was innocent and naive and hadn't fully understood the promises she was making, she had, at least, tried to stick to them as she understood them. She had been brought up on fairytales and the prayer book and happily-ever-after. Giovanni had learned other things – although from where, he could not say.

Not even when, in 1975, Vanessa screamed his infidelities to him and a ten-year-old Elizabeth – still wearing her confirmation dress from the day's celebrations – sobbed and screamed in sadness and howled at her parents to stop. But Vanessa wanted an answer – his parents weren't like that, what had she and Elizabeth done to deserve this?

For years after, Giovanni would maintain that Vanessa's parting words to him - “Go to your whore!” - were his mandate to leave the marriage. She wanted him to leave, which – while perhaps true – did not excuse his actions.

Elizabeth tried to stop him leaving. He shoved her out of the way and into the wall, bruising her shoulder and making her cry all the louder. He did not look back.

That was her first introduction to “the way the world really works” - and the foundation and pillar of her own personal truth. She hated her father for leaving her mother alone and so, in order that no-one would ever do that to her, she buried herself in her studies. She thought her father had nothing to offer her and so she accepted his guilt-money and went to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana to earn her degree. His rejection of his marriage vows disgusted her and so she vowed never to marry. His hypocrisy towards his faith appalled her and she rejected it all.

Seen from inside, from her own perspective, it all made perfect sense. Seen from the outside, it made perfect sense too – but for different reasons. Her rise to power through the 1980s was meteoric – she was a Vice President by the time she was thirty, the owner of an exclusive penthouse flat in Mayfair, extraordinarily wealthy and fantastically successful. All her friends – and she had few, if any, whom she would call real friends – thought she was happy. Sometimes, she even managed to convince herself.

It was Christmas 2000 in Vienna and Narnia – and Edmund and Michael – that changed all that.

It is not an exaggeration to say that she was changed by her experiences, and that the changes in lifestyle that those changes occasioned changed her still more. For the reader who knew the Elizabeth who nearly dipped her sleeve in her soup in the restaurant just off the Michaelplatz, and now knows the communicant mother and widow who founded her own company, the great shifts in her life will be clear.

But we began in Grosvenor Square, the home-from-home of America in England. Her life – for good or ill – has orbited this small patch of London. And now, anchored by the memorial of oak and stone and bronze to the dead, her mind often finds itself dwelling on the events of a day shortly after her wedding and the conception of her son.

And so we join her remembrances, as she sits on the fifth anniversary of that day in her office in Mayfair – mere minutes from her flat and Church and the memorial. Let us walk past the gleaming ice-gray Aston Martin DB9 with the registration JAD1S parked at the curb. We shall go through the door on which is written the legend “White Witch Enterprises” and sneak into her office. We behold the beautiful woman with hair like flowing night, dressed in bespoke Donatella Versace and snowflake-pattern lace with the six-pointed diamond-encrusted cufflinks, and peer at what lies behind those introspective eyes as she remembers the day she lost her husband.

A/n : Just for your information, the geography of this section is accurate – the American Embassy, the memorial and the Church are where I have placed them. You can find some excellent information about the various locations mentioned here by visiting the webpage devoted to this story (link in my profile) and following the links there. The only element which is not accurate is the school attached to Immaculate Conception; there is no school there as far as I am aware, nor has there ever been.

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