Joe Lyons Teahouse
Joe Lyons Teahouse, a London café in the Strand, is the site of the single, painfully brief reunion between Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis after his release from prison in 1939, a meeting whose emotional inadequacy and physical intimacy become the sole memory he carries through the war.
Setting and Context
The Joe Lyons Teahouse in the Strand was the location Robbie and Cecilia chose for their first meeting after three and a half years of separation. Robbie arrived early and took a corner seat with a view of the door, savoring the novelty of freedom—the pace and clatter of the West End, the colors of coats and skirts, the bright conversations of shoppers, the friendliness of the waitress, the spacious lack of threat. He felt that the everyday beauty he alone could appreciate. During his imprisonment, Cecilia had been his only permitted female visitor besides his mother, and they had maintained their connection through weekly letters, writing about literature and using characters as codes to express what the prison censor forbade.
The Meeting
When Cecilia entered the café wearing her nurse's cape, Robbie stood too quickly and knocked his tea. He was conscious of the oversized suit his mother had saved for him, which did not seem to touch his shoulders at any point. They sat down, looked at each other, smiled, and looked away. The closeness they had built through years of coded correspondence felt artificial now, and they fell into a helpless catechism of polite query and response. Robbie asked about her lodgings and her landlady, unable to think of anything better, fearing the silence that might lead to her telling him it had been nice to meet up again. He felt that prison had made him despise himself, while she looked as adorable as he remembered, especially in her nurse's uniform, but she was miserably nervous too.
The Kiss and Farewell
After half an hour, Cecilia looked at the little watch that hung above her left breast and told him her lunch break would soon be over. He walked with her toward Whitehall, toward the bus stop. In the precious final minutes, he wrote out his address for her—a bleak sequence of acronyms and numbers—and explained he would have no leave until his basic training was over. She was looking at him, shaking her head in exasperation, and then, at last, he took her hand and squeezed. The gesture had to carry all that had not been said, and she answered it with pressure from her own hand. When her bus came, she did not let go. They stood face to face, and he kissed her, lightly at first, but they drew closer, and when their tongues touched, a disembodied part of himself was abjectly grateful, for he knew he now had a memory in the bank and would be drawing on it for months to come. They tightened their embrace and kept kissing while people edged past them in the queue. She was crying onto his cheek, and her sorrow stretched her lips against his. Another bus arrived. She pulled away, squeezed his wrist, and got on without a word and did not look back. He watched her find her seat, and as the bus began to move, realized he should have gone with her all the way to the hospital. He began to run along Whitehall, hoping to catch up with her at the next stop, but her bus was far ahead, soon disappearing toward Parliament Square.
Significance
Throughout his training and deployment, Robbie continued to write to Cecilia, liberated from censorship and the need to be inventive, but they proceeded cautiously, wary of getting ahead of the touch of hands and a single bus-stop kiss. The memory of that kiss became his most sensual memory, though it was bleached colorless through overuse during the retreat to Dunkirk. He drew on it in a French barn in the small hours, and later, as he walked across the land toward the sea, the memory of her saying "I'll wait for you. Come back" was the reason he had survived. The Joe Lyons Teahouse meeting was the only physical reunion they ever had before the war separated them, and its inadequacy—the small talk, the awkwardness, the lost minutes—haunted him as much as its intimacy sustained him.
