The Glass Ocean

by Beatriz Williams

  “Everything all right in there?” I said, playing it casual.

  “Oh, Uncle Rupert? Right as rain. Have you gone and put the kettle on, like an angel?”

  “Straight down from heaven, if by heaven you mean a galaxy far, far away.”

  He came up next to me, and now his face was in its usual place, a foot above me, falling into earnestness. His hair was rumpled and tawny, and he hadn’t shaved. He rubbed an absent hand against the stubble on his left cheek and set his other hand against the edge of the Aga. “Sarah—” he began.

  “Sarah!”

  We jumped and turned to the kitchen entrance, where a tall, stout, somewhat grizzled man stood inside a cloud of wild white hair, like Einstein. He wore a tweed jacket over a threadbare, pilling sweater-vest of burgundy wool, and though his lips smiled thinly, his puckered forehead didn’t share their optimism.

  “John’s told me a great deal about you. Delighted to make your acquaintance.” He started toward us and stuck out his hand.

  John cleared his throat. “Sarah, this is Uncle Rupert. My father’s brother. Uncle Rupert, Sarah Blake, my—”

  He stopped short after “my” and started to blush.

  “Visiting historian,” I blurted, taking Rupert’s hand. “So nice to meet you, even in the middle of the night.”

  “For which I apologize again,” said John. “Rupert rang me up just as I was leaving, and I had the happy thought of swinging round to pick him up on my way out of London. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. My uncle, you see, happens to have dabbled in naval intelligence at one point in his checkered career.”

  “John exaggerates, of course. They merely consulted me on a purely mundane matter or two, from time to time.” Rupert’s left eyebrow made a funny little movement. He raised my hand to his lips and kissed the knuckles. “Enchanted. Speechless, indeed, and unutterably pleased to find John so—”

  “In any case,” John said, rather loudly, “as a military historian, Rupert has a bit of inside knowledge on the doings of our Langford ancestors, and while he’s kept tactfully mum on the subject until now, I thought he might be persuaded to bring us up to the mark on—well, whatever he thinks might be useful. I’ve already explained the nature of what we’re after in Robert Langford’s study.”

  “Lusitania.” Rupert nodded. He was still holding my hand between his, and he patted it now, as if comforting a child. “Poor old dear. I’m terribly sorry to hear about your great-grandfather.”

  “Um, thanks. I mean, I didn’t exactly know him personally, so it’s not what you’d call a fresh wound—”

  “Still, he’s your ancestor, Sarah. May I call you Sarah?”

  “Of course—”

  “This man is a part of you, my dear. His blood runneth in your veins, his heart beateth in your chest. His—”

  The teakettle began the soft climb of its whistle, and I tore my hand from Rupert’s sympathetic grip and spun in relief to the Aga, before he could see me smile.

  “Uncle Rupert’s always had the most tremendous regard for the past,” John said.

  “It’s a living creature,” Rupert said. “It keeps a mystical hold over me. I often imagine the old admiral doddering about the folly, adjusting his machine and peering out to sea, or Great-Grandfather Peregrine poring over his dispatches by the fire in the study. It’s the modern age, you see, this brutal modern age with its ugliness and its hypocrisies and its false preening moral virtues—I beg your pardon—”

  There was a faint choke, almost a sob, and I looked over my shoulder just in time to see Rupert turn away and slump toward the kitchen table. I glanced at John, lifting an eyebrow, and he returned me a small shake of his head and loped across the floor to the chair opposite Rupert’s.

  I turned back to the two elegant teacups before me—Limoges or something, no coarse coffee mugs around the Langford kitchen, not even the Dower House—and added leaves to the teapot, which was equally priceless, though not the same pattern as the cups. John had shown me how to make proper tea right after I’d asked him where to find the tea bags. You don’t drink tea from tea bags, do you? he’d said in horror, the way you might say You don’t drink wine from boxes, do you? He’d taken out the tin of tea and the mismatched elegant teapot and the silver strainer, explained how much tea and how long, and I followed his recipe now. While the tea steeped, I set the cups in front of John and Rupert. Rupert was staring at the table, counting the grains in the wood, and John was frowning at the top of Rupert’s head. Men, I thought. John looked up when I set the cup and saucer next to his clasped hands. “You’re not having any?”

  “God, no. I need my beauty sleep.”

  He rose. “I’m sorry. Let me help.”

  We fell into step without words, John finding the cream and sugar—tasting the sugar first, just to be sure—and me bearing the teapot and strainer to the table, while Rupert hunched over his cup and drew his thumbs restlessly around the edge of the saucer. He looked up gratefully when I hovered the spout over the cup’s delicate rim.

  “Strong, I hope?”

  “I think so.”

  He added cream and sugar, and John wandered over with a whisky bottle. “Yes, yes,” Rupert said, brightening. “That’s the stuff. My God. I didn’t know we had any left.”

  John added a dollop and set the bottle next to Rupert’s cup. “Just for special occasions.”

  “I’ve heard of Irish coffee,” I said, finding the chair next to John’s, “but Irish tea’s a first for me.”

  “Call it Scotch tea, if you like,” Rupert said. He lifted his cup and closed his eyes as he drank. “Or ambrosia, as I like.”

  John swung back into his own chair and poured his tea, adding cream and sugar but no whisky, which surprised me mildly. I wouldn’t have said that he’d drunk a lot over the past week, but he hadn’t exactly drunk a little, either. If I had a glass of sherry with him in the evening, he’d have two. When we split a bottle of wine at dinner, the split wasn’t what you’d call fifty-fifty. Not by twenty-five or thirty. He was never drunk, but he seemed to know exactly where to lay down his glass on the brink of drunk without quite going over, and who was I to judge? He’d lost his wife. He’d lost his career. More vitally, perhaps, he’d lost what—back in that mystical past his uncle Rupert so worshipped—they used to call honor. The man had a right to drown his sorrows.

  All the same, I was glad to see the bottle remain on Rupert’s side of the table.

  “So,” I said brightly, weaving my fingers together, “how was the drive?”

  “Marvelous,” said John.

  “Miserable,” said Rupert. “Sheets of rain. And there was some awful show on the BBC, what was it, some American rubbish—I beg your pardon, Sarah.”

  “Eh, I’ve heard worse.” I sent a friendly elbow into John’s ribs.

  “Rupert,” said John, “tell Sarah what you told me in the car. A bit of a shock.”

  Rupert sputtered his tea and set the cup hastily back in the saucer. “What, about Nigel? I really don’t think the poor child wants to hear my—”

  “No, no. Not about Nigel. About Peregrine. Peregrine and his dispatches in the study?”

  “Oh, yes. Naturally.” Rupert wiped his chin with his handkerchief and reached for the Scotch. He poured about three ounces into his remaining tea, stirred it with a delicate spoon, and gazed thoughtfully at the damp stain on the ceiling. “Sir Peregrine Langford, our venerable ancestor, knighted for his services to a grateful nation, the chap who blew his brains out in grief when he heard his son was lost on Lusitania—”

  “Yes, yes,” John said, “she knows all that.”

  “—learned of this tragedy before the rest of the world, you see, because he was a director of Room 40.”

  “Room 40?” I asked.

  “My dear child,” he said tenderly, “the secret department within the Admiralty responsible for cryptoanalysis.”

  “Decoding things, in other words,” said John.

  “O
h,” I said, and then, “Oh!”

  “Yes. Of course, his involvement was all kept quite hush-hush, and I didn’t learn of it myself until they had to give me clearance for one damned thing or another. Never told the rest of the family, because—well, at the time, it was secret. And while the facts have been largely declassified since—I discovered all this back in Cold War days, mind you, when they used to call me in for various panicky little briefings—I’m afraid I simply forgot.” He shrugged and smiled one of those sad, vague, old-man smiles. “At any rate, it never came up around Christmas dinner.”

  “Well, now it’s come up.” John turned to me. “What do you think, Sarah?”

  My head was spinning a little, whether from shock or glee or plain tiredness. I squinted across the table at Rupert’s long, lined face. I’d taken out my contacts, of course, and I hadn’t grabbed my glasses before leaving the bedroom, but even my nearsightedness couldn’t account for the bleariness of his expression, the way someone seemed to have smudged his edges with a pencil eraser. Next to me, John crackled with a strange, tensile energy, just as if he hadn’t actually been awake for twenty straight hours and driven all the way to London and back in the company of two different emotional vampires.

  And I hadn’t even told him about the coded message yet.

  “I think it’s too much for a coincidence,” I said. “It’s a breakthrough. How—I mean—what are the implications? Did he know his son was involved? Were they working together?”

  Rupert shrugged his tweedy shoulders. “I’ve got no idea, I’m afraid. Never imagined until now that Robert might also have been involved in—well, in espionage, to put it plainly. Given the subject of his books, I suppose we ought to have wondered about it, but nobody in the family ever raised the least hint that he was an actual spy, not just a creator of imaginary ones. Least of all Robert himself.”

  “Well, Robert certainly hasn’t left any hints about his father among his personal papers.” I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms. “Nothing we’ve uncovered yet, anyway.”

  John drummed his fingers on the table. “What about Peregrine’s papers? Have you ever had a look at those?”

  “No,” said Rupert. “It’s not my field of study, really. I’m afraid I never got around to any kind of comprehensive analysis. In any case, as you well know, you’ve got to know what you’re looking for in these types of papers, or else it tends to blow straight over your head.”

  “Where are they kept?” I asked.

  “His private papers were sent to the archives at the Bodleian, I believe. He was an Oxford man. Isn’t that right, John?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “As to his official papers, I imagine they’re gathering dust in the National Archives.”

  I uncrossed my arms again and leaned forward. “And how hard would it be for us to have a look?”

  Rupert set his fingers around the edge of his saucer and peered into the empty cup, one eye shut, as if trying to read the leaves. For some reason, his hands transfixed me. They were large but slender, gracefully shaped, the kind of hands you might call aristocratic, except that the joints of his knuckles were pink and swollen. I wondered if he had arthritis, or whether it was just the long car journey, or something else. A tiny ceramic rattle made itself known in the silence, and I realized his fingers were trembling. He seemed to have forgotten my question, and I was about to prompt him when he looked up suddenly and said, “I imagine I could pull a string or two.”

  “Excellent.” John rose from the table and picked up the teacups. “Shall we pop over there tomorrow morning, then?”

  “Certainly, if you like,” Rupert said. There was something shaky and brave about this sentence that made me peer into his eyes, profoundly tired, pink with exhaustion.

  I reached across the table and touched Rupert’s wrist, just below the sleeve of his white shirt. “In the meantime, though, how about getting some sleep?”

  * * *

  As it turned out, Uncle Rupert had a room of his own in the Dower House—one presumably not stuffed with relics from the Galactic Empire—and he didn’t seem to care whether the sheets had been freshened or not. I watched him trudge up the stairs, followed by John, who’d insisted on carrying the small, old-fashioned valise that Rupert had brought along with him.

  I returned to the kitchen and finished drying the teacups. Just as I slung the dish towel back on its hook, switched off the light, and headed for the doorway, John appeared around the corner, rubbing his hair with both hands, like he’d just discovered his own fatigue.

  “You should go to bed, too,” I said.

  “Yes.” He stopped just inside the doorway, a few feet away. The light from the hall slanted across the side of his face, which had lost its expression of boyish rapture and now looked grave.

  “Everything all right with Rupert?” I asked. “He seemed upset.”

  “Rupert? Oh, he’ll be all right. He’s had another row with Nigel, that’s all.”

  “Nigel?”

  “His partner.”

  “Oh!” I hesitated. “Business partner, or partner partner?”

  “Partner partner.” He smiled. “Nigel’s one of those chefs on the telly. A bit temperamental. Every month or two Rupert rings me up in tears and tells me it’s over, but they always kiss and make up. I don’t think Nigel could do without him; Rupert’s the only chap in his entire entourage who won’t take his guff.”

  “Good for him. Everyone needs someone like that. Someone you can . . .”

  “Yes?”

  My skin warmed. I was glad for the dimness, so he couldn’t see me blushing. “Be comfortable with. Be honest.”

  “Funnily enough,” John said, looking at me steadily, “I was thinking the same thing, driving Callie up to London this afternoon. Or yesterday afternoon, I suppose.”

  “How is Callie? I thought you said you were going to stay a couple of days.”

  He shifted his weight and leaned his shoulder against the doorframe. “Callie is just fine, Sarah. As fine as she’ll ever be, anyway. I took her to her mother’s house in Richmond. The old dear was a trifle taken aback, but as she’s between lovers now herself, it dawned on me that this might prove an excellent opportunity for the two of them to lend mutual comfort. Or maybe that was just an excuse to follow my own, rather urgent inclination to jump straight back in the car and return home before you flew off back to New York.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “If you didn’t think she was in good hands, you wouldn’t have left her there.”

  “Possibly you’re giving me too much credit.” He smiled. “But they’re quite alike, after all, except at least Lady Hammond’s got her alcoholism all sorted. My hope is that . . .”

  “She’ll show Callie the way to sobriety?”

  “Something like that.” His gaze shifted a few inches, lengthened, so he seemed to be staring at the darkened kitchen landscape just past my left ear. His smile faded. “She’s not a bad egg, Callie.”

  “Of course not. You wouldn’t have fallen in love with her if she were.”

  “I don’t know if I ever fell in love with her. I loved her, that’s all. Knew her all my life. Was sort of dazzled by her, I suppose, when she transformed into this glamorous London It girl, surrounded by her Tatler crowd, and still had time for plain old John Langford. I thought I could save her from it all.”

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t actually work that way.”

  “No, it doesn’t. As I discovered. But she’s got a good heart, underneath it all. She said something to me in the car, on the way to London.”

  “What’s that?”

  His eyes moved, returning to meet mine, and even though the light was dusky, even though his face had slipped into shadow, I could see every detail, every black eyelash. Without noticing, I’d stepped closer to him as he spoke, and I had to tilt my head up, while he tilted his head down at the exact complementary angle. “I’ll tell you some other time, maybe,” he said. “If she turns out t
o be right. And now I think I’d better step out of your way so you can go back to bed.”

  “Back to my berth in the Imperial Star Destroyer.”

  “I hope it’s comfortable. You could always take the master bedroom, you know. Mrs. F could freshen it up in a jiffy. Well, perhaps not a jiffy, but—”

  “Oh, I’m all right. It’s grown on me. More comfortable than that sofa in the folly, I’ll bet.”

  The corner of his mouth turned up a little. “Actually, that sofa is more comfortable than you’d think. Well cushioned. Wide, if a bit short.”

  “I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.” I forced a yawn I didn’t feel. My nerves were buzzing, my heart smacking. I caught the drift of scent from his old green cashmere sweater, the faint warmth of his skin. “Good night, then.”

  “Good night.” He reached out and touched my elbow. “Nice shirt, by the way.”

  “What, this?” I looked down. “Oh, gosh. I’m so sorry. That’s yours, isn’t it?”

  “My jersey from the 2003 Boat Race, in fact. Where did you find it?”

  “It was folded up with my laundry yesterday. I think Mrs. Finch must have slipped it in by accident. I was so tired last night, I just kind of grabbed it without thinking. You can have it—”

  “Sarah,” he said quietly, “don’t worry about it. I don’t mind. In fact . . .”

  “Hmm?”

  “I was happy to see you wearing it. When I saw you on the stairs.”

  “Oh.” I swallowed. “Oh. Good, then. I mean, thanks. Thank you. So. We should really go to bed.”

  “Yes, we should.”

  “I mean, you should go to your bed, and I should go to my bed, and—”

  John took hold of my other elbow and kissed me, brief and gentle, on the lips. “Do you mind?” he asked, raising his head a little.

  “No,” I whispered. “Do you?”

  “Not the least bit.” His hands moved, one to my waist and one to the side of my face, and he drew me closer and kissed me again. I had time to taste the tea on his breath, to feel the damp, delicious curve of his bottom lip and the scratch of his unshaven chin, before he lifted his mouth away and said, “Thank God. I’ve been wanting to kiss you all week.”