On an impulse she went across the lobby to buy a paper, as Jay went into the Rose Room in search of a table for breakfast, and happening to see it there bought The Times of a few days ago as well as a New York paper. And found herself with the most powerful of allies.
The story was on the third page, and she read it as she sat back replete after negotiating a massive breakfast (the offer of corned beef hash on the menu had so fascinated her it had been irresistible) and felt her overfilled stomach jerk with shock as she saw the headline SON NAMES FATHER AS ACCOMPLICE IN LONDON BLACK MARKET ENQUIRY.
‘Oh, God, Jay –’ she murmured and spread the paper on the table between them so that they could read together.
It was a clear and comprehensive account. Clearly the police had been watching Alfred Braham and his dealings for some time, for the evidence that had been offered in court was much more wide-ranging than anything her cable had suggested. And her brother too, it seemed, had been dealing in ways she had known nothing about.
‘Oh, my God, Jay, we got away just in time,’ she breathed and he nodded, almost awestruck at the narrowness of their escape.
‘I could have been up to my eyes in this shit,’ he said after a long moment and she nodded eagerly and put one hand over his on the smudged newspaper.
‘But I stopped it from happening, didn’t I? I told you I’d look after you, and I did. I got you all that money and kept you out of trouble and now we’re here, safe and sound, and Daddy can’t come after us, can he? Not with all this trouble for Ambrose –’
And suddenly, to her own amazement, she was crying. Tears were running down her face and splashing on the newspaper and her face was twisted like a baby’s as sobs choked her and he stared at her, startled, and then quickly pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and thrust it at her face.
‘She just choked on her coffee,’ he said hastily to the waiter who had arrived looking concerned and she kept the capacious handkerchief over her face, trying to maintain Jay’s polite fiction as the waiter went away and Jay slid an arm round her shoulders and held on tight, and at last, the tears began to ease.
‘What is it? The same as last time, on the ship? Crying for your Daddy?’
Convulsively she nodded, grateful for his understanding, and managed to get her breath back.
‘I’ve treated him so badly –’ she whispered. ‘Haven’t I?’
‘Not really,’ he said after a moment. ‘I mean, dammit all, Maddie, you didn’t tell him to run the sort of business he does! Any more than I tell my Pa. They do what they want to do. Usually it all goes great and no one ever says a word and likes the good that comes of it – but sometimes it doesn’t go so good, and what can you do? It’s not your fault. You only worked for him.’
She sniffed dolorously. ‘All the same, if he goes to prison –’ And again she shook with a deep sob.
‘He won’t,’ Jay said with great confidence. ‘Not him. He’s much too clever for that. Alfred Braham, go to gaol? Pigs’ll fly! He’ll wriggle his way out, all right. I keep telling you, he’s like my Pa –’
‘Could they take me to court for being involved? And for helping you the way I did?’ She lifted her chin and looked at him with red eyes. ‘Could you get into trouble too?’
There was a long silence and he took his arm from her shoulders and sat and stared down at the paper, reading the account of Ambrose in court, and then took a deep breath.
‘It might be better if we got married at that,’ he said at length, almost casually. ‘It’s only you who knew what I did, and how we fixed it, right? Better we were married, if it came to anything.’
At once the last shred of her distress melted and she took hold of his arm so sharply that he winced.
‘Oh, Jay, do you mean it? Can we? How long will it take to arrange it? And can I get something to wear and –’ And then she stopped. ‘How do you mean, if it comes to anything?’
‘Law,’ he said simply. ‘Wives can’t testify against their husbands. Or for ‘em come to that. So it’s better we get married, hmm? I’ll go to City Hall this morning, see what we can fix up.’
And he leaned across and smiled at her and then kissed her and she dissolved with delight and excitement, but not so much she didn’t wonder, just briefly, if the law about wives and testimony were the same in England as it was here in America. But never mind. Jay thought it was and that was good enough.
16
October 1950
The dreamlike state became ever more enchanting, and all she could do was beam her joy at everyone, and it was easy to do so, for the people she met did seem to be very responsive and that made her beam even more. But that was because she at last realised that that was the only possible response to give someone as hugely happy as she was. Her towering excitement and flowing good spirits dragged everyone within reach into her centre, and invested them with part of her warmth. Even Jay lost some of his usual self-absorption and laughed back at her when she turned her glittering gaze of pure bliss on him; so the next days were spent in a haze of excited happiness.
There was official business at City Hall, making the necessary arrangements for a wedding, Jay telling smooth tales about her age while warning her to keep quiet for fear her English accent would make officialdom too curious; money changing hands, forms being filled out and at last all arrangements completed for a Friday morning wedding, down to the required blood test (‘What on earth is that for?’ she asked Jay softly. ‘Nothing that need worry you,’ he had said and refused to explain), and time then to shop.
Dresses and little suits, coats and shoes and blouses and above all lingerie; wisps of nylon lace and satin that clung to her body and made her feel incredibly aware of her own sexuality; nightdresses in floating romantic chiffon that amused her hugely, for they were for posing in, never for sleeping or loving in – who needed dresses to make love? – and that most potent of symbols of luxury, nylon stockings. She ran the length of transparency through her hands and sighed with the sheer rapture of it all. Oh, to be Madeleine Braham at this moment, was to be the most successful, the most beautiful and above all the most supremely happy person in the world.
It was raining on the 28th of October, a thin biting rain, cold and dank, that threatened to creep into every corner of her, but it didn’t matter. She clung to Jay’s arm, very proud of the way he looked in his dark blue suit, specially bought for the occasion, and his shirt so white it almost blinded her and the handsome silk foulard tie in dark blue and crimson, and hardly heard a word the Justice said as he gabbled his way through the ritual. All she was waiting for was the magic moment when her Jay would slip a wedding ring on her finger. Then he would be hers for always and ever and she would never have to worry any more about anything. As long as they two were tied together as they were meant to be, all would be well; and for one tiny moment she had a sudden memory of her birthday party almost two years ago – could it be so short and yet so immense a time? – and the first time she had seen him, so beautiful with his thatch of glossy dark gold hair and his wonderful face; and she looked up at him now and almost wept with the delight of it, for he was even more beautiful now that she knew every plane, every pore, of his face in intimate detail.
She shook hands with the Justice and the witnesses – a couple of City Hall cleaners – and emerged on to the steps of City Hall to find the rain had stopped and she hugged his arm even closer and said gleefully, ‘Hello, Mr Kincaid,’ waiting for the obvious response. But he missed his cue, just smiling at her and saying, ‘Hi, honey.’
‘Call me Mrs Kincaid,’ she commanded and he laughed. ‘That isn’t you, for heaven’s sake! Mrs Kincaid is my mother! I can’t think of you except as Maddie. Crazy kid, Maddie.’
‘Well, you’ll have to get used to it!’ she said gaily. ‘Because that’s who I am now –’
‘Yeah,’ he said, seeming a little abstracted and then as she tugged again on his arm said, ‘Listen, hon, I thought – we ought to have a honeymoon, hmm? We can’t j
ust – can we?’
‘Can’t just what?’
‘Go back to the hotel and –’
‘Go to bed?’ she said mischievously. ‘Why not?’
‘It’s an idea – but after that – No, I made a plan. We’re going to London.’ And he looked down at her with his eyebrows raised and his lips curved in a wicked little smile.
She felt the colour leave her face. ‘What do you – Jay, are you mad? We can’t –’
‘Naw, New London, Connecticut. On Long Island Sound. It’s a nice place, right by the ocean, with a hotel I stayed in once a while back. Nice place, you’ll like it. Great for a honeymoon –’ And she shook her head at him in mock fury and pretended to beat his chest with clenched fists. Oh, it was so wonderful to be married to a man like Jay and share the sorts of jokes married people shared, and to know that for ever and ever they’d be together…
He had hired a car and after lunch at the hotel and the settling of the bill – he looked a little gloomy for a moment as he contemplated the size of it – they drove north-east out of Manhattan over the river and out on the Long Island turnpike and she sat beside him, the fur collar of her new coat pulled up about her ears against the chill, and listened to banal songs about red robins and four-leaved clovers on the radio and sang inside her head: Mrs Kincaid, I’m Mrs Kincaid; Mrs Kincaid, I’m Mrs Kincaid – and it sounded and felt all that she had ever hoped it would. It didn’t seem possible to be so happy.
She slept for a while, worn out with living at the very top of her emotional capacity, and woke only when they stopped for petrol – and she thought, I’ll have to learn to call it gas. I’m an American now. I’m Mrs Kincaid – and went into the diner for coffee and a doughnut.
‘Not much further now,’ he said, and smiled a little vaguely at her. ‘Another hour or so and we should be there …’
‘Something wrong?’ she said after a long pause and leaned over and touched his hand, for he was staring down into his coffee cup and paying her no attention at all.
‘Mmm? Oh, no – just homesick, I guess,’ and he looked up then and for the first time there was an expression in his eyes that startled her. She hadn’t realised before just how smooth and carefully controlled a face he had: he wasn’t one who, like her, bore his thoughts on his visage for all to see, but now he seemed troubled and – she reached for a word that would describe it and the one that came into her mind was young – he looked as young as a schoolboy and as anxious.
‘But why be homesick? You’re here in your own country. I’m not – and I’m not a bit homesick, I have you. That’s all the home I need –’
‘Oh Maddie, you do rattle on, don’t you? All that guff – you make me laugh –’ But he didn’t look all that amused and she felt a little stab of anxiety again.
‘But tell me, Jay, I want to understand. How do you mean, homesick?’
‘Boston’s my home, Maddie. Not New York. Wouldn’t you be homesick in England if you were – oh, I don’t know where – Nottingham, say. That awful place I had to go to on one of the whisky deals, remember? If you were there wouldn’t you be homesick for London?’ She considered for a moment and then nodded and held his hand in an even warmer clasp.
‘I see what you mean. But we’ll go to Boston, Jay, really we will. I just, I mean, I want to meet your family and see your home. It’ll be my home now, won’t it? It was just – I wanted us to be married first, so that we arrived as we mean to go on –’
But he wasn’t listening, staring over her shoulder into the middle distance with glazed eyes.
‘I used to come home this way sometimes in the old days when I’d been in New York with some of the fellas from Harvard – we’d go down by train but we’d come back in a hired car so that one of the New York guys could take it back, and it used to be –’ He shook his head in admiration of his memories. ‘It was great. All those miles, going so damned fast and dodging the cops, knowing when they were around, knowing when to slow down, when to take off and really burn up the blacktop – oh, it used to be such fun.’
‘How far are we from Boston then? Are we nearly there? Would you rather go there right away instead of to this hotel? I don’t mind, Jay. I can pretend our honeymoon was in New York, and we had it before the wedding –’ And she laughed, a soft chuckle that was meant to please him, but he shifted his eyes to look at her and said sharply, ‘Hey! Don’t go making gags like that to my folks, when you meet them, will you? That’s all I’m in need of!’
‘Of course I won’t,’ she said, outraged. ‘Do give me credit for some sense, Jay! I know they’re difficult. You’ve told me often enough –’
‘I haven’t told you the half of it,’ he said shortly and jerked his head at the boy in the white cap and apron behind the diner counter who was desultorily wiping the counter with a tired rag. ‘Gimme some more coffee – not the half of it, believe me.’
‘Then tell me now,’ she said and rested her elbow on the counter and propped her chin on her fists. ‘And tell me first how far we are from Boston.’
‘How far? Oh, another two, three hours. We’re an hour to New London and I could pick up the road to Providence there and be home in another two hours’ drive from there. If I pushed a tad –’ And he grinned and looked young again in a different sort of way. Impish, she thought, and loved the word as applied to him, ‘and I sure can push when I want to. I broke up one of Pa’s Studebakers, pushing too much.’
He was away now, talking easily and fluently in a way she hadn’t ever heard him do before, ignoring his cooling coffee and staring at her with that same wide-eyed glazed look, talking of the house his family lived in in Brookline: ‘It’s a handsome house, real handsome, on Commonwealth Avenue, as nice as any of those on Back Bay, in its own way. You don’t have to be Back Bay or Beacon Hill to be – well, Mother likes Brookline, and so do I. It’s a nice house –’
‘Tell me about it. How big is it?’
‘Big? Oh, big enough for all of us. Five bedrooms, two, three, bathrooms – you know. Nice front lawn – with a long drive. You know.’
She smiled, tenderly, as a mother does to an excited child. ‘But I don’t. I’ve never been to Boston.’
He laughed. ‘No, I suppose – well, it’s about a half-acre in front, the lawn, and at the back it’s a deal bigger, with a tennis court of course and a pool for the summer. It gets lousy hot in the summer in Boston. Real humid and up in the nineties. You have to have a pool –’
‘Of course,’ she said and smiled even more widely. ‘An essential –’
‘But most summers we went down to Cape Cod, to Hyannis. Well, to Osterville, really. We have this house there, right by the ocean, white clapboard, you know, and a long verandah where we had the swings – very nice and select. Mother liked it though Pa always said the place was stuffy and too Blue Book for him –’
‘Blue Book?’
‘Oh, the Brahmins. The real Boston kings, you know?’
She didn’t, but it didn’t matter. Not when he was so animated and excited. ‘What’s it like, this place? Where is it?’
‘I told you, Cape Cod. Right out on the elbow, where the big Atlantic rollers come in and the fishing and swimming are the best. Oh, we had such great summers there, the best, with wienie roasts on the beach after dark and going after the big fish in the small hours when the tide was just right, and the dances at the country club – the best of times we had, the very best –’
‘You will again,’ she said. ‘Maybe we could have a seaside place too? In Hyannis or wherever it was? And then when we have children we can take them there –’
He blinked and came back to her, his eyes sharp now. ‘What? Oh, yes, of course. But listen –’ He pushed his coffee cup away and leaned across to bring his face a little closer to hers. ‘Listen, about kids and all – we’ve got time, hmm? I mean, I don’t think we ought to be rushing into anything –’
She laughed softly. ‘And here was me thinking you wouldn’t do anything to – what was
it? Anything a good Catholic boy shouldn’t do! Are you suggesting we deliberately avoid having children?’
There was a little silence and then he said, ‘Yes. For a while. I can leave that to you, can’t I? What you do, you do. I don’t have to know everything, do I? My Pa always said that. The best way to be with a woman is not to know everything about her – and make damn sure she doesn’t know all about you.’
‘But I’m not just a woman, Jay. I’m your wife. I’m Mrs Kincaid – junior, if you like, to make sure it’s not your mother I’m talking about.’
‘There already is a Mrs Kincaid Junior,’ he said after a moment, and turned on his stool, digging into his pocket for change for the coffee and doughnuts. ‘My brother Timothy’s wife, Rosalie. She’s Mrs Kincaid Junior.’
‘Then I’ll have to be Mrs Jay Kincaid,’ she said slowly and stood up too. ‘So that they can tell us apart. What’s she like, Rosalie? Shall I like her? And is Declan married? And if –’
‘Declan isn’t married. And as for Rosalie –’ He shrugged. ‘It’s all a bit complicated there. They don’t get along. She wants a divorce but of course Mother won’t hear of it, so there it is. She has to turn out for family things but they spat a lot, she and Tim. Oh, you should hear ‘em! I reckon a divorce’d be the better of two evils, but there it is – Mother says –’
They had reached the door now and she was pulling her fur collar back around her ears against the chill night air outside. ‘But it’s their business, surely, isn’t it?’ she said lightly. ‘If they want to be apart how can anyone force them to be together? I mean, I thought here in America no one cared about divorce. It’s different in England, I know, but everyone’s so stuffy and silly there. But here, people get divorced all the time.’
‘Kincaids don’t’, he said shortly. ‘And Rosalie’s a third cousin too, Mother’s side, so there it is. And anyway there’s always the money. Timothy gets his allowance from Pa as long as Pa is happy to give it. If Mother gets upset, Pa sure as hell won’t be so happy. So, Rosalie turns out to family things and smiles and does as she’s told and gets her share of his allowance, but I’ll bet she gives Timothy one hell of a time when she does it,’ and he laughed, but the sound was snatched from his lips by the wind blowing around the service forecourt.
Maddie Page 18