The Ocean Liner

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The Ocean Liner Page 28

by Marius Gabriel


  Far away, he heard Dale asking if they’d had a good time at the Fair, and Masha telling Dale about the bomb, and Dale’s voice growing serious as he asked if she were all right. And then Dale said his car was parked on a yellow line and he would probably be getting a ticket right about now; and it was time to say goodbye.

  Masha hugged Thomas and kissed him on the mouth. He could smell the onions on her breath, and he wondered whether Dale Gordon would mind that. He thought Dale probably wouldn’t mind the smell of onions, wouldn’t mind anything that Masha did.

  As she walked away, she turned to look over her shoulder, and called to him, ‘Remember what I said. Don’t be a prisoner!’

  But before the hall of mirrors closed in his mind, Thomas knew that he would always be a prisoner, because he would love her forever.

  Washington, D.C.

  The room was cold and bare. It had whitewashed walls and a tile floor that smashed anything you dropped on it. There was a plain wooden cross hanging over the bed, but no Jesus nailed on it. Rosemary sometimes imagined that Jesus had quietly departed, taking the nails with him. It was hard to imagine that Jesus would have enjoyed this room, or indeed the gloomy convent chapel where mass was said every day and the long benches had no padding and were hard enough to make your backside ache and leave deep furrows in your knees.

  Rosemary hated this place. She hated the Clorox smell of the nuns. She hated their hard hands and cold eyes. She had never been lonelier in her life. No matter how bad things had been before, there had always been smiling faces around her, the laughter of children, the sound of music. Not here.

  Here there were no games. No children. There were endless lessons, stony tutors who told her she wasn’t working hard enough, didn’t apply herself enough, wasn’t devout enough. There were endless prayers, and a sharp tap on the shoulder if she fell asleep before they were done. And there was endless isolation.

  She hadn’t been happy since coming back to the States, not one hour of one day. She missed Belmont House terribly. She missed the children she’d been in charge of, and her friends and the fun that had filled every day.

  It was all so different here. The hours and the days were empty. And nothing came to fill the emptiness except bad things. Even when she was allowed to go home for a day, nothing worked out. Mother seemed to detest the sight of her. Her brothers and sisters were always busy. They had no time for her. Jack had his graduation and his book and all his classmates from Harvard. Eunice had her tennis and Kick had her English friends, and she wasn’t invited to their parties any more. They said she embarrassed them, even though she tried so hard not to.

  Even Joe Junior was impatient with her. He didn’t want to wrestle with her or cuddle her any more, or listen to her read Winnie-the-Pooh. So she’d been pushed in with the younger ones, and that was no good because they made her angry, and then she would lose her temper, and she wouldn’t know what she was doing until there were screams and tears and being locked in her room. They’d said if she hurt her little brothers and sisters again, she wouldn’t be allowed to see them any more. And she hated to see them shrink away from her after she had been angry.

  She missed Daddy terribly.

  She had seen so little of him since they’d come back from England. He’d never really explained why they’d had to come back, right when everything was so fine for her. When she’d asked him, he’d got angry and said the damn British had shown their true colours, and blind people didn’t have eyes to see, and stupid people didn’t like to face facts. He’d said they would be going back to England when the Germans were in charge there, which would be pretty damn soon. In the meantime he was being replaced by someone who was happy to see young men die, which sounded just awful to Rosemary.

  Then there had been the Democratic National Something in Chicago, and after that he was always on the phone, sometimes shouting, saying he was too old to start over again. He’d said his career was in ruins, and that old goat Roosevelt had stabbed him in the back at last, just as he’d always known he would.

  Rosemary hated Roosevelt for hurting Daddy.

  There were a lot of things she hated.

  She lay straight in the bed, the way Sister Katherine had left her, with her arms out of the blankets and stretched straight on either side of her, despite the autumn chill in the room. Hands that wandered under the blankets were strictly forbidden. Because you would play with your you-know-what down there, and the chromo of Mother Mary was watching from the opposite wall, ready to snitch on you if you did. And that would earn you the cane on your wicked fingers until they swelled up red and tears spurted out of your eyes.

  She was twenty-two, and she had never been so unhappy in her life.

  The sounds of the convent slowly stilled. Doors banged, bells chimed. Voices faded. Even when there was complete silence, Rosemary didn’t put her hands under the blanket. She had a better plan.

  She slipped out of her bed and went to her closet. The dark-red dress was one of her favourites. The nuns had tried to forbid it, but she’d got Daddy to explain that she needed at least some nice things to wear. She couldn’t go around in brown or grey all day. She put it on and peered at herself in the dim mirror. Of course there was no makeup allowed, not even face powder; but a friend in England had taught her to slap her own cheeks, which she did smartly, closing her eyes against the sting, and bite her own lips until they looked pink and fresh. That helped things a lot. She practised her smile a couple of times. It was her best feature, they always said, her brilliant smile. They said it lit up the room. It didn’t light up this sombre cell, but it did gleam back at her from the mirror. She brushed her hair and clipped on the pearls Mother had bought her in London. She pulled on a raincoat because it looked like being a drizzly night.

  Then, with the silent skill of long practice, she climbed out of the window.

  Her favourite place was a bar called The Shamrock, but there were only a handful of old men in it tonight. It was a Wednesday night and most of the bars were half-empty. But getting out of the convent on a Friday was almost impossible. So she walked around the corner to Mac’s. Mac’s was always busy, but it was also a little seedier. Still, sometimes that suited her.

  The jukebox was playing Glen Miller at a nickel a shot and the air was blue with tobacco smoke. Rosemary took off her raincoat and hoisted herself on to a stool at the bar. There was a battered cigarette in the pocket of her raincoat. She straightened it as best she could and put it in her mouth. She waited. It never took very long.

  A Zippo appeared in front of her eyes. A hand thumbed it open and flicked it alight. She half-turned to check the owner of the hand and the lighter. He was middle-aged but pleasant-looking, so she accepted the light, tasting the gasoline fumes of the Zippo as she sucked.

  She expelled the smoke upward. ‘Why, thank you, kind sir.’ She’d learned to say that from a movie she’d seen.

  ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ the man offered.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What’ll it be?’

  Rosemary looked at the rows and rows of bottles behind the bar. A tall, yellow one caught her eye. She pointed. ‘I’ll have that.’

  ‘Galliano? You Italian?’

  ‘Irish.’

  ‘Ah well, nobody’s perfect.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s just a joke.’

  ‘Oh.’ She laughed to show him she got the joke, though she didn’t.

  His face changed. ‘You’re beautiful when you laugh. Say, have we met before?’

  ‘No,’ Rosemary said, ‘we haven’t.’

  ‘I could swear I know you from somewhere.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she replied with a wink, ‘I’m just the girl of your dreams.’

  He moved closer to her. ‘Damn if you might just be the answer to a prayer.’

  His name was Lou. He didn’t ask for her surname, which was good, because she knew she had to be careful about that, and he didn’t tell her his, though she saw the wedding
ring on his hand.

  The Galliano turned out to be a good choice. The stuff was delicious. It tasted of liquorice and vanilla and it made her feel floaty and gay. Lou was funny and knew lots of jokes. He kept starting them with, ‘Have you heard this one?’ And he kept buying her drinks.

  At two a.m. the bar closed. They spilled out on to the sidewalk, where it was drizzling a bit, and the asphalt was shiny under the streetlamps. Lou suggested they go to his boarding house for a nightcap. Rosemary asked him why he’d taken so long to get around to suggesting that.

  They had to creep up the stairs with their shoes in their hands, so as not to wake the landlady, but Rosemary was used to that. In his room, they said nothing to each other. Lou had run out of jokes.

  He wasn’t rough, the way some men were, but his kisses were infinitely sad. There was no pleasure in this, and much sorrow; but it was better than the empty loneliness. For these moments, which were usually so soon over, she felt part of the world, desired by someone, needed by someone for something. Not a nobody offering empty prayers to a God who had long ago departed.

  She tried to think of Cubby, of what it had been like with him. But she couldn’t really remember his face any more, only the way he had made her feel. And remembering a happy feeling when you were sad was the worst thing of all. After a while she stopped trying to see his face in her mind.

  The nuns were waiting for her when she got back to the convent at dawn. At the sight of them, Rosemary was sick, spewing out the sour liquorice and curdled vanilla of all the Galliano she had drunk.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. Please don’t tell Daddy. Please don’t.’

  But she knew they would. The sick puddled around her feet and they had to step through it as they took her arms and led her to the shower.

  Santa Barbara

  The guest cottage at Santa Barbara was their weekend refuge, and they relished the drive up from the sprawling, grimy tangle of Los Angeles. The Sachses had provided a good piano in the living room, and Stravinsky could compose here, which was what he usually did every Saturday and Sunday morning. But Sundays at noon were reserved for Mother Russia.

  Stravinsky closed the lid of the piano, and with his cigarette-holder clamped in his teeth, searched for the fresh box of pins which he had brought up from Los Angeles. He found it in his briefcase, and went with it into the next room.

  The large-scale map of Russia had been fastened to a cork board. Coloured pins and lengths of tape marked the progress of the German invasion, which was now in its second month.

  That Hitler had suddenly turned on his erstwhile partner in crime, Stalin, had come as a surprise only to the naïve. Between the two nations there was not only a political gulf, with fascism on one side and communism on the other; there were also decades of ancient enmity. The Führer had clearly stated his belief that Russia must be conquered to provide the German people with the living space they required.

  It was a campaign being fought with unusual viciousness. The Nazis were waging a rapacious war of extermination and obliteration which would leave nothing behind but naked Russian soil for Germans to repopulate. The Russians were fighting desperately for their very existence.

  Stravinsky’s map showed the huge gains which the Nazis had made. If it were the map of a human body, it would show an apparently unstoppable cancer invading the healthy flesh in great swathes; or perhaps a savage beast devouring its prey in gulps, tearing off and swallowing limbs and organs each day.

  The German armies had Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev in their sights already, although von Runstedt had encountered fierce resistance in the south. Guderian’s panzers had captured Ostrov, and were almost at the great gates of Kiev. Russia was succumbing to the Blitzkrieg tactics which had annihilated France; and it seemed that nothing could stop Hitler.

  Stravinsky switched on the radio and fiddled with the dials until the announcer’s voice faded in. Then, sucking on his cigarette-holder, he sat back to listen to the latest news.

  Hearing the radio, Vera came in from the garden and sat on the arm of the chair beside him. She had been sitting in the garden, watching the sea, and he caught the sun-warmed smell of her skin as she leaned on his shoulder.

  They had been married for four months. Tumultuous as those months had been, Stravinsky was aware that he had never been happier, might never be so happy again. Vera, his mistress of so many years, was at last his wife. She had brought to his life her stability, her beauty, her magic. Above all, she had brought her healing.

  The announcer’s voice drifted in and out of the static, dryly cataloguing the progress of the war in Europe. Stravinsky trusted only the BBC Overseas Service, but reception was sketchy at best. He listened intently. When the news turned to Russia, he got up with his box of pins and went to the map. Yet again, he was forced to push new pins deeper into the bleeding body of the motherland. The Germans had made new advances, conquering almost incredible stretches of territory. Cities, towns, villages, lakes and farmland were now behind German lines.

  He moved the coloured ribbons into their new places, watched by Vera’s large and lustrous hazel eyes. His scowl deepened minute by minute. Then something that the announcer said caught his attention. He peered over his long nose at the map and stabbed a point with his finger.

  ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘I heard the usual catalogue of disasters.’

  ‘No, no, Vera. They have been checked here, at Novgorod, near the lake. The announcer says their troops are exhausted.’ He turned to her, his spectacles flashing triumphantly. ‘They’ve gone too far, too fast. It’s the mistake Napoleon made before them. Now they are depleted, far from their supply lines, overwhelmed by the vastness of the country. Here they will sit to recover; and then the rains will come. And then the snow.’

  She was a beautiful, stately woman with a dancer’s fluidity of movement. She slipped down into the armchair he had vacated, crossing her ankles on the arm. She inspected him over her peep-toe wedges. ‘The snow is months away yet, Igor.’

  ‘But it will come.’ He laid down the box of pins and smacked his fist into the palm of the other hand. ‘By God, it will come. And then we will show these Nazis how Russians can fight.’

  She smiled her soft, voluptuous smile. ‘We, Igor? Who is this we? For years you’ve been telling everyone you are French. Then you said America was your home. Now you are suddenly Russian again?’

  ‘I am French,’ he said, ‘and America is my home.’ He struck his chest. ‘But this is Russian.’

  ‘Your very nice Argyll sweater? As I recall, it came from Bloomingdales.’

  ‘My heart. My soul. Why do you mock me?’

  ‘Only because you have been abusing Russia for the past thirty years. You have been telling everyone it was bad to start with, and the Revolution has made it even worse.’

  ‘All that is true.’ He came back to her, and they lit the cigarettes which they tried to restrict to five a day. ‘But a man can have only one birthplace, one motherland. And the motherland is the most important circumstance in his life.’ He exhaled a cloud of smoke into the sunlight that streamed through the window. ‘The right to abuse Russia is mine, and mine alone, because Russia is mine and I love it. I give nobody else the right to abuse Russia. Especially not the Nazi swine.’

  ‘So you are Russian again.’

  He gestured at the map, festooned with pins and lines. ‘While this is happening, I am fully Russian again.’ He puffed at his cigarette. ‘I am going to start on a new work.’

  ‘But, darling, you’ve just finished something very important. You need to rest.’

  ‘I’ve never felt fitter,’ he retorted. ‘I’m going to write a symphony to celebrate the defeat of Hitler.’

  They had a late lunch with their hosts, the banker Arthur Sachs and his charming French wife Georgette, and then were joined by some visitors, including Robert and Mildred Bliss, for whom Stravinsky had written the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, and Ka
tharine Wolff. By common consent, seeing it was such a lovely afternoon, they drove down to the beach, and walked along the sand in two groups. Stravinsky strolled ahead with the Sachses and the Blisses, while Vera followed with Katharine at a distance.

  ‘How is he?’ Katharine asked.

  ‘Very engaged with the war,’ Vera replied. ‘This morning he made quite a speech about being fully Russian.’

  ‘Is that a good sign?’

  ‘I think so. It shows that he is becoming sure of his identity again. He is not so—’ She groped for the English word. ‘Épars.’

  ‘Fragmented.’

  ‘Yes, exactly. He has been broken in pieces for a long time, I think. And the pieces were all scattered. Now he’s starting to find these pieces of himself in strange places.’

  ‘Like the war news?’

  ‘The German invasion of Russia fills him with passion. It enthuses him. It’s almost like a novel or a film to him. You saw the maps, the coloured pins?’

  ‘I did. It’s very impressive.’

  She laughed. ‘You know how methodical he is.’

  ‘I think he should offer his services to the Allied High Command.’

  ‘He says he has never felt better. He’s talking about writing a Victory Symphony.’

  ‘So he’s composing again?’

  ‘Not only composing, but composing with great facility.’ Vera lowered her voice. ‘Don’t say anything, but he finished the Symphony in C yesterday.’

  Katharine threw up her hands. ‘But that’s wonderful. I thought he might never get back to it.’

  ‘It came like an easy childbirth. Few pangs, few alarms, few hesitations or second thoughts. The music is sad. But he was sad when he conceived it. It’s one of his great works. I see it as his farewell to Europe.’

 

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