The Kennedy Moment

by Peter Adamson

  Hélène felt a chill spread down her arms to her fingertips. ‘What do you want me to speak about?’

  ‘What you’ve been saying today. Telling it like it is.’

  Hélène picked up the menu again. ‘Wouldn’t that get you into a lot of hot water?’

  ‘I’ll survive.’

  Hélène’s thoughts raced. She had always joined all field workers’ chorus of complaint – that the health hierarchy never listened to the front line. She opened the menu. ‘It should be an African.’

  Michael pulled a face of agreement. ‘Yes, but it would be a hell of a lot more difficult for an African to say the kind of things you were saying today. Not to mention all your experience. Not many doing what you’re doing stick it out for more than two or three years.’

  ‘I might not be sticking it much longer myself.’

  She saw the surprise, the questioning in his eyes, and was relieved to have the conversation interrupted by the small fuss of accepting drinks and arranging coasters. It had been decided that they would not eat in the hotel, but when the waiter had gone she absorbed herself in the menu.

  Eventually Michael reached over and gently pushed the menu down to reveal her eyes. ‘Are you really thinking of quitting?’

  Again Michael had failed to carry through his plan to walk with Seema as they left the Cotswold Lodge for the restaurant at just after seven o’clock, and it was Toby’s arm she took as they crossed the Banbury Road.

  ‘Enjoyed the day, Tobe?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, okay, found it interesting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘Okay. I confess it had its moments.’

  Toby patted her hand. It was pleasant walking arm in arm with the beautiful Seema Mir, of whom he had always been just the slightest bit afraid.

  ‘There weren’t too many moments when you weren’t ogling her.’

  Toby sighed. ‘Can’t seem to get her to take me seriously, petal.’

  ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘Oh I know why, sweetheart. Oldest story in the book. La Belle et la Bête, you know. Simple as that, really.’

  ‘I don’t think she sees it quite that way. And anyway, doesn’t Beauty eventually kiss the Beast and turn him into a handsome Prince?’

  ‘I used that once in a deodorant ad. Flopped, unfortunately. Anyway, they never tell you how the Beast got the Beauty to kiss him in the first place.’

  ‘I think she felt sorry for him.’

  ‘Really? There’s hope yet.’

  They had turned into North Parade and were approaching the Luna Caprese, a small Italian restaurant with a stucco façade and grubby red awning that was one of the few Oxford restaurants to have survived from the 1960s.

  ‘Well, it’s very obvious to me,’ said Seema as they arrived, ‘that she’s still very fond of you.’

  ‘Oh please, sweetheart, spare me the “fond”. I’ve suffered enough.’

  The only significant development over dinner that evening was the discovery that four of the five would be together again in the same city in the New Year. When Hélène had mentioned that Michael had invited her to address a meeting in New York, Seema had been delighted. ‘And Stephen’s planning to come over as well, I think?’

  Stephen blustered, alarmed to see his barely conceived notion born prematurely into the world. He frowned at his napkin. ‘That may be in prospect, yes.’

  Hélène had protested that they couldn’t all get together without Toby. ‘No dramas,’ Toby had beamed, gratified. ‘Got to make the pilgrimage to HQ at least twice a year, drink from the pure fountain of untruth on Madison Avenue. Got a date in mind, Michael?’

  ‘First week in February.’

  Toby lifted his glass. ‘Right she’ll be. We’ll make a weekend of it. Celebration even. Hélène and I will probably be married by then.’

  ‘You’re married now, Toby.’

  Toby conceded the point with a glum look. ‘You were always good on the detail, Hel.’

  Hélène raised her eyes to the ceiling. Seema covered her glass with her hand as the bottle approached. ‘I’ve a feeling Tom might be in New York by then as well. You know he’s going to be chief medical correspondent on the Times?’

  Michael nodded. ‘He wrote me.’

  Stephen looked dubious. ‘Of all of us I should have thought he was the least likely to earn a living by the pen. Didn’t he read chemistry?’

  Toby lifted his glass, looking pleased at the turn events had taken. ‘Struggle with the idea of a literate scientist do we, sunshine?’

  Seema took a small notebook from her bag. ‘I’ll call him when I get back. See if he can make it.’

  With the prospect of getting together again so soon, the mood of the evening changed. There had been no set aim to the reunion weekend, no conclusion envisaged. But it would probably be true to say that each of the five had invested the occasion with vague hopes, perhaps anticipating a possibility of resolving vague, long-deferred concerns of the kind that worry away in the background of all lives. But without the plan to get together again in the New Year, the weekend would have ended with a sense of anti-climax, of some unarticulated opportunity missed. All this was now pre-empted by the promise of New York, though none of the five had any notion of the chain of events that had been set in motion.

  7 | Is there someone else?

  Body-clock still awry, and wide awake since the early hours, Seema watched from an upstairs window as Michael stood jogging on the spot at the corner of Norham Road. As lean and fit as she had imagined he would be, wearing only shorts and a T-shirt despite the frost that rimed the hedges. A few seconds later he was gone, running lightly and easily towards the Parks. She showered and dressed, refusing to answer her own question as to whether she was applying her make-up any more carefully than usual.

  Guessing he would be out for at least half an hour, she called Hélène’s room and arranged to meet for breakfast. There had perhaps been a reason for losing touch with Michael, but not with Hélène, with whom all the old warmth and intimacy had returned almost as soon as they had met.

  The dining room, converted to a breakfast area by an excess of morning light and the tall jugs of orange juice on the sideboard, was nonetheless redolent of the previous evening’s dinner: cigarette smoke lingered on the velvet drapes, and there was more than a tinge of alcohol accompanying the smell of bacon and eggs from the kitchen.

  Hélène came straight to the point. ‘So, what’s the skinny on Michael?’

  Seema grimaced. ‘Oh God, I don’t know. He hardly said a word to me all day yesterday. It’s as if there’d never been … anything. I think he might even dislike me. My head’s paining with it all.’

  ‘Nonsense, my dear. The good Dr Lowell is still in love with you.’

  ‘Hélène!’

  ‘He’s still in love with you, and so he’s afraid.’

  ‘Afraid of what?’

  ‘Now don’t be dense, Professor. He’s afraid of getting hurt.

  Not really surprising when you think about it’

  A cafetière arrived, and a tray of pastries. There was still no sign of the others.

  ‘I don’t think it’s that, Hélène.’

  ‘Then you’re blind as a bat. Anyway, never mind about his feelings, what about yours?’

  ‘Oh God, don’t ask.’

  Hélène stared at her, then tilted back in her chair, raising both hands as if to embrace the whole situation. ‘Okay, I think I’ve got the picture. Allow me to summarize, as Stephen might say.’ She looked at Seema pityingly. ‘Once upon a time there was this beautiful young woman who rejected a young man who loved her to distraction. But as the years went by …’ – she stretched out her voice to emphasize the point – ‘and she grow older and wiser, she began to realize she’d made a terrible mistake. Then, twenty years later, chance brought them together again in the city of their youth. But, instead of letting him know, she decided to be especially cool towards him
because she didn’t want to risk hurting him all over again …’

  ‘Hélène, it would be unforgivable—’

  ‘… and so he was cool towards her because she was being cool to him and making it quite clear she wasn’t interested. And so they both lived miserably ever after.’ She dropped her hands and reached for the toast.

  Seema laughed despite herself. ‘Toby doesn’t seem to be suffering from any similar inhibitions. He was looking at you like a love-sick puppy the whole day.’

  ‘Don’t change the subject.’

  ‘I haven’t had a chance to ask you – is there someone else?’ Hélène’s smile faded as she steadied the cafetière with one hand. ‘There wasn’t for a long time. I think African men thought I was too uptight. Maybe even matronly, God forbid. And most others of the unattached tribe were usually just passing through.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then I met Fabrice.’

  After a moment or two, Seema reached across the table to take her hand. Hélène bit her lip and looked down at her coffee cup. Eventually she recovered. ‘We were two busy, practical, no-nonsense doctors who suddenly found ourselves acting like a couple of kids. We were so much in love I couldn’t believe it was happening.’

  Another pause. ‘And?’

  Hélène turned to look out of the window in a determined effort at control.

  ‘He started a group called Médecins de Réforme. And he was speaking out. My God, was he speaking out. The kind of things I was mouthing on about yesterday, only not in the garden of an Oxford college.’ Hélène had her back to the room and there was no one to see her tears. ‘And then, one Thursday night, when we were due to have dinner as usual, he just never turned up. Not that night. Or any other night.’

  Seema put her coffee down. ‘You never saw him again?’

  ‘Not him nor any of the others.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  Hélène shook her head. ‘I don’t even know if he’s alive. Eat your breakfast, Seema – it’s a long time ago.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Two years and three months. The government denies knowing anything about it, of course.’

  ‘Can’t your embassy do anything?

  ‘If he’d been Canadian, maybe. But they can’t do anything about all the Africans who disappear.’

  ‘And you’ve heard nothing at all? Not even rumours?’

  Hélène swallowed hard.

  ‘Oh, there are always people who pretend they’re in the know. Mass graves in the forest, some place without roads. Lime pits in an abandoned army camp. An old slaving island just off the coast where no one’s allowed to go. Nothing you could ever follow up on.’

  ‘So you’ve just … waited?’

  ‘Nothing else I could do. I’ve used up every contact I’ve got. Got a warning from the embassy and from my own CEO back in Ottawa, would you believe. Jeopardizing the programme, apparently.’

  ‘How awful for you. All this time, Hélène. I wish I’d known. I wish I’d come.’

  ‘Come anyway, I wish you would.’

  ‘I will. I’ll come next year. We can plan it all in New York.’

  Hélène smiled. ‘You know Michael wants me to say all the things I was saying yesterday at his big international meeting?’

  ‘I gathered as much. Will you do it?’

  Hélène stared down at the tablecloth. ‘I told him it should be an African. He said it would be dangerous for an African to speak out. That’s when I knew I had to do it.’ She bit back tears again. ‘I have to do it for Fabrice.’

  Returning from his run, Michael had glanced into the breakfast room to see Seema breakfasting with Hélène. Showered and changed, he set off into town with Toby. ‘First rule of travel, Michael. Never eat breakfast in the hotel.’

  After bacon and eggs in the Covered Market, he left Toby to go to the bank and headed towards Stephen’s rooms. Finding no one in, he crossed the quad to the Buttery. Stephen was sitting alone, looking miserable and staring out over the croquet lawn.

  ‘Good morning, Dr Lowell, ready to do battle with la formidable Hélène?’

  Michael smiled. ‘Morning, Stephen. Hard to do battle when you don’t really disagree.’

  ‘I don’t remember her being as aggressive as that, do you? Seem to remember her as, you know, bit of a milk-and-water type.’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘And you mean to say you agree with her take on things? In your position, I mean?’

  ‘Mostly. So, you’re moving on?’

  Stephen’s face performed one of its academic contortions, implying dismissal. ‘Nothing decided as we speak. Considering my options, as they say.’

  ‘And the States is one option?’

  ‘Possibly, possibly. Oxford palls after a while, as I told the lovely Seema yesterday.’ He scrutinized Michael’s features for any reaction.

  Michael gave him no satisfaction. ‘I imagine these are difficult times for the disciples?’

  More facial acrobatics as Stephen made a show of rolling the proposition around in his mind. ‘Possibly. If one is focused merely on contemporary events. Intellectually, on the other hand, we live in interesting times. Quite daunting really. Whole sweeps of history that still need re-analysing. And of course we’ve only just started on the language revolution, subversion of the signified, textual politics of deconstruction and so on and so forth. Lot of intellectual heavy lifting to be done. Just not sure this is the best place to do it. Oxford’s never really “got” Marxist historiography – not like the Sorbonne.’

  Michael looked at the clock on the Buttery wall. Seema would be on her way down the Parks Road, probably with Hélène. The tension of seeing her again after all the years had ebbed, replaced by a kind of emptiness. She had made it clear she had no special feeling for him. And there was no reason why he should have expected anything else. Nonetheless, the weekend had lost its savour. He had told himself not to hope, but hope had hung on his horizon nonetheless.

  Stephen was in full flow, speaking in a manner that made Michael feel redundant. Toby would be arriving soon. Perhaps he should confide in Toby, as Toby had on occasion confided in him.

  ‘I should have thought what Hélène was saying yesterday was quite a virile little example of precisely what we’re talking about.’ Stephen was clearly veering in a direction to which Michael would have to devote at least part of his attention. ‘I mean to say, one can’t analyse what she was saying about the African situation by looking at the relationship of the masses to the means of production … it simply doesn’t work. Positively invites analysis by relationships to the power structure …’

  Michael half listened, his thoughts wandering to Hélène. Something was eating away at her, something that might be just the years of commitment and frustration, the daily face-to-face frustrations and confrontations with realities he was now shielded from.

  ‘And apropos of all this,’ Stephen was saying, ‘there’s something I wanted to mention to you, Michael, just between ourselves.’ Stephen glanced around the empty Buttery to check that they were alone. ‘You remember Toby’s little joke in the Parks last evening, about – how did he put it? – blowing bubbles in Times Square?’

  Michael smiled. ‘Toby being Toby.’

  ‘Very possibly. But one facet of the language revolution is that one knows to examine throwaway lines, even jokes, in the same way as stated propositions. Because sometimes, you see, the humour itself arises out of applying logic to produce a startling result. Startling, that is to say, because it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Applying an accepted morality, for example, but in a much more rigorous way than society is ready to accept. It’s the shock juxtaposition, a kind of dialectic if you like, that gives rise to “the gasp of humour” as it’s been called.’ He shook his head slowly, staring at Michael. ‘That’s why Toby’s little joke kept me awake last night.’ He blinked several times, almost as if coming out of a trance. ‘You all sleep well at the Cotswold L
odge by the way?’

  ‘Very comfortable.’

  ‘Ye-es, it has the reputation of being an acceptable temporary abode. Anyway, as I was saying, spent a long time thinking it through. Kept arriving at the same obvious little conclusion. I mean, unless we’re talking some sort of hand-me-down, soft-boiled, bed-wetting bourgeois morality here, then you’d have to say that almost any action might be justified if it stood to save five million children’s lives a year. Yes?’

  Michael remained silent, wondering what was coming. He decided to give Stephen the opportunity either to retreat or to cross a line.

  Stephen, leaning forward, peered at him over his spectacles. Failing to read his thoughts, he fell again into his slightly sing-song rhythm. ‘I mean to say, if memory serves, the equation we’re looking at here puts the deaths of five million children a year against a cost of prevention which is, to all intents and purposes, insignificant. You concur?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Stephen, taking the grim tone as encouragement, leaned slightly closer. ‘So, one has to ask at this point, what greater crime against humanity could there be, Michael? A crime against humanity of a scale and severity that would surely validate just about any action that stood a reasonable chance of stopping it?’

  Michael pushed his chair back onto two legs and folded his arms. ‘Where are you going with this, Stephen?’

  Stephen made one of his ‘isn’t it obvious’ facial somersaults to which Michael did not respond, instead looking steadily into the other’s eyes, inviting him to commit himself. After an uncomfortable moment, Stephen shrugged. ‘So, lying awake, as I said, I found myself wondering where someone like yourself, for example, might stand on a thing like that? I mean what your own assessment might be – professional, personal, political.’

  Michael turned away to look out across the croquet lawn to the windowless stone wall of the squash courts. The sun was beginning to warm the peaceful, protected space, the morning mist gone and another fine day in the offing. Suddenly he hated Oxford. Stephen had maintained a practised academic tone, as if discussing an abstract problem, but Michael decided not to allow him wriggle room. ‘You’re asking me what I think about using the threat of releasing the smallpox virus to get the world to immunize children?’