A blond giant moved skilfully between them and grinned down on her. ‘I’m your hostess’s brother’s buddy,’ he said, steering her towards a set of French doors. ‘Let’s go on to the terrace. There should be room to dance there.’
There was. The Supremes gave way to the Beatles, to the Stones, to Sonny and Cher.
‘… And so I go to LA next week to try out for the Rams.’
‘I got you Babe,’ Sonny and Cher sang out. ‘I got you babe.’
‘You mean you’re going to be a football player?’ Abbra asked, grateful for the cooling night breeze that was blowing in from the Bay.
‘You bet your sweet life I am. If Scott Ellis can make it professionally, I sure as hell can make it.’
She stopped dancing. ‘Scott Ellis?’ she said incredulously. ‘You did say Scott Ellis?’
He nodded. ‘He’s my buddy. He’s here somewhere.’ From his advantageous height he scanned the heads of the other dancers. ‘There he is, over near the doorway.’
Abbra turned to look. The figure he was pointing to had his back toward them and was surrounded by a bevy of admiring girls. He was tall, easily six feet three or four, with magnificently broad shoulders and a thatch of sun-bleached hair.
‘Oh boy!’ she said, her voice thick with laughter, feeling no twinge of destiny, no intimation of fate. ‘My mother is never going to believe this! I wonder if his father knows he’s here in San Francisco? If his brother knows?’
The giant shrugged uncomprehendingly. ‘Why should anyone know?’ he asked as they began to dance again, this time to the Kinks. ‘Scott doesn’t have to check in with anyone. He never has. He never will.’
When Set Me Free came to an end, she declined another dance with a smile and a shake of her head, knowing that if she stayed any longer, he would consider her his personal property. She didn’t seek out Scott Ellis. He had enough adoring females around him without another one swelling the ranks. Instead, she danced with her friend’s brother, and then with some of the guys from Stanford, and then with her friend’s brother again.
‘Someone’s come to get you!’ a classmate shouted across to her.
Abbra glanced down at her watch, said an exasperated ‘damn’ beneath her breath, and began to ease her way through the crowd and out of the room.
‘Abbra?’ He was twenty-eight or twenty-nine and bore no resemblance at all to the slightly awkward teenager she remembered. He was in uniform, and beneath the porch light lieutenant’s pips gleamed dully.
She nodded, stepping out on to the porch, saying with an apologetic smile, ‘I’m sorry about this. I’m afraid there are times when my mother behaves as if I were twelve years old!’
‘It’s no trouble.’ His voice was deep-timbred. ‘Your mother said for you to leave her car here. She’ll have her chauffeur pick it up in the morning.’
There was no easy affability about him. His mouth was intimidatingly uncompromising, and he was obviously a man who smiled neither easily nor often. Yet she was suddenly sure that she was going to like him. Beneath his peaked cap his hair was thick and curly, and his face was hard-boned and abrasively masculine. He wasn’t tall, not nearly as tall as the blond giant she had danced with, but he was toughly built and held himself well, with a muscular coordination that spoke of hard training and perfect physical fitness.
‘I suppose you’re wondering why my mother didn’t ask her chauffeur to pick me up this evening,’ she said with friendly ease as they began to walk down the lamplit drive towards his car. ‘He could have, but you see, if the party had proved to be wild, she wouldn’t be able to rely on him to inform her. She thinks you’ll be braver.’
‘And was it wild?’
There was the merest touch of a smile at the corners of his mouth.
‘No. Just the opposite.’ She suddenly remembered Scott. ‘Your brother was there. Probably still is.’
His car was a two-seater MG. ‘That doesn’t prove that the party was respectable,’ he said dryly, opening the door for her. ‘More the opposite.’
She giggled, glad that a sense of humour lurked beneath his somewhat forbidding manner. ‘Don’t you want to go back to the party and say hi to him?’
‘No.’ He flinched slightly as someone in the house turned the volume on the record player up. ‘Parties are Scott’s scene, not mine.’
Her amusement deepened. She believed him. It was impossible to imagine him at a party like the one she had just left. He was far too staid and serious-minded to let his hair down dancing to the Beach Boys.
‘I love parties,’ she said as he slipped into the seat beside her and slid the MG into gear, ‘and I hate leaving them just when they’re catching their second breath.’
‘We could go back if you want.’
He was a man who rarely acted on impulse, and his suggestion surprised him almost as much as it surprised her. He swung the MG out of the drive and into the street, wondering why he had made it. The answer wasn’t hard to find. From the instant she had stepped from the lighted hall on to the porch he had been attracted to her. Because he found her radiant wholesomeness, and her vibrancy and vitality, immensely appealing.
She was staring at him. ‘But you don’t like parties,’ she protested, uncertain about whether or not he was joking. ‘And I thought you promised my mother to have me home before the clock strikes twelve and I turn into a pumpkin.’
‘I promised to pick you up,’ he said, the breeze from the Bay tugging at their hair. ‘I didn’t say anything at all about the time I would get you home. What do you want to do? Go back to the party or go for a hamburger?’
There was an almost overpowering quality about him that she was beginning to find very interesting.
‘A hamburger,’ she said, knowing that if they returned to the party, he would immediately become the centre of female attention and she would lose the opportunity to get to know him better.
He drove down to a hamburger joint on the Embarcadero and they sat at a table overlooking the ink-black Bay.
‘Your mother tells me you’re at Stanford,’ he said when he had given the waitress their order. ‘What’s your major?’
She suppressed a grin. This was a little like being taken out by a diligent uncle. ‘I haven’t decided yet. Political science perhaps, or literature.’ She remembered her dim memory of Lewis as a teenager in an army cadet uniform. ‘Have you always been decisive about what you want to do?’ she asked curiously. ‘Have you always wanted to be in the military?’
‘Always. We’re a military family. Apart from Scott, that is. All Scott’s ever wanted to do is kick a ball around a field.’
The disapproval in his tone was so intense that Abbra had to struggle to keep her eyebrows from arching in reaction. ‘I’ve never been friends with anyone from a military family,’ she said, discounting his father, who was her parents’ friend, not hers. ‘Is it as restricted and dutiful a way of life as it sounds?’
‘No,’ he said firmly, and she could see tiny flecks of gold in the brown of his eyes. ‘It’s fun.’
The waitress delivered their hamburgers and french fries and Cokes. He waited until she had gone and then said, ‘I guess you know that my father was a battalion commander in the Second World War?’
Abbra nodded, wishing she had paid more attention whenever the conversation at home had included Colonel Ellis.
‘When the war was over he continued to serve in Europe and we were posted to twelve or thirteen different countries. I loved every minute of it and I knew at a very early age what it was that I wanted to do when I grew up. Later, when we returned to the States, I went to West Point and Scott went to Michigan State. It took my father quite a while to adjust to the idea that Scott wasn’t going to follow in his footsteps as well.’
‘But you did. That must have pleased him.’
Lewis’s hard-boned face softened slightly. ‘It did. When I graduated from West Point he was as pleased as hell.’
He was silent for a moment. A deeply reserved m
an, he couldn’t remember the last time he had spoken with such ease about himself. Aware that Mrs Daley had cast him in the role of an older brother, and not wanting to abuse her trust, he asked hesitantly, ‘I’m on three days leave at the moment. Could we meet again and spend the day in Sausalito or Carmel?’
Her first reaction was pleasure at the inherent flattery in his question. All her previous dates had been with young men close to her own age. Lewis was worlds removed from them. Tough and mature and sophisticated. Then she remembered Jerry.
‘I’d like to,’ she said truthfully, ‘but it’s a little awkward.’
‘You mean that you’re already dating somebody?’
‘Not exactly.’ She folded her arms on the table and leaned slightly on them, her hair falling forwards softly at either side of her face. ‘But I do have a kind of an understanding with someone.’
‘Tell me,’ he said, already determined that whatever kind of understanding it was, it wasn’t one that was going to stand in his way.
‘Jerry is a poet.’ Her eyes took on an impassioned glow. ‘At the moment he is in New York, but he’ll be coming back to San Francisco and when he does …’ She couldn’t finish the sentence as she would have liked to because she and Jerry hadn’t made any commitments. Instead, she gave an expressive lift of her shoulders, intimating that no more need be said, that when he returned they would be together.
‘Poets are pretty unconventional,’ Lewis said, giving no indication that he already knew all about Jerry Littler.
Her mother had told him at dinner how distressed she was by Abbra’s infatuation with him. How Littler wasn’t a legitimate poet but a long-haired, work-shy beatnik who attached himself like a parasite to anyone foolish enough to fund him.
‘He isn’t going to hit the roof simply because you have a day out with a family friend,’ Lewis continued, determined that Littler was never again going to surface in Abbra’s life. ‘I’ll pick you up at ten tomorrow morning and we’ll go to the beach.’
‘Do you always make people’s decisions for them?’ She tried to sound indignant but was too pleased to pull it off.
He rose to his feet, knowing that if he didn’t take her home soon her mother would no more allow her to spend the day with him than she would allow her to spend the day with Jerry Littler. ‘Always,’ he said, flashing her a smile that completely transformed his serious face. ‘It’s my military training.’
‘Well, I have to admit that I’m surprised by this turn of events,’ her mother said doubtfully when Abbra told her the next morning that she was going out with Lewis for the day. ‘I approve of Lewis, of course, but he is ten years older than you—’
‘It isn’t a date, Mom,’ Abbra said. ‘He’s on leave and I have nothing else planned for today, and so we’re going to the beach together. As friends. There’s no romance in the air, so please don’t behave towards Lewis as if there were.’
‘Nevertheless it would be extremely suitable,’ her mother said musingly. ‘Military weddings are so attractive, and Lewis is obviously destined to become a colonel, perhaps even a general.’
From beyond the front door there came the sound of a car drawing to a halt.
‘Well, I am not destined to become an army wife,’ Abbra said deflatingly. ‘Lewis is a conformist. He’s simply not my type.’ It was true. Although he was undeniably attractive, he was also staid and predictable. Unlike Jerry.
She didn’t wait for him to ring the doorbell because she didn’t want her mother to waylay him. She hurried out of the house, her hair swinging glossily, her fashionably short lemon sundress revealing long, suntanned legs. Although it was true that he was not her type, she knew that she was his. She had seen it in his eyes the previous night, and she saw it now as she strode across the gravel towards him.
He wasn’t in uniform and he looked different, far more relaxed. His cream-coloured slacks were snug on his hips and his short-sleeved cotton shirt was open at the throat, revealing a hint of tightly curling, crisp dark hair.
‘I’ve brought a picnic,’ he said, sliding the MG into gear.
She was just about to say how impressed she was when she saw bruising on his right temple that had not been obvious the previous evening. ‘What on earth did you do to your head?’ she asked, staring at a painful-looking swollen place an inch or two into his hairline. ‘Walk into a door?’
He gave a sheepish grin, ‘I got thwacked on the head a few days ago on a training manoeuvre.’
‘It looks nasty.’ She was suddenly very much her father’s daughter. ‘What did your medic say about it?’
‘You don’t run to a medic with every little bump and bruise,’ he said, amused and more than a little pleased by her concern. ‘The last thing a career soldier needs is a long medical record.’
She frowned slightly. She could understand that. Peak physical fitness was obviously the first requisite for a soldier. Nevertheless, she knew enough about neurology to appreciate that any head injury, however slight, justified medical attention.
‘Your commanding officer should have ordered you to go to a medic.’
He smiled. ‘My commanding officer hadn’t the slightest idea that I’d been hit,’ he said, dismissing the subject and pressing his foot down harder on the accelerator, heading south, toward Carmel.
They spent the morning strolling along Main Street, browsing in the little shops and boutiques, pausing at a café to sip margaritas, walking barefoot along the beach.
‘Let’s drive out of town and picnic up on the cliffs,’ he suggested as they began to walk back to the car.
She nodded agreeably, happy in his company, enjoying herself hugely.
‘What are you going to do with this bachelor’s degree of yours when you get it?’ he asked suddenly.
She knew very well what she wanted to do, but she had never told anyone. Not even Jerry. Especially Jerry.
She said now, unselfconsciously, ‘I want to write.’
‘You mean you want to be a journalist?’
‘No.’ A wide smile curved her mouth, dimpling her cheeks. ‘I want to write fiction.’
His brows rose slightly. ‘Wouldn’t journalism be more sensible?’ he asked, opening the car door for her.
Her smile deepened. It was impossible to imagine Lewis doing anything that wasn’t sensible. ‘It would, but I don’t want to be sensible. I want to be a novelist.’
He began to laugh but she didn’t mind. She began to laugh with him. ‘I want to be a world-famous, best-selling, superstar novelist!’
They were still laughing when he parked the MG high on the cliffs and retrieved the picnic basket from the backseat.
‘What have you got in there?’ she asked, the ocean breeze blowing her hair around her face as they walked over the springy turf.
‘Thinly-sliced ham and melon and roast chicken,’ he said, setting the basket down and sitting cross-legged beside it. ‘And peaches and strawberries and watermelon.’ He pulled her down beside him. ‘And French bread and whipped butter and pastries …’
She was on her knees, sitting back on her heels. He forgot about the picnic. Just looking at her high-cheekboned face and her wide-set blue, heavily lashed eyes, brought a lump into his throat. She was very beautiful. The most beautiful girl he had ever seen. But he couldn’t tell her so. Not so soon. She didn’t yet feel about him as he was beginning to feel about her, and to say anything now would jeopardize the intimacy developing between them.
‘I have another weekend leave at the end of the month,’ he said lightly, lifting a bottle of Chablis from the basket. ‘Why don’t we do this again? We could go to Sausalito or to the zoo.’
‘Let’s go to the zoo.’ She helped herself to a slice of melon. ‘I haven’t been there for years. Not since I was a child.’
He smiled. She made it sound as if her childhood were light-years behind her.
He raised his glass towards hers. ‘To the zoo,’ he said, suddenly so sure that they were on the verge of a very speci
al and precious relationship, that he had to resist the temptation of leaping to his feet and whooping out loud.
‘Where are you stationed?’ Abbra asked three weeks later as they strolled past the koala bear enclosure.
‘Fort Bragg, North Carolina.’
She halted in stunned surprise, staring at him. ‘But I thought you were stationed somewhere near San Francisco. Do you mean you’ve come all the way from North Carolina just so that we could go to the zoo?’
‘I came all the way from North Carolina to have a pleasant weekend away from school.’
‘School?’ she asked curiously, beginning to walk along beside him once again. ‘If you’re a lieutenant, what are you doing in school again? I don’t understand.’
‘I’m at Fort Bragg, at the Special Warfare School, taking courses in counterinsurgency, counterguerrilla operations, and military assistance operations with foreign governments.’
This time she not only stood still. The blood drained from her face. ‘You mean you’re going to Vietnam?’
‘I hope so,’ he said with dry humour, ‘or the months I’ve spent studying Vietnamese history and customs and language will be a waste!’
‘But I thought only marines were going out there. To guard the air bases.’
In February there had been a devastating Viet Cong attack on a US base near South Vietnamese Army headquarters at Pleiku. American special forces and military advisers had been billeted at the camp, and eight of them had died and a little over a hundred and twenty others had been wounded. Almost immediately President Johnson had ordered retaliatory air strikes against the north. Abbra remembered clearly the disbelief she had felt at his action when she had seen the newspaper headlines. A month later American marines had splashed ashore at Da Nang to guard the nearby airfield from Viet Cong attack. They had been the first US combat troops to land on the Asian mainland since the Korean conflict.
‘But they won’t be the last,’ her father had said grimly. ‘There’s going to be no backing down now. We’re committed whether we like it or not.’
White Christmas in Saigon Page 2