White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

  Gavin strode into the bureau’s office, walking briskly across to Paul’s desk. He’d bought khakis, helmet and canteen for himself that morning at the marketplace.

  ‘I’m just about ready to leave,’ he said as Paul looked up from the nightlead he was editing. ‘I bumped into the Vietnamese who picked me up at the airport. He was able to get hold of a Mini-Moke for me, so I’m driving to Hue.’

  Paul nodded, as if the acquisition of a Moke was so commonplace that it was unworthy of comment.

  ‘Do you know the man?’ Gavin continued. ‘He’s volunteered to go with me. Is he safe?’

  ‘As a driver, no. In any other city in the world he would not even be given a licence. However, if you mean is he safe from a security point of view, then the answer is unequivocally yes. Just don’t let him drive. And Gavin …’ He looked up again as another thought struck him ‘Remember you have to be patient when you’re telephoning copy back to the office. The American military radiophones link into the old French telephone system, and you have to be connected from exchange to exchange all the way down the country. If you’re unlucky, it can take up to two hours.’

  ‘Thanks’ Gavin said dryly, hoping a delay filing copy would be the worst of his problems.

  The name of his companion, sitting happily beside him as he drove out of Saigon was Tran Ngoc Huong.

  ‘But all Vietnamese first names, last name,’ he said helpfully. ‘So my name Huong.’

  Gavin nodded. He already knew most of the information that Huong gave him as they drove north in the searing heat of late morning, but he listened patiently, impressed by the fluency of Huong’s self-taught English.

  Although Hue was less than 500 miles from Saigon, it took them four days to reach it on roads congested with troops and refugees. They arrived to find a city in chaos. Government troops had cut off all essential food supplies in an effort to starve the Buddhists into Submission. Rumours about what had happened, or had not happened, when the troops had stormed Da Nang, were rife. On 26 May a group of students and young workers burned down the USIS library; on 31 May they burned the US Consulate.

  In the midst of all the mayhem, the mayor of Hue, Lieutenant Colonel Pham Van Khoa, declared that he was no longer going to give the Buddhists his support and moved out of the city, taking the thousand troops under his command with him.

  On 8 June, when government troops finally entered Hue, the only resistance they encountered was of unarmed civilians. It was a resistance that was soon put down. By the time Gavin returned with Huong to Saigon three weeks later, he had seen Buddhist students forming human roadblocks across the avenues leading into the city, only to be mown down by machine-gun fire. During his stay he had seen women and children brutally manhandled; he had witnessed, in sick disbelief, an aged Buddhist nun burn herself alive before one of the city’s central pagodas.

  Even though he hadn’t managed to interview Tri Quang, who was on a hunger strike, he knew he had achieved a great deal. He had entered Hue under almost impossible conditions, and he had filed copy under atrocious ones. He was so tired he could barely stand, and so hungry that he would have eaten whatever was put in front of him, however dubious. Above all, he was deeply satisfied. He hadn’t liked what he had seen in Hue, but he had coped.

  As he parked the Moke in front of the bureau’s office in Tu Do Street, and as Huong bade him good-bye, he determined that the first thing he would do, after bathing and eating and sleeping, would be to contact Nhu.

  Five minutes later he discovered that the initiative had been taken from him. Her message lay on his desk. She would meet him at seven that evening, on the terrace of the Continental.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Abbra didn’t wait for Patti Maine to approve or disapprove of the finished synopsis. The mere act of writing it, of creating the character that had, until then, existed only nebulously in her head, had opened the floodgates of her imagination. She wrote with total, single-minded concentration for eight, and sometimes nine hours a day; she felt as if she’d discovered a whole new World, a World so magical, so absorbing, she didn’t want to relinquish it even for a few days. By the time she received Patti’s encouraging letter telling her that the synopsis was better than she had hoped and that she now wanted the first three chapters so she could sell the idea to a publisher, Abbra had already completed her second chapter.

  ‘But surely you can take a break for just one weekend?’ Scott asked her when he made his regular Thursday night telephone call.

  It was the off season now, and Rosalie Bryansten had long ago been relegated to the position of an ex-girlfriend. She had had several successors, all of whose reigns had been equally brief. There was only one person Scott wanted to be with, and that was Abbra.

  ‘I’d like to come down to L.A. for the weekend,’ Abbra said truthfully. Scott had tickets for a film premiere, and she knew that if she went she would enjoy herself hugely. ‘But I’m just two pages into chapter three, and it’s going so well I hate the thought of setting it aside, even for a couple of days.’

  Scott was in a telephone booth at the Beverly Hills. He bit his lip, trying hard to curb his disappointment. He had made a pact with himself. Even though he did not have enough willpower to stick to his resolution of never seeing her again, he had promised himself that he would never force the issue. If he tried to override her protestations, he would be doing exactly that.

  ‘Okay,’ he said with an easy indifference he was far from feeling. ‘We’ll make it another time. When chapter three is safely under your belt.’

  She gave a little laugh, relief and disappointment inextricably mixed. ‘I’ll look forward to it,’ she said sincerely. ‘I’m scared to death about what will happen when chapter three is finished. Patti is sure that she will be able to get a contract on the strength of the synopsis and first three chapters, but what if she can’t? What if no one is interested?’

  ‘Patti Maine is a professional,’ Scott said, wishing that he could reassure her with more than words. ‘If she thinks a publisher will be interested in buying the book, then you can bet your life that they will.’

  ‘But not even Patti has seen the first two chapters yet. What if they don’t live up to her expectations?’ she asked, a note of panic creeping into her voice.

  Scott chuckled, visualizing the expression on her face, her violet-blue eyes dark with self-doubt. ‘You’re too hard on yourself,’ he said, hoping that she would interpret the love in his voice as brotherly affection. ‘You had exactly the same worries over the synopsis. And they were groundless. The book is going to be great. Just try to relax and enjoy yourself while you’re writing it.’

  She giggled, her doubts fading as they always did in the face of Scott’s boundless confidence, ‘Okay, professor, I’ll do exactly as you say, and I am enjoying myself. More than I’ve ever enjoyed anything before in my life. The minute I sit at the typewriter, and my eyes focus on the paper in front of me, my brain shuts out the rest of the world. I feel like Alice must have felt when she fell through the looking-glass. I just tumble into another world and the house fly by and it’s absolutely terrific.’

  Scott’s smile faded. He knew that she wasn’t exaggerating. Over the last few months she had gained confidence in her talent and she now placed it first, before everything, which was fine by him because he loved and understood her and knew how important her writing was to her. But would it be okay with Lewis? Would Lewis understand, when there were army functions to attend, when she asked if she could be excused because she was in the middle of a chapter? From what he knew of his older brother, Scott doubted it very much.

  ‘Have you written to Lewis about the book yet?’ he asked casually, pretty sure that she hadn’t.

  The pause before she answered was so brief that no one but himself would have been aware of it.

  ‘No.’ Her voice was vaguely dismissive. ‘I’m going to wait and see if anything comes of it before I do that.’

  Scott leaned against the wall of
the booth, his sun-bleached eyebrows drawing together in a frown. She had never even hinted that she was anything but deliriously happy and deeply in love with Lewis. Yet she wasn’t sharing with him the most important thing that had ever happened to her. He wondered if she was aware that in all likelihood Lewis would disapprove of her writing. And if she was, he wondered what on earth she intended to do when Lewis came home.

  It took her a month to finish the third chapter. The original draft had been finished in less than two weeks, but the prospect of mailing it off to Patti and hearing her reaction was so terrifying she wrote and rewrote until she was dizzy.

  ‘Make a copy of it before you send it off,’ Scott advised her when she telephoned him with the news that it was finally ready. ‘And once you’ve sent it off, try to forget about it for a few days.’ He hesitated for a moment and then said tentatively, There’s going to be a march this coming weekend in New York. ‘I’m going to fly out there to take part. Would you like to come and keep me company?’

  She had no need to ask what the march was for. At Christmas, when President Johnson had ordered a halt to the bombing raids over North Vietnam, there had been a faint glimmer of hope that the war might end through a negotiated peace. That hope had died at the end of January when American jet bombers once again flew north. All through February and March there had hardly been a week when an antiwar demonstration had not taken place in some major American city.

  ‘No,’ she said quietly but without the least hesitation. ‘You know that I can’t, Scott.’

  Alone in the apartment he had rented for the summer in Santa Monica, Scott shook his head in despair. The war in Vietnam, and the rights and wrongs of America’s participation in it, was the only subject they did not agree on. Scott knew damn well what Abbra’s true feelings were about the war. He also knew that if it hadn’t been for her marriage to Lewis, and her loyalty to him, she would have participated in any and every peace demonstration. The previous year she had been first in line when students from her college marched in sympathy with the civil rights marchers in Selma. But where Vietnam was concerned, he knew she couldn’t be true to her own instincts and judgement.

  While antiwar demonstrators protested against the war in Washington, New York, and on campuses across the country, Lewis was risking his life daily and hourly in the cause they derided. For Abbra to march with them would be, for her, the most flagrant act of disloyalty toward Lewis imaginable.

  ‘Then I shall march alone,’ he said wryly.

  She giggled. ‘Hardly. The Washington Post predicts there’ll be a big turnout.’

  Four days later, the morning after the march, she saw that the Washington Post had been correct. Protestors jammed the streets of. New York, and there was a photograph on one of the inner pages of a young, blond-haired English boy being hauled away by police, a placard declaring ‘Johnson for Ex-President’ and ‘Where Is Lee Harvey Oswald Now That We Really Need Him?’ still clutched in his hand. His name was Lance Blyth-Templeton and there was a further photograph of him being escorted to John F. Kennedy International Airport for deportation to England.

  She sighed and pushed a silky-dark strand of hair away from her face. It had been two days since she had sent the first three chapters of her novel to Patti. It would be at least a week, possibly longer, before Patti read them and passed judgement on them, and until she did so Abbra knew that she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything.

  During her most recent writing binge, she had been so immersed in her imaginary World that she hadn’t read the newspapers. Now she read the Washington. Post and the Los Angeles Times avidly. Both papers were full of reports of the Buddhist demonstrations taking place in Hue and Da Nang and culminating in grisly photographic coverage of a Buddhist nun immolating herself in the market square in Da Nang.

  Lewis’s letters did not mention the Buddhist campaign to oust Premier Ky. His initial enthusiasm at being a co van truong, and of being in a position to help the living standards of the villagers for the better, continued. At the end of April he wrote to her that a village girl who had been badly mistreated by her family was now working for him as a hooch-maid. ‘Her name is Tam,’ he wrote in a large, enviably neat hand, ‘and she is so quick. I’ve been teaching her English and in only a few weeks she’s become practically colloquial in it!’

  It was the kind of letter that Abbra liked to receive. It made no mention of ambushes and search-and-destroy operations and death and killing, and she was able to imagine Lewis as more of a Peace Corns worker, helping the people to improve their harsh living conditions, than as a soldier.

  It was several weeks before she received her long awaited telephone call from Patti.

  ‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting so long, Abbra,’ she said cheerily. Abbra’s knuckles clutched the receiver so tightly they were white. ‘I’ve been in London and flew back only five days ago. While I was there I showed your synopsis to a publishing friend and he was very interested. He said that if the opening chapters lived up to the promise of the synopsis then he wanted to have first refusal.’

  ‘And do they?’ Abbra’s voice was a croak.

  ‘The chapters are wonderful!’ Patti said, her throaty voice full of laughter at Abbra’s barely concealed anxiety. ‘Although first novels are usually difficult to place, I’m sure we won’t have a problem finding a publisher. I’m sending copies to my London friend immediately, and also to a New York publisher who is building up a new list and who has expressed an interest.’

  Abbra leaned her head weakly against the wall. It was all happening just as. Patti had said. A publisher was already interested in her novel and it wasn’t even finished yet.

  ‘Are you still there?’ Patti asked.

  Abbra laughed, ‘Yes. I’m just trying to believe that all this is actually happening. How long do you think it will be before you hear from the publisher in London?’

  ‘It could be a week, and it could be four,’ Patti said practically. ‘Leave all the worrying about publishers and contracts to me. Your job, Abbra, is to write the book and to make sure that the remaining twenty or twenty-five chapters are as good as the first three.’

  For the next six weeks she didn’t see Scott. She didn’t see anyone. To her mother’s increasing irritation, she stayed almost permanently in her bedroom, her fingers flying over the typewriter keys as she transferred the vivid images in her head on to paper.

  ‘I’m glad it’s going so Well,’ Scott said to her when he made his usual Thursday night call. ‘How many Chapter have you finished now?’

  ‘Seven?’

  ‘Which is how many pages?’

  ‘A hundred and forty.’

  He whistled. ‘So you’re a third of the way there?’

  When she had discussed the book with him in the early stages, she had told him that she thought it would run to about four hundred pages.

  ‘I’m not sure. The more I write, the more I seem to want to write. I think it’s going to be longer than I first anticipated. Do you think it will matter?’

  She had already signed a contract with the British publisher who had been interested in the synopsis, and a deal had been made with a New York publishing house. The book was going to be published in hardback in Great Britain and in paperback in the United States.

  ‘I don’t think so, not unless it’s going to be several hundred pages longer than you first projected. Is it in any shape for me to see yet?’

  So far she had shown him everything that she had written. The synopsis. The opening chapters.

  ‘Yes.’ She wanted Scott to read what she had written. His remarks were always on target and his boundless enthusiasm bolstered her spirits. ‘I would have sent the last few chapters down to you, but I’ve been so busy writing that I haven’t had time to have them copied.’

  ‘Never mind mailing them down,’ Scott said firmly. ‘Bring them down. It’s my birthday on Saturday, and Dad is flying in for a celebration dinner. I’ve reserved a table at the Polo
Lounge for three.’

  She could tell by the tone of his voice that to try to refuse would be pointless, and besides, she didn’t want to refuse.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ she promised. ‘I’ll drive down and stay at the Jamaica Bay.’

  The Jamaica Bay, where Abbra had stayed on previous trips to L.A., was on Admiralty Way, just off Marina del Rey and though only four minutes from L.A.X., its beach was superb.

  ‘Okay. I’ll pick you up about six and we’ll have drinks before meeting up with Dad.’

  The days when he would have tried to persuade her to stay at his apartment rather than at a hotel were long gone. That type of arrangement would have been pure torture.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked nervously when he’d finished the last page.

  For the past hour he hadn’t spoken. They were sitting at table one in the Polo Lounge, and while she had toyed with Pacific bay shrimp and sipped at a glass of Pinot Chardonnay, Scott had been reading the new chapters.

  He laid the typewritten pages down on the table and looked across at her, a broad grin on his face. ‘I think you’re a very clever lady, Mrs Ellis. If you’re not careful you’re going to be such a huge success that you’ll be able to live permanently in the Beverly Hills Hotel!’

  She leaned back against the banquette, laughing with

  relief.

  ‘Do you really think it’s good? I’ve become so involved in the life of the woman I’m writing about that there are times when I feel as if I am her! The next few chapters are set in Boston, and so I’m going there for a few days to walk in her footsteps, so to speak.’

  ‘It sounds like fun.’ He hadn’t planned anything important for the next few weeks. He could easily fit in a trip to Boston. And if he did, the gossips would have had a field day. He was well aware that his close relationship with his sister-in-law was being commented on, and he lived in dread that the prurient speculation would come to Abbra’s attention. He knew her well enough to know gossip might cause her to see far less of him.