‘Fort Rucker is a US Army Advanced Helicopter Training School.’
Rupert, who had driven the Lagonda smoothly out of the airport parking lot and on to the A4, nearly drove off the side of the road.
A smile curved Serena’s mouth. ‘Don’t worry, Rupert I’m not thinking of becoming a female air ace. I went there to see Kyle.’
He looked across at her, one eyebrow rising slightly. ‘I hadn’t realized the two of you were even on speaking terms.’
Serena’s smile deepened. ‘We haven’t been. Which is why I flew to Alabama. I wanted to rectify the situation.’
He was silent for a minute or two, driving at high speed towards the outskirts of Hounslow. ‘And did you succeed?’ he asked at last, a slight note of tension creeping into his upper-class drawl.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, knowing quite well the direction his thoughts were going and enjoying his probing. ‘As reunions go, it was definitely eight point nine on the Richter scale.’ Her smile faded and she said in sudden seriousness, ‘Joking apart, Rupert, it really was the most wonderful reunion. I’m in love with Kyle, heaven only knows why, but I am.’
‘And so no divorce?’ he asked, keeping his eyes on the road ahead of him.
‘No divorce.’
‘And no more friendly nights in my company at Annabel’s or Regine’s?’ he asked, taking the turn off for Kew.
‘Kyle is going to Vietnam,’ she said, a shadow darkening her eyes. ‘He’s going to be there for a year and I don’t imagine for one instant that he’s going to spend that year in a state of celibate faithfulness. It wouldn’t be in his nature.’
He had turned his head swiftly towards her when she had said the word Vietnam, shock flaring across his face. Now he said curiously, ‘And is it in yours?’
She pushed a heavy fall of pale blond hair away from her face and over her shoulder. ‘No,’ she said, unabashed. ‘I can’t see what difference my going to bed with you makes to my relationship with Kyle. In fact, it’s probably beneficial. After all, a steady relationship with one person has to be far preferable than a year-long succession of one-night stands, hasn’t it?’
‘It’s one way of looking at it,’ he agreed, both amused at her unsentimental practicality and disturbed by the thought of Kyle Anderson, flying out to South Vietnam and God only knew what kind of a fate.
‘It’s the way Kyle would look at it,’ Serena said with such conviction that he found himself partially believing her. As they sped past the entrance to Kew Gardens, she changed the subject. ‘Has Lance got himself into any more scrapes while I’ve been away?’
‘Not that I am aware of.’ There was an undertone of indifference in Rupert’s voice. At thirty-two, he felt himself too old to be in sympathy with the students who regularly massed outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square chanting anti war slogans and generally making a confounded nuisance of themselves. If he had any politics at all, they veered towards the right, and he had very little patience with Lance or his revolutionary pretensions.
He turned into King’s Road and looked across at her curiously.
‘How does Lance feel about having an American for a brother-in-law, especially one who is a member of the armed services?’
She turned her head quickly away from him, before he could see the anguish that had sprung into her eyes. ‘He doesn’t like it,’ she said briefly, with a slight dismissive shrug of her shoulders, as if his not liking it was unimportant. ‘You could hardly expect him to, could you?’
‘I don’t suppose so,’ he said easily, heading towards Serena’s family home in Cheyne Walk, well aware of the distress his careless question had aroused, and unpleasantly shocked by it. Serena wasn’t the kind of girl to become distressed without genuine cause, and he could only imagine that Lance’s reaction had been extreme.
‘There are a couple of important house sales taking place in Kent this weekend,’ he said, making a left-hand turn into an exclusive mews. He drew up before a glossily painted white door flanked by bay trees in terra-cotta pots and by tubs of geraniums and lobelia and trailing pansies. ‘Why don’t we both go? We can stay at the Grand at Eastbourne and make a weekend of it.’
‘That would be nice,’ she said, stepping out of the car, her eyes meeting his, her voice once more perfectly under control. ‘What kind of sales are they? Georgian? Regency?’
‘Georgian. Primarily glass and silver. There should be some interesting bargains to be had.’
He swung her suitcase out of the boot and decided not to invite himself in for a drink. She’d had a long flight, and signs of strain and tiredness were beginning to shadow her eyes.
‘Don’t bother coming in tomorrow,’ he said as she searched in her clutch bag for her key. ‘Stay in bed all day and have a good rest. Wednesday will be soon enough to be back at the battle stations.’
As she fitted her key into the lock she turned towards him with an affectionate smile. ‘I might just do that, Rupert. Are you coming in for coffee or a drink of something a little stronger?’
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, and knew that she was relieved. ‘I’ve things to do, people to see. Remember to pack a sensible pair of flat shoes as well as glad rags for our Kent and Sussex trip.’
‘Flat shoes?’ she asked, laughing despite the strain that thoughts of Lance had aroused. ‘What on earth do I need a pair of flat shoes for? I don’t think I even possess a pair!’
‘Then you should,’ Rupert said practically, gunning the Lagonda’s engine into life. ‘A walk over Beachy Head before breakfast on Sunday morning is an obligatory part of a weekend in Eastbourne.’ He leaned his head out of the window as the car began to pull away. ‘And bring a scarf as well!’ he called out. ‘It can be devilish windy, even in June!’
She raised a hand, waving good-bye, and then stepped into the house with her suitcase, closing the door behind her.
Lance. Incredibly, all the time she had been with Kyle, she hadn’t given him a single thought. Leaving the suitcase in the tiny hall, she walked through into the sun-filled living room. She hadn’t even asked Rupert if Lance had been telephoning the shop, asking where she was. If he had, and if Rupert had told him that she had gone to Alabama, then he would have known why she had gone there. And he would be prepared for the news she was about to break to him.
And if he hadn’t telephoned the shop? If he was unaware that she had even left the country? She moved slowly across the room toward the telephone. Then he wouldn’t have the slightest inkling that a reunion between herself and Kyle was even a possibility. He, and her parents, and all her friends, believed that her marriage was dead, and that was only a question of time before a divorce buried once and for all. The information that her marriage was far from dead, that it was, instead, very much alive a kicking, would devastate Lance, and might destroy the closeness that had been reforged between them. It wasn’t the kind of news that could be broken over the telephone and she didn’t even try.
‘Would you like to come over for a drink tonight?’ she asked, chewing the corner of her lip as she waited for his reply.
‘You sound suspiciously formal,’ he said cautiously. ‘What is this? An invitation to meet a new, godawful boyfriend?’
‘No.’ She kept her voice light despite her deepening apprehension.
‘I’ve been away for a few days and I’m tired, and I fancy an evening at home. With family.’
By family, Lance correctly assumed that she meant only the two of them.
‘Okay,’ he said agreeably. ‘I’ll be there in about an hour and a half, but I shan’t be able to stay for very long. I have a meeting to go to at eight.’
She said good-bye to him and walked tiredly upstairs to run herself a bath, wondering whether the purpose of his meeting was the planning of yet another anti-Vietnam war demonstration.
An hour later, feeling marginally refreshed, she switched on the television in order to catch the early evening news. It was dominated, as usual, by the events in Vietnam
. Two weeks before, unmoved and uninterested, she would have quickly changed channels. Now, knowing that Kyle was going there, she watched avidly.
There was a clip of film showing helicopters flying through heavy ground fire on an operation named Nathan Hale. According to the news, it was being fought by the 101st Airborne and 1st Cavalry Divisions. She wasn’t sure, but she thought Kyle had said he was going to be with the 1st Cav. The idea bothered her even though she knew he hadn’t arrived yet. She poured herself a gin and tonic, wincing as one of the helicopters took a direct hit. The film clip ended. The reporter announced in a monotone that Hanoi had rejected the new American proposal for peace talks, and was reiterating its demand that an unconditional bombing halt precede any negotiations.
Premier Ky’s jaunty image flashed on to the screen, and the newscaster informed viewers that after smashing antigovernment resistance in Saigon, Hue, and other major cities, Premier Ky had applied for conciliation and forgiveness for the ‘misunderstandings of the war’.
There was then a short piece of film from Paris, where students were rioting, followed by a brief news item about the Beatles.
She moved away from the television to pour herself another drink, grateful that at least there hadn’t been a report of any antiwar demonstrations with protestors being hauled away by the police. Her father still hadn’t recovered from the ignominy of Lance’s very public deportation from America.
The next programme was an inane game show, and she turned the television off, wishing passionately for the hundredth time that Lance were not so left wing in his views, and, so virulently anti-American. She was just about to wander into the kitchen and make herself a sandwich when she heard the unmistakable sound of his MG turning into the mews.
She hadn’t bothered to dress, and she pulled the tie belt on her white terry bathrobe a little tighter around her waist, smiling wryly to herself as it occurred to her that she was metaphorically girding up her loins.
‘My God! You really aren’t going anywhere tonight, are you?’ he said in amazement as he walked into the room, a bottle of Kahlua in one hand. ‘I bought this with me just in case you had nothing else for the vodka but the revolting tonic water you pour in your gin.’
He looked, as he always looked to Serena, heartachingly young, as if he were years her junior and not her twin. His arms seemed to be too long for his jacket, though it had been tailored in Savile Row. With loving amusement Serena reflected that Lance never allowed his left-wing views to deny him the luxuries he had always taken for granted. His wrists protruded from his sleeves bonily, with all the awkwardness of a young adolescent’s. Even though his hair was obligatorily shoulder-length, it still didn’t look quite as reactionarily unkempt as he no doubt wished it to. Silky-straight and blond, like her own, it served only to make him look more feminine and more touchingly vulnerable.
‘You said you’d been away for a few days. Where did you go? Paris? Rome?’ Without waiting for an answer, he strolled across to the rosewood cocktail cabinet and poured himself a large vodka. ‘I know exactly how you spend your year, and it doesn’t include being away in June, when it’s the Derby and Ascot and Wimbledon.’
‘What does it include?’ Serena asked, intrigued, glad of the opportunity to delay breaking her news to him.
He splashed some Kahlua into his vodka, added a generous amount of ice, and said with a grin, ‘January in the sun in Cape Town, to the shame of your politically unaware heart. Skiing in Europe in February and March. Home to an English spring at Bedingham in April. Monaco and the Grand Prix in early May, and then on to St Tropez for the last two weeks of the month. June in England for the aforementioned Derby and Ascot and Wimbledon and, also, as you’re a cricket fan, the first and second Tests. A week in Ibiza to break up July, then back to England and Bedingham in August for the beginning of grouse shooting on the glorious twelfth. September is a month-long house party in St Tropez, October starts in Paris for the Arc de Triomphe and ends in New York, and in November you hare off to the West Indies, coming home to Bedingham, of course, for Christmas.’
‘Idiot,’ she said, perching on the arm of the sofa. ‘I haven’t been to the Arc de Triomphe in years.’
‘The rest of it is pretty accurate though,’ he said with a grin. ‘Or it was until this year and your sudden, inexplicable decision to work for Rupert.’
His brows were raised questioningly. She knew he wanted to know if she was sleeping with Rupert and she decided not to satisfy his curiosity. It would only make what she was going to say to him even more complicated.
‘I haven’t been to Rome, or Paris,’ she said carefully. ‘I’ve been to Alabama.’
‘Alabama?’ There was blank incomprehension in his eyes. She realized with something of a shock that he knew nothing of Kyle’s whereabouts, or what he had been doing for the past ten months.
‘There is a United States Army Advanced Helicopter Training School in Alabama,’ she said, trying to keep her voice light and easy. ‘Since we never talk about Kyle I hadn’t realized that you didn’t know he had spent nearly all of last year training to be an army helicopter pilot.’
‘Training to be a what? Christ! I thought he was at fucking Princeton!’
‘It shows how long it is since you’ve spoken to Daddy. I thought he would have told you months ago about Kyle joining the army.’
‘Why should anyone in our family talk about Kyle Anderson? Or give a fuck about whatever it is that he’s doing? He’s history, for Christ’s sake! A past event! I didn’t think we were even going to celebrate the divorce when it comes through, because doing so would be to acknowledge his existence!’
Her eyes held his. ‘Kyle is not a past event,’ she said quietly.
He slammed his drink down so hard, vodka and Kahlua splashed on to the cocktail cabinet’s rosewood surface, ‘No, by God! I don’t suppose he is! Not if you’ve been flying to bloody Alabama to see him!’
They hadn’t had a row since the ghastly scene on her wedding day. She said; keeping her voice steady with difficulty, ‘I’m in love with Kyle, Lance. It’s something you’re going to have to accept…’
‘I bloody well do not have to accept it!’ he shouted, spittle gathered at the comers of his mouth, his fists clenched, his pale face contorted with anger.
He had faced her with exactly the same expression in his voice and eyes when he had been seven and she had ridden his brand new bicycle into Bedingham’s lake, and when he had been fifteen and their parents had decreed that she could holiday with friends in the Caribbean, but that he must stay home because his school report had been poor.
In both instances they had fought fiercely, but it had been over within an hour. She had waded waist-deep into the lake, retrieving the bicycle herself, much to her mother’s horror. And she had told her parents that if Lance wasn’t allowed to go to the Caribbean, then she wasn’t going either. And she hadn’t. She had spent the holiday in question at Bedingham, with Lance.
She ran a hand through her hair, pushing it away from her face. ‘Please be reasonable, Lance. You don’t have to speak to Kyle. You don’t have to see him. All you have to do is to accept that he’s the person I’m married to and …’
‘An American army pilot!’ he spat out. ‘No doubt he joined the bloody army so that he could go to Vietnam and burn babies and rape underage girls and murder old women and bomb the North!’
The tight rein that Serena had been exercising over her patience snapped. ‘Don’t be so utterly ridiculous!’ she flared, jumping to her feet and marching across to the cocktail cabinet. ‘I don’t know about the babies and the underage girls and the old women, but I do know that he won’t be bombing the North! He’s flying a helicopter, for Christ’s sake! Not a B-52 bomber!’
She poured more tonic into her glass, her hand shaking, appalled at her intense reaction to tie hideous images Lance’s words had conjured up. Until her reunion with Kyle, she had barely given Vietnam a thought. Now she found herself unable to think of anyt
hing else. He would be there soon. Shortly he would be a part of the savagery. When protestors marched through the streets of London and Washington with placards declaring ‘Don’t turn our sons into killers’, it was Kyle, and young men like him, that they were referring to.
Lance was so stunned that she knew the difference between a helicopter and a bomber that he temporarily forgot his rage, and the reason for it. ‘It’s not only B-52s that are flying over the North, they have F-8 Crusaders and F-2 Phantoms and E-2 radar planes as well. All the poor bloody North Vietnamese have is a handful of MiG fighters.’
For a brief second, thinking of the atrocities that were no doubt taking place in Vietnam, and which might reach out and touch Kyle, Serena had been stunned to find herself near tears. She despised easy emotionalism and she checked herself instantly, telling herself that her transatlantic flight had left her more tired than she had previously supposed.
‘Let’s call a truce, Lance,’ she said wearily. ‘If I can forgive you for your demonstrations and marches, and for the unpleasant press attention you attract to yourself, surely you can forgive me for marrying and staying married to Kyle?’
‘But your marrying anyone is so bloody pointless!’ The white heat of his anger had died and his voice was thick with misery and jealous frustration. ‘You’re not exactly in need of financial protection, are you? And what other reason is there for any woman to marry?’
His bewilderment was so genuine that despite her fatigue there was laughter in her voice. ‘Darling brother mine, I can think of one or two reasons, but I doubt if you would regard them as being rational ones.’
‘That’s your whole bloody trouble,’ he said petulantly. ‘You never are rational! You never think about anything seriously and neither does Kyle bloody Anderson. He’s gone out there, quite willing to kill and maim, and I don’t suppose he knows any more about Vietnam, or the Vietnamese struggle for liberation, than you do.’
‘No,’ Serena said agreeably, too relieved that Lance was now being merely sulky, and that they were no longer on the verge of an appalling fight to take exception to his assumption that Kyle would be killing and maiming with impunity. ‘I don’t suppose he does.’
White Christmas in Saigon Page 27