‘You’ll be getting a long letter from the person who has been assigned as your editor, detailing what revisions they think are necessary. From what they say, no major surgery on the manuscript is needed, so don’t worry. It’s all very normal. I hope to be hearing from the British publisher by the end of the week, and I have absolutely no worries as to what his response is going to be. He’s going to be thrilled! All you have to think about now is what you’re going to write about next!’
In April she visited her father-in-law for a few days. Lewis’s capture had done, nothing to diminish Colonel Ellis’s conviction that the only thing wrong with American military intervention in Vietnam was that it wasn’t hardnosed enough.
‘We shouldn’t only be bombing the North; we should be fighting on the ground in the North, where everyone is the enemy,’ he said fiercely. ‘Not pussyfooting around, worrying whether or not we’re shooting so-called friendly civilians! If we invaded the North, no holds barred, Ho and his cronies would be grovelling for peace within days!’
He was equally emphatic in his views on the antiwar activists who were demonstrating in increasingly larger and larger numbers.
‘They should be shot as traitors,’ he said vehemently. ‘They’re not fit to call themselves Americans!’
Abbra disagreed. Some of the antiwar activists were veterans, men who had fought in Vietnam and who had been so appalled by their experiences that on their return they had publicly burned their uniforms and tossed their war medals into the garbage.
Instinctively she had always felt it was wrong for Americans to be in Vietnam, but out of loyalty to Lewis she had tried to view American intervention in a different light. To see it as necessary for world peace. She no longer held that belief. The reading she had done in the past few months had convinced her that her initial instincts had been correct and that she should have held to them. As far as the antiwar activists were concerned, she was in total sympathy, and the days she spent with her father-in-law, fond as she was of him, were a terrible strain.
In May she began work on a new book, and even though there was still no shred of information regarding Lewis and where he was being held, or even if he was still alive, she continued to write her daily journal to him.
In June she was contacted by the army, but not with the news that she had been praying for.
In light of the circumstances of Lewis’s capture, and the dearth of information since, his status had been reviewed. He was no longer being classified as a prisoner of war, but as being missing in action.
She didn’t leave her room for three days. She knew what the army was trying to say to her. They were trying to tell her that Lewis was dead, but she didn’t believe it. He was alive. She knew he was alive. She couldn’t have lived through the past months believing him to be alive if he had been dead. It wasn’t possible.
Two days later Scott telephoned her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply. ‘But you shouldn’t fear the worst, Abbra. Just because there’s no hard information about the men who have been taken prisoner in the South doesn’t mean they aren’t still alive.’
‘I know,’ she said brokenly. ‘And Lewis is alive, Scott! I know he is!’
He hesitated awkwardly. It was the first time they had been in contact for over ten months. ‘Would it help if I came up to see you?’ he asked, not knowing what he wanted her answer to be.
If he saw her again, he knew that nothing would have changed, that he would still want her as fiercely and hungrily as he always had. And nothing could come of it. Nothing could ever come of it. She loved Lewis, and as long as there was the faintest hope that Lewis was alive, she would never love anyone else.
And if Lewis were dead?
His jaw clenched, white lines edging his mouth. He didn’t want Lewis to be dead. No matter what the price, he didn’t want Lewis to be dead.
‘No,’ she said huskily, her voice sounding as if it were choked with tears. ‘No, I don’t think so, Scott.’
His disappointment was so devastating that he had to lean against the wall behind him for support. Of course he had known what he wanted her answer to be. And she had not given it.
‘Bye, sweetheart,’ he said thickly, wondering how she was managing without friends who could understand her position, without a supportive family, without anyone to lean upon or confide in.
All through the summer she worked on her new idea. There was still no news of Lewis, still no real reason for her to believe he was alive apart from her own unshakable conviction.
In September she decided that she had been a compliant army wife for quite long enough. She had done everything that the army had advised her to do. She hadn’t spoken about Lewis to the press or to casual friends. She hadn’t involved herself in the antiwar movement. She hadn’t made a nuisance of herself, or been an embarrassment, in any way whatsoever. And her passivity had gained her nothing. She still didn’t know if Lewis was dead or alive. If he were alive, she still didn’t know where he was being held. In over a year she still hadn’t met, or spoken to, another woman in the same situation. She had had a bellyful of passivity, and she was going to be passive no longer.
In October, when the antiwar movement announced it would be holding an enormous rally in Washington, its aim being the closing down of the Pentagon, Abbra locked her manuscript away in her desk and bought herself a plane ticket.
She was going to abandon her compliant-wife role and become a fierce antiwar activist. Helping to close down the Pentagon seemed as good a way as any in which to start.
Chapter Twenty-one
Serena turned off the main road into the cobbled mews at suicidally high speed, tyres screeching as she came to a stop. She was late. She had less than half an hour to bathe and change before Rupert arrived. They were going to have dinner at Quaglinos and then go on to the Colony in Berkeley Square. She slammed the front door behind her, wondering whether to wear her new Mary Quant dress, or her Louis Feraud.
As she slipped her key in the lock she could hear the telephone begin to ring. ‘Damn,’ she said beneath her breath, pausing for a moment to enjoy the fragrance of begonias and fuchsias spilling from a hanging basket. ‘If that’s Toby, he can jolly well wait.’
Despite her open involvement with Rupert, Toby was as persistent as ever. Because she was fond of him in a completely asexual way, and because she had known him for what seemed to be forever, and because all his friends were also her friends, she still continued to see him. Whenever there was a function where all her old cronies would be gathered, and where the behaviour was likely to be infantile, such as a hunt ball, where champagne could be expected to be sprayed with gleeful abandon over ball gowns and dinner jackets, or a debutante party where guests were likely to be thrown into a swimming pool, then she spared Rupert’s dignity and was to be seen, instead, with Toby.
She stepped into the tiny hall and picked up the ringing telephone. ‘I’m sorry, Toby my sweet,’ she said, not sounding remotely sorry. ‘But tonight is an impossibility, I’m…’
‘It isn’t Toby. It’s Daddy.’ Her father’s voice was heavy and strained. ‘I’m afraid it’s bad news, darling. Sorry to break it to you like this, over the phone, but thought it was better you heard it from me than from anyone else.’
‘Lance?’ she said immediately, her voice cracking. ‘It’s Lance, isn’t it? What’s happened to him? Has he been arrested? Is he hurt? Where is he?’
Wherever he was, she would go to him. She would leave a note for Rupert. He would understand. Her hands tightened around her car key. ‘Where is he, Daddy?’
Her father’s voice sounded weary. ‘It isn’t Lance, darling…’
She leaned back against the wall, ashamed of the relief she felt. It was her mother. Her mother had been taken ill. She would drive to Bedingham early in the morning and stay there as long as necessary.
Her father cleared his throat. ‘I’m afraid that it’s Kyle. His father telephoned me a few minutes ago. He’s been shot down. A colleague s
ays he saw him alive on the ground after the crash, but it was in a heavily infested Viet Cong area and there‘s been no news of him since.’ He paused uncomfortably and then said, ‘He’s been officially listed as missing in action. I’m sorry, my dear, I’m most dreadfully sorry.’
For a second she didn’t feel anything at all. She couldn’t. She was beyond feeling.
Her-father’s voice sharpened. ‘Serena? Are you there? Can you hear me?’
‘Yes,’ she said at last with a great struggle. ‘Yes, I can hear you, Daddy.’ She couldn’t think of anything to say, anything to ask. Incredibly, all the time Kyle had been in Vietnam, it had never occurred to her that he would be killed or injured or listed as missing. Other men might be, were being every day, but other men weren’t Kyle. Kyle was too exuberantly alive, too fiendishly lucky, too arrogantly sure of himself, to come to grief. It was unthinkable to think of him as a loser. Inconceivable.
‘Would you like to come home for a few days?’ her father was asking. ‘Bedingham is at its best, the walls are half drowned in roses and honeysuckle.’
Her eyes closed, she thought of Bedingham. The roses had been out on their wedding day; pale Ophelias and dark purple Reine des Violettes. What would have happened if Lance hadn’t returned that day? There would have been no hideous scene for Kyle to walk in on, no need for him to have sped away from Bedingham and back to America. In all probability he would never have enrolled at helicopter school, never have been sent to Vietnam.
‘No, Daddy,’ she said thickly. ‘No, I don’t think I’ll come back to Bedingham. Not just now.’
If Lance hadn’t returned that day, she and Kyle might have been at Bedingham now, together. To be there without him would be unbearable. Slowly she hung up the phone. She remembered someone, somewhere, saying ‘if’ was the smallest, most terrible word in the English language. Whoever had said it was right. If only she hadn’t left Kyle’s side and hurried to the nursery to meet Lance. If only Kyle hadn’t grown impatient and followed her. If. If. If.
Rupert arrived twenty minutes later, looking elegant in a grey silk suit and with a carnation in his buttonhole. He took one look at her white, ravaged face and said, ‘My God! What on earth is the matter, Serena? What’s happened?’
She was holding a large vodka and tonic tightly in both hands. She made no move to put it down or to walk towards him. Her eyes met his, their smoke-grey depths so dark they seemed almost black. ‘Kyle has been shot down,’ she said with devastating simplicity. ‘He’s missing in action.’
He stood without moving for a moment, realizing instantly the changes and strains that were about to be put on their relationship, and then he walked across to her, gently taking the glass from her hand. ‘Tell me,’ he said with exquisite tenderness, drawing her towards him. ‘Tell me everything you have been told.’
Dry-eyed and still in shock, she haltingly repeated what her father had said to her. He was appalled at the scant amount of information.
‘When did it happen? How long ago? Why didn’t the army contact you as Kyle’s next of kin?’
‘Presumably because Kyle never gave them my name as next of kin,’ she said with unflinching candour. ‘When he joined the army, he believed we were going to divorce. We were reconciled only hours before he left for Vietnam. I suppose it’s only natural that he should have given the army his father’s name as his next of kin, and not mine.’
‘And have you spoken to his father yet?’
‘No.’ A tremor ran through her.
‘Don’t you think you should?’ he persisted. ‘You need to know whether Kyle was shot down in the North or in the South. If he was seen alive on the ground after he crashed, you need to know why he has been listed as missing in action when he could very possibly have been taken prisoner.’
‘I need something else first,’ she said unsteadily. ‘I need to be able to believe that it’s true, that it has really happened. I need to be able to cry.’
Even after she had spoken to her father-in-law the tears refused to come.
‘It’s all your fault!’ he had shouted at her savagely. ‘If it weren’t for you, Kyle would never have joined the army! He would never have gone to ’Nam!’
She believed him. She had known it the instant her father had told her what had happened. She was responsible. No one else.
For the next few days she still went into the antique shop, but she did so out of robot-like habit. She was no longer the ebullient, kooky personality that had so fascinated customers and gossip columnists alike. She was pale and withdrawn, and though she responded gratefully to Rupert’s sympathy and support, she did not sleep with him. And she did not sleep with anyone else either.
She broke the news to Lance in his Chelsea pied á terre, standing with her back towards him, staring out over the grey, rolling expanse of the Thames.
‘He was shot down near the Cambodian border,’ she said bleakly. ‘He was trying to pick up a reconnaissance squad that had been cut off and who were surrounded by Viet Cong. One of the other pilots, a friend of his, swears that he saw him scramble out of the helicopter alive, but the Viet Cong were everywhere and—’
She turned, about to tell him how Kyle’s buddy had flown under suicidal fire time and again in an effort to land beside Kyle’s blazing Huey.
He had been silent while she had been talking, and she had taken for granted that despite his virulent dislike of Kyle, and his fierce opposition to the war, he would be as shocked and as horrified as Rupert had been. No doubt if she hadn’t turned around so unexpectedly, he would have made a hypocritical effort to sound, and seem, suitably sympathetic. She was never to know. She swung around, catching him unaware, and saw the expression on his face.
He was smiling, sheer pleasure written clearly on every feature. It was then that the frozen dam within her broke. ‘You bastard!’ she howled, springing forward and raking at his face with her nails, the tears pouring down her cheeks. ‘You miserable, mean-minded, pitiful, bastard!’
It had been Rupert who had hauled her off him. He had been waiting for her in the street, in his Lagonda, and had heard her howl of rage. By the time he had sprinted into the block of flats and up the stairs, Lance had half fallen across a sofa and Serena was raining blows on him, sobbing hysterically, calling him names that would have made a stevedore blanch.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ he had said, striding across the room and physically separating them, relieved to see that Lance had made no effort at retaliation. ‘What’s the matter with the pair of you? Can’t you behave like reasonable human beings?’
Serena was still sobbing, the tears spilling down her face and on to her minidress, her hair streaming wildly over her shoulders and down her back. She tried to speak and couldn’t. Now that she had at last begun to cry, she was unable to stop. She was crying because she felt so wretchedly guilty, crying because Lance had been so stupidly insensitive and because things had once more gone wrong between them, and above all she was crying, at last, for Kyle.
Lance slithered into a sitting position on the sofa, his tie pulled halfway around his neck, a button torn from his shirt. ‘It was my fault,’ he said tersely to Rupert, dabbing at the scratches on his face with a handkerchief. ‘Serry thought I was pleased about Anderson being declared an MIA.’
‘You were!’ Serena gasped convulsively. ‘And he isn’t Anderson, he’s Kyle!’
‘Were you?’ Rupert asked him tightly.
Lance looked up. From where he was sitting, Rupert seemed very tall indeed. And very threatening.
‘Yes. No,’ he said undecidedly, springing to his feet so that he wouldn’t feel at a disadvantage. ‘Hell! I wasn’t pleased in the way Serry thinks I was pleased! I wasn’t pleased just because it was her husband who was missing!’ He began to pace the room furiously. ‘If I was pleased, then I was pleased because the Americans have to learn they can’t win in Vietnam, and it seems to me they’re going to learn that only when the great American public finds the loss of America
n life in Vietnam unacceptable. As far as I’m concerned, the sooner they do that, the better!’
Serena had finally stopped crying. She pushed her hair away from her face, wiping her cheeks with her fingers, saying in a flat, tired voice, ‘I should have known better than to have come here with such news. Will you take me home please, Rupert?’
Lance stopped pacing abruptly, his eyes flying to hers. He didn’t want her to go. He didn’t want there to be another rift between them, but he was damned if he was going to apologize to her in front of Rupert. He said instead, ‘If Kyle is alive and if he’s been taken prisoner, then you’d better start looking at things from my point of view, Serry. You’d better start getting involved and demonstrating for an end to the war, because until it ends, no one outside Vietnam is going to see Kyle Anderson again.’
She hadn’t replied. She, too, had wanted to make things right between them, but somehow she felt that to do so would be disloyal to Kyle. And loyalty to Kyle suddenly seemed very important. It was all that she could give him, all that she could do for him.
Over the next few days she read everything that she could about the war. She read about the way Americans were treated by the Viet Cong if they fell into their hands, how they had been found with steel rods rammed up their penis and anus, of how some had even been skinned alive.
The war was no longer an event of no concern to her, and the more she read, the more she began to think that perhaps Lance’s point of view wasn’t so extreme after all. Three weeks later she received a letter, via her father-in-law, from Charles Wilson.
‘… Kyle is alive, I’m sure of it,’ he had written. ‘I saw him scramble from the Huey, but there was no way anyone could land and pick him up. The ground fire was unbelievable’. He gave her the exact position where Kyle had gone down and then wrote, ‘He was my best buddy, the best I’ve ever had, and I’m going to do my damnedest to try to have his status changed from MIA to POW.’ He had signed the letter Chuck, not Charles.
White Christmas in Saigon Page 39