‘I understand what you are saying, Mrs Anderson,’ Mrs Wilson said with exquisite dignity, ‘and I am appreciative of your offer. But it isn’t a question of money. It is a question of Chuck’s own attitude about what has happened to him. He has never, ever, said that he regretted what he did and he has never blamed your husband for what happened to him. But he can’t accept what happened; he can’t even begin to learn to live with it.’
There came the sound of the wheelchair speeding out of the den. There was nothing more that they could say to each other. At least nothing that mattered.
‘I’ll serve supper, then,’ Mrs Wilson said as her son propelled himself into the room. ‘It’s so nice to have company for a change. Perhaps you’ll call on us again, Mrs Anderson?’
Radford stared at Gabrielle as if she had taken leave of her senses, ‘Do I hear you right, baby? You’re walking out? You’re giving up everything we’ve sweated for to go to Vietnam? You’re going to make me and the rest of the band give up everything we’ve sweated and bled for just when everything is good?’
She nodded, her eyes holding his unflinchingly. She had known what it was going to be like. She had known that she wasn’t only turning her own back on fame and fortune, but that by her defection, leaving them without a lead singer, she was in all probability forcing the entire band to turn its back on it too.
‘Yes. Je regrette, Radford. I know how crazy this must seem to you. I know what terrible timing it is, just when the band is on the verge of the really big time and the new recording contract has been signed, but it is something I have to do, mon ami. You will be able to find another singer, someone far better than me …’
They were standing backstage amid a tangle of electric cables and amplification wires. Up front, on the piano, Michel was experimenting with a new arrangement. The notes tinkled softly, stopped, began again, this time slightly differently.
In the dull light Radford’s skin had a sheen to it. Beads of pure rage clustered on his brow. He had been checking the readjusted lighting system, still convinced that the physics were all wrong, the beams’ focusing eyes away from Gabrielle’s spot and not on her. He was wearing a T-shirt, hip-hugging jeans, and sneakers, and he was mad enough to murder.
‘You walk in here. You tell me you’re going to fuck up everything I’ve worked for since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, and you tell me you’re sorry! What kind of a dude do you think I am? Do you think I’m going to say, “Oh, that’s all right, Miss Anne. Sure ain’t no bother for me”, because I ain’t going to do that, baby!’
Everything that had always smouldered between them was rising to the surface, seeking its outlet in frustrated anger.
‘You are this band!’ he spat out at her, ‘just as much as I am. There ain’t no way you going to walk out on everything now. No way, baby!’
The piano had ceased to tinkle. From somewhere a long way away Gabrielle could hear the faint sound of le petit Gavin squalling lustily. Maura would be with him. Maura would pacify him.
She could see the blinding, white-hot fury in his eyes and she knew it was completely justified. She was fucking him up, fucking the entire band up. She said a little unsteadily, ‘I said I was sorry, Radford, because I know of no other word to use. I am sorry. I know exactly how damaging my action is going to be for everyone, but it is something that I must do. I must try to find Gavin. I can’t remain, waiting impotently, any longer.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ He covered the distance between them in one stride, grasping her shoulders so hard that she cried out in pain. ‘Forget about him! He’s dead! Gone! Finished!’ Passionate fury had merged into other feelings too long suppressed. ‘This shit has been going on for too long, Gabrielle! You want what I want. You want to be the number one attraction in the world! And we can be that! We can be that together. Do you understand what I’m saying to you? Not only together onstage, but together, baby! You and me! An item!’
The skin was taut across his cheekbones. She could smell the perspiration sticking to his body and the faint lemon tang of his cologne. She could feel his hardness as he pressed her against him and sexual longing screamed through her, demanding satisfaction.
‘You want what I want,’ he said again, no longer shouting at her, his voice harsh and full of need. ‘I want you, baby. And you want me. You always have. You always will.’
Through the thin silk of her blouse his, touch was scorching her skin. She couldn’t move. A sob of shame and despair rose in her throat, and then Michel was saying tautly, ‘Le petit Gavin has fallen and grazed his knees. I think you had better come and comfort him.’
The sob turned to one of gratitude, and she pushed herself away from Radford, not looking at him, not daring to look at him. ‘Merci, Michel. Where is he? Take me to him.’
It was a long time before she felt calm again. She had been on the verge of betraying Gavin’s trust in her and only Michel had saved her. The knowledge left her feeling drained and sick at heart.
When she next faced Radford, both of them knew that the personal Rubicon they had reached would not, now, be crossed.
‘I will fly back to Paris the morning after our last American concert,’ she said to him, deep circles carved beneath her eyes, her kittenish face, usually so full of impishness and laughter, white and grave.
He had known that nothing he could do or say would persuade her to stay. ‘I’ll get another singer,’ he said raspingly, a nerve ticking convulsively at the corner of his jaw. ‘But she’ll only be a temporary. You’re still a member of the band.’ Knowing another moment of her nearness would unstring him completely, he pivoted on his heel and strode away.
She watched him, slim and supple in his blue jeans, his strong shoulder muscles rippling beneath his cotton T-shirt, and she hated herself for the regret knifing through her.
She was still feeling quite subdued two weeks later when she walked into the lobby of the George V to meet Serena.
Serena had arrived in Paris the day before. She had telephoned, announcing her arrival and saying that she was in possession of a Vietnamese visa, a fact that didn’t surprise Gabrielle. She had known that a ‘minor’ difficulty such as obtaining a visa for a country at war would pose no problem for a girl who obviously had friends in high places.
She smiled to herself as she crossed the sumptuous lobby. If Serena had told her that her father was Britain’s Home Secretary, she wouldn’t have been surprised.
‘Gabrielle!’ Serena called out, striding to meet her, head-turningly stunning in a raspberry-pink, miniskirted wool suit.
They hugged in the centre of the lobby, oblivious to the masculine attention they were attracting. Serena suddenly pulled away from Gabrielle, regarding her still-strained face quizzically, ‘My God, Gabrielle. What on earth has happened to you since we last met? You look as if you’ve been through the wringer!’
‘I have,’ Gabrielle responded with a grin, suddenly feeling her old, bubbly, bouncy self again, ‘And you? You are looking a little strained too, n’est-ce pas?’
Serena gurgled with laughter. ‘Life has certainly had its moments since Washington,’ she said, thinking of Chuck. She slipped her arm through Gabrielle’s and as they stepped out of the George V and into the Parisian streets and the pale November sunshine, she said confidingly, ‘Let me tell you all about it.’
Chapter Twenty-eight
The house Abbra rented looked out over the beach a half mile or so north of La Jolla. Her parents had been appalled when she told them she was moving, but she had been adamant.
‘I need isolation in order to work, Mom,’ she had said, slipping her arm through her mother’s and giving it a loving squeeze, willing her to understand.
‘You have all the isolation you need here! Why, you spend hours in your room writing. I’m sure it can’t be natural for anyone to spend so many hours cooped up all alone …’
‘All writers spend hours cooped up alone, Mom,’ Abbra said, laughing. ‘If they didn’t, they would never get a
ny work done.’
‘You won’t be able to spend hours cooped up alone when Lewis returns,’ her mother retorted tartly. ‘All this writing nonsense will have to stop then.’
Even though Lewis was MIA and not a POW, Abbra insisted that he be spoken of as though his eventual safe return were a certainty.
She sighed, knowing that now that her mother had brought her resentment of her writing into the conversation, there was absolutely no point in continuing.
Her mother had thought her writing a harmless occupation until the day that her book had been published. Then, seeing it in the bookstores, faced with tangible evidence of an achievement she didn’t understand, she had regarded it as harmless no longer.
Though Abbra had been thrilled when she first saw her finished book, and was elated each time she saw it in the store her name boldly printed across the jacket, she was aware of her mother’s consternation over her daughter’s new stature. Now she said, not wanting to get into a futile discussion with her mother over Lewis’s approval or disapproval, ‘I’m going shopping for some sheets and tablecloths this morning. Why don’t you come with me? We can lunch together and then stroll around an art gallery or a museum.’
Her mother had been slightly mollified. The conversation had changed course. And a week later, with her car packed to capacity with clothes and household items and books, and her typewriter safely wedged in the front seat beside her, Abbra had driven south to the new home she had chosen for herself, by herself.
Abbra’s life soon took on a routine. In the morning she reread her previous day’s work, and then wrote a minimum of twelve hundred words. The novel she was now working on was far more ambitious than her first novel had been and totally different in style. ‘A novel about North Beach in the fifties and the burgeoning beat generation!’ Patti had said doubtfully when she had first spoken to her about it. ‘It doesn’t sound commercial, Abbra.’
Abbra doubted that it was commercial too, but her first novel wasn’t selling as many copies as she, Patti, or her publishers had hoped, so she didn’t see that she had anything to lose by attempting something more ambitious.
In the afternoon she would walk on the beach, and when she returned she would write her daily diary, the diary that she mailed each week to Lewis, care of the North Vietnamese government.
There was never any reply. There was never any news of him. His name never appeared on any official list of prisoners being held. There were times, when she was overtired, or when it all seemed too much for her to bear, when she wondered if there was any point in continuing with the letters. They seemed to merely disappear into a black hole, a limitless void. The despair would pass, and the following week’s letter would be sent, but the loneliness and the longing remained, and were never eased.
In the third week of December she returned to San Francisco for a few days to spend Christmas with her parents. There was a card for her from Scott, but there was no letter enclosed, only his signature, big and bold and achingly familiar.
She put the card back in its envelope quickly, aware of her mother looking speculatively in her direction. Although nothing had ever been said, it was almost as if her mother had guessed at the reason he no longer visited her or telephoned. She had put no letter in her Christmas card to him, either, and she had not told him that she had moved. If there were news of Lewis, then she would contact him. Until then, she had to stay out of his life.
There were cards and letters from both Gabrielle and Serena, and she drew enormous strength from them. They were both in Saigon. Gabrielle was making as many contacts as she could with people who had known her uncle, and Serena was working as a volunteer in one of the local orphanages. Abbra had been amused by the last revelation. It was hard to imagine Serena, so carelessly soignée, feeding and changing tiny babies and clearing up the kind of mess that tiny babies were apt to make.
On the first of February she turned on the television to listen to the morning news as she made her breakfast, and was stunned to hear the news of the Viet Cong’s Tet offensive. It was the Vietnamese New Year and all across South Vietnam hundreds of towns and cities and US bases had come under simultaneous attack. In Saigon, Viet Cong guerrillas had blown a hole in the embassy wall and entered the grounds. There were reports that the embassy had been seized and was under Viet Cong control, that the war in all its fury had finally reached the heart of Saigon.
All day she listened to every newscast, fearful for Gabrielle and Serena, wondering if they were safe. The evening news programmes had live coverage of the events. At the embassy four GIs had been killed and another had been critically injured. The initial news flash, that the embassy had been seized, was denied, but the situation was still one of terrifying confusion. Dead Viet Cong lay sprawled on the embassy grounds as heavy automatic gunfire continued. Six and a half hours after the attack, the embassy was declared secure again, the last of the assailants being shot by a senior embassy official as he crept up a flight of inner stairs.
The American Embassy wasn’t the only ‘secure’ building to come under attack. A small group of Viet Cong, a woman among them, had tried to break into the Presidential Palace. There were live pictures of American and South Vietnamese troops engaged in a pitched battle with the attackers, their dead still lying in the street where they had fallen.
Saigon’s main radio station was seized. Roads were blocked to prevent American and South Vietnamese reinforcements from entering the city. General Westmoreland’s headquarters were attacked. There were reports from outlying towns of foreign doctors, nurses, missionaries, and schoolteachers being slaughtered by the insurgents, and Abbra’s fears for Serena and Gabrielle increased.
For a week, newscasts reported running battles in Saigon between the Viet Cong and American and South Vietnamese forces.
Abbra knew that she could expect no news of Serena and Gabrielle until order was restored. The often sunless February days passed with agonizing slowness. As normality returned to Saigon, there were horrific news reports of the fighting further north, in the old imperial capital of Hue.
The fighting in Hue continued for twenty-four murderous days, and at the end of the fighting, when the recently raised Viet Cong flag was ripped from the flagpole of the ancient fortress that dominated the town and the South Vietnamese red and yellow banner rose again, one hundred and fifty US marines lay dead. Four hundred South Vietnamese troops also died in the often hand-to-hand fighting, and it was estimated that thousands of civilians, some victims of Communist death squads, others victims of American air and artillery strikes, had also died. The city itself, the most historical and the most beautiful in the whole of Vietnam, was devastated.
It was while she was reading a newspaper report in which an American officer was describing paradoxically how ‘we had to destroy the city in order to save it’, that a telegram arrived for her from Gabrielle. She and Serena were safe. Tet had been ‘trés grisant’, very exhilarating. Rocket and mortar explosions had trapped them in their hotel room for three days, but now they were okay. She would write soon. And she sent much, much love.
Abbra’s relief was colossal. She was able to concentrate on her novel again. She had promised Patti that it would be finished by Easter, and she wanted to be professional and meet her self-imposed deadline.
For the next few weeks, television news coverage was all of the fighting at Khe Sanh, a marine base in the northwest corner of South Vietnam. The marines’ mission was to cover North Vietnamese infiltration routes from Laos, eight kilometres away from them, to the west.
At the end of January they had found themselves besieged by two crack North Vietnamese divisions, one of them the same division that had, fourteen years before, led the assault on Dien Bien Phu. All through February and March the newspapers were full of harrowing reports of the fighting. Day after day, eighteen-, nineteen- and twenty-year-olds were being slaughtered. Looking at the photographs, Abbra’s antiwar convictions solidified.
On 31 March, tired and
looking ill, President Johnson went on nationwide television to announce that he would not be seeking re-election. Abbra felt a surge of hope. A new presidency would mean new political decisions. Both Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, the two men seeking nomination as Democratic candidate, were antiwar. If either man became president, then the war would surely end. She began to root for Kennedy.
On 1 April, she finished her novel and on the third she delivered it to Patti, and they went for a celebratory lunch. On the fourth she felt as if she would never be able to celebrate anything again. Dr Martin Luther King was shot dead in Memphis. The assassination of a man who had always advocated peaceful resistance no matter how violent the provocation was so monstrous that Abbra felt as if a member of her own family had been murdered. There was worse to come.
On 6 June Robert Kennedy, the man she had hoped would be the next president, was gunned down in the Hotel Ambassador in Los Angeles minutes after triumphantly winning the California primary.
Two weeks later, when the black limousine slid to a halt outside her pastel-painted house, she knew that the saying ‘Death comes in threes’ held true. She never remembered going to the door or opening it. She only remembered facing the army officer and the accompanying chaplain, and the army officer saying gently, ‘Do you have a friend we could call, Mrs Ellis?’
She shook her head, overcome by a dizzying sense of déjá vu. She had been here before. Another army officer had asked her if she could call a friend before breaking his news to her, and that news had not been news of Lewis’s death. She clung to a remnant of hope. There was no reason why the news this time should be of Lewis’s death. It couldn’t be. She would have known if he had died. She wouldn’t have to be told. She would have known.
Looking around him and realizing that there was no neighbour within easy reach who could be called on to sit with her, the officer said unhappily, ‘May we come in, Mrs Ellis?’
She tried, to say yes, but no words would come. Her throat was so tight that she felt as if she were being strangled. Mutely she opened the door wide and led the way into her little sitting room. Her typewriter was on the desk. She had been trying to get the synopsis for a new book down onto paper, and several discarded pages lay crumpled in the wastebasket.
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