White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘And what is it that you do best, baby?’ Radford asked, and there was no mistaking the sexual innuendo in the rich dark timbre of his voice.

  She turned towards him, lifting her eyes slowly up to his. She was wearing a short-skirted white cotton-piqué suit and a black cotton Italian turtleneck sweater that she had bought in Baltimore on their American tour. The jacket was thrown casually around her shoulders, and at her neck was knotted a long black and white crepe scarf, the ends falling, freely down her back. A black and white leather belt with a gilt buckle cinched her waist, and on her left wrist were black and white twisted bracelets that Serena had bought her for her last birthday. She looked as coolly sophisticated as Serena at her best. Incredibly Parisian. Incredibly chic.

  ‘I’m a nightclub singer,’ she said, her voice betraying none of her inner perturbation.

  He was as handsome, as sensually aware, as mocking, and as confident as ever. Beneath the tight crinkle of his close-cropped hair, his eyes were hot with an expression that sent a flood tide of desire racing through her veins.

  ‘That may be what you think you are,’ he said, one corner of his mouth curling into a crooked smile, ‘but what I know you are is one of the best female rock singers in the business. And to prove my point, I want you and Rosie to duet on the Martha and the Vandellas number Dancing in the Street.’

  ‘I’m not coming back to the band,’ she said, grateful that there was at least one decision she was not in doubt about. ‘You’re doing just fine as you are, without me. And I want to go back to what I feel most comfortable doing.’

  ‘Singing love songs in dime-a-dozen clubs?’ he said, the humour leaving his voice, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘The clubs don’t have to be dime-a-dozen,’ she said, returning his gaze unflinchingly. ‘And they won’t. Not if I have half the talent you insist I have.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’ His nostrils flared and she knew that despite his careless dismissiveness, he was furiously, blazingly angry.

  ‘Come on, Gabrielle,’ the leading guitarist said encouragingly. ‘We’ve been looking forward to this for days. Let’s enjoy ourselves.’

  There were glasses and bottles of champagne on the lid of the nearby piano. The bass player played the opening riff of Dancing in the Street and grinned across at her. ‘It’s a song just made for the two of you,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you give it a blast?’

  She looked across at Rosie, who was looking at her in slight consternation. Gabrielle understood why. Her refusal to sing could be interpreted as pique at being asked to share centre stage with another singer. If Radford took it into his head that that was her reason for refusing to come back as a member of the band, then he might very well ask Rosie to leave it.

  She gave a sudden grin. ‘Ça va,’ she said, knowing that to continue to refuse was impossible, and knowing also that an informal session with the band would make not the slightest difference to the decision she had made.

  Rosie’s pert little face cleared with relief, champagne corks flew, Michel took his place at the piano, and Radford said to her with a smile, sure that she had changed her mind about preferring the clubs to the rock circuit, ‘Give it all you’ve got, honey,’ his voice thickened to a caress, ‘It’s been too long a time without you.’

  This time she kept her eyes steadfastly averted from his. The undercurrents between them were so raw and live that it seemed impossible to her that the other members of the band, and Michel and Rosie, should be oblivious to them. With her fingers trembling slightly, she slipped her jacket off her shoulders, laying it on a chair, and followed Rosie. What was going to happen when the session was over? How was she going to retain self-control and self-respect? Michel began to play the first few bars experimentally, and with monumental effort she tried to think of the song she was about to sing.

  ‘How are we going to do it?’ she asked Rosie. ‘I’m not even sure that I know all the words.’

  Rosie’s elfinlike face split into a grin. ‘We’re going to do it just as it comes,’ she said exuberantly. ‘We are going to enjoy ourselves!’

  From the first few bars they jelled together as if they had been singing duos for years. Even though Gabrielle had no intention of changing her mind about the decision she had made, not to return to the band, she had to admit that Radford had been right and that they would have been a sensation together onstage.

  After Dancing in the Street they went into the Gladys Knight and the Pips number, I Heard It Through the Grapevine, and then the Supremes’ You Can’t Hurry Love and You Keep Me Hangin’ On.

  ‘And now I want to hear you sing one of your own songs,’ Rosie said, panting for breath, perspiration sheening her face. ‘The kind of song that you say you prefer to sing.’

  Before Gabrielle could even reply to her, Michel played the first few bars of a song that had been her favourite in the Black Cat days. The rest of the band stayed silent. Radford didn’t move, but every line of his body was suddenly taut.

  She stood for a few moments, breathing deeply after the exertion of the dancing that had accompanied the last few numbers and then, as Michel played her in again, she took hold of the mike, and closing her eyes she began to sing.

  Apart from her voice, low now in register and deeply sensual, there wasn’t a sound in the large, drafty rehearsal room. Watching her, Michel knew that the decision she had made was the decision that was right for her. When she sang like this, when she was totally herself, she possessed an erotic presence that was electrifying. When the last note had died away there was a pause before the band broke out into wild applause. It was a pause by her peers, acknowledging a rare talent, a stage quality so mysteriously and implacably egocentric that there was no possible name for it.

  Only Radford did not join in the storm of hand-clapping and whistles and foot-stamping.

  ‘She is superb!’ Rosie said to Michel. ‘When she releases herself in a song she is not only a singer, she is a great dramatic artist as well.’

  ‘She has the one essential ingredient of international stardom,’ the bass player said in a low aside to Radford. ‘Every man who sees her onstage will want to make love to her.’

  A pulse had begun to beat at the corner of Radford’s jaw. He didn’t like what he was seeing and hearing because he knew damn well what it meant. She really wasn’t going to come back to the band. Musically she was going to go down her own road, even if that road never led to fame and riches.

  ‘Another!’ Rosie was calling out.

  ‘What about Fever?’ one of the guitarists shouted across to her.

  Gabrielle shook her head. ‘No, not Fever. Let’s do Stormy Weather.’

  This time every musician in the room reached for his instrument. The drummer did an experimental riff on the rim of his drum, and then, after a moment’s pause, Gabrielle once more began to sing.

  There was such deep pain in her husky, broken-edged voice that the simple words of the song became heart-wrenching.

  The café proprietor had come upstairs to listen more clearly. ‘Now, that,’ he said when the song came to an end and applause burst around Gabrielle’s ears like foam, ‘is my kind of song.’ He gave Radford a knowing wink and a leer. ‘And my kind of woman. Where the hell have you been hiding her all this time?’

  Despite insistent requests from the band that they continue the session, Gabrielle walked away from the microphone and over to the chair where she had left her jacket. She was drenched in perspiration, and the intensity of emotion that had been behind the words of her last song had left her feeling emotionally drained.

  Michel walked quickly after her, slipping her jacket around her shoulders, saying, ‘If you’re not careful, you’re going to catch a chill. This is Paris, not Saigon, and you don’t even have a coat with you.’

  Radford had picked up a black leather jacket, and with his thumb hooked beneath the collar, had swung it over one shoulder.

  ‘You and me have to talk, baby,’ he said, ignoring Michel.

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bsp; ‘Yes.’ It would have been infantile to have refused. She knew they had to talk. They had to talk about the decision she had made about her musical future, and they had to talk about other things as well, things that she was terrified of putting into words.

  In retrospect, she knew that the instant she left the rehearsal room with him the decision she had agonized for so long over had been made. There was going to be no going back. She was in utter subjection to her body and her physical needs, and she wanted one thing only. To lay naked beneath Radford’s hard-muscled body, to feel herself exploding with a passion that had been kept in check for too long, to kiss and to bite, to lick and to suck and to yield.

  There was a crazily ostentatious sports car parked outside the café. An Aston-Martin DB Mark 3. Radford opened the door for her and then strode quickly around to the driver’s side.

  ‘Thank Christ you’ve come to your senses at last,’ he said harshly, gunning the powerful engine into life.

  She knew that he wasn’t talking about music or her career or her return to Paris. There had always been a primitive telepathy between them. She didn’t have to tell him by word or gesture that she had inwardly sexually capitulated to him. He already knew.

  He rounded the corner of the street with a screech of the tyres, not speaking to her again, not even looking at her. They raced down the rue de Charenton and across the place de la Bastille, nearly mowing down a bicyclist and narrowly avoiding a collision with a truck.

  She had never been to his place, never had the remotest idea of where he lived. They swerved to a halt outside a typically grim-looking Parisian apartment block. The concierge eyed them indifferently as, still not touching, they began to run up the steep flight of uncarpeted stairs.

  In the apartment she was aware of stark white walls, of several colourful rugs, of a minimum of furniture, a record player and recording equipment, and literally hundreds of records stacked along the entire length of one wall.

  They didn’t make it to the bed. His T-shirt was off the instant he entered the room. By the time the door slammed behind them his shoes and his socks were off and his jeans were unzipped.

  She scrambled out of her panties, kicking off her shoes, lost to reason and conscience and self-respect.

  ‘Mon Dieu!’ she moaned as he bent her in towards him, lowering her to the floor, pushing up her skirt, ‘Be quick! Please, mon amour, be quick!’

  It was like the coupling of two savage animals. Both of them had waited to sexually gratify themselves with each other for too long. There was no tenderness, not even the pretence of love. She lifted her legs up and over his shoulders, her nails scoring his flesh, drowning in a release that nearly rendered her senseless. Only later, when he carried her to the bed, did they take time to savour each other, to touch with sensuality, and to explore.

  She had always been aware of his almost-pagan handsomeness. Naked, he was beautiful. His dark body gleamed the colour of rich mahogany. There was a light mat of tightly curling hair on his powerfully muscled chest, and a much denser bush of hair between his thighs. As she lay beside him, running her fingertips lightly up the length of his thigh and on over the flatness of his stomach, skirting his prick, which had fallen sideways and lay large and flaccid and still throbbing on his belly, she said with devastating honesty, ‘I don’t love you, chéri. I find you stunningly exciting, unbearably desirable, and I think that I must be a little in love with you. But I don’t love you. There is a difference, comprends-tu?’

  He understood all right. His eyes narrowed, his face suddenly expressionless. For a long moment he didn’t speak, and when he did, it was to say with casual brutality, ‘Your husband may not be alive. He may be dead. He may have been dead for months.’

  She winced, and he knew a moment of harsh satisfaction.

  ‘Non,’ she said, her voice slightly unsteady. ‘Gavin is alive. I know that he is.’

  Her fingertips were still on his flesh. His sex stirred and began to harden again. He didn’t want to talk about her husband. He didn’t want to do anything but make love to her again and again and again, until she forgot about Gavin Ryan, until she forgot about every other man she had ever had or had ever wanted, until she forgot about everything but him.

  When they made love again he refused to allow her to rush him. He took his time, teasing and tormenting her, using every trick he knew to give her the kind of pleasure that would have her on her hands and knees begging for more. Whenever she came to the brink of orgasm he denied her, turning his attention to another part of her body, crucifyingly in control of himself.

  ‘Mon Dieu,’ she whispered brokenly, ‘I can’t survive much more of this, chéri! I am going to die!’

  He was kneeling between her thighs, and she felt utterly vulnerable, utterly dominated. His tongue was hot and rough, moving in a long, agonizingly slow journey from her anus to her vagina, pushing deep inside and then, when she thought she could endure not another second, withdrawing and flicking lightly over her clitoris, sucking and nibbling and pulling with his lips at the velvety soft folds of her flesh.

  ‘Now, oh, please, now,’ she gasped. She had been too long without a lover. She could not delay her climax as he was delaying his.

  At the desperate plea in her voice he raised his head momentarily, a smile of triumph touching his lips, and then he thrust his tongue deep inside her. Seconds before she came he slipped a moistened finger inside her anus, and as the most intense orgasm of her life rocked through her she arched her back, giving a long, ululating cry of shock and ecstasy and total abandonment.

  He resisted the almost overwhelming temptation to ask her if her husband had ever made love to her with the same shameless expertise. He doubted it. Where bed was concerned, he immodestly figured he was far better equipped and far more skilful than any

  Australian could possibly be.

  Their affair lasted all through the spring and summer. Never once did she say that she loved him, and out of pride, never once did he say that he loved her. In bed they satisfied each other totally, and out of bed they struck the same kinds of sparks off each other that they had always struck. His fury at her refusal to come back as a member of the band was white hot, but nothing that he could do or say would make her change her mind.

  She began to sing at the Chez Duprée, in the Latin Quarter. It was run by Inez Duprée, a singer who specialized in fried chicken and jazz, and Gabrielle soon established a name for herself there. She wasn’t cutting records and doing tours as Radford and the band were, but she was doing what pleased her best. She was singing the songs that she wanted to sing, many of them her own, in the way that she wanted to sing them.

  It was early autumn when Nhu’s letter arrived, informing her of Dinh’s death.

  I am very grieved to be writing to you with the news that your uncle has been killed up-country in a farming accident. I believe that the accident took place some time ago, but exactly when I still do not know. There is no news of the friend who was with him.

  No news. There had never been any news. And now Dinh was dead. She wondered what the words farming accident really meant. Dinh was a soldier, not a farmer. He had never been a farmer. Was Nhu trying to tell her that Dinh had died fighting? If so, had Gavin been involved in the fighting as well? And where was he now? She put the letter down unsteadily. Wherever Gavin was, without Dinh to protect him, he would be a prisoner. As Lewis had been a prisoner. As Kyle still was. There would be no news now until the war was over.

  ‘Oh, my love, stay alive for me!’ she whispered fiercely through her tears. ‘Stay strong and stay alive!’

  The formal truce negotiations between America and the Saigon government and Viet Cong representatives continued in Paris. Gabrielle received a letter from Abbra in which Abbra expressed the hope that perhaps the end of the war was now in sight, that perhaps soon there would be news of Gavin’s whereabouts.

  At the time of Tet, Communist forces carried out massive rocket and mortar attacks against 115 bases, t
owns, and cities in South Vietnam, and Gabrielle, intensely relieved that she had not remained in Saigon with le petit Gavin, waited anxiously to hear from Serena.

  A letter came from her within days. The attacks in Saigon had been nothing like as bad as last year’s Tet attacks, and there was good news regarding some of the children at the orphanage. In the past two months six of them had been successfully placed for adoption with families in Belgium and Luxembourg and Serena was hopeful that more would be placed mother European countries.

  In June came the first piece of optimistic news since the peace talks had begun. At a meeting at Midway Island with President Thieu, President Nixon announced the planned withdrawal of 25,000 American combat troops from Vietnam.

  It really was beginning to seem as if the end could be in sight. Gabrielle had written to Nhu, asking if she thought any purpose could be served by her returning to Saigon, but Nhu’s reply had been disappointingly negative.

  Then, in September, Radio Hanoi announced the death of Ho Chi Minh.

  ‘I don’t see why you think Ho’s death is such a big deal,’ Radford had said to her, irritated as he always was by any mention of Vietnam and any reference to Gavin, however oblique.

  ‘It could make all the difference in the world,’ Gabrielle had said, deeply thoughtful. ‘It could change the attitude of the North Vietnamese.’

  ‘Well, if it does, no doubt President Nixon will tell us so,’ he responded sarcastically.

  Gabrielle did not rise to the sarcasm. They were in his apartment and had just made love. She swung her legs from the bed, beginning to dress. He raised himself up on one arm, saying bewilderedly, ‘Where the hell, are you going, baby? You don’t have to be at the club for another three hours.’

  She slipped on her shoes and picked up her clutch bag, her face fiercely determined. ‘I cannot wait for President Nixon to discover whether Ho’s death is going to make any difference to the North Vietnamese stance at the peace talks. I’m going to go there myself to find out.’