She closed her eyes, wondering how it was possible to have cried so much and to still be able to cry more. ‘I’m sorry, Scott,’ she said brokenly, ‘I love you with all my heart. Good-bye, my darling.’
As she lowered the telephone receiver she heard him shout, ‘I’m coming to get you! I was a fool ever to have let you out of my sight!’
She covered her eyes with her hands. She would have to inform Lewis’s doctors of what had happened. They would make sure Scott wasn’t allowed into the building. And when Lewis was released? She lifted her head up, her jawline strong and firm.
Lewis and his superiors had agreed that he should take a year’s sabbatical before deciding whether or not to continue his career in the army. They would be able to go away somewhere together. Perhaps to the East Coast, to be nearer his father. Perhaps even farther, to London or to Paris. Wherever they went she would be able to write, that was some comfort at least. It was the one thing that no one would be able to take away from her.
Not ever.
Lewis’s doctors had been unified in their opinion that a meeting between Lewis and Scott would simply subject Lewis to unnecessary stress.
Despite trying to physically storm down the doors, Scott had been refused all access. Abbra remained inside the building, grateful for the privacy of the single room that she had been allocated while Lewis underwent what was described as a ‘reorientation’ process.
Six years of his life had been lost. The world he had left behind him in 1966 was no longer the same. China was no longer regarded as an arch enemy, but as a friend. Friendly overtures were being made by the American government to the Soviet Union. Everything was upside down, and he and his fellow prisoners had to be brought up-to-date on all the world events that had taken place during the years of their imprisonment.
There were times when it was almost too much for him. The changes inside America were the hardest for him to come to terms with. Hours and hours of newsreels took him step by step through the development of the antiwar movement. He leapt to his feet, blaspheming viciously and storming out of the room when he was shown scenes of long-haired college students burning their draft cards. The details of Watergate dumbfounded him. In his book Richard Nixon was a hero, the guy to whom he owed his freedom. And then there were the hippies, and the amazing way homosexuality had become an accepted alternative life-style.
For hour after hour, day after day, he sat through films, read a six-year backlog of magazines and newspapers, sat in on lectures that varied in content from America’s new relations with China and the Soviet Union to the change in fashion and morals to details of new military hardware.
It was dizzying and sometimes overwhelming. How could politics, fashion, morals, music, technology, even speech, change so drastically? How come the seventies were so radically different from the sixties? He watched reruns of popular television shows, episode after episode of the Waltons.
‘I don’t intend to watch television ever again,’ he said firmly to Abbra when his reorientation was over. ‘Nor will I ever willingly listen to today’s pop music. The sixties were bad enough, but this new stuff is horrendous.’
She had laughed and hugged his arm as they went out of the building by the staff exit, glad to be leaving the hospital behind them for good. At Lewis’s request they were going to spend the next few days with his father in New York. The hospital authorities, eager to prevent an unpleasant confrontation between Lewis and Scott, had agreed to press announcements over the next few days indicating Lewis was still a patient and his release couldn’t be expected before the end of the following week, by which time, if Lewis was agreeable, Abbra intended to be half a world away, in London.
Over the next few days, and weeks, and months, things did not
grow easier. They grew more difficult. Despite the slow and steady improvement in his physical health, Lewis continued to have hideous nightmares. On their first night in London he had woken at 3:00 a.m. drenched in sweat, calling out in terror, ‘Tam! Tam!’
The next day he had shut himself broodingly away in the parlour of their hotel suite, refusing to go out with her, refusing even to have breakfast or lunch with her.
His psychiatrist had told her that there would frequently be periods when Lewis would need to be alone, and that she would have to come to terms with that need, no matter how difficult it might be for her.
On that day, their first in London, she had breakfasted alone and spent the morning wandering around the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. She had telephoned him before lunch to see if he wanted to eat with her, and when he had said that he didn’t, she had lunched alone at Fortnum & Mason, Afterwards she had walked along Piccadilly and into Hatchards, where she had the satisfaction of seeing her latest novel prominently displayed.
Back at their hotel she had knelt beside his chair, saying concernedly, ‘Tell me what it is that is troubling you, Lewis. Is it your nightmare? Was the name you called out the name of one of your guards?’
He hadn’t had to ask her what the name had been. ‘No,’ he said, running his hand through his hair, which was growing thick and curly again. ‘I was dreaming about Tam, the cleaning girl that we had at Van Binh. Do you remember me writing to you and telling you about her?’
She rested her weight back on her heels. It was so long ago, but she did remember him telling her about the village girl who had been badly mistreated by her father, and of how he had removed her from her father’s care by engaging her as a general all-purpose maid.
‘Was Tarn the girl who asked you to teach her English?’
He nodded, the hard line of his mouth softening slightly as he remembered their teacher-pupil relationship.
Abbra looked at him, perplexed. ‘But when you called out her name it was because you were terrified. You were drenched in sweat. Shaking. Why? I don’t understand.’
His mouth hardened again as he rose to his feet and paced across to the window. ‘There’s going to be no American victory in Vietnam, Abbra,’ he said, staring down into the rainwashed London street. ‘There’s going to be a negotiated settlement that will enable America to withdraw her troops. After that, depending on what agreement is reached and how it is supervised, there may be relative stability for a little while, but it won’t last. And when the North invades the South, as they will, then everyone who has ever worked for Americans, as Tam did, will be in danger.’
‘And that was why you had the nightmare?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that was why.’
‘The press wouldn’t be interested in us if you hadn’t written any novels,’ Lewis said tightly the first time he saw a magazine article about him, Abbra, and Scott. ‘Christ, have you read this stuff? It’s absolute filth!’
She had read so many more articles about them than he had that she was well prepared for whatever was in this one.
‘It isn’t so bad,’ she said comfortingly, dropping the magazine into a wastebasket. ‘It’s simply what is known in the trade as a human interest story, and it’s the sort of thing we have to expect.’
He rounded on her savagely. ‘I don’t have to expect it!’ he said explosively. ‘Just because you and Scott lived your lives in a blaze of publicity doesn’t mean that I have to become part of the circus as well!’
The blood had drained from her face. She knew that she dare not stay in the room with him. If she did, she would say things that would destroy everything they were trying to build together.
‘I’m going out,’ she said tersely, and without waiting for him to reply she spun on her heel and walked swiftly from the room.
There were other difficulties as well. Although sexually he desired her as much as ever, he was a conventional lover. His caresses were always the same: tender, deliberate, and unexciting. She yearned for Scott’s passionate, imaginative lovemaking, for the laughter that they had shared in bed, for the sense of total togetherness that had always existed between them.
Sometimes her loneliness see
med so encompassing that she wondered if she would be able to survive it. Even London was no distraction. Before Lewis had left the States, his superiors had given him introductions to several US Embassy officials. To Abbra’s surprise he had followed the introductions up almost immediately and had quickly become a part of a social circle that she felt alien in.
Instead of partying with the wives of the friends that Lewis had made, she spent long hours wandering around art galleries and museums, her thoughts not on paintings or ancient artifacts, but on Scott and Sanh. Often, regardless of where she was, tears would stream down her face. One morning she began to cry in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, another day she began to weep while shopping in Harrods. She knew what was happening to her, knew that she was heading full steam towards a nervous breakdown, and all her strength and determination were directed at staving it off.
The only person who knew her address in London, apart from her lawyer, was Patti. All through the year her letters came thick and fast, the questions in them remorseless. Why wasn’t she writing? She was under contract to her publisher to deliver another book by next May. Had she forgotten? Had she made contact with her London publisher yet? How was Lewis? Were the two of them happy in London? Were they unhappy? Was that why Abbra wasn’t writing? Was it why she wasn’t even writing letters? Did she want to meet and talk? If so, she would fly immediately to London.
Even worse than the questions was the information. Scott had brought Sanh to visit her. Sanh was well and happy but Scott had looked taut and strained. He was still demanding her and Lewis’s London address, and she was still adamantly refusing to give it to him. It wasn’t easy. On a previous visit when she had refused, his frustration had been so great that he had become violent and had smashed a door through with his fist.
Abbra had put the letter down, unable to read any further. There was no way in the world that she could see Scott again and remain with Lewis. But Sanh. Surely she could see Sanh?
‘No,’ Serena had written to her firmly.
It wouldn’t be fair to him to see him for a few hours or a few days and then to disappear from his life again. The traumatic relationships between you and Lewis and Scott would be beyond his understanding. Scott still writes regularly so I know that he is giving Sanh one hundred percent of his time. With Scott, Sanh is receiving all the emotional stability he needs. For you to remain in contact with Sanh, when Sanh knows that you are not in contact with Scott, would be far too difficult a situation for him to handle.
And so, because she loved him so much, and because she would have died rather than have caused him distress, she lived without her adopted son, as she lived without Scott.
The only person who did not seem to be suffering was Lewis. When they arrived in London she thought they might be there for a few weeks, perhaps even a month. But Lewis had fallen in love with the city.
He bore very few physical reminders of his imprisonment. He had always been toughly and compactly built, and through rigorous exercise his body was as hard and as muscular as it had been previously. As his hair had regrown, the grey in it no longer appeared so jarring. Instead, it merely flecked his hair, seeming to add to his physical attractiveness instead of detracting from it.
That he was still very physically attractive was obvious from the way embassy wives discreetly flirted with him. He was certainly far more popular, socially, than she was.
‘Every time those women look at me, it’s so obvious what they are thinking, what they are remembering,’ she had said after a dinner party where she had barely been spoken to by anyone other than her hostess.
Lewis had removed his dinner jacket and begun to take the cuff links out of his evening shirt. ‘I’m afraid that is the price you have to pay, Abbra,’ he had said casually, and had continued to undress, oblivious to her stunned look of disbelief.
She had known exactly what he had meant. Near social ostracism was the price she had to pay for having married Scott when she thought herself a widow. At least it was the price she was going to have to pay as long as she remained in his world and among his friends.
At the beginning of 1972, as his sabbatical year drew to a close, her feeling that they were growing more and more estranged increased.
‘It’s time we moved out of the flat and bought a house,’ he said to her one morning as they shared a prebreakfast cup of coffee. ‘I’ve been offered a position as an adviser at the embassy and I have decided to take it.’
She put her coffee cup down a trifle unsteadily. ‘What sort of adviser? Why haven’t you spoken to me about it? I thought you were still trying to decide whether or not to continue your career in the military?’
‘Well, I’ve decided,’ he said, and smoothly changed the subject by asking if she had remembered that they were going to the theatre that evening.
There were times, as 1972 dragged itself into 1973, when she wondered wildly if his new position as an adviser was actually a position with the CIA. He never spoke about what he was advising on. He never told her anything about the work that he was doing. She had not made the deadline on her book, and though Abbra was afraid the publisher might cancel the contract, she could not write.
Letters still came to her, via her lawyer, from Scott. They were always the same, demanding, reasoning, pleading with her to leave Lewis and to return to him. He enclosed photographs of him and Sanh, and whenever she withdrew them from the envelope she thought that her heart would break. She loved both so much. But she couldn’t return to them, not after the solemn promise that she had given to Lewis. When the Peace Accords were signed in Paris, she had expected that Lewis’s still-frequent nightmares would grow fewer and fewer. Instead, they increased, and they seemed to centre more and more on the Vietnamese girl he had befriended.
His psychiatrist had warned her that some POW returnees centred all their bitterness on to one often trivial image. She wondered if that was what Lewis was doing now, of if he was deeply concerned about Tam because there had been far more to his relationship with her than he had ever admitted.
It was an intriguing supposition, but one she couldn’t quite imagine. There was a puritanical streak in Lewis where sex was concerned. Despite the approaches that admiring women must have made to him, she was certain he hadn’t responded to any of them. And she was equally sure that he had never been unfaithful to her while he had been in Vietnam.
Within weeks it became quite obvious that Lewis was correct and that the truce between North and South was not going to be adhered to. Almost the first people to die were nine members of an international peacekeeping commission whose helicopter was blasted out of the sky by Viet Cong guerrillas.
By autumn, small-scale Communist attacks were taking place throughout the South. In the early months of 1974 the attacks escalated in both frequency and scale. Serena’s monthly letter to her from Saigon was full of the difficulties she and Mike were experiencing in arranging for the adoption of the scores of children still in their care. We have to make the arrangements quickly, Serena had written. Everyone in Saigon realizes that there is very little time. That the end cannot be very far away now.
She was still receiving letters from Scott, via her lawyer, but their tone had changed. I love you, and I still want you back, but I’m not living like a monk anymore, he had written in his last letter to her,
It isn’t in my nature, as I’m sure you realize! But I hate it, Abbra. I don’t want other women. I want you. Surely you know by now what a colossal mistake you have made. Pity isn’t any reason to live with anyone. If Lewis knew that pity was your motive in choosing to remain with him, he wouldn’t thank you for it. I know that you believe that what you are doing is the right and honourable thing, but you are wrong, sweetheart. It isn’t. The right and honourable thing is to return to the people who love you and you love in return. Come home, sweetheart. Please.
At Christmas Patti had written to her, telling her that one of her writers, a girl Abbra had met a couple of times in Los Angeles, was g
oing to London.
Her husband is a diplomat so you’re bound to meet on the embassy circuit. I think you last met her at one of my parties. Scott remembers her, anyway. He says you liked her when you did meet, so I hope you are not going to take offence at my suggesting she keep an eye out for you …
Abbra had decided the previous year that she hated Christmas. It reminded her too strongly of children and of Sanh, and made her agonizingly aware of all the things that might have been.
‘I know you don’t like parties,’ Lewis said to her as, she dressed reluctantly for a cocktail party that was being held at the French ambassador’s residence, ‘but tonight is rather special. There’ll be a lot of gossip about the deteriorating situation in Vietnam and I want to be privy to all.’
As always happened at such functions, they became almost immediately separated and swept off into different champagne-sipping groups.
‘… And so in my opinion, the Communists are now ready to launch an all-out attack on the South,’ the Englishman she was standing next to was saying.
She looked across the room and saw Lewis talking to a fair-haired girl who looked vaguely familiar. A small smile quirked the corner of her mouth. It was the novelist who was also agented by Patti. She wondered what on earth they were finding to say to each other.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t catch your name when we were introduced,’ the girl was saying breathlessly. ‘There’s such a crowd in here that you can hardly hear yourself speak.’ She glanced around, looking for a familiar face and said, ‘Oh goodness, is that Abbra Ellis over there? We share the same agent. I can’t imagine why she hasn’t written anything recently. Do you think she’s ill? She certainly looks it. The last time I saw her she was with her second husband, or the man she thought was her second husband. She simply glowed with happiness. I have never in my life seen two people so much in love …’
White Christmas in Saigon Page 67