Night Over Water

by Ken Follett

  Living with her for a year had changed him. He had gotten so uninhibited that he would walk naked from the bedroom to the bathroom; sometimes he did not even put on his pajamas before getting into bed; once he even took her here in the living room, right on that couch..

  He still wondered whether there was something psychologically abnormal about this kind of behavior, but he had decided that it did not matter: he and Carol-Ann could do anything they liked. When he accepted that, he felt like a bird let out of a cage. It was incredible; it was wonderful; it was like being in heaven.

  He sat beside her, saying nothing, just enjoying being with her and smelling the mild breeze coming in from the woods through the open windows. His bag was packed and in a few minutes he was leaving for Port Washington. Carol-Ann had left Pan American—she could not live in Maine and work in New York—and she had taken a job in a store in Bangor. Eddie wanted to talk to her about that before he left.

  Carol-Ann looked up from Life magazine and said: “What?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “But you’re going to, aren’t you?”

  He grinned. “How did you know?”

  “Eddie, you know I can hear when your brain is working. What is it?”

  He put his big, blunt hand on her belly and felt the slight swelling there. “I want you to quit your job. ”

  “It’s too early—”

  “It’s okay. We can afford it. And I want you to take real good care of yourself. ”

  “I’ll take care of myself. I’ll quit work when I need to.”

  He felt hurt. “I thought you’d be pleased. Why do you want to go on?”

  “Because we need the money and I have to have something to do.”

  “I told you, we can afford it.”

  “I’d get bored.”

  “Most wives don’t work. ”

  She raised her voice. “Eddie, why are you trying to tie me down?”

  He did not want to tie her down, and the suggestion infuriated him. He said: “Why are you so determined to go against me?”

  “I’m not going against you! I just don’t want to sit here like a lumper’s helper! ”

  “Don’t you have stuff to do?”

  “What?”

  “Knit baby clothes, make preserves, take naps—”

  She was scornful. “Oh, for heaven’s sake—”

  “What’s wrong with that, for Christ’s sake?” he said crossly.

  “There’ll be plenty of time for all that when the baby comes. I’d like to enjoy my last few weeks of freedom. ”

  Eddie felt humiliated, but he was not sure how it had happened. He wanted to get out of there. He looked at his watch. “I’ve got a train to catch.”

  Carol-Ann looked sad. “Don’t be angry,” she said in a conciliatory tone.

  But he was angry. “I guess I just don’t understand you,” he said with irritation.

  “I hate to be fenced in.”

  “I was trying to be nice.” He stood up and went into the kitchen, where his uniform jacket hung on a peg. He felt foolish and wrong-footed. He had set out to do something generous and she saw it as an imposition.

  She brought his suitcase from the bedroom and handed it to him when he had his jacket on. She turned up her face and he kissed her briefly.

  “Don’t go out the door mad at me,” she said.

  But he did.

  And now he stood in a garden in a foreign country, thousands of miles from her, with a heart as heavy as lead, wondering if he would ever see his Carol-Ann again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  For the first time in her life, Nancy Lenehan was putting on weight.

  She stood in her suite at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, beside a pile of luggage that was waiting to be taken on board the S.S. Orania, and gazed, horrified, into the mirror.

  She was neither beautiful nor plain, but she had regular features—a straight nose, straight dark hair and a neat chin—and she looked attractive when she dressed carefully, which was most of the time. Today she was wearing a featherweight flannel suit by Paquin, in cerise, with a gray silk blouse. The jacket was fashionably tight-waisted, and it was this that had revealed to her that she was gaining weight. When she fastened the buttons of the jacket, a slight but unmistakable crease appeared, and the lower buttons pulled against the buttonholes.

  There was only one explanation for this. The waist of the jacket was smaller than the waist of Mrs. Lenehan.

  It was probably a result of having lunched and dined at all the best restaurants in Paris throughout August. She sighed. She would go on a diet for the entire transatlantic crossing. When she reached New York, she would have her figure back.

  She had never had to go on a diet before. The prospect did not trouble her: although she liked good food, she was not greedy. What really worried her was that she suspected it was a sign of age.

  Today was her fortieth birthday.

  She had always been slender, and she looked good in expensive tailored clothes. She had hated the draped, low-slung fashions of the twenties and rejoiced when waists came back into fashion. She spent a lot of time and money shopping, and she enjoyed it. Sometimes she used the excuse that she had to look right because she was in the fashion business, but in truth she did it for pleasure.

  Her father had started a shoe factory in Brockton, Massachusetts, outside Boston, in the year Nancy was born, 1899. He got high-class shoes sent over from London and made cheap copies; then he made a selling point out of his plagiarism. His advertisements showed a $29 London shoe next to a $10 Black’s copy and asked: “Can you tell the difference?” He worked hard and did well, and during the Great War he won the first of the military contracts that were still a staple of the business.

  In the twenties he built up a chain of stores, mostly in New England, selling only his shoes. When the Depression hit, he reduced the number of styles from a thousand to fifty and introduced a standard price of $6.60 for every pair of shoes regardless of style. His audacity paid off, and while everyone else was going broke, Black’s profits increased.

  He used to say that it cost as much to make bad shoes as good ones, and there was no reason why working people should be poorly shod. At a time when poor folk were buying shoes with cardboard soles that wore out in a few days, Black’s Boots were cheap and long-lasting. Pa was proud of this, and so was Nancy. For her, the good shoes the family made justified the grand Back Bay house they lived in, the big Packard with the chauffeur, their parties and their pretty clothes and their servants. She was not like some of the rich kids, who took inherited wealth for granted.

  She wished she could say the same for her brother.

  Peter was thirty-eight. When Pa died five years ago, he left Peter and Nancy equal shares in the company, forty percent each. Pa’s sister, Aunt Tilly, got ten percent, and the remaining ten went to Danny Riley, Pa’s disreputable old lawyer.

  Nancy had always assumed she would take over when Pa died. Pa had favored her over Peter. A woman running a company was unusual, but not unknown, especially in the clothing industry.

  Pa had a deputy, Nat Ridgeway, a very able lieutenant who made it quite clear that he thought he was the best man for the job of chairman of Black’s Boots.

  But Peter wanted it too, and he was the son. Nancy had always felt guilty about being Pa’s favorite. Peter would be humiliated and bitterly disappointed if he did not inherit his father’s mantle. Nancy did not have the heart to deal him such a crushing blow. So she agreed that Peter should take over. Between them, she and her brother owned eighty percent of the stock, so when they were in agreement they got their way.

  Nat Ridgeway had resigned and gone to work for General Textiles in New York. He was a loss to the business, but in another way he was a loss to Nancy. Just before Pa died, Nat and Nancy had started dating.

  Nancy had not dated anyone since her husband, Sean, died. She had not wanted to. But Nat had picked his time perfectly, for after five years she was beginning
to feel that her life was all work and no fun, and she was ready for a little romance. They had enjoyed a few quiet dinners and a theater visit or two, and she had kissed him good night, quite warmly; but that was as far as it had gone when the crisis hit, and when Nat left Black’s the romance ended too, leaving Nancy feeling cheated.

  Since then, Nat had done spectacularly well at General Textiles, and he was now president of the company. He had also got married, to a pretty blond woman ten years younger than Nancy.

  By contrast, Peter had done badly. The truth was he was not up to the job of chairman. In the five years during which he had been in charge, the business had gone steeply downhill. The stores were no longer making a profit, just breaking even. Peter had opened a swanky shoe store on Fifth Avenue in New York, selling expensive fashion shoes for ladies, and that took all his time and attention—but it lost money.

  Only the factory, which Nancy managed, was making money. In the mid-thirties, as America was beginning to come out of the Depression, she had started making very cheap open-toed sandals for women, and they had been very popular. She was convinced that in women’s shoes the future lay in light, colorful products that were cheap enough to throw away.

  She could sell double the number of shoes she was making, if she had the manufacturing capacity. But her profits were swallowed up by Peter’s losses and there was nothing left for expansion.

  Nancy knew what had to be done to save the business.

  The chain of stores would have to be sold, perhaps to their managers, to raise cash. The money from the sale would be used to modemize the factory and switch to the conveyor-belt style of production that was being introduced in all the more progressive shoe-manufacturing plants. Peter would have to hand over the reins to her, and confine himself to running his New York store, working within strict cost controls.

  She was willing for him to retain the title of chairman and the prestige that went with it, and she would continue to subsidize his store from the factory’s profits, within limits; but he would have to give up all real power.

  She had put these proposals in a written report, for Peter’s eyes only. He had promised to think about it. Nancy had told him, as gently as she could, that the decline of the company could not be allowed to continue, and that if he did not agree to her plan, she would have to go over his head to the board—which meant that he would be sacked and she would become chairman. She hoped fervently that he would see sense. If he were to provoke a crisis, it was sure to end with a humiliating defeat for him and a family split that might never be repaired.

  So far he had not taken offense. He seemed calm and thoughtful, and remained friendly. They decided to go to Paris together. Peter bought fashion shoes for his store, and Nancy shopped for herself at the couturiers’ and kept an eye on Peter’s expenditures. Nancy had loved Europe, Paris especially, and she had been looking forward to London; then war was declared.

  They decided to return to the States immediately; but so did everyone else, of course, and they had terrible trouble getting passage. In the end Nancy got tickets on a ship leaving from Liverpool. After a long journey from Paris by train and ferry, they had arrived here yesterday, and they were due to embark today.

  She was unnerved by England’s war preparations. Yesterday afternoon a bellhop had come to her room and installed an elaborate light-proof screen over the window. All windows had to be completely blacked out every evening so that the city would not be visible from the air at night. The windowpanes were crisscrossed with adhesive tape so splinters of glass would not fly when the city was bombed. There were stacks of sandbags at the front of the hotel and an underground air-raid shelter at the back.

  Her terrible fear was that the United States would get into the war and her sons, Liam and Hugh, would be conscripted. She remembered Pa saying, when Hitler first came to power, that the Nazis would stop Germany going Communist; and that was the last time she had thought about Hitler. She had too much to do to worry about Europe. She was not interested in international politics, the balance of power, or the rise of Fascism: such abstractions seemed foolish when set against the lives of her sons. The Poles, the Austrians, the Jews and the Slavs would have to take care of themselves. Her job was to take care of Liam and Hugh.

  Not that they needed much taking care of. Nancy had married young and had her children right away, so the boys were grown up. Liam was married and living in Houston, and Hugh was in his final year at Yale. Hugh was not studying as hard as he should, and she had been disturbed to learn that he had bought a fast sports car, but he was well past the age of listening to his mother’s advice. So, as she could not keep them out of the army, there was not much to draw her home.

  She knew that war would be good for business. There would be an economic boom in America, and people would have more money to buy shoes. Whether the U.S. got into the war or not, the military was bound to be expanded, and that meant increased orders on her government contracts. All in all, she guessed her sales would double and perhaps treble over the next two or three years—another reason for modernizing her factory.

  However, all that paled into insignificance beside the glaring, awful possibility that her own sons would be conscripted, to fight and be wounded and perhaps to die in agony on a battlefield.

  A porter came for her bags and interrupted her morbid thoughts. She asked the man whether Peter had yet dispatched his luggage. In a thick local accent she could hardly understand, he told her that Peter had sent his bags to the ship last night.

  She went along to Peter’s room to see whether he was ready to leave. When she knocked, the door was opened by a maid, who told her in the same guttural accent that he had left yesterday.

  Nancy was puzzled. They had checked in together yesterday evening. Nancy decided to have dinner in her room and get an early night; and Peter had said he would do the same. If he had changed his mind, where had he gone? Where had he spent the night? And where was he now?

  She went down to the lobby to phone, but she was not sure whom to call. Neither she nor Peter knew anybody in England. Liverpool was just across the water from Dublin: could Peter have gone to Ireland, to see the country where the Black family came from? It had been part of their original plan. But Peter would know he could not get back from there in time for the departure of the ship.

  On impulse, she asked the operator for Aunt Tilly’s number.

  Calling America from Europe was a chancy business. There were not enough lines, and sometimes you could wait a long time. If you were lucky you might get through in a few minutes. The sound quality was generally bad, and you had to shout.

  It was a few minutes before seven a.m. in Boston, but Aunt Tilly would be up. Like many older people she slept little and woke early. She was very alert.

  The lines were not busy at the moment—perhaps because it was too early for businessmen in the States to be at their desks—and after only five minutes the phone in the booth rang. Nancy picked it up to hear the familiar American ringing tone in her ear. She pictured Aunt Tilly in her silk dressing gown and fur slippers, padding across the gleaming wood floor of her kitchen to the black telephone in the hall.

  “Hello?”

  “Aunt Tilly, this is Nancy.”

  “My goodness, child, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. They’ve declared war but the shooting hasn’t started yet, at least not in England. Have you heard from the boys?”

  “They’re both fine. I had a postcard from Liam in Palm Beach, he says Jacqueline is even more beautiful with a suntan. Hugh took me for a ride in his new car, which is very pretty.”

  “Does he drive it very fast?”

  “He seemed pretty careful to me, and he refused a cocktail because he says people shouldn’t drive powerful automobiles when they’ve been drinking.”

  “That makes me feel better.”

  “Happy birthday, dear! What are you doing in England?”

  “I’m in Liverpool, about to take ship for New York,
but I’ve lost Peter. I don’t suppose you’ve heard from him, have you?”

  “Why, my dear, of course I have. He’s called a board meeting for the day after tomorrow, first thing in the morning.”

  Nancy was mystified. “You mean Friday morning?”

  “Yes, dear, Friday is the day after tomorrow,” Tilly said with a touch of pique. Her tone of voice implied I’m not so old that I don’t know what day of the week it is.

  Nancy was baffled. What was the point of calling a board meeting when neither she nor Peter would be there? The only other directors were Tilly and Danny Riley, and they would never decide anything on their own.

  This had the marks of a plot. Was Peter up to something?

  “What’s on the agenda, Aunt?”

  “I was just looking it over.” Aunt Tilly read aloud: “ ‘To approve the sale of Black’s Boots, Inc., to General Textiles, Inc., on the terms negotiated by the chairman.’ ”

  “Good God!” Nancy was so shocked that she felt faint. Peter was selling the company behind her back!

  For a moment she was too stunned to speak; then, with an effort, she said in a shaky voice: “Would you mind reading that to me again, Aunt?”

  Aunt Tilly repeated it.

  Nancy suddenly felt cold. How had Peter managed to do this beneath her eyes? When had he negotiated the deal? He must have been working on it surreptitiously ever since she gave him her secret report. While pretending to consider her proposals, he had in fact been plotting against her.

  She had always known that Peter was weak, but she would never have suspected him of such treachery.

  “Are you there, Nancy?”

  Nancy swallowed. “Yes, I’m here. Just dumbstruck. Peter has kept this from me.”

  “Really? That’s not fair, is it?”

  “He obviously wants it passed while I’m away ... but he won’t be at the meeting, either. We’re taking a ship today—we won’t be home for five days.” And yet, she thought, Peter has disappeared....

  “Isn’t there an airplane now?”

  “The Clipper!” Nancy remembered: it had been in all the papers. You could fly across the Atlantic in a day. Was that what Peter was doing?