“Some guy gave it to me. They’re always giving it to me, hoping I’ll write something nice about them, I guess. I hate the goddamn stuff. Brings me out in hives. Now if you don’t mind my saying so, you need some gloves. I have a couple of ladies’ pairs I keep spare.”
Mary calculated that she had been gone more than two hours and that she needed to get back. As Sheppard burrowed into a drawer in a chest in the small entrance hall, she explained, while trying to minimize how foolish she sounded, her fear of getting into a taxi.
“Don’t worry, I understand. Kind of unsettles you having these big goons following you around. I’ll take you back myself. It’s ten minutes around the ring and I need some air anyway.”
He overcame Mary’s protests and forced a large rabbit-skin hat over his thin hair. “This is my minus ten hat. I have a minus twenty as well. But we Muscovites don’t get to put the flaps down till minus fifteen.” He gave her a big smile, full of America. “We consider it what you Britishers would call ‘unsporting.’ ”
He took her out to the courtyard and opened the doors of a muddy blue Volvo. With what seemed to Mary like miraculous speed after the rigors of her walk, they drove round the northwestern rim of the city, past the zoo and the American Embassy, and crossed the river at the Borodinsky Bridge.
Mary thanked her savior warmly, but her spirits fell as she found herself once more on the wide steps leading up to the Ukraina; she turned at the heavy doors, clasping her bag of supplies, and saw Deke Sheppard waving to her as he prepared to depart.
Back inside the murk, she crossed the expanse of the lobby and braced herself for the elevator wait. After a mere ten minutes she was clanking skyward, then making her way once more down the passageway beneath the sour gaze of the beshawled crone at her desk.
It seemed to Mary that she had already made this short walk an infinite number of times; its details had acquired the power of the eternal: Hell might be this reeking gray corridor, with its straight lines that converged to a never-realized vanishing point.
Once more as she fitted the key to the lock and opened the door she feared for what she would find inside. It was dark. When she had located the light switch, she placed the bag of food on the table and went into the bedroom. Charlie was lying down, curled up beneath the blankets, though something in his attitude made Mary think he was not asleep. She touched him on the shoulder and he slowly raised himself onto an elbow.
He smiled. It was the first time she had seen him smile since she had been in Moscow. She kissed him and told him she had brought some food. The smile left his face, but she said that after all the trouble she had been to, she expected him to try. She left him to get dressed while she laid out some plates and cutlery from the glass-fronted cabinet on the thick pile cloth with its curious dangling bobbles.
Charlie reached for the vodka bottle when he came into the sitting room, but Mary put her hand on his. “You must eat first. You can have one drink afterwards if you’ve eaten.”
Meekly he spooned some of the soup to his lips. He grimaced at the taste, but managed to swallow it. Mary also began to eat; she had had nothing since arriving twenty-four hours earlier and found Deke Sheppard’s picnic a feast of urgent flavors.
She watched Charlie spoon some caviar uncertainly onto a slice of bread.
What does it mean to love a man? she thought. Does it mean you take his weaknesses, his shaking hands, transparent failings, and subsume them in yourself, where you can heal, and make them strong, and give them back to him restored? It means that at some point you give up the idea of yourself as a person capable of infinite expansion. It means that if an impossible choice is to be made between his life and yours, you choose his. And it means that you cannot repine for this hard moment, because he is grafted onto you; that what you do for him you do also for yourself and for some separate entity that is greater than the sum of both, because the dangerous enterprise of your joined life is more dramatic, more arresting and more exciting than any alternative could ever be.
She could no more abandon him than she could turn away from the crying of her child. “I love you,” she said.
Charlie’s eyes filled with tears above the food he was struggling for her sake to eat. He swallowed and coughed. He said, “You’re more than I deserve.”
She said, “I don’t know what all this means. ‘Breakdown.’ What’s that? But you will be well again. I’ll make sure of that.”
“Will you stay with me?”
“Now?”
“No. Always.”
Mary looked round the room, at its sticky floor, botched carpentry and Soviet-approved paintings. She saw the wooden radiator cage, half detached from the wall, and she thought of the wires that ran back into the plaster of the monstrous building, up to a listening station on the twenty-somethingth floor, where two bored men with nicotine fingers and raw faces watched the slowly turning spools and listened like recording angels to the answer she must give.
Her voice was very quiet in her throat. “Yes,” she said. “Of course I will.”
Charlie lowered his head to the table and began to weep in huge convulsions.
“Of course I will,” said Mary. “And in return, you must promise me to live. I lost my fiancé in that war and I’ve never looked back, I’ve never compared you to one another. I loved you for yourself, because with your laughter and your stories you made life glorious. My darling, you invented it—a way of living it at least.”
She stood up, flushed with the daring of the moment. “I won’t let you join him among the dead. You owe it to him and to me and to all those thousands of young men not to give in.”
Charlie ceased his sobbing long enough to say, “I know.”
Mary walked round the table and knelt by him. She laid her head on his shoulder as she had done so many times when first they were together; and he, remembering, stroked back the thick, almost-black hair from her forehead with his faltering hand.
Chapter 20
The next day, Dr. Keslake called and certified Charlie fit to travel.
“Thank you,” said Mary. “I think I’m supposed to let the Ambassador …”
“Dont worry,” said Keslake. “I’ll fix all that.”
After lunch on the remains of Deke Sheppard’s largesse, Mary packed their cases and at two o’clock Michael Winterburn called to take them to the airport. Mary looked up one final time at the slabbed mass of the Ukraina behind them, the slave monument of one totalitarian order to another, its spiral point lost in graying snow; she closed her eyes as they climbed into the car and turned toward the West.
Winterburn could barely contain his relief as he sped them to the airport, chattering about Embassy matters, hoping insincerely that they would come back soon. Charlie made a weary grimace at Mary from the backseat, suggesting an imminent return was unlikely, and she stifled a laugh; it was their first moment of pleasure together since she had been in Moscow and she thought it was a good augury for what lay ahead.
At the airport, Winterburn helped them with their cases and watched through a glass screen until they had negotiated the line at passport control; it was as though he feared some last-minute hitch would throw Charlie back into his orbit, another Cold War bomb waiting to explode. When they walked across the runway to the plane and climbed the steps, Mary looked back into the terminal building where she thought she saw Winterburn’s anxious face pressed against the glass. He would not relax until he saw them airborne, she thought: he would not uncork his celebratory bottle until the aircraft was fifty miles west of Berlin.
With the hours winding back in their favor, they were home in Regent’s Park in time to see Richard and Louisa before bed. In front of the fire in the sitting room, Mary hugged them to her and did not doubt for a moment the justice of what she had decided in that distant hotel room. This was her life, these backs and ribs that she crushed in her embrace, the bloom of their cheeks against hers, the smell of Richard’s fragrant neck and Louisa’s just-washed hair.
After a week he was allowed home on condition that he attend as an outpatient three times a week for half a day; they prescribed a regime of sedatives and psychotherapy while they awaited definitive analysis of the liver. Charlie went into Whitehall to speak to the people in Personnel, who said he should take as long as he needed to recover; Charlie’s accumulated reputation was worth something and he drew heavily on its credit. They would wait for the medical situation to clarify, but if necessary they would not ask him to return to Washington; they would deem that posting complete and would bring forward his next due spell at home, to be commenced when he was fit.
Mary then took Louisa and Richard to see a school in Primrose Hill, where it was agreed that they should begin in January. Reunited with his parents and removed from the school in Norfolk, Richard began to regain his ebullience; Louisa’s eyes remained wary, but her mouth started to lose the suspicious, downward turn it had acquired since she had been taken from Washington. Mary could register the tiniest changes in their skin, or the shine of their eyes, and was gladdened by what she saw. Louisa took Mary’s old room at the top of the house, Richard the one next to it that had been earmarked for a sibling never born. Mary and Charlie occupied the spare room on the floor below, and the house slowly filled with noises of playing, quarreling and entreaty that it had never known before, certainly not in Mary’s soft-footed and solitary childhood.
One day when everyone was out, Mary telephoned Frank in New York. He was not at his office, so she left a message with the secretary in the newsroom to say that she and Charlie had returned safely from Moscow; the secretary told her that Frank was shuttling back and forth a good deal from Washington and so could not say for sure when he would next be in. He was “familiarizing” himself with the White House, she said, in preparation for Senator Kennedy’s inauguration, and Mary wondered if that familiarity would extend to the girls with Bermuda shorts and Shetland sweaters, the girls called Fiddle and Faddle and Squidge.
The only way to be sure of reaching him was by post; so on the next occasion she could contrive to be alone, she wrote to him, a letter of blind despair from her prison of family goodwill.
Louisa practiced “Silent Night” on the piano and Richard memorized the verses of “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks,” with schoolboy variations. Charlie went dutifully to Edgware, and found that the little he drank at night made him nauseous; perhaps, indeed, that was the function of the pills. By day he was stunned by drugs; at night he dreamed in stormy visions like a painter in a Victorian asylum: he found himself in Dien Bien Phu, on the road where the fighter-bombers laid their napalm trails. He was with the Tai tribesmen as they bayoneted the scorched Vietminh survivors; then he dreamed he was strolling on the boulevard St. Germain with the studious Captain Rigaud, his Montaigne’s Essais still beneath his arm, and that the boulevard opened up at the Raspail junction into an elevated highway to the clouds, taking Rigaud to heaven.
Most of all he dreamed of the cold, candlelit restaurant in Florence where he had dined off spaghetti parmigiana and occasional black-market mushrooms in the dank autumn of 1943. He looked at the grain of the wooden table and pictured in it the English streets where his letters of condolence to grieving parents had not been delivered. One night he dreamed that his beloved company was reunited, the dead men living, the prisoners returned, the wounded whole again, and that when the order came to occupy the forward part of the salient, he refused; that, to the fury of the officer commanding the battalion, he took his men back to the beach at Anzio, embarked them on various pleasure craft and went sailing in the bay.
On the morning of Christmas Day the children brought down their stockings to their parents’ room and opened them on the bed. Over the years a polite gratitude had edged into their sense of pure marvel at the bearded overnight visitor, but their pleasure in acquisition was undimmed. They went en famille to the church in Primrose Hill, brazenly, Mary thought, toughly confronting the fact that the last time they had been there was for her mother’s funeral. The vicar greeted them with a particular smile, that sympathized but also congratulated them on accepting that all things had their place in God’s calendar—the death, the Birth—and it was proper to submit themselves humbly to the great mysteries of Being.
Mary felt it was a fraud, that some essential error had been made, and it was only until she could sort it out that she was prepared to go along with this hypocritical contrivance. She shuddered beneath the vicar’s compassionate, congratulatory look and pulled her hand from his encouraging squeeze.
Her father opened some wine he had been saving to drink with the turkey, and Charlie made a jug of dry martinis, though he did not drink one himself. Mary could not understand her mother’s oven, which seemed to work either at full temperature or not at all; but by a sequence of brief yet intense irradiations over several hours the turkey was at last sufficiently cooked to be eaten without danger. It was late in the afternoon by the time they finally went through to the sitting room for charades, port, tangerines and other rituals that made all of them in their different ways feel that normality, if not restored—if not indeed recapturable—was at least capable of being imitated.
James looked at his daughter with gratitude, knowing what efforts she had made for him; Charlie gazed at her with stunned incredulity, still not able to replay, even in his stormy dreams, what had passed between them in the room at the Hotel Ukraina. Louisa and Richard extracted promises that they would never be sent away again, and Richard climbed on his mother’s knee, where he laid his head against her bosom, as he had when he was a baby.
Mary felt its comforting weight, heavy like ripe fruit, and barely allowed her glance to go through the undrawn curtain, where the top left-hand windowpane gave directly onto the diminished traffic of the London flight path; though once, as she stroked Richard’s hair, she did see the wingtip lights of an ascending plane, heading west, blinking like a solitary star in the festive sky.
After the holidays the French government exploded an atomic device in the Sahara Desert; the next day Charlie’s superiors wrote to say that in view of medical reports which suggested that it might be three months before he worked again, they would not be asking him to return to Washington. They suggested that his wife might like to go and tidy up their affairs, as they were anxious to have use of Number 1064 and of his office in the new Embassy building.
“I suppose we could just get the stuff shipped back,” Charlie said. “If you don’t want to go.”
“Well, it’s a bit of a nuisance, isn’t it?” said Mary. “But all the children’s things are there, and of course I’d like to say good-bye to everyone in Washington.”
“How long do you think it would take?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps a week.”
“On second thoughts,” said Charlie, “why don’t you take as long as you like? You deserve a break.”
She looked at him quickly to see if he was implying more than he said, but his expression showed only a mildly generous concern.
She bought the children’s uniforms and prepared the Regent’s Park house for her absence, laying in quantities of food and explaining to her father, as well as she could, how the oven worked. Richard and Louisa made her promise to leave nothing behind in her packing; she was not to assume they had “grown out” of anything, as she too often did, giving their treasured possessions away to charity.
On the morning of her departure her father said good-bye before he took the children out, as promised, to the West End. Mary, her suitcase packed and ready by the front door, stood with Charlie in the sitting room as they waited for the ordered taxi.
“Say good-bye to the Renshaws,” said Charlie. “Tell Eddie I found
those lines from Emily Dickinson we couldn’t remember that night. Wait. I’ll write them down.” As he took a pen and paper from the desk, he read out what he wrote: “ ‘If “All is possible” with him / As he besides concedes / He will refund us finally / Our confiscated Gods—.’ ”
Mary took the piece of paper.
“Got your passport? Say good-bye to Dolores. Have you got some money to give her? And say good-bye to Benton for me.” He smiled. “Hope she doesn’t ‘goof’ or ‘flip’ when she hears I’m not coming back.”
The taxi driver rang the bell and Charlie told him they would be with him in a moment. He nodded and returned to his ticking cab.
Charlie, pale and diminished, kissed Mary on the cheek as she stood on the threshold.
“And you?” he said.
She smiled. “Me what?”
“Will you be coming back?”
Squeezed into the washroom of the aircraft, 30,000 feet above the Atlantic, Mary shook her wet hands above the basin and searched for a paper towel. The plane was rocking on the high thermals, yet it drove onward undeterred on its hell-bent westward course, reeling in the hours. There was nothing she could do about it now. Above the basin was a mirror, illuminated by flickering strips along its edge. Mary looked at her face, unsteady in the turbulence, and in the no-man’s-land above the ocean her earthly resolutions had no gravity. She said softly, “I’m coming for you, my love. Don’t worry, I’m coming”; and in the glass, her eyes reflected only the glaring light of her need.
At Number 1064 Dolores was waiting to greet her. “There’s a lot of messages for you, Mrs. van der Linden.”
Upstairs, curled on the bed, Mary started dialing. The first call she made was to New York; the requests of other friends and colleagues could be made to fit in. She heard Frank’s voice against the background clatter of typewriters and telephones.
“I should have time Wednesday and Friday,” he said. “Can you make that?”
On Green Dolphin Street Page 34