by James Philip
“Ten years ago, I underwent a sterilization procedure,” she confessed, suspecting that she too was about to burst into tears. “That’s the little scar above my pubis that I laughed off the first time we slept together.”
“Oh…”
“I got pregnant, I planned to have an abortion in Paris – they don’t ask questions if you wave a wad of bank notes at them there, but I miscarried first. Probably, because of the stress of it all. Anyway, I decided that I was never going to go through that again and spent my money on having my tubes tied…”
“You were in a relationship?”
“Sort of, it hadn’t come to anything. He was looking for a submissive little wifey and I was never going to be that. He raped me when I told him it wasn’t going to work for me…”
“You never said…”
Melody felt the first tears wetting her cheek.
“I’ve never told anybody that before, okay. I’m not a victim and I got over it,” she insisted, her face suddenly burning hot, “and talking about it is very painful.”
Henrietta did not know what to say.
“Just because I fall in love with women doesn’t mean I hate men,” Melody stumbled on. “Last night I had an amazing fuck with Alonso and he had a really good time too, that’s as complicated as this needs to be, okay?”
She lurched to her feet, threw away her bundled dress and petty coats and skittered blindly into the washroom.
Chapter 5
Sunday 12th March
Castle Dore, Shinnecock Hills, Long Island
It was serendipitous that Leonora Coolidge had never entertained any illusions about Alexander Fielding. What you saw was what you got. He was not one of those men a good woman could mold, mellow or in any way reform. Fortunately, had he been that sort of a man she would have left him to his fate after he had done his very best to get them both killed being a hero.
‘What am I supposed to do?’ She had posed, rhetorically to her best friend, Maud Daventry-Jones. ‘I’m stupid about the guy. I love him and there’s nothing I can do about it!’
Which pretty much explained why, presently, she was the proportions of an average-sized barn door and aching for the day when she could start drinking and smoking again. She was well over seven months pregnant and about to wave goodbye to her ‘hero’ for God only knew how long!
Sure, Alex felt a little bad about leaving her in the lurch.
They had laughed about that!
In her case ‘leaving her in the lurch’ amounted to leaving her in the bosom of her wealthy, landed family in the luxury of the Coolidge mansion with every other private medical practitioner on Long Island on twenty-four-hour call to rush to her aid at the first sign of ‘junior’ deciding to come into the world.
Right now, junior was kicking like a mule.
Her mother said that meant ‘it’ was a boy.
Leonora had never really thought about having children until she had let herself get knocked up by her hero.
That would have been the night after their first proper date…
Alex had been in prison, out of circulation for the best part of a year by then and heck, that man had been in a hurry to make up for lost time!
Maud had quizzed her about that night a couple of days later.
‘I have never been so fucked silly in my whole life,” she had admitted, afflicted by goose pimples all over as she recollected the experience.
Alex had proposed marriage first, of course.
That was what you got for dating an officer and a gentleman.
Leonora had not even attempted to stop her father trying to talk her out of it, he had wanted to organise the society wedding of the year, preferably sometime in 1979 or 1980; Alex was having none of that.
‘Father will cut me off!’ She had protested.
‘His loss,” her hero had retorted, smiling that smile of his which always made her tingle in all the places a respectable girl never talked about in public.
They had spent most of the week after their chaotic registry office wedding in Brooklyn locked up in a plush room at the Ritz Hotel in Manhattan – luckily, daddy had been slow cutting off her allowance – doing what newlyweds from time immemorial have done, except more so…
Once her father discovered he was going to be a grandfather he had bitten the bullet and taken Alex to his heart, so everything had worked out just swell in the end.
Now, her hero had just landed his plane on Daddy’s lawn!
How crazy was that?
Didn’t the Air Force cashier people for things like that?
Actually, now that she looked at Alex jumping down from the old dope and fabric biplane, she reconsidered her initial impression; this was some old, very slow flying machine. Not even Alex could have got down safely in one of the new low-wing monoplanes that his squadron were scheduled to take down to the Border sometime in the next month or so.
Alex had not even bothered to don his flying leathers, he was dressed in his grey-blue day uniform, capless. Presumably, he planned to pull a suit off the rack in their rooms upstairs.
“The guy’s got style!” Maud murmured distractedly.
Leonora frowned.
Her friend got dreamier about Alex every day, if she did not do something about it, Maud would be hopelessly out of it if and when a suitable beau ever came along.
If I wasn’t so fat, I’d get straight onto that little project!
The two women watched the scene playing out on the lawn below the big house.
Alex was glad-handing his way through the assembled retainers and staff, swapping banter with other guests at that afternoon’s ‘going away’ soiree. The party was Leonora’s mother’s idea and even though Alex was teetotal these days he was nothing if not a party animal. Leonora had thought she was incorrigible, but Alex… Well, he took things to a whole new level!
They said there was going to be another war down in the South West and a lot of people were already asking if it was going to be a big enough war for Major Alexander Fielding!
Among other things her hero had become the instant sensation of her old set. Leastways, the members of that circle she had not completely alienated in her ‘jailbird year’ campaigning to get Alex out of prison, and seeking justice for all the wrongly accused bystanders swept up in the dragnet after the Empire Day outrages. Refreshingly, Alex tended to invite a lot more ‘real people’ to these affairs: perhaps, that was the way to go with Maud’s love life?
To introduce her to mere ‘real people’.
It was worth a try.
Leonora was startled out of her wool-gathering. In retrospect she had hardly known any ‘real people’ before her hero inadvertently enmeshed her in the Empire Day imbroglio…
Alex was hugging Maud.
“Put that woman down and start showering your wife with attention!” Leonora demanded with patrician severity.
Her husband did as he was instructed and with a dazzling smile put his arms as far around her as he could reach and held her close, pecking at her cheek preparatory to going mouth to mouth.
Leonora came up for air and realised, when she recovered her breath and her scattered wits that Alex was already shaking her father’s hand and making sweet with her mother.
How on earth does he do that?
Before she met her hero, she had been engaged twice – or was it three times – and not one of her beaus had ever got her mother smiling that way! As for her succession of failed future husband’s attempts to get on Daddy’s good side, well, those had all been hopeless causes.
But then none of the frogs she had kissed before her prince came along to sweep her off her feet – and knock her up in no time flat – were bone fide fighter aces.
Maybe, they had just not been made of the right stuff?
“Should you be standing up, princess?” Her husband inquired earnestly, his whole being shouting that for him she was the only woman in the room.
“I’m not ill, Alex,” she snapped irritably.
He knew it was just ‘baby testiness’ and smiled proudly.
Leonora instantly forgot why she was vexed in the first place.
“I’d much rather be alone with you, that’s all,” she admitted quietly. “Rather than with all these people!”
Her husband put his arm about her shoulder.
“Give me the word and I’ll start shooting the beggars,” he offered.
“Um… What on earth is that contraption you flew over here in?” She asked, changing the subject.
“We call them Fleabags,” Alex chortled. “They’re slow old things that the Army uses as artillery spotters and so forth. You can land one of them on a sixpence and if you make a hash of it, you’re usually travelling so slowly that when you hit the ground you can dust yourself off and walk away.”
Leonora did not find that entirely reassuring.
“You flew that thing all the way from Upper Manhattan?”
“Yes, I had a following wind. I’ll get one of the new chaps to drive over from Bronx Wood Aerodrome and fly it back to base tomorrow.”
Leonora patted her husband’s chest.
“I’ll come upstairs with you,” she suggested, “you’ll want to change into something more comfortable.”
This, of course, was something of a misnomer because she well knew that Alex was never more comfortable than when he was in his Colonial Air Force tailored uniform.
Except, that was, when he was in bed with her.
They fitted together just right…
They took the recently installed lift to the second floor.
Nobody batted an eyelid when, eventually, the couple came downstairs some ninety minutes later, nor remarked at the new flush in Leonora’s cheeks, a bloom perfectly complemented by the platinum blond of her hair.
In the couple’s absence Leonora’s father’s cronies had arrived en masse, now captains of industry, merchant bankers and a host of local dignitaries rubbed shoulders as the evening drew in.
Leonora reluctantly surrendered her hero to the great men of New York who clustered about him hoping, no doubt, that a little of his magic star dust would brush off upon them.
“They’re talking about Cuba and how it will hit the stock market if there’s a blockade, or something,” Maud Daventry-Jones announced, joining her friend in comfortable chairs a little outside the jostle of the party. This was their parents’ jamboree and they both felt out of things. “Alex is being fearfully bullied to tell people what he thinks is going on down in the Gulf of Spain…”
“He’s a big boy,” Leonora smiled archly. “He can look after himself.”
“You two were upstairs an age?”
“Yes,” Leonora agreed, smugly.
Maud giggled and patted her friend’s arm.
“Alex doesn’t really know what’s going on down on the Border or in Florida,” Leonora said without prompting. “Not that he would tell me if he knew, I suppose.”
“Has he ever talked to you about what it was like when he was down in Alta California and the Rio Grande country the first time?” Maud pressed, her voice pitched lowly confidential.
“He claims it was a quote: ‘Hell of a party once or twice a month and unbelievably boring the rest of the time’,” Leonora sighed. “But I never know if he’s teasing me. All I know is that he can’t wait to get back down there. How dumb is that?”
“Men!” Maud sympathised.
“Junior’s kicking again.”
The other woman tentatively placed the fingertips of her left hand on her friend’s belly.
“Yeah, I feel it…”
Leonora held Maud’s palm against her so she could get the full ‘kicking’ experience. She tried not to get ‘sloppy’ about these things but the last year, leastways since Alex had got out of jail, had been the happiest of her life. She had got to like herself, accept she was who she was and being married to Alex was well, living the dream. Her greatest fear was that her life would - or never could be – this sweet again.
A shadow passing through her peripheral vision snapped her out of her brief introspection.
Albert Stanton bowed and offered his hand to her.
“Albert,” Leonora smiled, offering her cheek for the newcomer to bow low and kiss. “We’d almost given up on you!”
“Many apologies,” the reporter grimaced. “I was detained in Manhattan. The Globe is publishing more than its fair share of tittle-tattle in its evening edition and the lawyers were in a dead funk.”
Leonora and Maud Daventry-Jones had got to their feet.
They had both got to know the dapper journalist – whose evidence, had it been listened to by the New York Constabulary the morning after Empire Day would have immediately cleared Alex and Leonora of any involvement in that day’s atrocities – who had done so much to publicise the two women’s campaign for justice last year.
Truth be told, Leonora was very aware that Maud went positively ‘stupid’ whenever Albert was around. Presently, her friend was blushing and smiling and shifting nervously on her feet as if she was a teenage girl in the first flush of unreasoning infatuation.
In the aftermath of the collapse of the trial of the Fielding brothers, Albert, whose support in print for Leonora and Maud’s campaign to free Alex, had subsequently earned him access to the exclusive ‘Shinnecock Hills’ club-cabal of bankers, industrialists and colonial legislators loosely orchestrated by Sir Maxwell Coolidge, Leonora’s father, and subsequently, his journalistic career had taken off like a rocket bound for some distant stellar body.
By repute he had been the highest paid, most in demand ‘scribbler’ in the First Thirteen, even before through Alex and Leonora he had been introduced to Abe and Kate.
Albert Stanton’s eagerly expected book about Abe and Kate – formerly ‘Fielding’ now ‘Lincoln, Leonora still had not got her head around that one – was expected to go straight to the top of the bestseller lists in New England and in the Old Country when it was published, an event provisionally scheduled for the autumn.
“Is it true you are besieged by Paris movie makers these days, Albert?” Leonora asked coyly.
The man grinned.
“Not quite. Abe and Kate have the final say on everything even though they are, how can I put it,” he shook his head, guffawed wistfully, “totally disinterested in money. Which I know, in the First Thirteen must sound like something of an oxymoron!”
“I thought you’d got around that, Mr Stanton?” Maud inquired timidly, lowering her eyes as she spoke.
“Yes, sort of. Abe and Kate don’t want to earn a penny from the book or any future sale of the movie rights to their story. They’ve engaged me to write the book on the proviso that the royalties due to them should be paid directly to the Royal Navy (New England) Benevolent Fund, a Canadian Trust managed by the Elders of the Iroquois Nation which teaches native children to speak and write the English language, and the Empire Day Society which alleviates the hardship of people injured in or otherwise economically disadvantaged by the events of 1976. The same deal will apply to the sale of the film rights. I’m travelling to Paris in a week or so to see the colour of the movie men’s money.”
“Albert gets to keep fifty percent of the royalties,” Leonora explained, not entirely helpfully.
The man was urbane about it.
He removed his spectacles – steel-rimmed today – and began to wipe the left lens with a small white cloth retrieved from an inside pocket.
“For the book royalties, yes. For that I initially agreed a fifty-fifty split with Abe and Kate. The movie rights will be split thirty-three percent to sixty-seven percent in Abe and Kate’s favour. Actually, I plan to donate half of my share of both deals to the Empire Day Society. The Admiralty Dockyards have been good at supporting their own people but the EDS does a really good job looking after all the other people who got caught up in the mayhem out in the Upper Bay that day.”
“That’s incredibly generous of you,” Maud gushed.
“
Actually, to be frank, I feel like a complete fraud making any money at all out of the Empire Day business,” the man frowned in self-deprecation. “Honestly, it’s not as if I’m short of a few pennies to rub together these days. Perhaps, Abe and Kate have got it right…”
He looked to Maud with no little concern.
Leonora thought her friend was about to swoon.
“Quickly, Albert,” she suggested, struggling hard to keep a straight face. “Quickly, take Maud’s arm and get a couple of stiff drinks down her neck before she faints!”
Stanton hesitated.
“Now! Can’t you see she’s absolutely besotted with you, man?”
“Leonora!” Maud complained, suddenly sobering.
Albert Stanton’s response was measured.
“Oh,” he murmured thoughtfully. “Is that so, Miss Daventry-Jones?”
Leonora rolled her eyes, suspecting Maud really would swoon now.
However, in the event her friend surprised her.
She blinked up – Maud was little more than five feet tall – at the Manhattan Globe’s star reporter with quietly determined eyes.
“Yes, Mr Stanton,” she admitted defiantly. “That would be pretty much the size of it.”
The man considered this, albeit not for very long.
“Well,” he sighed, “that’s a very good thing to know. Perhaps, in that case we ought to find somewhere a tad quieter where we can sit and discuss matters further?”
Chapter 6
Monday 13th March
HMS Achilles, Chesapeake Bay
On board a Royal Navy ship when a man errs it is not initially the Captain who takes him to task it is usually the Executive Officer, or on really big vessels like battleships, battlecruisers or the new fleet carriers, the ‘First Lieutenant’, usually a senior lieutenant or a lieutenant-commander, who is specifically responsible for crew discipline and the efficient running of the ship.
Commander Peter Cowdrey-Singh, the Achilles’s Executive Officer had wasted no time summoning Abe and his co-offender, Ted Forest to his cabin. He had ripped into them the moment the cabin door shut behind them.