Night Train to Lisbon (21 page)

Carson turned the page.

“Carson!” Her uncle's booming voice made her jump. She slammed the book shut with a bang
like a gunshot and looked up and saw him standing in the doorway to the bedroom suite. “I can't believe this,” he fairly shouted, and he quickly advanced on her, holding out one hand for the offending object.

“‘If only we could tell her who she really is,'” Carson recited from memory.

This was sufficient to stop her uncle in his tracks.

“What?” he said.

“So, who am I, really?” she said.

“I'm sure I—I mean, I—I should—”

But he was spared further stammering by the appearance in the doorway behind him of first Jane and then Philippa. “What's all this yelling and banging about?” Jane said, but then she saw the book in Carson's hands.

“‘If only we could tell her who she really is,'” Carson repeated evenly, holding the journal out in front of her, pointing it at her uncle. “So
who am I?
”

Lawrence turned helplessly to his wife. Jane in turn shook her head, equally helplessly, then turned beseechingly to her sister. Philippa in turn looked at Jane, looked at Lawrence, took a deep breath, and then walked past both of them. When she reached Carson, she held out both her hands. Carson tucked the journal tight against herself at first, thinking it was what Philippa wanted. But then she realized that Philippa wanted
her.
So, slowly, she set the book on the desk and reached back. She took Philippa's hands and looked her in
the eye. And then she waited for what she already knew was coming.

“Jane and Lawrence are your parents,” Philippa said.

“Philippa!” Jane cried.

“It's true,” Philippa said calmly. “It's no use keeping it a secret anymore. I think Carson is ready for the truth, as confusing and difficult and even, I'm afraid, as painful as it may be. I wouldn't have dared to believe she was ready until I saw it for myself this morning. The two of you—Carson, Jane—the two of you had
discovered
each other this summer. You had more to say to each other now than either of you had to say to me. I wouldn't have pursued this matter on my own, mind you. I wouldn't have chosen to make this particular truth known. But now that this moment is here, this
truth
is here, I think you're ready for it, don't you, dear?”

Carson nodded weakly. She didn't know if she believed what Philippa was saying, that she could handle this particular revelation. But it did make sense, in a way. The tension between the sisters. The long-standing distrust of Lawrence. Everything, in fact, that had to do with the aunt and uncle whom Carson had grown up knowing only as distant figures across the Atlantic. But now she
was
grown up, and it was just as her mother said: Given half a chance, Jane had become Carson's confidante.

“Carson,” Jane was saying, “please, please forgive me. Forgive us,” and she reached out for
Lawrence's hand and pulled her husband close. Lawrence, for his part, said, “Carson, you must believe us, we did try to do what was best—” but Carson cut him off.

“There's nothing to forgive. I understand. Or I think I do, anyway. You weren't married at the time, Jane, but your sister was.”

“And your father—my husband—and I couldn't have children, as it turned out,” said Philippa. “That was quite a blow.”

“So it was all rather convenient,” said Carson.

“Perhaps too much so,” said Jane.

But Carson was shaking her head. “No, I won't hear of it, Jane. You wanted more out of life than a child and a safe haven in Connecticut. You wanted to
live.
”

“Yes,” said Jane softly.

“But,” Carson said to her mother, “you wanted to live, too. And for you, to live—to really and truly live—was to raise a child.”

Her mother nodded.

“What's going on here?” It was Alec, poking his head in the room. “Everyone's going home out there. Making apologies. Tom and Michael have to catch the last train to Cambridge, and Mrs. Bertram's tired—”

But then he sensed the mood of the room and stopped himself.

“Say,” he said, “what
is
going on here?”

“Just the end of a story that we'll tell our children, and our grandchildren, and maybe, if we're lucky, they'll tell
their
children and grandchil
dren,” said Carson. “And do you know what the best part is?”

Alec shook his head no. Carson turned to Jane and Lawrence.

“Do you?” Carson said. “Know what the best part is?”

They shook their heads, too.

“
You
do,” Carson said to Philippa. “I
know
you do.”

She smiled at Carson. Then Philippa said, “And they lived happily ever after.”

C
arson Weatherell lived long enough to be able to cross the Atlantic in less than six hours. It was a trip, in fact, that she eventually needed to make with some frequency, if she wanted to see her grandchild and great-grandchildren.

During the summer after the one they spent in Portugal, she and Alec were married in the Old Bailey, and the following spring Carson gave birth to a boy, whom they named Philip, after Philippa. The following years were difficult ones to be living in London, and there were times Carson seriously questioned the wisdom of staying in England rather than removing herself and her son to Connecticut for the duration. But that, she always sensed, would have somehow felt like a betrayal. Not that she put herself or her son in
harm's way; her contribution to the war effort was to manage one of the offices that helped find temporary homes for British children in the countryside, where they would be safe from the bombing that tore across England. Still, here in England was where the fight was—here was where the truth was, the heart of the matter that she'd first encountered during that summer in Sintra—and she could no sooner run from it than she could have stopped herself from taking a train to Cambridge on the off chance that one of Alec's friends knew something about a book and a ring. In fact, it often seemed to Carson that the lesson of survival she had absorbed in the summer of 1936—of setting one foot in front of the other without knowing what her ultimate destination might be, but trusting herself to reach it nonetheless—was the same lesson everyone around her suddenly seemed to need to learn quickly, once the sirens began wailing over the blacked-out city streets and the bombs began raining on row houses and palaces alike, and a kind of madness descended on London like a black fog that wouldn't lift.

For his part, Alec was recruited by Lawrence to join Naval Intelligence, where he did in fact use his skills at telegraphy and cryptography to become part of one of the most respected teams of code breakers in Britain. That team, thanks to Alec's own recruitment efforts, also included Thomas Brandon and Michael Morling.

And what of Freddy Hunt? Indeed: What
of
Freddy Hunt? It was a question that always re-
mained with Carson. When Freddy disappeared that October day in 1936 down a twisting street in Cambridge, it was as if he'd vanished from the face of the earth. But he hadn't, Carson always suspected. Of course, it was possible that he'd hopped a ship, slipped overboard during typically turbulent weather in the North Sea, and drowned. Or that once British authorities had learned his secret identity, his German contacts came to regard Freddy as “expendable,” and expended him down a London sewer. But it was, Carson felt, far more likely that Freddy had made his way safely to Germany and did what he'd bragged he would: contributed his knowledge of radio communication and physics to the Nazi cause. Then, she imagined, he lived anonymously in defeat, bitterly but unrepentantly, to an old age. Lived on and on and on, just as Carson and Alec lived on and on and on.

When the war was over, Carson and Alec reunited in London; Mrs. Bertram had died in her sleep of a heart attack during the Blitz, and had left her house to them. The place had been damaged by a firebomb, but in time Alec and Carson managed to make it their own. Alec resumed teaching, now at University College, London, where Carson enrolled as a student, studying Romance languages and literature, with an emphasis on Portuguese poetry. She wrote her thesis on the tradition of
fado,
and later the thesis was published as a book.

Like most children, Philip grew up to believe
he had two sets of grandparents, though both of his happened to be on his mother's side. When Carson and Alec eventually explained to him, on his sixteenth birthday, the somewhat unusual circumstances concerning his mother's family background, his response was, not untypically for a teenager in 1954, “Cool.” Philip had inherited not so much his parents' academic leanings as their political sympathies. Having grown up hearing stories of his father's mistaken arrest before the war, he had decided he wanted to be a barrister, and he eventually became Queen's Counsel, representing the Crown in important cases.

The story of Alec's arrest, in fact, did pass down from generation to generation, just as Carson had said she hoped it might on the night of Alec's party at Claridge's. Philip and his wife, Susan, a painter, passed it on to their three children, and Carson always suspected that the decision of their eldest, Veronica, to enroll in the graduate program in political science at Columbia University was motivated at least in part by having grown up hearing stories of political intrigue in prewar Britain. Carson got to meet the twin girls that Veronica had with her husband, a Columbia economist, but they were too young to hear the story from Carson herself. Carson hoped Veronica would pass along the family legend, and even asked her if she would, but the fact was, as Carson shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic at the turn of the twenty-first century, she had to wonder just what young girls today would make
of such a tale from an era that even to Carson was beginning to feel like ancient history.

It was on one such flight that Carson Breve died in the spring of 2004. Alec had passed away the previous winter, during flu season, and though no one expected Carson to make the trip across the ocean so soon, she said she wanted very much to go. As Carson often did on these flights, she had been looking out the window at the ocean far below and thinking of the waves she'd observed day after day after day during her several crossings in the summer and autumn of 1936. Six days, this trip used to take; now, six hours. The world of 2004 that the eighty-six-year-old Carson Breve navigated effortlessly would have been more than unwieldly to the innocent, eighteen-year-old maiden voyager Carson Weatherell. It would have been utterly unrecognizable. Yet as much as the world had changed, Carson always felt that in some fundamental respects it was still the same—not just the same as it was in 1936, but the same as it always was. And all she needed to do to know she was right was to ask herself this question: What of Freddy Hunt?

Where
was
he?

He was, Carson told herself, everywhere. Slightly stooped now with age, his suit somewhat ill-fitting after all these decades, but still there: he might be that man coming at you as you cross Fifth Avenue on a beautiful spring morning in Manhattan. Or he might be whistling a nondescript tune as he shops a couple of aisles over
at the hardware store in your town. Or he might be sitting in the seat next to you on a plane. It had long ago stopped mattering to Carson whether Freddy Hunt himself had actually survived. What mattered was that the spirit of Freddy Hunt lived.

But—and this was the important part to Carson—so did something else: a thought that made the thought of all the Freddy Hunts in the world somehow manageable. It was what Carson always remembered when this happened—whenever she looked out a window of a plane and saw the ocean far below and felt herself transported to a distant, sinister decade. It was what Carson remembered now, on this plane, when she felt a vague thrumming under her rib cage; what she remembered as she reached for her wrist, pushed aside a bracelet with blue beads, and felt her fluttering pulse; what also survived: the memory of a young woman with her life ahead of her, in the arms of a man with his life ahead of him, the two of them falling in love with each other, now and forever, on a night train to Lisbon.