On Green Dolphin Street (45 page)

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?”

She calculated rapidly. It would mean she would have to squeeze her Washington appointments into one day, but perhaps she could come back afterward.

“It’s a little crazy here,” said Frank. “Then I may have to go to D.C.”

“I don’t want to be in New York if you’re coming here.”

Frank sounded tense. “I know. We just have to keep in touch. I’ll do everything I can.”

“I’ve come all this way to see you.” This was no time, she thought, for flirtation.

“I know.”

“I’ve got to see you, Frank.”

“Christ, sweetheart, I know. You can just come here, if you like. And then, I don’t know. Look, I’ll call tomorrow morning at ten. You be there.”

“I will.” She paused for a moment, then thought no better of it. “I love you,” she said.

She slept badly, waking at London hours, but had fallen asleep again by the time Frank called.

“I’ll meet you at one at O’Reilly’s saloon, Wednesday,” he said.

“What happens if you can’t make it? You need somewhere to leave a message. I’ll take a room in my old hotel. Then at least you’ll know where I am.”

“Okay. I gotta run now.”

With the appointment made, Mary relaxed a little. She prepared some
coffee downstairs and brought it back up to bed, where she began to work through the list of callers Dolores had left. Katy Renshaw offered to fix lunch the following day, Tuesday, for as many of the old group as she could. Next, she called a young man at the Embassy who had registered an interest in buying the Kaiser Manhattan and arranged for him to come and see it that evening. Benton said she could stop by the office anytime to go through Charlie’s things.

Mary went out onto the street. It was cold, and the forecast was discouraging; she needed to get any necessary driving over quickly before the streets became impassable. If there was freezing rain, as the met men predicted, the only way to get up a slope was to grind the edge of the wheel against the sidewalk for grip. The Kaiser Manhattan responded to some sentimental blandishments and a full choke; Mary moved the column shift into first and moved off cautiously. The Chinese couple opposite would be relieved, she thought, to be rid of the van der Lindens’ noisy parties. Number 1082 was unoccupied; the French journalist who had lived there had been sent home, according to Dolores: the reason that no one had ever heard of his magazine was that it was a front for unacceptable activities.

The new Embassy building was fully occupied and had a security system that kept Mary waiting in the glass-fronted lobby for ten minutes before Benton arrived to take her upstairs. In Charlie’s office the two women went through his papers and belongings, deciding what could be thrown away and what needed to be shipped back to London.

“Mr. Renshaw already went through most of the papers,” said Benton. “He took some away and put these aside for you to look at.”

“Yes, yes …” Mary could not concentrate, and she felt that Benton’s gaze was disapproving.

“How is Mr. van der Linden?”

“He’s much better, thank you. I think he was … overtired. Strained.”

“Sure.” Benton removed an empty vodka bottle from the desk drawer and dropped it into the trash. “Mr. Renshaw said to call when you came by.”

“Yes. I’d love to see him.”

A few minutes later, Edward Renshaw came into the room and took Mary in his arms. “Mary, I’m so sorry to hear about all your troubles. Is there anything more we can do to help you here? Are you seeing Katy tomorrow? What can I do?”

Mary was touched by his concern. “I don’t know, Eddie. Turn back the clock. Take us back to your cabin in the woods. We were happy there, weren’t we?”

Edward smiled. “How is the old bugger? Not too downhearted?”

“Not too bad. He told me to give you this. It’s part of a poem.”

“Yes, I remember now,” said Edward, glancing through it. “Keep in touch, Mary, won’t you? We’ll probably be back in London next year.”

When Edward left, and when she and Benton had finished their sorting, Mary took a package from her shopping bag and held it out.

“Charlie asked me to give you this. It’s just a little token. He didn’t have time to …” She found herself trailing off beneath Benton’s stern look, as though she had guessed that Charlie had made no such request and that the silk scarf she unwrapped was the best Mary could do at the airport.

“Thank you, Mrs. van der Linden. Please give your husband my best wishes for a speedy recovery. I had a great regard for him.”

“Thank you, I—”

“We all did here.”

“He’s certainly always—”

“We thought very highly of him as a man.”

“Thank you.” Mary looked down.

“Perhaps your husband might also care to know that I’m getting married in the fall.”

Outside, on Massachusetts Avenue, Mary had a powerful sense of her old life. It had all been so simple. Tomorrow, if everything had not gone wrong, she would be at one of Kelly Eberstadt’s mornings for the wives of the Asian embassies, where they laughed at the ambitions of their husbands, or at Katy Renshaw’s bake sale for the church, or Lauren’s book-reading group that was an excuse for a four-course lunch with Californian “champagne.” The next day she would go to the cinema way up on Connecticut, where she would sometimes slip off alone in the afternoon
to watch one of those French films that left her with a sense of the sweetness and density of life.