On Green Dolphin Street (8 page)

It was a rare evening, with no social activity. To please Mary, Charlie put on the record of
South Pacific
in the living room and left the door open so that it could be heard in the kitchen, where he returned and sat with his legs up on the table, drinking scotch, while Mary cooked the dinner.

She was wearing white slacks and a loose pink cardigan; she looked girlish for a woman of forty, and the tidiness of her figure, which had not swelled or slackened after the birth of the children, emphasized this youthfulness. He went over and put his arms round her as she stood by the cooker, enfolding her in his tight embrace.

“You’re as corny as Kansas in August, aren’t you?” he quoted from the song. He kissed her neck beneath the waves of dark hair and ran his hands up to her breasts. She wriggled in his arms, pretending to be impatient.

“Pity I haven’t found me a wonderful guy.”

“I can see a gray hair,” he said. “Is that your first?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Pour me a drink.”

Back in his seat at the table, Charlie said, “I had a talk with Duncan Trench today.”

“Lucky you. What did he say?”

Charlie looked up again at his wife’s back. His affairs had reached a state of such emergency that he was no longer able to confide wholly in Mary. Yet the urge to tell was great, and he thought he might relieve it by revealing a controlled amount, a sample.

“I’ve had some difficulties and he thought he might be able to help.”

“But he’s not in your department, is he?”

“Well, yes and no. He’s in Chancery. It was all a bit vague.”

Charlie had, over the years, become adept at being not quite truthful with Mary. In the beginning it had mostly had to do with other women. The strategy of strongly denying any feeling for any woman to whom he was attracted was a failure; Mary could tell in an instant that he was lying. They had developed instead a process of bluff and double-bluff by which he was able to confess to degrees of mild personal interest, superficial carnal excitement and occasionally to a grand passion, though the people for whom these feelings were professed were never the ones for whom they were felt.

It had worked well, and Charlie superstitiously provoked Mary into reciprocal confessions, though her fascination with the TV repairman and proclaimed passion for the delivery boy were never convincing. Charlie felt it was enough to keep canvassing the idea and that this would act as a lightning conductor in the event of her actually meeting someone: there would be a way of talking about it, exaggerating and making fun of it. The truth was, in his view, that Mary was constitutionally faithful and that her emotional life was too heavily identified with his and their children’s welfare for anything else to be conceivable; even to kiss another man would be like an act of cruelty to Richard and Louisa.

Mary put down a casserole of chicken à la king on the table. “It’s nothing sinister, is it?” she said. “I mean, you’re not doing anything … unusual.”

“No, no. People like me aren’t allowed to,” said Charlie, pouring another scotch. “Anyway. What about you?”

“I had lunch with Frank in this restaurant Lauren recommended.”

“Oh yes. What was it like?”

“Very Lauren. Regular. Neat. Quite nice.”

She said “quite nice” in a way that Louisa had first used at the age of two; it had a world-weary, tolerant singsong that had greatly amused Charlie. He had a keen memory for the linguistic oddities and failures of the children, some of which he had sardonically adopted as his own standard usage.

“What did you talk about?”

“You, mostly,” said Mary.

“You must have been desperate. Did you drink wine?”

“No, I just had water.”

“And I suppose he had chili con carne with milky coffee, did he?” Charlie shuddered.

“No. He had a drink. I forget what. Beer, I think.”

Charlie began to talk about American drinking habits, which still intrigued him. The telephone rang twice before the end of dinner: the first time was Frank Renzo to say he was free after all if the invitation to go sailing was still good; the second was Katy Renshaw, who said they planned to spend Saturday night in their country cabin after sailing, so would the van der Lindens please bring warm clothes, overnight things and records.

“And a New York journalist, if you don’t mind,” said Charlie.

“That’s fine,” said Katy. “Is he the one I met at your party? My sister’s coming down from Boston.”

They left early on Saturday morning in the Renshaws’ station wagon, Edward driving, with Katy and her sister, whose name was Sal, on the bench seat beside him, and the others in the back. The rear was piled with boxes of provisions, candles, gas lamps in case of electrical failure and extra blankets. There was only light traffic in town as they drove east and picked up Route 50. Washington seemed unmanned by the weekend; the closure of its government buildings, institutions and attorneys’ offices robbed the city of its raison d’être; the empty streets seemed sheepish and unreal.

Their early start meant that it was still not yet nine when they arrived at the Bay Bridge toll booth. From the shallow water in front of them the bridge rose up on its graduated stilts, like a gentle ramp at first, until it reached its main span across the bay to Kent Island. High above, the blue sky was broken up with white vapor trails from light aircraft going to the small landing fields on the island or the larger one at Easton on the shores of Maryland.

“Anyone got forty cents?” said Edward.

For once Mary was able to produce the right money from her purse; she found American coins hard to handle, those dimes, nickels and pennies: Charlie’s solution was to throw anything less than a quarter into the children’s money boxes.

Edward ground the column shift into first and they moved off across the bridge. The homemade appearance of its engineering reminded Mary of Richard’s short and emotional encounter with Meccano; she tried not to look down at the surface of the roadway, the trembling rivets or the drop into the water as the car was swept along at a speed determined by the hastening vehicles around them. Edward turned on the radio, Charlie wound down the window and Mary lay back against the seat, gazing up through the windshield at the huge open skies above the bay, ripped and flagged with puffs of white vapor.

Half an hour later, they were afloat. The sailing boat at once caught the spring breeze, its mainsail bagging out greedily on the wind, as the bow carved a bubbling gash through the dark waters of the bay. The women, in head scarves and sunglasses, sat along one side of the boat; the men, according to Edward’s barked instructions from the tiller, switched sides beneath the swinging boom to keep them on an even keel. Charlie, who had sailed before, pulled on ropes, or sheets as he knowingly called them, stiffening or slacking the spinnaker as the plaited cord ran through its screeching metal pulleys. No one on the boat could have said how seriously he took himself at his work, except Mary, who knew that his view of all human activity was satirical. His hair was whipped back and forth across his face, revealing patches of bare scalp from where it had forever retreated. Mary looked at him fondly; she laughed, with Katy and Sal, at
his inappropriate flannel pants and nautical oaths. Frank passed round cigarettes as he ducked beneath the boom; once back in his seat, he held firmly to the rail with an expression of mild suffering.

“Better than Lake Michigan, Frank?” said Mary.

“Sure,” he said, and nodded at the view. “Beats looking at Evanston.”

The shores of the bay were wooded on all sides; around the water, from vegetation protected and unchecked, there were wild birds calling; it was hard to believe that the world’s future was decided just the other side of the dense woods, in a clearing in the jungle.

“Do you know these lines, Eddie?” called out Charlie from the bow. “ ‘The world diminished to a surge of wind, / Flung clouds break up within my heart / The fitful joy of breathing.’ ”

“Sure,” said Edward. “It goes on … wait a minute. Yup. ‘Land listening for the hull’s return / Expands beneath the hammered blue / And something, something … ascends into the dancing air.’ ”

“Something like that. Who’s it by?”

“Search me.”

At lunchtime, they landed at a mooring Edward knew, where the man who ran it, whose name was Kenny, had a floating bar. They clambered onto the end of the landing stage, the boat rocking with their transferred weight. They walked down between the rows of gently rocking boats, the sloops, schooners and skiffs, the motor launches with their covered cabins and the chrome skipper’s wheels glistening beneath self-important awnings. There was something about boats and boat people that always made Mary want to laugh, though this was a tendency she had to check in front of those kind enough to take them out—not that Edward Renshaw seemed to take the matter very seriously, but Katy, his pretty Bostonian wife, was a person of some dignity.

On the door of Kenny’s floating bar was a notice that said “Berth Here,” but when Charlie, who was first up, went shakily across the suspended wooden walkway and tried the door he found it locked. On the other side of the boatyard was a man in overalls, whom Charlie followed into a small tackle store.

“Is the bar open for lunch?” he said.

“Sure. But Kenny’s not here right now.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“About four, I guess.”

“I see.”

Charlie walked back across the yard, past a gasoline pump and an area of loose stones covered with rusting marine detritus, to join the others.

“Lunch is at four.”

“I have some sodas,” said Katy. “It doesn’t matter.”

“But what the hell are we going to drink?” said Edward.

Charlie said, “I took a certain precaution.” From Mary’s wicker basket he extracted a two-pint thermos he had filled with dry martinis.

“I guess I did, too,” said Frank, and pulled out a hip flask.

They sat at the end of the landing stage, with their feet dangling over the water. Charlie lodged a ham sandwich between his teeth as he used both hands to unwrap the glasses; when he had poured four measures of martini, he broke the sandwich into small bits and threw them to the gulls.

“Sal’s brought some chocolate cake,” said Katy, who, with Sal, had preferred Coca-Cola. “She’s just the best cook.”

“I thought Katy was the dessert queen,” said Charlie.

“Oh, no. Just you wait,” said Katy.

“Hey, quit fooling around,” said Sal. She was taller and thinner than her elder sister; where Katy’s sleek prettiness was in her shiny chestnut hair and upturned nose, Sal was thin, with hunched shoulders and pale eyes. Mary thought Sal was beautiful, but Charlie always laughed at Mary’s idea of what was attractive in women; usually it was nothing more than the opposite of herself. Mary anticipated a whispered discussion in the cabin that night in which Charlie would explode with derisive laughter.

Katy handed round some cold chicken, then some apples; when they had finished and congratulated Sal on her cake, it was warm enough for them to spread out on the boards and close their eyes. Mary leaned against Charlie, who was having another drink, and angled herself into
the sun. She withdrew, behind her sunglasses and her closed eyes, into a cocoon from which she could hear Frank’s voice, low in conversation with Sal. She could pick out occasional phrases: Boston … Kennedy … Michigan primary. Frank seemed to be interviewing Sal as he had previously interviewed her in the restaurant, and Sal seemed to be responding happily: Mary could hear her occasionally shrill laugh and caught the scent of one of Frank’s cigarettes.

“Wind’s getting up,” said Edward.

“Oh dear,” said Sal, “does that mean we can’t sail anymore?”

“On the contrary,” said Edward. “The conditions are ideal.”

“Oh God,” said Charlie, as they piled their rugs and baskets back into the stern.

When they made their way out into the bay, a red-painted boat began tacking toward them: on the bow was a woman with binoculars held up to her face, waving her arm. As the boat came closer to them, Charlie said, “Isn’t it that bore from the French Embassy?”

A man with a blue yachting cap and shining new oilskins called out to them in French-accented English. Edward shouted back some sailing pleasantries and began to tack the other way, but the Frenchman was challenging them to a race.

“Around the island and back to the point!” he yelled, indicating a small, tree-covered hillock in the bay, about half a mile north.

“Do we have to, Eddie?” said Katy anxiously.

“It really doesn’t make any difference,” said Edward. “It’s not like a car. I can’t make the thing go any faster, it’s entirely up to the wind.”

“Won’t we end up in the wrong place, though?” said Mary.

“It’s all right. It’s only an hour or so from here back to the car.”

“Think of the honor of England,” said Frank.

“Quite right,” said Charlie, who had been nodding off in the stern.

“Hey, I need you, Charlie. Get up there,” said Edward. He looked at Frank. “And you. Give that rope a yank, or do I mean the other way round? You’re the crew.”

The two boats carved their separate courses, crossing and recrossing
like folded parallelograms, scrawling their joined lines as straight as the contrary wind would let them. Mary huddled down inside her jacket and rubbed her hands. From time to time she and the other women were required to lean out over the edge of the boat; then, as the boom swung across, they would scurry back beneath it, sometimes encountering Frank or Charlie coming back the other way on their urgent crewing business.

Edward kept a strong arm on the tiller, his eyes good-naturedly moving across the horizon, making sure the boats did not come too close. As they neared the island, it was clear that the French boat was ahead.

“Listen, skipper,” said Charlie, “I don’t want to start a mutiny, but shouldn’t you be splicing the mainbrace or something?”

“Put the bastard ashore,” said Frank.

“Hear, hear,” said Katy.

“Poor Eddie, he’s doing his best,” said Sal.

The wind was picking up further as they rounded the island and headed back toward the point, and it was beginning to rain in small, stinging drops that whipped into their faces.