The collected stories (88 page)

'Please don't come in,' she said. 'I'm terribly tired.'

Well, she looked tired, so I didn't insist. I had the taxi drop me at Victoria and I walked the rest of the way home. It was pleasant, walking home late, thinking about her. And it did not seriously worry me that there was a part of her life that she kept separate from me, because when we were together we could not have been closer. I had never met anyone I liked better. It became a point of honor with me that I did not discuss her absent Fridays or that weekend. It was the only weekend she asked for - there were no others.

Enough time had passed, and we were both committed enough, for us to think of this as a love affair. Flora must love me, I thought, because she is inspiring my love. But so far, the Embassy knew nothing about it.

This was just as well. Not long after Flora's mysterious weekend,

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (II): THE LONDON EMBASSY

we were given a talk on the antinuclear lobby in Britain. The feeling was fiercely against our installing nuclear missiles in various British sites. Every party hated us for it - the Labour Party because it was anti-Soviet, the Liberals because it was dangerous, the Conservatives because it was an iniquitous form of national trespass. We knew it was unpopular. We had Rve men gathering information on it. They had the names of the leaders of the pressure groups; they had infiltrated some of these groups; they had membership lists. They filmed the marches and demonstrations and all the speeches, whether they were at Hyde Park or at distant American bases in the English countryside, where the more passionate protestors chained themselves to the gates.

One of the films concerned a group calling itself Women Opposed to Nuclear Technology. It was not an antiwar movement: they weren't pacifists; they did not advocate unilateral disarmament. Their aims struck me as admirable. They wanted Britain to be a 'nuclear-free zone': no missiles, no neutron bombs, no reactors. And they were positive in their approach, giving seminars - so the boys on the third floor said - on alternative technology.

This film showed them marching with signs, massing in Hyde Park, and demonstrating at an American base. The highlight of this weekend of protest was an all-night vigil, which won them a great deal of publicity. They didn't shout, they didn't make speeches. They simply stood with lighted candles and informative posters. It was a remarkable show of determination, and one of the women in the film was Flora Domingo-Duncan.

I sat in the darkness of the Embassy theater and listened to the deadpan narration of one of our intelligence men, and I watched him take his little baton and point in the general direction of the woman I loved.

'This sort of person is doing us an awful lot of harm,' he said.

I smiled, and loved her more.

Did she know she was on film?

'No,' she said, 'but I'm damned glad you told me. The others will be mad as anything. Why did you tell me?'

'It's every citizen's right to know,' I said. 'Freedom of information.'

She laughed. She said, 'Now you know about my Friday nights. But I thought that if I told you about it you'd have to keep it a secret.'

DANCING ON THE RADIO

'It wouldn't have mattered,' I said.

'Something else to think about. You're busy enough as it is.'

It never occurred to her that I might disapprove of her agitprop because I worked for the US Embassy. It was nothing personal. She had acted out of a sense of duty.

I said, 'If I say I admire you for this - acting on your beliefs -will you think I'm being patronizing?'

'You're very sweet,' she said. She wrinkled her nose and kissed me. 'Let's not talk about atom bombs.'

The matter was at an end. Everything she did made me love her more.

We went on loving, and then something happened to London. In the late spring heat, the city streets were unusually full of people - not tourists, but hot idle youths who stared at passersby and at cars. Battersea seemed ominously crowded. They kept near the fringes of the park and they lurked - it seemed the right word -near shops and on street corners. They carried radios. There was a tune I kept hearing - I could hum it long before I learned the words. 'Dancing on the Radio,' it was called.

We start the fire

We break the wall

We sniff the smoke

Which covers all the monsters

Look at us go

Dancing on the radio,

Hey, turn up the volume and watch!

Turn up the volume and watch!

And there was a chanting chorus that went, 'Make it, shake it, break it? It was a violent love song.

The youths on the streets reminded me of the sort of aimless mobs I had seen in Africa and Malaysia. These south London boys looked just as sour and destructive. They lingered, they grew in numbers, and their song played loudly around them.

Flora called them lost souls. She said you had to pity people who were unprotected.

'Then pity the poor slobs whose windows are going to be broken,' I said.

'I know. It's a mess.'

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

I said, 'All big cities have these little underdeveloped areas in them. They're not neighborhoods, they're nations.'

Flora said, 'They scare me - all these people waiting. They're not all waiting for the same thing, but they're all angry.'

Many were across the road from Overstrand Mansions. They sat at the edge of the park; sometimes they yelled at cars passing down Prince of Wales Drive, or they walked toward the shops behind the mansion blocks and paced back and forth. There was always that harsh music with them.

'If this was the States and I saw those people I'd be really worried,' Flora said. 'I'd say there was going to be terrible trouble. But this is England.'

'There's going to be trouble,' I said.

She looked at me.

'We're getting signals,' I said.

The boys on the third floor, the ones who had filmed Flora, were now showing us films of idle mobs.

Then the trouble came. It did not begin in London. It started from small skirmishes in Liverpool and Bristol, and it grew. It was fierce fighting, sometimes between mobs - blacks and whites fighting - sometimes against the police. The sedate BBC news showed English streets on fire. It did not have one cause; that was the disturbing part. But that also made it like the African riots I had seen. There was trouble in a town and all scores were settled -racial, financial, social, even family quarrels; and some of the violence was not anger, but high spirits, like dancing on the radio.

When it hit London there were two nights of rioting in Brixton, and then, spreading to Clapham, it touched my corner of Battersea. One Sunday morning I saw every window broken for a hundred yards of shopfronts on Queenstown Road. There had been looting. Then the shop windows were boarded up and it all looked uglier and worse.

I had been at Flora's that night. We heard the news on her bedside transistor, and on the way home I had seen the police standing helplessly, and seen the running boys and the odd surge of nighttime crowds.

I was then deeply in love with Flora. I had been looking for her, I knew. She said the same, and this well-educated woman quoted a Donne poem that began, 'Twice or thrice had I loved thee, / Before I knew thy face or name . . .' But in finding her I had discovered an

DANCING ON THE RADIO

aspect of my personality that was new to me - a kinder, dependent, appreciative side of me that Flora inspired. If I lost her it would vanish within me and be irretrievable, and I would be the worse for it.

She was different, but that did not surprise me. All women are different, not only in personality but in a physical sense. Each woman's body is different in contour, in weight, in odor, in the way she moves and responds. It is possible, I thought, that every sexual encounter in life is different and unique, because every woman was a different shape and size, and different in every other way. But what about men?

Flora said, Tve stopped wondering about that. "Men" is just an abstraction. I don't think about men and women. I just think about you and me.'

We were at my apartment one Saturday, sitting on my Chinese settee from Malacca. I wanted to tell her I loved her, that sex was part of it, but that there was something more powerful, something to do with a diminishing of the fear of death. It was an elemental desire to establish a society of two.

'Let's talk about love,' I said.

'Folie a deux,' she said. 'It's an extreme paranoid condition.'

There was an almighty crash. I ran to the balcony and saw that a gang of boys had stoned a police car and that it had hit a telephone pole. The police scrambled out of the smashed car and ran; the boys threw stones at the car and went up to it and kicked it. Then I saw other boys, busy ones, like workers in an air raid scurrying around in the darkness, bringing bottles, splashing the car. They set the car on fire.

I shouted. No one heard.

Flora said, 'It's terrible.'

'This is the way the world ends,' I said.

She hugged me, clutched me, but tenderly, like a daughter. She was afraid. The firelight on the windows of my apartment came from the burning car, but it looked more general, like the sprawling flames from a burning city. And later there were the sounds of police sirens, and shouts, and the fizz of breaking glass, and the pathetic sound of running feet slapping the pavement.

We sat in the darkness, Flora and I, and listened. It was war out there. It seemed to me then as if we had been transported into the distant past or future, where a convulsion was taking place. How

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

could this nightmare be the here and now, with us so unprepared? But we were lucky. We were safe and had each other. And, in each others' arms, we heard the deranged sounds of riot and, much worse, the laughter.

Past midnight, Flora said, Tm afraid.'

'Please stay the night,' I said.

'Yes. I'm so glad we're together. Maybe we have no right to be so safe. But nothing bad can happen to us if we're together.'

Her head lay against my chest. We had not made love, but we would sleep holding each other and we would keep death away.

She relaxed and laughed softly and said, 'You didn't really think that I'd leave you tonight. I'm not brave-'

'You're brave, you're beautiful,' I said, and I told her how every night that we spent together was special and how, when it came time to part, it hurt and made me feel lopsided. I told her how happy I was, and how many places in the world I had looked for her - in Africa and Asia - and had practically given up hope of ever finding her, though I had never doubted that she existed. All this time the windows were painted in fire, and I heard Flora's heart and felt her breathe in a little listening rhythm. Tonight was different, I said, because we could spend the whole night together - it was what I had wanted from the moment of meeting her. And what was so strange about liking her first of all for her hair and her green eyes? That's how I had recognized her! She had been funny and bright and had made me better, and this nightmare world did not seem so bad now that we were together, and -

'To make a long story short,' I said.

And then she laughed.

'Isn't it a bit late for that?' she said.

Memo

When I took up my post at the London Embassy I entered into a tacit agreement to share all the information to which I became privy that directly or indirectly had a bearing on the security of the United States of America or on my own status, regardless of my personal feelings.

I feel it is my duty therefore to report on an American national new resident in Britain.

The Subject is a thirty-two-year-old female Caucasian; slight build, blond hair, green eyes, no visible marks or scars. She is single. She has no criminal record, although our files show that she was arrested once on a charge of Obstruction; the charge was later dropped. She was born in Windsor, New Jersey, of mixed Scottish-Mexican ancestry. Education: Wellesley College and Oxford University, England. She is presently on a one-year sabbatical from Bryn Mawr College, where she is a member of the Department of English, specializing in Women in Literature.

As an undergraduate at Wellesley, the Subject was a founder-member of several feminist groups, and at Bryn Mawr she has continued to support feminist organizations by acting as faculty adviser. She was arrested in 1980 at a sit-in protesting against the nonadoption of the Equal Rights Amendment; as stated above, the charge against her was dropped. More recently, she led a demonstration at a nuclear power station in central Pennsylvania.

The Subject entered the United Kingdom on a student visa in January 1981 and became caretaker-tenant of an apartment in Stamford Brook, West London. Her stated reason for being in London was to complete her research for a biography of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818), and Lodore (1835), as well as Valperga, or the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823). This research did not fully occupy the Subject, and soon after her arrival, together with some British nationals, the Subject founded a group calling itself Women Opposed to Nuclear Technology.

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

The US Embassy Fact-Finding Task Force on Security here in London has a substantial file on this (legally registered) organization, as well as tapes and films of its activities, and a membership list on which the Subject's name appears as Chairperson of the Agitprop Committee. The Subject attends the weekly Friday meeting of this committee.

What the Fact-Finding Task Force on Security is evidently not aware of is that the Subject has twice been entertained as a guest of Ambassador L. Burrell Noyes at Winfield House. Ambassador Noyes and the Subject's father are graduates of Franklin and Marshall College, Class of '43.

It was at Winfield House earlier this year that I became acquainted with the Subject, though it was some weeks before I learned of her activities in the areas of feminism and antinuclear protest. She struck me as tough-minded, independent, and somewhat combative intellectually. She is extremely personable. She is also lovely. In a short time in England she has managed to make friends with British people - most of them women, most of them opinion-formers - representing a wide spectrum of political thought.

The Home Office has refused to extend the Subject's visa, claiming that her student status is no longer applicable, as she has completed her work on Mary Shelley. Personally, I think the Home Office is somewhat antagonized by the Subject's political activities, but there has been no direct comment on this by the Home Office.

The foregoing may be necessary to you because of the sensitive nature of my job, and my involvement with the Subject. But none of it is really of much importance, and the only fact worth recording is that roughly two months ago I fell in love with the Subject. Yesterday, having consulted no one - why should we? - we met at the Chelsea Registry Office, where my part of the dialogue went as follows:

Registrar: 'Do you, Spencer Monroe Savage, promise to take Flora Christine Domingo-Duncan as your lawfully wedded wife,' etc.

And I said, l I do.'

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