The Sons of Adam (49 page)

And then there was Rebecca, the miracle of Rebecca.

It was only now, after so many years, that Tom learned what a jewel he had accidentally come to possess. She was wise, she was kind, she had an astonishing inner strength and purpose, like her own in-built compass needle. In a strange way, Tom had never really thought her beautiful before now. When he saw her these days, he didn’t even see her imperfections: her slightly too bony face, the wrinkles that spread their net out from the corners of her eyes. He only saw his one true love, a woman with grace in every movement, a woman who mixed love and laughter with her more serious virtues.

And Tom became younger. As a young man, he’d been charming, even dazzling. He could spark laughter from a woman with a handful of words. His own smile had been enough to ignite one in response. But then, following war and prison and his long succession of American failures, he’d lost even his desire to please. That had returned. These days, he and Rebecca
laughed.
If there was one thing they remembered about that time, other than the infinitely absorbing detail of Mitchell’s boyhood, it was laughter. Tom grew his hair long again, plunging his head into the water butt on his return home each evening to rinse it of the day’s oil and mud. And that was when it started each evening. She’d push him under water. He’d respond by shaking his head at her like Pipsqueak drying off. They’d splash and play and laugh, and then the laughter didn’t really stop until they climbed into bed that evening. They made love often and their lovemaking was wonderful.

One more nugget of positive news: Rebecca’s parents had finally made their move, away from Vilnius and the dangers of life there, all the way to Leipzig in Germany. Her father had set up a pharmacy: smaller than his Vilnius business, but already doing nicely. Her mother, a dressmaker, was as busy in her new surroundings as she ever had been in her old ones. They were well settled, with friends and a synagogue that welcomed them. There were unpleasant undercurrents in their adopted country, of course. But there was unpleasantness everywhere. The point was that they had resettled. They were happy. They were safe.

But even in Paradise, people grumble, and Tom and Rebecca grumbled in theirs.

They were renting a cottage hard by Mrs Elwick’s farmhouse. If they made noise, it was disapproved of. If they horsed around with water in the garden, it was disapproved of. On Sundays they were expected to attend church morning and evening (no matter that Rebecca was as Jewish as Yom Kippur) and to sit through a very long and dull English-style roast dinner.

It was time to move, but they were short of cash.

‘You go and ask her to give you lessons in Christian deportment, while I’ll nip upstairs and snitch her jewels.’

‘They’re all paste. I bet they are.’

‘Paste!’
cried Tom in a high-pitched imitation of Mrs Elwick. ‘How dare you say any such thing, you ungrateful little flapper!’

They laughed. It had been a hot day, Mitch was in bed, Pipsqueak snoring at his feet, and the two adults were taking it in turns to bathe naked in the waterbutt behind their cottage. Tom had arranged some wooden palings to shelter them from prying eyes, but even so, they kept their voices low to avoid attracting attention. Rebecca bobbed her head below the surface, took a big mouthful of the cool green water and spat it out on Tom, who dunked her for her trouble.

When she rose again, she wore a more serious look.

‘How much do you think we need to buy a place of our own?’

‘Well now, that’s all be depending on what exactly you were looking for.’ Tom’s accent was now a deep Texan drawl, with every vowel split into at least three long-drawn-out parts. ‘We can offer you a wide selection of shacks, dives, dumps, hovels and holes. Only thing we don’t have in at present are sties and flophouses.’

‘Seriously.’

‘OK, seriously now, our dumps aren’t too good at the moment. And the termites have pretty much gotten to the last of our shacks.’

Another green jet of water came Tom’s way. ‘Hopeless, absolutely hopeless.’

‘Them damn termites.’

Rebecca rinsed her hair back from her forehead, rested her forearms on the side of the butt and her chin on her forearms. ‘Three thousand dollars for somewhere decent?’

‘Yeah. About three thousand. I want to get away from Mrs E, but I don’t want Mitch to grow up in squalor.’

‘And how much do we have at the moment?’

‘Why, hon –’ Tom was Texan again – ‘I’m a mill-ee-on-ay-er. I got you, haven’t I?’

‘And in dollars?’

One thousand one hundred and sixty-eight.’

Rebecca grimaced. Even with her income, which was the equal of his, it would be a long haul to independence.

‘Tomek?’ It was a trick she sometimes had of switching his name into the soft East European syllables of her birth.

‘Yes?’

‘We do in theory have a little more than that.’

‘Not in the bank we don’t.’

‘No, not in the bank.’

Tom looked at her enquiringly.

‘You have the most beautiful eyebrows,’ she said, tracing them with a wet finger. ‘The most gorgeous mouth. I’m a lucky girl.’

‘Lucky-ish.’

They kissed.

‘No, really … Look, do you think there’s any way on earth you could get money back from that creep Harrelson?’

‘Ah!’

Tom jerked his head up and back, and sucked his breath in. He had a mixture of feelings. One feeling was it was a good idea. Tom had stuffed Harrelson’s pocket with cash in exchange for worthless paper. It would be nice to see some return from that, and doubly nice if it meant giving his family a chance to start out in a place of their own. But then, on the other side, Harrelson’s stupid dry-hole wonder was all that remained of Tom’s fantasies and dreams. In theory, if Harrelson ever struck oil, Tom had a big slice of it. It was a stupid daydream, but Tom still clung to it when the ghosts of failure hung too heavy round his bed.

‘Ah, jeez!’

‘Would you be able to make him give you anything?’ asked Rebecca.

‘Well, not strictly speaking, there wasn’t any kind of refund scheme, of course …’ Tom trailed off. His stake in Titch Harrelson’s hopeless well was his only chance of making something of himself. Tom followed developments in the oil industry closely and he was familiar with every detail of Alanto’s success: oil production in Persia expanding all the time; exploration projects in Iraq; marketing networks in Europe and Asia. Tom felt sick at the thought of it. And all he had to boast of was his stupid ten per cent of a barren well. Perhaps the time had come to put his last feeble hope behind him. ‘… Of course, I’m sure I could get
some
money from the guy.’

‘You could?’

Tom sighed. He had a difficult admission to make. ‘He sold that well so many times over that pretty much everyone this side of the Mississippi owns a piece of it. I’d only have to threaten him with the courthouse and he’d give me something to buy me off. He’d have to.’

Rebecca listened in silence. It was
her
money and
her
life that Tom had wasted, as well as his own. She was entitled to be angry, but all she said was, ‘The money. Does he have it?’

‘Titch? Hell, no. Course not. But he can get it. That’s the way he works.’

‘How much did you give him?’

‘Give him? Nothing. I invested it, of course.’ Tom laughed uncomfortably. His pained feelings on the subject were still close to the surface, and this was his second confession within a minute. ‘In cash and in lieu of wages, I guess the old bastard took around four thousand dollars.’

‘Oh, Tom!’

Tom had always been vague about his earnings, and Rebecca had never quite guessed exactly how much cash had been frittered away over the years. She was shocked, but it no longer mattered now that she had her husband back.

Tom was sunk in thought. The water on Rebecca’s back had dried off, but her hair still fell back from her forehead in a smooth unbroken sheet just as it had done when she rose from the butt. Tom reached for a quid of tobacco and began to chew on it, a habit he tried to keep confined to the rig but without complete success. His dark-veined mahogany spit began to speckle the ground.

‘If you can’t do it, dearest, then you can’t. Whatever happens, I don’t want to start fighting again.’

‘No … no.’

Tom spat again, crushed the tobacco into a pellet between his teeth and laid it aside. He couldn’t get Alan and Alanto out of his thoughts. If Alan had failed in Persia, how much easier things would have been! He took a deep breath. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘If I can’t manage it on my account, then I’ll manage it for Mitchell and you.’

‘You’re sure? You could think it over.’

‘No. Next week’s not a bad one to take off. The rig’s been listing a tad and we’ve got to quit drilling for a week while the construction crew levels it out again.’

That was true, but it wasn’t the reason. Tom felt a burst of resolve that shoved away the ghosts. It was better to act now while he was in the grip of his decision than to wait and let it fester. Rebecca suddenly shivered violently in the water. She’d been in too long and the evening had grown cool. She stood up, beautifully naked, and climbed into an old piece of curtain they used as a towel.

‘I love you,’ she said.

‘Me too. I love you too.’

Her deep dark eyes roved over him as they so often had before. ‘You’re a brave man. It’s not an easy thing to do.’

The wind blew and she shivered again. She felt a sudden chill. They were happy here. Things were good. Was it craziness on her part, sending Tom back to the heart of his addiction? Right or wrong, she was playing with fire.

Alan sat at the foot of the bed. Lottie sat up against a mountain of pillows. Her white nightgown hung half open. It was 12 March 1930. Their third child, Polly, born four months earlier, had fallen asleep during feeding, her tiny mouth still closed over her mother’s nipple. Lottie softly drew the baby away and closed her gown. She smiled.

‘You’re not tired?’ asked Alan.

‘It’s three in the morning, my love. Of course I am.’

Alan caught hold of Lottie’s foot beneath the bedclothes and massaged it. His wife was the only woman he knew – or rather, the only rich woman – who took care of her newborns herself, going to the extraordinary lengths of breastfeeding them, even at night. Even now, on their third baby, Alan wasn’t sure if he admired Lottie for it, or would rather she stopped.

‘You must take care of yourself too,’ he said.

‘That’s precisely what I am doing.’

‘We could have someone just for the nights, if you wanted.’

‘Yes. If I wanted, I could.’

Alan shook his head and smiled. He’d be as likely to strike oil in Piccadilly as he was to change his wife’s mind. He didn’t know why he bothered.

‘You weren’t sleeping either,’ she commented.

‘I was sleeping lightly and heard you wake. That’s all.’

‘Are you still dreaming?’

He glanced at her sharply. It was the first time for some while she’d mentioned his nightly dreams.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Or rather no. Yes and no.’

‘How clear. I’m so pleased I asked.’

Alan laughed. ‘It’s odd. I was trying to explain it to Westerfeld earlier. The dreams themselves haven’t changed in the slightest. I dream every night. Always about Tom. Always about the war. Always about Tom sinking down in a storm of fire.’

‘Oh, darling!’

Lottie’s voice was full of concern, but Alan shook his head. ‘But you see the odd thing is this. The dreams
have
changed. I used to wake up in nightmare. Now I don’t. It’s not exactly that my feelings have changed, it’s more that they’ve completely disappeared. I feel as though I’m watching a news-reel whose basic truthfulness I don’t actually believe for a minute.’

Lottie stroked her baby’s tiny head. Little Polly was beginning to snore, puffing milky bubbles from the corner of her mouth.

‘What does Westerfeld say?’ she said, keeping her voice low and gentle for Polly’s sake.

‘He says my unconscious can’t accept that Tom has died. He wants me to … to contemplate the possibility that Tom is still alive.’