Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Sebastian Faulks
Dedication
Title Page
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Where My Heart Used to Beat
Copyright
America, 1959. With two young children she adores, loving parents back in London, and an admired husband, Charlie, working at the British embassy in Washington, the world seems an effervescent place of parties, jazz and family happiness to Mary van der Linden. But the Eisenhower years are ending, and 1960 brings the presidential battle between two ambitious senators: John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. But when Frank, an American newspaper reporter, enters their lives Mary embarks on a passionate affair, all the while knowing that in the end she must confront an impossible decision.
Sebastian Faulks has written seven novels, including Birdsong (1993). He is also the author of a biographical study, The Fatal Englishman (1996).
He lives in London, is married and has two sons and a daughter.
ALSO BY SEBASTIAN FAULKS
The Girl at the Lion d’Or
A Fool’s Alphabet
Birdsong
The Fatal Englishman
Charlotte Gray
Human Traces
Engleby
To Richard and Elizabeth Dalkeith
THE VAN DER LINDENS’ house was distinguished from the others on the street by the creeper that covered half the front, running up to the children’s rooms beneath the eaves, where at night the glow from the sidewalk lamp gave to Number 1064 the depth and shadow of a country settlement, somewhere far away from this tidy urban street. Among the row of new Cadillacs, their tail-fins glinting like a rumour of sharks, Charlie van der Linden’s two-tone 1953 Kaiser Manhattan, maroon with cream roof and a dented rear fender, struck a doubtful, out-of-town note.
The house dominated its plot, the architect having sacrificed half the backyard to the status two extra rooms would bring a man. The lawn that remained was part paved, with a brick barbecue and a basketball hoop left by a previous tenant; at the end of the grass was a child’s metal swing which Charlie had assembled after a summer cook-out, to the amusement of his children, who had left it to rust unused. Where its neighbours sank their near-identical roots into the earth, this house gave off an air of transience; and when at night the bedroom lights went off along the street, like candles on an old man’s cake, the lamps in the van der Lindens’ house would often start to blaze again as a party spilled into another room. The guests’ cars were parked along the street as far as Number 1082, home to the Washington correspondent of a French magazine that no one had ever seen.
In their rooms, Louisa and Richard stirred occasionally in their sleep as a shriek of mirth came up the stairs or the gesture of some exuberant raconteur sent a glass shattering on the tiled floor of the hall. If the party wore on too long, Mary would go upstairs to check on them, leaning across their beds, fussing over the blankets and tucking them in; sometimes in the morning the children had a memory of her scent, lipstick, gin, and words of love pressed into their ears and sealed with the touch of her fingers.
That December evening, the van der Lindens were having a party. It was to be their last of the decade and it marked the anniversary of their wedding eleven years earlier in London. It was a change for them to have a private pretext; it was a relief not to have to feign interest in a visiting dignitary, a national day or a harassed politician who was passing through Washington in a daze, uttering solemn pleasantries. The guests were a favoured variation of the regular diplomats and journalists; there were one or two neighbours, either the most genial or the ones who would otherwise complain; there was also Weissman, Charlie’s doctor, and his Haitian bride.
‘To Scottish national day,’ said Charlie, flushed and off-duty as he unscrewed a bottle of scotch and poured three fingers of it over ice for Edward Renshaw, his closest ally at the British Embassy. ‘Tell me, how’s your economy doing these days?’
‘It’s a wreck. Chin-chin.’
Mary van der Linden stood in the sitting room, her dark hair alive in the electric glow of the table lamp behind her. Her doting brown eyes returned to Charlie. Here was the fountain of her happiness, her repeated glances seemed to suggest: erratic, flawed, but, in his way, dependable. Mary’s smile was not a thing anyone could predict; she was not the diplomatic wife in all circumstances. To begin with, she was too shy and found each function a trial of her resolve, but she seemed to have a resource of contentment that was stable, beyond the irritation of the day, and when her smile came from that depth, her face was lit with such serenity that people stopped for a moment to watch.
In the kitchen, Dolores, the resident Puerto Rican maid provided by the Embassy, was cutting Wisconsin cheddar into cubes, then impaling them, with olives, on to plastic cocktail sticks. With these and dishes of pretzels, nuts and clam dip with Salteen crackers, she loaded another tray and squeezed her way through the hall.
Charlie put a bossa nova record on the phonograph, took a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and inhaled the smoke as he gazed upon his party. His face, though flushed by broken capillaries and patchily shaved beneath the chin, retained some youthful beauty; his rumpled hair and sagging tie gave him a schoolboy look that the creeping fleshiness about his jaw had not quite dispelled. He saw Mary, now in the doorway to the hall, and smiled at her. It was a complicit smile which acknowledged the joint effort that their days consisted of – the compromises of the guest list, their shared jokes and fears about this man’s wife and that man’s drinking; the daily division of irksome duties, the labour of managing children and the pleasure of having despatched them, just in time, to bed. Charlie van der Linden was in trouble, not just with his health, but with his life; yet as he caught his wife’s eye he felt he could postpone a reckoning indefinitely, that three more glasses of scotch, a quiet weekend in the rustic inns of the Shenandoah valley and maybe some hard thinking would see him clear.
‘Who’s that man talking to Mary?’ Charlie felt his elbow taken by Edward Renshaw.
‘He’s a journalist, I think. I bumped into him this morning at the Spanish Embassy do and he claims we’ve met before somewhere.’
‘Let’s go and say hello.’
‘Eddie,’ said Mary, ‘this is Frank Renzo. Frank’s in town for a few days.’
‘Good to meet you.’ Frank Renzo was a tall, lean man, his cropped hair showing the first dust of grey; his accent was from the urban Midwest, perhaps Chicago.
‘Do you need a drink, Frank?’ said Charlie.
‘No, I already have one.’
‘What are you doing in town?’ said Edward Renshaw politely.
‘Just a piece for my paper. I’m based in New York.’
‘Well, enjoy yourself,’ said Charlie. ‘Call if we can do anything to help.’
Mary watched as Charlie left the small group and went towards the bar he had set up in the corner of the room. Normally they hired a barman from the Embassy staff to stand behind the row of liquor bottles, but tonight, as a small gesture of economy, Charlie had taken the task on himself. He scooped more ice cubes into the ornamental bucket from a pail concealed beneath the tablecloth.
‘They say the Kennedys are buying a new house on N Street,’ said the man from the Post. ‘Martha knows the realtor who showed them round. Apparently Jackie was crazy for it.’
‘Oh yes?’ Charlie poured bourbon over ice and heard it snap. ‘I thought they were buying Joe Alsop’s.’ He felt the scotch beginning to take hold, or rather to relax his grip, as he approached the state of uncritical bonhomie he most enjoyed. He smiled to himself. It was of course an irony that only in these moments of inebriation, these instants of perfect balance, did he have the philosophical poise to see his difficulties in their true perspective and to know that he could one day banish them. For the moment he was alive, and he glowed with the pleasure of these people’s company. At bad times he suspected that the fire was not renewable, that, for their delectation, he was burning away the core of himself; he feared that few of them shared his embrace of the minute, or were even momentarily diverted by his defiance of pettiness and tedium and time passing. He had never reached the lowest point of all, at which he might have wondered whether there was something morbid in his being so solitary in his flight from an unnamed terror.
Feeling as good as he did, generosity surging in his veins, tobacco unfurling in his lungs, he had no choice but to push onwards.
‘We meet on Wednesdays after we’ve taken the kids to school,’ Lauren Williams was telling Frank Renzo. ‘Then for lunch Kelly makes the appetizer, Mary-Beth or I does the entrée and Katy does the dessert. She does the best desserts you ever tasted.’
‘And you always have a project?’
‘Sure. Sometimes we just have a book we’ve all read, sometimes we’ll go see a show.’
‘And is that all the ladies in your group?’
‘Oh, no, there’s more. That’s just the inner circle. We’re usually seven or eight. Mary comes along pretty often.’
‘And what does she do?’
‘You mean, like, what’s her specialty? Well, she brings wine sometimes. You know, coming from Europe. I don’t know.’ Lauren Williams began to laugh. ‘Katy, what does Mary bring to our group?’
‘Mary?’ Katy Renshaw, too, looking at Frank’s grave face, began to laugh. ‘I guess she brings culture. Isn’t that right, Mary?’
‘Isn’t what right?’ said Mary, turning from another conversation.
‘In fact,’ said Lauren Williams, ‘Mary’s writing a book.’
‘Am I?’
‘Charlie always says you are.’
‘He has to find an explanation for me.’
Mary went with a tray out into the kitchen, where Dolores was stirring a pan.
‘Happy, Dolores?’
‘Yes, thank you, Mrs van der Linden. You happy?’
Mary considered, as she leaned back for a moment with her back to the stove and sipped from the glass of gin and tonic with its clashing ice. Happy . . .
When Louisa was twenty months old, she could talk with the fluency of a child of three or four, yet what was in her mind was quite unformed. On the Home Service in London she had heard the stations of the shipping forecast and talked back to them, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, her head cocked to one side, her concentration earnest. In moments of exalted love, of rapture, Mary believed Louisa’s mind was not empty, but filled with clouds of glory from a previous and purer world. She had spent many weeks in hospital with Louisa while doctors tried to discover the source of some violent allergy. When they eventually came home, they were seldom out of the same room. At bath-time, while Mary lay back in the water, the child stood hammering at her mother’s raised and closed knees, demanding to be let into the castle that would be formed by their parting. Once inside, she would ask questions about things that puzzled her: America, for instance: how big it was, how far, how different and then, after a long, considering pause: ‘Do they have children in America?’ Now, at ten years old, she had retained that unworldly grace, though she had been bruised by some encounters with the everyday that would have left no mark on others.
Richard, her brother, felt no such pain. To begin with, Mary had worried that she could not love a second child as much. He was so different from his sister that she was astounded to concede that he had eventually quarried out a comparable place in her affections for himself; by brute persistence he commandeered a territory as rare and irreplaceable as that occupied by Louisa. Perhaps it was the smell of him that first intoxicated Mary, of his neck along the hairline when she lifted him from his cot on her return from an evening out: the faint aroma of honey, calico, half-baked bread, wild strawberries, of warmth itself, was so delightful to inhale that she made excuses to ‘resettle’ him, though it was clear that he was already as tranquil as a sleeping child could be. His fierceness was the opposite of Louisa’s detached and dreamlike curiosity; he wanted the same lunch each day, the same programme on the wireless and then, at the same hour, to visit the bathroom where he would sit on the wooden seat, the cat clamped beneath his arm while, with tears rolling over his cheeks, he sang ‘The Camptown Races’.
Happy, thought Mary, as she folded the apron over the back of the chair and straightened her hair in the mirror over the kitchen counter: maybe not exactly happy, not in the facile way the word itself suggested, but who in these circumstances could not at least be touched from time to time by the ridiculous joy of existing?
Back in the sitting room, beneath the simmering layer of fresh cigarette smoke, Duncan Trench was stabbing his finger at Katy Renshaw, Edward’s American wife. Trench’s huge, slabbed cheeks and small eyes gave him what people called a chub-face, though the colour of his complexion always reminded Mary not of fish but of undercooked beef.
‘If the Negroes in North Carolina want to sit at the lunch counters all day without being served,’ he was saying, ‘then the storekeeper is quite entitled to use reasonable force to evict them. They’re preventing him from making a living.’
Few people knew what Trench’s job in Chancery entailed, but his manner was seldom diplomatic.
‘Sure,’ said Frank Renzo, ‘and he’s preventing them from having lunch.’
‘There are plenty of other places they can go.’
‘But they want to go to Woolworth’s. They like the sixty-five cent turkey dinner. You ever try it?’
‘No, but that’s not the point. What I’m saying is—’
‘You should. It needs some gravy. But, you know, it’s pretty good.’
‘By refusing to move they’re preventing customers being served.’
‘But they are the customers.’
‘You know what I mean.’
Mary could see Duncan Trench’s colour go from beef to borscht as she moved swiftly into the group.
‘Who’d like another drink?’ she said. ‘Duncan, have you met Kelly Eberstadt? She and her husband have moved into Bethesda and—’
‘Did you ever hear of a young man called Emmett Till?’ said Frank.
‘I don’t believe so,’ said Trench, as Mary took his elbow and guided him away.
‘You’d have liked him. Your kinda guy.’ Frank Renzo watched Trench depart; Katy Renshaw stared down at her shiny shoes for a moment.
‘Well,’ said Katy, looking up brightly again. ‘Que sera, sera.’
‘Nice song.’
‘Nice movie. You like Doris Day?’
‘Sure I like Doris Day, though I guess I like jazz even better,’ said Frank.
‘Oh, so does Charlie! Let’s put on a record and we can dance.’
The guests began to leave soon after one, though it took so long for them to be gone that Charlie was able to drink a half-bottle of burgundy he found in the dresser and a tumbler of Four Roses on the rocks as a nightcap. From time to time he tottered to the doorway, chastely pecking Lauren Williams on her powdered cheek, pummelling her husband, whose name always just eluded him, on the shoulder, taking the opportunity to bury his face in Katy Renshaw’s fragrant hair as he squeezed her waist.
‘A stoop full of kisses and goodbyes,’ he murmured. ‘Do you know that line?’
‘What?’
‘It’s from Wallace Stevens.’
‘Not in the Collected I read, Charlie,’ said Edward Renshaw, as he threw a wrap round the shoulders of his wife.
‘You’re right, Eddie. I made it up.’
The night had grown woundingly cold with a breeze whistling down out of Canada. Charlie lit one more goodnight cigarette as he leaned against the door-frame; Mary stood beside him as the last of their guests started up their cars. An upstairs light went on opposite: it was the Chinese couple who dined on bowls of clear soup and went to bed at seven. Mary flinched. The guests had left quietly, but the rumble of Detroit machinery was enough to shake the storm-windows gently in their frames.
As Mary looked down again, she saw a tall figure making its way towards them, hunched, veering from side to side. It was Frank Renzo. He was clasping his right hand in his left, and behind him, along the snowy sidewalk, there ran a trail of blood.
‘Jesus . . . goddam car door,’ he was muttering.
Mary went forward anxiously. ‘What happened? Come inside. It’s all right, it’s just tiles,’ said Mary as she led him, dripping, through to the kitchen.
‘What happened?’ said Charlie. ‘Do we have a bandage or something?’
‘Upstairs. In the bathroom.’
Frank’s face was pale. Mary held his hand beneath the kitchen faucet and the cold water pounded on to the metal sink, swilling with its rosy flow the last of the jettisoned clam dip. Mary pushed back the shirt cuff and rolled up the sleeve of his suit with its grey nailhead pattern. The cut was deep but clean; it ran through from the base of the thumb down into the blue wiring of the wrist.
‘Goddam car tool . . .’
‘Maybe we should call a doctor. Perhaps it needs stitches.’
‘Sutures? No, no, it’s fine. As soon as it stops bleeding.’
‘Is this any use?’ said Charlie. He was holding a first-aid box.
‘Let’s have a look,’ said Mary. ‘You’d better keep that hand under the tap.’
‘What happened?’ said Charlie.
‘It was an accident. Could I use your telephone?’
‘I’m sure we had a bandage.’
‘It’s in the hall.’
‘Did Louisa take it for her Barbie?’
When Frank came back into the kitchen, Mary dressed the cut with what she could find in the box.
‘You sure you’re all right?’ said Charlie. ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Maybe some scotch? Tell me, who was that guy with the red face?’
‘Duncan Trench,’ said Mary. ‘He’s at the Embassy.’
‘Is he a thimble-belly?’
‘What?’
‘Can he hold his liquor?’
‘I think he was tight.’
Frank sat back with his drink. ‘Thank you.’ For the first time since he had been back in the house, he smiled. ‘To tell the truth, I’m a little scared of blood.’
‘Let’s go and sit in the living room,’ said Charlie, as though sensing the chance that the party might re-ignite. He poured himself a measure of Four Roses to keep Frank company and lit another cigarette as he put on ‘Songs for Swingin’ Lovers’. It no longer seemed polite to ask Frank exactly what had happened to his hand.
‘That girl told me you like jazz,’ said Frank.
‘I certainly do,’ said Charlie. ‘We don’t get to hear much in Washington. You live in New York, don’t you?’
‘That’s right,’ said Frank. ‘I have an apartment loaned me by a friend who’s on a foreign posting. It’s in the Village.’
‘How lovely,’ said Mary.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Frank, grinding out his cigarette. ‘I don’t like the Village.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘Too many bead shops and fancy bakeries.’
Mary, standing with her back to the fireplace, looked at Frank closely for the first time. It was impossible to tell how serious he was being. Surely anyone below the age of fifty, particularly if he liked jazz, would want to live in Greenwich Village more than any neighbourhood in the United States of America; but Frank didn’t seem to be joking. His face, with its long, narrow jaw on which the first shadows of the morning’s beard were darkening, was not smiling. He looked drawn and anxious: the thin lapels of his suit, the narrow tie pulled halfway down over his cotton shirt, the long limbs folded over one another combined to suggest fragility. His pants had ridden up a little, showing where the grey woollen socks hung from his shins in slouched, concentric rings. There were dark hemispheres beneath his eyes, yet he showed no signs of wanting to leave. A drop of blood fell from the saturated dressing on to the maple parquet beside his chair.
Charlie said, ‘Have you heard this fellow Ornette Coleman I keep reading about?’
‘I went to see him once. At the Five Spot. I didn’t really like it. That free stuff. I’m not sure it’s as difficult as it looks.’
‘Apparently he can play the piano and the violin and the trumpet as well.’
‘Sure. But how well does he play them? That’s the point. Do you like Miles Davis?’
‘Quite,’ said Charlie. ‘But I’m pretty much lost with anything after Duke Ellington. This hard bop stuff, you know Charlie Parker and Dizzy—’
‘Yeah, but Miles Davis is kind of melodic, too. Did you hear the Kind of Blue record?’
Charlie refreshed their glasses and put his feet up on the table.
‘Would you two like something to eat?’ said Mary. ‘Those little snacks were a long time ago.’
‘To tell the truth, darling,’ said Charlie, ‘I’m not really hungry.’
‘Frank? I could make an omelette and toast. There are some potatoes I could fry up, too.’
‘I guess I should head back.’
‘Have a bloody omelette,’ said Charlie genially. ‘Here, listen to this.’ He took off Frank Sinatra and began riffling through a line of long-playing records held in a red wire rack.
By four o’clock, they had sampled most of the collection and the bottle of Four Roses was empty. Mary showed Frank upstairs to the lumber room at the back of the house; he lost his footing for a moment on the uncarpeted stair. Charlie was already in bed by the time Mary got back to their room and started to undress.
‘Have we got to get up early?’ he said.
‘Just the usual. School.’
Mary slid in beside him.
‘What do you make of that chap?’ said Charlie.
‘Who? Frank?’
‘Yes.’
‘Strange,’ said Mary. ‘Your sort of man, though.’
‘Yup. Ghastly taste in music.’
That night, for no reason she could see, Mary dreamed of David Oliver. His presence in her dreams was, naturally, unpredictable, though he always took centre stage as though nothing had gone wrong.
In the second summer of the War, having completed her studies, Mary was in London, living with her parents in their house in Regent’s Park. She helped them stick tape crosses on the window panes in the corridor that ran off the first-floor landing; though London was a dangerous place to be, beneath the German bombs, her parents felt better with their only child wrapped up safe inside their house. Mary, while she set about applying to join the WAAF, was glad to be home again, and to resume the familiar routine all three of them pretended they followed only to please the other two. Before dinner they gathered in the drawing room for drinks and did the crossword in The Times. Mary’s father, James Kirwan, read out the clues to give the women a chance to volunteer an answer; if none was forthcoming, he would fill it in himself with a propelling pencil. ‘Mary, here’s one for you: “One takes a hammering, sleeping rough without security”. Twelve letters. G, two blanks C, ends P three blanks. If “Pietà” is right, which I think it must be.’
‘Glockenspiel,’ said Mary. ‘I don’t know why.’
After dinner they would listen to the wireless, read or play cards. James often wore strangely unbecoming clothes, lumberjack shirts or tennis sweaters, after his day at the Treasury; Mary’s mother, Elizabeth, was usually in a suit she had worn to the surgery where she worked as a general practitioner. James was a solidly made man, patient and sardonic; Elizabeth suffered from weak eyesight, was sympathetic, untidy, with grey hair struggling to escape from a variety of restraints, and still had the clear skin and wide dark eyes that had made her beautiful. She also had a ferocious temper, which exploded without warning; although the subsequent peace-making could sometimes make the atmosphere more harmonious than before the outburst, it was a process the others both feared.
Mary had thought all children were as richly enfolded in love as she was because the child assumes the extent to which it possesses any quality is the norm, until its experience of others’ lives gives it a median against which to judge. It was not until her twenties that she started to appreciate that, even among families generally termed happy, few children had enjoyed what she could now see that she had had: a triangle of affection, in which each person was fully contented only in the presence of the other two. Sometimes when it was growing dark she watched the railings at the foot of Primrose Hill from her bedroom window until she saw her father’s hat and turned-up raincoat progressing towards the gloomy street lamp; though he denied it when she taxed him with it later, it was clear to her that his step unconsciously quickened to something near a run as he approached his house.
One day he brought back with him to tea a man called David Oliver, an economist who had been seconded to the Treasury from London University. He sat next to the fire with his teacup rattling in his lap; he was awkwardly polite towards Mrs Kirwan, struggling to his feet each time she came back into the room, slopping tea into the saucer, and was deferential towards her husband, occasionally slipping in a vocative ‘sir’. He had round cheeks and wire-rimmed glasses; it was a face that seemed aching to be comic, and his manner suggested some hilarity suppressed, but he successfully maintained a solemn front, smiling only when he glanced across at Mary, who was sitting on the sofa, her stockinged feet beneath her, stroking the marmalade cat.
Mary Kirwan, at the age of twenty-one, had something of the feline about herself. She was smaller than either of her parents, lacking her father’s solid build or her mother’s height; she was small-boned, with wavy hair of a colour bordering on black, cut a little above the shoulder and held off her face with combs. Her movements were still quick and girlish, while her features were those of her mother at the same age: large, dark eyes, prone to fright, in pale, clear skin. ‘It’s like looking at a miniature version of myself,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Like looking in a mirror that slightly reduces everything.’ Her sense of her daughter as someone of not quite serious adult size was integral to the way she loved her.
Mary’s father often brought home people from work; he liked to think his wife and daughter would enjoy their conversation and he wanted lonely colleagues to think they were free to share in his unexpected domestic happiness. A bachelor who lived in Southwark digs, where the landlady’s offering was some version of stew and semolina at six o’clock, David Oliver was easily persuaded to stay to dinner. He drank gin and orange and accepted two refills.
‘David’s a terrific brainbox,’ said Mary’s father over dinner. ‘People are in awe of him at work.’
‘I had to make myself good at work because no one took me seriously.’
‘Why was that?’ said Elizabeth.
‘It just happened. At school, at work, wherever I’ve been, it’s always the same. The others always seemed to think I was a figure of fun.’
‘But why?’
‘I don’t know.’ David looked down into his wine glass; he seemed less nervous than before. ‘Maybe I’ve just got a ridiculous face.’
A week later, Mary had a postcard from David asking if she would like to go to the pictures; there was a cinema in Bloomsbury still showing Rebecca, he said. Concealing the fact that she had already seen it, Mary took a bus to Russell Square and sat through the film a second time. Afterwards, they went to an ABC café, where they had tea and dry buns; David told her about his work and how little he liked it. He was in a reserved occupation, required to lend the weight of his economic expertise to the war effort; he had failed an army medical on the grounds that he was still debilitated by childhood polio.
‘But it’s absurd,’ he said, drawing a face with his finger on the steamed window of the café. ‘I’m as strong as an ox. I play squash twice a week. As soon as this job’s over, I’m going to reapply.’
‘I think you should,’ said Mary. ‘That’s a good drawing, by the way.’
‘What?’ David rubbed his hand quickly across the pane.
‘Do you do proper drawings? I mean on paper, not on glass?’
‘I do go to life classes, I admit. In an awful draughty place in Battersea. We draw a little man who used to be a prize-fighter, or so he says. He’s very hairy.’
Mary looked at David’s face closely: his blinking eyes and plump cheeks would hardly have enthralled a Rebecca, but she felt at ease with him, flattered by his attention.
David continued to send her postcards; he seemed anxious that her parents should know that he communicated with her, that there should be nothing underhand in his approach. He invited her to watch him play squash, where he revealed an unexpectedly muscular and competitive side, whipping the small black ball from the hidden corners of the court with a powerful wrist, his plimsolls squeaking with torsion on the narrow floorboards. He took her to a pub; he took her boating on the Serpentine; he invited her back to his digs and made her toast on the gas fire in his room overlooking Trinity Church Square. At Mary’s request, he showed her his sketchbooks, including charcoal drawings of the hirsute prize-fighter, and some watercolours of intense indigo and crimson.
One Sunday she arrived at David’s lodgings in her WAAF uniform, free not to return until ten. The film they had agreed on was due to start at five, and David made cocktails from gin and various tins of fruit juice he had found in his landlady’s cupboard. After lunch, Mary curled up on his sofa with a book, while he began to sketch, standing in the window where the light was best.
‘Would you like me to pose for you?’ said Mary, bored by the book.
David raised his eyebrows. ‘It’s rather cold.’
‘David! I didn’t mean—’
‘Of course not. I was being silly.’
She looked at his suddenly serious face, with the light coming through behind it, and she thought how much she liked him.
Flushed by the cocktails, she said, ‘I will if you like.’
David said nothing for a moment, then, ‘Are you sure?’
Mary laughed and sprang from the sofa. ‘You look so solemn!’
He grimaced and exhaled, as though he did not know what to do.
‘You could start by lighting the gas,’ said Mary.
‘All right. You can undress behind that screen. There’s a dressing-gown on the chair.’
As she stepped out of her skirt, Mary was aware that something more than art was happening. She had made no plans, but so great was her confidence in being loved and not betrayed that she barely hesitated, unfastening the hooks and clips of her underwear; she followed some light instinctive purpose, immune to the cautious gravity of self-questioning. Perhaps it was necessary in some way to liberate herself from the perfect triangle of her parents’ pure emotion, to coarsen the texture of her life, but she felt no awareness of this thought, only a strange levity as she wrapped David’s scratchy woollen dressing-gown around her.
Then, as she went back to the sofa, she changed her mind: it was only a drawing, nothing more than that. Her posing for him showed a new degree of trust and friendship – one that he had more than earned – but when she saw the prosaic details of his artistic preparations, watched him roll back the page on the pad and clip it in place, she saw she had been wrong to think this was somehow a significant moment.
‘How do you want me?’
‘Are you warm enough? If so, you can take the dressing-gown off.’
Apart from parents and doctors, Mary had never stood naked before anyone in her life. She had been so used to thinking of herself in the diminutive, her own body reflected back through the loving eyes of those who still viewed her as a child, that she had little sense of her breasts and the dark, filmy circles that spread from their centre; she was unaware of any effect the sight of her pale skin and its inverse, hidden folds might have on the clothed man standing opposite.
She held her hand for a moment across her chest as she sat down again, then breathed deeply and put it by her side.
‘Is this all right?’
‘Just turn to your left a little. That’s right.’
For twenty minutes, David stood scratching at the pad with short, irritable strokes, his eyes flashing back and forth behind the lenses of his spectacles. Mary knew that one thing a model was not supposed to do was ask to see the picture, and she concentrated on keeping still. Her back ached from the lack of support in the broken-springed sofa, and a nerve, which had caught in the ball of her foot where she had arched it in the hope of grace, was making her leg tremble.
Eventually, David put down his pencil and came over to where she sat.
‘Can I rearrange you a little?’ he said.
He lifted her elbow and resettled it.
‘This isn’t working at all,’ he said.
‘You look so worried.’
‘I can’t concentrate. You know why.’
‘Do I?’ It was the first time Mary had seen herself through the eyes of a man; and this intelligent, worldly person seemed quite disabled, reduced to helplessness, by some power of hers alone. Seeing this, she felt an exquisite trepidation.
David moved her arm again, this time allowing his hand to touch her breast. His voice was clotted. ‘You’re very beautiful, you know.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You are, you are.’ He ran his hand over her abdomen, down between her legs while his other hand stroked her forehead. ‘With your black gypsy hair.’
‘It’s not black.’
‘Almost.’
His hand ran slickly through her, then settled to a point of sensation that made her close her eyes as she felt her spine grow numb. The last coherent thought she had was that she still had not kissed him.
Later, although they had not actually made love, Mary felt ashamed of how easily she seemed to have found her way into this new experience; she felt awkward as she fumbled with the fastenings of her clothes behind the screen. By the next time she saw David, however, the natural poise of her temperament had reasserted itself: they went to the National Gallery and then for lunch in a café; she enjoyed being with him and was, in the end, disappointed that he did not seem to feel himself entitled to repeat his forward behaviour. She wondered if he really valued her, or if perhaps she had accommodated him too readily. She wanted to seduce him properly so that he would be forced to confront this new reality, whatever it turned out to be.
David needed no persuading, only an opportunity, which came the following weekend after a party given by a colleague. They took a taxi back to David’s lodgings, slipped their shoes off at the door and crept upstairs. He put a penny in the gas meter, lit the fire and then, when the black-out was up, a candle, by whose orange flame she allowed him to undress her, piece by piece, as he knelt before her on the threadbare hearth rug. As he dealt with her jacket and skirt, he was still talking about the landlady, Mrs Carman, with her bilious temper and bags full of odd-smelling possessions; when he pulled down her satin slip, he became more serious. How solemn his face then became, Mary could not say, as, acting on some childish impulse, she had closed her eyes in the hope of becoming invisible.
It was not all that she had hoped, when finally he lay on top of her, but it was enough for her to feel changed by it, in some way emancipated, bolder and brighter when she looked back on it the following day. David told her it was an adventure for him as well, something he had never tried before, though she thought he said that only to reassure her: how else could he so knowingly have touched her when she lay there naked as his model?
After Mary joined the WAAF, she was trained at first in London and continued to meet David when she was allowed. She had never had a boyfriend before and baulked at the word when her father used it, but when her embarrassment had subsided she was forced to concede to herself that this was what he was. The trouble was she had never felt the things that girls, according to friends and books she read, were meant to feel. She thought that perhaps her mother and father had so enveloped her in love that she had none to spare, or that any man would somehow have to become a part of her family, like a brother, before she could love him in return. This seemed undesirable, and for the first time in her life she fretted at her parents’ tight embrace.
David’s second application to join the army was successful, and he was despatched for preliminary training before taking a commission in a Shropshire regiment; Mary was posted by the WAAF to Norfolk, and their affair became one of leave-time assignations and weekly letters. One winter night, after a separation of six weeks, she arrived at Trinity Church Square only a few minutes after David himself. He looked unsoldierly in uniform, plump and vulnerable. He poured her a drink and sat on the bed in the corner, loosening his khaki tie, searching in the pocket of his tunic for cigarettes.
Sitting cross-legged on the arm of his sofa, Mary, half-swallowed by her air-force blue serge, her anxious dark eyes peering across at him, was struck by a strange sensation. The light by which he was lit, only a shaded bulb suspended on a flex from the ceiling, seemed to cast a glow about his head and shoulders, like an aura. His movements seemed to have slowed, as though he had moved into a separate world; when he raised his face from the flare of the match, it was radiant. For the first time, the contradictions of his comic face and serious manner were resolved: his expression, when he met her eye, was taut with tenderness.
She walked to him in a daze. She sat on his knee and put her arms about his neck. She buried her face against his shirt. She heard his voice at a distance going through a list of endearments and she wished that he could find more, that his voice would carry on speaking. A transcendence was happening in her, so light that she could not think what name to call it by; all she could tell when at last she pulled back her head from his chest and looked him in the eyes was that something was changed: she had tasted a power of emotion, and all her experiences from that moment would be seen in its light.
For seven months they saw each other as often as they could; then David’s battalion was sent to North Africa, from where he wrote her airmail letters, the brittle paper crushed beneath his desperate endearments. Mary lived in a converted school and bicycled to the airfield where she was instructed in how to track the movements of enemy aircraft; but her nights before the radar screen and her mornings in the dormitory were filled with lightness, a sense that they were in some respect provisional, because what mattered to her was elsewhere: not in Norfolk, not in the German bomber stations of Norway, nor even in the deserts of Tunisia, but in a separate, more fully realized existence.
She watched a point of light on the circumference of the screen and saw the straight beam sweep and catch on it: bright representations, radiant particles, and meaning altogether elsewhere.
A telephone call from her mother in London informed her that David had been killed in action. His company had been on the wing of a British advance that was counter-attacked by the Germans; David had been buried on the battlefield, but in the wake of the successful British action would be transferred to a Commonwealth war cemetery. Mary worried how he might have managed if he had lost his glasses at some stage in the fighting; she visualized him on a sand dune, swivelling round in blind desperation with sweat running down his cheeks, as she had seen him on the squash court, then blundering into a German gun.
She was able to think with clarity. When years had passed she would meet other men; the natural affability of her temperament would not change: but David was her one, her self, and therefore that aspect of her life was over. As a girl she had viewed her future as infinite and her expectations as limitless; but over them now she felt something slide and close.
IN THE MORNING Charlie van der Linden emerged from Number 1064, his hair still damp from the shower and with blood on the collar of his shirt from his peremptory shave. He felt too sick to have breakfast, but a taxi that Mary had called while he dressed was waiting for him; his own office was still in a hotel on Connecticut Avenue where his department was based until the new Embassy building was complete. Morning Prayers, however, the formal meeting that began each day, took place in the almost-finished premises on Massachusetts Avenue because it had a secure meeting room. The Ambassador was out of town, but the Minister, who would chair it, liked to draw on what counsellors had read to save him from the trouble of studying all the papers himself. As Charlie slumped back against the taxi’s leather seat, he desperately scanned the papers to see what questions might be directed his way.
He pulled the remains of a crushed pack of cigarettes from his jacket and searched for a match. The trouble with Washington was that it was drastically short of drugstores, delis, bars or anywhere that he could get what he needed to start his day. One street of the inner suburb gave way to the next without so much as a general store or a laundromat to service the residential miles. He told the driver to divert to one of the big hotels, where, while the cab waited, he ran into the over-heated coffee shop. He hated American coffee; it was always dusty, boiling hot and lacked the necessary caffeine. He drank as much as he could from a heated mug, managed half a Danish pastry, took two books of matches and left some coins on the bar.
By the time he reached the Embassy, he had flicked through the Post and the New York Times, but Morning Prayers were already under way. On hard chairs around the walls sat numerous grave-looking men, the economic and chancery first secretaries and the usual naval and military analysts. Charlie mumbled some apologies as he took his vacant place at the table.
‘Good morning, Charlie. We were talking about Richard Nixon. Do you fancy a trip to California?’
‘Not particularly, no.’
Charlie was feeling the exhilaration of a hangover that had not settled. A thin film had been shaved from his irises; the molecular movement of the surrounding world had increased in agitation by about half its normal speed; he could feel a slight flush in his neck and jaw, but the headache was still a distant threat. He felt bold, carefree, as he shakily rode the chemical balances of his system: he was essentially, he admitted to himself, still drunk.
Edward Renshaw glanced at Charlie, his eyes dilating for an instant as he took in the bloodstained collar. His own capacity for recovery was legendary, and he looked as pure and dedicated as the day he had first arrived in Whitehall. He pushed back his hair. ‘It’s very difficult to tell at this stage, of course,’ he said, clearly referring back to what was being discussed before Charlie arrived. ‘But our analysis still points to Nixon–Kennedy in November and to a narrow win for Nixon. That’s the assumption we’re working on.’
‘We’ll see,’ said the Minister, before beginning to analyse what a Republican government under Nixon might mean.
Charlie looked out of the window. He needed to prepare an excuse for not going to California. He dreaded the thought of having to ingratiate himself with Richard Nixon’s staff, buying drinks and lunches for various small-town lawyers who had slapped Joe McCarthy on the back, inquiring about their plans for foreign policy, as though Nixon had any policy at all beyond getting himself elected. What was decisive for Charlie, however, was not his distaste for the work itself, but the fact that he found himself unable to fly without having swallowed three sedatives and half a bottle of scotch.
He also wanted to be in Washington to keep an eye on the stock market, to consult brokers in London and New York; it was difficult to stay in touch when you were in Santa Barbara, eight hours behind the start of dealing in the City. Charlie’s portfolio of shares was now worth less than half its value three years earlier; he had borrowed more money to invest, but although he twice changed his broker, his inexplicable run, his own private bear, had continued.
Charlie held his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes. Sometimes he wished he had not had children. It was not that he didn’t love them; occasionally when he went into their room at night and saw them sleeping, he felt his stomach tighten as a feeling in him yearned protectively towards them. In the sober daylight, however, he found they were expensive, wearisome and always complicating the arrangements. Before, he had been true to some ideal he had developed of the way a man should live, without favour or obligation to anyone but himself; now he was preparing to persuade some adviser on the Nixon payroll that there was a coincidence of interest in the way they saw the Communist threat. Charlie had once been good at this kind of thing; his social ease and humour, coupled with degrees and honours he had acquired with the minimum of endeavour at ancient English and American universities, had fitted him in the eyes of his superiors for rapid advancement; they remained unaware of his difficulties, and his occasionally erratic behaviour was overlooked in the generally hedonistic atmosphere or accepted as the price of his talents.
After the meeting, he took a taxi to the hotel where his temporary office was on the first floor of the building. It was a converted bedroom suite, in the outer room of which, the former lounge, sat his secretary, a tidy American woman in a grey flannel skirt and black loafers.
‘Coffee, Mr van der Linden?’
‘Thank you, Benton.’ He called her what everyone else did; no one seemed to think that Patty, her first name, did justice to her severe efficiency.
‘I read the Russians are going to put a dog in space,’ she said as she placed the cup on his desk.
‘Really? Make me some appointments, Benton, get me busy. By lunchtime I don’t want to be free to travel.’
‘Right away, Mr van der Linden. Any news about when we’ll be moving into the new Embassy?’
‘Can’t tell you that, Benton. Classified.’
Benton’s first job had been working with the British military in Washington in the last year of the War, which had given her security clearance at a level exceptional for a non-native in the Embassy. Charlie liked to pretend that this had been a serious mistake.
Benton paused with her hand on the telephone. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘did you hear they invented a new cocktail? It’s called the Sputnik.’
‘OK, what is it?’
‘One part vodka and three parts sour grapes.’
‘I like it. I’m surprised at a good American like you, though, telling such unpatriotic jokes. You might find yourself the subject of a Hearing.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I heard one, too,’ said Charlie. ‘You know Eisenhower likes to read science fiction. What does Khrushchev read?’
‘I already heard that one,’ said Benton, as she settled at the desk and began to dial. ‘Science fact.’
Charlie gazed out at the frosted sycamore trees on the avenue. The people of the United States appeared to be in a condition of what his psychoanalyst in Bethesda called ‘free-floating anxiety’, expecting, for all their material comforts, to be overwhelmed at any moment by the superior technical weaponry of the Russian enemy or undermined from within by the machinations of its agents. They appeared to be losing the Cold War, and were always aware of that awkward fact. He knew one American family who had relocated to Montana to be beyond the range of Soviet missiles, but most seemed to have reached a compromise with their anxieties: to still the beating heart, they went hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains, they experimented with European wines, they planned holidays with friends and affairs with the same friends’ spouses; they listened to show tunes and jazz; they bought larger cars with bigger tail-fins. They opened charge accounts, bought new seasonal wardrobes and indulged their children in hula-hoops and Lincoln logs.
Charlie sighed and picked up the unopened mail on his desk. His stomach lining felt as though it had been scoured with wire wool.
Frank Renzo did not come downstairs until eleven o’clock. He found Mary on the telephone in the kitchen, explaining to Kelly Eberstadt that she might be late for their lunch appointment because of her sleeping visitor.
She hung up quickly. ‘Did you sleep all right? How’s your hand?’
Frank shifted round the room uneasily. ‘I’d no idea what the time was. Did I keep you from doing anything?’
‘No. No, I was just doing a little work and then . . . I’m going out in about half an hour. Can I get you some breakfast?’
Frank sat at the table while she made coffee. He leaned back in the chair and looked through the paper. He opened it only a few inches and held it at arm’s length, as though worried that he might be blinded by the glare of its contents.
‘What are these? he said, picking up a pile of woven name-tapes.
‘They’re for the children’s clothes. We’re sending them to boarding school in England.’