by Ian Slater
“Almost didn’t,” said David.
Choir Williams shook his head as David’s stretcher passed on, and looked over at Williams A. “You know, Williams, that Yank’s a nice fellow. But terrible morbid sometimes.”
“Listen,” said Aussie, wandering up to Choir. “Five to one Davey boy comes through the whole operation with flying colors. Dollars! U.S.!”
“Go away,” said Choir.
“Yes,” said Williams A. “Go home, you terrible man.”
“All right, all right,” said Aussie. “Yen. How about yen?”
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
The pact between the surviving members of the USS Roosevelt was kept and none went public with the knowledge that at least a third of them were probably dying. The secret of their invisible yet deadly illness was not a difficult one to keep in a world where the visible horrors of the war were so widespread. It was a secret Robert Brentwood believed he could keep from the moment he and the others had landed in the wild and beautiful Highland dawn to the time he and Rosemary visited his brother David. They took him down from Middlesex Hospital after the operation to convalesce at the Spences’ in Oxshott, where Mrs. Spence spared no effort looking after him, doubtless seeing in David the chance to repay Lana Brentwood for her kindness to young William when he had been wounded in the Atlantic. At times Richard Spence felt his wife’s attentiveness to David Brentwood was almost too cloying, but remembering the terrible emptiness that William’s death had caused in their lives, he was loath to interfere. In any event, he was as much worried about the effect of Peter Zeldman’s death on Georgina. But she, like her mother, had rallied, and while the loss would always be with her, Richard could already see in her a sudden maturing. She was still passionate about her ideas, and at times as argumentative as ever, but much more willing now to listen. Peter Zeldman in a way had tamed her, forced her to look at her innermost self beneath all the varsity-bred and nourished pretensions, so that when she met David, there was none of the petulant, knowing air of superiority she had once held toward “soldiers,” but more understanding of what young William and others like him and Zeldman must have been through, a new respect for action as well as for intellect.
“Would you like me to do that?” she asked David one morning as he struggled valiantly but in vain with knife and fork, his right arm particularly painful.
“Yes,” he said. It was the way she did that simple thing, smiling as she sat down beside him, a wide open smile, utterly devoid of connivance or any intent to impress, that touched him.
Richard Spence, interrupting his puzzle in the Telegraph, watched her and David looking at each other and inwardly groaned for his savings account at the Midland Bank, wondering yet again what unjust and perverse origin lay beneath the pernicious custom that decreed the bride’s father always got stuck with the bill. And Georgina’s taste in champagne exceeded only that of her Great Uncle Geoffrey, who never helped matters with his exuberance for the Spence family forming as many connections as possible “with our cousins across the water.”
* * *
It had been only a few days after the surrender when, at about 2:00 a.m., the Spences’ high-pitched burglar alarm awoke everyone in the house. Robert was up and out of bed before Rosemary realized it. As he made his way down toward the staircase, Richard Spence was coming up in his robe, apologizing profusely to everyone gathering at the top of the stairs, “Mea culpa… mea culpa. Terribly sorry… sorry, everyone. Went down for a snack, forgot to switch off the ruddy second beam.”
“Oh, Richard!” Anne chastised him, shaking, holding the rail for support, one hand on her chest as if to slow her heart.
“You frightened the dickens out of us! Well, you’d better stay up and answer the police call. It’s your own silly fault.”
“Yes… oh dear. I am sorry, everyone.”
“No problem,” said Robert, who went down to the kitchen with Richard to wait until the police called. Richard said the station at Leatherhead would either call or send a car already in the area.
“It’s a knack,” Robert said, watching Richard preparing the tea. “You won’t believe this, but before I came to England, I thought the only way you made tea was with tea bags.” Richard was opening a quarter-pound packet of Bushell’s, the small black India leaves measured by hand before he dumped them from his palm into the brown pot into which he’d poured hot, roiling water. At two o’clock in the morning, Robert wasn’t in the mood for anything more profound than a conversation about tea.
“Even when we use pots in the States, we just dump in the bags,” he said, but Richard didn’t seem in the mood for small talk. He gave the impression that his ritual of tea making was more an escape from something he wanted to say — an awkwardness that Robert hadn’t sensed before in the Spence household. “They say,” Robert continued, “that when Prince Charles went to visit Reagan in the White House, they asked him whether he’d like tea or coffee. He said tea, of course, but they brought him this little bag and he didn’t do anything with it. Must have been on old Ronnie’s mind, because next day he asked Charles at a formal dinner about it and Charles told him that he simply didn’t know what to do with this ‘funny little bag.’ “
Richard didn’t respond, merely pouring the steeped tea, moving the spout up and down, his left hand pressed against the lid — something robotic, if expert, in his movements that indicated his thoughts were elsewhere. He handed Robert a cup of dark, amber Darjeeling. “I didn’t trip the alarm,” he said quietly. He pushed the small packets of rationed sugar toward Robert. “There was someone in here. Two of them. I was on my way down for a snack. I rang the police just as I saw them take off. Couldn’t get the car number or anything, but there’s a good chance the police might cut them off at the roundabout.” He was stirring the tea thoughtfully. “No use frightening the women.”
“No,” agreed Robert. “Was anything taken?”
“No — that’s the thing. You see—”
The phone rang.
“Yes,” answered Richard. “Oh — yes, Inspector. I see. Yes — of course. Now?”
Richard returned to the kitchen table. “They caught two people — not at the roundabout. In the cul-de-sac down a bit. They’d like you and me to go down to the station.”
“Me?” asked Robert, surprised.
“Yes.”
“I didn’t see them. I’d have no idea—”
Richard was handing him the Identikit sketches of the “charmers” that Robert had sent him from Holy Loch. “Oh Christ—”
“Look, Robert — they said we could come in the morning if we liked, but I think under the circumstances — might be better if we nipped down there. I’ll tell Anne you’re coming along to keep me company.”
“All right,” said Robert.
* * *
Robert knew it was them the moment he stepped inside the Leatherhead police station. The desk sergeant was typing out the pink sheet, charging them with “breaking and entering” and “illegal possession of firearms”—.22 high-vels — the very make the superintendent at Mallaig had supposed SPETS abroad had been issued with. High-velocity, quiet, and very accurate at short range. Robert could still see the bullet hole in Price’s forehead. The two charmers didn’t look too happy — no confetti this time. The identification was simple and straightforward. There were no lineups given for Chernko’s people abroad. It would be “in camera” and they’d either be shot or, now the surrender was in place, exchanged for two of the Allies.
It hadn’t taken Robert and Richard long, but it had shaken them both to realize that even after the official surrender, the two SPETS had pursued their mission, and they wondered how many around the world were still at large.’Both of them agreed to say nothing to anyone else. There was no point. Besides, for Robert, the diagnosis to be given him by the radiation lab at Oxford was a much more immediate and pressing concern.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
On his third visit to what he’d told Rosemary was a “special
submarine update” school at Oxford, Robert Brentwood was informed by the specialists at the radiation medicine lab that the initial diagnosis was confirmed — he had indeed received above-acceptable levels of radiation.
“Am I dying?” he asked the doctor simply.
“We’re all dying, old chap.”
“Come on, Doc.”
“Truth is, we never know for sure. In a case like yours, I’d say—” the doctor shrugged “—fifty-fifty. We can speculate, predict, all we want, but there are other factors: will to live, fitness, individual metabolism…”
“Even in a case of radioactive poisoning?”
“Oh yes, though it’s not generally recognized.” He gave a warm, cheeky smile. “Sounds a bit too mystical for most M.D.s, you see. Difficult stuff to measure.”
The day of the third visit, as he strolled back from the radiation lab through Oxford’s rain-polished streets, the golden spires of the ancient university caught the wintry sun with such brilliance that only nostalgia and hope seemed permissible at that moment. He was shocked to find Rosemary waiting at the station. One look told him she knew where he’d been — her lips aquiver, though she was trying to be brave. She was wearing a scarf, the same one she’d been wearing when they had first met — a light pastel green covered with the wildflowers of an English spring. They held one another before either spoke.
“How long?” she asked finally.
“They don’t know. No one does.”
She didn’t go on at him about why he hadn’t told her. She knew his motive, though she might not agree with it, came from all the old-fashioned virtues of a silent service.
“You’d have nothing to worry about anyway,” he told her. “You and the bairn.” As usual, his Scottish accent was atrocious to her ears, but she felt his love all around her like a warm embrace on a wintry day.
“Anyway,” he hurried on, “I’ll be here to see the boy—”
She was in tears, as they stood hand in hand on the platform.
“Oh—” she said bravely, “what makes you think it’s a boy?”
“Or a lassie,” he said, and he stopped, turning her to him. “Rose. Let’s not be sad. I see the glass half-full, not half-empty.” She sobbed uncontrollably, told him she loved him and that there’d never be another man for her, and he held her tightly and prayed there would be if he went before his time— whenever that might be.
On the train back, the peaceful winter countryside rocking gently outside, he went to the bar and ordered a double gin and tonic for her, the British Rail attendant astonished, proclaiming, “A double? You’d be bloody lucky, mate. Been a war on, you know.”
“Ah — yes,” said Robert. “Then — I’ll just have the single.” He left a hefty tip, not really thinking what he was doing.
“Oh, ta very much,” said the attendant, suddenly solicitous of the American’s well-being. “You’re a gentleman and a scholar, sir.”
Rosemary refused the single gin and tonic, said she didn’t want to do anything that might harm the baby. “Have it yourself,” she said.
He did, and looking out at the land flashing by, the smell of frozen earth thawing, he felt so glad to be alive to feel and see and touch the world about him. It was like a longing fulfilled, and he was sure that what he was feeling at this very moment was what it must be like for Rosemary to feel the warmth of a life, his life, theirs, growing inside her.
“It’s going to be a boy,” he said.
“A girl,” she contradicted, snuggling into him.
“You’ve cheated,” he said, looking down at her with mock accusation. “You had a sonogram—”
“Ultrasound,” she said.
“Yes.”
“No. I don’t know, but my pulse is faster and—”
“Ah—” said Robert. “Superstitions. Anyway, I don’t care. As long as she, or he, joins the navy.”
“Or becomes a teacher,” she countered. “No — really, whatever they decide.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Robert—”
“Now, now,” he said. “No tears. Silent running.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
Outside Dutch Harbor’s Paradise Motel, it was twenty below. Inside, it was much hotter, Shirer already down to his T-shirt, Lana La Roche, nee Brentwood, letting him undress her. Soon he was getting out of control.
“Slowly,” she laughed. “You’re ripping my uniform.”
“I can’t wait,” he said frantically. “I don’t care about your uniform. I’m hornier than a toad.”
“Well—sit, toad!” she instructed him, laughing. “I’m not ready.”
“Not ready?” he challenged. “That isn’t what you said in your lettergram. It said, ‘Landing field ready’—”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “Ready for landing — not attack. And Frank—”
“Yes?”
“Please take that awful eye patch off.”
“Why? Thought it would kind of remind you of old times?” He made a Groucho Marx expression, tapping an invisible cigar, rolling his good eye. “If you know what I mean.”
“I remember,” she said. “But that was before Jay. I want to forget those days. Please take it off.”
He did, though she didn’t know that this time he hadn’t meant it as a joke, that this time, while the electromagnetic impulse of the air burst over Detroit had not penetrated Kneecap’s sheathing, the light of the massive explosion, “brighter than a million suns,” as the experts were so fond of describing it, had damaged his “steering” eye as well as blinding the navigator. He had to fly the plane alone, reading the instruments with the eye that had been protected by the patch. If it hadn’t been for the soft light inside the Paradise Motel, Lana would no doubt have seen the faint, milky whiteness where the microwave radiation had penetrated the aqueous humor of the damaged eye, literally cooking its clear protein, turning it white as easily and quickly as a microwave cooks the clear protein of an egg. But right now, neither the laser operations that might help repair some, though not all, of the damage, the air bursts that had caused it and had injured so many others, nor the long wait he might have for any corrective surgery while America struggled to rebuild herself into something approaching prewar normalcy were on his mind as he turned the light’s dimmer switch to low.
“Lordy,” he said, “you look better than a carrier deck on a rainy night.”
“Oh, how romantic,” she said, smiling, her loose hair falling about her shoulders as she demurely slipped between the covers. “Do you always sweet-talk your lady friends like that?”
“I don’t have any other lady friends.”
“I believe you,” she said, her hand rustling the pillow on the other side of the small double bed.
In her arms, the war, Jay, everything was forgotten. Hopefully soon everyone would be at peace, but if it wasn’t to be, then for now at least the world was theirs, the promise of love so close, so urgent, they ached for each other. As they joined, the aching gave way, turning pain to pleasure that mounted and grew, enveloping them, pulling them faster and faster, harder, until they were free — over the cascading precipice, falling in timeless cool space where only rapture was certain.
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