There wasn’t much to see. The plane looked small against the dark sky and the harbour, rolling with the swells of water, at the mercy of the elements. A light, soft snow had started falling. Some of the flakes struck the windshield and melted to droplets that clung to the glass before losing their hold as the wind chased them off again.
Jim watched Amelia, as she watched the plane. She didn’t cry. He found that worse, somehow, than if she had. It hurt him more to see her being strong; to watch her red-rimmed eyes shine bright with all the tears that she refused to shed; to see her lips compressing as she tried to stop them quivering; to see her look on steadily, unmoving save for that small, ceaseless turning of her wedding band. She sat like that, not speaking, while the Clipper made its final preparations, and she stayed there till the aircraft finally loosed its moorings, turned, and nosed its way into the blackness of the night, rising from the water like a great, unnatural bird on wings of steel, until at last it vanished altogether, and was gone.
Even then, she didn’t cry. Her muscles tensed, as though she were attempting to hold on to something precious, something vital, that was being wrenched away from her. And then she pulled her gaze from where the plane had been, and turned to Jim, and in a very quiet voice said, ‘Thank you. You can take me back to the apartment now.’
Not ‘home’, he thought. She hadn’t told him, ‘take me home’. Perhaps it wouldn’t feel like home to her, without her husband there. Starting up the car, he wheeled it back the way they’d come and started driving, searching for the words to reassure her, to give comfort. But he couldn’t think of any.
He glanced over at her, once, then wished he hadn’t. Never, in his whole life, had he seen a woman look so lonely.
Talk to me, he thought, I’ll listen. Please, Amelia, talk to me. But she stayed silent in her seat, face turned towards the window and the blur of whirling snowflakes, holding in the tears, as though to let them fall would somehow be a failing, on her part.
‘He’ll be fine,’ Jim said. ‘Don’t worry. He’ll come back to you all right.’
He saw her mouth curve, very briefly, in an effort at a smile. Then, to his dismay, he saw one small tear spill over and run down her cheek in silence. And she closed her eyes.
He kept his mouth shut after that. He saw her up to the apartment, switched the lights on, checked the locks, and turned to ask her, ‘Are you going to be OK?’
There was no sign of that stray, solitary tear. Her face was perfect. ‘Yes, Jim. Thank you. Thanks,’ she said, ‘for everything.’ She held her hand out, formal, and he shook it. Gave it back to her.
‘You’re welcome. I’ll be by to take you out for lunch tomorrow. Have you tried that little restaurant on the corner?’
‘But…’ She frowned, not understanding. ‘But I thought, with Andrew gone…’
Jim smiled. ‘You thought my job was over? Well, ordinarily, it would be, but your husband made me promise I’d take care of you,’ he told her, ‘and I always keep my promises.’
He tried his best, the next few weeks, to do just that: take care of her; to see that she was happy, or at least as happy as she could be, in the circumstances. They went walking, when the weather wasn’t bad, or went to lunch, or even, one time, to the theatre. They talked, as they had always done, about small things – their families, mostly, and the way their lives had been before the war.
He didn’t see her every day. He didn’t want to harm her reputation; didn’t want her neighbours thinking there was anything improper going on. So when the letter came for him from Lisbon, with its single, small request, he wasn’t sure, at first, that he should do it.
But he did.
Amelia looked surprised to see him standing at the door with flowers.
‘I can’t take the credit for these,’ he said, with a smile. ‘They’re from your husband. Happy birthday.’
She took the bouquet, wondering. ‘I didn’t think that he’d remember.’
‘I hope I got it right. I had to go to a couple of florists before I could find what he wanted.’ Roses, plain roses, he thought, would have been fairly easy to buy, in New York, but not—
‘Tea roses,’ she said, and brushed a pink bloom with a delicate touch. ‘They’re tea roses.’
‘That’s right.’
She looked quickly down and away from him, hiding her face, but he’d already seen her expression; the flush of emotion, the betraying brightness of her eyes. ‘They’re beautiful, Jim,’ she said. ‘Just let me put them in water.’
He wondered what tea roses meant in the language of flowers, but he didn’t like to ask her when she seemed so overcome.
Instead he waited, and that evening he went past the public library, and went inside and asked if they had any books that listed all the flowers and their meanings, and they did. Tea roses, it turned out, meant: I’ll remember, always.
A peculiar thing, Jim thought, to tell your wife.
Amelia Deacon seemed to understand, though. Later on that week, when Jim dropped by, he found the flowers on the front hall table, pink and blooming, beautiful. But in the room beyond, he saw a suitcase.
Frowning, he asked, ‘Are you taking a trip somewhere?’ Surely, he thought, they weren’t sending her to Portugal. The journey was too dangerous.
She kept her head down. ‘I thought I’d go home for a visit. My mother could do with the help just now, and I could do with the company.’ Quickly she carried on, ‘Not that you haven’t been very good company, Jim, but—’
‘I understand.’ He saw her relax when he smiled. He asked, ‘When are you going?’
‘My train leaves tonight.’
‘That soon? And when will you be back?’
‘I don’t know. I likely won’t stay long. But then, you never know.’
He wasn’t altogether sure how he would like New York without Amelia Deacon in it, but on the other hand he felt relieved that she was going home, to family, where she wouldn’t be so lonely. ‘Look,’ he told her, as he searched his pocket for his card, ‘if you need anything at all, just write, and I’ll take care of it.’
She took the card and, looking at it, said, ‘I will, Jim. Thank you.’
‘And when you come back, call me, and I’ll come and meet your train.’
‘All right.’
She never called.
He waited all that winter. Every now and then he’d walk up West 73rd Street and look for signs of life in the apartment windows, but he always found them dark. A few times he even went into the building and knocked at the door. No one answered. And then came the spring, and the FBI sent him to Washington.
The work was busy. He forgot about Amelia Deacon – or, at least, that’s what he told himself; what he preferred to believe, though the truth was he still turned to look when a redhead walked by, even though he knew full well it wouldn’t be her.
And then, one day, it was.
He stopped dead on the sidewalk in surprise. It was her – there was no mistake. She passed him, walking with another girl, head bent in earnest conversation.
Jim called out, ‘Amelia!’ and he saw her slow her step and turn, eyes searching, almost hopeful; then she saw him, too, and he could see the moment when she recognised him. At her side, the other girl said something, and Amelia hesitated; then she shook her head and turned away again and smiled at the other girl, and carried on as if he were invisible.
He followed her for half a block, and called again, ‘Amelia!’ but she didn’t look around, and by the time he could push through the other people on the sidewalk she was gone.
That was in May. Late May.
Then D-Day had come, and the great Allied surge across Europe, and finally, the end of the war.
Jim had stayed on in Washington, settling into professional life there as much as his nature allowed him to settle. He worked, and he travelled. He liked the warmer destinations: Cairo, one year. Athens. Rome. In 1958 he went to Istanbul – he had a yen to see the Blue Mosque, and the Castle of
the Seven Towers, and the tombs of Suleiman and Roxelana. He was standing in the Hippodrome, that great and ancient stadium, imagining the chariots with racing colours, red and white and green and blue, hurtling round in a dust-raising thunder of hooves to the cheers of the Byzantine crowds and their Emperor – when, quite by chance, he saw someone he knew.
Andrew Deacon had aged. He looked tired, and greyer, but Jim knew him instantly. The Englishman was wandering some little distance off, beside a broken column twined with serpents.
Jim didn’t call out to him. They were, after all, in Istanbul, the gateway to the Bosporus, a stone’s throw from the Soviet Union, and if Andrew Deacon was still in the business of spying for Britain, the last thing he needed was some damn fool blowing his cover. But Jim did take a moment to look round, to see if Deacon’s wife was in the Hippodrome, as well. He didn’t see her.
‘Jim.’ The quiet, friendly voice beside him caught him off his guard. He hadn’t noticed Andrew Deacon moving; hadn’t heard the man’s approach. ‘I must say, what a pleasant surprise. Are you here on a holiday? Come, let me buy you a drink.’
They found a tea room, off a side street near the Church of St Sophia. The tea was served in glasses, strong and fragrant. The proprietor – a huge Turk with a very black moustache – turned on the radio to entertain them while they drank. The songs were American, mostly.
Jim smiled. ‘Sounds like home.’
‘Are you still in New York?’ Andrew Deacon asked.
‘No, I’m in Washington.’
‘Washington? I was there last month. A shame I didn’t know…’
‘Well, here, let me give you my address, and then the next time you’re in town you can call me. We’ll do something.’ Jim wrote the address down; handed it over. Noticing the wedding ring on Andrew Deacon’s hand, he casually asked, ‘Is Amelia not with you?’
Andrew Deacon paused in the act of accepting the paper. He looked up. ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were told.’ Dropping his eyes, he folded the paper into crisp, neat squares. ‘My wife passed away.’
Jim felt that like a blow to his own chest. ‘No.’ It was unthinkable – that bright and lovely woman, with the laugh that could electrify a room. ‘I am so sorry.’
‘Thank you. It happened quite a while ago. I’m told one does adjust.’ He felt his pockets for his cigarettes, and offered one to Jim. ‘No? You don’t mind if I…?’
‘Go ahead.’
A match flared. Through the swirl of smoke that followed, Andrew Deacon said, ‘She had an accident, you see, the April I was out in Lisbon.’
Jim fell silent. With new eyes he looked at Andrew Deacon’s face. And then he said, ‘But that’s impossible.’
The Englishman had not expected that. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I saw your wife in Washington, that May. And she was very much alive. She—’ Jim broke off and frowned, remembering the circumstances – how she had been walking with another girl, and how her face had changed when she had recognised him; how she’d turned away. And then, all of a sudden, it made sense. He felt a growing sense of certainty; of wonder. ‘Christ, she wasn’t your wife, was she? She was… what? One of us?’
Andrew Deacon didn’t answer right away. He exhaled smoke, and looked towards a corner of the room, as though deciding something. Slowly, then, he said, ‘Not one of us. Not in that way. She was only a girl who was asked to do something quite selfless, to help with the war. And she did it, I thought, rather brilliantly.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned.’ Jim sat back. ‘I think I will have that smoke, after all.’ He lit the cigarette and shook the match out, squinting hard. ‘You two sure had me fooled. I would have sworn that you were newlyweds – you seemed so much in love.’
He was becoming used again to Andrew Deacon’s habit of remaining silent, putting off a question with a small lift of one shoulder, like a shrug.
The tinny tea-room radio was playing Doris Day. It was an older song: ‘I See Your Face Before Me’, and her honeyed voice was singing words that Jim found quite appropriate:
In a world of tinsel and show
The unreal from the real thing is hard to know…
He looked at Andrew Deacon. ‘You did love her,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you?’
The Englishman stayed quiet for so long that Jim felt sure he wouldn’t answer, but at length he raised the cigarette and brought his gaze around again, and calmly said, ‘I should have been a great fool if I hadn’t.’
‘Then why, in God’s name, did you let her go?’ He wouldn’t have, himself, thought Jim. If he had had Amelia for his own, he would have moved the earth to keep her. He felt curiously angry at this self-collected Englishman, for wasting such a golden opportunity. ‘She loved you, too, you know that? I was there,’ Jim said. ‘I saw. It nearly killed her when you went away.’
Again the stretching silence, and the sideways sliding of the gaze. ‘She had a fiancé,’ said Andrew Deacon quietly. ‘A pilot. Shot down over France, he was, not long before she got paired up with me. That’s why she had a thing with planes… you might remember.’
Jim remembered.
Andrew Deacon carried on, ‘I’m not a violent man. It’s not my way to wish another person ill, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope, in private, that Amelia’s fiancé was dead; that he’d been killed in France. I held that hope, in fact, for quite a while.’
He raised his cigarette again, and in the pause that followed Doris Day sang mournfully:
It doesn’t matter where you are
I can see how fair you are
I close my eyes and there you are,
Always.
Jim saw a faint twist of the Englishman’s impassive mouth.
‘And then, one day,’ said Andrew Deacon, ‘not long after I’d arrived in Lisbon, Jack Cayton-Wood took me to Caldas da Rainha. You knew it yourself, surely?’
‘Where all the refugees were.’
‘Yes, precisely. Our purpose, I was told, was to debrief a young man who had just arrived; made his way down, with his wits, out of Occupied France. Not the nicest of journeys, I shouldn’t imagine. He was rather the worse for it. Had a bad arm. It had broken, I think, and there hadn’t been anyone with him to set it. He’d done a fair job on his own, but one could see it gave him pain. Still, he didn’t complain. He was that kind of chap. Quite impressive. The kind of chap I might have bought a pint for, if I’d met him in a pub. The kind one knows will make his mark in life.’ He paused, to take a sharp pull of the cigarette. Breathed out. ‘At any rate, we finished the debriefing, and then he and Cayton-Wood fell to talking, about where he came from, his family, his girl. His chief concern, as I recall, was how to let them know he was all right. And after that, how quickly he could make it back to join up with his squadron, and get back into the air. He was a pilot, did I mention that? Canadian.’
Jim felt for him. ‘Amelia’s fiancé.’
The nod was brief. The cigarette had burnt down nearly to its end. He stubbed it out. ‘The damned thing was, I liked him. I admired him. And I knew he loved her too.’
The sad, clear voice of Doris Day sang on into the silence as the song came to an end:
Would that my love could haunt you so;
Knowing I want you so,
I can’t erase your beautiful face before me.
Jim thought, in that one moment, that he’d always hate that song. He’d never hear it, after this, without remembering the buried pain in Andrew Deacon’s eyes; those eyes that wouldn’t meet his own, but kept their focus on the corner of the room, as though that small, fierce effort was the only way that he could manage the emotion, as a man might brace himself against the wind.
‘And so I told myself, well, it’s the chequerboard, you see. Like in The Rubaiyat. You’ve read The Rubaiyat?’ he asked. ‘Because that’s all we are – we’re only playing pieces, and we move where Fate would have us move.’ His gaze slipped finally from the corner; angled down, to his left hand, and to the wedding ban
d he wore. And then he raised his eyes to look at Jim. ‘You asked me why I let her go,’ he said, and smiled – a small, sad smile that stayed with Jim a long time afterwards. ‘The answer is a simple one: She wasn’t mine to keep.’
Somebody clinked a teacup near us. They were starting to clear tables in the little banquet hall.
‘What did he mean,’ I asked: ‘“The chequerboard”?’
Jim Iveson glanced up, and smiled – an echo, I was thinking, of the smile he’d seen in Istanbul, those many years ago.
‘I looked it up,’ he said. ‘I was never a very good student, at school. Reading poetry wasn’t my thing. But I got curious, myself, and so I looked it up. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, by Edward Fitzgerald – that’s what he was quoting from. The part he spoke of goes like this:’ And in his slow, deep voice, he said:
‘’Tis all a chequer board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with men for pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.’
The lines were lovely, resonant; made all the more so by his strongly felt delivery. In the silent moment that came afterwards, I thought about their meaning; thought of all the lives that had been played with – thrust together; torn apart.
Jim said, ‘I saw a lot of sad things, in the war; heard a lot of sad stories. But I always thought Andrew’s was one of the saddest. He never complained, mind you. Went on with life, in his own quiet way. But it might have been so different.’ I remembered how I’d thought that, myself, in my grandmother’s kitchen, the night she had told me her story.
I remembered thinking how life might have been for her, with Deacon, and I’d wondered whether she would have been happier if she had chosen him – but now I knew that Deacon hadn’t let her make the choice. He’d stepped aside. He’d met my Grandpa Murray, and he’d liked him, so he’d sacrificed his own wants in one fleeting, noble move – a tiny playing piece discarded from the game board.
I thought of the few lines that Jim had quoted, and how perfectly they fit the private tragedy of Deacon and my grandmother. I thought, too, of the vicar of St Stephens; how he’d told me that there were no random meetings…and I had an inclination to believe he might be right. Perhaps a greater hand was moving us, according to its will.
Every Secret Thing Page 37
