White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

  She read and reread the letter and then put it down thoughtfully. It hadn’t occurred to her that there was such a vital difference in status between MIA and POW. Until Kyle’s disappearance, she had hardly been aware that there was a difference. She had thought there was nothing she could do for Kyle, but she had been wrong. She could campaign for his status to be changed. And to do that, she would first have to inform the United States Army that she was an army wife.

  It was a decision she had almost made before she had read Chuck’s letter. Although her father-in-law had forwarded that particular piece of mail to her, she couldn’t rely on him. If she wanted to be sure of receiving every bit of possible information about Kyle, then she had to inform the correct authorities that she was his wife, and that she was entitled to receive it.

  Two weeks after she had written to the army, enclosing her birth certificate and her wedding certificate, she received an official reply. For the first time she was given an official account of Kyle’s last mission and the way in which he had been shot down. And she was told of how Chuck Wilson had flown through enemy fire repeatedly in an effort to land beside Kyle’s blazing Huey, and of how, in doing so, he had sustained near fatal injuries.

  She had reread Chuck Wilson’s letter again. He had written merely that ‘the ground fire was unbelievable’. There was no mention that he had been injured in his attempt to rescue Kyle. No mention that he had, apparently, been writing to her from a hospital bed.

  The letter from the army also apologized that Kyle’s personal belongings had been sent to his father and not to her, but assured her that there had been no personal mail among the items. It finished by asking her to treat all information regarding her husband as confidential.

  ‘What information?’ she had said aloud, bewildered. She had written back asking why, if her husband had been seen scrambling from his Huey alive, he was being listed as MIA and not as a possible prisoner of war. She also asked for the name of the hospital where Charles Wilson was being treated so that she could write to him and thank him for his brave rescue attempt.

  At the beginning of October, she received her next official communication from the United States Army. She opened the buff-coloured envelope without any premonition that it might contain news other than the information she had asked for.

  ‘—your husband’s name has been included in a list of names recently released by Hanoi. It is believed that he is being held in Hoa Lo prison, Hanoi. In view of this information, your husband’s status has been changed from MIA to POW. You may be certain that you will be informed of any further information received regarding your husband. Inasmuch as your husband is now being carried in a captured status, it is suggested, for his safety, that you reveal only his name, rank, file number, and date of birth to inquiries outside your immediate family—’

  He was alive. She began to tremble, and then to laugh and cry at the same time. He was in some ghastly prison, but at least he was alive.

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t be dead!’ she exulted aloud, as if he were in the room with her. ‘You’re too damned hip to be dead!’

  Rupert was intensely relieved by her news. He knew how guilty she felt, and though he believed her guilt to be irrational, he had been unable to convince her.

  ‘Nothing you did was responsible for Kyle haring back to the States and becoming a pilot,’ he had said gently when she had told him why she felt so guilty. ‘You can’t imagine for a moment that if I had been in Kyle’s shoes, and if I had walked in on that odious little scene in the nursery, that I would have imagined you were a willing party to what was taking place. The fact that Kyle did so only proves to me how little he knows about you.’ Or loves you, he had been tempted to add, but hadn’t.

  Looking across at her as they sat on the sofa in his elegant Knightsbridge home and she finished telling him about Kyle’s official change of status, he hoped that the news would enable her to shed some of her guilt, and that their relationship would at last return to normal.

  His arm was around her shoulders, and he pulled her closer to him, sliding his free hand up a long, slender, smoothly naked leg. ‘I’ve missed you in my bed, lady,’ he said, his voice thickening. ‘Welcome back.’

  Despite the brisk weather, beneath her minuscule skirt she was wearing only the briefest of panties. He pulled them low, her honey-gold pubic hair brushing springily against the palm of his hand as he began to caressingly separate the lips of her labia, sliding his fingers into her hot moistness.

  She gave a deep moan, stiffening and contracting against him. It had been nearly two months since she had made love. And Kyle was now no longer missing in action, feared dead, but a prisoner in Hanoi. She closed her eyes as Rupert lowered his mouth to hers, his thumb circling arousingly over her clitoris, his fingers continuing to move and probe. She had not made love and Kyle was safe. Very gently she pushed her hands up against Rupert’s chest, pushing him away from her.

  He looked down at her queryingly, his hand still moving rhythmically, loving the slippery, excited feel of her.

  ‘No,’ she said, her eyes apologetic. ‘I’m sorry, Rupert. I can’t.’

  He frowned slightly, his penis so engorged it was straining painfully against his trousers. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, his voice dark with need. ‘There’s no reason in the world for us not to make love now.’

  ‘There is.’ She was so excited she was nearly screaming, but she stilled his moving hand with hers. ‘I didn’t make love and Kyle is no longer missing in action but a prisoner of war. If I continue not to make love, then he’ll be released, I know it.’

  He stared at her. ‘You are joking, aren’t you?’ he asked at last.

  Smoke-grey eyes, wide-set and dark-lashed, held his. ‘No,’ she said, wriggling slightly and freeing herself from his hand. ‘I know it isn’t very logical, but…’

  ‘It isn’t logical at all!’ Rupert said, thwarted desire trying his patience to the limit. ‘It’s sheer primitive superstitious nonsense! How on earth can your making or not making love affect what happens to Kyle in Hanoi? And when you talk of not making love until he’s released, how long have you got in mind? The war has been going on for years already. It’s hardly likely to come to a sudden halt just because you’ve taken a vow of celibacy! Kyle could be in Hanoi for years!’

  She stood up, smoothing her miniskirt down over her thighs, her hand trembling slightly. ‘Kyle couldn’t endure captivity for years,’ she said unsteadily. ‘It would kill him.’

  He rose to his feet slowly, facing her, bitterly regretting his ill-chosen words. ‘Maybe he won’t be there for years,’ he said quietly. ‘A war doesn’t have to end for prisoners to be exchanged.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed, slipping on her shoes. ‘It doesn’t.’

  She was going, and he knew that she would not be coming back. He regarded her with loving affection, and pity, and regret.

  ‘If he is exchanged, it won’t be because you have been behaving like a nun,’ he said, resigned.

  Despite the hideous images his words had conjured up, of Kyle being immured in Hoa Lo prison for years on end, an amused smile quirked the corners of her mouth. ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said with a return of her old jauntiness. ‘After all, going without sex is the greatest sacrifice I could possibly make!’

  At the end of October her father telephoned her to say that he and her mother were going to Barbados for the winter. Although his domestic staff was quite capable of looking after his aging spaniels, he said the dogs would prefer it if a member of the family was also there and would she kindly oblige?

  She obliged quickly. Bedingham was at its best in the autumn, and she had been away from it for far too long. She drove north out of London, beneath a pale apricot sky, feeling as if a physical burden were being lifted from her shoulders with each mile she travelled. At Bedingham she would be able to see the future more clearly. Her affair with Rupert was over, although he was still the first person she turned to if she needed advice, or
sympathy or support. He had offered her a partnership in the antique shop in an effort to both retain her services in the shop and to ensure that contact was maintained between them, but she had turned it down.

  She didn’t want any encumbrances, however pleasurable. Kyle’s capture had changed her life. Though she couldn’t imagine what the future held, she was certain it was going to be something far different from anything she had experienced in her past. And when it came she wanted to be ready for it.

  Lance had left several messages on her answering machine, but she had not contacted him. It was as if denying herself the relief of a reconciliation with him was yet another of her voluntary penances.

  In November, during his weekly telephone call, Rupert rather ruefully informed Serena that he had become the regular escort of Lady Sarah Mellbury, the seventeen-year-old daughter of an old school friend.

  Serena had been vaguely amused and not the slightest regretful. If she had wanted to resume her old relationship with Rupert, she knew that Lady Sarah would have been no obstacle. But she didn’t want to resume their old relationship, at least not yet. She wanted to remain at Bedingham, tramping the grounds and the beech woods with the dogs and returning to drink Earl Grey and to eat piles of buttered crumpets before a roaring log fire.

  The army had forwarded her the name of the military hospital in Japan where Chuck Wilson was being treated and she had written to him, thanking him for his brave attempt to rescue Kyle.

  Just before Christmas she received a reply. It was an odd letter, brief and curt and indicating that he saw no reason why they should enter into further correspondence with each other. She wondered why. As a buddy of Kyle’s, it was impossible to imagine him as being anything other than outgoing and extrovert, and his first letter to her, though full of pain, had been sympathetic and friendly.

  He had been transferred to a hospital in the States and she decided not to be deterred by his almost formal reply. She wrote again, asking him when he expected to be discharged, saying that she would like to meet him, so that she could thank him personally.

  When the New Year arrived, Serena was convinced that Lance was, for once, correct. Antiwar demonstrations were necessary if the war was ever to be brought to an end. She drove up to London to take part in a demonstration.

  It was bitterly cold, and there was snow and ice underfoot as she merged with an amazingly large group of stalwart marchers, tramping with placards held high from Trafalgar Square to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

  She marched along near the front of the procession, linking arms with a bearded hippie carrying a banner with the words I HATE WAR on it, and a fierce-looking girl who said she was a student at the London School of Economics.

  As they entered Grosvenor Square, chanting ‘Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, Americans out! Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi Minh, Americans out! Americans out!’ they joined an advance group of protestors already in the square. A number of mounted police were gathering in the adjoining side streets. A grin touched her mouth as she saw Lance’s distinctive silky-gold shoulder-length hair. It had been over four months since he had reacted so horribly to the news that Kyle had been shot down, and she had long ago forgiven him. She had also decided that after such a long time, a reconciliation would no longer be an act of disloyalty towards Kyle.

  In an effort to negate the effeminacy of his hair, Lance had grown a Che Guevara style moustache. He was smoothing it with his forefinger, casting an assessing eye over the numbers entering the square, when he saw her. At first there was only blank amazement on his face and then, as her grin deepened and she waved exuberantly in his direction, relief flooded his eyes and he began to shoulder his way through the crowd towards her.

  ‘Serry! What the devil are you doing here?’ he shouted to her as the chanting around them became louder and more vitriolic and the police horses began to edge their way into the square.

  ‘I thought I’d come and give you a little sisterly support!’ she yelled back, hugging him tight, insanely happy to be back on the old footing with him again.

  ‘Then stick with me and keep away from the horses! Christ alone knows why they’re being used for crowd control when it’s so slippy underfoot. One of them is sure to go down!’

  ‘I hope not,’ Serena said passionately, ‘We’re not such a large crowd. They don’t need to use horses to keep us in control.’

  Lance gave a snort of derision. ‘You’ve a lot to learn,’ he said darkly, grateful that she was making it unnecessary for him to apologize to her, that she knew that he was sorry, that his hideous little display of glee need never be mentioned between them again.

  He took hold of her arm, forcing a way through towards the front of the crowd. ‘What have you been doing with yourself all winter? Did you know that the parents have fled to Barbados?’

  She nodded, squeezing after him, narrowly avoiding being hit in the eye by a placard declaring BRING THE TROOPS HOME. ‘Yes, Daddy phoned me before they went and asked me if I would look after the dogs. I’ve been at Bedingham ever since.’

  ‘Alone?’ The words were out, and the implication that if he had known he would have joined her there, before he could stop them.

  She tactfully avoided his eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said as a scuffle broke out on the edge of the crowd between one of the demonstrators and a foot policeman. ‘I’ve been doing some reading, and thinking, and I’ve been bombarding the United States Army with letters.’ She kept her eyes firmly averted from his. ‘Kyle’s status has been changed from MIA to POW. He’s in Hoa Lo prison, in Hanoi. What I want to know from the army is what the hell they’re going to do to get him out.’

  ‘And have you had much success?’ he asked, knowing damn well that she couldn’t possibly have.

  ‘No,’ she said grimly. ‘But they haven’t heard the last from me. Not by a long shot.’

  In March her parents returned from Barbados to Bedingham and she reluctantly returned to her mother’s pied á terre in London. She began to be seen at parties and discos again, but she felt as if she were attending them merely out of force of habit. The more fun everyone around her was having, the more acutely she was aware of what Kyle must be suffering. When she went out to dinner with Rupert, and he sent back the wine because it wasn’t chilled enough, she wondered whether Kyle was receiving clean water to drink, whether water was there for him when he needed it. If he was manacled and shackled for large parts of the day. If he ever thought of her, and of the precious hours they had spent together at Bedingham.

  In April she received another letter from Chuck Wilson. He had been discharged from the hospital and was going to stay on an uncle’s ranch in Wyoming for the summer, to recuperate. He still made no mention of his injuries, and he barely mentioned Kyle or his incarceration in Hoa Lo. The letter seemed hardly worth the bother of writing, unless, as there was no mention of his Wyoming address, it had been written to let her know that he would not be contactable for several months and to dissuade her from corresponding with him further.

  ‘But I will, Mr Wilson,’ she said to herself. The paper was stamped with what she presumed was his home address in Atlantic City, and she put it away carefully in a bureau drawer. She was beginning to have a shrewd suspicion as to why his letters were so out of character for a man who had been Kyle’s best buddy, and she had every intention of finding out if her suspicions were correct. She would make contact with him when he returned from Wyoming,

  and it wouldn’t be by letter. It would be in person.

  All through the summer, her letters to the United States Army, and to the casualty assistance officer who had been assigned to her, continued. She asked if she could be given the addresses of other wives with husbands imprisoned in Hoa Lo, so that she could write to them, and introduce herself to them, but no addresses were ever forwarded. By the end of the summer her patience was wearing thin.

  ‘They won’t release any information to me,’ she said exasperatedly to Lance as they shared a punt on the upper reaches of the Thames.
‘I don’t even know how many other men are being held in Hoa Lo. If I had the names and addresses of some of the other wives, I could at least write to them. They are probably just as frustrated by the American government’s policy of discouraging inter- POW-family relationships as I am. We could form a pressure group of sorts. Hell, we have to do something. Some men have been held prisoner since 1965!’

  ‘Write an open letter to The Washington Post, appealing for any other wives in the same situation to contact you,’ Lance, said practically, punting around the low-lying tendrils of a willow tree. ‘And go to the States. There’s a massive demonstration being planned for October in Washington. Dr Benjamin Spock is going to speak and a vigil is going to be held at the Pentagon. It’s supposed to be the biggest antiwar demo yet held.’

  ‘And it’s at the end of the summer,’ Serena said cryptically.

  ‘What does that remark mean?’

  Serena lay back against the punt cushions, a white silk shirt open at her throat, her long legs encased in a pair of pale blue jeans. ‘It means that someone who has spent the summer in Wyoming will no longer be there,’ she teased.

  Lance didn’t rise to the bait. Instead of asking her who the devil she knew in Wyoming, he said instead, ‘Are you going to go to Washington for the Pentagon demo?’

  She nodded, her eyes gleaming with fierce determination. ‘Yes. And I’m not going to come back until I’ve made contact with other women whose husbands are being held in Hanoi. I can’t be the only wife frustrated by the American government’s attitude towards the prisoner issue. There must be other rebellious waiting wives. And I’m going to find them.’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  After the dizzying success of the open-air concert, life had been so hectic that Gabrielle scarcely had time to draw breath. The group had been inundated with offers from agents, all wanting to assume dictatorial control of their affairs. Radford had rebuffed all the offers no matter how extravagant the promises.