‘You’re going to what?’ Radford yelled, sexually satisfied lethargy vanishing as he shot upright in the bed. ‘You’re going where?’
‘To the peace talks,’ Gabrielle said composedly. ‘I’m going to speak to Xuan Thuy, the chief North Vietnamese delegate, and I’m going to ask him where Gavin is being held.’
Chapter Thirty-two
In Los Angeles, Abbra, too, wondered what political changes would result now that Ho was dead.
‘That’s why the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong made such an all-out attempt to take the South last year at Tet,’ Scott said to her wryly. ‘It must have been obvious to them that Ho was an ill man who only had a year or so to live. I guess they wanted a decisive victory that would enable him to die happy.’
The war still played a large part in both their lives. Abbra kept in regular communication with both Gabrielle and Serena, and in November, two months after Ho’s death, when another massive antiwar demonstration took place in Washington, both she and Scott were among the quarter of a million participants.
‘What are we going to do about this latest idea of yours?’ he said to her as they flew back home to Los Angeles. ‘Are we going to go ahead with it?’
Her hand tightened in his. Serena had written to her, telling her of how some Cáy Thóng orphans had been adopted by European families. The bureaucratic difficulties involved in the arrangements were horrendous, she had written in her large distinctive handwriting, but when I finally waved the children good-bye, knowing that they were going to homes where they would be loved and cherished, the satisfaction I felt was the deepest I have ever experienced.
The letter had profoundly affected Abbra. She and Scott had been married for over a year now and though they had both been united in their desire to have a baby as quickly as possible, no baby had as yet put in an appearance.
‘There is no medical reason why you shouldn’t conceive,’ the gynaecologist she had consulted had told her. ‘You must be patient, Mrs Ellis. Nature often takes her time about these things.’
She still hadn’t despaired of having a baby of her own, but Serena’s letter opened up other possibilities. Why didn’t she and Scott adopt a Vietnamese baby who had been abandoned or orphaned? If they had a baby of their own afterwards, it wouldn’t matter. The child they had adopted would simply be a ready-made older brother or sister for it.
She hadn’t been afraid of suggesting such an unconventional idea to Scott as she would have been of suggesting it to Lewis. There had been times, in her short marriage to Lewis, when she knew that she had made very wrong assumptions about the way he was thinking or feeling. She still remembered her bewilderment and horror when he had revealed that there were some aspects of battle that he actually enjoyed. She had felt as if they were each on opposite sides of a deep chasm, a chasm that had been bridged only by her very idealistic love for him.
No such chasm had ever sprung open at her feet while she had been married to Scott, and it was unthinkable that it would ever do so. They were as mentally in tune as they had become physically in tune. On their first night in bed together he had overcome her momentary nervousness with passionate ease, making her laugh as well as arousing desire so intense that it almost bordered on pain.
Lewis had always made love to her with slow, tender deliberation. Scott’s lovemaking was stunningly uninhibited. He taught her that in bed, between two people who loved each other, nothing was wrong or offensive or out of bounds if it gave mutual pleasure.
Their marriage, when it became public knowledge, gave rise to a lot of prurient speculation and gossip, but between the two of them there was never the slightest problem. Lewis’s name was mentioned freely and often. His photograph stood on her desk as it had always, only now it stood alongside a photograph of herself and Scott.
On their first wedding anniversary her father-in-law had telephoned them, his voice abrupt with embarrassed awkwardness as he wished them well. Despite repeated attempts at reconciliation on their part, it was the first time he had spoken to either of them since the day they had told him of their decision to marry.
There was no such overture from Abbra’s parents. The marriage was one they were totally incapable of accepting. What made things even worse, for them, was that Scott was such a public figure. There were regular articles in football magazines about him. His name was mentioned with zestful enthusiasm by television sports commentators. His photograph, with Abbra at his side, appeared regularly in the gossip columns of nationwide newspapers. It seemed to them that everyone in the country knew that their daughter had been widowed and had, within months, married her playboy football-star brother-in-law.
Abbra knew very well that her parents would be violently opposed to her adopting a Vietnamese orphan, but she was determined she and Scott would live as they wished to.
As the stewardess moved deftly through the first class cabin, removing empty glasses and serving fresh drinks, Abbra lifted her face away from Scott’s shoulder, where it had been resting, and said softly, ‘Do you want to, darling?’
He nodded, smiling down at her, his eyes so full of love for her that her heart seemed physically to turn within her chest. ‘You know I do,’ he said, and at the husky undertone in his voice she knew that he was thinking about their previous night’s lovemaking.
She smiled, a deeply happy woman, and with her hand still clasped in his, laid her head once more against his shoulder. ‘I’ll write to Serena the minute that we reach home,’ she said, wondering how long it would take for all the necessary documentation to be completed. She wondered, also, how old the child that would be sent to them would be and if it would be a boy or a girl, and not caring an iota either way.
As they walked through the arrivals lounge at the Los Angeles airport, they were spotted by photographers almost immediately. Over the last year or so they had become a well-known media couple. The public liked to be reminded that some of their hard-muscled, handsome heart-throbs were also genuine Mr Nice-Guys, and since his marriage Scott had fallen most definitely into the Mr Nice-Guy category.
Abbra, too, had become worthy of media attention in her own right. Her novel about North Beach, and the burgeoning Beat Generation, had won a prestigious literary prize, and had established her very firmly as a young writer of great promise.
Flashbulbs popped and a journalist who was hanging around the arrival area for any story that might come his way called out, ‘Hey, Scott! I understand you’ve just flown in from attending the antiwar demonstration in Washington. How do you think your brother would have felt about that? Didn’t he pick up a handful of medals before he was blown away in ’Nam?’
It was the kind of tasteless, brutal question that was regularly thrown at him by some members of the press, and though he was filled with an overwhelming desire to punch the journalist in the nose, he merely said with practised ease, ‘I make it a rule not to talk about my brother in airport lounges, I find it disrespectful. What do you think about the Broncos’ performance this week? That new head coach of theirs is certainly hurling them from the backwoods into the twentieth century. They’re a team really going places.’
They were outside the arrivals lounge now, but the journalist was still hard on their heels. Suddenly there came a distant cry of ‘I tell you, Brigitte Bardot is aboard the New York flight that has just landed! She’s travelling as Mrs Evelyn Watson!’ Their tormentor spun on his heel, almost falling over himself in his haste to run back inside the building.
‘Thank goodness for that,’ Abbra said with a sigh of relief as they walked over to the car park. ‘Another minute and we would have been in “how does it feel to sleep with your brother’s widow” country.’
Scott grinned. ‘One of these days I’m going to tell them that it feels just fine and they can make of it what they want!’
They didn’t have far to drive to reach the sanctuary of their home. Although one of the first things they had done after their marriage was to buy the little beach ho
use that Abbra had been renting, they also had a home in Westwood, less than twelve miles from the airport.
It was an elegant house, in an elegant district, and Abbra had decorated and furnished it with warmth and love. The floors were of polished beech, the rugs Oriental in soft colours of dusty rose and muted green. There were plants everywhere and comfortable sofas and chairs. On the walls were the paintings they had bought for each other over the past two years: a La Jolla beach scene that had been Abbra’s first Christmas gift to him, a watercolour of the Spanish Steps that he had bought for her in Rome, an oil painting depicting a rainy evening beside the Seine, a stunning charcoal sketch of Lincoln Cathedral.
There were shelves of books, and books piled up on the glass-topped coffee tables. Poetry, and English and American classics for Abbra, biographies and spy thrillers for Scott. Beneath a long, chintz-covered window seat were hundreds of LPs. Oscar Peterson and Sarah Vaughan companionably piled against the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and Chopin and Mozart.
In the kitchen there were copper pans on the walls and jugfuls of fresh flowers and in the bedroom there was a brass-headed bed covered with a white damask French counterpane. The walls were pale yellow, the carpet was creamy-beige and ankle deep, and the windows looked out over their flower-filled garden towards Santa Monica and the sea.
There was a blue and white decorated guest room that Patti had often occupied, and another room that had stood empty for too long.
That evening Abbra opened the door on to it, and stood looking at it thoughtfully. It had been decorated as a nursery. Hand-painted nursery-rhyme figures decorated the white walls. The bassinet was a French antique that they had bought on a visit to Gabrielle in Paris. Stuffed toy teddy bears and tigers and elephants were crammed on to the seat of a low-legged, Victorian carved-rosewood chair which she had reupholstered herself. Soon she would be sitting in the chair, telling bedtime stories to her adopted son or daughter. A warm tingle of excitement surged through her veins. She would need to buy a small bed in case the child that they were sent was no longer a baby. If the child was a girl, then she would pretty up the room a little more. If it was a boy, then she would ask Scott’s advice as to the kind of toys she should buy, toys to supplement the waiting teddies and tigers and elephants.
It was February the following year before Serena was at last able to write to them and confirm that all the necessary documentation had been processed and that now all that was necessary was the exit visa for Fam, the five-month-old baby girl whom they were to adopt.
She was brought in to us from a village some twenty miles north of the city. Her parents both died when the village was caught in cross fire between American forces and Viet Cong. She was severely malnourished when we received her and even now is not very robust. The sooner she leaves Saigon the happier I shall be. We are suffering from a measles epidemic at the moment and several children have already died.
March came and went and still little Fam’s exit visa was not processed.
Believe me, I am doing everything that I can, Serena had written in angry frustration.
Fam’s travel documentation is with the Vietnamese authorities and every day I inquire I am told that the documentation will be finalized ‘tomorrow’. I keep thinking of a few lines from Kipling:
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: ‘A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.’
If I should meet an unexpected end, it will be the most apt epitaph in the world for me!
Two weeks later there was another letter, full of rage and despair.
Dearest Abbra,
I don’t know how to break the news to you, but little Fam has died. She caught measles three days ago and was totally unable to withstand the disease. If only the authorities had processed her travel documentation with even partial efficiency she would be alive and well and with you in Los Angeles. As it was, we received her exit visa just two hours after burying her.
For days Abbra felt numb. She had never held Fam, had never even seen her, but for weeks she had regarded her as her daughter. And now she was dead and the little room that she had made so pretty for her would never be hers.
‘It doesn’t mean the end of our plan to adopt, sweetheart,’ Scott had said to her gently. ‘The one thing Vietnam has, God help her, is an abundance of orphans.’
‘I know,’ she had said quietly, ‘but I need to grieve for the child I thought was going to be ours. If I don’t, who else will?’
He had given her a sad smile. ‘Me,’ he said, pulling her lovingly into the circle of his arms and holding her close.
Towards the end of her letter, Serena had written bitterly:
Fam isn’t the only victim of crass inefficiency. Do you remember Sanh? He is the little boy who was taken so very ill with haemorrhagic fever within his first few days of coming to us. He nearly died then because he was left unattended and uncared for in an overcrowded hospital ward. Shortly afterwards he contracted polio. He is nine years old now and in leg irons but the most cheerful, lovable child imaginable. Last Wednesday he came down with what seemed to be a sudden toxicosis.
Unfortunately, neither Mike, Lucy, or I were there at the time. A large bomb had gone off in Cholon, killing dozens of people and injuring scores more, and we had been asked to go down there and give what assistance we could. In our absence, the Australian girl who had been left in charge took Sanh to the hospital, the same one he had previously been taken to. The minute I knew what had happened I rushed down there to see him. Once again he had been left alone and unattended, this time in a passageway full of decaying food and medical refuse. He had a temperature of 105 and was delirious. Mike came down to the hospital in a taxi and we took him immediately back to Cáy Thóng, where I have been nursing him night and day for the past three days. This morning, thank God, his temperature has begun to drop. I truly believe that if we hadn’t removed him from the hospital, he, too, like Fam, would be dead by now.
Abbra reread the entire letter before sitting down to write back to Serena. Sanh was nine years old. She and Scott had imagined adopting a small child. A baby, or possibly a toddler. It would be strange to become overnight the parents of a nine-year-old boy, and a boy who was also crippled.
She sat for a long time, the letter in her hand, thinking. Then she pushed her chair away from her desk and went in search of Scott.
He was in the large basement room that had been converted into a gymnasium, working out. For a brief moment, as she watched him lifting weights, his arm and shoulder muscles bulging, his magnificent body gleaming with perspiration, she wondered if what she was going to suggest to him was fair. He was an athlete. Physical fitness was essential to him. If he had a son, he would surely want a son who would be able to follow in his footsteps, a son he would be able to play football and baseball with. To run and to swim and to go off on camping weekends with.
He looked across at her and grinned, putting the weights down. ‘What is it, sweetheart? News from Patti?’
Patti had telephoned earlier in the week to say that French translation rights were pending on Abbra’s newly finished novel and that she would be in touch immediately after the deal was finalized.
Abbra shook her head. Incredibly, over the last few days she hadn’t written a word and hadn’t given her work a thought. ‘No. It’s something else.’
At the hesitancy in her voice he rose to his feet, throwing a towel around his neck and walking towards her. She was wearing a pair of faded denim jeans and a gentian blue, open-necked cotton shirt. Her dark, jaw-length hair fell forwards softly at either side of her face; and her feet, with their pearly-pink painted toenails, were bare. He was filled with the sudden urge to make love to her, to slide her down beneath him then and there on the polished pine floor. Her eyes met his, clouded with uncertainty, and he suppressed the desire with difficulty, saying gently, realizing that something was troubling her, ‘Is it Fam? Are you
brooding about her and unable to work?’
She looked up at him, loving him so much that her chest seemed to ache. ‘No, it’s not Fam. I’ve accepted what happened to Fam. Or accepted it as much as I will ever.’
Beneath the electric lights of the basement his shaggy mop of undisciplined hair was the colour of old gold. A trickle of perspiration was running down his throat, and she wanted to stand on tiptoe and lick it away. As his eyes held hers, she knew with a surge of relief and shame that by doubting what his reaction to her suggestion was going to be, she was doing him a great disservice.
‘I’ve been rereading Serena’s letter. Do you remember her references to Sanh, the nine-year-old boy who is crippled by polio and who has just been so ill?’
Scott nodded, wiping his neck slowly with the towel, a slight frown touching his brow.
‘Serena hasn’t said so, but I imagine that a crippled nine-year-old will be far less likely to be adopted than small, healthy babies, and so …’
‘And so you wondered if we might adopt him,’ he finished for her, his frown clearing. He had been apprehensive that she had been mentioning Sanh because the child’s plight was causing her even further distress. Now that he knew what was on her mind, he slipped his arm around her shoulders, saying, ‘It’s a good idea, sweetheart. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it when we first read Serena’s letter.’
‘And you don’t mind … about his disability?’
He gave her a mock punch against her jaw. ‘A child of our own could be born with a physical handicap. You wouldn’t expect it to make any difference to me then, would you? Besides, with the right kind of medical treatment and the right kind of care, who is to say that he will have to remain in leg irons? I don’t know a damn thing about polio and its after effects, but while the adoption documentation is going through I’m going to find out all I can.’
White Christmas in Saigon Page 58
