White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

  She bought some croissants, and then returned to Nhu’s.

  ‘There is nothing on the BBC,’ Nhu said as she made coffee. ‘Only news of the evacuation. Nothing about a surrender.’

  ‘Let’s try Radio Saigon,’ Gabrielle said, adjusting the frequency. She was just in time to hear General Minh begin to speak.

  ‘I believe firmly in reconciliation among all Vietnamese,’ he began emotionally. ‘To avoid needless bloodshed I ask the soldiers of the republic to put an end to all hostilities. Be calm and remain where you are now. To save the lives of the people, do not open fire. I also call on our brothers, the soldiers of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, not to open fire, because we are waiting here to meet with their representatives to discuss the orderly turnover of the reins of government, both civilian and military, without causing senseless bloodshed to the people.’

  At the same time as the speech was being broadcast over the radio, Nhu and Gabrielle could also hear it being relayed over loudspeakers in the streets. Then, as General Minh finished speaking, there came the faint rumble of approaching tanks.

  Despite Nhu’s pleas, Gabrielle refused to stay indoors. Gavin might be with the very first soldiers to enter the city. She had to see the tanks arrive, had to be there.

  Other Saigonese were also hesitantly gathering in the streets, fearful and apprehensive. Gabrielle began to walk in the direction of the Presidential Palace. The North Vietnamese would want to occupy key buildings first, and the first place they would want to fly their flag from would be the Presidential Palace.

  At first there was only one tank. It rumbled majestically and undeterred down the street towards, the palace and crashed through the palace gates. Small groups of bystanders gathered to see what would happen next.

  Minutes later, on the palace balcony, the flag of the Provisional Revolutionary Government was raised over Saigon.

  Other tanks soon followed the first one, and columns of soldiers followed the tanks, but there was no gunfire. Everything was very quiet, very orderly. Gabrielle stood for a moment watching the flag, realizing that at last, for better or for worse, Vietnam was again one country, and then she turned and began to make her way back towards the central square and the Continental.

  That was where Gavin would head first. The Continental had always been the central meeting place in the city for all journalists and Europeans. He would go to the Continental in order to get his bearings, and she would be there, waiting for him.

  The atmosphere in the streets was very strange. The North Vietnamese were neither being welcomed into the city as liberators, nor were they being repelled as invaders. It was as if they were simply being endured by a people who had endured much and would, no doubt, endure much more.

  At the Continental Gabrielle went up to the room she had shared for so long with Serena. It looked out over the square and would give her a grandstand view of all arrivals.

  Occasionally, as the long afternoon progressed, she would go back down into the street and across to Givralle where the proprietor was doing a roaring trade selling freshly baked rolls to North Vietnamese troops. With her face shaded beneath her conical straw hat, and in her black peasant pyjamas, Gabrielle attracted no attention, but she was shocked at how young the majority of the soldiers were.

  She went back to her room and her vigil. She saw the western journalist she had seen earlier, this time he was talking to a South Vietnamese police colonel in front of the large statue of American marines that dominated the square. As she watched, the Vietnamese turned away from the journalist, saluted the statue, and then, before the journalist could stop him, raised the pistol to his head and fired.

  Gabrielle covered her eyes. Despite the lack of house-to-house fighting, or bloodshed in the streets, it was obvious that retribution would be meted out by the North Vietnamese to men who had held high rank in South Vietnam’s army or police force.

  The man in the square below her had decided not to face such retribution, and she knew that there would be many others who would make the same choice.

  Just as dusk was approaching, a fresh convoy of trucks chugged their way up Tu Do Street and into the square. They were crammed full of bo dois, North Vietnamese Army foot soldiers. All of them were dressed in baggy, dark green uniforms; all of them were wearing pith helmets. All but one. His hair was shaggy and tumbled and sun-gold.

  She threw open the tall French windows, leaning perilously far out over the windowsill. ‘Gavin!’ she cried, her heart full. ‘Oh, mon amour! Gavin!?’

  He stood in the back of the crowded truck looking around for the source of the cry. Then he looked upwards. Gabrielle saw a face that at first she scarcely recognized. There were deep lines furrowing his brow and running from nose to mouth, and then she saw his eyes, and they were Gavin’s eyes, warm and grey and blessedly unchanged.

  ‘Gavin, mon amour!’ she shouted again hoarsely.

  For a second he did not recognize her, and then she ripped the black kerchief from her hair, and her sizzling red curls tumbled free. With a cry rent from his very soul he vaulted from the truck, sprinting towards the Continental’s entrance.

  Gabrielle was already at the room of her door, running, running, running. She raced along the corridor, narrowly missing the elderly waiters who, with no customers to wait on, had taken to sleeping in the passageways on rush mats. She raced to the head of the stairs, her heart thundering, the blood crashing in her ears. Down the stairs, running, running, running, taking them two and three at a time.

  He was racing towards her. They were only yards away from each other. Only feet away.

  ‘Oh, Gavin, mon amour!’ she cried, hurtling into his arms, ‘Tu m’es manqué! How I have missed you!’

  As soon as his lips touched hers, the long intervening years went whistling down the wind. Between them, nothing had changed. Between them, nothing ever would change.

  ‘I love you, Gaby!’ he said over and over again. ‘Oh, sweet Christ! How I love you!’

  She was laughing and crying at the same time, touching his face with her fingertips, running them over his eye-brows, his cheeks, his mouth. ‘Is it really you, mon amour? Oh, after all this time, is it really you?’

  Still kissing, still with their arms wrapped tightly around each other, they sat on the red carpeted steps of the Continental’s grand staircase.

  ‘I’ve never stopped missing you, never stopped loving you, Gaby,’ he said huskily.

  Her eyes held his, so full of love that he thought he would die with happiness. ‘Nor me you,’ she said softly and truthfully. ‘Nor me you, chéri.’

  A long time later they moved downstairs to the empty, grandiosely furnished main lounge.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked simply. ‘What happened to you after Dinh was killed?’

  With his arm around her shoulders, as Saigon prepared for its first night under Communist rule, Gavin told her of the life he had led for the last nine years, and which he had begun to think he would always lead.

  ‘I was never treated badly. I was simply put to work in the fields, as were all the other prisoners in the camp I was in. There were no in-depth interrogation sessions, but whenever there was even the slightest contact between myself and any official, I always repeated that I was a friend of North Vietnam. That Comrade Duong Quynh Dinh, a hero of North Vietnam and a personal friend of General Giap, had invited me into the North to chronicle the historic battles that were taking place.

  ‘And every official seemed completely indifferent to what I said. Then, a month ago, there was a change of attitude. I was told that North Vietnam was poised to take Saigon. And that at last I could fulfil the mission Colonel Duong had assigned to me.’

  Gabrielle cuddled close against him. ‘And so you travelled south, with the troops?’

  ‘Yes.’ He could still scarcely believe that it had happened, that he was no longer a prisoner, that he was free and with Gabrielle and in the Continental Palace Hotel in Saigon. ‘And you?’ he said ge
ntly, tilting her face upwards towards him. ‘What have you been doing in the nine years that I have been away?’

  She thought of Radford, and the rock band; of her return to the kind of singing that she loved the best, and of the heady success that she had achieved with it. She thought of the long months and years she had spent besieging the Vietnamese Embassy in Paris to get information about him, the years in Saigon with Nhu and Serena. And she thought of le petit Gavin. None of the other things mattered. She would tell him about them all, eventually. Even about Radford. For now she would tell him about his son.

  When she had finished, and when it was completely dark outside, she said, ‘What happens now, mon amour? Will we be allowed to leave the country?’

  He nodded. ‘I’ve been told to report to the French Embassy. It’s the only embassy still functioning. It may be a long time until there are scheduled flights, but when there are, we’ll be on board one of them.’

  ‘And so it is all over,’ she said, raising the back of his hand to her lips and kissing it. ‘No more waiting. No more heartbreak.’

  He grinned down at her. One of the aged waiters had thoughtfully lit the lamps in the room, and in the lamplight Gavin’s shaggy mop of hair was a dull, burnished gold. Incredibly, at that moment he scarcely looked any older than he had the day she had met him. ‘For you, and me, and for le petit Gavin, everything good and wonderful is just about to start,’ he said huskily, and then he lowered his mouth to hers, and her arms slid around his neck.

  Epilogue

  Abbra and Scott, with Sanh holding Abbra’s hand tightly, stood in the arrivals hall at Orly Airport. Serena and Mike, and Kylie and le petit Gavin were with them. An Air France 707 from Bangkok had just landed, and Gabrielle and Gavin were aboard it.

  ‘Oh, goodness, I wish they would hurry the passengers through passport and customs!’ Abbra said impatiently. ‘It’s been on the ground for fifteen minutes now!’

  Serena’s mouth was so dry that she couldn’t speak. Her arm was around le petit Gavin’s shoulders, and the emotional drama of the scene that was about to be enacted was almost too much for her.

  ‘They’re beginning to come through now,’ Scott said tensely as a handful of passengers filed out, pushing luggage-laden trolleys before them.

  ‘Oh, God!’ Abbra whispered beneath her breath, her eyes shining. ‘They will be here in a minute! Oh, I can’t believe it!’

  An old woman came out of the swinging doors leading from the customs hall, and then a couple of teenagers. Serena felt as if she were going to die with nervous anticipation. They could be only minutes away now. Only seconds.

  The doors swung open again, and this time no heavily laden luggage trolley was trundled through. Instead, Gavin and Gabrielle burst into the departure hall, holding hands.

  Serena saw a fair-haired, surprisingly boyish-looking man in his early thirties, with warm grey eyes and a dazzlingly attractive smile.

  ‘Gabrielle!’ Abbra cried, racing forwards.

  Serena was hard on her heels. For a few crazy seconds they hugged and kissed, three women who had shared the same brand of suffering, who were bound closer together as friends than they would ever be with anyone else, ever.

  At the same moment, Serena and Abbra remembered le petit Gavin. They stood aside. Le petit Gavin’s eyes were fixed on Gavin’s. Suddenly they were all very still. If there was noise in the arrivals hall around them, none of them was aware of it.

  Gavin smiled at his son. ‘Hello, Gavin,’ he said tenderly. ‘We have a lot of time to make up for, don’t we?’ and he opened his arms wide.

  Le petit Gavin uttered a strangled cry and then sprinted forwards into his father’s arms, clasping him tight, tears falling down his face.

  Gabrielle looked around at her friends, her smile radiant. ‘I think some introductions are called for,’ she said, her eyes dancing with laughter at the ridiculous realization that there they were, all such good friends, and yet not everyone had been introduced. ‘Scott has not yet been introduced to Serena and Mike, Mike hasn’t been introduced to Abbra, and Gavin has not yet been introduced to anybody!’

  ‘Let’s make all the introductions over champagne at La Closerie des Lilas,’ Gavin said, setting his son back on the ground but keeping firmly hold of his hand.

  ‘A good idea!’ Abbra enthused as Scott slipped his arm around her shoulders.

  ‘A wonderful idea,’ Serena agreed in the cut-glass English accent that amused Gabrielle and Mike so much.

  Mike took Serena’s hand in his and Gavin’s free hand encircled Gabrielle’s waist. Abbra and Serena and Gabrielle looked across at each other and laughed with sheer joy. Then, their children at their side, they walked out of the arrivals hall into the Parisian May sunshine, three stunningly beautiful women, deeply and happily in love.

  THE END

  Copyright

  First published in 1989 by Transworld

  This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  www.curtisbrown.co.uk

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3012-0 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3011-3 POD

  Copyright © Margaret Pemberton, 1989

  The right of Margaret Pemberton to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The Macmillan Group has no responsibility for the information provided by any author websites whose address you obtain from this book (‘author websites’).

  The inclusion of author website addresses in this book does not constitute an endorsement by or association with us of such sites or the content, products, advertising or other materials presented on such sites.

  This book remains true to the original in every way. Some aspects may appear out-of-date to modern-day readers. Bello makes no apology for this, as to retrospectively change any content would be anachronistic and undermine the authenticity of the original.

  Bello has no responsibility for the content of the material in this book. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not constitute an endorsement by, or association with, us of the characterization and content.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books

  and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and

  news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters

  so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.