On Green Dolphin Street

by Sebastian Faulks

  When Frank had gone, Mary went back to sewing nametapes onto Richard’s socks (six pairs, gray, woolen, knee-length, the printed clothes list specified). She loved looking at his name in print: Richard van der Linden—so solid, so real. It was ridiculous: he was a creation of her and Charlie’s imagination, an idea they had fancifully invested with a character, not a proper person with a grown-up printed name. Someone was bound to find them out sooner or later.

  Charlie was due to have lunch with two congressional aides and had booked a table in the upstairs room at a recently fashionable Italian restaurant on 17th near the junction with L Street. The venue was convenient for one of his favorite bars, the tall sitting room of the Hay-Adams Hotel, where the price of drinks was offset by the discretion of the assiduous staff. At twelve-thirty, he set himself down in a wing chair by the vast fireplace and lit a cigarette while the waiter brought his dry martini, straight up, with no risk of alcohol displacement by ice, and no olive or twist. With both hands, he raised the trembling meniscus to his lips and sucked; he closed his eyes as he rested his head against the back of the chair.

  The bar with its exalted ceilings reminded him of childhood Gothic, the illustrations to fairy tales or the castle home of a sinister uncle. Logs crackled in the fireplace as the waiter answered Charlie’s brief wave and replaced the empty glass with a new one; he lacked only a basking Irish wolfhound at his feet. It amused him to linger in this play world while a brief walk away the earnest young men in button-down collars pounded the corridors of the White House, gabbling, minuting, telephoning; and five minutes’ taxi ride the other way, the real city, the southern settlement hacked from the surrounding swamp, carried on in its impoverished way, unmoved by the proximity of world decisions and the jabbing fingers of a thousand intent stenographers.

  The second martini filled Charlie with a sense of peace, though he could feel a tightness in the skin of his forehead and the approaching thrum of pain behind the temples. He took two aspirin from a small tin in his jacket pocket and sluiced them down; when he had finished his drink, he played briefly with the idea of having another. The moment of balance he was looking for, the instant of perfect pitch, was becoming harder to find each day. Once there had been a time when two martinis at noon had made him feel like a king; not only that, but the feeling had lasted, with a glass of wine here or there, for two or three hours, even sometimes until the evening scotch. In that mood, he could see all his troubles for what they were—insolent, negligible—and he could live off the feeling of reassurance. Now it was almost impossible to prescribe the mixture, or the volume, that would liberate that powerful sensation; and on the rare occasions that he found it, it seemed to last only a few minutes.

  He was late for his two lunch companions, who were at the restaurant’s downstairs bar, where, after the handshakes, he was offered a drink.

  “What are you chaps having?” he said, peering at their glasses.

  “Martinis.”

  “Well, I suppose I might as well join you.”

  He took a second one up with him to lunch. The sight of the others drinking white coffee with their food made him queasy, and he pushed his buttered macaroni and fegato alla veneziana more or less untouched to one side. He drank some iced water and for a moment reached a stage of hot balance, as one of the aides talked of foreign policy realignments. Charlie was so bored that he thought he might weep, there at the table, in long hysterical sobs: he detested every word they said and the tawdry, life-denying world they represented. Perhaps all they really wanted was an invitation to the Ambassador’s residence, something they could tell their wives about or to which they even hoped to bring them.

  Charlie’s neighbor plowed his last piece of chicken through the red sauce on his plate, then raised his cup, on which the milk had separated from the coffee, and drank it down.

  “Excuse me.” Charlie rose from the table and went to the head of the stairs: he felt drops of sweat on his chill forehead and upper lip. The stairs looked vertiginous; the floor at the foot of them heaved beneath his gaze. Clasping the handrail, he limped down step by step. With all the mental power that had once been bent to solving academic problems, he forced himself to concentrate on negotiating the width of the slippery room to the door marked “Signori.” The sweat felt like a full, cold mustache as he twisted the handle and went inside. He made it no farther than the doorway before he vomited an arc of colorless liquid across the tiles. He pulled open the door of a cubicle and slumped down on the floor. His cheek was cold against the porcelain, but his head was too heavy to move.

  After her lunch with Kelly Eberstadt, Mary had time to do some food shopping before she went to collect the children. Christmas was approaching. The lights were glimmering on early trees in the living-room windows of the residential streets; the gas station on Woodley Road had a giant spruce with flashing crimson bulbs; the supermarket had frosted greetings sprayed across the windows. Perhaps at this moment, a few minutes down the road, Mrs. Eisenhower was putting some final touches to her own tree, which were sure to be stylish in a store-bought, Mamie kind of way.

  Mary liked being in America at this time of year: people had not yet grown tired of the festival; its rigmarole still seemed to strike them as sincere and new, not exhausted by repetition. As she waited by the school gates, she saw Richard and Louisa emerge inside the wire-fenced compound and sounded her horn. Louisa looked up and waved unhurriedly; Richard was too absorbed by some cards he was showing a friend. Once they had climbed into the back of the car, Mary tried to find out how the day had gone. “What lessons did you do?” “History.” “How was that?” “Okay.” “What else?” “We had a spelling bee.” “How was that?” “Okay.” Louisa had developed a slight Maryland inflection which she could exaggerate at will; Richard’s voice was unchanged by America.

  “And we had A-bomb drill.”

  “Yeah, our class went down to the basement, all in line, two by two. It was horrid and smelly. We had to stand by the furnace.”

  “You’re lucky. We had the emergency drill. You know, in the classroom? You have to cover your head so your brains don’t blow out and dive down like this!”

  “Ow, stop it, Richard. You hurt my leg!”

  They were always hungry, having eaten their packed lunches at noon, and, as it was a Friday, Mary gave way to their clamoring insistence to stop off for a milk shake at the soda fountain. The traffic was so slow, she thought, it would make no difference to their journey.

  The children ran ahead of her from the car across the lot, jostling and shouting. Louisa had Mary’s small bones and dark hair; her younger brother was already an inch taller, strong, and pulsing with an unguided joie de vivre. At home, they often fought or played on their own, but when they were happy together they sank into a self-contained contentment that had a peculiar tranquillity, signaled by Louisa’s gurgling laugh and Richard’s uncharacteristic quietness. These moments were so few and so valuable to Mary that she could have named and numbered them; yet on the memory of these finite instants would be based an agreed history of their childhood.

  Mary watched as Richard and Louisa reached up to the counter with their coins. Did strangers see them as just high-spirited kids, or did they know how provisional they were, and how gently they must therefore be treated?

  It was later than usual by the time they arrived home, and the telephone was ringing in the hall. As the children dropped their bags and coats on the floor and ran upstairs, Mary answered it.

  “Mary? It’s Edward Renshaw. Charlie was taken ill at lunchtime. It’s nothing to worry about, but some imbecile at the restaurant rang an ambulance and they’ve taken him off to hospital. Now he wants you to go and pick him up.”

  “You sure he’s all right?”

  “Yes, he’s fine. They wanted to keep him in overnight, but you know what Charlie’s like.”

  “I do.”

  Calling instructions to Dolores and the children, Mary ran out to the Kaiser Manhattan, which, for
once, started the first time. When she arrived at the address in Bethesda she found Charlie sitting on a hospital gurney in a treatment room, looking pale and impatient: he was irritated that the staff would not let him smoke.

  Mary kissed him and took his arm as she led him out to the parking lot; through the sleeve of her overcoat she noticed the tremor in his hand.

  “What did they say was the matter?”

  “The doctor said I should have my blood pressure checked again next week. He said I should get Weissman to do some tests—diabetes, that kind of thing.” That was not all the doctor had said.

  “But he wasn’t worried?”

  “Not in the slightest. How’s your day been?”

  “My day? Fine. Very ordinary.”

  “What time did that fellow leave?”

  “Frank? Quite late. I thought I might not be in time for lunch, but it was all right. Now let’s get you home and into bed.”

  Back at Number 1064, while Mary was downstairs, telephoning Dr. Weissman, Charlie put on some pajamas and took a sedative from the bottle in the bathroom cabinet. A long night’s sleep would help him to see things in the old perspective: he didn’t need much, just a lucky break or a change of scene. He switched on the bedside light and reached over to Mary’s night table for a book; he found a volume of stories by Irwin Shaw, which he began to read as Mary’s anxious voice came up from the hall.

  “… ask you for some tests. The doctor at the hospital thought he might have diabetes.”

  Charlie pictured Weissman’s snort. “Sure, and maybe W. C. Fields died of too much 7UP.”

  One of the most touching things about Mary, in Charlie’s view, was that she still viewed him as irreproachable. Of course she knew he drank a good deal, but so did all their friends in Washington, and none of them in Mary’s opinion benefited from it as much as Charlie: no one became as magnanimous, as death-defying as Charlie late at night. She did not wonder why his previously frictionless movement through the diplomatic labyrinth now seemed fraught: there were political considerations in a large embassy like in Washington; other men’s lives and paths had to be accommodated; and he was only there to do a specific political job for a limited period. She repeated to him what the ambassadors in two former postings had told her: that Charlie was unique, one of the very best.

  Louisa arrived with a cup of tea and kissed her father on the cheek. He held her to him for a moment, losing his face in her dark hair, which smelled of soap and cookies. He felt detached from her, he felt old and tarnished: how far apart had been their contemporaneous experiences of the day.

  The other thing about Mary, Charlie thought when he was alone again, was that she lacked the capacity to envisage disaster. He knew that she had lost a fiancé in the war, but she seemed somehow to have eliminated the experience. It was not that she did not remember David, but that she did not allow the tragedy to alter her trust that all was well, that while she believed in those she loved, no harm could come to them.

  Later, Mary brought him scrambled egg on a tray, and sat on the edge of the bed to eat hers with him. Charlie forced down a little and drank some black coffee, but was reasonably able to plead sickness as a reason for not eating. When Mary had gone back downstairs, Charlie reached for another pill and turned off the light. He fell into a profound and sweaty sleep, too drugged to dream or hear the telephone ringing by the bed.

  Mary picked it up in the kitchen. She heard her father’s voice at the other end, and this was in itself a cause for anxiety. Her parents were unsure of the time difference between London and Washington and did not really believe, despite the evidence of their ears, that the telephone was capable of connecting them over such a distance; and even if it could be made to work, the cost of a call was certain to be punitive.

  Mary stretched the long lead across the kitchen to the sink, where she was drying the last of the dishes. She stared through the window, fixing her eyes on the dark outline of a tree. In London, it must be nearly one o’clock in the morning, she thought.

  “Can you hear me all right?” said her father suspiciously.

  “Very well, thank you.” There was a slight delay on the line, but Mary had grown used to dealing with it: when you had finished speaking you had to stop and wait. She thought of RAF coastal stations; she was tempted to say “Over.”

  James Kirwan came to the point quite soon, as though fearful that the connection would not hold. “Your mother’s been feeling a little unwell and she’s had some tests … there does appear to be some sort of growth.”

  Although James spoke loudly, to give the sub-Atlantic cable every chance, what he said came to Mary in fragments, as though some self-defensive censor were breaking it up into morsels she could manage. She stared hard at the branches of the black tree. This was the moment against which she had prepared herself in her imagination for almost forty years. Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don’t know what I’d do.

  Now that it was here, or might be here, the first thing that she and her father did was to agree that everything was still all right. Each reassured the other: wait and see … nothing we can do anyway … know more next week … exactly.

  They agreed that there was no reason for Mary to go back to London; then Elizabeth herself came on the line to lend weight to James’s optimism. As a doctor, she brought some authority to the cheerful prognosis; she seemed in any case more interested in Louisa and Richard and whether the Christmas presents she had sent had yet arrived.

  When she had rung off, Mary stood, staring out of the window at the leafless tree for a long time. Everything was all right. Her mother was alive, that was the important thing: nothing had changed.

  She went up to the top floor and kissed the children good night. There was a photograph of her mother holding Louisa as a baby in the garden of the Regent’s Park house on a summer afternoon. Perhaps even when she had taken it, Mary had been aware of how few such occasions there were: you talked them up into a life, a history, but in fact you could count the days on the fingers of two or three hands.

  Chapter 3

  Dr. Weissman ran liver function and other tests on Charlie van der Linden, but, to Weissman’s irritation, the readings all fell within the prescribed range. He told Charlie that unless he cut down on the amount he drank he could not accept responsibility for what happened: there would be blackouts, accidents, organ damage. He recommended that Charlie go more often to see the psychoanalyst with whom he had begun treatment the previous autumn; he also prescribed barbiturates to help him sleep.

  Charlie’s absence from work excused him from the trip to California, but when he went back in January he found his diary uncomfortably full of the diversionary appointments Benton had made. His will to survive was still strong enough for him to recognize that a period of quiet efficiency was required of him. He did the meetings and he did the lunches; he went to the offices on the Hill and talked to congressional aides; in the afternoons he drafted convincing telegrams. He reassured London that Richard Nixon, for all his spotted past domestically, was unlikely to be a Taft-like isolationist in foreign affairs. He gave reasons. He wrote a memo on the significance of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. He kept to two martinis before lunch and nothing in the afternoon; when the vodka bottle in his desk drawer was empty he did not, immediately, replace it.

  At Number 1064 the first twelve weeks of the new decade were quiet with the stillness of life suspended. The children went, with other diplomatic exiles, to England, where Mary’s mother met them at London Airport. Mary was alone in the house. There were no school bags and coats dropped anyhow in the tiled hall; she did not trip on sections of Richard’s wooden railway when she crossed the kitchen to the fridge; Louisa’s painful practice at the piano no longer provided the lounge music at the cocktail hour. She went up to their rooms, but they were tid
y now and she had no excuse to linger: for the first time in ten years the toys were in their proper boxes; the expensive christening mugs were not lying beneath the bed; a silver watch left to Richard by Charlie’s father was no longer the damp treasure in a muddy pirate ship beneath the maple.

  Mary picked out some of their books from the shelf, the ones from which they had learned to read, and, before that, the ones at which their consciousness had first flared up. Here was the story of a fire engine, the book itself broken and stained. At eighteen months old Louisa’s eyes had widened when Mary read it to her: behind their gaze her mind was in the act of being made, lifted and stirred by news of the world. Every day Mary witnessed the intimate act of creation as Louisa began precociously to talk, speaking with exploratory gentleness, as though her tentative framing of a word was the first time it had found human utterance. Each syllable gave Mary a pathway into the mind she was anxious to reach, so that the eruption of love in her could find a channel and a home in the heart of this astonishing child.

  She replaced the book on the shelf. The children who had sat on her knee were gone; each week they were replaced by new versions of themselves, epigones of the purer being. The love that welled in her was always readjusting to their changes, racing after them. Once when she knelt beside her bath, Louisa had looked her in the eye and, for no reason Mary could tell, said, “Mummy, why do you love me so much?”

  So much … Why indeed? thought Mary as she sat down on Richard’s bed. The truthful answer was simple: because I believed you were the most wonderful and beautiful creature ever to have opened its eyes on the world, and I felt stupefied, blessed and transfigured that I should have been chosen to be your mother. She could not admit this; she only said, “You funny monkey,” and kissed Louisa’s forehead. What puzzled her was why this should be the nature of things: what plan, divine or biological, had been so arranged or had so evolved that a reasonable adult human should, in the course of her most natural function, be subject to this transcendent passion?