On Green Dolphin Street

by Sebastian Faulks

  Mary went to the top of the stairs, reluctantly. It was not just the children’s former selves that had vanished; it was the physical beings they had become who were absent. She longed for their skin, their hair, their necks, the touch of the muscle beneath their clothes; no one had told her how tactile was this love, how intimate the knowledge of a forehead’s swell, a knee’s flex, the edible cartilage and soft tissue of the ear, which she had sniffed and nibbled like a rabbit.

  She went downstairs and sat alone in the living room. She must find something to distract her, to help her through: perhaps this was the time for her to write the book with which, Charlie was always boasting to their friends, she would one day surprise them.

  That evening, after dinner, the telephone rang and Charlie reached across to answer it.

  “Hi. This is Frank Renzo.”

  “Well, hello.” Charlie fought for a moment to remember who he was. “How’s the hand?”

  “What? Oh, it’s okay. I find I’m back in Washington.”

  “Again?”

  “The paper sent me back. I have to do another piece.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s a feature. Diplomatic life, how people view the election, that kind of thing.”

  “I see. Where are you?”

  “I’m in a hotel in Georgetown, but I’ll be here for a few days.”

  “Well, anything we can do to help?”

  “Can I call in the morning?”

  “I have to go to work, but I daresay Mary—”

  “I appreciate it.”

  Charlie put down the receiver. “Are you doing anything tomorrow?”

  “Was that Frank?” said Mary.

  “He needs someone to show him round, I suppose. Make some introductions. I did promise. When he came to the party.” Charlie thought for a moment. “Anyway, he might be useful. We could always use more contact with the papers in New York.”

  The next morning Mary put on a dress she had bought from Lord & Taylor in New York the previous summer. It was in grass-green tweed, round-necked with a slightly gathered skirt; the magazine advertisement described it as “deceptively casual” (perhaps it really meant “deceptively formal”) and as something the “woman of today can wear at any time.” Mary liked it because it looked the kind of thing that Audrey Hepburn might have worn.

  She arranged to meet Frank at the new British Embassy building on Massachusetts Avenue. Within a week of the van der Lindens’ arrival in Washington, Mary had been identified as a wife who should be used as much as possible. Despite a little shyness, her buoyant character and essential good manners were viewed as assets; there was a tradition at the Embassy that if someone was unmarried or his wife was indisposed he could call on the wife of a junior to be his hostess at a function, and Mary had, rather against her will, been used in this way. Most of the British diplomats subscribed to what was known, after the Washington columnist who had invented it, as the Joe Alsop Amendment, which stated that with eight people at dinner there could be no bores present; with ten there could be half a bore; with twelve a whole bore could be absorbed; with fourteen, a bore and a half, and so on. Half-bores, in Alsop’s definition, were dull but very powerful men or vacuous but very beautiful women.

  The new building was a functional rectangle of concrete, steel and glass in which the need for Civil Service gradings, competitive views and relative office sizes had prevailed over aesthetic design. It was being slowly inhabited, corridor by right-angled corridor, as diplomats temporarily housed about the city in borrowed buildings, hotels and office blocks moved in their maps, papers and Rolodex address finders. Mary waited downstairs in the glass-fronted lobby, chatting to the receptionist. Showing Frank around was a chore she felt she could have done without, and if Charlie was anxious to help him for some reason, she did not see why he could not have spared the time himself. She felt less than diplomatic—reserved, unwilling—when Frank crossed the floor, taking off a wide-brimmed felt hat and holding out his hand.

  “I can give you a tour here to begin with,” she said. “Then you’d better explain to me more exactly what you want.”

  “Sure,” he said. “You understand that this is entirely off the record.”

  “Yes. The Head of Information’s been in touch. He’s joining us upstairs.”

  As they went across to the elevator, Mary said, “By the way, how’s your hand?”

  “Oh, it’s fine. It healed well.” He showed her a closed scar that ran down and disappeared beneath the cuff of his shirt. He flipped open a notebook he took from the pocket of his raincoat. “All right if I take notes?”

  “As long as—”

  “Sure. Background only.”

  They started at the top of the building, where the canteen would open in due course. The Head of Information, enthusiastic about meeting a new journalist, was waiting for them.

  “You lead on, Mary.” He smiled. “I’ll just open a few doors, literal and metaphorical.”

  There were one or two people already in their new offices to whom she was able to introduce Frank as they slowly descended through the building. Once they had been assured that they would not be quoted, most of them seemed happy to be distracted from their work and to answer his questions. He asked them what they thought of Eisenhower’s presidency and who they thought the next president would be; he wanted to know what they made of Washington, how it compared with other postings and how they spent their evenings.

  When they reached the ground floor, Frank said, “Do I get to see inside the Ambassador’s residence?”

  “Yes,” said the Head of Information, “I’m going to hand you over to the Ambassador’s secretary.”

  The Ambassador was in New York, but they were allowed to look round the residence, a mock-Queen Anne building next door to the Embassy with towering brick chimneys, mansard windows and creeper-clad walls at the rear.

  “Charlie calls it Greyfriars,” said Mary as they walked over in the surprising warmth of early spring. “He thinks it looks like a boys’ boarding school.”

  “It’s sure big enough for one man.”

  “It used to be the Embassy itself. It had all the offices until they ran out of space.”

  They rang the doorbell and waited for the Ambassador’s secretary. As they went inside and looked up at the white-stone staircase, Frank said, “Jesus, it’s like a kind of fancy restaurant.”

  Mary smiled. “Yes. Indian, I think. The man who designed it, Lutyens, did a lot of government buildings in New Delhi.”

  Frank nodded. Mary presumed he knew nothing of India and the British Raj. She looked at him properly for the first time that morning: he was clean-shaven and neat, but with the same stray, fatigued look she remembered from before. He had mentioned that he was from Chicago and she wondered what difficulties he had found in extracting himself from the deprived neighborhood he had described and heading east.

  The Ambassador’s desk was set with its back to Massachusetts Avenue. The polished expanse of wood was impressively clear; at the edge were three trays, marked In, Out and Destroy. Each was empty, and the only other items on the desk were two paper flags, American and British, and a well-consulted New York restaurant guide. There was a leather-covered fender in front of the fireplace, wing-back armchairs and shiny bookcases with matching sets of leather volumes; there was a feeling of borrowed grandeur, dignity by the yard: the atmosphere was of a Manhattan gentlemen’s club for graduates of not-quite Ivy League universities.

  “What kind of guy is the Ambassador?”

  Mary glanced up to see that his secretary was out of hearing. “I think you’d describe him as an empire loyalist. He’s anxious about Britain’s declining role in the world.”

  “Sounds okay for an ambassador. Does he like Washington?”

  “I don’t think so. He got off to a bad start. It was just after Suez, and Dulles called him into his office. Dulles asked him why the British hadn’t won and the Ambassador became so angry he had to le
ave the room.”

  They went downstairs, where they were shown the gardens at the back of the building, with their soft, deep lawns, rose beds and herbaceous borders. Mary thought how out of place Frank looked in his New York newspaperman’s clothes, a man of the streets with grass beneath his feet.

  They walked back to the Embassy and out onto the service road that ran off Massachusetts Avenue. A delivery truck was unloading cases of champagne to the side entrance of the residence.

  “Would you be free for lunch tomorrow?” said Frank.

  “I’m not sure, I …”

  “I have to go see someone else right now, but I’d appreciate the chance to talk a little more. Could I call you in the morning and see if you’d have the time?”

  “All right. Can I give you a lift somewhere? I’ve got the car here.”

  “No, it’s fine, I’ll take a cab.”

  Frank was still waiting by the side of the road, scanning the impatient traffic, when Mary drove past, but since he had been quite emphatic, dismissive almost, she did not stop or repeat her offer. Although it was nearly lunchtime, she did not want to go home to the silent kitchen, so she swung the car left and drove up toward the Naval Observatory from where she could drop down to Fiorello’s, an Italian café she had discovered that overlooked the Potomac.

  She took a table in the corner and looked out of the window, toward the river and Theodore Roosevelt Island. Few cities in the world could have had so many memorials in proportion to such a relatively short lifetime, she thought. Without thinking too hard, she could list the lapidary reminders of Lincoln and Jefferson; the George Mason Memorial Bridge, the Arlington Memorial Bridge leading to the Iwo Jima memorial … What were they so scared of forgetting?

  For lunch the next day, Frank urged Mary to choose somewhere she particularly liked, as his newspaper would pay. Fiorello’s was her own retreat, unknown even to Charlie, and she did not want to compromise her privacy; she chose instead the Old Firehouse, a large, traditional-looking place in Georgetown which the reliable Lauren Williams had recommended, and booked a table for one o’clock.

  It was a day of early spring sunshine; there was some high, broken cloud, a light breeze and an almost-forgotten sensation of warmth in the air as Mary walked down 33rd Street from where she had parked the car, past the period houses with their shiny paintwork and the village shops where nothing of vulgar, corporate America had been allowed to penetrate. In the front gardens there were the shoots of croci and a swelling in the twig that presaged buds on the magnolia and cherry trees. There was something false about the houses, part colonial, part neo-Georgian, their period style enforced by statute after some adventurer had bought a plot and built a home from cinder blocks; but you would have to be a grudging person, Mary thought, not to feel uplifted by this island of civility, particularly when you turned onto the lively sidewalks of M Street.

  She arrived a little early at the restaurant and handed her coat to the hatcheck girl. She was wearing a beige cashmere sweater and a navy woolen skirt; her dark hair was pushed back from her face by two tortoiseshell combs. A waiter showed her to the back of the room: the table was in a booth with bench seats, one of half a dozen such on a raised platform; the napkins were white and starched, but the mahogany surface itself was bare. She lit a cigarette and sipped a glass of water as she waited; she began to read a copy of the Post, trying to interest herself in an article about the economic outlook, which told her that with a falling GNP and the highest unemployment since the Depression, some urgent rejuvenating action was required.

  “I hope I didn’t keep you.”

  Mary looked up from the paper in surprise, having neither seen nor heard his approach.

  “Not at all,” she said, untruthfully, as Frank slid in opposite.

  When his drink came, he stirred it quickly with the plastic swizzle stick, which he then knocked twice on the rim of the glass and flicked into the ashtray; it was a swift, practiced movement with a defined sequence of sound.

  He smiled as he took a long pull from the drink. “Did you look at the menu?”

  “Yes, I thought I’d have the chicken sandwich.”

  The waiter was standing by the table. Frank looked up. “We’ll have one chicken sandwich here. And can I get the French onion soup, then the steak and salad? I’ll have a beer with that. Do you have Schaeffer on tap?”

  “Sure. And for the lady?”

  “I’ll just have a glass of water.”

  “Glass of water,” Frank repeated.

  Mary suddenly laughed. “God, I sound like Franny.”

  “What?”

  “Franny. She’s a character in a story I read in a magazine. I think it was The New Yorker. It doesn’t matter.”

  “The Salinger story?”

  “Yes.” Mary was unable to keep the surprise out of her voice. “You’ve read it?”

  “Sure. It was a big thing a couple of years back. You like it?”

  “Yes, I did. I thought it was very touching.”

  “You think the kid’s pregnant?”

  “Franny?” Mary thought Franny was a dim but likeable college girl on the edge of a nervous breakdown caused by her insensitive boyfriend. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Maybe not. Anyway, she has the chicken sandwich, right?”

  “Yes, and he has snails and frogs’ legs.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  Frank questioned her about Washington and how they lived; he opened his notebook and laid it beside his plate. He scribbled a couple of lines in it, left-handed, then laid down the pencil.

  “We were in London before we came here and before that in Tokyo.”

  “Tokyo?”

  “Yes, in Japan. It’s—”

  “I know where it is. What was it like?”

  “I enjoyed it, in a way. Before that we were in London and before that Moscow.”

  “And that’s in Russia, right?”

  Mary found herself blushing slightly. “Yes. Anyway, I hardly went there, because Louisa was ill and she was being treated in hospital in London.”

  “Is she okay now?”

  “Yes, but it was frightening at the time. She was very ill for a year. Eventually they discovered she had an allergy to wheat. As long as she watches what she eats she’s fine. And then I was pregnant with Richard and it looked as though I might lose him. So what with one thing and another, Charlie was pretty much on his own in Moscow, which he didn’t like.”

  Frank pushed his soup bowl to one side; in the saucer were some crackers in an unopened cellophane pack.

  “And what about you? You seem to me like a very happy person.”

  “I suppose so. I have every reason to be.”

  “Charlie?”

  “Yes, of course. And our children.”

  “Tell me about Charlie.”

  Mary looked at the open notebook.

  “Pardon me,” said Frank, swiftly putting it away in his pocket.

  Mary thought of Charlie, and the thought made her smile. “He’s a remarkable man. He’s … I don’t know. I don’t know where to start. Why do you want to know?”

  Frank spread his hands. “You don’t have to tell me.” He cut a piece off the end of his steak with the knife in his left hand, speared it with the fork in his right, dipped it in sauce, laid down the knife and rapidly transferred the fork to his left hand, ready to eat the piece of meat.

  Mary watched the shuttling maneuver.

  “But maybe you’d like to tell me,” said Frank. “Maybe you have things on your mind.”

  “Well …” Mary hesitated: the thought of her family made her feel precariously fortunate. “I suppose the first thing you’d say about Charlie is that there’s not much middle ground. No moderation in anything. He’s very kind, very clever, very funny. His moods, though. If you had to put them in order, they’d probably be elation first, then despondency. Then exhilaration, then despair. Things like pensive, hopeful or patient wouldn’t come in until about numb
er twenty on the list. I don’t think content would come in at all.”

  “What does he despair about?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone quite knows, least of all Charlie. I think it’s partly a fear of boredom.”

  It was a long time since Mary had discussed Charlie with anyone, and Frank, in his abrupt way, was an effective questioner. He seemed always slightly to misunderstand, which made her eager to correct him, to clarify, and go on. She did not pause to wonder if this was professional technique. Frank seemed so disconnected from the world that she could not tell what he was thinking, or if he felt anything at all; yet talking to him did make her feel better. She had not been able to share with Charlie her feelings about the children’s absence: she could not put into words her physical loss without sounding self-pitying. As for her mother, Charlie could understand and sympathize well enough, having lost both his own parents, but there was really nothing to say beyond the platitudes on which she and her father had fixed.

  “You finished with that, ma’am?” The waiter held the plate with her half-finished chicken sandwich. She nodded, and he took it away.

  “This thing with your mother,” said Frank. “Do you know how sick she is?”

  “We’re still waiting to find out for sure, but you know how it is with cancer. You have to be prepared for the worst. You expect it.”

  “How old is she?”

  “A fair age. Seventy-two. It’s not that it’s unfair. Most of my friends have lost parents, one or two have lost brothers and sisters, or children, which must be unbearable. But I suppose I never thought it would happen to either of mine.”

  Mary took a cigarette from the pack Frank proffered. She said, “You never get over the way you view them as a child, they seem indomitable, eternal, and their death is the worst disaster that could happen—the end of the world. Even when you’ve grown up, it seems to belong to an unforeseeable future. I find it hard to believe that that hypothetical future event has taken a form, now. It seems somehow too … specific.”