by Herman Wouk
“It may be close at that, Admiral. We’re having a bit of trouble holding altitude. How’s your French?”
34
PAMELA had remained in London. She knew it was a night bombing mission and she knew the distances. It was not hard to calculate when Victor Henry would be getting back. At ten in the morning she went to his flat—it had no other occupant for the moment—and persuaded the charwoman to let her in. She sat in the dowdy living room, trying to read a newspaper, but actually only counting the minutes and praying that he was still alive.
Pug Henry had entered her life at a dark time. Her parents had been divorced before she was fourteen. Her mother had remarried, made a new life, and shut her out. Alistair Tudsbury had deposited her in schools while he travelled. She had grown up well-mannered, attractive, but almost wild, and had had several love affairs before she was out of her teens. In her early twenties she had met Philip Rule, a tall golden-haired newspaper correspondent, who had for a while shared Leslie Slote’s flat in Paris. An ice-cold man with beguiling ways, a rich flow of clever talk, and corrupt tastes, Rule had bit by bit destroyed her ambition, her self-confidence, and almost her will to live. She had fought off suicidal depression by breaking off with him at last and going to work as her father’s slave; and as such, she had encountered Victor and Rhoda Henry on the Bremen.
She had never met a man quite like Commander Henry: remote, taciturn, apparently an old-fashioned narrow professional, yet incisive and engaging. She had found him attractive from the start, and had come to like him more and more. Aboard ship, such attractions take on an unreal intensity, but usually fade fast on dry land. For Pamela the feeling had only grown stronger on seeing him again in Berlin. There she had sensed that Pug was beginning to like her, too. But the start of the war had broken their contact, except for the momentary encounter in Washington.
When Victor Henry arrived in London, Pamela had been quite ready to marry the fighter pilot; and this visit of the older man who had been something like a shipboard crush had not changed that. But since then Gallard had vanished, and she had had two weeks with Pug. In wartime, as on board ship, relationships deepen fast. Nothing had yet happened between them. He had awkwardly put an arm around her while watching the German bombers come in; that was all. But Pamela now thought that, whatever the views and scruples of this very married man, she could go to bed with him if she pleased, and when she pleased.
Still, Pam had no intention of enticing Captain Henry into what he termed a “shack-up.” Blinker Vance, in Henry’s disapproving view, was shacked up with Lady Maude Northwood, though the shack was one of the most elegant flats in Mayfair and Lady Maude, if somewhat horse-faced, was a clever and charming woman. Pamela didn’t in the least believe in Victor Henry’s morality. She thought it was a crust of cramping nonsense that stopped her from giving the lonely man and herself pleasure. But that was how he was. She was determined above all things not to upset or repel him; rather, to let matters take their course.
Almost exactly at noon the key turned in the lock.
As Pug let himself in, he could hear the noonday news broadcast echoing in the flat. He called, “Hello, who’s here?”
Steps clicked in the living room. The girl struck him like a blue projectile. “Oh, my God, you came back.”
“What the devil?” Victor Henry managed to say between kisses. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m absent without leave. I shall be court-martialled and shot. I should have sat here for a week. Your charwoman let me in. Ahhh!” With growls of pleasure, she kissed him again and again. Disorganized enough before this surprise, Pug dazedly kissed her back, not quite believing what was happening. Pam said, “Good heavens, Captain Henry, you do reek of rum.”
“That’s the debriefing. They give you a big breakfast and lots of rum and you talk.” He had difficulty getting this out, because Pamela kept kissing him. Dead on his feet as he was, he nevertheless began on instinct to respond to this eager aroused girl clinging to him. He realized foggily, as he pulled her close and returned her kisses, that at this rate he was soon going to take her to bed. He was caught by surprise and had no impulse to stop, strange and dreamlike as it all was. He was hours away from a brush with death, and still numb and stunned. “Well, how about this?” he said hoarsely. “The conquering hero’s reward, hey?”
She was covering his face with soft slow kisses. She leaned back in his arms, looking into his eyes. “Just so. Exactly.”
“Well, I didn’t do a goddamned thing except take up space, burn up gasoline, and get in everybody’s way. However, thank you, Pam. You’re beautiful and sweet, and this welcome makes me feel great.”
His evident exhaustion, his clumsy moves, his comical indecisiveness about what to do next with this unfamiliar female body in his arms, caused a wave of deep tenderness to go through her. “You look absolutely drained,” she said, stepping free. “Totally wrung out. Was it very bad?”
“It was long.”
“Want a drink? Some food?”
“A drink, I guess. I feel okay, but I’d better get some sleep.”
“So I figured.” She led him to the darkened bedroom. The bed was turned down, his pajamas laid out. She took her time about mixing the drink, and when she came back to the bedroom he was asleep. On the floor, uncharacteristically dumped, lay the tweed suit that Aircraftsman Horton had missed out on.
The hand on his shoulder was gently persistent. “Captain Henry! It’s five o’clock. You’ve had a call from the embassy.”
He opened his eyes. “What? What embassy?”
It took him a few seconds to recollect where he was, and why Pamela Tudsbury was standing over him in uniform, with a smile so intimate and bright. In his dream he had been back in F for Freddie, fumbling and fumbling for a cloth to wipe the vomit off the poor rear gunner; the hallucinatory stench was still in his nostrils. He sat up and sniffed. A delicious odor of broiling meat floated through the open door, erasing the dream smell. “What’s that?”
“I thought you’d be hungry by now.”
“But where’d you get food? There’s nothing in that icebox but beer and club soda.”
“Went out and bought it.”
He tried to shock himself awake with a cold shower, but still had a feeling, as he shaved and dressed, of stumbling through dreams within dreams. He could not get used to the wonder of being alive in normal circumstances. A dim recollection of Pamela’s ardent welcome added to that wonder.
“What the Sam Hill!” he said. “Where and how did you get all this?”
The salads, the bowl of fruit, the long bread, and the bottle of red wine made an attractive clutter on the small table. She was humming in the kitchen. She said, entering with steaks on two plates, “Oh, I’m a London alley cat, I know where to forage. Sit down and get at this. The oven’s really not very good, but I’ve done my best.”
He cut into the meat and took a hot mouthful. The bread broke soft and crusty; the heavy wine was delicious. Pug Henry fell to with the gusto of a boy home from tobogganing. Pamela cut herself a piece of steak and ate it, not taking her eyes off Victor Henry as he wolfed the food. “Well,” she said. “Rather hungry at that, weren’t you?”
“Why, this is marvellous. It’s the best meat, the best wine, the best bread I’ve ever eaten.”
“You exaggerate, but I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I’m trying to make up for the stupid way I acted before you left.”
“Pam, I’m glad I went. That was the right decision.”
“Oh, now that you’re back, there’s no argument. My apologies.”
Victor Henry put down his knife and fork. All his senses were new-edged. To his eyes, Pamela Tudsbury’s face radiated remarkable beauty and sweetness. He experienced a pleasant quake in all his nerves, remembering vividly their stunning kisses at the door.
“You’re forgiven.”
“Good.” She drank wine, looking at him over the edge of the glass. “Do you know that I fell for you o
n the Bremen? Did you have any inkling of it? In Berlin I was hard put to it not to try my luck with you. But I knew it was impossible. You’re so devoted to your wife.”
“Yes indeed,” Pug said. “Rock of Gibraltar. I guess I’m dumb, but I hadn’t the slightest notion of that, Pamela.”
“Well, it’s true. I’d been in rotten shape for a couple of years. It did me good to be able to like a man so much. I proceeded to go mad over Ted shortly thereafter.” A shadow of sadness flickered across her face. “When you opened the door a few hours ago, I came close to believing in God. There’s strawberry tart for dessert.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not kidding. I passed a pastrycook’s and the tarts looked good.”
He reached out and took her slim wrist. Her skin felt as sweet to his blunt fingers as her lips had felt on his mouth. “Pam, I’ve developed a high regard for a London alley cat, myself.”
“I’m glad. I should be sorry to think that my great passion was totally unrequited. If you’ll unhand me, I’ll serve your strawberry tart and coffee. It’s getting on for six. Captain Vance was most insistent that you be at the embassy by six-thirty.”
“What will you do? Go back to Uxbridge?”
“What will you do? That’s what matters.”
“First I have to find out what Blinker wants.”
“Shall I wait for your call at my flat?”
“Yes, Pam. Please do that.”
They parted on the sidewalk. He kept glancing back over his shoulder at the dwindling figure in blue, marching among the pedestrians with that odd swing he had first noticed on the Bremen—just another perky little WAAF among the thousands in London.
He felt reborn. He smiled at people he passed on the street, and they smiled back. The young girls appeared seductive as starlets; the older women were full of grace. The men were all great good fellows, the slope-shouldered pale clerks with briefcases and bowler hats no less than the passing soldiers, the withered gray men, and the purple-faced fat men in tweed. They all had the stuff that he had seen at the Biggin Hill dispersal hut and in F for Freddie. They were Englishmen, the happy breed. The sunlight dappling the leaves in Grosvenor Square was golden, the leaves were fresh green, and the sky was the blue of a WAAF uniform. What a world! What an idiocy in these Europeans to dump fire and explosives on each other’s habitations, built with such hard work! All things were washed clean, or at least he was seeing them with a child’s clear inquisitive eye—a shiny automobile, a shop-window dummy, a box of red geraniums on a windowsill. He noticed that the sidewalk gave off tiny sparkles in the late sunlight.
The American flag fluttering from the second story of the embassy struck Pug with a pang of pride. Its red, white, and blue seemed so rich, its slow waving so full of majesty, that a sixty-piece orchestra might have been playing “The Star-Spangled Banner”; but there was no orchestra in the square, only discordant loud traffic noise. He sat on a bench for a moment looking at the flag, suffused with zest for life and a burning wish to live a long time yet in this radiant world through which he had been walking blind as a bat. This grim stocky obscure American Navy captain sat bemused on a London park bench, undergoing an exaltation for which he finally found the name. At first he had thought his exhilarated mood was the snapback from the bombing mission, the plain joy of being alive after brushing death in a diving plane, in a whirl of blue cones and exploding colored balls. But it was something more. Nothing like this had happened to him in twenty-five years, and he had not expected it ever to happen again, so recognizing it had taken him this long. Nothing could be simpler. He had fallen in love.
A black Cadillac pulled up at the embassy door and discharged an admiral whom Pug recognized, two Army generals, and Blinker Vance. Pug hastened across the street.
“Hey, Pug!” Admiral Benton offered a fat hand. This holy terror, his old boss at War Plans, was a short rotund man with a shiny round face and a bald round head. Pug liked him, despite his short temper, because he was a smart and driving worker, wasted no words, admitted ignorance, and took blame when the blame was his. He was a gunnery expert too, the Navy’s best. His weakness was opinionated political theorizing; he thought the New Deal was a Communist plot.
Blinker Vance brought the four men to a quiet second-floor conference room panelled in cherry wood. He left. They sat themselves at one end of a long polished table lined with twenty chairs upholstered in blue leather. Admiral Benton took the head, with the two generals on either side of him and Pug below the younger-looking one. “Now goddamn it, Pug,” Benton began, “the ambassador says if he’d known about this observer flight of yours, he’d have stopped you. He’s dead right. We don’t want to give the Army and its Air Corps”—he gestured at the other men—“the idea that the Navy trains goofy daredevils.” Benton sounded very pleased with Pug. “These gentlemen and I have been waiting for you to get back from that blamed fool excursion. This is General Anderson, and General Fitzgerald here is Army Air Corps.” Benton glanced at the others. “Well, shall we get at it?”
General Fitzgerald, who sat beside Pug, danced long lean fingers together. He had wavy blond hair and a handsome thin face; he might have been an artist or an actor, except for the stone-hard look in his pale blue eyes. “Admiral, I’d like to hear about the captain’s bomber ride myself.”
“So would I,” said Anderson. Victor Henry now recognized him as Train Anderson, a West Point football star of around 1910. Anderson was heavy and jowly, and his thin hair was smoothed tight on a pink scalp.
Victor Henry narrated his bomber adventure in a matter-of-fact way.
“Great!” Benton burst out when Pug came to the explosion of the gasworks.
The three senior officers listened tensely to the account of his return trip in a damaged aircraft; the jettisoning of all removable weight to maintain altitude; the final thirty miles flown at a few hundred feet. When Pug finished, Train Anderson lit a cigar and leaned back on a thick elbow. “Quite a yarn, Captain. It amounted to a token bombing though, didn’t it? Berlin sounds untouched, compared to this place. You’ve been to the docks, I presume?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We toured them today. The Germans are making mincemeat of the area. At this rate, in a week London will cease to be a port. Then what happens? Famine? Plague?”
“That’s a big dock area,” Pug said. “Their repair and fire-fighting crews are good, General. Things look worse than they are.”
The Air Corps general laced his fingers daintily together. “Have you been in the public shelters, Henry? We visited one during a raid. Nothing but a shallow cement hole. A hit would have killed everybody. All stinking of unwashed bodies and urine, all jammed with nervous, jittery old folks and crying kids. Big crayon scrawl on the ceiling, This is a Jew War. We visited the underground, too, last night. A mob of people sleeping on the tracks and the platforms, a sanitation nightmare, a setup for an outbreak of typhus.”
“Sickness and casualties are running far under their estimates, sir,” Pug said. “There are thousands of empty hospital beds.”
“So this man Vance told us,” put in Anderson. “Well, they’ll fill ’em. Now, Captain Henry, you’ve been an observer here, and you’ve been sending optimistic reports to the President recommending all-out assistance.”
“Not wholly optimistic, sir, but recommending full assistance, yes.”
“Possibly you’re a bit out of touch with what’s happening on the other side of the water. So let me read you something. It’s from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a red-hot New Deal paper.” He took out his wallet, unfolded a neatly cut newspaper clipping, and intoned through his nose:
“‘Mr. Roosevelt today committed an act of war, turning over to a warring power a goodly portion of the United States Navy. We get in exchange leases on British possessions. What good will these leases be if Hitler should acquire title to these islands by right of conquest? Of all sucker real estate deals in history, this is the worst. If Mr. Roosevelt ge
ts away with this, we may as well say good-bye to our liberties and make up our minds that henceforth we live under a dictatorship.’”
“That’s a Roosevelt supporter talking,” observed Anderson, puffing violently on the cigar. “Now, we’re proceeding from here to a dinner at the Army and Navy Club, in half an hour or so, with some British generals and admirals. We already have the list of the war materials they want. It would strip our armed forces clean. We have to make cabled recommendations to the President within five days. He’s already let them have—in addition to these fifty warships—virtually all our seventy-five-millimeter field guns, several squadrons of naval aircraft, half a million rifles, millions of rounds of ammunition—”
“He hasn’t given ’em away, General,” Benton observed. “The Limeys have paid cash on the barrelhead.”
“Yes, luckily the Neutrality Act compels that, but still it was a goddamned lie to call the stuff surplus. Surplus! We don’t have any surplus! You know that. Fifty destroyers! All this without any authorization from Congress. All things we’re short of. And now Congress is passing a draft law. Our boys will be drilling with broomsticks! There’s going to be an accounting one day, you know. If the British fold and this stuff winds up in German hands—a possibility to be reckoned with—the accounting will not be far off. All who have taken part in these transactions, or even advocated them”—here General Anderson turned a belligerent face at Victor Henry—“I warn you, stand a good chance of hanging from lamp posts on Constitution Avenue.”
After a silence, Admiral Benton said mildly, folding his hands over his stomach, “Well, Pug, I’ve told these gentlemen that I know you, and that any dope you put out is reliable. We’ve got a big responsibility. We’ve been handed one hell of a hot potato. So get down to the short hairs. What makes you think the British will keep fighting, after the way the French folded? No horseshit now.”
