Life: An Exploded Diagram (26 page)

L
ATE ON SATURDAY
night, in the White House, an exhausted but sleepless John F. Kennedy sat in his private quarters watching one of his favorite movies:
Roman Holiday,
starring that sexy little thing Audrey Hepburn and the comically wooden Gregory Peck. It was comfort food for the brain: warm, familiar, and bland. He needed it. The day had not gone well. It might actually be easier to fight a war than chair those damned ExComm meetings.

His bowel griped and he shifted in the chair, painfully, to break wind.

He was beginning to think he could see a way through this thing. Khrushchev’s last letter, yesterday, was full of the usual bluster and bull, but what it came down to was that he was prepared to do a deal. Maybe the fat little bastard wasn’t, after all, totally insane. Maybe he’d looked at it all and decided that fifty million, minimum, dead Russians was too high a price to pay for a propaganda stunt in the Caribbean. But Khrushchev couldn’t pull his missiles out if it looked like a defeat. To save his fat face — maybe to save his life, because they played pretty rough in the Kremlin — he’d need to make it look like he’d got something out of it. Like he’d extracted a price. Won. And the price was, Kennedy thought, incredibly cheap. What Khrushchev was saying, it seemed, was that he’d disarm the Cuban missiles if the U.S. removed its Thor missiles from Turkey. And promised not to invade Cuba.

Losing the Turkish Thors was not, in Kennedy’s view, a problem. They were obsolete, anyway. “A heap of junk,” Bob McNamara had called them. So the thing to do was dismantle the Thors, publicly. Then station a Polaris submarine, with up-to-date nukes, off the Turkish coast and make sure the Russians knew it was there. And as for not invading Cuba, well, Jesus, even that foul-mouthed moron Shoup had to admit that at least five thousand marines would die before even one made it onto the beach. And that estimate was based on the Russians not using their nuclear battlefield weapons. Kennedy knew that public opinion would turn against him when the blood started to flow. That was the one immutable law of politics.

So it seemed to him that the Turkey trade-off might be a way out.

It brought problems with it, though. Like Khrushchev, Kennedy had to come out of it looking good. He’d have to put some smart political spin on the deal. It couldn’t look like the Russians had suckered him, had used Cuba to force him to back down in Europe. He’d have to say to Khrushchev, “Okay, Nikita, you take the nukes out of Cuba; I take the nukes out of Turkey. But it’s a
secret
deal, all right? You can crow about it to those wall-faced comrades of yours in the Kremlin all you like, but you don’t go public with it. I’m going to wait a while before I take those Thors away, so that nobody will make the connection and call me a weakling. Deal?”

So both of them would come out of the thing with something they could call
honor.

Unless — and there was always this — the Russians had something else up their sleeves. It was no coincidence that the bastards were so good at chess.

He allowed himself to enjoy his favorite scene in the movie. He was interested in, and knowledgeable about, women’s clothes. Hepburn’s were terrific. She wore the kind of stuff that Jackie wore. He wondered, drowsily, whether Hollywood imitated his wife’s taste or whether it was the other way around.

He dreamed a Soviet missile crunching through the floors of the White House, thrusting its awful snout through the shattered masonry, seeking him out, personally. Crushing him. Squashing him, opening its rotten metal mouth to swallow his head. Then obliterating everything for miles around, in bellying circles of fire.

“Hello, Chack.”

Khrushchev in the chair on the other side of the coffee table. That awful way of sitting he has, legs apart, hands on his thick thighs. Like a man on the toilet. Dreadful shiny suit designed by a bickering committee. Smile like a bad set of dentures shoved into a steamed pudding.

“Nikita?”

“How are things with you, Mr. President?”

“Uh, okay. No, I was dreaming I was dead.”

“Funny. So was I. But because of the time zones, I was dead before you was.”

“How was it?”

“Oh, you know, Chack. A blinding light. A splitting headache, then nothing. I thought of my wife at the last moment, like you do. Because we were apart.”

“Yes.”

“There is no heaven, by the way.”

“Ah. I kinda thought there might not be.”

Khrushchev’s sparse eyebrows lifted.

“I think your friend the pope would not be pleased to hear you say that, Chack.”

“I guess not.”

Khrushchev reached inside his jacket and produced something large, pinkish, and trussed.

“I brought you a gift,” he said. “A turkey. For your Thanksgiving.”

“Uh, that’s really kind of you, Nikita. A generous thought. Thank you.”

“Please. It is nothing. In the people’s paradise of the Soviet Union we have more food than we know how to eat.”

He put the big plucked bird down on the coffee table and patted its nude breast complacently.

“Plump,” he said. “Do you have something for me, Chack?”

“Aah, lemme see.”

Kennedy searched through his pockets with increasing urgency. They were all empty.

Grinning, embarrassed, he said, “Well, er, I guess nothing, right now, Nikita. But on behalf of the people of the United States of America, I thank you for the turkey.”

Khrushchev’s smile went out like a lamp. He reached again into his jacket and took out a large pair of scissors. He used them to cut the string that bound the bird’s legs and wings. The turkey flexed its naked limbs and stood up on the knobs of bone where its feet had been. It withdrew its feathered and wattled head from inside its body cavity and looked around, stretching its raw neck. Then, with an angry gargle, it went for Kennedy’s eyes with its beak.

He woke up, sweating and alone. His corset was pressing into his kidneys. He forced himself more upright in the chair. The screen was a white hiss. He drank some flat Coke from the bottle and waited for his mind to clear.

The problem wasn’t Khrushchev; it was his own people: the ExComm Hawks and the military. The Hawks were deeply unhappy about trading the Turkish Thors. Shrewdly, they’d focused on how it would
look,
especially to America’s allies in NATO. Mac Bundy’d had a point when he said that if the U.S. were seen to be doing unilateral deals with the Soviets, “we’d be in real trouble. If we appear to be trading the defense of Turkey for a threat to Cuba, we’ll just have to face a radical decline in the effectiveness of NATO. The whole thing could fall apart.”

And the military . . . well, they were at full boil. It was getting harder all the time to keep the lid on. That morning, when Kennedy had asked Maxwell Taylor for a planning update, the general had said crisply, “Aerial bombardment for seven days, followed immediately by full-scale invasion. All forces ashore in eighteen days.” As if it was inevitable, a foregone conclusion. Then that poor bastard, whatshisname, Anderson, had got himself shot down. McNamara said that when the news reached the Pentagon, the desire to retaliate was so strong that you could smell it in the air, like jock sweat in a locker room. Thank God that other U-2, that’d gone walkabout over Russia, got home in one piece. If the Russians had brought down
two
on the same day, that nutcase Curtis LeMay might’ve climbed into a B-52 and gone off to nuke Moscow personally.

General Power ( jeez, how had primitives like him and LeMay come to have control over the hardware?) had rigged the IBMs in Montana so that the double-fault fail-safe system that prevented an accidental launch of the missiles could be bypassed. Which meant, without hyphens, that two guys, maybe gone crazy or panicking in their underground bunker, could let go a nuclear missile without checking authorization.

B-52 bombers, permanently, in rotation, were cruising the perimeters of the Soviet Union. Each was loaded with four Mark 28 nuclear bombs. An Mk-28 had seventy times the power of the bomb that had obliterated Hiroshima. An encoded — or wrongly encoded — radio signal could send any one of those planes veering off to drop destruction onto Omsk or Tomsk or Gomsk, or whatever the hell those Russian places were called.

And on this night, divisions of marines had boarded ship in full expectation of swarming through tropical surf to purge the Caribbean of Commies.

And on this night, U.S. ships and planes were searching for the four, maybe more, nuclear-armed Soviet submarines within the quarantine, with orders to regard them as hostile.

And a missile ship, the
Grozny,
was going to hit the blockade line at dawn.

Kennedy had installed a situation room in the White House: screens, phones, alert young people. It occupied a space that President Eisenhower had used as a bowling alley. The SR tapped him into the information that was fed to the Pentagon. It allowed Kennedy to monitor real-time developments, allowed him to feel that he was in control. But he wasn’t, and he knew it. He was not at all sure who
was
in control. Who was in control of the Cuban missiles? The Russians, who at least seemed to have some discipline? Or Castro, who might do who knew what?

It seemed to Kennedy that the whole thing was like a pyramid of eggs, or a cluster of bubbles. Unbearable delicacy. Just one component starts to roll, something pops, and
poof!
the world is gone.

The gray telephone by his elbow tempted him. He could wake his personal assistant. Dave Powers. Tell Dave to get him a woman. Mary Meyer, perhaps. That would be nice. Mary’s husband was a CIA officer, which made her a risky mistress. She was so good, though. Very understanding, very discreet, and accepting of his disabilities. And her husband, if he was doing his job, would not be at home.

Powers answered on the third ring.

I
T WAS STILL
dark when Ruth heard noises from the bathroom, then the toilet flushing and Win going back to her room, singing to herself.

George was right, Ruth thought. Her mother was going a bit peculiar. And she’d be retiring from the laundry six months from now. A batty old woman in the house all day, oh, my God. Dunt even think about it. Ruth squinted at the alarm clock. Five something? George’s breathing rattled in his chest. The fags. She worried herself back to sleep.

She awoke when George brought the cups of tea in, which was the Sunday arrangement.

“Did you make one for Mother?”

“No,” George said. “There’s no sound out of her.”

“Ent there? Thas rum, ent it? She never sleep this late.”

George kicked his slippers off and got back into bed.

“I better go’n see if she’s all right,” Ruth said, heaving her legs out from under the blankets.

“’Course she’s all right. Drink your tea.”

“She might be ill, George.”

“Ill?” he snorted. “When’s she ever been ill?”

Win hadn’t opened her curtains, so it was understandable that in the dimly lit bedroom Ruth mistook what lay on the floor for a big gray cat. Understandable, therefore, that she screamed. And understandable when she realized that she was looking at her mother’s chopped-off hair that she screamed again.

“What?”
George said, from the doorway.

“Whassup, Mum?” Clem, for some reason holding his dressing gown in front of him instead of wearing it.

But Ruth couldn’t say anything. With her hand over her mouth, she was staring at her mother’s bed, which was empty, the blankets pulled away from the bare and lumpy mattress.

She was too distracted to manage the usual Sunday breakfast. Eventually, George ate a bowl of cornflakes, his silence worse than accusation.

When Clem wheeled his bike out of the shed, Ruth called, “Where’re you gorn?”

“I said I’d help Goz with his paper round. Thas five miles on a Sunday, and them Sunday papers weigh a ton, he says.”

“So you’re gorn down Arnold Pitcher’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Nip round the corner to Angel Yard, Clem, then. See if your gran’s all right. I’m that worried. I espect she’re with Hoseason and that lot, but if she ent, you come back and tell me, orright?”

“Okay, Mum,” Clem said.

He hid his face, making a show of checking his brakes.

It was like he flew to the coast.

Frankie.

The huge white sky smiled down on him. His legs were effortless.

Frankie.

Freewheeling the slow downhill out of Napton, he took his hands from the handlebars and put them in his pockets and fiddled with himself.

Frankie.

The sign that said
HAZEBOROUGH
was deceitful; there was nothing for an uphill mile. He stood on the pedals.

Frankie, Frankie!

Then the sea spread itself in front of him, like restless metal. A car, a bulbous little Austin A30, passed him with a clergyman at the wheel, who smiled and waved. Perhaps he had mistaken Clem’s incandescent halo of lust for something more spiritual.

A road sign:
NORWICH 21 MILES.
NORWICH. People wrote it on the back of love-letter envelopes as a joke. It stood for Knickers Off Ready When I Come Home. Should be KORWICH, anyhow. The
k
is silent in
knickers.
The phrase struck him as funny, and he laughed aloud. Then something, someone, an older version of himself perhaps, told him that he was laughing because he was scared. Made him stop at the top of the low hill, the sea cliff dipping down to his right. He set his feet on either side of the bike on the tar-and-gravel road. He didn’t know if he stunk when he was sweaty. Some boys did. Goz did, a bit.

The thought he had tried to smother rose up again:
It’d be better not to do it than be no good at it.

The electrical thrill of anticipation changed polarity, became something closer to dread. He was trembling; his watch shook when he looked at it. Ten to eleven, nearly. The strident calling of herring gulls sounded like mockery.

Where,
exactly,
do you put it in?

The railway that brought holidaymakers clattering to Cromer and Sheringham did not reach Hazeborough, despite the fact that the little hamlet had a beach superior to those of its jollier neighbors. But that was not the only reason that it remained unpopular, almost, in fact, desolate.

In 1940, after the heroic disaster of Dunkirk, the Ministry of Defense made a hasty survey of England’s south and east coasts to work out the likeliest places for Hitler’s forces to come ashore when they invaded. It was fairly unlikely that they’d choose north Norfolk, as opposed to Kent, say, or Sussex. But if the sneaky Nazi swine
did
decide to come across the North Sea rather than the English Channel, Hazeborough was exactly the kind of place they might fancy. The cliffs there were lower than at any point for miles and miles. The sea was shallow for some considerable distance from the shore, even at low tide. So the Royal Navy tethered sea mines — big buoyant spheres of explosive with detonator spikes — a mile or so offshore. The Royal Engineers garlanded the beach, all three miles of it, with coiled barbed wire and built “pillboxes”— concrete gun emplacements — atop the cliff. When that was done, the Royal Ordnance Corps planted land mines.

The Germans never came, as we know.

After the war, a decent effort was made to clear all this stuff away. It proved more difficult, and more hazardous, than putting it there. Maps and charts had gone missing. Navy minesweepers recovered fewer sea mines than they should have done; some had broken free of their mooring chains and drifted off. Tides and wild weather had reshaped the beach. In the winter of 1944, a large chunk of cliff had toppled down onto the minefield, bringing a pillbox with it.

It was four years (during which time one ROC man was killed, and two others maimed, by land mines) before Hazeborough beach was considered safe enough to be reopened to the public. And even then, in 1950, the farthermost reaches of the beach remained fenced off and marked with warning signs — a skull and crossbones inside a red triangle. In time, the mesh fences were slumped by windblown sand, and the signs were disfigured by boys with catapults. Even so, Hazeborough was regarded with suspicion. (Ruth was one of many who believed that you’d get blown up as soon as you set foot on the sand. She’d have had a purple fit if she’d known that Clem had gone there, even if his motives had been pure.) The place remained unprosperous and unpopular.

He leaned the bike against one of the rust-flaked uprights of the railings behind the shuttered clapboard café. He watched the sea lazily heave itself onto the shingly sand and retreat, sighing. The weather was on their side, at least. The wind up here could slice you to the bone if it wanted to, but today it was resting, or waiting. Above the horizon, a swath of sky was striped like the skin of a blue mackerel.

She wouldn’t come.

No, don’t think that.

The world could end now. The sky could convulse, turn sideways, become a tower of fire. He could be sucked into oblivion at any second, waiting in bloody Hazeborough to lose his virginity.

Don’t think that, neither.

A man with a muzzled greyhound walked by and gave him a good looking at.

Clem lit a cigarette and smoked it, then popped a Polo mint into his mouth for his breath.

She wouldn’t come. She hadn’t got out of going to church. She was sitting on a pew, her tears reflecting stained glass.

A tinny chirrup of a bicycle bell, and there she was. Coming toward him, waving. She was wearing a skirt and a tight white sweater under her coat. Glimpses of stocking top and thigh flickered at him, and his heart went ballistic.

The Reverend Hugh Underwood, white-surpliced, stood at the porch of Saint Nicholas’s Church, bidding farewell to his flock. It didn’t take long, but even so it was tedious. The business was nearly over when two of his departed congregation returned: the spinster twins, the Misses Fiske, clearly in a state of excitement. After a good deal of mutual nudging and urging, one of them said, “If yer’ve got a minute, Vicar, there’s somethun in the square you oughter see.”

Underwood considered this unlikely.

“Really? And what might that be, pray, Miss Fiske?”

The ladies couldn’t muster a reply between them. Instead, they blushed, made matching beckoning gestures, and scuttled off. Sighing, in need of a cup of tea and a cigarette, Underwood followed.

Borstead’s square was, in fact, roughly rectangular. Toward its slightly wider end stood an ancient stone cross, stump armed and covered in elaborate carvings blurred by time. It was, tradition had it, more than a thousand years old, placed there on the orders of Saint Dunstan himself, when Borstead was a nameless pagan crossroads. Next to it, for reasons no one could remember, an ancient fire engine was parked. It was an eighteenth-century horse-drawn cart, a lead-lined water tank and hand pump set into a red-painted wooden frame on iron-rimmed wheels. On market days, when the square was lined with stalls, the cross and the fire engine were an irritation to traffic; at other times they were largely ignored, on account of their familiarity. On this Sunday morning, however, they were the center of attention. A good many people, and not only the Reverend Underwood’s faithful, had gathered at the margins of the square to create a mocking hubbub, which hushed, gradually, as the vicar approached. Alongside Edmond’s, the haberdashery, he halted, aghast.

A circle of white-robed figures surrounded the cross and the fire engine. They were so extraordinary, so utterly unfamiliar, that for a dizzy moment he thought they might have descended from space or — less likely — heaven. Clearly, some were male and some female, yet the females had hair like men, and the males had no hair at all. And they were barefoot. A single voice persisted when silence descended: a stout bald man reciting from the book of Revelation. It took Underwood a full half minute to realize that it was Enoch Hoseason. Then he started to recognize the others. There were twelve, in all. The mad messiah and his disciples. There was heresy in the very number. Underwood formed his face into a stern mask and advanced.

Frankie dismounted and let her bike fall onto his, her pedals barging into his spokes.

“Hiya,” she said, and the awkwardness of it, the fact that she’d never said it before, melted him.

He embarked on a number of sentences that he couldn’t complete.

“Are you . . . ? Do you still . . . ? Did you, was it, I mean . . .”

She busied herself with herself, ignoring him. She fussed with her garter belt through her skirt, tugged her sweater back into order, shrugged her coat into shape. Tossed her hair back. Then she looked up at him. Her face was almost expressionless.

“Shut up,” she said, then planted her mouth on his and forced her tongue in, pressing herself against him. He was shocked; they’d never snogged openly in a public place before.

“So,” Frankie said, pulling away, “here we are. Still alive, just as I said we’d be. Where are we going?”

“This way,” he said.

He didn’t dare take her hand until they were some way along the beach, out of sight of the cliff-top huddle of fishermen’s cottages and gabled bungalows. Despite the enormity of what they were about to do, Frankie seemed to be without a care. She lifted her face to the bright pallor of the sky. She inhaled the sea air like a tourist. The silence between them didn’t appear to bother her; in fact, she seemed to want it. His own anxiety was so strong that he thought it might be audible, plangent as cracking ice. At least there was no one else around, he thought. He had no faith in his luck. It would not have surprised him if they’d come face-to-face, at this momentous moment, in this remote spot, with someone who knew him, someone who would report his assignation and bring the world down in a heap.

The gorsy jumble of fallen cliff forced them closer to the low surf. They walked across a springy mat of seaweed, bladder wrack. Its brown blisters popped beneath their feet, which delighted her. She let go of his hand and jumped on them, bursting them childishly, laughing, little squirts of water staining her shoes. He stood watching her, smiling like a parent.

Beyond the landslip, there was a sign on a pole: a pocked and dented skull and crossbones.

Frankie said, “What’s that mean?”

“Beware of pirates,
”
Clem said. “Come on.”

He took hold of her hand again and led her toward the cliff, where a great slab of concrete, a wartime ruin, angled into the sand. He reckoned that in the lee of it they would see anyone approaching before anyone approaching would see them.

“Will this do?”

Frankie looked around as if she were considering buying it.

She leaned her back against the slab and smiled and opened her arms, which parted her coat, and said, “Come here, Clem Ackroyd.”

So he went to her and kissed her and put his hands up inside her clothes, up her back where he could feel the bra strap and the silky shiftings of her shoulder blades. She parted her legs, and although he almost didn’t want to, he shoved his shameful hardness up against her. Miraculously, it excited her. She placed her hands at the top of his hips and tugged him tighter in, lifting herself, mumbling his name into their kiss.