Stranger in Paradise (Home Front - Book #2) (6 page)

London had never looked more beautiful to her than it did as she darted up a side street, her hand tucked securely in Mac’s strong one, and showed him a shortcut to the palace. Suddenly Mac came to a stop.

“Why are we going to the palace?” he asked.

“Because—” She stopped. “I don’t exactly know.”

“The speech will be on the radio, won’t it?”

She nodded. “She certainly won’t make the broadcast from the balcony.”

“I don’t think she’d miss us, do you?”

“Not one bit.”

“We could grab some supper then catch the fireworks over the Thames.”

“I’d love that.”

“Then we can talk about the future.”

She met his eyes. “I’d love that even more.”

He pulled her close. She wondered how she’d lived all these years without the feel of his strong arms around her.

But, more importantly, she wondered how she would live the years yet to come without him.

* * *

The hamburgers were cooked to perfection. The potato salad was a success. The four children at the table didn’t fight, throw up, or make rude noises and bounce potato chips off the dog’s nose. The adults made adult conversation. Any other night Nancy would have been thrilled to have hosted such a wonderful dinner party.

Tonight she couldn’t wait to see it end.

When the Danzas said good-night and climbed into their Oldsmobile 88 to head back into the city, Nancy breathed a sigh of relief and hurried back into the den to watch the film of the coronation. The girls were already in bed, and Gerry, exhausted after a long day at work, was sleeping behind his copy of the
Lang Island Press
. Even their dog, Bingo, snored peacefully in his basket near the fireplace.

She was alone with the television, a nickel bottle of Coca-Cola and Queen Elizabeth II. Curled up on the sofa in her favorite blue chenille bathrobe, she could mingle with aristocrats and dance with princes and never leave home. How had she ever lived before television? Thanks to her nine-inch window on the world, she could invite Clark Gable and Cary Grant into her den and hobnob with royalty half a world away. It was a miracle, that’s what it was. An absolute miracle. Why her parents were dragging their heels about the new invention was beyond Nancy. Who needed the drone of the radio when you could watch history unfold right there in your own house?

Television brought magic into your life. To Nancy it seemed anything was possible when she turned on the set and watched other people’s dreams come true in front of her eyes. Her own dreams of going places and seeing things, of meeting new people and hearing new voices, had disappeared along the way. There were times when she looked at Gerry asleep in his armchair and wondered what their lives would have been like if they’d cast their fates to the wind and hit the road together.

But there hadn’t been time for spontaneity. They’d married right after the war had ended and, as night follows day, three little girls had appeared on the scene with dreams of their own. Dreams that Nancy and Gerry would move heaven and earth to fulfill.

Not that she regretted any of their decisions, but she was only human, and the sameness of their days sometimes felt like a hundred-pound weight across her shoulders. She could only imagine how it felt to Gerry, knowing that every weekday morning—stretching far into the unimaginable future—he’d board the train into the city and go to work for his wife’s sister.

What had happened to their dreams of independence? To their plans to see the world before they grew too old and gray to care if they were in Levittown or London? There was a time when they had looked with horror at her parents and the Weavers and others like them. “Not for us,” they had said fervently, as only the very young dared. “We’ll be different.”

She sighed and switched off the reading lamp, so that the room was bathed in the gray glow from the television. It was impossible to be different in a world that prized sameness. The camera swept over the faces in the London crowd, pretty Englishwomen with complexions like summer roses, dapper Englishmen with smiles like Cary Grant. Nancy was certain the lives they led were far more exciting than her own perfectly average existence.

“And there she is now,” said the announcer on channel two. “The new monarch and her family are on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, waving as the crowd below screams ‘Long live the Queen!’”

Nancy raised her bottle of Coke in salute and settled down to enjoy the spectacle while her family slept.

* * *

The ground was soggy, the air was damp and chill, but neither Mac nor Jane noticed. Love, it seemed, provided protection from the elements.

“Our sixth date,” said Mac, toasting her with champagne he’d managed to procure from a friend at the bureau.

“Our seventh,” said Jane, laughing softly as they linked arms and sipped from each other’s paper cup.

“Not that you’re counting.”

“Of course not,” she said, her tone oh so prim and proper despite the fact she had lost track of time along the way. One thing she hadn’t lost track of was the way each
faux
date was ended with a kiss. Lingering. Sweet. Passionate. Truth was, she could scarcely remember anything about the coronation or the crowds or the pageantry of the day. Mac’s kisses had erased all else from her memory.

“We’re going to have a great life, Janie,” he said, wiping a drop of champagne from the corner of her lip with his index finger. “I promise you.”

His touch sent spirals of sensation rocketing through her body like the golden fireworks exploding in the night sky. “Don’t make promises,” she whispered.
Not when you’ll be gone come morning
.

“We can work things out, Janie. You just have to trust me.”

“It’s impossible,” she said forlornly. “We’ve known each other only twelve hours. How can we pledge our lives on such short acquaintance?”

He said nothing. What on earth could he say? Any rational being would know the situation was daft, that tossing in your lot with a total stranger, albeit one with beautiful green eyes, was a fool’s errand.

But then he kissed her and the fireworks in the sky seemed to go off inside her heart.

They could write letters, keep the transatlantic phone lines humming as they pledged their love, but the one thing they couldn’t do was guarantee they’d have a second chance. The slow contemplative world she’d grown up in was gone, vanished as surely as the hoop skirt. She had nothing and no one to call her own. Nobody who cared, really cared, if she was lonely or sad or frightened that life was passing her by.

If she let Mac Weaver sail away tomorrow afternoon alone, she’d be losing the best thing that had ever happened to her. The world didn’t hold still simply because you wanted it to. Magic happened once in a lifetime, but it required proximity to take root. Long-distance magic didn’t stand much of a chance, not even in this age of speed.

Jane understood the way life really was; good intentions and pretty promises weren’t enough to ensure a happy ending. Sometimes you had to close your eyes and jump right in and pray you remembered how to swim against the tide.

“Yes,” she said. The word shimmered in the air before them like a silver rocket.

Mac’s blood pounded in his ear. “Say it again.”

She turned slightly and touched his cheek with her hand. “Yes.”

His mind went blank. No words. No thoughts. Nothing but a rush of pure happiness so intense he felt as if the fireworks were going off inside his chest.

“You’ll marry me?”

“If you still want me.”

“We leave tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“Your job... your flat... your family.”

“I’ll call Leo... I live in a boarding house... you know I have no other family save Nigel.”

“You’re sure?”

She took his hand and placed it against her chest. He marveled at the calm and steady beat of her heart. “Never more so, Mac.”

“It’ll work,” he said, above the thunder of fireworks illuminating the darkness. “We’ll make it work.”

And although a wiser woman might have questioned how, Jane Townsend only nodded and gave herself over to her future husband’s kiss.

Maybe if they’d had time to think about it, Mac and Jane might not have gone ahead with the wedding. Maybe if they’d had just one moment to catch their collective breath, they might have realized what a crazy, impetuous, downright foolhardy venture they were about to embark upon, and have parted friends. Anything at all would have done it: trouble at the registry office; a problem with the rail passage from London to Southampton; even an objection from the complacent Uncle Nigel or the vociferous Leo Donnelly might have been enough to stop the forward motion of their plans. But, as fate would have it, everything fell into place without so much as a fare-thee-well, and at a few minutes before eleven on the morning of June 4, 1953, Jane Margaret Townsend and MacKenzie Weaver became man and wife in St. Julian’s Church on Winkle Street.

“Go with God,” said the priest with his incongruous French accent. “May you have many years and many children.”

Jane stared down at her left hand. Mac’s school ring, Columbia University 1939, dwarfed her middle finger up to the knuckle. The cold metal was a strange sensation against her skin, and she knew she would have to take care her makeshift wedding band didn’t slip off.

The priest nudged Mac with a smile. “Kiss the bride, lad. She’s a pretty one.”

The word “children” had done something to Mac, something words like “forever” and “in sickness and in health” hadn’t. This was his wife, not his girlfriend. This was a step into the future, not an easy way to keep the past at bay. He looked at the tiny dark-haired woman he’d taken to wife and felt stark terror. She looked so delicate in her pale blue suit with the white orchid pinned to her left shoulder. They’d had time to race to Covent Garden at dawn before they caught their train and, for a price, he’d gotten a Cockney flower vendor to hand over the choicest bloom.

Jane had blushed the color of a pale pink tea rose, and he’d been flooded with the desire to sweep her into his arms and protect her from dangers both real and imagined.

He still wanted to protect her, but he also wondered why nobody had tried to protect him from doing something as crazy and impulsive as marrying a total stranger. Not that she wasn’t a beautiful stranger; hell, any man with eyes could see she was as perfectly made as a woman could be. Soft where she should be soft. Curved where you want a woman to be curved. Smart and sassy and sweet. Everything a guy could want in a woman. Only trouble was, he knew more about Queen Elizabeth than he did about Jane Townsend Weaver, the woman who happened to be his wife.

She looked up at him, all dewy-eyed and expectant. He wanted to say, “It’s not too late... we haven’t signed the papers yet... the ship hasn’t sailed...” but there was something so appealing about the soft swell of her lower lip, the sweep of her dark lashes against her cheeks, that he wondered what one kiss could possibly hurt.

For a moment Jane was terrified that he wasn’t going to kiss her. Once on a trip to the country she’d seen a deer trapped in the headlights of a lorry. That was the look in Mac’s eyes when the priest pronounced them man and wife, then commanded Mac to kiss his brand-new bride.

Not that Jane felt like a bride. Right now, she didn’t feel anything so much as bewildered. They had kissed their way through London last night, then kissed their way down from London to Southampton, cuddled together in a salon away from prying eyes. Now it seemed as if kissing her was the last thing he had in mind.

But then he dipped his head toward her and she raised hers to him and his mouth found her mouth and she remembered what it was that had brought them to this unexpected spot in the first place.

“Married,” he said against her lips.

“I know,” she answered.

“Mrs. Weaver.”

A delicious thrill rippled through her. “Yes, Mr. Weaver?”

He kissed her again. The priest chuckled softly and Jane drew away from her husband, embarrassed that their pleasure in each other should be so obvious to a man of God. But the man of God understood the ways of the world and he blessed the newlyweds and sent them on their way.

“I wish we had time for a wedding breakfast,” said Mac as they hurried toward the dock where the
Queen Mary
was being prepared for the westward voyage.

“We’ll have five days of wedding breakfasts,” she pointed out, curling the fingers of her left hand so that her makeshift band stayed put.

Of course five days meant five nights, and that thought sent Jane spiraling back into silence.

Mac was doing his best not to think of anything but boarding the ship on time. He knew there was bound to be a problem negotiating passage for Jane, his unexpected traveling companion, and he wanted to have his arguments—and his pound notes—ready. Besides, it was easier dealing with concrete problems like passports and customs duties than the more abstract problems of falling for—and marrying—a woman he’d known less than twenty-four hours.

They rounded a corner and Jane gasped as they found themselves staring up at the
Queen Mary
in all her glory. There was something almost frightening about the massive structure, whose three red smokestacks, banded in the traditional Cunard black, scraped the overcast Southampton sky. Dockworkers loaded huge steamer trunks into the hold of the ship while an elegant Afghan hound waited with its mistress for permission to go aboard. Men carried huge crates of live lobsters and laughed as an occasional claw poked through an opening to grab an unsuspecting ear. A man, wearing a towering white chef’s hat, inspected each crate as it went by. Jane laughed as a gust of wind lifted the hat from his head and deposited it gracefully atop the back of the Afghan.

They stopped at the foot of the gangway. Mac turned to Jane. “Last chance.”

She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin.

“Next stop, America,” she said.

* * *

When Mac had called in a few favors and secured a suite on the Main Deck, he hadn’t known it would be his honeymoon cabin. Fate must have been watching over him, for when he swept Jane up into his arms and carried her across the threshold—to the amusement of other passengers milling around—the room waiting for them was beyond their wildest expectations. The walls were paneled in sycamore wood of the palest cream, a stunning counterpoint to the rich carpet and spread of sea-foam green. Dressers, nightstands, boudoir table were all built in to the wall in the same sycamore as the paneling. Also built-in was a round clock that silently kept track of the hours. Nigel and Roxie had sent a huge bouquet of roses, which the steward had arranged in the watered niche over the mantelpiece.

Mac and Jane made it through the deliberately comical lifeboat drill with the same good grace exhibited by their fellow passengers. No one had to be reminded of the fate suffered by the
Titanic
just forty years ago—or of the importance of flotation vests and lifeboats.

There were, of course, many ways to save your life, and maybe marriage was the best way of all. The trouble was, as the harbormaster eased the
Queen Mary
from her berth and piloted her toward open waters, both of the Weavers were struck with the certainty that they had made a dreadful mistake.

Not a simple mistake, mind you, but one of such cataclysmic proportions that Jane actually gauged the distance from the railing where she stood down to the water below. More than likely she’d break her neck in the dive, but for an instant it almost seemed worth the chance. After all, what could be more dangerous than marriage to a stranger?

As for Mac, he, too, had a fleeting moment of panic when the blast from the ship’s horn rattled his teeth and the great ship took to the sea. Weddings at sea were commonplace. He wondered if anyone had tried annulments at sea.

But the itinerary kept them busy those first hours. Jane had to speak with the purser, show her passport and marriage certificate, and certify she was neither a fugitive, an agitator, or totally daft. The last one gave her pause, but she signed her name to the form. Her hand balked at the unfamiliar name. The exuberant “W” and the elegant curves of “e-a-v-e-r.”

“Feels strange, does it?”

She looked into the amused eyes of the silver-haired purser and nodded. “That it does.”

“You’ll get used to it. First time’s always the hardest.”

The purser’s words came back to haunt her later that night as she prepared herself for bed.

Mac had excused himself, saying he wanted to go back up to Promenade Deck for a little while longer, leaving Jane alone to do whatever it was a bride did on her wedding night.

Elegant nightware didn’t have much place in Jane’s life. When you lived in a tiny cold-water flat right off the Mersey River, you concerned yourself more with warmth than allure. Mac must have noticed the heavy cotton nightgowns as she’d unpacked her overnight case, for when she retired to the cabin after supper and their stroll on Promenade Deck, a peignoir set of delicate ivory silk lay across the turned-down bed.

The fever began deep inside, in a place so dark and secret she’d not known of its existence until that moment. The negligee was in the center of the bed; the bed was at the center of her universe. Her mouth grew dry with anticipation and a sense of inevitability embraced her.

The cabin was spacious but by no means large. Mac had filled the room with his presence. There would be no secrets tonight, she thought, as she gathered up her toiletries and headed for the small bathroom. No place to hide. When he walked back through that door again, it would be to claim his rights as her husband.

* * *

The last time Mac had seen the good
Queen Mary
, she had been stripped of her luxurious fittings and painted battleship gray. The
Queen Mary
had joined her sister ship, the
Queen Elizabeth
, at war. The destruction of the two queens of the North Atlantic had been a prime German objective, but God must have been watching over the vessels, for they not only survived the long war intact, but the
Queen Mary
had the honor of ferrying the first load of GIs back home after V-E Day had been declared.

Tom Wilson had come home on the
Queen Mary
in June 1945. Mac had followed two weeks later, en route to the battleground in the Pacific. The
Queen Mary
had been strung from stem to stern with hammocks below-deck. Mac would never forget the stink of flesh and cigarette smoke and soda pop as 20,000 men counted down the hours to freedom. He would also never forget the thrill as the Ambrose Channel Lighthouse appeared in the distance, signaling that the end of the journey was at hand. A roar had risen from the GIs as the sun rose in the east and spread a mantle of gold across the shoulders of the Statue of Liberty, that great lady who welcomed her children home at last.

Even Mac, hard-bitten cynic that he was, had blinked back bittersweet tears of joy that he had made it home. If only his brother had been so lucky...

Tonight, however, those memories were far from his mind.

The war was over eight years ago. The
Queen Mary
was once again clad in splendor.

And Mac Weaver was waiting to take his bride to bed.

He tossed his cigarette into the ocean then lit another one. He’d left Jane in the stateroom, although it would have been swell to be there to see her face when she found the ivory lace nightgown he’d left draped across the bed.

“This one,” he’d told the shopkeeper in the ship’s arcade while Jane was ironing out details of her passport at the purser’s office. The gown was delicate, spun sugar, impossibly beautiful. So was his new wife.

The ship had stopped in Cherbourg for a few hours in late afternoon, then finally set out into the waters of the North Atlantic a little after sunset. Jane’s passport problems had taken longer than anticipated, and then there was the obligatory stroll on the Promenade Deck. They’d passed on dinner in the main dining room in favor of a light supper at the Verandah Grill on the aft end of the Sun Deck. Huge windows overlooked the stern of the ship, and the endless ocean in all its splendor had been their only dinner companion.

Conversation that had flowed so easily twenty-four hours earlier was stilted and forced now. Mac smoked half a pack of cigarettes while Jane picked at her lamb chop.

Another walk on the Promenade Deck, then Mac said, “Guess it’s time to turn in.”

“I imagine so,” said Jane, eyes averted.

And so there he was, alone at the railing, wondering what the rules were in a situation like this. If he stayed away too long, she’d wonder where he was. If he went back too soon, he might embarrass her. You think you’re sophisticated, that you’ve seen the world, but when push comes to shove, there’re times when you just have to let your heart tell you what to do.

Moonlight glittered off the dark ocean. Overhead the stars were silver spangles in the night sky.

In their cabin his wife was waiting.

He tossed his cigarette into the ocean and turned toward the stairway.

It was time.

* * *

“My husband,” Jane said aloud to her reflection in the tiny bathroom mirror. The word resonated inside her chest. Husband. It sounded of permanence. Years ago she had believed in permanence, back before she lost her brother and father to the senseless waste of war. War did nothing if not drum home the temporal nature of most things women held dear. She hadn’t asked for Mac to come into her life; their meeting had been serendipitous, an act of chance just like a turn of the roulette wheel in the casino below-deck. Was she mad to pray that permanence could come from such a beginning?

She brushed out her thick dark hair with the silver-handled brush that had belonged to her mother. Her stomach rumbled ominously. She’d barely eaten supper; the thick lamb chops and rich side dishes had overwhelmed her senses, and coupled with nervousness, her appetite had fled. So much food on one plate! After years of hardship, both during the war and after, it was hard to conceive of such bounty, just there for the taking. Beef was still a luxury for the working classes; on the
Queen Mary
, roasts and steaks and chops were there for the taking.