Winds of War (75 page)

“Won’t you? Good. Neither will I. Some hours weigh against a whole lifetime, don’t they? I think they do. Well! Good-bye, Captain Henry, and safe journeyings. I hope you find all well at home.”

“Good-bye, Pam. I hope Ted makes it.”

Her voice broke a little. “Somebody’s coming for me. Good-bye.”

Fatigued but tensely awake, Victor Henry changed to civilian clothes and drifted to Fred Fearing’s noisy air hot apartment. A bomb bursting close by earlier in the week had blown in all the windows, which were blocked now with brown plywood. Fearing’s broadcast, describing his feelings under a shower of glass, had been a great success.

“Where’s la Tudsbury?” said Fearing, handing Henry a cupful of punch made of gin and some canned juice.

“Fighting Germans.”

“Good show!” The broadcaster did a vaudeville burlesque of the British accent.

Pug sat in a corner of a dusty plush sofa under a plywood panel, watching the drinking and dancing, and wondering why he had come here. He saw a tall young girl in a tailored red suit, with long black hair combed behind her ears, give him one glance, then another. With an uncertain smile, at once bold and wistful, the girl approached. “Hello there. Would you like more punch? You look important and lonesome.”

“I couldn’t be less important. I’d like company more than punch. Please join me.”

The girl promptly sat and crossed magnificent silk-shod legs. She was prettier than Pamela, and no more than twenty. “Let me guess. You’re a general. Air Corps. They tend to be younger.”

“I’m just a Navy captain, a long, long way from home.”

“I’m Lucy Somerville. My mother would spank me for speaking first to a strange man. But everything’s different in the war, isn’t it?”

“I’m Captain Victor Henry.”

“Captain Victor Henry. Sounds so American.” She looked at him with impudent eyes. “I like Americans.”

“I guess you’re meeting quite a few.”

“Oh, heaps. One nicer than the other.” She laughed. “The bombing’s perfectly horrible, but it is exciting, isn’t it? Life’s never been so exciting. One never knows whether one will be able to get home at night. It makes things interesting. I know girls who take their makeup and pajamas along when they go out in the evening. And dear old Mums can’t say a word!”

The girl’s roguish, inviting glance told him that here probably was a random flare of passion for the taking. Wartime London was the place, he thought; “nothing else holds fashion!” But this girl was Madeline’s age, and meant nothing to him; and he had just said a stodgy, cold, miserable good-bye to Pamela Tudsbury. He avoided her dancing eyes, and said something dull about the evening news. In a minute or so a strapping Army lieutenant approached and offered Lucy Somerville a drink, and she jumped up and was gone. Soon after, Pug left.

Alone in the flat, he listened to a Churchill speech and went to bed. The last thing he did before turning out the light was to reread Rhoda’s nostalgic, sentimental, and troubled letter. Something shadowy and unpleasant was there between the lines. He guessed she might be having difficulties with Madeline, though the letter did not mention the daughter’s name. There was no point in dwelling on it, he thought. He would be home in a couple of months. He fell asleep.

* * *

Rhoda had slept with Dr. Kirby on the trip to Connecticut. That was the shadowy and unpleasant thing Pug half-discerned. Proverbially the cuckold is the last to know his disgrace; no suspicion crossed his mind, though Rhoda’s words were incautious and revealing.

War not only forces intense new relationships; it puts old ones to the breaking stress. On the very day this paragon of faithfulness - as his Navy friends regarded him - had received his wife’s letter, he had not made love to Pamela Tudsbury, mainly because the girl had decided not to bring him to it. Rhoda had fallen on the way back from New London. It had been unplanned and unforeseen. She would have recoiled from a cold-blooded copulation. The back windows of the little tourist house, where she and Kirby had stopped for tea, looked out on a charming pond where swans moved among pink lily pads in a gray drizzle. Except for the old lady who served them, they were alone in this quiet relaxing place. The visit to Byron had gone well and the countryside was beautiful. They intended to halt for an hour, then drive on to New York. They talked of their first lunch outside Berlin, of the farewell at Tempelhof Airport, of their mutual delight at seeing each other in the Waldorf. The time flowed by, their tone grew more intimate. Then Palmer Kirby said, “How wonderfully cozy this place is! Too bad we can’t stay here.”

And Rhoda Henry murmured, hardly believing that she was releasing the words from her mouth, “Maybe we could.”

“
Maybe we could!
” Three words, and a life pattern and a character dissolved. The old lady gave them a bedroom, asking no questions. Everything followed: undressing with a stranger, casting aside with her underclothes her modesty and her much-treasured rectitude, yielding to a torrent of novel sensations. To be taken by this large demanding man left her throbbing with animal pleasure. All her thoughts since then went back to that point in time, and there halted. Like a declaration of war, it drew a line across the past and started another era. The oddest aspect of this new life was that it was so much like the old one. Rhoda felt she had not really changed. She even still loved Pug. She was trying to digest all this puzzlement when she wrote to her husband. She did have twinges of conscience, but she was surprised to find how bearable these were.

In New York, Rhoda and Kirby heard in the bright afternoon sunshine the Churchill broadcast which Pug had listened to late at night. Rhoda had chosen well the apartment for Madeline and herself. It faced south, across low brownstones. Sunshine poured in all day through white-draped windows, into a broad living room furnished and decorated in white, peach, and apple green. Photographs of Victor Henry and the boys stood in green frames on a white piano. Few visitors failed to comment on the genteel cheerfulness of the place.

“He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame, until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe. . . .”

Puffing at his pipe, Kirby slouched in an armchair and stared at the radio. “Marvellous phrasemaker, that man.”

“Do you think they’ll actually hold off the Germans, Palmer?”

“What does Pug say?”

“He wrote a pessimistic letter when he first arrived there. He hasn’t written again.”

“Odd. He’s been there a while.”

“Well, I tell myself if anything had happened to him I’d have heard. I do worry.”

“Naturally.”

The speech ended. She saw him glance at the watch on his hairy wrist. “When does your plane go?”

“Oh, not for a couple of hours.” He turned off the radio, strolled to the windows, and looked out. “This is not a bad view. Radio City, the Empire State Building. Pity that apartment house blocks out the river.”

“I know what you’d like right now,” she said.

“What?”

“Some tea. It’s that time.” Answering his sudden coarse grin with a half-coy, half-brazen smile, she hurriedly added, “I really mean
tea
, Mr. Palmer Kirby.”

“My favorite drink, tea. Lately, anyway.”

“Don’t be horrible, you! Well? Shall I make some?”

“Of course. I’d love tea.”

“I suppose I should swear off it, since it was my downfall. Of all things.” She walked toward the kitchen with a sexy sway. “If only I could plead having been drunk, but I was sober as a minister’s wife.”

He came to the kitchen and watched her prepare the tea. Palmer Kirby liked to watch her move around, and his eyes on her made Rhoda feel young and fetching. They sat at a low table in the sunshine and she decorously poured tea and passed him buttered bread. The picture could not have been more placid and respectable.

“Almost as good as the tea at Mrs. Murchison’s guesthouse,” Kirby said. “Almost.”

“Now never mind! How long will you be in Denver?”

“Only overnight. Then I have to come to Washington. Our board’s going to meet with some British scientists. From the advance papers, they’ve got some remarkable stuff. I’m sure they’re surprising the Germans.”

“So! You’ll be in Washington next.”

“Yes. Got a good reason to go to Washington?”

“Oh, dear, Palmer, don’t you realize I know everybody in that town? Absolutely everybody. And anybody I don’t know, Pug knows.”

He said after a glum pause, “It’s not very satisfactory, is it? I don’t see myself as a homewrecker. Especially of a military man serving abroad.”

“Look, dear, I don’t see myself as a scarlet woman. I’ve been to church both Sundays since. I don’t feel guilty, but I do feel mighty curious, I’ll tell you that.” She poured more tea for him. “It must be the war, Palmer. I don’t know. With Hitler bestriding Europe and London burning to the ground, all the old ideas seem, I don’t know, TRIVIAL or something. I mean compared to what’s real at the moment - the swans out in back at Mrs. Murchison’s place - those sweet pink lily pads, the rain, the gray cat - the tea, those funny doughy cakes - and you and me. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.”

“I didn’t tell you why I’m going to Denver.”

“No.”

“There’s a buyer for my house. Wants to pay a tremendous price. I’ve told you about the house.”

“Yes, it sounds heavenly. Do you really want to let it go?”

“I rattle around in it. I’ve been thinking, and it comes to this. Most of my friends are in Denver. The house is perfect to live in, to entertain in, to have my children and the grandchildren for visits. If I had a wife, I wouldn’t sell it.” He stopped, looking at her now with serious, large brown eyes filled with worried shyness. The look was itself a proposal of marriage. “What do you think, Rhoda?”

“Oh, Palmer! Oh, heavenly days!” Rhoda’s eyes brimmed. She was not totally astonished, but the relief was beyond description. This resolved the puzzlement. It had not been a crazy slip, after all, like that foolishness with Kip Tollever, but a grand passion. Grand passions were different.

He said, “That can’t really be news to you. We wouldn’t have stayed at Mrs. Murchison’s if I hadn’t felt this way.”

“Well! Oh, my lord. I’m proud and happy that you should think of me like that. Of course I am, But –
Palmer
!” She swept her hand almost gaily at the photographs on the piano.

“I have friends who’ve married again in their fifties, Rhoda. After divorces, some of them, and some are blissfully happy.”

Rhoda sighed, dashed her fingers to her eyes, and smiled at him. “Is it that you want to make an honest woman of me? That’s terribly gallant, but unnecessary.”

Palmer Kirby leaned forward earnestly, tightening his large loose mouth. “Pug Henry is an admirable man. It didn’t happen because you’re a bad woman. There was a rift in your marriage before we met. There had to be.”

In a very shaky voice, Rhoda said, “Before I ever knew him, Pug was a Navy fullback. I saw him play in two Army-Navy games. I had a boyfriend who loved those games – let me talk, Palmer, maybe I’ll collect myself. He was an aggressive, exciting player, this husky little fellow darting all over the field. Then, my stars, he BURST on me in Washington. The actual Pug Henry, whose picture had been in the papers and all that. The war was on. He looked dashing in blue and gold, I must say! Well, great heavens, he courted the way he played football. And he was very funny in those days. Pug has a droll wit, you know, when he bothers to use it. Well, all the boys I went with were just from the old Washington crowd, all going to the same schools, all cut out by the same cookie cutter, you might say. Pug was something different. He still is. For one thing, he’s a very serious Christian, and you can bet
that
took a lot of getting used to! I mean right from the start it was a complicated thing. I mean it didn’t seem to interfere at all with his ROMANCING, if I make myself clear, and yet – well, Pug is altogether unusual and wonderful. I’ll always say that. I must bore Pug. I know he loves me, but – the thing is, he is so Navy! Why, that man left me standing at my wedding reception, Palmer, for half an hour, while he drove his commanding officer to catch a train back to Norfolk! That’s Victor Henry for you. But in twenty-five years – oh dear, now for the very first time I suddenly feel very, very wretched.”

Rhoda cried into her handkerchief, her shoulders shaking. He came and sat beside her. When she calmed down, she looked at him and said, “You go along to Denver, but ask yourself this. I’ve done this to Pug. Wouldn’t you be thinking forever and a day, if by some wild chance you got what you’re asking for, that I’d do it to you? Of course you would. Why not?”

He stood. “I’ll keep that appointment in Denver, Rhoda. But I don’t think I’ll sell the house.”

“Oh, sell it! As far as I’m concerned, you go right ahead and sell that house, Palmer. I only think you yourself might regret it one day.”

“Good-bye, Rhoda. I’ll telephone you from Washington. Sorry I missed Madeline this time. Give her my best.” He said, glancing at the photographs on the piano, “I think your kids would like me. Even that strange Byron fellow.”

“How could they fail to? That isn’t the problem.” She walked with him to the door. He kissed her like a husband going off on a trip.

Chapter 35

September was crisping the Berlin air and yellowing the leaves when Pug got back. Compared to London under the blitz, the city looked at peace. Fewer uniforms were in sight, and almost no trucks or tanks. After beating France, Hitler had partially demobilized to free workers for the farms and factories. His remaining soldiers were not loafing around Berlin. Either they were poised for invasion on the coast, or they garrisoned France and Poland, or they guarded a thin prudent line facing the Soviet Union. Only the air war showed its traces: round blue-gray snouts of flak guns poking above autumn leaves, flaxen-haired German children in a public square gawking at a downed Wellington. The sight of the forlorn British bomber – a twin of F for Freddie – with its red, white, and blue bull’s-eye, gave Pug a sad twinge. He tried and failed to see the wrecked gasworks. Scowling Luftwaffe guards and wooden street barriers cordoned off the disaster. Göring had long ago announced that if a single British bomb ever fell on Berlin, the German people could call him Meyer. The evidence of Meyer’s shortcomings was off limits.