Blame It on the Bossa Nova (14 page)

She looked up. She looked almost surprised that the place hadn’t been destroyed by a blitzkrieg, that despite all her experiences it was exactly as she had left it. She nodded.

“How far?”

“‘Bout five minutes.”

I pulled up next to a corporation bench overlooking a grassed roundabout.

“You’re sure it’s only five minutes?”

She nodded again. I opened the door and she crawled out, taking Chris’s blanket with her. I didn’t bother saying goodbye, somehow it didn’t seem adequate. As I drove off I saw her settling down on the bench. Her immediate problem was how to explain her appearance to her parents. I hoped that would be her only one. She was a bright young girl, I reasoned, resilient.

My only thought now was to dump the car. Irate fathers are dangerous, they can start wars. I saw a railway station and turned off into its courtyard. It was quite light now as I parked facing the building. I took the keys out of the ignition and put them back in the glove box, then I walked inside. A guy was just opening up the ticket office and I bought a single ticket to Waterloo. He told me it was a half hour wait. I went and stood by the door where another bloke had arrived and was setting up his newspaper stall. I bought a newspaper, he pointed to the car.

“Somebody’s been in a smash up.”

“Yeah, some people.”

He said he thought you should be made to take the driving test every five years and I agreed with him. I could see he was going to get chatty so I went back inside and sat on a platform seat. For a while I tried to read the tiny print of the adverts on the other side of the tracks, telephone numbers of estate agents, etcetera. Strangely I wasn’t at all sleepy, more frustrated at having empty time on my hands. I didn’t feel like reading the newspaper so I looked at a clock and tried to work out what percentage of the time I had to wait was taken up by a minute. Then I started adjusting the figure to what it would be when the train was due in fifteen minutes. Then I started working out what one percent of the time was in seconds. Then I got fed up and opened the newspaper. Splurged across the front page was the news that Khrushchev had climbed down over Cuba. War had been averted. The sighs of relief from the world’s lesser leaders were reproduced to testify that we had all witnessed it - They couldn’t go back. Cuba, Cuba, Cuba – I’d forgotten all about it.

*****

I’d let the door of the flat swing open and was fiddling around trying to put the latchkey in my pocket without dropping the pint of milk and loaf of sliced bread that I had picked up at the corner shop.

“For Jesus Christ’s sake, come in and shut the door whoever you are,” Frank shouted from the bedroom. I put the milk and bread down, walked along the hall and kicked the door open. Frank and Pascale were sitting in bed together facing me. My eyes went straight to Pascale’s breasts, then to her face. It was ironic, slightly sympathetic.

“Sorry the bed wasn’t made,” I said.

“Boyo Boyo Boy, Alex. D’you always leave parties like that? I had to put my car across the drive to stop them chasing you. They would have lynched you if they’d gotten their hands on you.”

“Cheers,” I said and sat down on the bed. Pascale started putting on her bra.

“Sure honey, don’t get cold.” said Frank, slightly upset that her virginal image had been sullied... Undressed Frank was more imposing than dressed. Clothes, particularly his, are the confirming insignia of a social role, and Frank’s role, in my experience, was the buffoon. Looking at his large naked chest and arms I could imagine their attractiveness to women. A sort of Rod Steiger power - The Animal.

“A tough break on Chris though,” he said.

“That was bloody stupid,” said Pascale.

“What? Hitting Chris, or all of them?”

“The whole bloody thing was stupid.”

“Yes,” I said. “... Perhaps I shouldn’t have hit Chris. I’ll phone him and apologise.”

“I wouldn’t do that for a while, Alex,” said Frank.

“Not the right moment, eh?” I said. Pascale got out of bed and slipped a shirt on.

“D’you want coffee, Alex?” she said.

“Yes.”

She disappeared towards the kitchen. Frank had brought out a domesticity in her that I hadn’t thought existed. We heard the sound of crockery clinking and Frank said to me.

“I guess you’re surprised to find us here.”

“Nothing surprises me Frank,” I said in my four times round the world as hobo, barman, ski instructor and private detective voice.

“You’re a buddy, a really buddy, you know that?” he said emotionally and punched me on the arm hard enough for it to hurt a little.

“Good luck to you mate. It’s nice work if you can get it.” I nodded down the corridor in my artful dodger persona and winked at him.

“Yeah, that Pascale. She’s really something, you know that...”

He thought for a second. “... How d’you know her Alex?” He said it suddenly as if he wanted it to sound impromptu, and not a question he had been dying to ask.

“A friend, you know...” He obviously didn’t. “I think I first met her at a party.” It was all very vague to me, I could hardly remember. “... Yes, a party.”

“A party, huh?” He thought about it. “... Look. Have you two got something going? I’m asking you Alex, because, I’ll be straight with you, I’m pretty damned keen on her myself.”

He was a nice guy basically. I’d never disliked him, and it seemed to me he’d done me a pretty big favour the night before... And I was pissed off with the other scene. Why not tell him? They’d never know it was me, it would just be the natural caution of a top ranking U.S. military man...

“Look Frank, there’s something you should know....”

Footsteps in the hall were quickly followed by Pascale standing at the door with three coffees on a tray.

“Coffee up,” she said. I helped myself to a Senior Service tipped from the packet on Pascale’s side of the bed.

“The question I keep asking myself,” I said after we had drunk the coffee, “... is why they let a four star admiral, or whatever they call them in your navy, fuck off to a party deep in the heart of the English countryside on the very night that he should be practising pushing little red buttons to fire Polaris missiles to start the Third World War... That’s the question I keep asking myself.”

Pascale looked a little irritated that I had broached the subject of Frank’s day-to-day duties. Frank, however, didn’t look at all irritated.

“That’s a very understandable question Alex, and I think it deserves a straight answer. You see, number one, if the shit is going to fly these days, it’s gonna be diarrhoea... and for that you don’t need an admiral, leading signalman will do... You’ve heard of MAD haven’t you?”

I hadn’t.

“Mutually Assured Destruction. That’s the ball game. I’ll be heading for the deepest fall-out shelter in the western world - And that aint this side of the Atlantic, baby... No, this whole thing was diplomatic, the closest the Navy got involved was the Coastguard service. That brings me to number two, the political side. The whole thing’s a put on. We knew Nikki was gonna climb down from Day One. It’s a try on, and he’s won. We can never give the fuckin’ Krauts nuclear warheads now. What he’s done today is to secure Berlin for the East for the rest of the century. Sure he’d like to put missiles on Cuba. I would have liked to fuck Marilyn Monroe.” He took a Senior Service tipped and lit it. Pascale took one as well. I wondered if the Kremlin had kept her abreast of this new twist on the Monroe Doctrine. From the way she lit the cigarette and dragged at it I guessed not.

A few days later Toby telephoned to sack me. He gave me a few scarcely veiled threats about the inadvisability of talking to anyone about anything and then hung up.

Confounding Toby’s dire predictions the relationship of Frank and Pascale flourished. To me looking in, as chosen witness of their happiness, it looked a good match, however superficially incongruous. Frank continued to pay visits to my flat and while there he and Pascale often took the opportunity to fuck. This pissed me off somewhat, but not unduly. I considered that I’d got over my crush on Pascale and ‘though I still fancied her it didn’t break my heart to know she was making it with other guys. I was more irritated by the inconvenience of not being able to be alone at times when I felt like it, of coming back to the flat and finding them in it, and at it.

I could have told them not to come, but I didn’t. I could have asked them why they had to use my place, but I didn’t do that either. I could imagine why Frank’s Mayfair flat was out of bounds but I couldn’t see what was wrong with Pascale’s. I supposed that me and the flat were talismans for them, and no one likes to flush a rabbit’s paw down the lavatory. One day we went to the November Ascot National Hunt meeting, driven down in a Roller by one of Frank’s cronies, and knocked back double brandies in the grandstand as the riders and horses disappeared into the Berkshire mist.

One night we found ourselves together at the flat, and perhaps out of consideration for me they weren’t fucking. We sat around drinking the scotch, bourbon and wines that Frank brought with him - I couldn’t complain on that score - and talking. We used to discuss anything and everything, but generally only brushed the fringes of politics, but the television was on in the corner. It was a new one that Frank had brought round, not as a present for me but because he got so annoyed by mine, and a guy on the box mentioned Cuba. Frank stopped talking and listened.

“That guy’s an asshole,” he said, indicating a political commentator who had referred to the Cuba business as a victory for Kennedy.

“Why’s that Frank?” said Pascale quietly.

“We cocked up it honey. We set up a situation where Mr K. couldn’t lose.”

No one said anything and he took this to be an endorsement to explain matters to us. “Look, number one, you’ve got to understand the man - his position. All the whole Goddamed fucking Western World could ever see was their own point of view. We explored every fucking avenue from our own side of the fence but all we could ever bring ourselves to imagine about his side was, would it be humiliating for him if he backed down?... How fucking crude. That’s not the question he was asking himself... Look at it in his shoes. What’s the situation? All over the world there are ex-colonial countries, poor countries, banana republics, getting pissed off with the West. Khrushchev would like to support them, but he can’t because Uncle Sam is very sensitive about these things, and also Nikki, being sensible, is shit scared of thermo-nuclear war. So what does he do?.... He sits down and thinks about it, and he comes to the conclusion - very convenient for him - that all these countries are going to come to socialism eventually, most of them through nationalist movements…. So,... time is on his side. Then along comes Fidel Castro - he goes and starts a revolution a day’s walk from Florida if you’re Jesus. Nikki is frankly embarrassed, but he can’t disown the guy, too much loss of face involved. Then the U.S. starts to go bananas. The Mafia gambling and prostitution lobby in Congress starts putting on the pressure and, hey presto, you get economic sanctions followed by an invasion of lunatics backed by the CIA... The whole Eastern block is looking to Nikki, he has to respond. He takes Cuban sugar, but that aint enough, they keep asking for more, more, more. Soon he’s underwriting the whole fucking economy. And if that aint bad enough, it’s the Czechoslovakians who are bearing the brunt of the aid programme, and they aren’t so mad about the idea, not being at all sure about Karl Marx himself in the first place. But one thing Nikki is getting out of it, he’s proving to the World that the Soviets can replace the U.S. as a source of economic aid. So we can take it that thus far he’s ahead on points. Back in Kennedy’s corner his seconds from the New York Times and Capital Hill tell him he’s got to show a lot more aggression to catch the judge’s eye if he wants to get the decision.... So Our Boy comes out fighting at the beginning of round two with military pressure as well as economic. He wants to show the world that not one further square inch of the Western Hemisphere is going to be surrendered to communism. He is prepared to physically liquidate the Cuban regime to make this point.... This scares Castro so much that he sends President Dortico to request to the U.N. that Cuba’s integrity is guaranteed in exchange for disarmament. But that old liberal Adlai Stevenson throws that right back down his throat and the word is out that the Cubans are chicken.... Nikki has to do something; he writes a letter to Kennedy in the middle of September saying he’s prepared to go nuke over Cuba. It’s a big problem... In a nuclear age how do you persuade your adversary that you mean what you say? We had the same question in Berlin last year. We tried to do it by reinforcing our garrison there. It’s a gesture. Nikki solves it by putting missile sites in Cuba, and this is the good bit, he makes no attempt to camouflage them. I tell you the military brass couldn’t believe it when they saw those reconnaissance photos..... They weren’t trying to hide those silos, they were there to be seen... It’s just like your General De Gaulle’s force de frappe....” He addressed Pascale as he said this. Did he really believe she thought of De Gaulle with a possessive pronoun?.... “Anyway, I reckon that as long as Castro remains in power in Cuba, Nikki can be well satisfied with his bargain.... Sure, the Chinese will attack him for softness, but in reality the Soviets have proved that they’re still the leaders of the communist block and Nikki has increased his world popularity as the peace giver. Kennedy’s the warmonger... beautiful, aint it?” He sat back with a contented smile on his face and polished off the rest of his drink. Pascale was looking thoughtful.