Night Train to Lisbon (12 page)

The meal—a classically American one of porterhouse steak, mashed potatoes, an iceberg lettuce salad, and devil's food cake, served up proudly by the Weatherell family's longtime cook, Jeannie—wound down immediately after the plates were cleared. Carson professed exhaustion, insisting she simply had to get to bed, although of course the trip back across the Atlantic had been leisurely.

And so she retreated to her own room. Here, she thought, was the one place in the world she could truly be herself. She sat on the window seat and looked out over the beautiful lawn and wondered what Alec was doing right now. She imagined him in his flat in Cambridge, for he'd once described it to her. He and his friends shared a suite of rooms that were piled high with books and teacups and writing pads. Four junior tutors at Cambridge, busy with teaching and with their
own research, surely couldn't be bothered to keep things in order.

“But if you and I get married someday,” Alec had said, “I promise to keep our home much better than that. I shall give up my junior-tutor ways.”

“You'd better,” she'd said with a laugh. It had been easy to imagine him deep in thought in his flat, a cigarette burning down to a stub between his fingers, the ashtray overflowing, his head tilted down over a book. He was a brilliant man, that much she knew. Just the way he composed his sentences let her see how intelligent he was—even if almost everything he'd said was a lie.
Especially
if almost everything he said was a lie. It took a special kind of brilliance to achieve such a seamless duplicity—a kind of brilliance, she supposed, that was not at all inconsistent with what it took to be a first-rate physicist. It was possible to be intelligent and corrupt; one had nothing to do with the other.

It was here, in the solitude of her childhood bedroom, that Carson at last began to bend under the enormous burden of her final days in Portugal. No playacting in the Pensão Moderna now. No lies to Jane, no withholding of intimate details from Lawrence. No pretenses in train stations, no false declarations of love on docks, no forced dinner-table conversation with her parents. For ten days Carson had protected herself, had isolated herself from her emotions, steeling herself with inner resources she had no idea she pos
sessed. She had done what she needed to do for Lawrence, for Queen, for country; for Alec, even; and then, tonight, for her parents.

Now, though, she would do what she needed to do for herself. Now, alone at last with only empty days ahead—the emptiness of days that until recently she had imagined would be full of the giddy possibilities and sober responsibilities and sense of shared adventure that come with falling in love—Carson had nobody and nothing but herself and her own thoughts. Now, in this room with its canopied bed and bookshelf full of children's classics and window seat with a view of the lawn and trees that she had gazed upon nearly every day of what once was and now was again Carson Weatherell's life without Alec Breve—now she could begin to mourn what might have been.

Slowly at first. An idle thought here: What's Alec doing now? A darker thought there: intelligence and corruption and what little they had to do with each other. And then—

And then she leaned her forehead against the leaded glass of the window. She had cried in Lawrence's office when he told her what he'd discovered about Alec, and then she had pulled herself together; and she had cried in Alec's arms the night when she found herself making love to a man she no longer knew, and she had somehow managed to compose herself on that occasion, too; and now she cried again. This time, though, Carson saw no reason to stop.

Was she wrong to have fallen in love? No. She couldn't believe that. She had
loved. She
had loved. She who had set forth at the beginning of the summer with fear and trepidation and homesickness had discovered instead the pleasure of opening herself to the unknown. And what she had found there surpassed everything she'd ever imagined—anything she'd ever thought possible, anything she could have remotely understood if she'd followed her first impulse and fled the wilds of world capitals for the safe precincts of Connecticut. For the rest of her life she would have been ignorant of the possibilities of love, and in her ignorance she wouldn't have known the difference, but now she did know the difference, and she knew she would have been the worse for not having loved.

So, rather, was she wrong to have fallen in love
with Alec Breve?

Maybe. Maybe so. Because it wasn't just
love
she'd lost. It wasn't just love in general, love in the abstract, the love she could find described in most of the books on the shelf in her bedroom, the love she had heard about in every fairy tale her mother had ever told her. No, it was one specific love she'd lost. It was the love of Alec Breve.

Not the new Alec, the real Alec, the keeper of dark secrets, the one whose heart of hearts was forever out of reach. That person was unfathomable to Carson, though that didn't stop her from trying to figure him out. Instead it was the old Alec, the one to whom she had opened her
own heart of hearts. It was the memory of that Alec that had allowed her to play her part so well during those final three days in Portugal and then on the train back to Paris, right through that last kiss and lying declaration of love on the dock at Southampton, and it was the memory of him that haunted her now. That focused her thoughts in the night, as she stared at the blank canvas of white fabric hanging above her bed. That flooded her thoughts in the morning, as soon as she opened her eyes and remembered where she was and who she was and why right this second she couldn't bear to be either. That forced her to ask herself every waking moment:
Why?

Why couldn't it have lasted? Why did it have to end? Why couldn't Alec Breve be who she thought he was?

And the answer to all those questions, no matter how many times she asked them, no matter how many ways she found to phrase them, was always the same: because Alec Breve
wasn't
who she thought he was.

It was that simple, and that complex.

Simple,
Carson told herself, pulling herself upright, pacing the length of her room, back and forth between the window seat and the edge of the bed. It was so simple. So, so, so…
simple,
was the only word for it. Carson balled her hand into a fist, squeezed it tight, digging her nails into her palm, as if the answer were indeed so simple, so compact, that she could actually grasp it. Alec wasn't who she thought he was; was in fact prob
ably a monster; therefore she should be glad to be rid of him. For a moment Carson would experience a light-headedness, as if, at last, this one insight might be just the thread she could follow to find her way back to some semblance of a normal life.
She should be glad to be rid of him.
The reasoning couldn't be clearer.

And it couldn't be less reassuring. Sinking to the bed or the window seat, she would find herself circling back again—and again and again and again and
again
and
again
—to this: She
wasn't
glad to be rid of him. It didn't matter at such moments who Alec really was. Maybe one day the fact that he wasn't who he said he was would provide some comfort. But not yet. Not now, while the wounds were still fresh—the memories of who she'd thought he was, and what she'd thought they had together, and what she'd thought the two of them together would have for the rest of their lives. Now all that mattered was that she wanted him back.

She was always traveling on that train now. She was looking through the glass of a compartment door into a smoky room and meeting the eyes of a young man as he looked up from a spray of playing cards. She was shaking the hand of that same young man minutes later at her aunt and uncle's table in the dining car. She was studying his features, admiring their asymmetry. She was hearing his voice, and laughing at his deadpan self-deprecation. She was alive to the shine of the silver in the hands of the diners in the room,
the red of the roses in the vases on each table, the blinding white of the linen tablecloths.

She was more alive, and the world was more alive because of it. More real, more vibrant, more luminous. Lighter, darker; louder, closer. This was what it was like to be alive, fully alive, to be a part of the world in a way she'd never known. Sitting at the table with her aunt and uncle and Alec in the dining car, she could feel her back arch, her face flush, her fingers flex, stretch, yearn—for what? For something to hold on to. For flesh. For him.

She was walking beside him down that corridor on the train, the swaying taking them any way it wanted, so they had to hold on. To the brass railings that ran the length of the cars, yes, of course. But to each other, too. His hand on her arm. Her bare arm. The fabric ending three inches off the shoulder; his fingers below it, encircling. Encircling her flesh. Friendly. Two friends. What her aunt and uncle saw from their compartment as Carson and Alec passed: just that: two friends. Or: two friends? Future lovers? A naive niece and a possible spy, in her uncle's eye?

The blast of stale cigarette smoke from his compartment where they played cards. The blast of fresh air on the outdoor platform at the rear of the train. The intoxicatingly clear air and dark night and the promise of everything possible. The two of them, alone, now. The two of them, together, always. The possibility of that. How close he was. How handsome and near and possible and alive
and bright and clear he was as he looked into her eyes and said…whatever it was he said.

And yet.

That was the thing.
And yet:
the thought that came to Carson one day, as she paced her room, running through the events on the train for the umpteenth time since her return home. It was a thought, and she couldn't just dismiss it. She'd had it; too late now. She could no sooner dismiss this thought—no sooner not pursue it—than she could the conversation with her uncle back in his office in Sintra. Once the possibility was there, there was no denying it, no pretending it wasn't what it was: a possibility. Simple as that.

Simple, simple, simple. Carson got up, balled her fist, pulled the hem of her bathrobe, and swung it so that it wrapped around her calves.
Nothing is simple,
she reminded herself.

So what was it? What was the thought? What was wrong with this picture?

The picture was this: the two of them, on the rear platform of a train as it raced through an anonymous night. Wind. Wine. Linen, brass, smoke, whist. The wind. Breaths coming shorter. So close. So
cold.
So suddenly cold. His coat, around her shoulders. The weight of it, of him, on her. So cold.

Cold, to her. Not to him. He's known cold. He's known poor. He's gotten past it. And now he's going to—how did he put it—“make a difference in the world.”

“And are you making a difference?” Carson asked.

“I like to think I will,” he answered, after giving the matter some thought, as if figuring out just how to phrase it.

No modesty now. For the first time all evening, a straightforward statement of intentions.

Or a statement of intentions, anyway. Just maybe not so straightforward.

And this was the thought that Carson grabbed hold of, as if she had indeed caught it in her little balled fist and couldn't let go. Yes, of course, modest little Alec Breve would like to use his knowledge of physics to make a difference in the world—and eager little Carson Weatherell would assume, as anyone in her position might, that the difference he wanted to make was the one
she
would want to make, if she were young and brilliant and a physicist at Cambridge in the run-up to a war.

So, let her assume. Phrase it just so, so she'll think what she wants. State what you mean, and, for the first time all evening, don't be modest about it, because it's too great a source of pride, it's too central to your identity—to who you are in your heart of hearts. State what you mean so that you're true to yourself, but leave the meaning just open enough to others that they'll think what they want.

Sometimes Carson could punch that window with its stupid view of the stupid lawn. In the evening, the leaded glass gave back her reflection, and she didn't want to see that. So she shut off the lights. But she didn't stop pacing.

Because that was only the beginning, that ambiguous statement of Alec's on the train. There were more. Once Carson noticed one, others followed, like hidden pictures in one of those children's drawings. Once your eyes adjusted to what you were supposed to be seeing, the snakes came tumbling out of the trees.

When they confided in each other the intimacies of their life stories, and it was her turn to ask him what Cambridge was like, and he deflected her questions as expertly as he had those of her uncle that first night at dinner on board the train, she thought it was because he couldn't be bothered. She thought he, like she, didn't want to talk about the part of his background that interested him least. She, in her falling-in-love narcissism, thought he was just like her. And he allowed her—relied on her—to think that, instead of thinking the truth: he didn't want to talk about the part of his background that interested him most.

Or: the one time the four Cambridge scholars and Carson had sat around a bar in Lisbon drinking
caipiroscas
and discussing the political situation in the world, what did Alec have to offer? Carson thought hard about that afternoon, grateful she'd limited herself to one drink that day so she knew she could trust her memory now and come up with the exact answer to what Alec had added to that discussion weeks earlier: nothing. Everyone else weighed in. There was talk of the Fascists in Britain and Italy, talk of King Kong, talk of a German monster taking over the world,
and all along Alec just sat there in silence, not simply impatient with any human interaction that didn't somehow allow him to draw closer to his lover, as Carson had interpeted his silence at the time, but unwilling to participate on any terms but his own. The monster waiting to take over the world? It was right there at their table, sipping, listening, waiting.