Night Train to Lisbon (15 page)

In the distance she could see the lights of the Hendricksons' party. Cars lined the road in the
town of Barston Hills, and well-dressed couples in their twenties were laughing in the cool, dry night. “Hello, Harris!” someone called, and Harris said hello back, introducing Carson all around.

She could feel herself being sized up by other women, and looked over appraisingly by men. The glances, she could sense, were admiring. She fit in here. Some of these people knew her family, or at least knew of them. Others simply gathered, from her appearance and grooming, that she was “their kind.”

And maybe I am,
thought Carson.
Maybe I really am, after all.
She linked her arm through Harris's, and walked with him up the macadam drive and into the foyer of the Tudor house. Someone handed her a flute of champagne, and Harris led her inside.

They went on like that for two more weeks. There were other dinners at different young married couples' homes, and evenings spent at supper clubs. The days grew colder and the afternoon tennis games were abandoned. In one week Harris would be off to Yale, and Carson wondered what she would do with herself all day. One night at dinner she announced to her parents that she wanted to take a class of some sort, perhaps in a language, perhaps in court stenography, so that she would have some skills and could begin to look for a job.

“A job?” her father said when she brought this up. “Is that really essential?”

“I think so,” Carson said quietly. “I'm getting bored, Daddy, just sitting around the house. And Harris is leaving any day now.”

“There are plenty of things you can fill your day with,” said her father. “Just ask your mother here.” He turned expectantly to Philippa, but she seemed put on the spot.

“Oh yes,” she said, “the days are very full, what with the club, and the charity season coming up, and all the work that needs to be done on the third floor of the house…” Her voice drifted off here, as though she realized that such activities would never be enough to sustain her daughter for a prolonged period of time.

“Well,” Carson's father said, “if you're really interested in some sort of training, we'll have to think about it, all right?”

“All right, thank you, Daddy,” Carson said. It was good enough for now. It would have to be. The problem with going off to Europe and having a love affair and then covertly working for British intelligence was that after you returned, the dimensions of your regular life might not seem adequate any longer. Being with Harris, to her surprise, was soothing. Soon, of course, he'd be at college; she pictured him in his dormitory room in Silliman at Yale, tossing a football idly in the air while he tried to focus on his studies. Harris promised to write to her once a week. The promise couldn't help but remind Carson of Alec's previous influx of letters, which had finally ceased.

Her letter to him must have done the trick. Alec
must be over her, she thought, and if there was a sting of disappointment in this reasonable conclusion, Carson didn't want to dwell on it. Already she had begun to consign that whole part of her life to a distant closet in her mind, as if it were last season's fashions.

One night, she was lying in her bed after Harris had dropped her off at home; they'd just been to dinner at the Seaboard Grill, a dim but glossy restaurant with a fireplace roaring in the back and lobsters splayed on platters. Drinks had been liberally poured, and Harris entertained her with stories of the fraternity he planned to join at Yale, which his father and grandfather had belonged to before him.

After dinner, sitting in the front seat of his car, he'd reached out and kissed her more assertively than he'd ever done before, and then he moved closer so his body was against hers, and she could feel how substantial and lithe he was.

“Can we go somewhere?” he whispered. “Somewhere private?”

“Not yet,” she whispered back.

“I want you so much,” he said.

“I know,” she said softly, almost sympathetically. “Still, let's wait.”

“All right,” he said. “Of course.” He pulled away, steadying himself, straightening his tie, coming to his senses. “I got a little carried away,” he admitted. “Being with you does that to me. I've never been this way. There's been no one before you, Carson.”

She didn't answer him, though not to be cruel. To be kind, in fact, to spare Harris from hearing that, yes, there had been someone before him—that fellow she'd mentioned once, the one she'd fallen in love with over the summer. That, yes, his girlfriend hadn't “waited.”

But what, exactly, was she waiting for now? Not for marriage, certainly, for she hadn't felt the need to wait for that with Alec. And not for “love” either, for Carson knew that what she felt for Harris Black right now was probably the extent of what she could ever feel for him. A strong, uncomplicated
like,
mixed with real physical attraction. Many marriages, such as her parents', were built on far less. But in Carson's mind, she wanted to wait to make love to Harris because what she felt for him really wasn't enough to justify such intimacy. When would it be enough? Perhaps never. For now, all she could say was “Let's wait,” and Harris assumed she was being honorable, and moral, and this probably made him want to make love to her even more.

That night, after he'd said a lingering good night to her on the Weatherells' front porch, Carson went upstairs slowly and quietly, not wanting to disturb her parents. In her own bedroom, she lay down on the bed, her pale pink skirt flowering all around her, and for the longest time she just lay there, unwilling to get up yet. The scene with Harris had left her uneasy—not because of what he'd wanted from her, but because it reminded her that the reprieve Harris Black had of
fered her from her own worries and concerns was drawing to an end. In three days he would be motoring off to Yale. Three days: the same amount of time that with Alec she had hoped would last forever, until she had prayed for it to pass in the blink of an eye. Now the three days remaining before Harris left her seemed like…three days, actually. Carson's thoughts drifted to that job she'd mentioned to her parents. She thought about Harris's visits home from Yale in the fall. She thought about helping her mother with charity work and—what was it her mother had said? Something that needed to be done on the third floor of the house?

Suddenly Carson heard a spray of pebbles at her window.
It must be Harris,
she thought.
Perhaps he's decided he can't wait, after all.
Carson went to the window and wearily pushed both halves open. There, down below, standing on the lawn and looking up at her in the thin light, stood a figure. She was about to call down to him, when her eyes began to adjust and she saw that it wasn't Harris Black down there.

It was Alec Breve.

A
ll she could think about, looking down at him in astonishment from her second-story window, was the balcony scene in
Romeo and Juliet.
In Shakespeare's play, Romeo had come to Juliet's house to profess his love to her and be near her. But here, on this chilly night in 1936 in Connecticut, Alec had traveled all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to…to do what? Carson had no idea. To wreak revenge? Had he somehow discovered that during their final days together she was reporting back to her uncle his every movement, almost? She was so shocked by his presence that she could hardly speak. For a moment she just stayed where she was, framed by her window, still peering out at Alec, who looked so small down below.

“Carson,” he said in a voice so soft she could barely hear it. “I have to talk to you.”

She didn't know whether to slam the window and call for help or to play it cool. Then it occurred to her that if she slammed the window and called for help, she might never learn why Alec had come all this way.

“What are you doing here?” she hissed.

“You know what I'm doing here,” he hissed back. “All those letter and calls. I had to find out for myself what was going on.”

That
was why? Not because he'd been exposed as a Nazi sympathizer, but because he'd been jilted?

“I wrote you two weeks ago,” she said, recovering. “Didn't you get it?”

“Yes, I did. But I didn't believe it.”

“Well, believe it.”

“I'm beginning to, after what I've seen tonight.”

“What?” she said, thrown again. “What have you seen?”

“Your new…boyfriend. Out front earlier. Saying good night.”

Carson felt herself flush. “Were you
spying
on me?” She opened her mouth to say more, then realized the irony of being indignant at
Alec
spying on
her.
“Oh, this is absurd,” she said. “All right. Wait a little while. Go for a walk or something. My parents usually go to bed in about half an hour. I'll meet you by the greenhouse over there,” and she pointed past a bank of trees.

He hesitated, then nodded and disappeared into
the darkness. She sat in her room anxiously, barely moving, not knowing what she was doing or what was about to happen. She tried to organize her thoughts, to come up with a plan of some sort. But she had no idea what to expect from Alec, and so she had no way to prepare herself, and instead she simply sat there, on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap, as if by being the very picture of calm, she might actually become calm.

Half an hour later, like clockwork, her parents' bedroom light snapped off. Downstairs, the housekeeper was sponging down the kitchen counters and yawning. In a moment, Carson heard her pad off up the back stairs to the servants' quarters. Slowly, quietly, wearing a cloth coat over her pink dress, Carson descended the front stairs. She could hear the gentle ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room, as well as the slight settling of the wood of the house that she'd heard throughout her life when she was trying to sleep at night. Without a sound, Carson walked through the house, headed to the back door, and opened it. There, across the lawn, sitting on the stone bench in front of the small greenhouse her father had installed just last summer, Alec waited for her. As she came closer, she could see him much more clearly than from above. He wore a thick black cable-knit sweater and carried a rucksack slung over his arm, like some merchant seaman who'd been traveling for months.

He stood at her approach. She pointedly stopped a good ten yards from him.

“All right,” she said. “I'm here. What do you want?”

“I want to know why you've done this,” he said. “I just don't understand it.”

“I told you,” Carson said, unable to meet his eyes. “I had time to think it all through. It was just a summer romance.”

“It was
not,
” said Alec angrily. “I refuse to believe that you feel this way. I've racked my brain again and again, trying to come up with what I've done, what could possibly have turned you away from me like this. I tell myself: It's that other man, she's in love with him, but then I remember that it was in
Portugal
that you started acting strange. And then things got better again near the end, but something had shifted. The balance was off, or something, and it never quite recovered for the rest of our stay. I told my friends about it, and they thought I was daft. Michael said you were the best person of the female persuasion to come along in my life since he'd known me, and Freddy said you were perfect, for a Yank, and Tom told me I was boring them to death with my paranoid fantasies that you didn't love me anymore even though you said you did.”

Carson didn't say anything. She just stood trembling in the watery light from the greenhouse, listening to what he had to say.

“I've never felt this way about a woman before,” he went on. “And you
are
a woman, not a little girl, even though when you came abroad you wanted to cling to childhood as long as you
could. So maybe that's what you're doing again, is that it? Clinging to childhood one more time, because it's been taken away from you. Because I stole your innocence, is that how you see it? Because I made love to you and
you liked it.
”

His words seared right through her. She knew she shouldn't say a word, but should simply absorb everything he was accusing her of, letting him think he was right. But she felt wrongfully accused. After all, it was Alec, wasn't it, who had ruined everything?

He began to walk toward her.

“Don't,” she said. “I mean it, Alec. Stop. Stop right there or I'll call for help, I swear I will, Alec.”

He stopped. They were still several paces apart.

“Call for help?” he said. “What has gotten into you? It's only me. Alec.”

“Whoever that is,” she said before she could stop herself.

“What? What's that supposed to mean?”

“
You
know,” said Carson, looking down at the ground, slightly surprised that she'd done this, the one thing she'd promised her uncle she would not do, but slightly relieved, too.

Alec started to take a step toward her, then stopped himself. “No, I
don't
know,” he said, and his face was twisted up in a way that she'd never seen before. He was almost spitting the words now, his voice a combination of anger and pain. Carson couldn't be sure, but he seemed to be on the verge of tears. “I can't stand it. I can't take this anymore, Carson. Tell me.
Tell
me.”

Carson closed her eyes, took a deep breath, opened her eyes.
“That you're a Fascist and a member of the Watchers and are giving information to Germany,”
she said in a rush.

There. She'd done it. In the long silence that followed, she studied Alec's reaction closely.

He just looked at her. He seemed to be studying her in return, regarding her strangely, slowly. Now he knew that she knew his secret. What would he do about it? she wondered. Oddly, she didn't feel afraid at all. Whatever happened, happened. She was far past really caring now. Blurting out the truth to Alec hadn't been something she'd planned, but whatever Alec had to say to her now would apparently be equally unscripted and unrehearsed. From the heart, if only he'd had one.

All right. So now you know,
she thought he might say, his voice low and challenging, his figure advancing on her in the dark. Or maybe,
How did you find out?
in the matter-of-fact manner of the criminally insane.

But instead he just looked at her and said, “That is the most absurd thing I've ever heard in my life.”

She looked back at him, neither of them even blinking. He didn't look challenging; he didn't look menacing. He looked almost…puzzled.

“I don't believe you,” she said.

“It's true,” said Alec. “I hate those Fascists, those Mosleyites, with their black shirts, marching around in imitation of Hitler. And I'm not
crazy about the Germans either. For God's sake, Carson, they killed my father.”

“They did? You never told me that,” she said, suddenly thrown once again.

“I don't like to talk about it much,” he said. “Look, my father
was
a drunk. But he was also a soldier. He enlisted during the last war. He fought hard and then he died for England. A German soldier stabbed him with a bayonet and he bled to death. My father might have been drunk at the time; I hope he was, actually, so that he didn't feel the pain so badly.” Alec took a breath. “I grew up with that,” he said. “My whole life has been shadowed by it. And you have the gall to say that I'm a spy for the Germans. I will give my life to defeat the Germans if England goes to war—no,
when
England goes to war. Because I think I've come to agree with your uncle, that war is precisely where we're headed.”

Alec's face, when he spoke, was hard and furious.

“I don't understand,” Carson tried. “Either you're the best liar in the world or my uncle is wrong.”

“Your uncle?” said Alec. “He's the one who told you this lie?”

It was too late to back down now, Carson knew. She'd done everything she swore to Lawrence she wouldn't, and yet there had been no choice. Who'd have thought that Alec would have traveled across the Atlantic to confront her face-to-face?

“He said there was proof,” said Carson. “Definite proof.”

“What proof?”

“He wouldn't say. Couldn't say. He said it was classified.”

“And that's when your whole attitude toward me started to change, back in Portugal?”

Carson lowered her eyes and nodded her head. Then she looked him in the eye again. “My uncle said this evidence, whatever it is, definitely links you to the Watchers.”

“You can't be serious,” Alec said, running his hand through his hair and half turning in a circle. “This can't be happening. Those people are fanatics. And their hatred of Jews?” He turned back to Carson and held out a hand, pleadingly. “I've known Jews my entire life. The past couple of years, as this whole Fascist nonsense has spread through England, I've even gotten into a couple of fistfights over anti-Semitic remarks. And did you know that Mrs. Bertram—the woman who put me through Cambridge—is Jewish? Look at me, Carson. Do you really think that I'm capable of the things you've accused me of?”

She looked him full in the face. There, in the spill of light, she took in the sheer despair of his features, the magnitude of it, unadorned and removed from pretense. He was either telling the truth or he was a liar beyond human comprehension—or her comprehension, anyway.

“Why should I trust you?” she finally said.

“I can't answer that,” he said softly. “Only
you
can answer that.”

Trust.
That word again. Carson had tried to
learn to trust herself this summer, but after that fateful conversation with her uncle about Alec, she'd decided that she'd made a terrible error in judgment. So she had trusted her uncle, instead. But what if
that
had been a terrible error in judgment? What if she had been right about Alec all along, right from the start, right from that first night on the train to Lisbon? What if the Ministry of Defence had made some mistake?

Carson considered her options. Her uncle had told her one thing, and now Alec was telling her another. Only one story could be true. She could trust her uncle, or she could trust Alec.

Or, she slowly realized, she could just trust herself. Not trust or distrust Lawrence. Not trust or distrust Alec. Just trust herself, moment by moment, step-by-step, however long it might take, however difficult it might be, until she'd reached the truth.

Carson took that first step now. Tentatively she made a move forward, toward Alec, and then he, freed from his frozen position, took a step, and then the two of them rushed together. Carson threw her arms around his neck and Alec wrapped his hands around her waist. Touching him again was such a relief; she could feel it in her body, a kind of catharsis, as though she'd been holding her breath all this time. She kissed him then, hard, hungily, and it was like being released from a spell, like waking herself up from a hundred-year sleep. Carson wasn't naive. She knew it was possible that she was making another terrible error in judgment.

But she didn't think so.

She was being given a second chance, that's what she believed. It wasn't often in life that you got one of those, yet here it was, waiting for her like an unclaimed gift.

Suddenly Alec pulled back. “Oh, I almost forgot,” he said, breaking their embrace. He fumbled in his pocket for a moment, then produced an object, which he held out to her.

It was her bracelet. The one he'd given her in Lisbon, and which she'd sent back to him through the mail. Here it was again, with its delicate chain and tiny blue beads. He slipped the bracelet onto her wrist.

“Oh, Alec,” she whispered, her eyes shining. She reached up to touch his face, and the bracelet slid slightly down her arm. “I can't believe this is happening. I can't believe you're really here.”

“I know,” he said. “I can't either,” he added, and he laughed. “I suppose it
was
a bit extreme, coming over here. But it was the only chance I had. Nobody believed me. None of my friends, anyway. Nobody but Mrs. Bertram.” Alec explained how he'd told Mrs. Bertram that the nice American girl he'd been promising to bring back with him to Bloomsbury had mysteriously discarded him, and how he'd told her the only way he could believe it was true was to hear it from Carson herself, and how Mrs. Bertram had promptly offered to pay Alec's way to the States. “I think I caught the very next ship out of Southampton, literally,” Alec said now, and he laughed again. But
then his expression darkened. He pulled away from Carson slightly and peered down at her. “You said your uncle is convinced I'm passing information to the Germans,” he went on.