On Green Dolphin Street (40 page)

Chapter 19  

M
ary hugged her father on the threshold of the family house. He looked gratifyingly the same, not physically reduced by grief, as he held his daughter tightly to his chest for a moment or two, then released her so that he could also welcome Charlie, who was waiting on the step.

When she and Charlie were installed in her old bedroom at the top of the house, Mary went down to see what needed doing. Her father’s domestic arrangements had not fallen apart as she had feared they might; once she had settled the men in front of the sitting-room fire with some coffee, she went out to the shops to stock up with what she and her father would need for the next week or so while Charlie was in Moscow.

She was relieved to be out of the house. It was the familiar smell that was intolerable, the odor of antiques polish, cut flowers, woodsmoke from the fire and something peculiar to the fabric of the house itself. This was the aroma of her childhood; for forty years it had been the smell of love and permanence. She did not know how her father could live with it; that, or the unchanged creaks and rattles that failed to register the crucial change in the human weight that sounded them, or was no longer there.

When she returned with half a dozen bags of groceries, she heard laughter from the sitting room, and blessed the part of Charlie that had always responded to her father, resolutely understanding what he called the point of him, even siding with him in pretend alliance against Mary. She joined them before lunch, pulling her chair up closer to the fire, stifling a yawn as she fought off waves of fatigue brought on by the sleepless flight.

“Keeping you up, are we?” said James, in a decades-old response to her yawn.

Mary completed the catechism. “No. You’re keeping me awake.”

“Charlie’s been telling me about this Moscow visit. He’s obviously a useful asset, knowing both sides, as it were.”

“That’s right,” said Mary.

“Didn’t you want to go too? See old friends and so on?”

Mary laughed. “Daddy, I was only there for about five minutes. I was living with you most of the time. Don’t you remember? When Louisa was ill. Anyway, it’s difficult, getting people in and out.”

“It’s exceedingly fraught,” said Charlie. “They won’t let me go alone, which is why I have to wait until Friday, when there’s a group of building inspectors going. Things are very strained, what with the U-2 business and the collapse of the Summit and so on.”

James nodded. “I can imagine you’d have to be careful. What exactly are your colleagues worried about?”

Charlie sighed. “That I might be compromised in some way. They try to set you up with women, or drug your drink so you don’t know what’s happening. Then they take photographs. You’re followed everywhere, every step, and everything you say is recorded. You’re not allowed to travel alone outside the city, you have to be accompanied at all times. Even in Moscow they don’t really like you to be on your own. I’m being put up by an old friend from the Embassy.”

“But you wouldn’t actually … vanish, would you? As a diplomat of all people? Surely you have immunity and so on.”

“Of course. Though the Soviet definition of what you’re allowed to do
is so tight that if they chose to enforce it, pretty well any foreigner could be arrested. You have to be wary.”

And, presumably, sober, Mary thought to herself with a squeeze of anxiety.

“The worst thing,” said Charlie, “is that there are no real records of anything. There are no telephone directories in Moscow. If someone disappears, the authorities can deny that there ever was such a person. If they had a listing in the phone book their family could point to it as evidence that they really did exist. And there are no maps.”

“How do you know where you are?”

“You get to know the streets. The CIA have made a map and I believe we now have copies. That’s the only one there is.”

That night at dinner, Charlie seemed preoccupied, joining in the conversation less than usual. He drank only a glass or two of wine, though Mary knew how much whiskey he had earlier consumed upstairs. It was not surprising, she told herself. Both of them were tired, and Charlie was nerving himself both for the flight to Moscow and for whatever was waiting at the other end.

The night before he was due to leave, Charlie awoke from a drugged sleep with a feeling that he was being stifled. He struggled to breathe as he climbed out of bed and made his way across the room to the window; he held hard to the sill as he looked through the parted curtains and down to the street lamp below. It took him some moments to recall where he was. Mary’s home in London. But why? And was he truly there or would he wake to find himself in Moscow?

The weight of barbiturate tugged at him, dragging him back toward unconsciousness, but he did not want to go there, for fear of what he might find. There was sleep, there was unknowing; there were dreams and there were cities; all of them were separate realities, and in none of them could he locate himself.

He felt fear begin to sweep away the sedative power of the drug. He did
not know if he was awake or dead, but he seemed to be waking up further, going up through levels of awareness that would make the ordinary sensation of living look like sleep.

His hand on the window frame was visible in the bright city darkness, but he did not recognize its shape; the fingers were not his. The flesh appeared transparent; the skin gave up the secret of what lay beneath, the wiring of the nerves and arteries.

Charlie breathed in deeply. He turned from the window and walked into the room. The wooden boards beneath his feet were for a moment reassuring; they were cold, familiar, and pressed as they should onto his skin, tree on flesh, hard on soft.

He sat on the edge of the bed and held his face in his hands. This, too, felt good, for a moment: the bone beneath the cheek on the strong palm. Then the thought that these two disparate things were part of the same body dismayed him; they were separate yet joined; one yet two. And his mind also was not one mind, but many; and he was not one man, one steady consciousness through which the world was mediated, but a plain, an open road for any reality that chose him for its own.

He slid to the floor and held on to the foot of the bed. He squeezed the wood beneath his hands. He wanted to call out to Mary, but was too frightened of the sound he might make. The noise that emerged might not be his own voice; it might turn out to be that of a stranger. He was frightened that Mary would hear his voice, but would not recognize it; that she would wake and run for help, calling for someone to turn out the intruder from her room.

One part of his mind told him he must let go of the bed, find the new pills Weissman had prescribed and take two, preferably with whiskey. Yet he was scared that when they dropped him into unconsciousness he might find there a worse reality.

He watched the luminous hands of the traveling alarm clock, but could not make sense of the minutes. He hauled himself across the floor to his open suitcase and found the pills; from the frilled pocket at the back of the case he slid a bottle of Wild Turkey and unscrewed the cap.

The rough spirit gave him immediate relief, enough at least to enable him to crawl back to the bed.

He climbed in with infinite care, terrified that he might wake his sleeping wife and that she would not know him.

In the morning, James drove them to London Airport in his slow Rover. Mary, at Charlie’s insistence, went in the front with her father, while he sat stunned in the back, staring at the London streets that slid past his glazed eyes like painted cutouts on a stage. He had told her nothing of what had happened to him in the night.

Mary was so used to seeing him depart unwillingly on flights that she did not see anything unusual in his demeanor. Her father, apparently sensing some heaviness in the atmosphere, switched on the car radio, on which the Light Programme was playing
Housewives’ Choice
. He and Mary talked inconsequentially above the music.

“Could I borrow the car next week to go up to Norfolk?” she said. “It’s the end of term and I can surprise the children by picking them up myself, rather than have you meet them at Liverpool Street.”

Charlie’s head sank lower as the car traveled through the western suburbs; there was hardly any traffic on the Bath Road as they neared the airport. With frictionless dispatch, the car was parked, the bag unloaded and the three of them were in the departure lounge, ready to check in.

“Mr. van der Linden? My name’s Sheila Millward.” A young woman in a dark suit was shaking Charlie’s hand. “I’m from the Foreign Office. I’ve been sent to introduce you to your traveling companions. There’s a building inspector and three contractors.”

“Thank you,” said Charlie meekly, as she took him over to a group of four men carrying briefcases and heavy winter overcoats across their arms.

Mary stood with her father, watching as Miss Millward ushered Charlie through the procedures. They were almost two hours early, as instructed, and there was no one else checking in for Moscow. When his
suitcase had been swallowed by the clunking conveyor, Charlie turned to face them, his head hung low, his body passive.

Mary swallowed and forced herself to smile. Miss Millward stood back tactfully to allow him to make his farewells. Charlie shook hands with James, then turned to Mary. She hugged him tightly and she smiled again, dry-eyed and encouraging, as she stood back.

“I love you,” Charlie muttered; or if those were not his words, Mary thought, they were something very like it.

He went with his group to the departure doors; he did not turn back as he vanished from sight.

In Regent’s Park Mary gave herself to comforting her father. What he needed more than anything else, it seemed to her, was someone to listen to him. Occasionally she forced him to talk about her mother, but it became clear to her that it was too soon for any sort of catharsis. He was evidently still hoping that time would show it to have been a macabre mistake and that Elizabeth would walk back through the front door and explain. Instead, Mary listened to him talk about the minutiae of daily life, some of which—those, presumably that Elizabeth had taken care of, such as housekeeping—seemed to surprise and distress him.

At night she liked being in her childhood room because it gave her some sense of continuity when every other element of her life seemed fractured. Frank in New York, Charlie in Moscow, Richard and Louisa in their drafty school and her mother … All had gone from her. She pulled the blankets and eiderdown over her shoulders and forced herself to think of better days, of sailing on the lake, of dancing in the Renshaws’ wooden cabin with the flush of wine and fire in her cheeks, swirling in the warmth of friendship and …

The telephone rang on the landing below with brutal urgency, and Mary was jerked from her half-sleep with a pounding heart. No matter how often experience told her they were wrong numbers or foreign inquiries, nighttime calls meant only panic to her.

She went down the cold stairs in her nightdress to see her father, in his dressing gown, hair disheveled, lifting the receiver. He nodded a few times and she tried to read his grave face. Richard had fallen from a window; Louisa had …

“It’s for you,” said James. “It’s someone from the Foreign Office.”

“Hello?”

“Mrs. van der Linden? I’m sorry to telephone you so late. My name’s Anthony Malbrook. I’m afraid we have a problem in Moscow. Your husband has had some sort of collapse and we need you to go and bring him home. It’s a matter of some urgency.”

“Collapse? What sort of collapse? Is he all right?”

“Medically, I understand, he’s not in any danger, though he needs expert treatment. However, his presence is a potential embarrassment. Our people are anxious that he should be got home as quickly as possible.”

“My God. Poor Charlie. Are you sure he’s all right?”

“There’s no flight tomorrow, but there’s one on Wednesday. We’ll need to get you a visa.”

“Do you promise me he’s all right?”

“All I can tell you, Mrs. van der Linden, is what I’ve been told by our people there, which is that medically there is no immediate danger, but that diplomatically it’s vital he be taken home. I’ll telephone if I have any more news and to give you details of your traveling arrangements.”

When Malbrook had rung off, Mary thought of more questions she wanted to ask him, but he had left no number. James laid his hand on her shoulder.

“He’s not well,” she said.

“I thought he looked pale.”

“No, it’s … He’s really not at all well. He hasn’t been for a long time. They want me to go and get him.”

“Well, that’s good. Then you can bring him back to London and we’ll have him properly looked after. You can all come and stay with me until he’s better.”

“Yes … yes, he’d like that.”

—

The following day Mary rang Frank in his apartment at eight o’clock New York time to tell him what had happened. He gave her the telephone number and address of his newspaper’s correspondent, Deke Sheppard, in Moscow.

“He’s a good man. If you need help of any kind or just someone to talk to, give him a call.”