On Green Dolphin Street (6 page)

Mary stretched the long lead across the kitchen to the sink, where she was drying the last of the dishes. She stared through the window, fixing her eyes on the dark outline of a tree. In London, it must be nearly one o’clock in the morning, she thought.

“Can you hear me all right?” said her father suspiciously.

“Very well, thank you.” There was a slight delay on the line, but Mary had grown used to dealing with it: when you had finished speaking you had to stop and wait. She thought of RAF coastal stations; she was tempted to say “Over.”

James Kirwan came to the point quite soon, as though fearful that the
connection would not hold. “Your mother’s been feeling a little unwell and she’s had some tests … there does appear to be some sort of growth.”

Although James spoke loudly, to give the sub-Atlantic cable every chance, what he said came to Mary in fragments, as though some self-defensive censor were breaking it up into morsels she could manage. She stared hard at the branches of the black tree. This was the moment against which she had prepared herself in her imagination for almost forty years. Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don’t know what I’d do.

Now that it was here, or might be here, the first thing that she and her father did was to agree that everything was still all right. Each reassured the other: wait and see … nothing we can do anyway … know more next week … exactly.

They agreed that there was no reason for Mary to go back to London; then Elizabeth herself came on the line to lend weight to James’s optimism. As a doctor, she brought some authority to the cheerful prognosis; she seemed in any case more interested in Louisa and Richard and whether the Christmas presents she had sent had yet arrived.

When she had rung off, Mary stood, staring out of the window at the leafless tree for a long time. Everything was all right. Her mother was alive, that was the important thing: nothing had changed.

She went up to the top floor and kissed the children good night. There was a photograph of her mother holding Louisa as a baby in the garden of the Regent’s Park house on a summer afternoon. Perhaps even when she had taken it, Mary had been aware of how few such occasions there were: you talked them up into a life, a history, but in fact you could count the days on the fingers of two or three hands.

Chapter 3  

D
r. Weissman ran liver function and other tests on Charlie van der Linden, but, to Weissman’s irritation, the readings all fell within the prescribed range. He told Charlie that unless he cut down on the amount he drank he could not accept responsibility for what happened: there would be blackouts, accidents, organ damage. He recommended that Charlie go more often to see the psychoanalyst with whom he had begun treatment the previous autumn; he also prescribed barbiturates to help him sleep.

Charlie’s absence from work excused him from the trip to California, but when he went back in January he found his diary uncomfortably full of the diversionary appointments Benton had made. His will to survive was still strong enough for him to recognize that a period of quiet efficiency was required of him. He did the meetings and he did the lunches; he went to the offices on the Hill and talked to congressional aides; in the afternoons he drafted convincing telegrams. He reassured London that Richard Nixon, for all his spotted past domestically, was unlikely to be a Taft-like isolationist in foreign affairs. He gave reasons. He wrote a memo on the significance of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.
He kept to two martinis before lunch and nothing in the afternoon; when the vodka bottle in his desk drawer was empty he did not, immediately, replace it.

At Number 1064 the first twelve weeks of the new decade were quiet with the stillness of life suspended. The children went, with other diplomatic exiles, to England, where Mary’s mother met them at London Airport. Mary was alone in the house. There were no school bags and coats dropped anyhow in the tiled hall; she did not trip on sections of Richard’s wooden railway when she crossed the kitchen to the fridge; Louisa’s painful practice at the piano no longer provided the lounge music at the cocktail hour. She went up to their rooms, but they were tidy now and she had no excuse to linger: for the first time in ten years the toys were in their proper boxes; the expensive christening mugs were not lying beneath the bed; a silver watch left to Richard by Charlie’s father was no longer the damp treasure in a muddy pirate ship beneath the maple.

Mary picked out some of their books from the shelf, the ones from which they had learned to read, and, before that, the ones at which their consciousness had first flared up. Here was the story of a fire engine, the book itself broken and stained. At eighteen months old Louisa’s eyes had widened when Mary read it to her: behind their gaze her mind was in the act of being made, lifted and stirred by news of the world. Every day Mary witnessed the intimate act of creation as Louisa began precociously to talk, speaking with exploratory gentleness, as though her tentative framing of a word was the first time it had found human utterance. Each syllable gave Mary a pathway into the mind she was anxious to reach, so that the eruption of love in her could find a channel and a home in the heart of this astonishing child.

She replaced the book on the shelf. The children who had sat on her knee were gone; each week they were replaced by new versions of themselves, epigones of the purer being. The love that welled in her was always readjusting to their changes, racing after them. Once when she knelt beside her bath, Louisa had looked her in the eye and, for no reason Mary could tell, said, “Mummy, why do you love me so much?”

So much … Why indeed? thought Mary as she sat down on Richard’s
bed. The truthful answer was simple: because I believed you were the most wonderful and beautiful creature ever to have opened its eyes on the world, and I felt stupefied, blessed and transfigured that I should have been chosen to be your mother. She could not admit this; she only said, “You funny monkey,” and kissed Louisa’s forehead. What puzzled her was why this should be the nature of things: what plan, divine or biological, had been so arranged or had so evolved that a reasonable adult human should, in the course of her most natural function, be subject to this transcendent passion?

Mary went to the top of the stairs, reluctantly. It was not just the children’s former selves that had vanished; it was the physical beings they had become who were absent. She longed for their skin, their hair, their necks, the touch of the muscle beneath their clothes; no one had told her how tactile was this love, how intimate the knowledge of a forehead’s swell, a knee’s flex, the edible cartilage and soft tissue of the ear, which she had sniffed and nibbled like a rabbit.

She went downstairs and sat alone in the living room. She must find something to distract her, to help her through: perhaps this was the time for her to write the book with which, Charlie was always boasting to their friends, she would one day surprise them.

That evening, after dinner, the telephone rang and Charlie reached across to answer it.

“Hi. This is Frank Renzo.”

“Well, hello.” Charlie fought for a moment to remember who he was. “How’s the hand?”

“What? Oh, it’s okay. I find I’m back in Washington.”

“Again?”

“The paper sent me back. I have to do another piece.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s a feature. Diplomatic life, how people view the election, that kind of thing.”

“I see. Where are you?”

“I’m in a hotel in Georgetown, but I’ll be here for a few days.”

“Well, anything we can do to help?”

“Can I call in the morning?”

“I have to go to work, but I daresay Mary—”

“I appreciate it.”

Charlie put down the receiver. “Are you doing anything tomorrow?”

“Was that Frank?” said Mary.

“He needs someone to show him round, I suppose. Make some introductions. I did promise. When he came to the party.” Charlie thought for a moment. “Anyway, he might be useful. We could always use more contact with the papers in New York.”

The next morning Mary put on a dress she had bought from Lord & Taylor in New York the previous summer. It was in grass-green tweed, round-necked with a slightly gathered skirt; the magazine advertisement described it as “deceptively casual” (perhaps it really meant “deceptively formal”) and as something the “woman of today can wear at
any
time.” Mary liked it because it looked the kind of thing that Audrey Hepburn might have worn.

She arranged to meet Frank at the new British Embassy building on Massachusetts Avenue. Within a week of the van der Lindens’ arrival in Washington, Mary had been identified as a wife who should be used as much as possible. Despite a little shyness, her buoyant character and essential good manners were viewed as assets; there was a tradition at the Embassy that if someone was unmarried or his wife was indisposed he could call on the wife of a junior to be his hostess at a function, and Mary had, rather against her will, been used in this way. Most of the British diplomats subscribed to what was known, after the Washington columnist who had invented it, as the Joe Alsop Amendment, which stated that with eight people at dinner there could be no bores present; with ten there could be half a bore; with twelve a whole bore could be absorbed;
with fourteen, a bore and a half, and so on. Half-bores, in Alsop’s definition, were dull but very powerful men or vacuous but very beautiful women.

The new building was a functional rectangle of concrete, steel and glass in which the need for Civil Service gradings, competitive views and relative office sizes had prevailed over aesthetic design. It was being slowly inhabited, corridor by right-angled corridor, as diplomats temporarily housed about the city in borrowed buildings, hotels and office blocks moved in their maps, papers and Rolodex address finders. Mary waited downstairs in the glass-fronted lobby, chatting to the receptionist. Showing Frank around was a chore she felt she could have done without, and if Charlie was anxious to help him for some reason, she did not see why he could not have spared the time himself. She felt less than diplomatic—reserved, unwilling—when Frank crossed the floor, taking off a wide-brimmed felt hat and holding out his hand.

“I can give you a tour here to begin with,” she said. “Then you’d better explain to me more exactly what you want.”

“Sure,” he said. “You understand that this is entirely off the record.”

“Yes. The Head of Information’s been in touch. He’s joining us upstairs.”

As they went across to the elevator, Mary said, “By the way, how’s your hand?”

“Oh, it’s fine. It healed well.” He showed her a closed scar that ran down and disappeared beneath the cuff of his shirt. He flipped open a notebook he took from the pocket of his raincoat. “All right if I take notes?”

“As long as—”

“Sure. Background only.”

They started at the top of the building, where the canteen would open in due course. The Head of Information, enthusiastic about meeting a new journalist, was waiting for them.

“You lead on, Mary.” He smiled. “I’ll just open a few doors, literal and metaphorical.”

There were one or two people already in their new offices to whom she
was able to introduce Frank as they slowly descended through the building. Once they had been assured that they would not be quoted, most of them seemed happy to be distracted from their work and to answer his questions. He asked them what they thought of Eisenhower’s presidency and who they thought the next president would be; he wanted to know what they made of Washington, how it compared with other postings and how they spent their evenings.

When they reached the ground floor, Frank said, “Do I get to see inside the Ambassador’s residence?”

“Yes,” said the Head of Information, “I’m going to hand you over to the Ambassador’s secretary.”

The Ambassador was in New York, but they were allowed to look round the residence, a mock-Queen Anne building next door to the Embassy with towering brick chimneys, mansard windows and creeper-clad walls at the rear.

“Charlie calls it Greyfriars,” said Mary as they walked over in the surprising warmth of early spring. “He thinks it looks like a boys’ boarding school.”

“It’s sure big enough for one man.”

“It used to be the Embassy itself. It had all the offices until they ran out of space.”

They rang the doorbell and waited for the Ambassador’s secretary. As they went inside and looked up at the white-stone staircase, Frank said, “Jesus, it’s like a kind of fancy restaurant.”

Mary smiled. “Yes. Indian, I think. The man who designed it, Lutyens, did a lot of government buildings in New Delhi.”

Frank nodded. Mary presumed he knew nothing of India and the British Raj. She looked at him properly for the first time that morning: he was clean-shaven and neat, but with the same stray, fatigued look she remembered from before. He had mentioned that he was from Chicago and she wondered what difficulties he had found in extracting himself from the deprived neighborhood he had described and heading east.