Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart (5 page)

Then we go back to the jeep.

“Full steam ahead for Cambridge!” he decrees, slapping his hands together. “And wouldn't it be swell if we could also take in Grantchester?”

“In Connecticut they breed them ambitious,” I declare.

“Not so much ambitious. Merely anxious to make up for lost time.”

“But why haven't you seen all these places before?”

“Who knows? Laziness? Lack of opportunity? Lack of the proper person to see them with?”

“Oh, well,” I agree, airily. “Probably reason enough.”

Groton lies amid some of the most beautiful scenery in the county; this is the edge of Constable country. From time to time we even see a windmill. Matt compares the twisting Suffolk lanes to that strip of Roman road which runs out of Halesworth—and of course to the detriment of the latter—but we hadn't yet met a large car coming in the opposite direction (a car, incidentally, whose occupants he'd needed to salute) when he happened to voice that particular opinion.

“Oh, yes, naturally it still holds. Do you see me, then, as someone who lacks constancy?”

It's about half-past-three when we arrive in Cambridge. We park the jeep and wander through the town and look inside the courts of several of the colleges. (“Matt, just listen to those blackbirds!”) I feel the rightness of the day compounded when we enter Trinity through the Great Gate and a nice old boy with red complexion, thin silvery hair and a grubby pullover engages us in conversation, discovers Matt comes from New England, and reveals that John Winthrop was a student here. But in the end he has less to say about Winthrop, who apparently wasn't an object of scandal, than about Lord Byron, who undoubtedly was. Our guide turns out to be one of the masters of the college. He leads us across to the magnificent Franciscan fountain in which it is said that Byron used to disport himself naked.

The old man chuckles.

“He's also alleged to have climbed onto the roof of the library and added certain…embellishments…to the statues up there.”

As we walk out of Trinity, Matt echoes my own feeling.

“I had a hunch today was going to be special.”

“That kind of hunch is very often fatal.”

“Agreed. However, today I had a kind of hunch it wouldn't be.”

We're now strolling along the Backs, hand-in-hand. We sit down on the riverbank and watch a soldier skilfully propel a punt. His companion is leaning back on a bed of cushions and although the weather is still a long way from being warm the fitful late-afternoon sunshine—impressively forecast by one of the farmhands—makes it look inviting.

“Maybe we could do that?” suggests Matt.

“I'm told it's not as easy as it looks.”

“Surely you can't have forgotten that you're talking to a man whose forefathers survived the Arabella?”

The passenger in the punt has red hair that falls about her shoulders. I admire it—then append rather casually: “Your fiancée? What colour's
her
hair?”

He answers less casually. “Not a lot different to yours.”

“Mousy? Poor girl. Do you have a snapshot?”

He takes out his wallet and passes me a photograph. “Meet Marjorie.”

“My goodness! The face and figure of a film star!”

“In fact that's what she wants to be. She's done a bit of summer stock.” Is there an element of dryness there? He adds neutrally: “And her father hobnobs with some of the best-known names in Hollywood.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“She was engaged to my brother,”

I hadn't even known he had a brother.

Now I discover that he hasn't. “Tom died of bone cancer. Three years back.”

“Oh, my God. How awful. I'm sorry.”

“Yes.” He remains silent for a while but then continues. “Marjorie was left desolate. She may look… But the truth is she's intensely vulnerable and if you'd seen the way she pined for Tom… It fell to me to try to get her over it, help her to recover her courage. And gradually, before either of us had realized…”

“She was enormously lucky, then, that Tom had a brother like you.” I recognize a certain amount of dryness in my own tone; a dryness which I honestly do my utmost to eradicate.

Matt returns the snapshot to his wallet.

“No, I was the lucky one, to have a brother like Tom. Marjorie would have been okay, eventually. She's the kind of girl who brings out the protective instinct in practically any man she meets. Even a guy like me.”

“Why do you add that?”

“Oh, I don't know. Wasn't thinking, I guess.” He picks a blade of grass and starts to chew on it, lying back and leaning on one elbow. “I guess I used to see myself as being pretty weak.”

“Weak!” The surprise is genuine.

“Thank you for that—but, yes, I often used to think so. Before my brother died, before I realized that Marjorie could ever view me as any kind of…well, as any kind of a replacement. And in a way that's why this stint in England has been so good for me. I know that sounds selfish but it's shown me I can cope. That I can cope the same as anyone.”

“But what on earth made you think that you were weak?”

He rolls onto his back, throws away the blade of grass. “Well, for one thing, I suppose, I find my father a bit formidable. My mother's also got a very forceful personality. I'm fond of them both and missed them like hell when I first got to England but—” He laughs. “That's another thing, of course. Homesickness is hardly a great sign of strength.”

“What an idiotic remark…for a highbrow.”

“I've no idea,” he says, “why I'm telling you all this. Well, actually, yes I have. From the start I've found you remarkably easy to talk to.”

“I'm glad.” I wish I could have met him earlier, during that period when he missed his home.

But suddenly I get a consolation prize (and almost wonder if he might be telepathic).

“You know, Rosalind,” he says, “I really found you at the right moment. I'd been feeling fairly low, what with Roosevelt's death; the discoveries at Buchenwald… Well, of course, everybody had. I'm not claiming any special sort of sensibility; don't get me wrong. But that Jack o' the Clock was the first thing to make me smile in days. I had nearly told Walt to find someone else to go with him to Southwold. In fact I did but he was surprisingly insistent.”

“Good old Walt. And you did more than smile. You really laughed.”

“I know. It was a true liberation.”

I lie back, feeling happy.

“And then, too, see how you've taken me out of myself today! John Winthrop, Maria Marten, Meg Taylor, Lord Byron. Though I give you my solemn word,” he says hastily—albeit with a touch of mischief, “I am
not
making light of Maria Marten!”

We decide to take a punt to Grantchester. Yes, at first he gets the pole caught but then he quickly grows proficient and his movements become a joy to watch.

“Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,

Beside the river make for you

A tunnel of green gloom…”

Also he recites the whole of ‘The Soldier'—at Dartmouth he majored in English—and gets it word-perfect. It's a memorable experience: drifting along a lovely river on a fine spring evening (the sky has at last got rid of the remnants of its cloud) and listening to a moving poem well spoken against the very setting which inspired it.

We tie up the punt and for a wonderfully enchanted hour we ourselves roam England's ways and love her flowers and feel we have hearts very much at peace under an English heaven. Is war still raging in the Pacific? Bloodshed, pain, bereavement? Even boredom, muddle, apathy? We poke our heads round the gateway of the Old Vicarage and try to put the clock back forty years to when the poet would have been eighteen, try to picture him running across the lawn, sitting on that wrought-iron seat, standing on the very spot where we ourselves now stand. 1905. It's easy to imagine—in such a place, on such an afternoon—that we have turned into time travellers who have stumbled upon a secret door into that sunlit, safe, Edwardian world; at least, Matt cautiously amends, sunlit and safe for those who had a good income. We admire the exterior of the church; we look for his name on the village war memorial (there it is—Brooke—after Baker, Blogg and Bolton) and think a little, too, about those other names imprinted on the stone. Then we eat a proper English tea, high tea, in a proper English cottage, with a proper homemade sign outside its door. And afterwards, while still not quite of this world, while wandering through some twilit balm-filled extension touched with just sufficient melancholy to sharpen our appreciation of it, we wend our way back to the punt and give a florin to the boy who's been left most proudly and willingly in charge.

However, once we're in the jeep returning to the farm, tranquillity soon disappears. And how! Pity all the life of field and hedgerow. ‘You're in the army, Mr Brown'…‘The Lambeth walk'…‘She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes'…‘It's a grand night for singing'…

But then he must have seen me shiver (it
is
cold riding in a jeep after the sun's gone down) for with his free hand he pulls me towards him and I lay my head on his shoulder and we drive along less boisterously for the remainder of the way.

As we get closer to home I tell him he must come in and meet Fred and Amy and have a mug of tea and a sandwich. The Crawfords stand to some extent
in loco parentis
and I would vaguely feel I had to do this anyway, even without the urge to show him off and give him something hot and let him see the farm by moonlight, for the house is moated and therefore picturesque as well as merely old. I could have shown it to him in the morning but had felt then that this was the better way to do it. Another time—and I was now fairly certain there was going to be another time—he could look at it by day.

I can see he's making an impression on the Crawfords: I've never heard them talk so animatedly to somebody they didn't know. They even turn down the wireless: Albert Sandler and his Palm Court Orchestra playing ‘Bells Across the Meadow'! As usual, the lamp has the faint aroma of paraffin about it but its light spreads a soft glow over the kitchen and the range gives out the same style of homeliness, with the kettle now boiling once more and whistling gently on the hob. Fred, stringy, weather-beaten, with slightly protuberant eyes, talks about the execution of Mussolini, the supposed cerebral haemorrhage of Hitler and the dropping of food bombs on Holland. Amy, mending towels, the typical farmer's wife, rosy-cheeked, round, comfortable, talks about the children and the difficulties of making do. (“I have eighteen people to feed; two gallons of broth to prepare each evening!”) Then Matt asks about the moat and Fred's well away: protection against peasant uprisings, wolves and winter floods and cattle thieves—well, that's only the start of it. Fred's an authority.

Therefore it's nearly a quarter past ten when Matt again stands up to take his leave—and this time is allowed to—fairly late when you consider we all have to be up so early (although as yet there's not been any sign of Trixie). He hesitates about whether to give me a goodnight kiss, then does so, on the cheek, which is exactly right.

In bed, in our small room with its sloping floor and equally sloping ceiling, I drunkenly review the day and suddenly I'm aware of a tremendous sense of loss, an awful ache of longing in the abdomen. Already.

I don't want to lose him!

Can't bear the thought I'll have to lose him!

7

We get to the embassy at half-past-nine and discover it's been open for an hour. We're directed to the Upper Brook Street entrance. A man in front of us has his attaché case looked into but we're okay, neither of us is carrying anything. Oh, yes, Tom has a bunch of keys in his pants pocket. So he has to hand it over for a minute and once again pass through the metal-detector. Parking the car has taken all the coins he had—and the money he's lent me wasn't in change.

American Citizen Services is to the right and up some stairs. A Marine security guard watches as we go inside. The young woman who greets us from behind her counter sounds Irish rather than American. I explain that I've lost my passport. (“Start easy,” Tom had advised. “Don't throw it at them all at once.”) Totally unfazed, she hands me a form and asks us if we'd like to sit while I complete it. We go a little further in and the place opens up to resemble a vast modern bank: airy and pleasant with all the walls, desktops and partitions either cream-coloured or grey, and the carpet adding a bluish tinge. Typewriters, computers and printers introduce a lighter shade of grey. There are anomalies, of course: a vase of flowers, a large and leafy plant, the U.S. flag drooping from a staff topped by a golden eagle.

We sit on plastic chairs and glance through the form: Application for Passport Registration. Initially there doesn't seem a lot I can fill in. It starts with name, date and place of birth. Social security number. But then I find the next six questions to be simple. For my mailing address I give Tom's. I tell them my gender; that my height is six foot; the colour of my hair, light brown; my eyes, blue. For my home telephone number they get Tom's. (They get his business phone as well—that makes a seventh field not left entirely blank.) After that, it's permanent address and occupation. Father's name, father's birthplace, father's date of birth. Is or was father a U.S. citizen? Then comes my mother's maiden name and a request for
her
details. Then it's back to me. Have I ever been issued with a U.S. passport? (If yes, passport number, issue date and disposition. In this context, what does
that
mean, exactly? Neither of us knows.) Have I ever been married? (If yes, date of most recent marriage.) And so on. In other words, not without problems for someone like myself. Tom points out a note on the reverse side: if no birth record exists, a circumcision certificate might help to prove identity. “Oh, yes, extremely funny,” I reply.