Circles of Time (33 page)

“
Two
people in love, Jamie.”

He walked slowly over to her and sat stiffly at the opposite end of the sofa.

“That just makes it worse, doesn't it? I mean to say, it's so bloody hopeless.”

“From whose viewpoint? Ours? There's a registry office in Southampton. We could be married before the ship sails on Wednesday. Or we could be married at sea by the captain.”

“God, Alex, it's not as simple as all that.”

“You don't want to marry me? Is that it?”

“Christ,” he groaned. “I'd give my right arm. You—Colin—but it wouldn't be right for either of you. Not fair. Not in the long run. Giving up—all
this
—the type of life. For what? A small house in Coronado or La Jolla. A husband who comes home every night with grease all over his shirt cuffs!”

“For a man both Colin and I love.”

“Colin's a baby. He loves the airplanes.”

“Not just the airplanes. He's a baby, yes, but babies have instincts. They sense love, warmth, and real affection. Babies
know.
Colin was wiser than his mother. I should have known that day on Burgate Hill.”

“I knew,” he said, staring down at his hands. “It terrified me.”

“And you're frightened now, aren't you? Is it fear of going with me to see Father?”

He shook his head. “I'd walk through a furnace. His Lordship—we've always—even when I was his driver—talked man to man. He's—well, he's a bit like your son, you see. A man with instincts. I could talk to him all right. That doesn't frighten me one bit. What frightens me, Alex, is your waking up one morning in California and saying to yourself: ‘God in heaven, what am I doing
here?
'”

She moved across the sofa to him and kissed his cheek softly. “I'd never say that, Jamie. Not if I always wake up beside you.”

I
T WAS INFURIATING
to Lord Stanmore, and he was quick to set the man in his place.

“I don't give a damn what the regulations are, I am seeing my daughter off to America and neither my wife nor I intend running half a mile to do so!”

The gatekeeper at the Cunard dock gave in to the tirade and swung open the barrier. It was a section of the long dock used only for delivery of supplies and freight by lorry and rail. The soaring black and white bulk of the S.S.
Mauretania
could be seen in the distance, white feathers of steam rising into the wind from her giant funnels.

“Drive as fast as you can, Banes,” the earl said into the voice tube. He sat rigidly beside Hanna, palms resting on the bamboo handle of his furled umbrella. “It would be wrong not to wave them goodbye—despite our innermost feelings on the matter.”

“What
are
our innermost feelings, Tony?” Hanna asked, staring ahead. Dark smoke began to rise from the funnels and they could hear distinctly the hoot of the great liner's steam whistle. “We shall miss seeing them after all.”

“Nonsense. There's plenty of time.” He tapped the umbrella handle impatiently against the glass separating them from the chauffeur. Banes pressed down on the pedal and the big car picked up speed, lurching and rocking over the maze of railway tracks and uneven asphalt roadway.

“You didn't answer my question,” Hanna said, removing a handkerchief from her purse and wadding it in her hand.

“Well—dash it—after all …”

“After all
what
, Tony? You can be quite—
incoherent
at times.”

“Bit of a stunner. Quite knocked me for six. Thought she was madly in love with Noel—although for the life of me I couldn't see why.”

Hanna's smile was faint. “I thought you liked Noel.”

“Good man on a horse and all that, but—oh, I don't know, not
quite
a gentleman.”

“Jamie Ross is not
any
sort of a gentleman. He's just in the American sense, a good man.”

He looked at her with some annoyance. “If you felt he was such a good man, Hanna, then why in the name of blazes did you shut yourself up in your room for three days weeping buckets? And why did
I
have to suggest that we come see them off? And why have you sat like a stone for the entire drive and not said a blessed word until now?”

“Because I'm a mother,” she cried, dabbing at her eyes with the handkerchief, “and you couldn't begin to understand
that!
”

“No, thank God! Fathers are less devious!” He lowered the glass partition. “Over there, Banes—past those empty railroad cars. You won't be able to drive much further than that.”

They were level with the soaring knife-edge of the prow. Banes coasted for a few more feet and then stopped and hurried out to open the rear doors.

“If I'd been aware of your feelings,” said the earl with some bitterness as he took Hanna's arm, “we could have come down for the wedding.”

She said nothing in reply. Explaining her feelings could wait. And they were not that easily explained. It had been too much of a shock—the suddenness of it, and the unpleasantness of it all—with a distraught and bewildered Noel racing about the house on Saturday seeking to understand the unexplainable, refusing until Sunday night to face the fact that the wedding was off—that Alexandra Mackendric and her son had departed, quite suddenly, for Southampton with a man by the name of James Andrew Ross, from Coronado, California, U.S.A.

But who in Christ's name is he?

Hanna had shut, and locked, her door against the anguish and the storm, feeling, for some time, as outraged as Noel Edward Allenby Rothwell.

A state of shock that took some time to pass. She had refused to open her door to Alexandra, and when her daughter had slipped an envelope under it she had come within a split second of tearing the envelope and the letter it contained into a thousand pieces. Instead, she had wadded it into a ball as she stood by her sitting-room window and watched them leave the house and get into Jamie Ross's automobile. What she had seen did not fully register on her mind for two full days. When it did, she sat on a chaise longue and opened the envelope, carefully smoothing out the contents …

Hanna had folded the wrinkled sheet of paper and put it carefully aside. She was thinking at that moment of Colin, the glimpse of him she had seen from her window. He had been in the arms of Jamie Ross as they left the house and went to the car. Colin had been clinging to the man's neck—and he had been laughing.

“There they are!” the earl shouted, pointing upward with his umbrella. “They're waving at someone in the crowd. Must be Charles.”

They stood alone on the dock between the looming side of the ship and a towering, open-sided structure crowded with people who were waving to the ship's passengers. A blast from the ship's horn—answering toots from tugboats. The liner began to drift away from the dockside and out into the broad stretch of Southampton water.

“They've spotted us, by God!” the earl shouted again, waving his umbrella furiously.

Hanna could see them now—small figures standing at the rail. Colin was waving his arms. She waved back. And then the great ship turned slowly and they were lost to view.

“Ten days,” the earl said in a kind of wonder. “Do you realize that, Hanna? We could be in California in a mere ten days. Quite possibly less. Something to think about this winter. Yes, indeed. Something to think about.”

Hanna nodded, but could say nothing. The ship steaming majestically now toward the Solent and the open sea. Leaving the old world for the new. She whispered something to the wind that sounded to the earl very much like a blessing.

I
T WAS AN
honor to be invited to dine at Wipple's. The old club in Queen Victoria Street frowned on the casual guest. It had been founded by journalists in the eighteenth century as a club for journalists. The view from the upper windows of the embankment and the river had not changed over the years, but the membership had. No Grub Street hacks or Fleet Street stringers belonged to Wipple's any longer. Its membership was small and composed exclusively of newspaper or wire-service owners and editors whose opinions either bolstered or damned the day-to-day events of the nation—if not the world. Guests, by tradition, were limited to those men and women who were, at least at the time of their arrival, considered newsworthy. The “official” guest for the night of March 3 was the Honorable Andrew Bonar Law, who, after the recent downfall of David Lloyd George, found himself an unlikely prime minister at the age of sixty-five, struggling with ill health and a rising and vociferous Labor party that held one hundred and forty-two seats in Parliament.

Another guest of the evening—sponsored by Jacob Golden, although no one could quite understand why—was a Major Archibald P. Truex, a minor functionary at the War Office. There were some whispered speculations about that, for it was noticed by several sharp-eyed editors that Golden and Martin Rilke totally ignored the prime minister and spent the evening in huddled conversations with Major Truex, who was, to be kind, no more than a Whitehall drone. They also noticed the transfer of a manila envelope from the major's hand to those of Jacob Golden.

“What's the blighter up to?” Thornberry of the
Telegraph
remarked to his companion, a senior editor of the
Guardian.

“Damned if I know. Some sort of
scoop
, I would imagine. That chap Golden. Like father like son—
de mortuis
and all that.”

Major Truex, in consideration for an evening at Wipple's and a chance of ingratiating himself with a press lord, had ferreted through the filing cabinets at the War Office and had made copies of all correspondence pertaining to Lieutenant Colonel Fenton Wood-Lacy, Twelfth Battalion, Sixty-fifth Brigade, Iraq. It made depressing reading—except to Jacob Golden, who had discovered the first glimmer of light in it. He sat in the back of his Daimler, smoking a cigarette and humming softly to himself while Martin sat beside him, elbows resting on the fold-down table, scanning through the documents under the pinpoint glare of the reading lamp.

“They have him in a box—or so it seems to me,” Martin said.

“Oh, yes,” Jacob said cheerfully. “And a very tight little box it is. And Fenton, with characteristic style, keeps making the box stronger. Note the memorandum from RAF command, Baghdad, complaining to the army commander of Fenton's ‘interference' and ‘unorthodoxy.'”

“I just read it. That sort of criticism certainly won't do him any good.”

“My dear chap, it's that sort of criticism that will get him home and assigned to the staff college.”

“Your logic escapes me.”

“It's simple, really—one merely has to understand the workings of the military mind at the higher levels of command. The more Fenton irritates them with his so-called unorthodoxy, the harder they'll bear down on the poor blighter and try to force his resignation from the service of king and country.”

“That would be the best thing that could happen, it seems to me.”

“To you perhaps, but not to Fenton. If he were hounded out of the army, it would destroy him—and everyone close to him. It's my opinion—and the opinion of my newspaper, which is one and the same thing—that little Britain might well be in dire straits one day unless the leadership of her armed forces is composed of men of imagination and vision. Do you know where the vast majority of our future military leaders are? They're buried in French and Belgian mud, that's where they are. And the type of ossified thinking that put them there still permeates the marble corridors of Whitehall. And furthermore—”