Crossings (28 page)

“Come on, let's go inside and have a cup of coffee.” There was a constantly available pot in the dining room, and it did a land-office business. There was nothing else to do on the ship except sit around and talk, or walk the decks, or sit in one's cabin while others slept or poured out their stories of the war. The ship wasn't set up for entertainment or distraction. And the few books that had been lined up on shelves in the dining hall had disappeared when the first passengers boarded. Even the zigzag course grew tedious very quickly, and it was difficult to escape one's own thoughts in the monotony of looking out at the empty horizon. The mind drifted back to recent weeks, to the events of the past month, to the people one had left…. Liane sat down in the dining room at an empty table and tried to stop her tears. As she blew her nose in a lace handkerchief the children had given her for her last birthday, she looked up at Nick with an attempt at a smile.

“I'm sorry.”

“For what? For being human? For loving your husband? Don't be silly, Liane. When I put Johnny on the
Aquitania
, I stood on the dock as it pulled out, and cried like a baby.” He still remembered the dockworker who had patted his shoulder and muttered a few comforting words. But nothing had really helped. He had never felt so bereft in his life. But Liane was looking at him now and her face registered a question. He hadn't mentioned Hillary.

“But you told me that Hillary went with him.” Suddenly she was confused. Had he sent the child alone? But she thought …

“Yeah.” He decided to tell her now. “And with Philip Markham. Do you know who he is?” Nick's eyes grew hard as he stared into his coffee and then back at Liane. He spoke in a low voice and his hand shook slightly on his cup.

“I've heard the name.” All over Paris for a while, linked to Hillary. But she didn't say that. “He's something of an international figure.”

Nick smiled a bitter little smile. “An international playboy, to be exact. My wife has charming taste. They spent the summer in the South of France together.”

“Did you know they would be on the ship together?”

Nick shook his head. “I saw his name on the manifest after they left that morning.”

She couldn't resist asking the next question. Does it still bother you, Nick?” He should have been used to her indiscretions by now.

He looked into her face, at the softness of her skin, and wondered as he had before how two women could be so different. “My source of concern isn't because she's my wife. I'm past that. I never got a chance to tell you, but after we spoke on the
Normandie
that night, I don't think I ever felt the same way again. I think she'd pushed me too far. And I let her do what she wanted in Paris. But I care because of Johnny. If she continues carrying on like that, one of these days she's going to find someone who suits her, and she may get ideas into her head about leaving and taking Johnny. Up to now she's been content to live with me and fool around, I've gotten to the point where I can live with that.” He fell silent for a moment and then told Liane the truth. “I'm scared … I'm so goddamn scared that I'd lose Johnny.”

“You couldn't.”

“I could. She's his mother. If we got divorced, she could do anything she damn well pleased. She could move to Timbuktu, and then what? I see him once a year for a two-week vacation?” It was a horrifying thought he had pondered often, particularly lately. He knew from Hillary's silence that things had changed in the last six months. Before, she had felt some obligation to report to him. But there had been not a word, not a line, not a sound since the first cable.

“I didn't think she was that interested in the boy.” Liane looked worried for him.

“She's not. But she cares about what people think. And if she gives him up, people will say a lot of ugly things about her. She'd rather keep him and park him somewhere with his nurse while she goes off to play. She hardly ever called him last summer when she was in Cannes with Markham.”

“What are you going to do about all that, Nick?”

He sighed deeply and finished the last of his coffee before he set his cup down and looked her in the eyes. “I'm going to go home and shorten her leash again. I'm going to remind her that she's married to me and that's the way it's going to stay. She'll hate me for it, but I don't give a damn. It's the only way I can keep my kid. And, damn it, that's what I'm going to do.”

Liane felt bold as she listened to him. She was going to tell him what she thought. They were once again on a ship, suspended between two worlds, and all was fair. “You deserve a better woman than that, Nick. I don't know you very well, but I do know that much. You're a good man and you have a lot to give. And she's never going to give you a damn thing in return except heartache.”

He nodded. She already had done much of that. But at least his heart was no longer involved. Only his son. And to him that was more important. “Thank you. That's a nice thing to say.” They exchanged a smile over their empty coffee cups, and a group of the journalists on board wandered in for a round of coffee. One of them was carrying a half-full bottle of whiskey to add a little kick to the coffee. But neither of them accepted his offer of a nip. Nick was thinking over what Liane had said. “The trouble is that in order to get myself another woman, I'd have to give up my son, or at least living with him. And I'd never do that.”

“It's a high price to pay.”

“It is either way. And in ten years he'll be grown up and things will be different.”

“How old will you be then?” she asked softly.

“Forty-nine.”

“That's a long time to wait to be happy.”

“How old was Armand when you married him?”

She smiled at the question. “Forty-six.”

“I'll only be three years older. And maybe if I'm very lucky, I'll find someone like you.” She blushed at his words and looked away, but he reached out and touched her hand. “Don't be embarrassed. It's true. You're a wonderful woman, Liane. I told you when I first met you that Armand was a lucky man, and I meant it.” She brought her eyes back sadly to his.

“I gave him a hard time this year in Paris.” She felt guilty about that, now that she knew what he'd been doing. “I didn't understand what pressures he was under. We hardly ever saw each other and …” Her eyes filled with tears again and she shook her head. But she had been haunted for days now by her anger at Armand over the past months. If she had only known … but how could she have?

“You must both have been under a tremendous strain.”

“We were.” She sighed. “And so were the girls. But Armand most of all. And now he won't even have us to lean on.” Not that he really had in the past year. He had carried all the burdens alone. She looked at Nick with agony in her eyes. “If something happens to him …”

“Nothing will. He's too smart to take chances. He'll be all right. You just have to hang on.” And he knew she would. She was that kind of woman.

They went back outside then and stood on the deck for a while, and then she went to find the girls. They were enjoying the trip, and acute boredom hadn't set in yet, although she suspected it would later.

They didn't see Nick again until that night, when he played guessing games with the girls in a sheltered corner of the deck. Most of the male passengers had stayed in the dining room to drink and talk, and Liane had thought it best to remove the girls. No one had got rowdy yet, but perhaps they would. Although no one spoke of it on the darkened ship, the tension was beginning to run high. There were inevitable fears that a German U-boat would strike, and the only way to live with the fears was by drinking. And the men did. A lot.

Liane sat with Nick and the girls, trying to keep their spirits up.

“Knock, knock, who's there? …” The jokes and stories and riddles went on forever, and the four of them laughed as they sat on the stairs. Eventually Liane put the girls to bed and went back outside for a walk. She had left their life vests at the foot of their beds, as the passengers had been instructed to do, and she didn't venture too far, but she needed to get out. The atmosphere in the tiny room was oppressive. The
Deauville
had been prepared to take on twenty passengers and no more, there were five double rooms and ten singles, and instead they were carrying sixty men, a woman, and two children, with a crew of twenty-one. With eighty-four people on board, the ship felt like it was about to burst at the seams, and the noise from the dining room grew more and more raucous as she stood on the deck with her eyes closed in the wind. She was chilly but she didn't care. It just felt good to be out.

“I thought you'd gone to bed.” She turned as she heard Nick's familiar voice beside her, and she turned to look up at him with a smile. They were all getting used to being in the dark.

“I put the girls to bed, but I wasn't tired.”

He nodded. “Is it hot in your room?”

“Stifling.”

He smiled. “Mine's like an oven, and there are six men in it.”

“Six?” She looked shocked.

“I have the deluxe suite, so-called on the
Deauville
. So they put five more beds in it. Cots actually. But I don't think anyone cares.” They had all been lucky to get passage at all and they knew it. “But to tell you the truth, I'm not sleeping in my room.”

She remembered the studio he'd switched to on the
Normandie
after his blowout with his wife. “You do that a lot, don't you?”

“Only on transatlantic crossings.” He grinned and they both laughed. “This time, the captain showed me a perfect little spot. There's a secluded area under the bridge. And they put up a hammock for me. No one ever comes around, and I'm out of the wind, but if I peek around a little bit, I can see the stars … it's heaven.” He looked pleased. Despite his enormous fortune in steel, he was an easy man to please. A hammock under the stars, borrowed clothes from a sailor when his luggage fell overboard. He was good-natured and easygoing and unpretentious. And in that way, he was much like Liane. Between the two of them they had two of the largest private fortunes in the United States, but to look at them one would never have known it. He was in his borrowed seaman's garb. She was wearing gray flannel slacks and an old sweater, her hair was loose in the wind, and she wore no jewelry save a narrow gold wedding band, and they both looked perfectly at ease as they were. The men on the ship had been startled to realize who Nick was, and had they known that Liane was Crockett Shipping, they would have been even more so. She had totally unassuming ways, as did Nick. It was part of their inner beauty. He looked down at Liane after a while. “Do you want me to bring you another cup of coffee or a drink?”

“I'm all right. I'll go to bed in a little while. The girls will stay up talking all night if I don't, and it's so hot down there, they can't sleep either.”

“Do you want me to have another hammock rigged up in my little hideaway for them? There isn't enough room for two hammocks, but they could share one and then at least you'd have peace in the cabin.” It was a sweet suggestion and she smiled at him.

“Then you won't get any sleep. They'll keep you up all night, telling jokes and asking questions.”

“I'd love it.” And she knew he would, but she thought it best to keep them with her.

And then, after a little while longer, she bade him good night. And as she returned to her cabin she thought how remarkable it was that they should meet again, crossing the Atlantic. Before she went to bed, she washed her hair again. She had already had to wash it three times since they'd arrived to get the smell of the fishing boat off her. What an experience that had been. She smiled to herself as she got undressed. It would be funny, if it weren't so tragic. But at least laughing at it now and then kept her from crying for Armand all the time. She was barely able to think about having left him without her eyes filling with tears, and she fought the thoughts off again now as she washed her hair in the tiny sink and dried it with a towel. She did everything in the dark, and she had forced the girls to stop talking when she came in. And she could hear now from the silence in their bunks that they were sleeping at last.

She had just gotten into her own bed, and pulled the sheet over her, when suddenly there was a terrifying, unfamiliar whooping sound, and she sat up in bed like a shot, trying to remember what the sound meant. Was it a fire alarm, an air raid, or were they sinking? With a speed and deftness she hadn't known she had, she leaped from her bed, grabbed their life vests, and shook the girls. “Come on, girls, come on … quickly. …” She pushed Elisabeth into her vest. The child was still half asleep, despite the noise. Then she grabbed Marie-Ange and helped her, and she had both girls halfway out the door in nightgowns, life vests, and shoes, and she struggled to pull her own life vest on over her nightgown. She hadn't even had time to find her own shoes in the dark, but it didn't matter, she crowded into the passageway with the others, emerging from their cabins with startled looks. Most of them had still been awake, but a few of the men looked as sleepy as the girls did. There was an instant cacophony of voices and questions and a shout from the far end from someone who couldn't find his life vest. They pressed onto the deck almost as one mass, and there, in the distance, they saw the reason for the sirens. A ship of indeterminate size looked like a ball of fire on the horizon, and members of the crew moved among them now, explaining in rapid French that a troop ship out of Halifax had been hit by a U-boat two days before. The
Deauville
had just now gotten the message. There were men in a lifeboat with a transmitter too weak by now to have reached them at any greater distance. The ship had been burning for two days, and it had carried more than four thousand men bound for England.

Both the news that they heard and the sight of the burning ship were terrifying in the stillness of the summer night. There had been a gentle breeze before, but now there wasn't even that. It was as though they were moving toward hell, and all eyes were held riveted by the inferno ahead.

The captain came out on the bridge with a bullhorn in his hand, and spoke to them all in English. He knew that most of the passengers were Americans and he needed their immediate attention.