Night Train to Lisbon (11 page)

Connecticut, Carson thought at first, then realized that he meant Sintra. But she was right the first time. Going now to her aunt and uncle's house would simply be a temporary measure, but Carson felt so sick from the sun that she let Alec help her up from the blanket, and she leaned
against him as they went back to the car. He carefully covered her with the blanket. “So you don't get a chill in the wind as we drive,” he said, and she surrendered to his tenderness, leaning into him and closing her eyes and, for the rest of the ride, drawing as much human comfort from his touch as she could.

When they arrived back at the villa, Alec carried Carson inside while Jane and Lawrence hovered over, exclaiming in upset voices.

“Brew some tea, Mrs. Emmett, would you please?” Alec asked. “And then if you could put it in a large bowl with plenty of ice. The tannic acid in the tea is a good salve for sunburns. I know that from personal experience.”

So Carson lay on her bed and let her aunt apply poultices of the iced tea. Alec was right; she did start to feel better. Though nothing could be done to take away the sunburn itself, at least the effects of it wouldn't be so severe. Aunt Jane gave Carson two grains of aspirin and some cold
limonata
to drink. By now, Alec, Freddy, Michael, and Tom had quietly left and driven back to the city, and Carson was alone in her bedroom with her aunt. Evening was just falling; off in the kitchen of the villa, Lawrence was cutting up a chicken for dinner.

“What happened today, Carson?” Aunt Jane asked as she sat on the edge of Carson's bed, beneath the mosquito netting.

“Alec told you,” said Carson flatly. “I lay in the sun too long and got burned.”

“No, he said you seemed peculiar
before
that,” said Jane. “That you seemed upset, for reasons he couldn't explain. That you were almost unfriendly to him. Of course, I didn't say a word about the argument you had last night with Lawrie, but that's what this is about, isn't it?”

“Yes,” said Carson vaguely.

“I thought as much.”

Carson sat up in bed, leaning her head heavily against the muslin pillow sham. “Aunt Jane,” she asked with sudden emotion in her voice, “do you think it's really possible for a person to know what's inside another person? Inside their heart?”

Her aunt appraised her in the dim light of the bedroom. “Well, it depends on what you mean by that,” she said. “Two people in love—they like to think that they're twins, in a way. That they've spent their whole life until now wandering the earth without their other half. And now they've found it, and it's a great relief. Usually, people who have recently fallen in love want to tell each other everything, want to pour out the contents of their heart.” She paused. “Is that what you're getting at?”

“In a way,” said Carson. She wanted to tell her aunt what Lawrence had said to her in his study the night before, but she knew it was essential that she not do that. In fact, Carson had already begun doing exactly what her uncle asked her
not
to do: she'd behaved differently toward Alec. She'd been distant to him, she'd withdrawn her affections. He was beginning to ask questions, to
wonder what was really going on here—precisely what her uncle had instructed Carson not to let happen under any circumstances.

I'm a terrible spy,
she thought as she sat there on the bed with her aunt.
I've really got to do much better than this.

Later that night, when the aspirin had taken effect along with the iced-tea poultices, Carson managed to eat a little of the roast chicken that Lawrence had sweetly if clumsily prepared. After the meal, during which no one spoke very much, she asked her aunt and uncle if she might use the telephone. Of course, they said, and so Carson sat in the living room speaking into the heavy receiver.

“Fala ingles?”
she asked the operator.

“Sim,”
said the woman across the crackling line.

Then Carson asked in English whether she could place a call to Lisboa, to the Pensão Moderna,
por favor.

When Alec got on the line, he sounded so relieved to hear her voice that his own voice came out in a rush of air. “Carson,” he said, “oh, you're all right?”

“I was stupid to have lain on that blanket like that,” she said. “Once, back in Connecticut, I got a terrible burn. I'd forgotten how susceptible I am.”

“So you haven't turned into a piece of fried
bacalhau
?” he asked, and she pretended to laugh as she told him that no, she hadn't.

“There's something else I wanted to say,” she said to him.

“Yes, what is it?” he asked.

“You remember today, how you thought I was acting strangely?”

“Of course I do,” he said.

“Well, you were right. I was.”

“Finally! The girl admits it! I knew I wasn't going crazy,” said Alec.

“I was feeling confused,” she found herself saying. “Things have happened so quickly this summer. Time has been compressed for me; it's as though you and I have been together for years, and yet of course it's only weeks.” It amazed her how fluidly and easily the lies came. She almost believed them herself—that the reason for her strangeness today was the headiness of love. “But I want to see you as soon as I can,” Carson said. “To reassure you that it was only a momentary lapse. Because”—and she paused here, experiencing, despite herself, a secret thrill at still being able to say these words, as if even now they contained the same illicit heat they'd held for her all summer, as if by saying them she might somehow erase all the horrible knowledge she'd gained in the past day and return to a time when they were true—“I love you, Alec.”

 

And so it was that the very next day Carson Weatherell found herself back in the center of Lisbon with Alec Breve, the two of them walking along broad, leafy avenues the way they had
done before Uncle Lawrence's pronouncement. She'd had nothing to report to her uncle regarding the previous day, of course, yet her uncle had insisted that she tell him everything. “You never know what might prove important later on,” he said, sitting behind the desk in his study that morning, scrupulously copying down Carson's description of the drive to the beach and what little she remembered of the beach itself. She supposed she would have to perform the same duty the following morning, though the evening, as it passed, seemed as unpromising as the beach: a beefsteak dinner in a tiny, narrow restaurant lit by long, dripping tapers, followed, Alec informed her as the meal drew to a close and the waiters began clearing a space at the very back of the restaurant for a small platform and a microphone, by a show.

“Fado,”
Alec said.

“
Fado?
What's that?”

“You'll see,” he said.

Within moments a young, beautiful man appeared on the platform holding a guitar. He wore a simple white cotton shirt with embroidery; it was opened down his chest, revealing bronzed skin. His eyes were gleaming and sorrowful as he put the guitar strap around his neck and began to sing. He was a
fadista,
she learned, a performer of the old Portuguese art of
fado,
an expressive tradition that for centuries had combined tales of lost love and forgotten glory with music. The combination was wrenching. All she could think
of as she watched and listened was how everything had been destroyed between herself and Alec. The only difference between herself and the
fadista
was that though her feelings of love for her lover were dying, the object of her love was still close at hand.

Later that evening, in Alec's room at the
pensão,
she made love with him again, and not only because if she didn't, then she knew he would surely grow suspicious. After all, she could have used the sunburn as an excuse. And maybe, she thought, some part of her had wanted to stay in the sun too long yesterday, to spare her having to face a moment just like this.

But that was yesterday. Pressing her sunburned body now against Alec's, she felt the surface of his muscles and the tension collected within, waiting to spring. She thought of the Alec of old, the friend and lover in whose presence she prayed for time to stop. She thought of her uncle, and how she would leave this part of the evening out of her morning report. She thought of the young
fadista
onstage tonight, and how palpable his sense of isolation and loss was. As Alec pressed urgently against her, covering her neck, her collarbone, her mouth with kisses, Carson realized that tears were streaming from her eyes. At first she thought she was crying for the
fadista,
but then she realized that she was crying, of course, only for herself.

T
wo days later, Carson and Alec traveled back to Paris on the same train that had brought them to Lisbon. Then, as now, they were not officially together. Carson, of course, was still in the care of her aunt and uncle, and Alec was still bunking with his three Cambridge mates, but Carson couldn't help thinking that what might have seemed to Alec like a temporary exercise in discretion—in keeping up appearances—was in fact, without his knowledge, final: a farewell.

And one that was beginning to take its toll on Carson. For the past three days in Portugal she had been willing to act the role of devoted lover—a part, she had to admit, that she had grown willing to play. And she'd apparently played it well. After that first semidisastrous day on the
beach, Alec would have had no reason to suspect anything. The following day he had seen Carson for dinner and the
fado
show and a round of lovemaking back at the
pensão,
and then he had seen her again the day after that, their last together in Portugal.

They had planned to spend the day exploring the coast. Alec had told Carson he'd heard of yet one more noble, crumbled
castelo
in Sintra that looked down on the coastline, where the waves, no doubt, would gently be striking the rocks. But when Carson had arrived at Alec's door at the Pensão Moderna, the thought of sightseeing had struck them both as absurd. The only sights they wanted to see on this day—the only landscapes they wished to commit to memory—were their own.

And so they did, beginning at noon, stretching through siesta, and then lasting eventually into the evening. Sometimes during that final, endless afternoon, Carson would find herself thinking about what she was supposed to be doing here—what her uncle and England expected of her. Once, in an attempt to draw Alec out, Carson offered this: “He expects war, you know.”

Alec, lying on his back, trying to catch his breath, waited a beat. Then he said, “Who?”

“My uncle.”

“Your uncle. He expects war, does he?” Alec's tone suggested not so much curiosity as bafflement.

“You asked what he thought once, remember?”

“Did I?”

“And he's not alone,” Carson went on. “He tells me the entire Ministry of Defence considers war absolutely inevitable.”

“Well,” Alec said, sitting up and turning toward Carson, his arms encircling her as if to devour her, “do you know what I consider inevitable?” And then he pulled Carson on top of him.

Wherefore art thou?
she'd once wondered about Alec, meaning: Who are you? Now she could ask the same question of herself. Who was this woman who slipped so easily between the role of lover and betrayer? Who found it astonishingly easy to lead a double life? Who routinely did things that until recently she would have considered unimaginable, and unforgivable? She lied to Jane. She lied to Alec. She snooped, rooting through his private things. That final afternoon with Alec, while he was down the hall in the washroom, Carson climbed out of bed and furtively shuffled through the stack of mail lying on his bureau. But it, too, was unrevealing; there were innocuous-seeming letters from friends back at Cambridge, and a note from the wealthy dowager, Mrs. Bertram, who had employed Alec's mother as a housekeeper when he was growing up, and who, after his mother's death, had assumed the role of second mother to Alec. Once Mrs. Bertram had seemed to be as much a part of Carson and Alec's future together as had her own parents. Alec often talked of how one day he would lead Carson down the quiet streets
of Bloomsbury, past the British Museum, to the house where Mrs. Bertram still kept a room for Alec, just as Carson tempted him with visions of the Weatherell family's glassed-in porch, its view of the sun falling gently on the snow-covered lawn, a table set for an American version of “tea.” Carson sighed deeply now, slipped the letter back into its envelope, and gently returned it to the top of the bureau, where it rejoined the pile of letters and a fountain pen and a hairbrush and all the other minutiae of what once had been, and soon would be again, Alec Breve's life without Carson Weatherell.

 

Just as he had that first night on the train, Alec joined Carson and Jane and Lawrence for dinner on the ride back to Paris. The meal passed innocuously, with much talk of Sintra and no talk of war, and at the earliest opportunity that she could do so without raising suspicions, Carson retired to her compartment. She changed into her night-clothes and climbed up the metal ladder to the bunk that a porter had turned down. Carson lay there awake for a long time, trying to lose herself in the rhythm of the train, and staring at the ceiling. Somewhere along the corridor slept Alec. Carson could picture him lying on his back, his tanned chest bare, smoking a cigarette and thinking about…what? About her? About the Watchers? About Germany and military secrets and the glories of Nazism?

“No,” she said aloud, surprising herself.

“Pardon?” The voice of her aunt came from the bunk below. Carson had long before turned off her reading lamp, but she could see from the spill of light on the red carpet that her aunt was still awake.

“Nothing,” said Carson. “I must have been dozing off.”

Carson heard the dull thump of a book closing and then the shifting of sheets. After a moment, her aunt's light went out. But then Jane spoke again.

“Carson,” she said, “is there anything you'd like to talk about?”

“No. But thank you. Good night.”

Another silence. Then: “Sometimes, Carson, and I do hope you don't take this the wrong way, but sometimes I wish you could really talk to me. Oh, I don't mean the way we do. We get along famously already, don't you think? And I've had a marvelous time getting to know you better this summer, and the fact is, I do feel I really know you now. You're not this invisible niece I rarely see. You're flesh and blood now. Family. So: mission accomplished. That's what I hoped would happen when I invited you to spend the summer with Lawrie and me, and it did happen. I do think we'll have a friendship now. But,” she went on, “there are times—and maybe I'm being presumptuous even to suggest this, and maybe I've no right to say this, none at all—but sometimes, Carson, I wish you could open up to me a bit more. I would like very much if you came to feel that you
could confide in me the way…well, the way a daughter would with her mother.”

Carson didn't answer at first. The fact was, she wished it, too. Her aunt was kind, and worldly, and wise. Carson felt if she could confide in Jane, unburden herself to her, that her aunt would know what to tell her, how to make her feel better. And she was sure, in turn, that this sharing of secrets would make her aunt feel better. Poor Jane, Carson thought now, married to a husband who was married to the Home Office. Jane loved Lawrie, of course; but that love came at a cost. Maybe all love did. After the initial explosion of passion, when the all-consuming part of the romance has passed and the outside world has begun to bleed through, like the morning light through bedroom blinds, you start to find out who the other person really is, and he or she finds out more about you, and then you decide whether it's worth the cost. For Jane, the kindnesses and comforts of Lawrie outweighed his devotion to his job. But what could outweigh a lover's secret devotion to fascism? Nothing.

Carson, though, had given her word to Lawrence—to Britain and to liberty. She couldn't speak to anyone about what had happened to her these past three days—no, not even to her mother when Carson got back in Connecticut, let alone to an aunt, however close and wise. And so Carson shook her head in the dark, bit her lip, and forced herself to answer, “Yes, Jane. I'd like that, too. I feel the same way about you, if it's any help. And
if I had anything to talk about, you'd be the first to hear it, I swear.”

“I'm glad you said that,” Jane answered after a moment.

So am I,
thought Carson. And then, as the train whistle shrilled mournfully, she fell asleep.

 

On the ship home to the States, this time traveling without the chaperone her parents had hired for the voyage over, Carson spent a good deal of time standing on deck and smoking, looking out at the water. Her mother and father would be shocked to see her with a cigarette in hand, but then again, they'd be shocked by plenty of things that had happened to her over the course of the summer. All they'd wanted was for her to go on a debutante's tour of Europe; they'd meant for her to see the Tower of London and the Eiffel Tower, which she had done, and then to see some places more obscure and quaint, such as a coastal town in Portugal, which she'd also done. But they'd never meant for her to fall in love, and certainly not with someone like Alec Breve.

She and Alec had said their good-byes. When they stepped off the Lisbon train into the dusty, windowed light of the Gare St. Lazare, Alec walked beside Carson, his arm looped through hers, and she smiled at him periodically, as she knew she ought to do. From the crowded docks of nearby Calais, it was a short boat trip across the Channel to Southampton and the
Queen Mary,
where Alec accompanied her to the dock to see
her ship sail. When Jane and Lawrence tactfully disappeared to give them a few minutes alone, Alec had pulled Carson over behind the shelter of an enormous mountain of trunks and valises that were being loaded onto the ship. There he told her again that he loved her, and she saw the slightest glaze of tears in his eyes.

“I love you, too,” she'd said, and then they'd kissed one final time. He smelled like leather and salt and something sweet: toffee, perhaps. It was
his
smell, something male and personal and singular, and one, Carson thought as she finally pulled away from him, that she would never smell again.

And that was it. “Mission accomplished,” as her aunt had said about Carson's visit to the Continent. Minutes later, gripping the railing of the swaying metal gangplank that spanned the space between dock and ship, and receiving the calls of “bon voyage” from all her friends onshore—Jane and Alec, of course, but Freddy and Michael and Tom, too—Carson leaned over as if to give her uncle a kiss good-bye. Instead, she'd whispered into his ear, “I'm done.”

Lawrence had acknowledged this last communiqué. He'd straightened, giving Carson a piercing, questioning look, and then he'd averted his glance, if not out of professional probity, then out of personal guilt. But he'd somehow managed to offer a nod of his head, too, in a manner that would have been imperceptible to anyone in the group of well-wishers who might be observing
the moment closely, but meaningful to the one person who mattered most, Carson.

So, Lawrence agreed: she was, indeed, done. “Three more days,” Lawrence had promised during the discussion in his office, and now those three days were up. Now Carson could hardly be much help to Lawrence, England, the democratic tradition, or anything or anyone but herself. Now Carson needed to try to get past everything that had happened this summer. To forget, and to move on. Alec would write to her, but she would not return his letters. And he would call her, too, she knew, but she would not speak to him. Eventually she would write him a farewell letter, and that would be the end of it. He wouldn't know what hit him, and if he for some reason suspected that her uncle had something to do with it—that British intelligence was on to him—well, that would be Lawrence's problem. Alec would have his problems, Lawrence would have his, and thousands of miles away, Carson would have hers.

Now, standing at the railing of a ship churning toward America, Carson took a long drag on the cigarette, then exhaled, watching the stream of smoke pour out into the open deck air. She could go through the motions of nodding hello to strolling couples on deck, of making pleasant talk with her fellow passengers at meals, of sipping a glass of champagne while listening to the band in the ballroom. She could do all that and more, if she had to. She knew that about herself now. She
could do whatever she had to do until she found herself safely back on familiar ground.

Carson remembered how on the passage over to Europe she had wished to be back in her own bed as a child. That's not what she wished now. She didn't want to be a child listening to a fairy tale about a princess finding her prince. But as she flipped her cigarette toward the horizon, watching the red ember tumble toward the roiling waters below, she had to admit she wouldn't mind being back in her own bed nonetheless.

 

On the dock at New York Harbor a week later, Carson was received by her family as if she were a returning war hero.
If only they knew,
she thought that night as she sat at dinner with her parents in Connecticut and regaled them with the kinds of touristy stories she thought they'd want to hear.

“How was Paris?” her mother asked. “Are the fashions really as incredible as people say they are? Do women actually walk around in those enormous hats?”

Paris. Oh, right. Vaguely, Carson recalled her time there, and how Jane had brought her around to the various couture houses, until she'd eaten a bad oyster and taken to bed in her hotel. That seemed to have happened a million years earlier; the clothes she'd bought there were folded into Carson's steamer trunk, and they hadn't been taken out once in Portugal, for there had been no need for anything so formal.

Carson answered her mother as best she could, trying her hardest to describe life on “the Continent,” as people called it, but being so distracted that it was obvious she was only paying lip service to her mother's questions. Her father asked about Germany, and how the German situation looked to Europeans. Carson told him of the anxiety that hovered in the air there, and what Uncle Lawrence had said about its inevitability, and her father listened well, nodding and wanting to know more. It occurred to Carson that her father was probably surprised at how articulate she'd become about such a serious matter.