Night Train to Lisbon (13 page)

In the darkness of her room, following the path of moonlight along her carpet, Carson crossed to the window seat and slowly, slowly lowered herself to the cushion, and anyone who for any reason might have happened to be looking up at the grandest house in Marlowe, Connecticut, in the last days of August, 1936, would have seen a very frightened young woman—no: a very frightened girl—staring back.

T
he first letter arrived four days after she arrived home: a thin, sky-blue airmail missive covered with Alec's spidery, elegant handwriting.

“Darling girl,” he wrote:

It was tempting to imagine, even if only for a moment, that the conversation with her uncle had never taken place, that the final three days in Portugal had passed in uninterrupted bliss, that Carson had returned to Connecticut breathlessly anticipating the arrival of precisely this kind of letter from her lover. But no: Carson reminded herself that she'd indulged enough fantasizing lately about what she'd hoped to have with Alec. Now, ignoring the slight shaking of her hand, she folded the letter back into its envelope and slipped it beneath the cushion of her window seat, where she used to hide her diary, and where she was certain Alec's letter would remain undiscovered.

Another letter arrived the following day, then another the day after that, and a fourth the day after that, all declaring his undying devotion. The day after
that,
Philippa Weatherell personally brought the mail upstairs to her daughter. There were two airmail envelopes, both of which she lightly tossed onto Carson's bed.

“These came for you,” Philippa said in a casual voice that was, in actuality, anything but casual. “I gather they're from that boy your aunt Jane told us about.”

That boy.
Alec was hardly a boy, but Carson held her tongue. It was to be expected that Jane would tell her sister about the romantic interest in Carson's life, but she had to wonder exactly what Jane had said about the relationship. Carson couldn't be sure, but she felt that her aunt would have been protective of her niece's privacy. Which meant that, even if Jane suspected that Carson and Alec had become lovers, she wouldn't tell Carson's mother. That, if nothing else, came as a relief.

“Carson, darling,” her mother continued now. “Your father and I have been talking. We can't help noticing how, shall we say, distracted you've been since you've returned from abroad.”

“I'm fine, Mother,” Carson tried.

“Sleeping late. Going to bed early. Spending most of the day in your bathrobe. And I—we; your father and I—we just want to say that however nice this boy might be, there
are
other boys out there.”

“Like Harris Black,” Carson said tonelessly.

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact,” said Philippa. “Now, it's perfectly normal for someone your age to think that this boyfriend of yours is the only one for you, your one true love, but Carson, darling, I can tell you from experience that love doesn't work like that.”

Carson groaned inwardly. “You don't understand,” she said.

“Oh, I think I understand a good deal more than you give me credit for.”

“Please,” Carson said, turning to face her mother, “you really don't know what you're talking about.” She could feel her cheeks starting to blaze as she spoke. “I'm breaking it off with him,” she said.

Her mother stared at her for a moment, clearly taken aback. “Does he know that?” she asked gently. “I mean, he keeps writing to you, dear.”

Carson shook her head. “No,” she said. “He doesn't know that yet. I can't bring myself to write back. And if he calls, please don't put me through to him. Have whoever answers the phone say that I'm not home.”

“Well, if you're not going to write to him, and you're not going to take his calls, when do you plan to tell him?” Philippa asked.

“I'm not sure,” said Carson miserably. “I figure if I just don't answer his letters for a while, maybe he'll get the idea.”

“Is that really fair to him?”

“He doesn't deserve my fairness,” Carson said.
Her mother looked puzzled, and Carson quickly went on. “I don't know what else to do, Mother. I've never been in this kind of situation, and I don't really know how to handle it.”

Philippa walked over to Carson, and Carson allowed herself to be hugged by her mother.

“Do you want to talk about what happened?” Philippa asked, and Carson was taken aback by the tenderness in her mother's question. To Carson's surprise, there was no obvious judgment in Philippa's words. She seemed concerned with Carson's welfare, and little else—decorum be damned.

“Maybe,” said Carson. “Maybe someday I'll tell you the whole story.” She straightened up, and her mother released her. “But not now.”

In fact, though, Carson wished just the opposite. She wished that she could tell Philippa everything, could simply pour out her heart to her mother the way she used to, but she knew that she couldn't, and not just because of the promise to her uncle. It was funny in a way, but Carson would have felt more comfortable confiding in her aunt. On the train ride back from Lisbon, Jane had offered her the opportunity to do just that, and Carson realized now, after her mother left her room and she was alone again, that if her aunt were here right this minute, she'd take her up on that offer—she'd tell Jane everything, regardless of Lawrie's orders. Carson wanted someone to talk to, but someone who had
lived,
who had taken chances and knew what it
was like to risk everything for a love that would change your life forever.

In the absence of anyone to talk to, though, Carson found herself powerless to answer Alec—at least so far. And so instead, over the following week, she dispassionately read his letters, those long, earnest-seeming rambles that declared his love for her over and over, and she dodged his two telephone calls.

Had Alec ever really loved her? Had he merely used her to get to her uncle? Did he somehow love her, in his own way, during their most intimate moments of passion, or was she just some naive girl he'd met who had made his summer abroad pass more pleasantly? What did love even mean to someone like him? He must feel something; otherwise why would he keep up this assault from afar?

Maybe he really
did
love her; maybe he was one of those people who was able to split himself in two, so that one part of him could be a Fascist sympathizer and German supporter, while the other part could genuinely care for a young American woman. Carson had led a double life for three or four days, and it had depleted her. Alex was apparently able to do so indefinitely—and this was a more disturbing image than that of someone who was heartless and simply pretending to be in love. The split personality seemed more deadly, more corrupt. It reminded Carson of the way, when she was small, she'd found an earthworm that had been accidentally cut in half
by a wheelbarrow in the garden, and how, even though it was now in two separate pieces, both halves lived on valiantly, squirming on the damp grass.

Wherefore,
indeed.

 

One morning at nine
A.M
., Harris Black came calling. He'd telephoned several times since Carson had returned from her trip to Europe, but she'd always insisted she was busy, or unwell, or simply “fatigued.” Finally it seemed to occur to Harris that he wasn't going to get anywhere by telephoning, and so he simply appeared at the door of the Weatherell house, dressed in tennis whites.

He was extraordinarily handsome, Carson was reminded as she looked him over, having been forced downstairs by her mother to say hello. (“Carson, if you don't go see this poor boy, I will be so mortified next time I see Miranda Black at the club, I don't know what I'll do!”) There he stood in the marble foyer of the house, in his white shorts and white cotton V-neck sweater. His skin was tanned from a summer spent sailing and swimming and lounging on the Blacks' private spit of sand. He had a tennis racket slung over his shoulder casually, the way a soldier might carry a gun, Carson thought. War was certainly far from Harris's thoughts. She wondered if he worried at all about what was happening in Europe. Or, she thought, somewhat meanly, did he worry only about his backhand? And then
Carson remembered that the last time she saw Harris, she'd been unfair to him then, too. It was on board the
Queen Mary,
when he and his parents had driven down from Connecticut to wish her bon voyage and he had lingered a moment in her stateroom to say he would see her when she returned, and Carson had corrected him:
You mean
if
I return.

Who was that person?
Carson wondered, not so much ashamed at the casual nature of her school-girl cruelty as at the innocence it implied. A comeback that she'd imagined to be the height of sophistication she now understood, from only a couple of months' distance, to be a transparent confession of insecurity.

In all fairness to Harris, Carson really had no idea how he viewed the world, and as she stood looking at him in the entryway of her house, something inside her took note of the fact that he was male, and very good-looking, a fact that she'd always known and had stored away. He smiled at her, a bright and warm smile that had the slightest tremor of uncertainty about it, and this made it touching. She realized that he wondered what she thought of him; clearly, he wanted to make a good impression. His own healthy looks matched hers, and his family's money was nearly as formidable as the Weatherell fortune. Carson imagined he wanted to spend time with her because it would be like coming home.

And that was the moment that Carson began to
appreciate something she'd previously been able to acknowledge only on a rational, intellectual level: Alec Breve was not who he said he was. He was instead something she couldn't love. She should therefore be glad to be rid of him. It was that simple, and that complex—but it
was
that simple, too: Carson was, at long last, glad to be rid of Alec, if only a little.

Still, it was a start. She felt vaguely light-headed, as she usually did at such moments of clarity, but this time the feeling didn't disappear a moment later, swallowed inside the blackness of her longing for what might have been. Instead, the light-headedness lingered, like the relief that follows a high fever, so that when Harris asked her to play a set of tennis with him at the club that day, and then to have lunch with him, Carson answered, lightly, “Why don't you pick me up at noon?”

 

The cascade of letters from Alec piled up over the first two weeks of September on Carson's bureau, only now they remained unopened. She'd simply decided to stop reading them, and if she'd had any doubts about that decision, the last letter of his she'd read had eliminated them.

“Carson,” he'd written (no “dear” this time):

She'd put the letter aside, still unwilling to answer. Somewhere in that same period Uncle Lawrence had called to ask about “the state of the relationship” between herself and Alec. Tersely she repeated what she had told him on the dock in England, that she was done.

“You sound angry,” said Lawrence across the crackling transatlantic connection.

“Angry?
Me?
” said Carson, and all of a sudden the feelings she hadn't been able to express to her uncle face-to-face began to come out. “That's a good one,” she said. “You mean, just because the man I fell in love with is an informer and I've been trying to rat him out? Why, whatever gave you the idea that I'd be angry?”

“All right, Carson,” her uncle said quietly. “I get the point. I'm very sorry that things worked out the way they did. I would never have gotten you involved in the first place if I wasn't positive it was important.”

“Yet I was unable to give you any meaningful information,” she said. “So what was the point, in the end?”

There was a long pause; all Carson heard was the static in the cables, and then finally her uncle said, “Look, there's another reason I'm calling.
Jane has heard from Philippa that you haven't yet broken the news to Alec.”

“So?”

“So,” he went on, “don't you think it might be helpful if you did? By all means, yes, break it off with him, but I'm afraid too much of a delay will get him questioning things again. We don't want that.”

“No, we don't,” she answered drily.

“Then you'll do what's best?” he said.

“Yes,” she answered, then added to herself:
What's best for me. Not for you. Not for Alec. For
me
this time.

There was another long pause, and then her uncle offered his apologies once again for getting her into this mess, and after Carson asked him to pass along her love to Jane, that was the end of the call. It wasn't until after she'd hung up the telephone in the downstairs library and retreated back up the stairs to her room that Carson realized she hadn't asked about Alec: whether they were planning to arrest him, or even, given the time lag between posting a letter in England and receiving it in the States, whether he was already in prison.