On Green Dolphin Street (49 page)

M
ary was too shocked by the speed of events to feel much as the taxi made its way through the streets of the Lower East Side. Each light seemed to yield its green obediently as they approached, so it was not until the East River that the car seemed to slow down at all. She turned her head around to see the last of that monstrous skyline which always reminded her of Dresden, with only the strongest buildings left standing. They moved rapidly onward to the tunnel at First and 41st … At last! She had found her new prime number, her escape from the grid.

There seemed to be hardly any traffic at all on the way to Idlewild.

“Where is everyone?” she said. She was hoping for an accident, some terrible pileup of cars, of slewed and jackknifed trailer trucks across the highway, that would make it impossible to complete the journey.

“Beats me,” said the driver, a young man in a leather jacket. “Enjoying the ride? It’s a new car. I only had it three weeks. Where ya headed?”

“London. England.”

“Which airline?”

“BOAC.”

“Okay, you’re right by the main entrance in the arrival building there.” Mary looked up at the modest frame houses on the embankment above the expressway and she envied the people who lived there for the tranquillity of their lives. She was frightened by the thought of how long it was going to take her to digest what was happening to her.

The green and white signs above the road began to flash their terminal messages: La Guardia, then International Airport. Her throat was dry. She could barely believe the speed with which they were completing the journey. The driver was delighted when his headlights picked out the upright rectangle of the new arrivals building; the site itself was full of half-finished work, notably the TWA terminal, a white birdlike structure through whose skeletal wings tall girders rose into the night. There were hardly any cars on the slip roads or at the front of the building; it was more like an airfield than an international airport.

Mary was on the curb, and the driver hauled out her suitcase while she fumbled for the right money to pay him. She hoped he would suddenly stop and say something like, “It’s all right, lady. It’s a practical joke. I have to take you back now.”

He said nothing after he had thanked her, but climbed back into the yellow car and switched on his light. Mary went through the plate-glass doors to the check-in. Her hand was shaking a little, perhaps from exertion, as she hauled her bag onto the scale. The woman behind the desk politely checked the ticket, and again Mary hoped she would tell her it was the wrong day or the wrong place, but she merely smiled and wished her a pleasant flight as she handed back the passport.

She went, as instructed, to the escalator at the end of the hall and up to the first floor. There was an atmosphere of calm and opulence: all the women wore hats; the men were dressed in suits and ties. The polished floor was barely used, and the ashtrays in their upturned metal cones were empty. It was still only six o’clock and her flight was not due to leave for another hour. She didn’t know what to do to make the time pass, so she went along to the BOAC lounge. Inside there was a feeling of studied luxury, as though they wished to put the facts of flying as far away as possible. There was a smell of leather from the seats; the woodwork was in
teak and the end wall was covered in blue and magenta leather squares. She sat at a vacant table—all the tables seemed to be vacant—and ordered a vodka and tonic, something she never normally drank.

She tried to think of Louisa and Richard, but she could not concentrate. They were young and what they felt could not touch her at this moment. It was a disease of being the age she was that had made her feel that her deepest experiences of love—for her mother, for Frank, for her children, for Charlie—were in some way presentiments of dying. She could not tolerate the experience of loving as desperately as she did; she would rather they were all dead, so she would have nothing left to suffer. She knew it was not rational: Louisa and Richard never gave a thought to their mortality; even her mother as she neared the end had been curiously indifferent to it.

She smoked a cigarette and ordered another drink. She gazed at the decor. She had the time to take in every detail.

She could not think clearly about the events of the last year; the memory of them rushed at her from different angles, impossible to hold, though one thing did strike her in the confusion. Her private decision to take a room in New York had been influenced by her impetuous need to escape from Duncan Trench’s importunings; Charlie’s first suspicions of her behavior had been suggested to him by agents of the FBI; while her own moment of emotional clarity in Moscow had been precipitated by the haunting presence of the state’s unseen watchers. What strange days, she thought. And then poor Billy Foy, used up and thrown away …

She drained the drink down to the ice. The alcohol was doing something to weaken her resolve. She was finding it very difficult to keep herself calm in this formal, well-behaved environment.

She began to believe that she had made a mistake. She should have stayed with Frank. She had had one chance, and out of some confused motive—pride and fear as much as anything—she had let it slip. At half past six there came an announcement over the p.a. system.

Her flight had been delayed for an hour.

It was this news that fractured her resolve. She knew she could not wait
that long. She stood up and went out into the hallway to look for a telephone. There was a booth halfway down, next to a newsstand. Somehow she was going to have to make those coins work for once, those nickels, dimes and pennies.

She knew Frank’s number by heart, but she pulled out the book of matches—the original one on which he had first written it. She did not want to make a mistake at this stage; she didn’t want to beg a stranger to come out to the airport for her.

Her hands were shaking so hard she couldn’t fit a dime in the slot. She clamped the receiver between her shoulder and her ear and used both hands to steady the coin. She drove it home with her thumb and dialed.

As she listened to the connection being made, Mary sensed two or three people waiting in line behind her. She heard the telephone ringing in Frank’s apartment.

She had not cried once—at least, not that she could recall—since this chain of terrible events had begun. Now she felt something filling up inside her, a great reservoir on which the lid was beginning to lift.

No one answered the telephone. Hearing the impatient clucking of the people behind her, she slowly redialed, showering coins on the polished floor. A man in a felt hat picked them up and put them back into her hand with a gracious smile; his act of kindness almost broke her self-control.

There was no doubt that this time she had dialed correctly. There was still no answer, but she did not dare to hang up in case Frank was running down the corridor from the elevator, dashing into the room and lunging for the phone, grabbing it the very moment it stopped ringing.

So, to fool the people behind her, Mary began to speak, as though he had really answered.

“Hello, Frank,” she said. “How are you? I’m fine, I’m fine …”

At that point tears at last erupted from her eyes and began to wash down her cheeks. Her voice died in her throat. Now she faced a different problem: she could not turn around and let the people see her disarray. She had to pretend to make another call. She rotated the dial again, affecting,
through blinded eyes, to read another number from the book of matches. She stamped her foot in mock impatience, shook her head and dialed again.

Eventually she had regained enough control to swivel quickly from the telephone. She could not see to replace the receiver in its cradle, so she left it dangling on its flex, as she rushed into the news vendor, where she closely examined the long rows of magazines on the shelves.

For ten or fifteen minutes she stood in front of the display with tears of death running down her face onto her coat. She had no handkerchief with which to stanch them, so she kept turning round to avoid inquiring stares. To kill more time, she thought she should buy presents for Richard and Louisa, and grabbed a doll, a tinny statue of the Empire State Building and made her way to the till with lowered eyes. She gave over a ten-dollar bill but could not see to pick up the change. She waved a generous hand behind her to the protesting storekeeper and went to the ladies’ washroom, where she found a cubicle and sat down heavily behind a locked door. Her body was heaving and shaking in her arms. She could not stop it.

She heard her flight being called, and made her way unsteadily to the gate, her face streaked black with run mascara.

On the plane she found herself sitting next to a young man. She was by the window and she turned her head away from him to stare at the retreating baggage truck. The perspex was cold against her forehead.

The plane taxied to the end of the runway, and she felt it brace, then rush toward the night. She did not know she had so many tears inside her. They were not like the two bilious little pearls she had squeezed from her reluctant eyes in her parents’ rose garden as her mother lay dying—though she supposed they were related to that day. They were a river, a torrent, that ran and washed down her face, drenching the collar and the front of her sweater. The rims of her eyes were like fire.

The young man, embarrassed, offered her a handkerchief, which she took wordlessly. She could not stop crying. They were in the air, heading for Europe, and she could not stop crying.

She felt time begin its linear rush, the big plane gobbling up the hours in its howling craw, and she wept and wept and wept.

She thought of Frank, she thought of him below her on the ground. She did not know what he was doing then, but she formed a picture in her mind. Once, when she and Charlie were coming from Boston, the plane had flown around the southern tip of Manhattan. She did not think it likely her BOAC plane was doing so that night, but, because of the weather, it just might be. There obviously was a flight path there, she thought, because she could see the planes from Frank’s window.

Her idea of what Frank was doing was quite clear.

He was back in his apartment. He had put on a favorite record and it was playing softly at the other end of the room. There were the bass and drums, the piano hitting its rhythm and the trumpet snaking out above them.

He poured himself a drink and went over to the big window that overlooked the Jersey shore, holding the glass in his hand. He gazed for a long time into the night, and up there he saw the wing lights of her plane as it turned toward the east; he watched intently as the small light went flashing on, off, on, off in the black snow clouds; and he raised his glass to it, he drank to it in a gesture of love and forgiveness, as in the uprushing hours it blinked once more, then vanished, swallowed by the dark.

BIRDSONG

Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, this intensely romantic yet realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches in No Man’s Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a work of fiction that is as tragic as
A Farewell to Arms
and as sensuous as
The English Patient
.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-77681-8

CHARLOTTE GRAY

In blacked-out, wartime London, Charlotte Gray develops a dangerous passion for a battle-weary RAF pilot, and when he fails to return from a daring flight into France she is determined to find him. In the service of the Resistance, she travels to the village of Lavaurette, changing her name to conceal her identity. Here she will come face-to-face with the harrowing truth of what took place during Europe’s darkest years and will confront a terrifying secret that threatens to cast its shadow over the remainder of her days. Vividly rendered and tremendously moving,
Charlotte Gray
confirms Sebastian Faulks as one of the finest novelists working today.

Fiction/Literature/0-375-70455-8

THE GIRL AT THE LION D’OR

On a rainy night in the 1930s, Anne Louvet appears at the rundown Hotel du Lion d’Or in the village of Janvilliers. She is seeking a job and a new life, one far removed from the awful injustices of the past. As Anne embarks on a torrential love affair with a married veteran of the Great War,
The Girl at the Lion d’Or
fashions an unbreakable spell of narrative atmosphere that evokes French masters from Flaubert to Renoir.

Fiction/Literature/0-375-70453-1

The Fatal Englishman
explores the lives of three remarkable men who had the seeds of greatness but died tragically young. Christopher Wood was a painter in the beau monde of 1920s Paris whose charm, good looks, and dissolute lifestyle sometimes frustrated his ambition and achievement as an artist. Richard Hillary was a World War II fighter pilot who wrote a classic account of his experiences,
The Last Enemy
. Jeremy Wolfenden, a hack journalist in Cold War Moscow, was a spy and an open homosexual at a time when such activity was still illegal. Through the lives of these doomed young men, Faulks paints an oblique portrait of English society as it changed in the twentieth century, from the Victorian era to the modern world.

Biography/0-375-72744-2

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