War and Remembrance (73 page)

“No, no, I have nothing to do.” Rhoda’s proposal would at least kill the time until midnight. “That sounds just right. I’m awfully full of duck and wild rice.”

Colonel Peters stood alone in the restaurant lobby looking pleased with himself. He straightened when he saw Kirby and Rhoda, and his face turned self-conscious and solemn. Rhoda went off to the lounge.

“Kirby, is that the lady who lost a son?”

“Yes.”

Peters made a grimace of incredulity. “You could have told me the naval aviator was her husband, I’d believe you.”

“She’s a handsome woman,” Kirby said. “Your Miss Chaney’s the surprise. I never imagined she could gussy herself up like that.”

“Oh, Joan’s not a bad sort. A lot of laughs. You know, Kirby, my nephew Bob went and joined the RAF in 1939. Army brat, twenty-one, couldn’t wait to get into the scrap. Got himself killed in the Battle of Britain. My brother’s only son. Wiped out the line, because I’ve never married. Bob was a fine boy, a splendid boy. It just about destroyed his mother, she’s been in and out of sanatoriums ever since. Your friend seems to be handling it better.”

“Well, she has other children. And in point of fact, she’s a very strong woman.”

Miss Chaney came out of the powder room, her hips swaying, her bust quaking under the shiny green silk. With a wolfish grin, Peters put out his hand to Kirby. “That was a good visit we had today.”

“Any time, Colonel.”

Miss Chaney wiggled her fingers at Kirby, and rolled her eyes. “Well, Dr. Kirby, so we meet in the Pump Room! Beats the Physics Department, doesn’t it?”

“In every way I can think of,” said Kirby. Miss Chaney accepted this as a salacious compliment, and went off on the colonel’s arm in a flurry of giggles.

Soon Rhoda emerged. What a difference there was in women, Kirby thought; how it showed in the very way Rhoda stepped along and held her head. At a disadvantage of so many years, she was far more alluring than poor Miss Chaney. To Kirby the natural sway of her slim body was potent as ever, or more so. An intense notion struck him to fight this dismissal. He could look forward to only ten or fifteen more years. Without Rhoda they stretched ahead bleak as an Antarctic landscape.

But they went to the movie, and sat beside each other watching
Silly Symphonies.
Palmer Kirby, who had so often roughly taken this woman all naked in his arms to share raptures, now hesitated to take her hand. At last he did. Rhoda did not withdraw it, nor did she keep it unresponsively stiff or limp. But there was no sex in the clasp; Kirby was just holding a friendly hand. After a while, feeling foolish, he put it back in her lap. The three little pink pigs were gambolling on the screen singing, “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?” and Palmer Kirby knew that he had lost Rhoda Henry for good.

She kissed him just once, standing on the steps of the Pullman car. It was a cool kiss, not quite empty of sex. She drew her head back, lifted her veil, and looked hard into his eyes. Her own were dry and rather glittery. He felt that she was savoring his regret, balancing off once for all the months when he had neglected her, the hesitation he had displayed over marrying her. The thing had oscillated back and forth but never had worked; it had always been wrong to cuckold another man, above all a fighting man in wartime. He was well served, thought Kirby, and he must face his Antarctic landscape.

“Good-bye, Palmer dear.”

“Good-bye, Rhoda.”

After Rhoda settled her things in her compartment, she walked up to the club car for a nightcap. There she came upon Colonel Harrison Peters.

I
N
Hollywood, Pamela had told Rhoda of her love for Victor Henry because burning her bridges had seemed the best thing she could do, for both these bereaved people. Now, sitting at her old portable, trying to start a letter to Victor Henry, it came very hard.

Dearest Victor,

What is she doing in Cairo, do I hear you cry? I shall tell all, if heat prostration and a bout of Gyppy tummy don’t finish me off first.

Slumped at the machine in a short shapeless Hawaiian flower-print, under which she heavily perspired, Pamela paused over these jocose lines. The heat and the damp seemed to be melting her bones. She had just ghosted an article for her father, and she felt wrung out. After a long stare at the yellow sheet, she ripped it from the typewriter, rolled in another, and began again, shutting her senses as best she could to the street vendors’ haunting wails, and the spicy-fetid smells coming through the open french windows. Typing hesitantly at first, she worked up to a rapid clatter.

Dearest Victor,

We saw your son Byron almost a month ago in Gibraltar. I’ve been meaning to write you about it. In fact, he asked me to. Censorship is heavy on his ship, and he didn’t want to entrust the news about his wife and son to some faceless snoop.

Perhaps by now he’s gotten word to you, but if he depended on me, I’m sorry. We’ve been in an unrelieved rush since we got to Egypt. The climate is enervating, and as my poor plump father wilts — he’s never at his best in the heat — I must take on more of the burden. In fact, he’s shared a couple of recent by-lines with me.

I’ll presume you haven’t heard from Byron. He’s on temporary duty with the Royal Navy, attached to
Maidstone,
a submarine depot ship (you call them “tenders”), servicing a flotilla which includes some old Lend-Lease S-boats of yours. He’s there with other Americans to assist in maintaining the S-boats. Actually the
Maidstone
personnel are quite up to the job, he says, and he’s fallen into sinfully soft and pleasant duty, including social forays to the Spanish side of the Rock. Of course food and bunks on a depot ship are of the best. Also, since the American mission on Gibraltar is chronically shorthanded, he’s made some enjoyable air trips as a courier into unoccupied southern France.
He looks tanned and well, but he itches to get back to “the war,” as he refers to Pacific operations, and he means to do so as soon as Natalie’s situation clears up.

Now about that. Byron’s information comes from Leslie Slote, who’s now the political secretary at your legation in Switzerland. Some time ago, Natalie and her uncle disappeared from a seaside resort called Follonica, to the immense chagrin of the Italian authorities, who had extended very special privileges to them. Through contacts with Jewish organizations in Geneva, Leslie has ascertained that they may be making a run for Lisbon or Marseilles, aided by Resistance groups. All this has dissuaded Byron from attempting to go to Bern, where he could accomplish nothing, since the birds have certainly flown from Italy. Perhaps by now all has ended happily. At any rate, that was Byron’s news a month ago.

It’s always seemed passing strange to me, incidentally, that a son of yours married this girl, whom I knew long before I was aware you existed. Byron has much aged since I saw him in Hawaii. Removing the beard is part of it, for his mouth and chin are quite stern. The loss of his brother has hardened and thickened the texture of the young man. Less mercury than iron, now, one might say.

I should tell you, too, that we saw your family in Hollywood. Your wife said she would try to join you in Hawaii. I hope she has, and I must assume she’s recounted a talk I had with her. Perhaps you’re angry about that. It seemed to me that she’d better know there had been a risk of losing you. She asked me point-blank if we’d had an affair, so I told her. Whether she deserved your steadfastness is a closed question, but you should remember that for her the war when it broke out must have seemed the crash of everything.

That was how I felt in Singapore. Nothing mattered,
nothing,
with those snarling yellow men coming on. It was the worst moment of the war and of my life, until you returned from Midway; and I saw in your eyes what had happened, and felt that I was useless to you, and that it was over. That was worse.

Here in Cairo people are still rattled by the closeness of Rommel, but encouraged by your planes, tanks, and trucks pouring to our Eighth Army via the Cape of Good Hope, and on direct convoy past Malta. Talky has it straight from Churchill — Winnie flashed through here twice this month, raising a cloud of bloody nonsensical trouble — that all this is a drop in the bucket compared to the Niagara of equipment that you’re flooding to the Russians. When or how your countrymen produce all this, I don’t know. Your country baffles me: a luxurious unharmed lotus land in which great hordes of handsome dynamic people either wallow in deep gloom, or play like overexcited children, or fall to work like all the devils in hell, while the press steadily drones detestation of the government and despair of the system. I don’t understand how America works, any more than Frances Trollope or Dickens did, but it’s an ongoing miracle of sorts.

In London things are bad. The repair of the blitz devastation goes sluggishly. People drag themselves through the rubble in sticky weather on dwindling rations. Those in the know are frozen with fear of the U-boats. I’m not revealing secrets to you, I’m sure; Victor, they have sunk over
three million
tons
just since you entered the war. In June alone they sank close to a million tons. At that rate you can’t mount an attack against Europe, and we can’t hold out much longer. The Atlantic’s becoming impassable. It’s a queer sort of menace, this invisible strangulation that shows up in thinner British bodies, fewer vehicles, sicklier faces, a general flavor of bad-smelling decay, and a creeping defeatism in Whitehall. There are mutters about coming to terms. When Tobruk fell, Churchill survived a no-confidence vote, but it was a red-light warning. Macaulayesque speeches won’t keep him afloat much longer.

But bad as the surrender of Tobruk hit London, it was nothing to what went on here in Egypt. We missed the worst of it, but we hear it was like the fall of France. Rommel came roaring along the coast, all fueled up and rearmed with masses of stuff he captured at Tobruk. By the time he halted at El Alamein, two hours by car from Alexandria, government bureaus, military head quarters, and rich big shots were all fleeing eastward to Palestine and Syria in every available train and vehicle. Less-favored folk were clogging the roads on foot. In the cities there were strict curfews, empty hotels, abandoned streets and office buildings, looters, trigger-happy patrols, and all the rest. Little of this got past the tough censorship.

Things are less scary now. Some of the skedaddlers are sheepishly drifting back, but the more prudent ones are staying where they are. Obviously Rommel is retooling and gassing up for another try. There’s little hope for a long respite, such as the Russians had once the Germans bogged down outside Moscow. It doesn’t snow in Egypt.

Now, a little news about me, and I’ll cease boring you. Duncan BurneWilke is in Cairo to take over the logistics of the air effort against Rommel. Unless I give him a discreet signal to desist, I suspect he’s going to ask me to marry him. I saw quite a bit of him in London. Lady Caroline died of cancer a few months ago. I don’t know whether you ever met her. She was a tremendous swell, most elegant, somewhat bossy and bristly, the daughter of an earl. Duncan married over his head, so to say, for he’s “just” a viscount and his father, who made motor cars, bought the title.

The marriage hadn’t worked well for a long time. In fact, Duncan once very sweetly proposed to me what we civilized Europeans call an arrangement. Well, I’m not very moral, but I’ve had my standards always. In all my misadventures (strike out Singapore) I’ve been passionately in love, or thought I’ve been. I was terribly in love with you at the time, you old iron man, and it would have been indecent to accept Duncan. The girls around the plotting table at Biggin Hill all sighed and languished after Duncan like a Gilbert and Sullivan female chorus, but the truth is I had no such feeling about him and I still don’t.

Nevertheless, I suppose I must begin to think of what to do with my life. I can’t go on and on with Talky; for I know he’s failing. Duncan is a dear man, to be sure. I just don’t see plunging into such a commitment now, though it would be ever so swanky a step up for me. Our family’s respectable enough, in fact landed on my long-deceased mother’s side, but I’m just a reasonably educated commoner, and my drawn face, alas, is my fortune. All that’s fine, but Talky still needs me. We’ll stay here for Rommel’s onslaught, and I’m not looking
past that. There’s growing confidence here, based partly on Tommy Atkins’s pluck, and partly on those heartwarming rows and rows and rows of olive-painted American trucks and tanks on the Alexandria wharfs.

Talky’s slumbering noisily in the next room, having taken a sleeping cachet. Churchill’s second whirl-through jangled and exhausted everybody. I must sleep, too. We leave before dawn tomorrow for Alexandria by train, and thence for a press-briefing by Montgomery out at his field headquarters. He’s newly in command and opinions differ here about him. The buzz in the Shepheard’s Hotel bar is about fifty-fifty pro and con; tactical genius, pompous eccentric showoff.

I really look forward to another trip out to the desert. Difficulties have been made about my gender, since the men strip naked out there to bathe in the sea, or wash, or just keep cool, and they perform natural functions casually. I was excluded from Talky’s first trip, but he missed me and raised a great row, and now I go along. Presumably signals roll along the coast at my approach, “Female, take cover.” I’m sure I’m a damned nuisance, but it’s heartbreakingly beautiful out there — the glittering blue-green sea, the long white sand beach, blinding as snow, and then the slate-gray salt flats, the brackish lakes, the yellow and red sands of the desert dotted with brush — and oh, the sunsets and the clear starlit nights! The magnificent Australian troops stripped to trunks, bronzed as Indians! One of the rottenest aspects of this war, actually, is its beauty. Remember London on fire? And that tank battle in the snow we glimpsed in the distance outside Moscow, the flames from the burning tanks, reflected purple and orange on the mauve snow?