The Winds of War

engaged to be married.”

“I noticed your ring.”

“Well, it was a good job I didn’t wait for that Navy flier son of yours, wasn’t it?”

“You didn’t give me any encouragement, or I might have worked on it.”

Pamela laughed. “Fat lot of difference that would have made. And Natalie really has your other boy, has she? Well, that’s the end of the available Henrys, then. I made my move in good time.”

“Who is he, Pamela?”

“Let’s see. Ted’s rather hard to describe. Teddy Gallard. From an old Northamptonshire family. He’s nice- looking and rather a lamb, and a bit mad. He’s an actor, but he hadn’t got too far when he joined the RAF. He’s only twenty-eight. That makes him fairly ancient for flying.

He’s in France with a Hurricane squadron.”

After another silence Pug said, “I thought you didn’t like to dance. Especially with Americans.”

“I don’t. But you’re so easy to dance with and so tolerant. The young ones are now doing an insane thing called the shag. One or two have got hold of me and fairly shagged my teeth loose.”

“Well, my style is straight 1914.”

“Possibly that was my year. Or should have been. Oh dear,” she said, as the music changed tempo and some of the younger couples began hopping up and down, “here’s a shag now.”

They walked off the dance floor to a purple plush settee in the foyer, where they sat under a bright bad painting of Queen Mary. Pamela asked for a cigarette and took several puffs, leaning an elbow on her knee. Her low-cut dress of rust-colored lace partly showed a small smooth white bosom; her hair, which on the Bremen had been pulled back in a thick bun, hung to her shoulders now in glossy brown waves.

“I have a yen to go home and enlist in the WAAFs.” He said nothing. She cocked her head sideways. “What do you think?”

“Me? I approve.”

“Really? It’s rank disloyalty, isn’t it? Talky’s doing a vital service to England here.”

“He can get another secretary. Your lucky RAF man is there.”

She colored at the word lucky, “It’s not that simple. Talky’s eyes do get tired. He likes to dictate and to have things read to him. He keeps weird hours, works in the bathtub, and so forth.”

“Then he’ll have to indulge his eccentricities a bit less.”

“But is it right just to abandon him?”

“He’s your father, Pamela, not your son.”

Pamela’s eyes glistened at him.

“Well, if i actually do it, we shall have Tudsbury in Lear, for a week or two. ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, to have a thankless child!’ — I think the governor will rather enjoy throwing himself into the part at that. Perhaps we should return to him now, Captain Henry.”

He said as they stood and walked to the main reception room, “Why not call me Pug, by the way? Everybody does who knows me.”

“Yes, I heard your wife call you that. What does it mean?”

“Well, at the Naval Academy, anybody named Henry usually gets called Patrick, the way a Rhodes gets labelled Dusty. But there was a ‘Patrick’ Henry in the class above me, and I was a freshman boxer, so I got tagged Pug.”

“You boxed?” Her glance travelled across his shoulders and arms. “Do you still?”

He grinned. “Kind of strenuous. Tennis is my game, when I can get around to it.”

“Oh? I play fair tennis.”

“Well, good. If I ever get to London, maybe we can have a game.”

“Are you -” She hesitated. “Is there any chance of your coming to London?”

“It’s not impossible. There they are, way down there,” Pug said. “Gosh, this room’s mobbed.”

“Natalie seems miserable,” Pamela said.

Pug said, “She just lost her father.”

“Oh? I didn’t know that. Well, she’s grown more attractive, that’s sure. Definitely marrying your boy, is she?”

“It seems so. Maybe you can give me advice on that one. I feel she’s too old for him, too smart for him, and just about everything else is wrong with it, except that they’re crazy about each other. Which is something, but not everything.”

“Maybe it won’t come off. There’s many a slip,” Pamela said.

“You never have met Byron. You’d see in a minute what I mean, if you did. He’s really still a baby.”

She mischievously glanced at him and tapped his arm. “You do sound fatherly at that.”

Tudsbury and Slote were in a lusty argument, with Natalie looking sombrely from one to the other.

“I’m not talking about anything he owes England. That’s beside the point,” Tudsbury said striking his empty glass on the table. “It’s his responsibility to the American people as their leader to ring the alarm and get them cracking, if they’re to save their own hides.”

“What about the Chicago quarantine speech?” Slote said. “That was over two years ago, and he’s still trying to live down the warmonger charges. A leader can’t dash ahead around the bend and out of sight. The people still haven’t gotten over their disgust with the First World War. Now here’s another one, brought on by stupid French and British policy. It’s not the time for singing ‘Over There,’ Talky. It just won’t work.”

“And while Roosevelt watches his timing,” said Tudsbury, “Hitler will take half the world. Pamela, be a love and get me another drink. My leg’s killing me.”

“All right.” Pamela docilely walked to the bar.

Tudsbury turned to Henry, “You know the Nazis. Can Roosevelt afford to wait?”

“What choice has he? A few months ago Congress was fighting him just on selling you guns.”

“A few months ago,” Tudsbury said, “Hitler wasn’t overrunning Belgium, Holland, and France, and directly facing you across the water.”

“Lot of water,” said Pug.

Slote slowly beat two fingers with one, like a professor. Talky, let’s review the ABC’s. The old regimes are simply not competent for the industrial age. They’re dead scripts, molted skins. Europe’s made a start on replacing them by a lot of wholesale murder — the usual European approach to problems, and that’s all the First World War was about — and then by resorting to tyrannies of the left or the right. France has simply stagnated and rotted. England’s played its same old upper-crust butterfly comedy, while soothing the workers with gin and the dole. Meantime Roosevelt has absorbed the world revolt into legislation. He has made America the only viable modern free country. It was a stupendous achievement, a peaceful revolution that’s gutted Marxian theory. Nobody wholly grasps that yet. They’ll be writing books about it in the year 2000. Because of it, America’s the power reserve of free mankind. Roosevelt knows that and moves slowly. It’s the last reserve available, ‘the last best hope.’”

Tudsbury was screwing all his heavy features into a mask of disagreement. “Wait, wait, wait. To begin with, none of the New Deal issued from this great revolutionary’s brain. The ideas flooded into Washington with the new people when the administration changed. They were quite derivative ideas, mostly copied from us decadent butterflies. We were a good deal ahead of you in social legislation. — Ah, thank you, Pam. — Now this slow moving can be good politics, but in war it’s a tactic of disaster. Fighting Germany one at a time, we’ll just go down one at a time. Which would be a rather silly end to the English-speaking peoples.”

“We have theatre tickets. Come and have dinner with us,” Slote said, standing and stretching out a hand to Natalie, who rose too. “We’re going to L’Escargot.”

“Thank you. We’re dining with Lord Burne-Wilke. And hoping to inveigle Pug Henry into joining us.”

* * *

Slote bought Natalie as luxurious a dinner as Washington offered, with champagne; took her to a musical comedy at the National Theatre; and brought her back to his apartment, hoping for the best. In a common enough masculine way, he thought that if all went well he could win her back in one night. She had once been his slave; how could such a feeling disappear? At first she had seemed just another conquest. He had long planned a prudent marriage in his thirties to some girl of a rich or well-connected family, after he had had his fun. Natalie Jastrow now put him in a fever that burned up all prudent calculations. Leslie Slote had never wanted anything in his life as he