out crying. She reminisced about their honeymoon, when they had danced so often to that song; about his long absence in 1918; about their good times in Manila and in Panama. With Palmer Kirby, who now kept a small office in New York, she had just driven up to New London to visit Byron — a glorious two-day trip through the autumn foliage of Connecticut. Red Tully had told her that Byron was lazy in his written work, but very good in the simulator and in submarine drills. She had asked Byron about the Jewish girl.
The way he changed the subject, I think maybe all that is over. He got a peculiar look on his face, but said nary a word. Wouldn’t
You know that Janice is pregnant, don’t you? You must have heard from them. Those kids didn’t waste much time, hey? Like father like son, is all I can say! But the thought of being a GRANDMOTHER!!! In a way I’m happy, but in another way it seems like the end of the world! It would have helped a lot if you’d been here when I first got the news. It sure threw me into a spin. I’m not sure I’ve pulled out of it yet, but I’m trying.
Let me give you a piece of advice. The sooner you can come home, the better. I’m all right, but at the moment I really use a HUSBAND around.
He walked to his flat and telephoned Pamela. “Oh, my dear,” she said, “I’m so glad you called. In another quarter of an hour I’d have been gone. I talked to Uxbridge. They’re being very broad-minded. If I come back tonight, all is forgiven. They’re short-handed and they expect heavy raids. I must, I really must, go back right away.”
“Of course you must. You’re lucky you’re not getting shot for desertion,” Pug said, as lightly as he could.
“I’m not the first offender at Uxbridge,” she laughed. “A WAAF has a certain emotional rope to use up, you know. But this time I’ve really done it.”
He said, “I’m ever so grateful to you.”
“
“Pam, I’m leaving day after tomorrow. Going back to Berlin for about a month or six weeks, and then home… . Hello? Pamela?”
“I’m still here. You’re going day after tomorrow?”
“My orders were waiting at the embassy.”
After a long pause, in which he heard her breathing, she said, “You wouldn’t want me to desert for two more days and take what comes. Would you? I’ll do it.”
“It’s no way to win a war, Pam.”
“No, it isn’t, Captain. Well. This is an unexpected good-bye, then. But good-bye it is.”
“Our paths will cross again.”
“Oh, no doubt. But I firmly believe that Ted’s alive and is coming back. I may well be a wife next time we meet. And that will be far more proper and easy all around. All the same, today was one of the happiest of my life, and that’s unchangeable now.”
Victor Henry was finding it difficult to go on talking. The sad, kind tones of this young voice he loved were choking his throat; and there were no words available to his rusty tongue to tell Pamela what he felt. “I’ll never forget, Pamela,” he said awkwardly, clearing his throat. “I’ll never forget one minute of it.”
“Won’t you? Good. Neither will I. Some hours weigh against a whole lifetime, don’t they? I think they do. Well! Good-bye, Captain Henry, and safe journeyings. I hope you find all well at home.”
“Good-bye, Pam. I hope Ted makes it.”
Her voice broke a little. “Somebody’s coming for me. Good-bye.”
Fatigued but tensely awake, Victor Henry changed to civilian clothes and drifted to Fred Fearing’s noisy air hot apartment. A bomb bursting close by earlier in the week had blown in all the windows, which were blocked now with brown plywood. Fearing’s broadcast, describing his feelings under a shower of glass, had been a great success.
“Where’s la Tudsbury?” said Fearing, handing Henry a cupful of punch made of gin and some canned juice.
“Fighting Germans.”
“Good show!” The broadcaster did a vaudeville burlesque of the British accent.
Pug sat in a corner of a dusty plush sofa under a plywood panel, watching the drinking and dancing, and wondering why he had come here. He saw a tall young girl in a tailored red suit, with long black hair combed behind her ears, give him one glance, then another. With an uncertain smile, at once bold and wistful, the girl approached. “Hello there. Would you like more punch? You look important and lonesome.”
“I couldn’t be less important. I’d like company more than punch. Please join me.”
The girl promptly sat and crossed magnificent silk-shod legs. She was prettier than Pamela, and no more than twenty. “Let me guess. You’re a general. Air Corps. They tend to be younger.”
“I’m just a Navy captain, a long, long way from home.”
“I’m Lucy Somerville. My mother would spank me for speaking first to a strange man. But everything’s different in the war, isn’t it?”
“I’m Captain Victor Henry.”
“Captain Victor Henry. Sounds so American.” She looked at him with impudent eyes. “I like Americans.”
“I guess you’re meeting quite a few.”
“Oh, heaps. One nicer than the other.” She laughed. “The bombing’s perfectly horrible, but it is exciting, isn’t it? Life’s never been so exciting. One never knows whether one will be able to get home at night. It makes things interesting. I know girls who take their makeup and pajamas along when they go out in the evening. And dear old Mums can’t say a word!”
The girl’s roguish, inviting glance told him that here probably was a random flare of passion for the taking. Wartime London was the place, he thought; “nothing else holds fashion!” But this girl was Madeline’s age, and meant nothing to him; and he had just said a stodgy, cold, miserable good-bye to Pamela Tudsbury. He avoided her dancing eyes, and said something dull about the evening news. In a minute or so a strapping Army lieutenant approached and offered Lucy Somerville a drink, and she jumped up and was gone. Soon after, Pug left.
Alone in the flat, he listened to a Churchill speech and went to bed. The last thing he did before turning out the light was to reread Rhoda’s nostalgic, sentimental, and troubled letter. Something shadowy and unpleasant was there between the lines. He guessed she might be having difficulties with Madeline, though the letter did not mention the daughter’s name. There was no point in dwelling on it, he thought. He would be home in a couple of months. He fell asleep.
Rhoda had slept with Dr. Kirby on the trip to Connecticut. That was the shadowy and unpleasant thing Pug half-discerned. Proverbially the cuckold is the last to know his disgrace; no suspicion crossed his mind, though Rhoda’s words were incautious and revealing.
War not only forces intense new relationships; it puts old ones to the breaking stress. On the very day this paragon of faithfulness — as his Navy friends regarded him — had received his wife’s letter, he had not made love to Pamela Tudsbury, mainly because the girl had decided not to bring him to it. Rhoda had fallen on the way back from New London. It had been unplanned and unforeseen. She would have recoiled from a cold-blooded copulation. The back windows of the little tourist house, where she and Kirby had stopped for tea, looked out on a charming pond where swans moved among pink lily pads in a gray drizzle. Except for the old lady who served them, they were alone in this quiet relaxing place. The visit to Byron had gone well and the countryside was beautiful. They intended to halt for an hour, then drive on to New York. They talked of their first lunch outside Berlin, of the farewell at Tempelhof Airport, of their mutual delight at seeing each other in the Waldorf. The time flowed by, their tone grew more intimate. Then Palmer Kirby said, “How wonderfully cozy this place is! Too bad we can’t stay here.”
And Rhoda Henry murmured, hardly believing that she was releasing the words from her mouth, “Maybe we could.”
“
