Georgian champagne, right here and now. Well! That’s absolutely wonderful. Where’s the
“Pearl Harbor.” She glanced inquiringly at him. “Oahu. The Hawaiian Islands.”
“Oh. Hawaii. All right. We’ll start plotting to get me to Hawaii. No doubt there’s a British consulate there, or some kind of military liaison. There has to be.”
“Aren’t you on leave from the Air Force? Won’t you have to go back on duty if Talky returns to London?”
“My love, let me take care of all that. I’m very, very good at getting what I want.”
“I believe that.”
She laughed. They brushed snow from a bench outside the rail of the bizarre cathedral. Its colored domes shaped like onions and pineapples were half-hidden, like the red stars on the Kremlin towers, under drapings of thick gray canvas. “When do you leave for Hawaii, and how do you get there?”
“I’ll leave as soon as I can, and go via Siberia, Japan, and the Philippines.” He clasped her hands as they sat down. “Now, Pam, listen—”
“Are you going to lecture me? Don’t bother, please, Victor. It won’t work.”
“You mentioned my wife. She’ll probably come to Pearl.”
“I should think she would.”
“Then what have you in mind, exactly?”
“Why, love, since you ask me, I have in mind that you and I deceive her, decently, carefully, and kindly, until you’re tired of me. Then I will go home.”
This blunt declaration shook Victor Henry. It was so novel, so outside the set rules of his existence, that he only replied with clumsy stiffness, “I don’t understand that kind of arrangement.”
“I know, darling, I know it must seem shocking and immoral to you. You’re a dear nice man. Nevertheless I don’t know what else to propose. I love you. That is unchangeable. I’m happy with you, and not happy otherwise. I
“No, it isn’t a bad bargain, but you won’t keep it.”
Pamela’s face showed surprise; then into her eyes came an amused glow, and her lips curved in a mature clever smile. “You’re not so dumb.”
“I’m not in the least dumb, Pamela. The Navy doesn’t give battleships to dumbbells.”
A line of olive-painted trucks marked with large red stars came roaring up into the square, rolling past the red brick museum and the shuttered GUM building, and pulled up side by side facing the Lenin tomb.
We’re in a time bind here,” Pug went on, raising his voice. “For the moment I’ll put Rhoda aside, and just talk about you -”
She interrupted him. “Victor, love, I know you’re faithful to your wife. I’ve always feared you’d think me a pushing slut. But what else can I do? The time has come, that’s all. Ever since I was forced to tell Talky this morning, I’ve been flooded with joy.”
Henry sat leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped, his eyes half closed in the sun glare off the snow, looking at her. Soldiers began piling out of the trucks. Obviously new recruits, they were lining up in ragged ranks in the snow under the barking of sergeants in ankle length coats, while rifles were passed and handed out. After a long pause Henry said, in a matter-of-fact way, “I know this kind of chance won’t roll around again in my life.”
“It won’t, Victor. It won’t!” Her face shone with excitement. “People to whom it happens even once are very lucky. That’s why I must go with you. It’s a mischance that you can’t marry me, but we must accept that and go on from there.”
“I didn’t say I can’t marry you,” Henry said. She looked astounded. “Let’s be clear. If I love you enough to have an affair with you behind my wife’s back, then I love you enough to ask her for a divorce. To me the injury is the same. I don’t understand the decent kindly deception you talked about. There’s a right name for that and I don’t like it. But all this is breaking too fast, Pam, and meantime you have to leave Moscow. The only place to go is London. That’s common sense.”
“I won’t marry Ted. Don’t argue,” she said in a hardened tone as he started to talk. “I know it’s a beastly decision, but it’s taken. That’s flat. I didn’t know about your battleship. That’s thrilling and grand, though it complicates things. I can’t make you take me along across Siberia, of course, but you had better forbid me right now, or I’ll manage to get to Hawaii myself and much sooner than you’d believe possible.”
“Doesn’t it even bother you that you’re needed in England?”
“Now you listen to me, Victor. There’s no angle of this that I haven’t contemplated very, very thoroughly and long. I wasn’t thinking of much else on that four-day auto ride, if you want to know. If I leave old England in the lurch, it will be because something stronger calls me, and I’ll do it.”
This was direct language that Victor Henry understood. Pamela’s gray coat collar and gray wool hat half hid her face, which was pink with cold; her nose was red. She was just another shapelessly bundled-up young woman, but all at once Victor Henry felt a stab of sexual hunger for her, and a pulse of hope that there might conceivably be a new life in store for him with this young woman, and her alone, in all the world. He was overwhelmed, at least for the moment, by the way she had pitched everything on this one toss.
“Okay. Then let’s get down to realities,” he said gently, glancing at his watch. “You’ve got to make a move today, in a couple of hours. And I have to attend to this little matter of going around to the other side of the world to take command of my ship.”
Pamela smiled beautifully, after listening with a formidable frown. “What a nuisance I must be, suddenly draping myself around your neck at this moment of your life. Do you really love me?”
“Yes, I love you,” Pug said without difficulty and quite sincerely, since it was the fact of the matter.
“You’re sure, are you? Say it just once more.”
“I love you.”
Pamela heaved a thoughtful sigh, looking down at her hands, “Well! All right. What move shall I make today, then?”
“Go back with Talky to London. You have no choice, so go quietly. I’ll write you or cable you.”
“When?”
“When I can. When I know.”
They sat in silence. The Kremlin wall, painted to look like a row of apartment houses, echoed the shouts of the sergeants and the metallic clash of rifle bolts, as the recruits clumsily did some elementary drill.
“Well, that will be a communication to look forward to,” Pamela said lightly. “Can’t you give me some hint of its contents now?”
“No.”
For some reason this pleased her, or seemed to. She put a hand to his face and smiled at him, her eyes full of naked love. “Okay. I’ll wait.” Her hand slipped down to the ripped shoulder of his coat. “Oh, I wanted to mend that.”
“What time is it?”
“It’s after ten, Pam.”
“Then I must get cracking. Oh dear, I honestly don’t want to travel away from you again.” They rose and began walking arm in arm. Among the recruits they were walking past stood Berel Jastrow, newly shaved. He looked older so, with his scraped skin hanging in reddened folds. He saw Victor Henry, and for a moment put his right hand over his heart. The naval officer took off his hat as though to wipe his brow, and put it back on.
“Who is he?” Pamela said, alertly watching. “Oh! Isn’t that the man who burst into Slote’s dinner?”
“Yes,” Victor Henry said. “My relative from Minsk. That’s him. Don’t look around at him or anything.”
In the unlit hallway outside her suite, Pamela unbuttoned her own coat and then unbuttoned Victor Henry’s bridge coat, looking into his eye. She pressed herself hard to him, and they embraced and kissed. She whispered, “You’d better write me or cable me to come. Oh God, how I love you! Will you drive with us to the airport? Will you stay with me every second to the last?”
“Yes, of course I’ll stay with you.”
She dashed tears from her face with the back of her hand, then wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. “Oh, how glad I am that I dug in my nasty little hoofs!”
Tudsbury came limping eagerly toward the door as she opened it. “Well? Well? What’s the verdict?”
