Night Over Water

with two men in two hours, and she tried to stop herself, but she could not.

When she came, she cried.

Fortunately, Mervyn did not notice.

As Diana sat in the elegant lounge of the South-Western Hotel on Wednesday morning, waiting for a taxi to take Mark and her to Berth 108 in Southampton Docks to board the Pan American Clipper, she felt triumphant and free.

Everyone in the room was either looking at her or trying not to look at her. She was getting a particularly hard stare from a handsome man in a blue suit who must be ten years younger than she was. But she was used to that. It always happened when she looked good, and today she was stunning. Her cream-and-red dotted silk dress was fresh, summery and striking. Her cream shoes were right and the straw hat finished the outfit off perfectly. Her lipstick and nail varnish were orange-red like the dots on the dress. She had thought about red shoes but decided they would look tarty.

She loved traveling: packing and unpacking her clothes, meeting new people, being pampered and cosseted and plied with champagne and food, and seeing new places. She was nervous about flying, but crossing the Atlantic was the most glamorous voyage of all, for at the other end was America. She could hardly wait to get there. She had a filmgoer’s picture of what it was like: she saw herself in an Art Deco apartment, all windows and mirrors, with a uniformed maid helping her put on a white fur coat and a long black car in the street outside with its engine running and a colored chauffeur waiting to take her to a nightclub, where she would order a martini, very dry, and dance to a jazz band that had Bing Crosby as its singer. That was a fantasy, she knew; but she could hardly wait to discover the reality.

She felt ambivalent about leaving Britain just as the war was starting. It seemed a cowardly thing to do, yet she was thrilled to be going.

She knew a lot of Jewish people. Manchester had a big Jewish community: the Manchester Jews had planted a thousand trees in Nazareth. Diana’s Jewish friends watched the progress of events in Europe with horror and dread. It was not just the Jews, either: the Fascists hated the coloreds, and the Gypsies, and the queers, and anyone else who disagreed with Fascism. Diana had an uncle who was queer and he had always been kind to her and treated her like a daughter.

She was too old to join up, but she probably ought to stay in Manchester and do volunteer work, winding bandages for the Red Cross....

That was a fantasy, even more unlikely than dancing to Bing Crosby. She was not the type to wind bandages. Austerity and uniforms did not suit her.

But none of that was truly important. The only thing that counted was that she was in love. She would go where Mark was. She would have followed him into the heart of a battlefield if necessary. They were going to get married and have children. He was going home, and she was going with him.

She would miss her twin nieces. She wondered how long it would be before she would see them. They might be grown up next time, wearing perfume and brassieres instead of ankle socks and pigtails.

But she might have little girls of her own....

She was thrilled about traveling on the Pan American Clipper. She had read all about it in the Manchester Guardian, never dreaming that one day she would actually fly in it. To get to New York in little more than a day seemed like a miracle.

She had written Mervyn a note. It did not say any of the things she wanted to tell him; did not explain how he had slowly and inexorably lost her love through carelessness and indifference; did not even say that Mark was wonderful.Dear Mervyn,I am leaving you. I feel you have become cold toward me, and I have fallen in love with someone else. By the time you read this, we will be in America. I am sorry to hurt you but it is partly your fault.

She could not think of an appropriate way to sign off—she could not write: Yours or With love—so she just put: Diana.

At first she had intended to leave the note in the house, on the kitchen table. Then she had become obsessed by the possibility that he would change his plans, and instead of staying at his club on Tuesday night, he would go home, and find the note, and make some kind of trouble for her and Mark before they were out of the country. So in the end she had mailed it to him at the factory, where it would arrive today.

She looked at her wristwatch (a present from Mervyn, who liked her to be punctual). She knew his routine: he spent most of the morning on the factory floor; then toward midday he would go up to his office and look through the mail before going to lunch. She had marked the envelope PERSONAL so that his secretary would not open it. It would be lying on his desk in a pile of invoices, orders, letters and memos. He would be reading it about now. The thought made her guilty and sad, but also relieved that she was two hundred miles away.

“Our taxi’s here,” Mark said.

She felt a little nervous. Across the Atlantic in a plane!

“Time to go,” he said.

She suppressed her anxiety. She put down her coffee cup, stood up and gave him her brightest smile. “Yes,” she said happily. “Time to fly.”

Eddie had always been shy with girls.

He had graduated from Annapolis a virgin. When he was stationed at Pearl Harbor, he had gone with prostitutes, and that experience had left him with a sense of self-disgust. After leaving the navy, he had just been a loner, driving to a bar a few miles away any time he felt the need of companionship. Carol-Ann was a ground hostess working for the airline at Port Washington, Long Island, the New York terminal for flying boats. She was a suntanned blonde with eyes of Pan American blue, and Eddie would never have dared to ask her for a date. But one day in the canteen a young radio operator gave him two tickets to Life with Father on Broadway, and when he said he did not have anyone to take, the radioman turned to the next table and asked Carol-Ann if she wanted to go.

“Ayuh,” she said, and Eddie realized she was from his part of the world.

He later learned that at that time she had been desperately lonely. She was a country girl, and the sophisticated ways of New Yorkers made her anxious and tense. She was a sensual person, but she did not know what to do when men took liberties, so in her embarrassment she rebuffed advances indignantly. Her nervousness got her the reputation of an ice queen, and she was not often asked out.

But Eddie knew nothing of this at the time. He felt like a king with her on his arm. He took her to dinner, then back to her apartment in a taxi. On the doorstep he thanked her for a nice evening and screwed up his courage to kiss her cheek, whereupon she burst into tears and said he was the first decent man she had met in New York. Before he knew what he was saying, he had asked her for another date.

He fell in love with her on that second date. They went to Coney Island on a hot Friday in July, and she wore white slacks and a sky blue blouse. He realized to his astonishment that she was actually proud to be seen walking alongside him. They ate ice cream, rode a roller coaster called the Cyclone, bought silly hats, held hands and revealed trivial intimate secrets. When he took her home Eddie told her frankly that he had never been this happy in his entire life, and she astonished him again by saying she hadn’t, either.

Soon he was neglecting the farmhouse and spending all his leave in New York, sleeping on the couch of a surprised but encouraging fellow engineer. Carol-Ann took him to Bristol, New Hampshire, to meet her parents, two small, thin, middle-aged people, poor and hardworking. They reminded him of his own parents, but without the unforgiving religion. They could hardly believe they had produced a daughter so beautiful, and Eddie understood how they felt, for he could hardly believe such a girl could have fallen in love with him.

He thought of how much he loved her, as he stood the grounds of the Langdown Lawn Hotel, staring at the bark of the oak tree. He was in a nightmare, one of those hellish dreams in which you start by feeling safe and happy, but you think, in a fit of idle speculation, of the worst thing that could occur, and suddenly you find that it is actually happening, the worst thing in the world is actually, unstoppably, terrifyingly happening, and there is nothing you can do about it.