‘I phoned the club an hour ago,’ Sunny said grimly. ‘Vic Impari told me you’d already left.’
Mary put her hand out to her sister. ‘Slow down, Sunny,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know Fin was that bad.’ She found she was experiencing a real sense of virtue, as if it were her decision, not the chance mention of the sofa, that had prevented anything happening in Meyerick. Perhaps something showed in her voice.
Suddenly Sunny’s face softened. ‘I was worried. I guess I panicked.’
‘OK, Sunny.’ Cy came forward and put his arm round her. ‘Our fault for leaving you alone.’ He turned to Harker. ‘We’re grateful to you for coming over, John,’ Cy said. ‘It would have been too much for Sunny alone.’
‘I was alone,’ Sunny said, ‘for the best part of two hours.’ She watched the faint flush climb her sister’s cheek and the same ugly suspicions came back to her. Was it possible? Was it even remotely possible? Her sister, the steady, conventional Mary Page Butler. Was it possible she had spent the last hour screwing her brother-in-law on the office sofa?
Dr Harker was going. ‘I’ll call in tomorrow. I want him to go for a complete medical, everything. But I know Fin. By tomorrow he’ll be asking you what all the hassle is about.’
‘I’ll make sure he doesn’t,’ Mary said. ‘I know it’s important.’ She took him to the door and thanked him again.
‘I’ve had a rough night,’ she heard Sunny say to Cy. ‘Are you coming to bed?’
‘Sure,’ Cy said casually. ‘I’ll be up.’
‘I mean like now,’ Sunny snapped.
When they had gone upstairs Mary went up to check on Fin. He was sleeping peacefully enough, snoring gently, his face relaxed and youthful. She felt a rush of emotion for him. Not really love perhaps, but a great surge of friendliness. Bending forward she kissed him on the forehead, the first time her lips had touched him in more than a year. Then she returned downstairs and walked through the house into the kitchen and made herself coffee.
Did Sunny suspect? But suspect what? After all nothing had happened. She sipped the hot coffee. She was trembling again. She wanted to run upstairs and shake Sunny and tell her nothing had happened. And that nothing ever would. Ever.
But of course she couldn’t do that. First because it would confirm any suspicions Sunny might have. And second because she didn’t know if it was true.
Chapter Ten
Seated in the Thai Airlines short-haul from Bangkok, Max Benning could see below him the tiny shapes of fishing boats on the grey-blue sea. They had already begun the long shallow descent on Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Son Nhut airport. As they banked lower he could see that the fishing fleets were distinguished by different sails, a slack heavy red sail in the boats to starboard, a dull white a few miles ahead and closest to the coast a strangely shaped black sail, a wind-filled rhomboid of canvas.
As the undercarriage thumped down for the landing, Max looked out across the paddy fields and blue hills fleeing away behind his line of sight. A dusty single-track road built high on an embankment cut across the paddies and headed for the hills. He found himself already overwhelmed by the sadness of the country and by the sense that the dead on both sides, East and West were somehow present in this strangely forlorn landscape.
Did Max feel this because he knew his father had felt these things? His mother had given him a small pack of his father’s letters before he left. He remembered by heart the lines of a letter Peter Benning had written to his wife during the French war from a foxhole at Dien Bien Phu: ‘We shall certainly be defeated here – that is as it should be. We are trying to destroy an ancient tradition. There will be no peace for either side until the end of the century.’
The wheels hit the ground and the pilot put the engines into reverse thrust. His father wrote with a strange apocalyptic foresight. Peace still evaded the tortured people of this land. And the memory of the war was still not effaced from the life of millions of Americans. But it now seemed the Vietnamese government was about to make the first stumbling overtures towards the West. Their leaders had watched the Soviet empire crumble in Europe.
Without Western aid they saw the writing on the wall for themselves.
The letter Max had received from Ho Chi Minh City had been remarkably frank: ‘We are aware of the dangers of corruption among some provincial officials. The trial of Quatch will be open to Western journalists. It will prove once and for all that the government is striving towards an open, democratic Vietnam.’ For Max a postscript had been added to the letter sent to other journalists. For his work in tracing and rescuing Vietnamese antiquities during the war, Peter Benning was to be posthumously decorated with the Ho Chi Minh Star. Max was asked to be present to accept it.
Leaving the air conditioning of the plane Max stepped into air like a thick soup. Widely travelled as he was, he had not experienced this degree of heat and humidity outside a sauna. A big Australian journalist behind him said: ‘Up in the jungle it’s different. Worse. My name’s Hunter.’
Max indicated the card pinned to his shirt. ‘Benning,’ he said. They shook hands.
Around them milled a group of Western journalists carrying cameras and camera bags. They stood together for a moment on the oil-stained concrete apron. A long fascia board across low concrete buildings read: TAN SON NHUT AIRPORT, and underneath: WELCOME TO HO CHI MINH CITY.
‘They’re a very courteous nation,’ Hunter said. ‘Don’t take it personally.’
From the airport bus, old and bouncing on its springs, Max looked out at the former city of Saigon spread before them under cloud seeping from the sky over the shoulders of a north-east monsoon. From ground level the interminable paddy fields, pocket handkerchiefs of flooded land between green embankments, looked desolate and uncared for. A freshly painted American tank, its turret half blown away, stood by the roadside in a square of neat whitened rope.
At a hotel in the city outskirts, the bus stopped. Duffel bag hooked over his shoulder, Max stood in line waiting to get off. As he reached the doorway he stepped down on to the hotel forecourt and stopped, looking towards the hotel. The man behind him eased him aside. Max grunted an apology. He was looking at a group of Vietnamese standing in the doorway of the hotel. Mostly he was looking at the remarkable Amerasian girl in a sleeveless pink high-necked blouse. As he watched, the leader of the Vietnamese welcoming party crossed towards the visiting journalists filing off the bus and began introducing himself and his assistant interpreters.
‘Mr Benning,’ Nan Luc said. ‘Welcome to Vietnam.’ He watched the muscles flicker up the olive-smooth arm as she held out her hand to him. Her face was composed, blank. ‘I’m Nan Luc,’ she said. ‘I’ve been assigned to look after you during your stay.’
The possibility of seeing her again was certainly in his mind when he accepted the Vietnamese government invitation, but he had never dreamed it would happen like this, moments after arriving in Saigon. He looked at her, remembering the impression she had made on him in Paris, seeing her as you might a hologram, flickering from Asian to Westerner at the slightest movement of her head. He shook her hand. It was long-fingered, with carefully shaped, polished nails.
She led him towards the hotel. ‘What happened in Paris?’ he said, as soon as they were out of earshot of the others. ‘Did I cause trouble for you?’
Nan smiled a greeting to another of the interpreters as they passed. ‘My grandmother had me recalled,’ Nan said. ‘She was afraid, for Quatch’s sake, of reviving interest in your father.’
‘Are you saying Quatch was responsible for my father’s death?’