In the pocket of the US Navy anorak she wore, Nan moved her thumb slowly back and forth across the surface of Ed Brompton’s letter. Acceptance of his offer of marriage meant the loss of Max for ever. Any hope that one day their lives would link up again would have to be trampled on until it no longer had the power of pain. As a memory, a dream, he could occupy some recess of her being. But she was well aware of the difference between the memory and the hope.
He had told her that he spent a good deal of time in the United States. Within weeks she could be living there. But there must be no attempt to make contact, no phone call, no letter. If she accepted Ed Brompton’s offer she was bound by her sense of honour to make every effort to create a marriage. She could not use a man like Ed in any other way.
Or she could return to Gulanga after her period of detention in Hong Kong. Hope and struggle one day to be granted a visa. But then, though Max Benning would not perhaps be lost to her for ever, the task she set herself, the finding of her father, would have to be abandoned for months, even for years. And nothing in her would tolerate that. She must take what was generously offered.
She looked out to where moonlight gleamed on the sea like a thin stream running across a flat black landscape. She remembered standing at the rail of the American warship on that first night of their salvation. She had looked out across the same flat sea and watched the black sail of Cahn Roc list sharply and glide like a shark’s fin into the glistening water.
In that moment, now it seemed so long ago, Nan Luc had experienced an orgasmic thrill of triumph. Max Benning had stood somehow securely in her distant future. America, and her father, lay immediately before her.
But that was when she still believed that what she had fought for she could grasp with both hands. Before she understood that the Western world was sick of refugees. Before she understood that she would be forced to choose between the hope of Max Benning and the revenge she needed to make her whole again. Before she decided she must accept what Ed Brompton’s letter offered her.
Max Benning crossed the concourse at Hong Kong international airport, his eyes scanning the gate numbers, but his real attention confined to the unending flight calls and requests for passengers to proceed to departure gates.
It was not anything as positive as hope, perhaps even it was closer to despair, but the fantasy haunted him of a call from Ottenshaw, sparked by a last-minute discovery on his screen of Nan Luc’s name, tucked away in some small, so far unsearched, reception centre. Every name called over the loudspeaker system only slowly registered as being not his name.
He shook his head in anger. His flight was already boarding. The girl’s voice, softly Chinese accented, was requesting someone to go to the Central Information Desk. The name was muffled by the liquidity of her accent. Had she said Benning?
Max stopped on the concourse streaming with small, neatly suited Hong Kong businessmen. He was a few yards from the information desk. He started forward. He could see the girl in the blue uniform lean into her microphone. ‘Will Mr Henson, British Airways passenger to London, please come to the information desk. Mr Roger Henson, please.’
The surge of hope died. The sharp image he had held of Nan Luc’s face, suddenly alight with astonishment, faded. Max turned and walked back to the departure gates. Through a glass panel he could see a British Airways 747 and two long streams of passengers boarding.
Part Three – To New York
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It was a brilliant winter afternoon. The fog had lifted early. From the long orangery terrace of Ed Brompton’s low built Spanish house the view was across North Island, the city of San Diego and the bay. A green and black tanker moved slowly out towards the ocean led by an escort of madcap seagulls. From island to shore, ferries and tugs criss-crossed the pale water.
‘After Ellie died,’ the woman in the pale green picture hat said, ‘I would have bet anything on Ed staying single. But this one, I have to admit, is gorgeous.’
Ed Brompton’s sister Susan, standing beside the woman in the green hat, looked towards Nan Luc who stood among a group of Navy men at the far end of the orangery. ‘I like her,’ Susan said. ‘She’s very frank about the gulf between the life they’ve both led up to now. But when she said, “I will” I think she meant it.’
‘They were actually married in the boat people’s camp, she told me,’ Susan’s friend Kate Morgan said.
Susan shrugged. ‘So what? I was married in a tented camp in Kenya.’
‘That was romantic and your own choice,’ Kate said. ‘Don’t try to pretend that this isn’t different.’
Susan laughed. ‘Ed’s too old for romance.’ She paused. ‘He’s got a nice, prosaic, unruffled mind. Just perfect for a quiet middle-aged marriage. I hope that’s never a problem between them.’ From the double doors leading from the house Ed Brompton looked down the length of the orangery and out over the broad lawn, liberally sprinkled with people in the sort of clothes they might have chosen for a Washington spring garden party. Even for the bay it was a period of freak weather, the sun warm, the ocean heavy with a lazy, almost summer swell that belied the calendar reading. He could pick out Nan Luc’s plain yellow dress among the Navy uniforms and for a moment or two he leaned back against the door jamb and let himself catch his breath.
She had said yes. That was, to Ed Brompton, the staggering, amazing fact he had still to absorb. She had made no secret of the conditions at Gulanga, of the near impossibility of escape without an American guarantor or proof of verifiable political refugee status. How had she put it? He had remembered the words for Susan when they got back from Gulanga. ‘Yes, to me, means yes. I accept my responsibility in making the marriage work.’
She had insisted on returning with him to San Diego for their honeymoon and while he had been at sea for the month that followed she had found herself a job among the large Vietnamese population of Southern California. Somehow the nature of her work slightly embarrassed Ed. Perhaps he felt it reflected in some way on his own marriage.
‘A marriage broker?’ Susan had exclaimed nervously when she first heard of what Nan Luc was doing. ‘What’s a marriage broker do in the twentieth century?’
Nan Luc smiled. ‘Roughly what they’ve been doing for a couple of dozen centuries before it. They don’t operate as a dating agency, if that’s what you’re thinking. In Vietnam they are brought in at the next stage, when a marriage contract has to be drawn up.’
‘You mean terms and conditions are laid down,’ Susan’s husband Garrard had said. ‘And the two parties sign up.’
‘The two families sign up,’ Nan Luc told him. ‘I started drawing up contracts in Vietnam. It was part of my job in the villages. In the camp at Gulanga I just carried right on. Lots of girls got pregnant, marriages were agreed but dowries and settlements were difficult. Most families didn’t know where they were going to be in a month’s time. I promise you, Susan, there’s nothing you couldn’t tell your grandmother about it.’ Nan smiled. ‘Or I, mine.’
After supper at two long tables in the Spanish barn, Ed’s brother stood up to propose the toast of the couple. Although it was some weeks since the marriage, everybody recognised that this was the wedding party.
The guests’ comments on Ed’s new wife flowed as freely as the champagne.