“Oh, Daddy,” said Jeannie, bursting with pride. The sad note in their reunion was Beth’s report that the newspapers were listing Melissa Lange — David’s old flame, Beth remembered — as one of those killed in the Russian ICBM attacks against SAC in Omaha, and that their officers’ quarters house in Seattle was presumably “gone,” like so many others. Meanwhile they would have to remain billeted in the Marriot Hotel, which the children thought was “great!” Ray’s dad was on the line from New York, though it had taken him over an hour to get through.
“Well, son,” he said, voice tight with emotion. “Well done. Well done. Well done.”
“Oh, John!” It was Ray’s mom on the extension. “Sounds like you’re ordering a steak! Let me speak to him. Ray — I’m so proud. I’m just so—”
“Now, Mother,” began John, but his wife, Catherine, took no notice, her joy unreined after hearing from the Pentagon that David, though wounded, and Robert had survived the war. The War Office had seen no point in raising the question of Robert’s radiation dosage. This was something that the navy thought would best be kept under wraps for a while, largely in an effort to dampen public concern over the number of “Chernobyls,” or downed subs, which now lay littered about the ocean’s floor and which would seriously affect the food chain for some time to come. The navy also justified its position by pointing out, correctly, that the effect of an individual’s radiation dosage could vary widely and in any case was something best left for those affected to discuss with their families as they saw fit.
When David arrived at Heathrow in the Red Cross ambulance, his stretcher wheeled into the army waiting hall, where the other seven survivors of the SAS raid were still being debriefed after exhaustive medical examination, he was conscious, but the painkilling shots he’d received on the flight had made him dopey, putting him temporarily at peace as they readied him for transfer for the operation to remove two 7.62-millimeter bullets from his thigh. As his stretcher passed by, it was the first time David had ever seen the Australian genuinely shocked. “Struth!”
“What’s up with Aussie?” David asked Choir Williams groggily.
“Oh,” explained the Welshman in his basso profundo, “‘e’s lost a bloody fortune, that fellow has. Bet a packet on you, he did — that you wouldn’t make it back. Or that Laylor chappie from Troop A. Very depressed, Aussie is.”
“Sorry to disappoint him,” said David croakily, his throat parched from the morphine.
“Oh,” said Choir philosophically, “I wouldn’t worry about ‘im, sir. ‘E’s probably taking bets from some poor sod that the surrender won’t hold or t’ sun won’t come up in the morning.”
“Almost didn’t,” said David.
Choir Williams shook his head as David’s stretcher passed on, and looked over at Williams A. “You know, Williams, that Yank’s a nice fellow. But terrible morbid sometimes.”
“Listen,” said Aussie, wandering up to Choir. “Five to one Davey boy comes through the whole operation with flying colors. Dollars! U.S.!”
“Go away,” said Choir.
“Yes,” said Williams A. “Go home, you terrible man.”
“All right, all right,” said Aussie. “Yen. How about yen?”
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
The pact between the surviving members of the USS Roosevelt was kept and none went public with the knowledge that at least a third of them were probably dying. The secret of their invisible yet deadly illness was not a difficult one to keep in a world where the visible horrors of the war were so widespread. It was a secret Robert Brentwood believed he could keep from the moment he and the others had landed in the wild and beautiful Highland dawn to the time he and Rosemary visited his brother David. They took him down from Middlesex Hospital after the operation to convalesce at the Spences’ in Oxshott, where Mrs. Spence spared no effort looking after him, doubtless seeing in David the chance to repay Lana Brentwood for her kindness to young William when he had been wounded in the Atlantic. At times Richard Spence felt his wife’s attentiveness to David Brentwood was almost too cloying, but remembering the terrible emptiness that William’s death had caused in their lives, he was loath to interfere. In any event, he was as much worried about the effect of Peter Zeldman’s death on Georgina. But she, like her mother, had rallied, and while the loss would always be with her, Richard could already see in her a sudden maturing. She was still passionate about her ideas, and at times as argumentative as ever, but much more willing now to listen. Peter Zeldman in a way had tamed her, forced her to look at her innermost self beneath all the varsity-bred and nourished pretensions, so that when she met David, there was none of the petulant, knowing air of superiority she had once held toward “soldiers,” but more understanding of what young William and others like him and Zeldman must have been through, a new respect for action as well as for intellect.
“Would you like me to do that?” she asked David one morning as he struggled valiantly but in vain with knife and fork, his right arm particularly painful.
“Yes,” he said. It was the way she did that simple thing, smiling as she sat down beside him, a wide open smile, utterly devoid of connivance or any intent to impress, that touched him.
Richard Spence, interrupting his puzzle in the Telegraph, watched her and David looking at each other and inwardly groaned for his savings account at the Midland Bank, wondering yet again what unjust and perverse origin lay beneath the pernicious custom that decreed the bride’s father always got stuck with the bill. And Georgina’s taste in champagne exceeded only that of her Great Uncle Geoffrey, who never helped matters with his exuberance for the Spence family forming as many connections as possible “with our cousins across the water.”
It had been only a few days after the surrender when, at about 2:00 a.m., the Spences’ high-pitched burglar alarm awoke everyone in the house. Robert was up and out of bed before Rosemary realized it. As he made his way down toward the staircase, Richard Spence was coming up in his robe, apologizing profusely to everyone gathering at the top of the stairs, “Mea culpa… mea culpa. Terribly sorry… sorry, everyone. Went down for a snack, forgot to switch off the ruddy second beam.”
“Oh, Richard!” Anne chastised him, shaking, holding the rail for support, one hand on her chest as if to slow her heart.
“You frightened the dickens out of us! Well, you’d better stay up and answer the police call. It’s your own silly fault.”
“Yes… oh dear. I am sorry, everyone.”
“No problem,” said Robert, who went down to the kitchen with Richard to wait until the police called. Richard said the station at Leatherhead would either call or send a car already in the area.
“It’s a knack,” Robert said, watching Richard preparing the tea. “You won’t believe this, but before I came to England, I thought the only way you made tea was with tea bags.” Richard was opening a quarter-pound packet of Bushell’s, the small black India leaves measured by hand before he dumped them from his palm into the brown pot into which he’d poured hot, roiling water. At two o’clock in the morning, Robert wasn’t in the mood for anything more profound than a conversation about tea.
“Even when we use pots in the States, we just dump in the bags,” he said, but Richard didn’t seem in the mood for small talk. He gave the impression that his ritual of tea making was more an escape from something he wanted to say — an awkwardness that Robert hadn’t sensed before in the Spence household. “They say,” Robert continued, “that when Prince Charles went to visit Reagan in the White House, they asked him whether he’d like tea or coffee. He said tea, of course, but they brought him this little bag and he didn’t do anything with it. Must have been on old Ronnie’s mind, because next day he asked Charles at a formal dinner about it and Charles told him that he simply didn’t know what to do with this ‘funny little bag.’ “