So, to fool the people behind her, Mary began to speak, as though he had really answered.
“Hello, Frank,” she said. “How are you? I’m fine, I’m fine …”
At that point tears at last erupted from her eyes and began to wash down her cheeks. Her voice died in her throat. Now she faced a different problem: she could not turn around and let the people see her disarray. She had to pretend to make another call. She rotated the dial again, affecting, through blinded eyes, to read another number from the book of matches. She stamped her foot in mock impatience, shook her head and dialed again.
Eventually she had regained enough control to swivel quickly from the telephone. She could not see to replace the receiver in its cradle, so she left it dangling on its flex, as she rushed into the news vendor, where she closely examined the long rows of magazines on the shelves.
For ten or fifteen minutes she stood in front of the display with tears of death running down her face onto her coat. She had no handkerchief with which to stanch them, so she kept turning round to avoid inquiring stares. To kill more time, she thought she should buy presents for Richard and Louisa, and grabbed a doll, a tinny statue of the Empire State Building and made her way to the till with lowered eyes. She gave over a ten-dollar bill but could not see to pick up the change. She waved a generous hand behind her to the protesting storekeeper and went to the ladies’ washroom, where she found a cubicle and sat down heavily behind a locked door. Her body was heaving and shaking in her arms. She could not stop it.
She heard her flight being called, and made her way unsteadily to the gate, her face streaked black with run mascara.
On the plane she found herself sitting next to a young man. She was by the window and she turned her head away from him to stare at the retreating baggage truck. The perspex was cold against her forehead.
The plane taxied to the end of the runway, and she felt it brace, then rush toward the night. She did not know she had so many tears inside her. They were not like the two bilious little pearls she had squeezed from her reluctant eyes in her parents’ rose garden as her mother lay dying—though she supposed they were related to that day. They were a river, a torrent, that ran and washed down her face, drenching the collar and the front of her sweater. The rims of her eyes were like fire.
The young man, embarrassed, offered her a handkerchief, which she took wordlessly. She could not stop crying. They were in the air, heading for Europe, and she could not stop crying.
She felt time begin its linear rush, the big plane gobbling up the hours in its howling craw, and she wept and wept and wept.
She thought of Frank, she thought of him below her on the ground. She did not know what he was doing then, but she formed a picture in her mind. Once, when she and Charlie were coming from Boston, the plane had flown around the southern tip of Manhattan. She did not think it likely her BOAC plane was doing so that night, but, because of the weather, it just might be. There obviously was a flight path there, she thought, because she could see the planes from Frank’s window.
Her idea of what Frank was doing was quite clear.
He was back in his apartment. He had put on a favorite record and it was playing softly at the other end of the room. There were the bass and drums, the piano hitting its rhythm and the trumpet snaking out above them.
He poured himself a drink and went over to the big window that overlooked the Jersey shore, holding the glass in his hand. He gazed for a long time into the night, and up there he saw the wing lights of her plane as it turned toward the east; he watched intently as the small light went flashing on, off, on, off in the black snow clouds; and he raised his glass to it, he drank to it in a gesture of love and forgiveness, as in the uprushing hours it blinked once more, then vanished, swallowed by the dark.
ALSO BY SEBASTIAN FAULKS
BIRDSONG
Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, this intensely romantic yet realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches in No Man’s Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a work of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-77681-8
CHARLOTTE GRAY
In blacked-out, wartime London, Charlotte Gray develops a dangerous passion for a battle-weary RAF pilot, and when he fails to return from a daring flight into France she is determined to find him. In the service of the Resistance, she travels to the village of Lavaurette, changing her name to conceal her identity. Here she will come face-to-face with the harrowing truth of what took place during Europe’s darkest years and will confront a terrifying secret that threatens to cast its shadow over the remainder of her days. Vividly rendered and tremendously moving, Charlotte Gray confirms Sebastian Faulks as one of the finest novelists working today.
Fiction/Literature/0-375-70455-8
THE GIRL AT THE LION D’OR
On a rainy night in the 1930s, Anne Louvet appears at the rundown Hotel du Lion d’Or in the village of Janvilliers. She is seeking a job and a new life, one far removed from the awful injustices of the past. As Anne embarks on a torrential love affair with a married veteran of the Great War, The Girl at the Lion d’Or fashions an unbreakable spell of narrative atmosphere that evokes French masters from Flaubert to Renoir.
Fiction/Literature/0-375-70453-1
The Fatal Englishman explores the lives of three remarkable men who had the seeds of greatness but died tragically young. Christopher Wood was a painter in the beau monde of 1920s Paris whose charm, good looks, and dissolute lifestyle sometimes frustrated his ambition and achievement as an artist. Richard Hillary was a World War II fighter pilot who wrote a classic account of his experiences, The Last Enemy. Jeremy Wolfenden, a hack journalist in Cold War Moscow, was a spy and an open homosexual at a time when such activity was still illegal. Through the lives of these doomed young men, Faulks paints an oblique portrait of English society as it changed in the twentieth century, from the Victorian era to the modern world.
Biography/0-375-72744-2
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Sebastian Faulks, On Green Dolphin Street
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