Cocoa Beach

  “Is that true? Did he really say that?”

  She leans back in her chair. “He did.”

  My head is beginning to ache. My stomach is sick. Across the room the curtains are drawn over the windows, because my eyes are so sensitive to the light, but I think the sun must be setting. The glow that surges past the edges of all that white fabric is thick and molten, like you could hold it in your hand. You could hold it in your hand, but if only you could get out of your bed to try. If only you could lift your arm and stretch out your fingers toward the sun.

  You might think, at this point, that all sorts of questions should be rattling around inside my skull, and they are. Rattling and screaming and carrying on. But I can’t quite seem to grasp them. I can’t quite seem to make them hold still and talk sense. As if I’m staring at a jigsaw puzzle, not a terribly complicated one, not all that many pieces, and I can’t remember what I’m supposed to do. What to do with those pieces, lying there on the table before me.

  I just lie there, gazing at the thick yellow line between the two nearest curtains, and I think, She knows so much. How does she know so much?

  And: She wants me to stay here. Safe and sound.

  Which sounds lovely—staying here at Maitland, in this tranquil room, in this tranquil state of being—but it’s not. There exists something deep inside my tranquil, tranquilized brain that doesn’t want to stay here. A small worry, a particle of fear. An atom of anxiety. I am not where I am supposed to be. I am not doing what I am supposed to do.

  I want an aspirin. How long until I can take another aspirin?

  My lips move. I hear myself asking Miss Bertram if I can see my daughter.

  Evelyn cheers me up. Evelyn always makes me feel better.

  It’s an effort, but I manage to climb out of bed and into a chair. I don’t want Evelyn to see me like that, all motionless, lying prone on a four-poster with the blankets up to my chin. A little girl shouldn’t have to see her mother like that.

  Instead, I sit in the large wing chair in the corner, wrapped in a dressing gown, my toes balanced on the edge of the matching footstool. Evelyn’s just finished her dinner, and I’m grateful to see that she displays none of my symptoms. That her cheeks are pink and healthy, her eyes bright, her movements unfettered. She rides an imaginary pony around the room and tells me about her day, in the random, unconstructed sentences of a small child. The grapes she ate for lunch. The giraffe in the book Miss Portia read to her. The toy soldier Sammy let her play with.

  “Sammy, darling? Who’s Sammy?”

  Sammy is the boy she plays with.

  “Whose boy?”

  She shrugs. Just the boy.

  (I am concentrating very hard. Thinking Sammy, my God, Sammy. What does this mean?) “Where? Where does the boy live?”

  Miss Portia’s house.

  “Is he Miss Portia’s boy?”

  Yes. Miss Portia boy. He THIS many years old.

  (She drops the pony’s reins, tucks her doll underneath her elbow, the rag doll that used to sit against the mirror atop my chest of drawers, and holds up seven fingers.)

  I always take my aspirin late in the evening, when the house is quiet, because I don’t want anyone to catch me. Also, I’m starting to run low, and I think that if I take this pill just before I go to sleep, the effects will somehow last longer. The aspirin will see me through the night, the beautiful black velvet night, so thick and so heavy that I can just about live there, free of all pain, until morning comes.

  Until the aspirin runs out.

  What will I do when the aspirin runs out?

  I wait until the atmosphere is absolutely still. Until every last floorboard has gone silent. And then I lie there a little longer, gathering my strength, because it requires such a vast amount of strength to push back the covers and rise from the bed. Such a colossal will to stagger across the width of the bedroom (sometimes I actually crawl, you know, because the effort’s so immense) and open the bathroom door and then, on top of all that, to open the door of the medicine cabinet and grasp the bottle of aspirin that the doctor gave me in Cocoa. A hundred little white pills, only there aren’t a hundred there anymore. Not even close. I try to count what’s left, to figure out how many days of relief I have remaining, but I lose myself in the middle. Well, never mind. I can always send out for more aspirin, can’t I?

  But what if I can’t? What if I don’t remember? What if I entrust this task to Miss Bertram and she brings back the wrong kind of aspirin? What if—even worse—she decides I don’t need the aspirin anymore?

  The bottle is shaking before me, rattling the little pills within, making me think of a snowstorm. One of those glass globes you brought back from your holiday in the mountains, filled with liquid, depicting some miniature landscape, and you shake and shake until the delicate white flakes within blur into a miniature blizzard, obscuring the miniature landscape within. Sophie bought one of those for Evelyn when we visited Switzerland last year. Geneva. Or was it Zurich? How Evelyn laughed. How she shrieked with delight.

  And I realize that the bottle of pills isn’t shaking by itself—of course not. That my hand holding the bottle is shaking. That I am so desperate for my evening dose of aspirin, I am actually shivering with the force of my anticipation. One arm braced on the washstand. Mouth dry. Eyes hazy. Brain aching.

  And I think—the first really clear thought I’ve had all day, maybe all week—

  This isn’t really aspirin, is it?

  Chapter 17

  France, August 1918

  I first met Samuel Fitzwilliam in the small, badly lit café near Château Thierry where the evacuation hospital staff used to go for a little food and company on our few hours off, that last August of the war. I was eating dinner with a couple of nurses, whose names I forget; he sat alone with a bottle of sherry and watched us silently.

  I knew he was there, of course. I noticed him right away, not just because he was that kind of man—tall, marble-faced, shoulders wedged like anvils into a corner too small for them—but because his gaze was so familiar. His eyes, I soon discovered, were the exact shade and shape of his brother’s.

  One of the nurses leaned confidentially over the table. “Don’t look now, but there’s a fellow in the corner over there, watching our every move.”

  Everyone looked, except me.

  “Ooh, very nice,” said one of the other girls. I think her name was Mary. “I do like those British officers. They’re such gentlemen.”

  “Not all of them,” I said.

  “Well, he’s too big for me,” said the first one. “Too big and too dark. And I don’t like the look in his eye. Like he wants to eat us up.”

  “I wouldn’t mind that,” said Mary. She was sitting opposite me, and the officer sat diagonally to her right. She sent him a look that I supposed was flirtatious, and he must have acknowledged her in some way, because she laughed, and her skin turned a little pink.

  The waiter came then, and we ordered our dinner. It was only five o’clock in the afternoon, but we were due back on duty by eight, and the hospital lay an hour’s walk away. Outside, the sun was still high, and the air was hot and salty, like a seaside holiday. I didn’t have much appetite, and the food at the café was terrible: usually cassoulet, made mostly with beans and only a little canned meat, or else a gritty stew made of shellfish. Hazel, who was on duty at the moment, called it mal de pesce.

  But free afternoons were rare, and the food at the hospital canteen was usually much worse, so those of us lucky enough to be off-duty at four o’clock in the afternoon always met in the hospital courtyard, rain or shine or hail, for the walk down to the village and the Papillon, with its red-checked tablecloths and its decent vin de table, served in small, old glasses that the waiter wiped with his apron.

  He was wiping them now, examining them critically against the light from the window, while I vigorously ignored the familiar, tactile sensation of being watched. The buzz along each hair on my scalp and arms; the awarene
ss, as we ordered four plates of cassoulet and a bottle of wine, of each small shift in his position, each twitch of his fingers, though he sat behind me and to the left, just outside the limits of my vision.

  The waiter nodded and left to fetch the wine. In his absence, I felt exposed, like an animal that has stepped outside its cover.

  “He’s getting up!” whispered Mary, but I didn’t need the warning. I already knew that he was rising, sidling away from his corner, straightening his tunic. Beneath the edge of the wooden table, my hands gripped each other. A shadow cast itself over the red-checked cloth.

  “Good evening, mademoiselles,” the man said, in a voice that I remember finding rather sinister at the time: velvet-soft and drawling, and yet so resonant it seemed to rattle the wineglasses. Mary’s eyes goggled. The other nurses shrank in their seats.

  He went on without a pause. I had the impression that he was used to that kind of reaction, and that he didn’t give a damn. “Have I the honor of addressing Miss Fortescue?” (He laid a touch of ironic weight on the word honor.)

  Someone gasped; I wasn’t sure who. I was taking in the giant size of this man’s hands, which gripped the tiny sherry glass as if it belonged to a dollhouse set.

  “I am Miss Fortescue.”

  “I’d like a word with you, if I may. Briefly.”

  I looked up finally at his face, and the sight of his eyes sent a shock through my nerves. And yet I didn’t recognize him. I knew those eyes, but I didn’t know how I knew them. My brain couldn’t quite connect this giant man, whose hands looked like shovels, with the trim, professional figure of Simon Fitzwilliam.

  “Excuse me. Have we been introduced?”

  His eyebrows lifted. “Do we still need that kind of thing?”

  “I do. I’m in the middle of a private dinner. I’m not about to run off into a corner with any stranger who asks.”

  “Oh, I see. In that case.” He set down the glass and placed his fingers along the edge of the table. The action tilted his torso forward, so that he loomed over the salt cellar and the meager jar of yellow chrysanthemums like a large and meaty thundercloud. “My name is Samuel Fitzwilliam. I understand you’re acquainted with my brother, Simon.”

  We sat at the corner table, under the furtive surveillance of Mary and the other nurses. The bottle of sherry stood between us. He had pushed aside the chrysanthemums to make room. My nerves were still splintering from shock, and my chest was cold and fearful. I had brought a glass of wine with me—the bottle had arrived just after Major Fitzwilliam—but I didn’t drink. I wasn’t sure I could hold the glass without spilling it.

  “Simon said you were killed.”

  “Did he? Not quite. I was taken prisoner.”

  “Prisoner! For how long?”

  “Over three years. I was in the regulars when the war started, you see. The Coldstream Guards, to be precise. Second son joins the army; it’s a kind of tradition with those of us in the landowning classes, when there’s only so much land to go around. It meant I was among the first men to set foot in France with the BEF. Captured by a damned patrol at the end of October and sent to Breslau.”

  “How awful.”

  “Better than getting killed, I suppose, which is how I’d have ended if the Boche hadn’t got their mitts on me. Every last officer in my regiment—below the rank of major, of course—is now feeding the French soil.”

  “But how did you get out? Were you released?”

  “Released? You mean for good behavior? No. I escaped.” He poured again, slow and exact, and pointed out that I wasn’t drinking my wine. Was there something wrong?

  “No,” I said. “I’ve never been a great drinker.”

  “That’s a shame. It’s the only human pleasure worth its price.” He saluted me with his glass. “Cheers. To you and to my splendid brother. I understand you’re well acquainted.”

  I hesitated. “Yes.”

  “You’ve been carrying on with him for a year or so, if I heard the story right. I’ve been told I don’t always pay close attention to people’s stories. Especially about my brother.”

  “Who told you this? Simon?”

  “Ha-ha. No, not Simon. A little birdie. Is it true, though? You and Simon?”

  “I . . . we . . .” There was no point in lying, was there? Not to Simon’s brother. And—the thought now burst into bloom, the wondrous implications of Major Fitzwilliam’s return from the dead—wouldn’t he greet this news with delight? “We’re in love. We—we’ve had to keep it secret, of course.”

  “Oh, of course. But in the meantime . . . ?”

  In the meantime. Well, what was I supposed to say? In the meantime, while Simon’s getting his divorce from the woman you love, the mother of your child, we’ve been carrying on a love affair. A love affair, true, in which our meetings had been short and furtive, and our surroundings bleak, and our partings desperate. Letters crammed with passionate longing and plans for the next time, always the next time, a few days in Paris or a night in Amiens, the German offensive throwing everything into chaos last spring, the Allied counterattack reversing our direction yet again. And now, at last, the prospect of hope. The end of the war. The possibility, at last, of something longer and more permanent, a week together, a month together. A cottage by the sea instead of a room in a sordid hotel. The lifting, at last, degree by degree, of the shroud of dread from my shoulders. The new and brilliant dawn at my window.

  “In the meantime, we are in love,” I said.

  “How marvelous. I expect you’ve been meeting up for dirty weekends and that sort of thing. Knowing my brother.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Of course you have. Because the thing about Simon, he always gets what he wants. Since childhood, really. Did you know that we’re twins?”

  “I think he mentioned it.”

  “Well, it’s true. Shared the same womb and all that, and it seems we made a little trade, while we were swimming around in the primordial bath. I got all the size, and he got all the charm. And if Simon decided he wanted you in his bed, well, he certainly wasn’t going to let a little thing like matrimony get in the way, was he?”

  “What a terrible thing to say!”

  “Well, now. I suppose it is. But then, we’ve never been close.”

  “But why not? You’re brothers, you’re twins!”

  He closed one eye and examined the sherry in its glass. “I’m afraid that’s rather a long and knotty tale, Miss Fortescue, strewn with all the usual incidents of brotherly affection and family accord, and—as you’ve kindly made clear to me, in your forthright American way—you haven’t got much time to waste on idle chatter with strange men. So, in the interests of brevity, soul of wit and all that, I’ll just skip right over the trivial details of the family history and—what’s that wonderful phrase I used to hear, when I was in New York once? Cut to the chase, that’s what they told me. Cut to the chase, sonny. I haven’t got all day.”

  He finished the sherry and reached for the bottle. It didn’t seem to be having the slightest effect. I guessed that was fair. A puny bottle of sherry wouldn’t stand much chance against that enormous frame. And yet he wasn’t fat. Every ounce of him was carefully rationed, without a dimple of prodigal flesh. He was just bone, and the necessary muscle to cover it, and the bulk of an officer’s uniform over that. I thought he could probably swallow his brother whole and nobody would know the difference. I tried to imagine him confined in a German prison, and failed. But I could imagine what it might have been like. How he would have suffered. The bitterness it must have worked on his mind and spirit.

  And then to break free at last, and realize what you had missed.

  “At least you’re alive. Your family must be so happy,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your family. Simon. I suppose you’ve been to see them already?”

  He transferred his attention, which had wandered briefly to Mary and the nurses, back to me, and for an instant I was tru
ly frightened. His eyes, which so uncannily resembled Simon’s, such that the sight of them made me lose my breath, contained a strange intensity of emotion—as if he were one of those spoon benders in the curiosity show, and I were a spoon. No one had ever looked at me like that. Not my father. Not even Simon. No one had ever wanted to bend me before.

  “Well?” I said. “Haven’t you seen them? Don’t they know you’re alive? You have no idea what—”

  “But I did write, Miss Fortescue. That’s the thing. I did write. They do, in fact, know I’m alive. They have known, from the beginning.”

  “From the beginning? You mean since you were captured?”

  “Yes. The Red Cross gets the letters out. Didn’t you know?”

  “But that’s impossible. They must not have received them.”

  “They did receive them.”

  “No, they didn’t. Simon said—”

  He laughed. “Simon said.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The glass was empty again. He poured another—the bottle was running low—and asked me if he could light a cigarette, though he didn’t wait for a reply. Just pulled out a packet and a book of matches from his tunic and lit himself up.

  I leaned forward. “Well? Are you certain they know you’re alive? Have you been to Cornwall and spoken to them?”

  “A better question, I think, is whether you have been to Cornwall. Have you ever seen my family? Spoken to them?”

  “Of course not. I’ve had no business with your family. No opportunity to travel, even if I did.”

  “Only with Simon?”

  “Just Simon.”

  “Ah, Simon. My dear brother. And Simon told you that I was dead, didn’t he? That I’d been killed at the beginning of the war.”

  “He said—I don’t remember exactly what he said. That you went missing, I think, and were presumed killed.”

  “How convenient of me. Terrible blow.”

  “Well, it was! He said it was! He’ll be delighted to know you’re alive. In his last letter—”