The anger in his voice made Frankie cautious.
“I suppose so,” she said. “But the Bomb is different, isn’t it? It would be mad . . .”
“That’s what wars are, Frankie. Mad.”
She came back to him and sat down. Clem reached his right arm around her, and she put her head on his shoulder.
He said, “I heard on the wireless this morning that they reckon the Yanks will invade Cuba on Monday at the latest. P’raps even tomorrow.”
When she said nothing, he pulled his head back to look at her. There were tears trickling down each of her cheeks. He hadn’t wanted this. But perhaps it was good.
“I don’t want to die, Clem. Not yet.”
Ah.
“Don’t you? Why not?”
“It’s . . . it’s not fair.”
Clem laughed, a sound like a snort. “Fair? Nothun’s fair, as far as I can see. But if it did happen, you know, right now, boomf, it would be sort of nice, wouldn’t it? Well, not nice, but . . . we’d be together, wouldn’t we? It’d be a shame that we hadn’t . . . you know . . .”
She sat up straight and looked at him, her eyelashes pearled with tears.
“That could happen, couldn’t it? Any second. We wouldn’t know. We wouldn’t have time to do anything.”
“Thas right,” he said, sliding his hand under her sweater and onto her belly.
“Oh, God,” Frankie said, or sobbed. “Poor Marron. Poor, poor Marron. It’s nothing to do with him.”
Sod Marron, Clem thought, but he suffered the unwelcome image of the tethered horse evaporating into fire, its meat whirled, burning from its tall bones.
Frankie got to her feet.
“I’ve got to go and see him,” she said. “Make sure he’s all right. I’ll be back in a sec.”
So much for effing poetry, Clem thought. When it comes to girls, it loses out to horses every time. He took the cigs from his pocket and lit one. From somewhere behind him, a pheasant croaked a complaint about its vanishing habitat. After a while, he heard Frankie making her way back, her feet slushing the leaves.
“Give me a puff on that,” she said.
He looked over his shoulder. She was sitting on the stump of the wall, swinging her legs as though nothing mattered. He stood and went to her and gave her the cigarette.
“I know what the poem means,” she said. “I know why you wanted to read it to me.”
He said nothing, feeling suddenly and deeply ashamed and obvious.
“Do you want any more of this?”
“No.” He took the cigarette butt from her and threw it away.
“Come here.”
He went to her. She parted her legs and hooked her heels around the back of his thighs, pulling him against her.
With her mouth close to his ear, she said, “I want to do it with you, Clem. I want to Go All the Way. It would be stupid if we . . . well, you know.”
His heart and penis surged, but his mouth, for some crazy reason, said, “We don’t have to. It’s all right.”
What?
“No. We do have to. I absolutely refuse to die a virgin. It would just be too awful.”
“God, Frankie,” he mumbled, and tried to press himself up to her.
“No. Not now, Clem. Not here. I don’t like it here anymore.”
He died slightly.
She said, “When you think about, you know, us doing it, where are we?”
“What?”
“When you’re in bed. You must think about us having sex when you’re in bed, don’t you? I do. All the time.” She hugged him tighter to hide her shame. “It’s delicious, isn’t it? You know what I mean.”
He gaped, wide-eyed, over her shoulder at the surviving wintering trees.
“I sometimes think about doing it in the barn, which is nice. But mostly it’s always by the sea. Us doing it with the tide coming in, getting closer all the time. Is that mad, do you think?”
“I dunno. No. I think that’s nice.”
“Where’s the nearest beach from here, Clem?”
“What? Um, well, Hazeborough, I spose.”
“How far is that?”
He was nibbling the lobe of her ear, something she usually liked. “What?”
“How far is Hazeborough?”
“Christ, Frankie. I dunno. Eight miles, something like that.”
“So three-quarters of an hour on a bike?”
“More or less. Frankie . . .”
“Listen,” she said. “Tomorrow, tomorrow morning, Daddy’s driving Mummy to Norwich. She wants to go to the Catholic church. Just to be on the safe side, she says. They’ll want me to go, too, but I won’t. I’ll say I’ve got the Curse or a headache or something. Mrs. Cutting goes to church as well, in Borstead. Clem, are you listening?”
“Yeah.”
“Then stop doing that to my ear. So, as soon as they’ve all gone, I’ll get on my bike. I could be in Hazeborough by elevenish. Where shall I meet you?”
“Frankie, what the hell’re you on about? C’mon, let’s do it now. The Bomb could drop at any minute. Please, Frankie.”
She leaned away from him and took his head in her hands. She studied him with immense seriousness, as if they were about to part forever and she was memorizing his face. She bit her lip.
“Please, Frankie.”
“No,” she said. “I’m . . . I’m not ready.”
“What d’yer mean? You just said —”
She silenced him with a tongue-in kiss that undid his knees. When it was over, he went for second helpings, but she stopped him.
“Where shall I meet you? In Hazeborough?”
Clem moved away from her, turned his back, sulkily. Put his hands in his pockets, adjusting himself.
“Christ, Frankie. You drive me nuts. You really do.”
“I know I do. I’m sorry.”
She waited.
“There’s sod all in Hazeborough, really. There’s two ways down onto the beach. The second one’s next to a caff. Sort of like a wood shack. It’ll be closed this time of year.”
“I’ll meet you there, then. You will wait for me, won’t you? In case I’m late?”
LATE ON SATURDAY night, in the White House, an exhausted but sleepless John F. Kennedy sat in his private quarters watching one of his favorite movies: Roman Holiday, starring that sexy little thing Audrey Hepburn and the comically wooden Gregory Peck. It was comfort food for the brain: warm, familiar, and bland. He needed it. The day had not gone well. It might actually be easier to fight a war than chair those damned ExComm meetings.
His bowel griped and he shifted in the chair, painfully, to break wind.
He was beginning to think he could see a way through this thing. Khrushchev’s last letter, yesterday, was full of the usual bluster and bull, but what it came down to was that he was prepared to do a deal. Maybe the fat little bastard wasn’t, after all, totally insane. Maybe he’d looked at it all and decided that fifty million, minimum, dead Russians was too high a price to pay for a propaganda stunt in the Caribbean. But Khrushchev couldn’t pull his missiles out if it looked like a defeat. To save his fat face — maybe to save his life, because they played pretty rough in the Kremlin — he’d need to make it look like he’d got something out of it. Like he’d extracted a price. Won. And the price was, Kennedy thought, incredibly cheap. What Khrushchev was saying, it seemed, was that he’d disarm the Cuban missiles if the U.S. removed its Thor missiles from Turkey. And promised not to invade Cuba.
Losing the Turkish Thors was not, in Kennedy’s view, a problem. They were obsolete, anyway. “A heap of junk,” Bob McNamara had called them. So the thing to do was dismantle the Thors, publicly. Then station a Polaris submarine, with up-to-date nukes, off the Turkish coast and make sure the Russians knew it was there. And as for not invading Cuba, well, Jesus, even that foul-mouthed moron Shoup had to admit that at least five thousand marines would die before even one made it onto the beach. And that estimate was based on the Russians not using t
heir nuclear battlefield weapons. Kennedy knew that public opinion would turn against him when the blood started to flow. That was the one immutable law of politics.
So it seemed to him that the Turkey trade-off might be a way out.
It brought problems with it, though. Like Khrushchev, Kennedy had to come out of it looking good. He’d have to put some smart political spin on the deal. It couldn’t look like the Russians had suckered him, had used Cuba to force him to back down in Europe. He’d have to say to Khrushchev, “Okay, Nikita, you take the nukes out of Cuba; I take the nukes out of Turkey. But it’s a secret deal, all right? You can crow about it to those wall-faced comrades of yours in the Kremlin all you like, but you don’t go public with it. I’m going to wait a while before I take those Thors away, so that nobody will make the connection and call me a weakling. Deal?”
So both of them would come out of the thing with something they could call honor.
Unless — and there was always this — the Russians had something else up their sleeves. It was no coincidence that the bastards were so good at chess.
He allowed himself to enjoy his favorite scene in the movie. He was interested in, and knowledgeable about, women’s clothes. Hepburn’s were terrific. She wore the kind of stuff that Jackie wore. He wondered, drowsily, whether Hollywood imitated his wife’s taste or whether it was the other way around.
He dreamed a Soviet missile crunching through the floors of the White House, thrusting its awful snout through the shattered masonry, seeking him out, personally. Crushing him. Squashing him, opening its rotten metal mouth to swallow his head. Then obliterating everything for miles around, in bellying circles of fire.
“Hello, Chack.”
Khrushchev in the chair on the other side of the coffee table. That awful way of sitting he has, legs apart, hands on his thick thighs. Like a man on the toilet. Dreadful shiny suit designed by a bickering committee. Smile like a bad set of dentures shoved into a steamed pudding.
“Nikita?”
“How are things with you, Mr. President?”
“Uh, okay. No, I was dreaming I was dead.”
“Funny. So was I. But because of the time zones, I was dead before you was.”
“How was it?”
“Oh, you know, Chack. A blinding light. A splitting headache, then nothing. I thought of my wife at the last moment, like you do. Because we were apart.”
“Yes.”
“There is no heaven, by the way.”
“Ah. I kinda thought there might not be.”
Khrushchev’s sparse eyebrows lifted.
“I think your friend the pope would not be pleased to hear you say that, Chack.”
“I guess not.”
Khrushchev reached inside his jacket and produced something large, pinkish, and trussed.
“I brought you a gift,” he said. “A turkey. For your Thanksgiving.”
“Uh, that’s really kind of you, Nikita. A generous thought. Thank you.”
“Please. It is nothing. In the people’s paradise of the Soviet Union we have more food than we know how to eat.”
He put the big plucked bird down on the coffee table and patted its nude breast complacently.
“Plump,” he said. “Do you have something for me, Chack?”
“Aah, lemme see.”
Kennedy searched through his pockets with increasing urgency. They were all empty.
Grinning, embarrassed, he said, “Well, er, I guess nothing, right now, Nikita. But on behalf of the people of the United States of America, I thank you for the turkey.”
Khrushchev’s smile went out like a lamp. He reached again into his jacket and took out a large pair of scissors. He used them to cut the string that bound the bird’s legs and wings. The turkey flexed its naked limbs and stood up on the knobs of bone where its feet had been. It withdrew its feathered and wattled head from inside its body cavity and looked around, stretching its raw neck. Then, with an angry gargle, it went for Kennedy’s eyes with its beak.
He woke up, sweating and alone. His corset was pressing into his kidneys. He forced himself more upright in the chair. The screen was a white hiss. He drank some flat Coke from the bottle and waited for his mind to clear.
The problem wasn’t Khrushchev; it was his own people: the ExComm Hawks and the military. The Hawks were deeply unhappy about trading the Turkish Thors. Shrewdly, they’d focused on how it would look, especially to America’s allies in NATO. Mac Bundy’d had a point when he said that if the U.S. were seen to be doing unilateral deals with the Soviets, “we’d be in real trouble. If we appear to be trading the defense of Turkey for a threat to Cuba, we’ll just have to face a radical decline in the effectiveness of NATO. The whole thing could fall apart.”
And the military . . . well, they were at full boil. It was getting harder all the time to keep the lid on. That morning, when Kennedy had asked Maxwell Taylor for a planning update, the general had said crisply, “Aerial bombardment for seven days, followed immediately by full-scale invasion. All forces ashore in eighteen days.” As if it was inevitable, a foregone conclusion. Then that poor bastard, whatshisname, Anderson, had got himself shot down. McNamara said that when the news reached the Pentagon, the desire to retaliate was so strong that you could smell it in the air, like jock sweat in a locker room. Thank God that other U-2, that’d gone walkabout over Russia, got home in one piece. If the Russians had brought down two on the same day, that nutcase Curtis LeMay might’ve climbed into a B-52 and gone off to nuke Moscow personally.
General Power ( jeez, how had primitives like him and LeMay come to have control over the hardware?) had rigged the IBMs in Montana so that the double-fault fail-safe system that prevented an accidental launch of the missiles could be bypassed. Which meant, without hyphens, that two guys, maybe gone crazy or panicking in their underground bunker, could let go a nuclear missile without checking authorization.
B-52 bombers, permanently, in rotation, were cruising the perimeters of the Soviet Union. Each was loaded with four Mark 28 nuclear bombs. An Mk-28 had seventy times the power of the bomb that had obliterated Hiroshima. An encoded — or wrongly encoded — radio signal could send any one of those planes veering off to drop destruction onto Omsk or Tomsk or Gomsk, or whatever the hell those Russian places were called.
And on this night, divisions of marines had boarded ship in full expectation of swarming through tropical surf to purge the Caribbean of Commies.
And on this night, U.S. ships and planes were searching for the four, maybe more, nuclear-armed Soviet submarines within the quarantine, with orders to regard them as hostile.
And a missile ship, the Grozny, was going to hit the blockade line at dawn.
Kennedy had installed a situation room in the White House: screens, phones, alert young people. It occupied a space that President Eisenhower had used as a bowling alley. The SR tapped him into the information that was fed to the Pentagon. It allowed Kennedy to monitor real-time developments, allowed him to feel that he was in control. But he wasn’t, and he knew it. He was not at all sure who was in control. Who was in control of the Cuban missiles? The Russians, who at least seemed to have some discipline? Or Castro, who might do who knew what?
It seemed to Kennedy that the whole thing was like a pyramid of eggs, or a cluster of bubbles. Unbearable delicacy. Just one component starts to roll, something pops, and poof! the world is gone.
The gray telephone by his elbow tempted him. He could wake his personal assistant. Dave Powers. Tell Dave to get him a woman. Mary Meyer, perhaps. That would be nice. Mary’s husband was a CIA officer, which made her a risky mistress. She was so good, though. Very understanding, very discreet, and accepting of his disabilities. And her husband, if he was doing his job, would not be at home.
Powers answered on the third ring.
IT WAS STILL dark when Ruth heard noises from the bathroom, then the toilet flushing and Win going back to her room, singing to herself.
George was right, Ruth thought
. Her mother was going a bit peculiar. And she’d be retiring from the laundry six months from now. A batty old woman in the house all day, oh, my God. Dunt even think about it. Ruth squinted at the alarm clock. Five something? George’s breathing rattled in his chest. The fags. She worried herself back to sleep.
She awoke when George brought the cups of tea in, which was the Sunday arrangement.
“Did you make one for Mother?”
“No,” George said. “There’s no sound out of her.”
“Ent there? Thas rum, ent it? She never sleep this late.”
George kicked his slippers off and got back into bed.
“I better go’n see if she’s all right,” Ruth said, heaving her legs out from under the blankets.
“’Course she’s all right. Drink your tea.”
“She might be ill, George.”
“Ill?” he snorted. “When’s she ever been ill?”
Win hadn’t opened her curtains, so it was understandable that in the dimly lit bedroom Ruth mistook what lay on the floor for a big gray cat. Understandable, therefore, that she screamed. And understandable when she realized that she was looking at her mother’s chopped-off hair that she screamed again.
“What?” George said, from the doorway.
“Whassup, Mum?” Clem, for some reason holding his dressing gown in front of him instead of wearing it.
But Ruth couldn’t say anything. With her hand over her mouth, she was staring at her mother’s bed, which was empty, the blankets pulled away from the bare and lumpy mattress.
She was too distracted to manage the usual Sunday breakfast. Eventually, George ate a bowl of cornflakes, his silence worse than accusation.
When Clem wheeled his bike out of the shed, Ruth called, “Where’re you gorn?”
“I said I’d help Goz with his paper round. Thas five miles on a Sunday, and them Sunday papers weigh a ton, he says.”