The Last Letter From Your Lover (42 page)

Don picked him up two days later, on the afternoon that the hospital had agreed to discharge him, with appropriate liver-function results and dire threats of what would happen to him if he dared to drink again.

“Where are we headed?” He watched Don load his small suitcase into the boot of his car and felt like a refugee.

“You’re coming to mine.”

“What?”

“Viv says so.” He didn’t meet Anthony’s eye. “She thinks you need some home comforts.”

You think I can’t be left alone.
“I don’t think I—”

“It’s not up for discussion,” Don said, and climbed into the driver’s seat. “But don’t blame me for the food. My wife knows a hundred and one ways to incinerate a cow, and as far as I can tell she’s still experimenting.”

It was always disconcerting to see one’s workmates in a domestic setting. Over the years, although he had met Viv—red-haired and as vivacious as Don was dour—at various work functions, Anthony had somehow seen Don, more than anyone, as someone who physically inhabited the
Nation
. He was always there. That office, with its towering piles of paper, its scribbled notes and maps pinned haphazardly to walls, was his natural habitat. Don in his house with velvet slippers, his feet up on an overstuffed sofa, Don straightening ornaments or fetching pints of milk, went against the rules of nature.

That said, there was something restful about being in his house. A mock-Tudor semi in the commuter belt, it was large enough that he didn’t feel under anybody’s feet. The children were grown and gone, and aside from framed photographs, there were no constant reminders of his own failure as a parent.

Viv greeted him with kisses on both cheeks, and made no reference to where he had been. “I thought you boys might like to play golf this afternoon,” she said.

They did. Don was so hopeless at it that Anthony realized afterward it must have been the only thing his hosts could think of that the two men might do together that didn’t involve drinking. Don didn’t mention Jennifer. He was worried still, Anthony could tell. He made frequent references to Anthony being all right, to the resumption of normality, whatever that was supposed to be. There was no wine at lunch or supper.

“So, what’s the plan?” He was sitting on one of the sofas. In the distance they could hear Viv washing up, singing along to the wireless in the kitchen.

“Back to work tomorrow,” Don said. He was rubbing his stomach.

Work.
Part of him wanted to ask what that might be. But he didn’t dare. He had failed the
Nation
once, was afraid to have it confirmed that this time he had done so conclusively.

I’ve been talking to Spackman.”

Oh, Christ. Here it comes.

“Tony, she doesn’t know. Nobody upstairs knows.”

Anthony blinked.

“It’s just us on the desk. Me, Blondie, a couple of the subs. I had to ring them to tell them I wasn’t coming back to work when we got you to hospital. They’ll keep their mouths shut.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“That’s a bloody change. Anyway.” Don lit a cigarette, and blew a long plume of smoke. His eyes met Anthony’s almost guiltily. “She agrees with me that we should send you back out.”

It took Anthony a beat to register what he was saying.

“To Congo?”

“You’re the best man for the job.”

Congo.

“But I need to know . . .” Don tapped his cigarette on an ashtray.

“It’s fine.”

“Let me finish. I need to know you’re going to look after yourself. I can’t be worrying.”

“No drinking. Nothing reckless. I just . . . I need to do the job.”

“That’s what I thought.” But Don didn’t believe him—Anthony could see it in the sideways look. A short pause. “I would feel responsible.”

“I know.”

Clever man, Don. But Anthony couldn’t reassure him. How could he? He wasn’t sure how he was going to get through the next half an hour, let alone how he’d feel in the heart of Africa.

Don’s voice broke in again before the answer became overwhelming. He stubbed out his cigarette. “Football’s on in a minute. Chelsea versus Arsenal. Fancy it?” He climbed heavily out of his chair and flicked on the mahogany-clad box in the corner. “I’ll tell you one bit of good news. You can’t get that bastard yellow fever again. When you’ve been as sick as you were, apparently you’re immune.”

Anthony stared unseeing at the black-and-white screen.
How do I make the rest of me immune?

They were in the foreign editor’s office. Paul de Saint, a tall, patrician man with swept-back hair and the air of a Romantic poet, was studying a map on the desk. “The big story’s in Stanleyville. There are at least eight hundred non-Congolese being held hostage there, many in the Victoria Hotel, and perhaps a thousand more in the surrounding area. Diplomatic efforts to save them have so far failed. There’s so much infighting between the rebels that the situation is changing by the hour, so it’s near impossible to get an accurate picture. It’s pretty woolly out there, O’Hare. Until maybe six months ago, I would have said the safety of any white man was guaranteed, whatever was going on with the natives. Now, I’m afraid, they seem to be targeting
les colons
. There are some fairly horrific stories coming out. Nothing we can put in the paper.” He paused. “Rape is only the half of it.”

“How do I get in?”

“There’s our starting problem. I’ve been talking to Nicholls, and the best way is going to be via Rhodesia—or Zambia, as they’re now calling the northern half. Our man there is trying to work out a land route for you, but many of the roads have been destroyed, and it’ll take days.”

As he talked travel logistics with Don, Anthony let the conversation drift away from him and saw, with some gratitude, that not only had a whole half hour gone by in which he hadn’t thought of her but that the story was pulling him in. He could feel nervous anticipation germinating in his belly, and was drawn to the challenge of getting across the hostile terrain. He felt no fear. How could he? What worse things could happen?

He leafed through the files that de Saint’s deputy handed him. The political background; the Communist aid to the rebels that had so enraged the Americans; the execution of the American missionary, Paul Carlson. He read the ground-level reports of what the rebels had done, and his jaw tightened. They took him back to 1960 and the turmoil of Lumumba’s brief rule. He read them as if at a distance. He felt as if the man who had been out there before—the man so shattered by what he had seen—was someone he no longer recognized.

“So, we’ll book flights to Kenya tomorrow, yes? We’ve got a man on the inside at Sabena who’ll let us know if there are any internal flights to Congo. Otherwise it’s drop at Salisbury airport and make your way across the Rhodesian border. Yes?”

“Do we know which correspondents have made it there?”

“There’s not an awful lot coming out. I suspect communications are difficult. But Oliver has a piece in the
Mail
today, and I’ve heard the
Telegraph
is running big tomorrow.”

The door opened. Cheryl’s face was anxious.

“We’re in the middle of something, Cheryl.” Don sounded irritated.

“Sorry,” she said, “but your boy is here.”

It took Anthony several seconds to grasp that she was looking at him. “My boy?”

“I’ve put him in Don’s office.”

Anthony stood up, barely able to digest what he had heard. “Excuse me a moment,” he said, and followed Cheryl out across the newsroom.

There it was: the jolt he experienced on the few occasions he got to see Phillip, a kind of visceral shock at how much he had changed since the last visit, his growth a constant rebuke to his father’s absence.

In six months his son’s frame had elongated by inches, tipped its way into adolescence, but not yet filled out. Hunched over himself, he resembled a question mark. He looked up as Anthony entered the room, and his face was blanched, his eyes red-rimmed.

Anthony stood there, trying to work out the cause of the grief etched across his son’s pale face, and some distant part of him wondered, Is it me again? Did he find out what I did to myself? Am I such a failure in his eyes?

“It’s Mother,” Phillip said. He blinked furiously and wiped his nose with his hand.

Anthony took a step closer. The boy unfurled and threw himself with unexpected force into his father’s arms. Anthony felt himself gripped, Phillip’s hands clutching at his shirt as if he would never let him go, and he allowed his own hand to fall gently onto his boy’s head as sobs racked the thin body.

The rain was so loud on the roof of Don’s car that it almost drowned thought. Almost, but not quite. In the twenty minutes it had taken them to edge through the traffic on Kensington High Street, the two men had sat in silence, the only other sound Don’s fervent drags on his cigarette.

“Accident,” Don said, staring at the snaking red taillights in front of him. “Must have been a big one. We should ring the newsroom.” He made no effort to pull over by the telephone boxes.

When Anthony said nothing, Don leaned over and fiddled with the radio until static defeated him. He examined the end of his cigarette, blew on it, making it glow. “De Saint says we have till tomorrow. Any later than that, and we have to wait four days for the next scheduled flight.” He spoke as if there was a decision to be made. “You could go, and we’ll pull you off if she deteriorates.”

“She’s already deteriorated.” Clarissa’s cancer had been shocking in its swiftness. “She’s not expected to last the fortnight.”

“Bloody bus. Look at it, taking up twice the road.” Don wound down his window and threw his cigarette into the soaked street. He brushed the raindrops off his sleeve as he closed it again. “What’s the husband like, anyhow? No good?”

“Only met him once.”

I can’t stay with him. Please, Dad, don’t make me stay with him.

Phillip had gripped his belt like someone hanging on to a life raft. When Anthony had finally taken him back to the house in Parsons Green, he had felt the weight of those fingers long after he had handed him over.

“I’m very sorry,” he had said to Edgar. The curtain merchant, older than he had expected, had eyed him suspiciously, as if some insult had lain in what he’d said.

“I can’t go.” The words were out there. It was almost a relief to say them. Like finally being given the death sentence after years of possible reprieves.

Don sighed. It might have been melancholy or relief. “He’s your son.”

“He’s my son.” He had promised:
Yes, of course you can stay with me. Of course you can. It’s going to be all right.
Even as he said the words, he had not fully understood what he was giving away.

The traffic had begun to move again, at first a slow crawl and then walking speed.

They were at Chiswick before Don spoke again. “You know, O’Hare, this might work. It might be a bit of a gift. God knows what could have happened to you out there.”

Don glanced sideways.

“And who knows? Let the boy settle down a bit . . . you can still go off into the field. Maybe we’ll have him to stay. Let Viv look after him. He’d like it at ours. God knows, she misses having children around the place. Christ.” A thought occurred. “You’re going to have to find yourself a bloody house. No more living out of hotel rooms.”

He let Don ramble on, laying before him this mythical new life, like stories on a page, promising, soothing, the fellow family man emerging to make him feel better, to hide what he had lost, to quell the drum still beating somewhere in the darker regions of his soul.