‘If Sam was around all the time I’d end up scratching his eyes out,’ Judy had explained to her friend and thankfully, Sabrina had calmed down a little in the week since the two women had had their little chat.
“Are you awake?” Sam murmured.
His hand gently stroked her belly, and she answered his question by pressing back into his arms.
“I wonder sometimes if we have any right to bring a baby into the World,” she murmured to the father of her unborn child in a tiny, sleepy voice.
“Because of the radiation?”
“That, and the way everything is so unreal…”
“Was real ever that good before the war, babe?”
“You know what I mean,” she protested feebly, her heart not in it. “What if the baby is sick?”
The man was silent.
“You hear and read about kids born since the war,” Judy persisted. “But nobody knows if the ones that are okay are really okay?”
“Nobody knows if the ones who they say aren’t okay,” Sam pointed out, “which seems to about the same number as before the war, aren’t okay either, babe.”
This was true but having ventilated her deepest terrors Judy could not easily retreat back into the safe cocoon of her rational self.
“It’s unreal here in LA,” she whispered. “You don’t see anybody with burns. There are hardly any blind people. And nobody really talks about the war even though you know everybody thinks about it all the time and it’s always there, in the background like a big black cloud just below the horizon. That’s why people love your songs. You put into words the things they want to say but they are afraid to say out loud. The Government pretends the war is over, that we’re all safe now. But we’re not safe; none of us will ever be safe again.”
Sam sighed, carefully recovered his arm from under Judy’s face, and propped himself on an elbow in the darkness.
“Don’t you think it was weird how we never thought about the future when we were getting out of Bellingham, or when we were in that refugee camp in Canada,” he offered vaguely, “not having any kind of future made things easier, I suppose. It is all a state of mind. We weren’t safe before the war; we just didn’t know it. Nothing has changed except people.”
Judy rolled onto her back.
“Do you want to know a secret?”
“What, babe?” Sam chuckled; immensely relieved Judy’s mood seemed to have lifted.
“I feel incredibly horny!”
Chapter 35
Gretchen Betancourt had got up early and gone for a long walk to clear her head. Her father had rented her the nice upmarket apartment in an old house on Cathedral Avenue, a picturesque tree-lined street. In summer the trees in leaf would provide shade and rustle reassuringly in the breeze, but at this season the branches were bare and the vista unobstructed. Washington Zoo, the National Observatory and the National Cathedral were all with easy walking distance of her comfortably appointed home from home which meant that the apartment had to be very expensive; but she did not think about that very often. Nothing cost that much when one’s father was a wealthy, incorrigible old rogue intent on promoting his daughter’s prospects.
It was only now, after she had had a little time to consider recent events that she was a little guilty about the way she had treated Dan Brenckmann.
Dan was a good guy; he deserved better.
However, she was only a little guilty about it.
Otherwise, she had no regrets at all.
On Monday she had an appointment with the twenty-third United States Under Secretary of State, Dean Rusk’s number two at the State Department and the man who, reputedly, had pulled most of the foreign policy strings since the October War. Gretchen had been so eager — shamelessly so — to prepare herself for that interview that she had spent most of the last forty-eight hours trying to find out as much as she could about George Wildman Ball, the man she hoped to soon be working for at ‘Foggy Bottom’, the Main State Building at 2201 C Street.
She had been so determined to be ‘well informed’ that last night she had called her father. The old rascal had been hugely amused that she had turned to him for advice, and flattered, although he was not about to admit it in so many words to his pesky and disputative youngest child. It had turned into a long telephone call — a seminar on the ‘dog’s breakfast’ that presently constituted the United States of America’s post-war foreign policy — and she had lain awake in bed afterwards trying to sort the facts from the chaff of gossip and her father’s mostly apocryphal anecdotes. In a way she almost hoped her father was less ‘well informed’ than he thought he was; especially about the military and ideological quagmire the Administration was, for apparently incredibly bizarre reasons, getting dragged into in South East Asia.
The air was cold but the spits of rain were few and far between as Gretchen quartered the streets around her apartment that morning, and gradually, the cobwebs cleared. Preparation was a prerequisite of a successful first meeting. First impressions were vital, a bad first impression could never be undone and one wasted so much time in undoing damage when one could and should be seizing new opportunities. There had been no real opportunity to understand what made Nicholas Katzenbach tick and that had nearly been her undoing. She was not about to make the same mistake a second time.
It would be George Ball’s fifty-fourth birthday in two weeks time. He had been a protégé of Adlai Stevenson; the Governor of Illinois, Ambassador to the United Nations and doyen of post-1945 Democratic Party liberalism. Ball, a banker and diplomat had been with Stevenson in both of his unsuccessful Presidential campaigns in the fifties. Since the October War there were those who suspected that Ball had become semi-detached from the rest of the Administration, disenchanted with the renewed isolationism in Congress, and philosophically disillusioned and undermined by the sudden irrelevance of his lifelong Eurocentric outlook. However, nobody really knew the truth of the matter because Ball was that rare thing in American political life, the soul of discretion. Nevertheless, persistent rumours circulated that latterly he had fallen out with his boss, Dean Rusk, and most of the President’s closest advisors over, of all things, Vietnam. Or that, at least, was what Gretchen’s father had said. For her part she had no idea how significant that was — for her rather than for the Vietnamese, that was — whose welfare and wellbeing had never been and were unlikely to become her concern. What did concern her was the medium to long-term wisdom of becoming too closely associated with a man who was, potentially, threatening to become a pariah within the Kennedy Administration.
However, putting that concern aside practically everything else she heard about George Ball was unambiguously impressive. Back in the 1945 war he had been a senior official in the Lend Lease program, and immediately after the war been appointed Director of the Strategic Bombing Survey — of Germany — based in London. Later he had worked with Jean Monnet on the implementation of the Marshall Plan, and in 1950 he had helped write the Schuman Plan; the basis of the future European Coal and Steel Community, the organisation which had become the European Economic Community with the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. George Ball was a very serious player, definitely a man who got things done which inferred that if he and the people closest to the President had fallen out over South East Asia that might be a big problem. On the other hand, if there had been such a big falling out and George Ball was still in post it also spoke to his weight within the Administration, a thing greatly in his favour.