She had arrived home half an hour ago, wet, tired, bitterly angry with herself at the opportunity she had missed. She had taken a shower and put on the lemon yellow bathrobe. Standing at the window she looked out at the lights of the city flickering through floating banks of rain-laden mist.
She turned slowly, still in the half dark, and punched the button to see if Edward had called. She listened to his easy voice, relaxed, asking her to hurry through her business and get back out West. She sipped her mineral water and listened to his voice as he told her Susan and the family were there. ‘So that’s the West Coast news and weather, Nan.’ He paused and she detected a faint change of tone. ‘Yes, one more thing. Max Benning called. Staying at the Chelverton Hotel, West 44th Street. Wants you to get in touch with him there. Hurry back, Nan. I miss you.’
The telephone stood on a low cream coloured table beside her now. She knew she had only to pick up the phone. But she also knew Max, and Max alone, could come between her and her duty. Her duty to Edward. Her duty to herself.
She turned to the mirror and stared at her face. It was moments before she realised she was crying.
She threw herself back into the armchair. Her drink spilled forward between the folds of her robe. She almost cried aloud as the cold liquid rolled down her thigh.
She did not ask herself why he was in New York. At this moment she didn’t care. The simple idea that Max was sitting in a bar or restaurant or hotel room within a mile or two of where she was affected her with such intensity that it was almost enough for the moment.
She let her mind slide back into the past, fuzzing the edges of the images like a waking dream. She knew they shared memories not because she believed he had been affected in the same way by each event in their time together, but because it had been so short a time, there had been so few events.
She drifted with the sampan down the river and felt the extraordinary glow that warmed her body by the knowledge that this one man was watching her every movement. She relived the hypnotic effect of the sunlight through the great overhanging trees. And she felt again that exclusive surrender which she had not allowed herself since Max had left Saigon.
In a fever almost equal to that Max had suffered, she relived the night in bed beside him, his hot, shivering body, the strangeness of his eyes as he slipped back into consciousness and realised she was naked against him. She raised in her mind the shadowed image of his unshaven cheek, the whiteness of his teeth, the smudges below his eyes.
Would she love him when he walked quickly, no longer bowed with fever, across the lobby of a New York hotel and stopped in front of her?
Her body answered her. She could feel that she was trembling slightly and she sat forward and shook her head. She remembered with a smile that Edward had told her that young British and American boys, in the sort of private school he had attended, were recommended a brisk cold shower when thoughts of the opposite sex became too disturbing. She also remembered he said it was very much a short-term solution.
She got up and switched on lights.
She had given Edward her word. He had not bribed her into marriage. She had been totally candid about it. She had told him about Max. Told him that she loved Max. In turn, when he had offered marriage as a solution, he had told her she could take it as a simple facility offered by a friend, one that would enable her to escape from Gulanga. But as soon as they met in Gulanga, even before the marriage had taken place, she had made it clear what she intended. She would not use marriage to him as a device to become an American citizen. She had accepted his offer of marriage and would be a full partner in the marriage. She would share his burdens and successes as he would share hers. She would share his bed. She would stay with him as long as he wanted her.
She took her drink to the window and stood leaning against it, peering down into the half-lit darkness of the street. Did she have the strength to meet Max? Just once more?
The rain, which had been falling in large drops, flickering in the streetlights like a million fireflies, had almost stopped.
Nan Luc turned back to the telephone. She had decided.
Schmidt’s laid no claim to modernity. A long bar faced the entrance; a line of booths ran along both side walls, booths with red plush seats and heavy brass rails from which at one time curtains could be drawn for privacy. The tables were covered with white cloths and the boarded floor had not yet been carpeted or tiled. Germans had always come here, Emil Jannings once, Marlene Dietrich several times. Now young Germans came, diplomatic, business and advertising men and women visiting New York from Hamburg and Frankfurt and Berlin. This year it was one of New York’s in places, to the surprise of its elderly waiters and the third Schmidt in line to have owned it.
Max knew most of the staff from earlier visits to New York and used the restaurant like a club. But he had chosen Schmidt’s for other reasons, reasons attached in some way to the idea of a meeting on emotionally neutral ground. Now that the moment had come to tell her, he felt the pit of his stomach falling away, a fierce turmoil in him that rose in a flush to the face and forehead.
He had not yet adapted to the idea of seeing her against anything but a Vietnamese backdrop, the courthouse, the stone harbourmaster’s tower, the Cahn Roc River.
She was of course married. The woman he had spoken to, Edward Brompton’s sister, had not said so in so many words. But she had said enough. She had said too, casually, not knowing its significance that Nan Luc was in New York, in New York City trying to trace her father. He must tell her. And here at Schmidt’s was a better place than most, a gentler place, a survivor from another age.
Max watched her push open the door and hesitate. She had seen him before he stood up. She did not smile. As he came forward she walked towards him. She was wearing jeans and a polo-shirt and a short suede jacket. Somehow in all his dreams about her he had only seen her in black trousers and a white Mao jacket.
She found him greatly changed. As she crossed the room he rose from his seat, a young fair-haired man in a dark linen suit. But his eyes were dark, his smile almost anguished. She wanted to throw her arms round him, to ask him what was wrong. But she felt now, at this moment of seeing him, desperately nervous, as if all the Western experiences of the last months had fallen away from her. She was, she realised, as so many people young and not so young have realised before, made infinitely shy by love.
She stopped a pace from him. ‘Max,’ she said in a voice little above a whisper.
He took her arm and guided her to the booth, barely trusting himself to speak. When they were sitting down he reached out and held her hands across the white tablecloth. Then withdrew them quickly. ‘Just give me a moment to catch my breath.’
She smiled, a soft unhurried smile. ‘Take your time,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to move from here, ever.’
He shook his head. ‘Ask me something, some ordinary question to wake me up.’
‘All right. How did you find me?’
‘I went back to Vietnam, to Cahn Roc. An English policeman in Hong Kong… It’s a long story.’
Pain shadowed her face. ‘You went back to Cahn Roc?’
‘You must have known I would.’
‘So you knew I’d gone to the West.’
‘I knew you’d tried. I went to Bangkok and Hong Kong.’ He stopped.
‘I was at Gulanga.’
He nodded. ‘I know. I discovered. Too late.’
For a long time she said nothing, looking at him, her face pale, her eyes full of tears. ‘I’m sorry, Max,’ she said at last.