‘Yes,’ Cubby answered. Johnson looked worn, already overburdened by the office he had once sought, and which had fallen to him so shockingly.
Rosemary hardly said another word after that. In St Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, the requiem mass began. The cameras focused on a statue of Jesus while a tenor sang Ave Maria. The voice of the priest was disembodied, intoning words which meant nothing to Cubby, though the nuns crossed themselves from time to time. He wondered how much of this Rosemary was following. He’d raced to be here with her in case she needed him, but it seemed as though the death of her brother, the third of her siblings to die – and all of them violent deaths – had left her unmoved.
Suddenly, however, Rosemary yelled, making them all start.
‘Lollie! Get off the chair!’
Rosemary’s poodle had jumped on to an armchair with a ball in its mouth. ‘Hush, Rosemary,’ Sister Ursula said in dismay.
But Rosemary was furious. ‘Get off! Get off! ’ Her yelling made the dog roll its expressive brown eyes, wriggling its stump of a tail. Rosemary got to her feet, still a tall and daunting figure. The dog leaped off the chair, dropped its ball to bark, and then picked it up again. ‘Taking her for a walk,’ Rosemary said, stamping after the animal, which was already making for the door.
‘But the funeral—’ Sister Ursula protested.
Cubby also rose. ‘I’ll go with her.’
They walked among the trees, the poodle frisking around them. After a while, Rosemary took Cubby’s hand. Her fingers clutched his tightly, like a child. ‘They’re crying all the time,’ she said. ‘Getting on my nerves.’
‘They’re sad because your brother was a great man.’
She nodded. ‘I can’t cry any more. Don’t know how to.’ She touched her head. ‘After they did this.’
‘I understand,’ Cubby said gently.
‘Used to cry a lot. Before.’ She stopped at the sound of a distant shot.
‘It’s just a hunter in the woods, a mile or two off.’
She resumed walking. ‘I cried all the time when you went away.’
‘I know you did.’
‘Why didn’t we ever get married?’ she asked.
He was always stuck for an adequate answer to that, though she asked it almost every time he came. ‘Well, the war started. I had to go and fight.’
‘Can’t have children now.’ She laid her hand on her belly. ‘All gone. Operation.’
‘I know.’ They’d given her the hysterectomy some years earlier, but it was still fresh in her mind, even though she’d been through an early menopause as a result. She was forty-five now. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Wish I could cry now. But I can’t.’ Abruptly, she kicked at the dead leaves, her face red with anger. The fragile brown things flew into the air, then settled around her shoes. ‘I get so mad. So goddamn mad.’ She put her arms clumsily around him and held him tight, her cropped head on his shoulder. Cubby wanted to cry for both of them, but like Rosemary herself, he didn’t know how to any more.
They stood like that, leaning on one another among the stark trees, for a long while. At last, she kissed him clumsily on the mouth. There was nothing sexual in the kiss. It was almost a blow, her lips dry and hard. ‘Love,’ she said, looking into his eyes.
‘Love,’ he agreed.
They walked back to the cottage.
The funeral took all day. It ended in Arlington, in the dusk. The soldiers fired three volleys into the air. A bugler played ‘The Last Post’. The setting sun streaked the sorrowful faces of the crowd who stood among a sea of fallen leaves. Jackie and Bobby lit the flame that would burn for evermore. The coffin sank into the earth at last. Evening came swiftly, and the flame was left flickering in the darkness, alone and restless.
By now Rosemary was tired and irritable. He knew it was time to leave. He said goodbye to her, and then set off on the long journey home.
Kennedy Space Centre, Florida
It had been a particularly nerve-racking three days. The first launch had been aborted at the last second – literally. With seven seconds to go before ignition, Columbia’s hazardous gas detection system had suddenly reported high levels of hydrogen in the orbiter’s aft engine compartment. With vivid memories of the 1986 Challenger fireball, in which all seven crew members had died, Thomas König and the other system engineers in Kennedy Space Centre’s Firing Room No. 1 had had to take a decision. The launch had been aborted less than half a second before the three main engines were due to ignite.
Columbia’s five crew members had emerged from the spacecraft in their orange flight suits, disappointed but philosophical. The STS-93 mission was historic in being the first in space shuttle history to be commanded by a woman, Eileen Collins, with a second woman among the five-person crew, Cady Coleman.
On inspection, the hydrogen concentration indication had turned out to be a false reading.
‘We took the right decision,’ Thomas said to his dejected team, his German accent still noticeable after a lifetime in the United States. ‘Better safe than sorry. We’ll reinitiate countdown shortly.’
After recalibrating the gas detectors, they’d scheduled a second launch for two days later.
This time, the weather had closed in, with storms and high winds. The second launch had also been scrubbed. They’d initiated a twenty-four-hour turnaround, hoping the weather would improve, as the meteorologists were predicting.
While the shuttle crew tried to relax, Thomas and the rest of the team worked round the clock on preparations for the third countdown. Third time lucky, everybody said. The mission would be a short one, five days in orbit; but every minute of every day would be filled with work for the astronauts. There were several secondary payloads to be deployed, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, an orbiting X-ray telescope fifty times more powerful than anything yet used, capable of reading the letters on a stop sign from twelve miles away.
On the space station, the astronauts would monitor several ongoing biological experiments, and would all take turns on the treadmill to collect valuable data on how exercise in space affected the microgravity of the space station. Routine stuff; but even after all these years, there was nothing routine about space exploration. Every day brought new wonders and new challenges.
‘You’re going to miss all this, Tom,’ a colleague said to Thomas.
He nodded. ‘Yes, I am.’
It was his last launch. Now into his seventies, he was ten years older than NASA’s official retirement age. His lifetime with the Agency, and his deep involvement with the Space Shuttle Program, had kept him working, sharing his experience and wisdom. But by the time Mission STS-93 returned to Florida, he would be in retirement. A tall, spare figure in white shirt-sleeves and dark tie, he would in his turn be missed by all those he had worked with. His reputation for brilliance and reserve, tempered with kindness, was legendary.
The day of the launch dawned clear. The meteorologists had prophesied correctly. The Firing Room system engineers were all at their desks by midday. The huge screens on the wall in front of them showed the space shuttle, aimed at the heavens, waiting to be unleashed from earth’s sullen bonds. Steam rose tranquilly around it into the pellucid afternoon sky.
Reflected in the lagoon that extended beside the launch pad, Columbia appeared pristine, though the shuttle was now ten years old. Unlike other spacecraft, which took on the appearance of turkeys left too long in the oven, Columbia returned from space relatively unscathed each time. Her tiled surfaces were carefully designed to withstand the heat generated by ploughing into the earth’s atmosphere at orbital speed during re-entry. Only a close look revealed the scuffs and burns left by twenty-five previous missions.