Looking back, it had been Kate who had really given him the theme for the feature he had published in the Manhattan Globe that had so caught the public imagination, and swiftly attracted an unstoppable avalanche of interest in New England, and, it now seemed, practically everywhere that the map was painted Imperial Pink!
People ran away with the idea that Kate was some kind of latter-day Pocahontas. She was nothing of the sort yet in her down to earth practicality, stoicism and devotion to her husband and son she had somehow ceased to be ‘a squaw’◦– he loathed that term◦– adrift in the ‘white’ world of the First Thirteen and become a kind of ‘every-woman’ with whom few New England housewives could fail to identify. Kate herself, did not think she was in any way remarkable, or any different from other women. She had spoken of her love for her husband◦– they had been childhood sweethearts and teenage lovers, married under tribal law before they were twenty, a secret Abe had kept from his family for nearly four years◦– their life together and their hopes for the future with a simple frankness which spoke straight from the page of the first draft of ‘Abe and Kate’, the working title for what was promising to be the English language publishing sensation of 1978.
Abe and Kate◦– Stanton did not think for a moment that would be the actual title by the time the interminable haggling with publishers was concluded◦– was already well on the way to burying the now fading notoriety of that other bestseller, Two Hundred Lost Years.
And it might not even be published for another six months!
Perversely, now that he was finally in Paris◦– a city he had always wanted to visit◦– a part of him wanted to be on the boat home as soon as possible.
Maud Daventry-Jones had been hanging, literally hanging, on his arm by the end of that soiree at Castle Dore, the great bastion of the Coolidge dynasty in the Shinnecock Hills of Long Island.
She had been hanging on his arm and he had felt like he was eight feet tall!
A dinner at the Ritz in Manhattan the evening before he boarded the CEREBUS for the journey across ‘the pond’ had flown by in a blur and in retrospect he could not make up his mind who had been more fascinated, utterly infatuated with whom. With any other girl that meal might have concluded with a steamy night in an impetuously booked hotel room, or perhaps, in his cramped Brooklyn apartment.
That was a thought which had not even occurred to him until much later, lying awake in the dark trying to make sense of his feelings, having kissed his date goodnight on the steps of the Ritz before putting her in a taxi back to her West Side studio overlooking the Hudson River.
He had bent his face to hers, intending to respectfully peck her cheek. She had shyly raised her mouth to meet his. Just for a fleeting second and then… bizarrely he was recollecting, he knew not why, a meeting with Melody Danson◦– heck, she was a one off!◦– when they had both agreed that they were not each other’s ‘type’. There was absolutely nothing about Maud that was not ‘his type’ and it was pretty clear that she felt the same way about him. The serendipity of it all left him stunned. And right now, he was a little home sick, out of sorts in a strange city a long way from the only woman in the world he had ever loved…
Yet it had not even occurred to him to ‘take liberties’ with Maud the other night because she was just so much better than that. She deserved more, only the best and he could not help but wonder if he was, in his heart of hearts, worthy of her.
Albert Stanton had first encountered Maud in prison.
She had been locked up in the Massapequa Prison for Women after one of her protest stunts with Leonora Coolidge had gone wrong, or right, depending upon one’s viewpoint. Maud had been sitting beside her friend; both women’s hair still streaked purple-pink◦– the after-effect of a botched attempt to deluge the Chief Magistrate of New York with purple dye and butter acid bombs outside his office on Clinton Street◦– and they were both in a mood to pick a fight with any man who crossed their bows.
Notwithstanding, Leonora was the willowy beauty she could not help being, a woman like Helen of yore, whose face might inadvertently launch a thousand ships and turn countless strong men’s souls to mush. Maud had seemed round-shouldered, a little dumpy and vaguely tomboyish, except even that day her brown eyes had twinkled when she spoke…
I must have been blind the last year!
Of course, Maud was the equivalent of Long Island aristocracy and he was a guy from the back of nowhere who, at that time, was still working hard to make something of himself. Women like Leonora and Maud had seemed like exotic creatures from another world, unattainable, untouchable.
Maud was over-conscious that she was no statuesque Venus de Milo exemplar of womankind like her friend.
‘I’m short, curvy, buxom and liable to plumpness if my mother is anything to go by…’
Stanton had observed: ‘It takes all sorts. Wouldn’t it be terrible if we were all the same?’
That had come out all wrong.
What he had meant to say was: ‘I adore you exactly the way you are!’
However, from the smile on Maud’s face he got the general impression that regardless of what he had actually said, that was what she had heard spill from his lips.
He sighed.
He tried to read the papers while he waited for his hosts to make an appearance. He had arrived early at the plush boulevard café almost but not quite in the shadow of Notre Dame Cathedral◦– the great Gothic monument flattened by German artillery in the 1860s and still, in places, undergoing restoration to its former glory over a century later◦– taking an inside table due to the cool breeze threatening rain sweeping up the Seine.
Like all newspaper men he was an avid consumer of newsprint. Practically every major daily newspaper printed in the World had a Paris edition produced in an English, German or French translation, and he had worked his way through half-a-dozen papers that morning.
He had not realised that the Germans and the Russians, traditional enemies, had been so hugger-mugger of late. Apparently, Crown Prince Frederick had just got back to Berlin from a State Visit to Moscow. The son of the German Emperor was reputedly a huge fan of Wagner, Tchaikovsky and the Opera◦– and of loud music in general, and the Tsar had taken Frederick and his wife, Kristina, a placid Danish princess with a smile fit to melt an ogre’s heart, to the ballet before he and his new friend ‘Freddy’◦– a second cousin, all the royal families of Europe were variously inbred◦– off to play toy soldiers.
It seemed the Russians were going to buy over a thousand warplanes from the concern of Messers BMK◦– the Berlin, Munich and Kassel Aircraft Works◦– in the next couple of years. Payment was to be made in oil, rather than specie, shipped directly from the Caucasus.
There had been fleet manoeuvres between the Kaiserliche Marine and the Russian Fleet in the Baltic and the Far East…
Okay, that sort of thing never got reported back in New York!
The Paris Stock Market was down again…
Breaking news in the Times of Paris: ‘Disturbances in the streets of Madrid for the second day running. Troops fired warning shots over the heads of the mob outside the Royal Palace of Aranjuez…’