Ian Slater: World in Flames

Three miles south of Burns’s cottage outside Ayre, occasional spots of rain turned to sleet and Robert turned on the wipers. In the drowsy hum he and Rosemary were lost in their own thoughts — she wondering how her younger sister, Georgina, and Robert’s executive officer, Peter Zeldman, were getting along — or if they were getting along at all after having graciously performed their official roles as best man and maid of honor at Robert and Rosemary’s wedding.

Georgina’s beauty was matched by her pride and a strong streak of leftist feminism that Rosemary surmised might not “go down” or, as Robert would say, “sit well” with the plainspoken, somewhat taciturn Zeldman. On the other hand, Rosemary, after the years of teaching all types of students in her Shakespeare class, was aware that sometimes opposites attract in the most unpredictable way. She hoped so, suspecting that, deep down, Georgina, though too proud to admit it, wanted a relationship that would give her a measure of certainty and stability in the world of “avant-garde” politics at the LSE and in a world made daily more uncertain by war.

She thought of her brother William’s death in the convoy and of how terrified he must have been, his ship torpedoed in the middle of the Atlantic. She thought, too, of Robert’s sister, Lana, who, as William’s nurse, had written them about William, and without whom Rosemary would never have met Robert, who’d so kindly brought the letter down to Surrey on his first leave. Lana Brentwood, it seemed, had been with William in the final days of his life on the Halifax-bound hospital ship where he died. Rosemary thought, too, of Robert’s youngest brother, David, twenty-four, who, though now safe in Liege in Belgium, had been listed as an MIA for several weeks after he and others, in the big drop by the American airborne over the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, had been swept off course by cross winds into enemy territory. She wondered what he was like. There was still so much she didn’t know about Robert’s family. “Does your brother David have a girlfriend?” she asked.

Robert shrugged. “Sort of, I guess.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure. Had a girl he liked back in the States—” He paused. “High school sweetheart — far as I can recall. But that was before the war. Don’t know if it’s still on between them.”

“Do you know her name?”

“Mmm—” Robert pondered the question while using another tissue to clear the semicircle of mist above the dash. “Now there,” he said, “you’ve got me.”

“Oh, Robert — you must know!”

“Mel…Mel… Melanie, I think.” It bugged him that he couldn’t remember, a nuclear sub skipper who, like Zeldman and others in the service, was expected to have a photographic memory of enemy maneuvers and myriad descriptions of ships and armaments. But he was having trouble even trying to visualize the girl’s face.

“Melanie who?” pressed Rosemary. “He must have spoken about her?”

“Not David,” said Robert. “Very closemouthed about dating. We all were. All I remember is that he and a guy called Rick Stacy were in competition for her.”

“Sounds serious.”

“I guess. She was a nice kid — well, a kid then.”

“So you’ve met her?”

“Once. On leave. She was a coed.”

“A first-year student?”

“What — oh, yes,” replied Robert. “First year at Oregon State. She was a bright — hold on!”

Rosemary was thrown forward, the car’s rear end skewing hard right, skidding to a stop on the rain-slicked road. “You okay, honey?” he asked her quickly.

Off to her left, Rosemary caught the auburn blur of a deer slipping through the mist. “I’m all right,” she said. “For a second—” she sat back against the headrest and turned to him, hand over her heart “—I thought it was another car.”

“Figured the honeymoon was over, eh?” he said, swinging the Morris back onto the left-hand side of the road.

“Yes,” she said. “I did.”

He put a hand on her knee. “Sorry, sweetie.”

“It’s all right — not your fault.” The fog was so thick, it made day seem like night, and for a moment Robert realized again how close the line was between survival and death — if it had been another car — a head-on collision on the lonely, narrow road across the moor. The irony of him and Rosemary dying on their honeymoon while David, having weathered the vicissitudes of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, was now safe in Liege, awaiting transport back to England, struck with full force. Even hitting the deer could have been disastrous for them, and in a second he found himself envisaging Rosemary’s face slashed bloody with broken glass and saw his other brother, Ray, the thirty-seven-year-old ex-captain of a missile frigate, the USS Blaine.

Ray, once nicknamed “Cruise” because of his resemblance to the onetime Hollywood idol, had been wounded in the flash fire following the attack of a swarm of fast, small North Korean attack boats, one of whose missiles had exploded on the Blaine’s bridge. Ray’s face was now a horror mask of tight, polished skin, and he was still convalescing after a long, painful, and still unfinished series of plastic surgery operations. Robert had been revolted when he’d first seen the pictures of Ray and then felt guilty. He had never been close to either Ray or David. Perhaps, he thought, it wasn’t so much a matter of different personalities as the gap in ages between him and his two younger brothers. It was like the age of “Bing” Crosby, as Robert was called by his crew, meeting Springsteen. After a certain age, your tastes just didn’t change much, “nor your tactics,” as one of the submarine instructors had told them, which is why anyone heading into his “deep” forties was considered too old for submarines. The temptation to let old habits ride, never to change them, from music to tactics, he knew could be fatal aboard the most complex fighting machine in history.

“Burns’s cottage,” said Rosemary, looking down at the map, “should be about five miles further on.” Robert was feeling unusually drowsy, a temporary reaction, he knew from his war patrols on the sub, to the rush of adrenaline caused by a near miss — in this case a deer standing in for a Russian depth charge.

“Robert — I don’t want to be a backseat driver, but you’re going awfully fast.” He glanced at the speedometer — seventy kilometers per hour.

“Just a tad over forty,” he said, and almost added that Roosevelt went faster than this when she was submerged — but he stopped himself.

“You’re angry?” she said, turning to him.

“Nope.”

“Yes you are.”

“No, seriously. I was — Melissa! That’s it.”

“What—?”

“David’s girlfriend. Melissa Lange.”

“Have you been thinking of her all this time?” Rosemary pressed mischievously. “I supposed that’s why we almost hit that poor deer.”

“No,” he said, smiling across at her. “That had nothing to do with it. You were right. I was going too fast for fog like this.”

“ ‘Och, och —’ as Mr. McRae would say, ‘ye’re noo tellin’ me the truth, Robert Brentwood. You were going fast because you were thinking of her. This Melissa creature. ‘Turns you on,’ I suppose, as you Americans say.”

“Aye,” he joked, in an atrocious imitation of a Scottish accent. The car slowed to twenty kilometers, the fog so thick, visibility was near zero. Now the car was at a crawl, Robert sitting well forward in the seat. He flicked on the left turn signal.

“What are you doing?” asked Rosemary, alarmed. “We’re not there—”