“HOW BAD WAS IT, DARLING?”
We were in Martha’s rooms at the Dorchester, on Park Lane. Of all the fancy London hotels, it was the drabbest on the outside, especially now, with the sandbags piled outside the main entrance and the windows taped or boarded. On its best day, it looked like a branch of the Bank of England or the Board of Trade. Now it didn’t look even that good. But the rooms were still luxurious, if just a bit worn. Across the street, Hyde Park was decked out in its summer green, but there were barrage balloons hovering above the nannies pushing prams and the little girls in pony clubs, riding on Rotten Row. You couldn’t forget the war, even on a sultry Saturday evening.
“It was pretty bad,” I said.
We were lying in bed without our clothes, which is how I realized that she had lost her dark Cuban tan. I hadn’t seen her in a while. The last time I had seen her like this was on a beach on the Caribbean side of Cuba. She was brown all over then. That had been a good day.
“If you don’t want to talk about it, it’s okay,” she said.
“You have enough material to write about, as it is?”
“God, yes. There’s nothing but material.”
“In that case, let’s skip it for the time being. Let’s talk about the next few days. I have a week’s leave.”
“How lovely. Let’s go somewhere romantic.”
“Paris is out, I’m afraid. But I’m open to suggestions.”
“I know! We’ll go out to Stockbridge. It’s a little village in the country, not too far, so petrol shouldn’t be a problem. I can get a car. There’s a charming hotel there. Very cozy. Very eighteenth-century. We can fish during the day and make love at night and sleep late in the mornings and have breakfast in bed and dinners in the pub. Bangers and mash and pints of local beer. Yum.”
“Fish?”
“Yes. It’s brilliant fishing there. The Test River runs right through town. We’ll hire a gillie and catch some trout.”
“That’ll be a new experience for me.”
“Even better. I can teach you. We can rent tackle at the hotel. It will be fun. Ernest would be green with envy, not that I’ll tell him. The Test is a world-famous trout stream.” Ernest was her husband and a well-known aficionado of all things having to do with fishing.
“It sounds perfect.”
It didn’t really, not the fishing part, but I didn’t want to spoil her mood. And besides, she might be right. I might like it, too. The fishing part, I mean. I knew I would like all the rest of it, and, after all, wanting perfection is the best way to ruin your appreciation of the good things of life. I think Voltaire said something along those lines, and he was right about that, at least. A Bollinger ’41 might not be a Veuve Clicquot ’26, but it is still champagne. And if I’m entirely honest with myself, I can’t really tell much difference.
“What do you want to do now, darling?” she whispered.
“I have an idea.”
“Oh. So I see. Encore? Well, you have been at sea for a long time, haven’t you?”
“Yes. And away from you even longer.”
“I’m glad. Not about the separation. But about the reunion. Do you still like me even though my tan has faded?”
“Looking for a compliment?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, then—If ever any beauty I did see, which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.”
She looked at me for a moment, dropping all suggestion of flirtation.
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. In this case.”
“That’s a line from John Donne, isn’t it? I think so.”
“Yes.”
“My God. I’d almost forgotten what a romantic you are.”
“Someone has to be.”
“You spoil me for the real world, you know.”
“At your service, madame.”
During this last Atlantic crossing, while we were shepherding the slow-moving convoy and when we were in the mid-Atlantic, and not yet into the danger zone of the Western Approaches, there was a lot of time to read, and I read most of John Donne. Not his sermons, but all the poems. He had a lot of good lines. That doesn’t mean I didn’t mean what I said to Martha. It just means Donne had a lot of good lines.
He also wrote No man is an island. I couldn’t agree with him about that. No man is an island? Really? Once the Germans started their relentless attacks on our convoy, there were plenty of men left isolated and adrift, bobbing in the swells, pathetic specks we didn’t dare to stop and rescue because of the U-boats below and the Luftwaffe bombers overhead. The best we could do was try not to run them down as we zigzagged at flank speed to avoid the bombs and torpedoes and the burning oil and smoking cargos. Those men blown into the water when their vessels sank sure looked like little islands, some waving to us to come back, others exhausted, oil-soaked, helpless, and resigned. They were alone in their fate, as forlorn as any useless speck of coral in the midst of nothing.
Of course, islands don’t sink and drown, so in that sense, men aren’t islands. But I don’t think that’s what Donne meant when he wrote that poem. I think he was talking about the brotherhood of man, or some such happy horseshit. Frankly, I couldn’t see it.
And I remembered that Martha’s husband had borrowed that poem for the epigraph of a book. I wondered if he really believed it. I don’t think so. I knew him. Not that I wanted to think much about him—not while I was lying naked next to his naked wife.
“Speaking of John Donne,” I said, “there’s another pretty line that seems appropriate. But I’ll save it for the morning.”
“I’ll bet I know. And now good-morrow to our waking souls. Is that it?”
“Nicely done. But you’ve ruined the surprise. I forgot that you went to Bryn Mawr.”
“Only for three years. So you can tell me again in the morning. I promise I’ll forget it tonight, if you give me something to take my mind off it.”
“As I said, I am at your service.”
“And I, my darling, am at yours.”
“Well, then, Where can we find two better hemispheres?”
“God. I’m ruined. But, darling, let me ask you something. Are you sure I don’t need a pillow under my ass?”
“I told you months ago in Cuba that that was nonsense.”
“I was just wondering. I may have lost a few pounds, since I’ve been here. The food is bad for the figure.”
“The only thing you’ve lost is your tan.”
“I’m glad you think so. Now will you please do to me whatever you want to do?”
“How about if I do whatever you’d like me to do?”
“Mmm. I’ll bet they’re the same things.”
I don’t know who told her that business about the pillow. I could guess, but I wasn’t sure. But whoever said it had hurt her, and it was unfair, because I wasn’t lying when I said she didn’t need one. She really didn’t. But even if she did, it wasn’t the kind of thing you’d say, if you cared about her. Or even if you didn’t.