Kitty/Kate had none of the self-consciousness of the middle-aged woman, but then, she’d had none of the self-consciousness of the young woman twenty years ago. Modesty was always, by definition, false modesty, of which she had none. No ‘Don’t look at my stretchmarks’ or ‘Don’t look at my spare tyre.’ She had neither: she’d looked after herself. At almost forty-nine she was tall, lean and firm with a better tan than she’d ever have had to show if she’d spent her life in England. At almost forty-four Troy was skinny and pale, a book of scars on which she passed no comment. This was a gentler Kitty. The need was obvious, the haste absent. It was a slower, more gentle lovemaking than he’d ever known with her. And she was setting the pace. He would not have initiated the sexual rage of their younger days, but he would not have objected either. A little rage might have convinced him of his own capacity. He liked slow and easy. He’d rather liked rage too.
Afterwards. Kitty sprawled and musing. Stringing her sentences together slow and breathy. ‘You remember the film?’
‘Which film?’
’The Best Years of Our Lives. The one you were ‘Right.’
‘The scene where Fredric March finally gets back to his apartment in whatever one-horse town it is. . .’
‘Of course, they never do tell you exactly where. There’s that marvellous shot from the bomb-aimer’s window as the plane comes in low over Kansas or Iowa or wherever, lasts for ages, and you see the midwest, flat and almost endless, rolling away beneath the plane. I think it’s meant to give you a sense of it being Anytown, USA.’
‘Have you finished? Because I hadn’t. Myrna Loy is in the kitchen. March comes in the front door and shushes the kids, but Myrna Loy . . . I guess she kind of hears the silence. But she doesn’t turn around straight away. There’s a tangible moment of anticipation. You almost hear her breathing. Then . . . well, then . . . you know. That’s not unlike Cal’s return home. I mean, I didn’t think he was dead or anything. In fact, I knew damn well he wasn’t. But it was scary. In 1943 he’d got himself transferred out of Intelligence to a front-line regiment. He could have spent the whole damn war at a desk in Washington, but he wouldn’t do it. Said it would make him sick to see other guys fighting the war while he polished a chair with his trousers. Said he’d had enough of spooks and spookery, scuttlebutt and lies. So he did the honest and stupid thing – he put his life on the line.’
‘So did Rod. Had a desk job working with Ike at Overlord HQ. Once the D-Day plans were fixed he asked to fly again.’
‘Did they let him?’
‘Yes. Led squadrons of Tempests over France. Made Wing Commander.’
‘Cal was a full colonel by 1945. That February the Americans – I should say we, the Americans – landed on Iwo Jima. That was the only time I really thought he might have bought it. About a thousand dead GIs for every square mile. He was there, as much in the thick of it as a full colonel could be. But in the end it was promotion saved him. By the end of the war he was a one-star general.’
‘That’s like what? A brigadier?’
‘Yep. And he was one of the youngest. And he came home in 1946, and it really was like that Myrna Loy moment. Just to touch him. Knowing he was safe wasn’t enough. I had to touch him. Young Walt was born nine months later to the day. Then in ‘47 he puts in his papers and says he’s running for the Senate. His grandfather’s old seat. And I said, “I thought you’d had enough of scuttlebutt and lies” . . . but he couldn’t see the comparison. He won the seat easily enough. Catch Cormack’s grandson and a war hero to boot. How could he lose? Even had enough of the adman in him to open the campaign in uniform, with all those medal ribbons across his chest. Soon switched to a suit. That’s Cal. Wasn’t a soldier any more so he couldn’t pretend he was. I said yes to a soldier. For all but the first five years I’ve been married to a politician. Even that was tolerable. But now I’m married to a candidate. And if all goes well for him, the candidate. It’s like being married to a suit.’
They’d just made love. Twice. She had mused away the afterglow talking of her husband. It was as well not to mind. Later, as Kolankiewicz had warned him, Troy’s insomnia returned. She slept, he blazed as though floodlit in the darkness. He tried an American version of counting sleep, working out the names of all those presidents who had been bachelors, not trusting Kitty’s knowledge of history any more than he’d trust her knowledge of quantum physics. Sleep through ephemera. Jefferson had been a widower – one of his daughters had been First Lady . . . which said nothing of the Second Lady, the black mistress, or of their children, born into slavery . . . and Buchanan, had he been a bachelor? Who remembered the first thing about Buchanan? He was about as important as Neville Chamberlain for much the same reasons. Woodrow Wilson had been a widower too, but remarried . . . Perhaps the only contender was Grover Cleveland, who had married during one of his disparate terms of office . . . but which one? However, this altered nothing. Underlying Kitty’s assertion was the inescapable truth that there’d never been a divorced president. In a land that stamped ‘In God We Trust’ on its coins, biblical rectitude was never far away and could be invoked by the most godless of critics. The infidelities of Ike and the curious marriage that had been Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s notwithstanding, Kitty could unseat Cal at the first hurdle. He wouldn’t win a primary, let alone the nomination, without a loyal wife by his side.