“I don’t know what to say.”
“That’s a bloody change. Anyway.” Don lit a cigarette, and blew a long plume of smoke. His eyes met Anthony’s almost guiltily. “She agrees with me that we should send you back out.”
It took Anthony a beat to register what he was saying.
“To Congo?”
“You’re the best man for the job.”
Congo.
“But I need to know . . .” Don tapped his cigarette on an ashtray.
“It’s fine.”
“Let me finish. I need to know you’re going to look after yourself. I can’t be worrying.”
“No drinking. Nothing reckless. I just . . . I need to do the job.”
“That’s what I thought.” But Don didn’t believe him—Anthony could see it in the sideways look. A short pause. “I would feel responsible.”
“I know.”
Clever man, Don. But Anthony couldn’t reassure him. How could he? He wasn’t sure how he was going to get through the next half an hour, let alone how he’d feel in the heart of Africa.
Don’s voice broke in again before the answer became overwhelming. He stubbed out his cigarette. “Football’s on in a minute. Chelsea versus Arsenal. Fancy it?” He climbed heavily out of his chair and flicked on the mahogany-clad box in the corner. “I’ll tell you one bit of good news. You can’t get that bastard yellow fever again. When you’ve been as sick as you were, apparently you’re immune.”
Anthony stared unseeing at the black-and-white screen. How do I make the rest of me immune?
They were in the foreign editor’s office. Paul de Saint, a tall, patrician man with swept-back hair and the air of a Romantic poet, was studying a map on the desk. “The big story’s in Stanleyville. There are at least eight hundred non-Congolese being held hostage there, many in the Victoria Hotel, and perhaps a thousand more in the surrounding area. Diplomatic efforts to save them have so far failed. There’s so much infighting between the rebels that the situation is changing by the hour, so it’s near impossible to get an accurate picture. It’s pretty woolly out there, O’Hare. Until maybe six months ago, I would have said the safety of any white man was guaranteed, whatever was going on with the natives. Now, I’m afraid, they seem to be targeting les colons . There are some fairly horrific stories coming out. Nothing we can put in the paper.” He paused. “Rape is only the half of it.”
“How do I get in?”
“There’s our starting problem. I’ve been talking to Nicholls, and the best way is going to be via Rhodesia—or Zambia, as they’re now calling the northern half. Our man there is trying to work out a land route for you, but many of the roads have been destroyed, and it’ll take days.”
As he talked travel logistics with Don, Anthony let the conversation drift away from him and saw, with some gratitude, that not only had a whole half hour gone by in which he hadn’t thought of her but that the story was pulling him in. He could feel nervous anticipation germinating in his belly, and was drawn to the challenge of getting across the hostile terrain. He felt no fear. How could he? What worse things could happen?
He leafed through the files that de Saint’s deputy handed him. The political background; the Communist aid to the rebels that had so enraged the Americans; the execution of the American missionary, Paul Carlson. He read the ground-level reports of what the rebels had done, and his jaw tightened. They took him back to 1960 and the turmoil of Lumumba’s brief rule. He read them as if at a distance. He felt as if the man who had been out there before—the man so shattered by what he had seen—was someone he no longer recognized.
“So, we’ll book flights to Kenya tomorrow, yes? We’ve got a man on the inside at Sabena who’ll let us know if there are any internal flights to Congo. Otherwise it’s drop at Salisbury airport and make your way across the Rhodesian border. Yes?”
“Do we know which correspondents have made it there?”
“There’s not an awful lot coming out. I suspect communications are difficult. But Oliver has a piece in the Mail today, and I’ve heard the Telegraph is running big tomorrow.”
The door opened. Cheryl’s face was anxious.
“We’re in the middle of something, Cheryl.” Don sounded irritated.
“Sorry,” she said, “but your boy is here.”
It took Anthony several seconds to grasp that she was looking at him. “My boy?”
“I’ve put him in Don’s office.”
Anthony stood up, barely able to digest what he had heard. “Excuse me a moment,” he said, and followed Cheryl out across the newsroom.
There it was: the jolt he experienced on the few occasions he got to see Phillip, a kind of visceral shock at how much he had changed since the last visit, his growth a constant rebuke to his father’s absence.
In six months his son’s frame had elongated by inches, tipped its way into adolescence, but not yet filled out. Hunched over himself, he resembled a question mark. He looked up as Anthony entered the room, and his face was blanched, his eyes red-rimmed.
Anthony stood there, trying to work out the cause of the grief etched across his son’s pale face, and some distant part of him wondered, Is it me again? Did he find out what I did to myself? Am I such a failure in his eyes?
“It’s Mother,” Phillip said. He blinked furiously and wiped his nose with his hand.
Anthony took a step closer. The boy unfurled and threw himself with unexpected force into his father’s arms. Anthony felt himself gripped, Phillip’s hands clutching at his shirt as if he would never let him go, and he allowed his own hand to fall gently onto his boy’s head as sobs racked the thin body.
The rain was so loud on the roof of Don’s car that it almost drowned thought. Almost, but not quite. In the twenty minutes it had taken them to edge through the traffic on Kensington High Street, the two men had sat in silence, the only other sound Don’s fervent drags on his cigarette.
“Accident,” Don said, staring at the snaking red taillights in front of him. “Must have been a big one. We should ring the newsroom.” He made no effort to pull over by the telephone boxes.
When Anthony said nothing, Don leaned over and fiddled with the radio until static defeated him. He examined the end of his cigarette, blew on it, making it glow. “De Saint says we have till tomorrow. Any later than that, and we have to wait four days for the next scheduled flight.” He spoke as if there was a decision to be made. “You could go, and we’ll pull you off if she deteriorates.”
“She’s already deteriorated.” Clarissa’s cancer had been shocking in its swiftness. “She’s not expected to last the fortnight.”
“Bloody bus. Look at it, taking up twice the road.” Don wound down his window and threw his cigarette into the soaked street. He brushed the raindrops off his sleeve as he closed it again. “What’s the husband like, anyhow? No good?”
“Only met him once.”
I can’t stay with him. Please, Dad, don’t make me stay with him.
Phillip had gripped his belt like someone hanging on to a life raft. When Anthony had finally taken him back to the house in Parsons Green, he had felt the weight of those fingers long after he had handed him over.
“I’m very sorry,” he had said to Edgar. The curtain merchant, older than he had expected, had eyed him suspiciously, as if some insult had lain in what he’d said.
“I can’t go.” The words were out there. It was almost a relief to say them. Like finally being given the death sentence after years of possible reprieves.
Don sighed. It might have been melancholy or relief. “He’s your son.”
“He’s my son.” He had promised: Yes, of course you can stay with me. Of course you can. It’s going to be all right. Even as he said the words, he had not fully understood what he was giving away.
The traffic had begun to move again, at first a slow crawl and then walking speed.
They were at Chiswick before Don spoke again. “You know, O’Hare, this might work. It might be a bit of a gift. God knows what could have happened to you out there.”
Don glanced sideways.
“And who knows? Let the boy settle down a bit . . . you can still go off into the field. Maybe we’ll have him to stay. Let Viv look after him. He’d like it at ours. God knows, she misses having children around the place. Christ.” A thought occurred. “You’re going to have to find yourself a bloody house. No more living out of hotel rooms.”
He let Don ramble on, laying before him this mythical new life, like stories on a page, promising, soothing, the fellow family man emerging to make him feel better, to hide what he had lost, to quell the drum still beating somewhere in the darker regions of his soul.
He had been given two weeks’ compassionate leave to find himself somewhere to live and to shepherd his son through his mother’s death and the dour formality of her funeral. Phillip had not wept in front of him again. He had expressed polite pleasure at the small terraced house in southwest London—close to his school, and to Don and Viv, who had thrown herself into her role as prospective auntie with relish. He sat now with his pitiful suitcase, as if awaiting some future instruction. Edgar did not telephone to see how he was.
It was like living with a stranger. Phillip was anxious to please, as if afraid he would be sent away. Anthony was at pains to tell him how pleased he was that they were living together, although he felt secretly as though he had cheated someone, been given something he didn’t deserve. He felt horribly inadequate to deal with the boy’s overwhelming grief, and struggled to function in the face of his own.
He embarked upon a crash course in practical skills. He took their clothes to the launderette, sat beside Phillip at the barber. He didn’t know how to cook much more than a boiled egg, so they went each night to a café at the end of the street, huge, hearty meals of steak and kidney pie and overboiled vegetables, steamed puddings swimming in pale custard. They pushed the food listlessly around their plates, and every evening Phillip would announce that it had been “delicious, thank you,” as if going there had been a great treat. Back at the house, Anthony would stand outside his boy’s bedroom door, wondering whether to go in or if acknowledging his sadness would only make it worse.
On Sundays they were invited to Don’s house, where Viv would serve a roast dinner with all the trimmings, then insist that they play board games after she had cleared up. Watching the boy smile at her teasing, her bullish insistence that he join in, her enfolding of him into this strange extended family, made Anthony’s heart ache.
As they climbed into the car, he saw that even as Phillip waved at Viv, blowing kisses from the front window, a solitary tear rolled down his cheek. He grasped the steering wheel, paralyzed by such responsibility. He couldn’t work out what to say. What did he have to offer Phillip when he still wondered hourly whether it wouldn’t have been better if Clarissa had been the one to survive?
That night he sat in front of the fire, watching the first television pictures of the freed Stanleyville hostages. Their blurred shapes emerged from army aircraft and huddled in shocked groups on the tarmac. “Crack Belgian troops took a matter of hours to secure the city. It is still too early to count the casualties with any accuracy, but early reports suggest at least a hundred Europeans died in the crisis. There are many more still unaccounted for.”
He turned off the television, mesmerized by the screen long after the white dot had disappeared. Finally he went upstairs, hesitating outside his son’s door, listening to the unmistakable sound of muffled sobbing. It was a quarter past ten.
Anthony closed his eyes briefly, opened them, and pushed open the door. His son started and shoved something under the bedspread.