The First of July(55)

“But, you know,” she said, “your country’s right in there. They’re beyond choice. If I were an Englishman, even a legitimate exile, I might just want to see what kind of soldier I’d make.”

She was watching him, perhaps to see if she’d gone too far. His eyes met hers.

“You mean what kind of man I’d be.”

She inclined her head minutely, then looked around the room, taking in the company. He became conscious of a hubbub of voices, metal on china, clinking glasses, murmurs filling the silence when she stopped speaking. He realized how warm it was, noting that the skin of the black footman standing on the far side of the table was beaded with sweat. He could smell the gardenias. Yet outside, New York was frozen.

Finally, after a minute, she turned back to him.

“A wealthy man, a comfortable man,” her smile softened any mockery, “a well-connected man. Clearly a thinking man. But what else might you be or not be?”

That night, he wrote to an Army friend of his father’s who was currently commanding the Somersets. And the next day, he spoke briefly to a rather perplexed secretary at the British Embassy.

Over the next month, spring officially came closer but the weather got colder. He was restless and left his office early one day, intending to be home before Marina returned from her weekly painting classes. The air hurt his lungs as if particles of powdered glass were suspended in it. It was only early afternoon, yet the sun was beginning to set. He bought the papers and read them while stamping his feet to keep warm. An already out-of-date London Illustrated News had a cheerful picture of Australian soldiers training in England before departing for France. They looked healthy and happy: farm boys tanned by a recent southern summer. He read that Australian volunteers had overwhelmed recruitment offices. Boys looking for adventure, something outside the narrow confines of the world they knew, of sheep or mining, and on his home turf now, ready to fight. It had begun to feel as if America was the only nation not at war.

On the inside pages was an account of the battle being fought between Austrians and Russians in the snow and bitter cold of the mountains and forests of the Carpathians. He had no real idea where this was, nor could he envisage the two forces. A new atlas of the imagination was required for this war. The first photographs of Austria’s armies parading as they went to war had looked somehow exotic, like the early nineteenth-century prints of men in shakos and gold-frogged jackets that his father had hung in his study at Abbotsgate. There was nothing of this here. The soldiers photographed in The Times were unidentifiable: dark, crouched bundles of despair or death in churned-up, dirty snow.

As he turned for home, he glanced back toward the park, a favorite view of his in summer, and saw something extraordinary. Between the bare trees rose a column of misty colors: indigo, pink, and green, a frozen helical rainbow rising from the ground until it vanished into the sky. He looked around to see if anyone else had seen it, but he was alone in the white expanse of frozen grass, with the shimmering prism of light an unknown distance away.

He left the park, turning his back on it. It was, he was sure, a combination of sunlight, temperature, and perhaps humidity. The sun would set in half an hour and the effect would not survive that, he thought. But he was still full of the wonder of it as he sat in the drawing room, gazing out into the New York evening: a darkness that never was dark, a wilderness of light, it had seemed to him when he first arrived.

Then, standing at the window, about to draw the curtains, he saw Marina’s father’s car pulling away from the curb, his driver at the wheel. When she came through the front door, he had turned on the lights and was waiting in what she called the vestibule and he still called the hall. She was still in her dark vicuña coat and a velvet hat trimmed with white fur, colorless strands of hair curling onto her pale skin. The tip of her nose was pink, but otherwise she was a picture in monochrome. Feeling a surge of love for her, he put his arms around her and, for the first time, felt reciprocation in her embrace: her chilly cheek against his, her lips on his neck, her fur hat tickling his eyes.

“This is purely in pursuit of warmth,” she said. “Life-saving.”

He pulled her closer, spun her around. Pushed her before him toward the bedroom, then unpinned her hat, set it carefully on the table, unhooked her coat, sat her on the ottoman at the foot of her bed, and, kneeling, unbuttoned her boots from ankle to calf. He ran his hand under her heavy skirt and up her calves, then stopped and glanced up, suddenly uncertain, and she returned his unspoken question with a look of such beauty and tenderness that he felt a vast sense of relief, enough to make him fumble for a second in loosening her stockings.