Martha brings the woman an apple.
“I’m waiting for him to come out,” the woman says, polishing the apple on her thin cotton skirt. “Then I’ll say, remember me? Remember the weekend we spent in the cottage by the sea? Well, we have a daughter. I’ll say, I only want what’s mine.”
Later, Martha sees the apple, shiny but uneaten, lying under a tree.
DIANA HAS PREPARED a light supper. Cold slices of leftover lamb. A salad. But she tells Nigel she won’t be joining them. Some nights it is more than she can manage to make her way downstairs to the dining room.
“Do you think Winston Churchill would have an illegitimate child?” Martha asks Nigel. She is cutting her meat into tiny pieces.
“I don’t know,” Nigel says, baffled and embarrassed.
“He’s half-American, you know,” she says.
“Of course I know that,” Nigel says. “He’s our prime minister.”
She leans wickedly close to him. Her eyes are green with flecks of gold, like a precious stone of some kind. “Did you know his mother invented the Manhattan?” she asks him.
Nigel frowns. “The Manhattan?” he repeats.
“Oh,” she says, grabbing his hands. “It’s the most wonderful cocktail. I’ll make us some! That’s what I’ll do!”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Just wait,” she says, closing her eyes, still holding on to his hands. “You’ll love a Manhattan.” She opens her eyes. “We won’t tell Diana.”
“No,” Nigel says.
“It will be our secret,” Martha says. She winks at him. Such a fun-loving girl, a happy-go-lucky girl. He sees why his son married her. He still doesn’t understand why Robin didn’t tell them, why he didn’t bring her home himself. But he sees Robin loving her. That much is clear.
NIGEL SUPPOSES HE SPENDS too much time drunk. It isn’t the drunkenness of his youth, when he and his friends would spend hours at the pubs, drinking and boisterous, singing, loud. This is a somnambulant drunkenness. It makes everything fuzzy and soft. It makes everything pleasant. It slows his thinking and reactions; he knows that. But it’s worth it for the gentle humming it brings deep in his brain.
He watches the girl leave and wonders in his drunkenness if tonight she will bring home the Manhattans, like she promised. It is morning. It is May. He is drunk. The girl walks with her bouncy American steps down the gray London streets.
MARTHA SITS ON THE BENCH and eats some bread and cheese. She waits.
“Winston Churchill is the father of my daughter,” the woman says loudly. “I only want what is mine.”
WEEKS PASS. Nigel waits. But the girl does not bring him secret cocktails.
She is in Vermont. It is fall. The air carries a chill that gets into your bones. Martha sleeps under four blankets, sinking into the feather bed. Her mother reads her Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses. She closes her eyes and her mother’s voice lulls her to sleep.
Since they got word about Robin, Diana has not let Nigel touch her. But tonight he feels her hand slide down his pajama bottoms. She takes him, soft and small, into her hand and works and works but he cannot grow hard. There is an ache where his leg used to be, a deep ache. He thinks he might cry from what he has lost and the pain it brings him now, even after all this time. Diana pumps and pumps his poor soft thing. When she gives up, he makes his way on his one good leg to the front room and sits in his pajamas and drinks another glass of sherry.
From behind the closed door of the girl’s room he hears that song.
Missed the Saturday dance . . . Heard they crowded the floor . . .
THEN, WHEN HE has finally given up hope that Martha will come to him, she slips into his study. Nigel does not want her to see him like this. He has on only his boxer shorts and his shirt. His artificial leg leans against one wall like a sentry. The stump where his leg used to be is bright red and covered with fresh sores.
But he cannot get up and hide it from her. She is here and is holding a pitcher of amber liquid with ice and cherries in it. In her other hand, she has two cocktail glasses.
“Try to get some bourbon in this town,” she says, laughing. She tries not to look at his stump.
She pours them each a drink, then hands him one. When they clink glasses, she says, “To Winston Churchill!”
“To Winston Churchill,” Nigel says. The drink is delicious, sweet but sharp. “Very good,” he says.
“What happened to you?” she asks, glancing at it.
“War,” he says. “The last one.”
She is a good drinker, this girl. A party girl, Nigel thinks after she refills their glasses.
“Where did you meet him?” Nigel asks her.
“At a dance,” she says. “He was in uniform. So handsome,” she says, her eyes and her voice both fading. But then she turns bright again. “Like his father.”
Nigel has that foggy pleasure in his brain. The girl is muted somehow. The sound of her voice distant.
She moves toward him, reaches out a tentative hand.