“I really am.”
He insisted on watching the news that night. Everything seemed terrible. It was a relief to go to bed, even to a fraught bed that had Michael making love to Bee. Pat felt unnecessary and uncomfortable, but stayed, because she remembered what a comfort it had been to her to have Bee there. Afterwards, Michael went to sleep in the spare room and Pat and Bee curled up together as they did every night. “Imagine them growing up together,” Bee whispered, her hand on Pat’s belly where she had just begun to feel the baby moving.
“If the Russians and Americans leave us a world for them to grow up in,” Pat said.
The next morning it appeared that they would not. There had been what the BBC called “a limited nuclear exchange” in the night. Kennedy and Khruschev were reported to be talking.
“Oh, now they’re talking!” Bee said. “What was wrong with talking yesterday before all those people were killed?”
Pat found it hard to take in. The Russians had bombed Miami from their Cuban bases and the Americans had retaliated with a strike on Kiev, from a base in Turkey. “What does it mean?” Pat asked.
“I don’t know,” Michael said. “Fallout. Radiation poisoning. And maybe it will be the all-out Armageddon we’ve all been expecting. It can’t be over. I should go back to my parents.”
“Thank you for coming. If the world’s still here, we’ll let you know whether we’d like you to come down next month. And of course, you’d be welcome to visit at any time just to visit.” Pat hugged him.
Bee drove Michael back to the station and Pat washed dishes in the kitchen, listening to the radio. Hundreds of thousands of people were dead in Miami, but the fallout seemed to be carried out into the Atlantic rather than polluting the rest of the US. She wasn’t sure where Miami was, so she looked it up on an old Penguin atlas of Bee’s. Florida. On the coast. Quite near Cuba, really. Britain was in a state of preparedness for war, the BBC announced. In the event of a nuclear attack, citizens should take shelter. Where, Pat wondered, in the cellar? She remembered the bomb shelters in the war. The world was so beautiful and so fragile. They really shouldn’t risk it this way.
When she thought of bombs falling it wasn’t Kiev or Miami she saw, or even Cambridge, but Florence. Sharp hot tears burned in her eyes as she thought of Florence vanished in a flash, or, almost worse, full of deadly radiation and empty of people, all the art crumbling and neglected. Cellini’s Perseus would last if it was anything but a direct hit, and Michelangelo’s David. Marble and bronze survived, but would anybody ever look at them again and understand what they were? She so much wanted to show Florence to her baby, and to Bee’s baby, and to future generations.
Then suddenly she was afraid for her baby. Was deadly radiation already filtering down through the bright sky? When she came back Bee could dispel that fear at least. “It would be days before it reached us. And depending on the weather it might never reach us. Stop crying, what good does that do?” Bee took her in her arms and rocked her.
“It’s the hormones,” Pat said, sniffing. “I thought of Florence—”
“I keep thinking of all those people in Miami and Kiev. So many people. Like the Blitz ten times over and all at once. Men! You’d think Hiroshima would have been enough to let anyone know how terrible a weapon it is. How could they have used it? How could they?”
At six o’clock it was announced that Khruschev and Kennedy had bowed to the Secretary General of the United Nations and would make peace. The Russians would withdraw their missiles from Cuba, and the Americans from Turkey. They regretted the loss of life.
“Regretted!” Bee snorted.
Kennedy’s recorded image addressed them from the screen, looking tear-stained and broken, ten years older than when she had last seen him. “He looks guilty enough,” Pat said.
“For what good that does.”
“The world has come to the brink of destruction,” Kennedy said. “We have stepped back from the abyss.”
“Can the world just go back to normal, after that?” Pat asked. “I mean, is it possible? People always talked about The Bomb, with capital letters, as if dropping one meant dropping them all. Doomsday.”