Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [92]
Wonderful, isn’t it? Here are the Brightest and Best, within a gnat’s whisker, as far as they know, of global catastrophe, and they’re arguing about the meaning of the word standstill. That old pedant Tash Harmsworth would’ve been delighted, though not so much with the Americans’ grammar.
Of course, the whole discussion was pointless. The Russians had a veto in the U.N. Security Council, and there was no way in the world they were going to vote for a “standstill” and allow U.N. inspectors to snoop around their Cuban missile sites. In the language of the Hawks, Adlai Stevenson and the other Doves were screwed. War was on its way. It was the only game in town. The only question was, who dealt?
Clem had looked up coy in the two-volume Oxford Dictionary and had been surprised to discover that it was the name for “a lobster trap.” Surely not . . . No, the second definition offered “shyly undemonstrative” or “distant, disdainful.” That would be it. Then he sat in one of the beaten-up leather armchairs in the Nelson Library with a copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse and turned its small, wispy pages until he got to Marvell.
He found the poem hard going, at first. Shakespearean. Until he got to the line that ended with the word breast. It definitely meant “tit,” because Marvell was talking about taking two hundred years “to adore each breast.” And “each” means there were two, therefore . . . Then came the lines that Tash had quoted in the bogs.
Clem went back to the beginning of the poem and read more slowly, and it dawned on him: the poem was about seduction; no, the poem was a seduction. It was pretty dirty, actually.
Marvell was saying to his tight-kneed girlfriend, “Look, we’re going to die, and it might happen anytime soon. And we’re going to be a long time dead. So let’s have sex, right now, before it’s too late.”
It struck Clem as a fairly convincing argument. And urgently topical, despite having been written three hundred years ago.
He didn’t understand the last two lines:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
But the gist of the poem was clear enough. He went to the signing-out book on the corner table and wrote, The Ox Book of Eng Verse, then his name and the date.
A lower-sixther called Sullivan walked into the room and said, “The four-minute warning has just gone off. No, really. Didn’t you hear it? I’m off upstairs to do Stinker’s daughter before I die. Anyone coming with me? The swivel-eyed tart will never know which one of us it was.”
“Go away, Slug,” a prefect named Bradley said from another armchair. “Or would you prefer that in language that you understand?”
The American invasion of Cuba was code-named Operation Scabbards. It would begin with a series of massive air bombardments: three a day until missile sites and other military targets had been wiped out. Then twenty-three thousand airborne troops would seize Havana’s airport — or what was left of it — south of the city. Meanwhile eight divisions, a hundred and twenty thousand men, would land on beaches to the east and west. The Americans would converge on Havana from all three directions, isolating it and cutting it off from its inland missile bases, if any had survived.
All well and good, except that the Americans still didn’t know about the forty thousand Soviet troops waiting to greet them. And until late on Friday, the officers who would be at the sharp end didn’t know that the Russians had nuclear battlefield weapons. When they found out, they started demanding them, too.
Castro and his Russian allies had received a good deal of information — some of it accurate — about the American buildup. Fidel was convinced that the Yanquis hadn’t invested so much energy, and so many of their filthy capitalist dollars, in some sort of symbolic gesture. This time they would invade, for sure. He’d been anticipating — eagerly, some thought — another invasion ever since the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He’d never really understood why Kennedy had pulled back that time.