Night Over Water - Ken Follett [43]
When she came, she cried.
Fortunately, Mervyn did not notice.
As Diana sat in the elegant lounge of the South-Western Hotel on Wednesday morning, waiting for a taxi to take Mark and her to Berth 108 in Southampton Docks to board the Pan American Clipper, she felt triumphant and free.
Everyone in the room was either looking at her or trying not to look at her. She was getting a particularly hard stare from a handsome man in a blue suit who must be ten years younger than she was. But she was used to that. It always happened when she looked good, and today she was stunning. Her cream-and-red dotted silk dress was fresh, summery and striking. Her cream shoes were right and the straw hat finished the outfit off perfectly. Her lipstick and nail varnish were orange-red like the dots on the dress. She had thought about red shoes but decided they would look tarty.
She loved traveling: packing and unpacking her clothes, meeting new people, being pampered and cosseted and plied with champagne and food, and seeing new places. She was nervous about flying, but crossing the Atlantic was the most glamorous voyage of all, for at the other end was America. She could hardly wait to get there. She had a filmgoer’s picture of what it was like: she saw herself in an Art Deco apartment, all windows and mirrors, with a uniformed maid helping her put on a white fur coat and a long black car in the street outside with its engine running and a colored chauffeur waiting to take her to a nightclub, where she would order a martini, very dry, and dance to a jazz band that had Bing Crosby as its singer. That was a fantasy, she knew; but she could hardly wait to discover the reality.
She felt ambivalent about leaving Britain just as the war was starting. It seemed a cowardly thing to do, yet she was thrilled to be going.
She knew a lot of Jewish people. Manchester had a big Jewish community: the Manchester Jews had planted a thousand trees in Nazareth. Diana’s Jewish friends watched the progress of events in Europe with horror and dread. It was not just the Jews, either: the Fascists hated the coloreds, and the Gypsies, and the queers, and anyone else who disagreed with Fascism. Diana had an uncle who was queer and he had always been kind to her and treated her like a daughter.
She was too old to join up, but she probably ought to stay in Manchester and do volunteer work, winding bandages for the Red Cross....
That was a fantasy, even more unlikely than dancing to Bing Crosby. She was not the type to wind bandages. Austerity and uniforms did not suit her.
But none of that was truly important. The only thing that counted was that she was in love. She would go where Mark was. She would have followed him into the heart of a battlefield if necessary. They were going to get married and have children. He was going home, and she was going with him.
She would miss her twin nieces. She wondered how long it would be before she would see them. They might be grown up next time, wearing perfume and brassieres instead of ankle socks and pigtails.
But she might have little girls of her own....
She was thrilled about traveling on the Pan American Clipper. She had read all about it in the Manchester Guardian, never dreaming that one day she would actually fly in it. To get to New York in little more than a day seemed like a miracle.
She had written Mervyn a note. It did not say any of the things she wanted to tell him; did not explain how he had