Night Over Water - Ken Follett [44]
Dear Mervyn,
I am leaving you. I feel you have become cold toward me, and I have fallen in love with someone else. By the time you read this, we will be in America. I am sorry to hurt you but it is partly your fault.
She could not think of an appropriate way to sign off—she could not write: Yours or With love—so she just put: Diana.
At first she had intended to leave the note in the house, on the kitchen table. Then she had become obsessed by the possibility that he would change his plans, and instead of staying at his club on Tuesday night, he would go home, and find the note, and make some kind of trouble for her and Mark before they were out of the country. So in the end she had mailed it to him at the factory, where it would arrive today.
She looked at her wristwatch (a present from Mervyn, who liked her to be punctual). She knew his routine: he spent most of the morning on the factory floor; then toward midday he would go up to his office and look through the mail before going to lunch. She had marked the envelope PERSONAL so that his secretary would not open it. It would be lying on his desk in a pile of invoices, orders, letters and memos. He would be reading it about now. The thought made her guilty and sad, but also relieved that she was two hundred miles away.
“Our taxi’s here,” Mark said.
She felt a little nervous. Across the Atlantic in a plane!
“Time to go,” he said.
She suppressed her anxiety. She put down her coffee cup, stood up and gave him her brightest smile. “Yes,” she said happily. “Time to fly.”
Eddie had always been shy with girls.
He had graduated from Annapolis a virgin. When he was stationed at Pearl Harbor, he had gone with prostitutes, and that experience had left him with a sense of self-disgust. After leaving the navy, he had just been a loner, driving to a bar a few miles away any time he felt the need of companionship. Carol-Ann was a ground hostess working for the airline at Port Washington, Long Island, the New York terminal for flying boats. She was a suntanned blonde with eyes of Pan American blue, and Eddie would never have dared to ask her for a date. But one day in the canteen a young radio operator gave him two tickets to Life with Father on Broadway, and when he said he did not have anyone to take, the radioman turned to the next table and asked Carol-Ann if she wanted to go.
“Ayuh,” she said, and Eddie realized she was from his part of the world.
He later learned that at that time she had been desperately lonely. She was a country girl, and the sophisticated ways of New Yorkers made her anxious and tense. She was a sensual person, but she did not know what to do when men took liberties, so in her embarrassment she rebuffed advances indignantly. Her nervousness got her the reputation of an ice queen, and she was not often asked out.
But Eddie knew nothing of this at the time. He felt like a king with her on his arm. He took her to dinner, then back to her apartment in a taxi. On the doorstep he thanked her for a nice evening and screwed up his courage to kiss her cheek, whereupon she burst into tears and said he was the first decent man she had met in New York. Before he knew what he was saying, he had asked her for another date.
He fell in love with her on that second date. They went to Coney Island on a hot Friday in July, and she wore white slacks and a sky blue blouse. He realized to his astonishment that she was actually proud to be seen walking alongside him. They ate ice cream, rode a roller coaster called the Cyclone, bought silly hats, held hands and revealed trivial intimate secrets. When he took her home Eddie told her frankly that he had never been this happy in his entire life, and she astonished him again by saying she hadn’t, either.
Soon he was neglecting the farmhouse and spending all his leave in New York, sleeping on the couch of a surprised but encouraging fellow engineer. Carol-Ann took him to Bristol, New Hampshire,