Reckless by William Nicholson
‘Darling Pammy, it’s been ages! I’ve so much to tell you! What have you been doing? Where have you been hiding?’
She looked round the café as they settled down.
‘No nude models here, as far as I can see.’
They both lit up cigarettes. Pamela was shocked by the experience of seeing Susie again. They had been such good friends at school. That now seemed as if it had been a hundred years ago.
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ said Susie, lowering her voice to a whisper. ‘Though I bet you’ve guessed already.’
‘No,’ said Pamela. ‘Tell.’
Susie flashed her ring finger. A diamond winked.
‘You’re engaged!’
Susie nodded, bursting with pride.
‘Who is it?’
‘Logan, of course,’ said Susie.
‘I thought he was your cousin.’
‘He’s only a sort of a cousin. And anyway, you’re allowed to marry your cousin.’
‘Susie, how wonderful! Congratulations!’
Pamela did her best to come up with the appropriate ecstasy. In fact she was appalled. How could Susie be married? She knew nothing about anything. It was all a game to her.
‘He’s as thick as a brick, of course,’ said Susie blithely, ‘but he’s an absolute sweetheart. I’m so lucky.’
‘So tell me how it happened. When did he propose?’
‘Actually on midsummer’s day. It was so romantic. He got a ring and everything. He took me out to dinner, and to be honest I half-guessed. He ordered champagne! Then when we were clinking glasses, he pushed this little box across the table!’
‘Oh, Susie! So what did he say?’
Pamela could picture the scene all too easily: pink-faced Logan, shiny-faced Susie, the champagne, the ring. The ritual gestures copied from a thousand magazine articles. She could even predict the words, some charming bumbling non-communication that only served to show how masculine he was.
‘He said’ – Susie covered her mouth and giggled – ‘he said, “How about it, old girl?”’
She burst into laughter.
‘Darling Logan. He’s no poet. But he’s a sweetheart. And Pammy, it’s all your fault!’
‘What did I do?’
‘You made us go to that club, remember?’ Once again she lowered her voice. ‘With the showgirls.’
‘I remember.’
‘Logan got very amorous after that. In the car, after we dropped you off, it got quite steamy. He had his hands all over me. When it started to get a bit too much, I said, Little boys have to learn to wait for their treats.’
‘You actually said that?’
‘I said it. And he knew I was right. You know how boys are, Pammy. They have to have their noses smacked, like puppies, or they’ll be forever jumping up at you.’
Pamela listened in awed silence.
‘So have you or haven’t you?’ she said.
Susie giggled.
‘Not all the way. But after he proposed I let him go a jolly sight further, I can tell you.’
‘How far?’
Soundlessly, Susie mouthed, ‘Knickers off.’
Pamela tried to picture this scene, and failed. She could get no further than a half memory from childhood of playing doctors and nurses.
‘And you really love him?’ she said.
‘Madly. I can’t wait for the wedding night.’
‘But you will.’
‘Oh, well, we might as well. It’s not so long now. Then it can be special, the way it’s meant to be.’
‘Yes. Of course.’
She grasped Pamela’s hands across the table, her over-made-up eyes shining.
‘Now tell me all about you,’ she said.
Pamela had no intention of doing any such thing.
‘Oh, there’s nothing much to tell,’ she said. ‘You’re the one with the exciting news. So when’s the big day?’
‘We want it to be a spring wedding. We haven’t quite settled on a date yet. Mummy thinks May.’
‘My God! Can you wait that long?’
‘Oh, there’s masses to do. That’s only six or seven months away. I don’t know that we’ll have enough time as it is.’
‘No, I meant – is Logan happy with that?’
‘Logan does as he’s told. You have to start as you mean to carry on.’
Pamela could see the marriage stretching out before her, like a view of a landscape from a hilltop. The early excitement, the home-making, the babies. The boredom, the infidelity, the thickening waists.
At this moment Stephen Ward walked into the café. He saw Pamela at once and came over with a smile.
‘Pamela! What a delight!’
‘Hello, Stephen. You remember my friend Susie?’
Stephen smiled for Susie and pulled out a chair.
‘May I?’
‘Of course you may.’
Pamela was surprised to find how pleased she was by his arrival.
‘Two lovely young ladies! Just the pick-me-up I need.’
‘Are you hung-over, Stephen?’
‘No, no. I don’t drink. You know that. But I’ve just had an hour of Eugene ranting at me.’ To Susie, with a smile, ‘Eugene’s a Russian friend of ours. He’s full of some scheme of his that he swears will stop war breaking out.’
‘War!’ said Susie.
‘It’s this Cuba business. Eugene kept on telling me how strong and proud his people are. He’s been telling me that if Kennedy invades Cuba, the sleeping bear will wake!’
He spoke the last words in a Russian accent.
‘Is this the missiles row?’ said Susie, trying to keep up.
‘Yes,’ said Stephen. ‘Khrushchev’s gone and put nuclear missiles on Cuba.’
‘But they’ll sort it out, surely? I mean, no one wants a nuclear war.’
‘These things can happen by accident.’
‘By accident?’ Susie stared in bewilderment. ‘A nuclear war?’
‘All it takes is a ship to be fired on, or a plane to be shot down. Then the real shooting starts.’
‘But a nuclear war!’ repeated Susie. ‘I mean, that means everyone gets killed.’
‘It does rather.’
‘And you think this might happen before my wedding?’
Pamela burst into laughter.
‘I think you should tell Eugene,’ she said to Stephen. ‘Urgent message to Khrushchev. Delay end of world to after Susie’s wedding.’
‘Oh, Lord,’ said Susie. ‘I suppose you think I’m so silly. But it would be so jolly unfair.’
Stephen stayed with them long enough to down a double espresso. Then he got up, gave Susie a mock bow, and said to Pamela,
‘If you’re around at Sunday lunchtime – if, that is, the world hasn’t ended – Bill’s asked us to lunch. Do join us.’
‘I don’t know, Stephen.’
‘Just give me a tinkle. I could swing by and pick you up.’ After he was gone Susie said, ‘So who’s Bill?’
‘Just a friend of Stephen’s.’
‘You seem to have got some pretty rum friends, Pammy.’
‘They’re not really friends. You know how people appear in your life and then disappear again.’
‘That’s what so reassuring about Logan,’ said Susie. ‘I’ve known him for ever. He says he used to pull my pigtails, which is nonsense, because I never had pigtails. Just imagine, when I was seven he was twice my age!’
50
In Moscow, Khrushchev was maintaining his hard line in public. Privately, as Friday wore on, he began to be afraid that he had misjudged Kennedy. Might the still-inexperienced young president be so foolish as to risk war over Cuba after all?
This was the puzzle that kept Khrushchev awake at night. What was Kennedy thinking? Both Andrei Gromyko at the Foreign Ministry and Oleg Troyanovsky, his foreign affairs adviser, told him that Kennedy would never countenance a nuclear war.
‘How do you know this?’ said Khrushchev. ‘Kennedy is a wea
‘All the assessments from our embassy in Washington reach this conclusion.’
‘What do they know? They hear the official line. Of course Kennedy says he doesn’t want nuclear war. Don’t tell me what he says. Tell me what he’s thinking.’
‘How are we to know that, Nikita Sergeyevich?’
‘That is what our intelligence services are for! No political leader reveals his true intentions in public. So we listen to the whispers and the murmurs, we look for the unguarded moments. A word spoken between friends is worth a year of public speeches.’
Khrushchev believed this because it was true of himself. At the same time he was aware that in moments of excitement or anger he could let his tongue slip. Secretly he regarded this as one of his most skilful strategies: the accidental outburst that could be excused later as a lapse in the heat of the moment, but which nevertheless conveyed a message.
In this spirit he arranged to meet an American businessman who was in Moscow to promote a deal. William E. Knox, president of Westinghouse International, found himself summoned to the Kremlin for a three-hour rant from Khrushchev. The Soviet leader defended his aid to Cuba, insisted on his desire for peace, and concluded with a threat.
‘If the United States insists on war,’ he said, ‘we’ll all meet in hell!’
Afterwards Troyanovsky asked Khrushchev why he had taken the trouble to say this to a businessman, who was no part of the American government.
‘If I tell Dobrynin to say it,’ replied Khrushchev, ‘they won’t believe it. When they hear it from an electrical goods salesman, they’ll believe it.’
*
Later that day GRU headquarters in Moscow received an interesting report from a new back channel. A junior attaché at the London embassy had apparently succeeded in opening up a direct line to the British prime minister. His report was sent on to KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square in a purple folder. During the crisis all information received from abroad was coordinated by a special task force in the Lubyanka, reduced to manageable proportions and passed on to the chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny. The task force was encouraged to give priority to information not knowingly given.
In this light Captain 2nd Class Ivanov’s proposal looked both promising and distinctly odd. Why were the chief of Britain’s defence staff and the British prime minister in contact with such a junior official at all?
‘Who is this Ivanov? Is he one of ours?’
Ivanov was GRU, Army Intelligence, not KGB. The task force was exclusively KGB.
‘Surely the British are using him,’ they said to each other. ‘They may even have turned him already. He’s either a dupe or a double agent.’
‘This peace summit he proposes. This is London looking for a way to trick us into backing down.’
To give themselves political cover, the KGB passed the file to Oleg Troyanovsky in the chairman’s office. Troyanovsky glanced at it, saw that it related to the British, not the Americans, and put it aside to read later.
Among the folders sent up by the KGB directly to Khrushchev’s desk was one that gave prominence to two alarming reports. The first had come through KGB sources in Washington. A barman at the National Press Club called Johnny Prokov was serving drinks in the Tap Room when he overheard two Herald Tribune journalists. One of them, Warren Rogers, was telling the other, Robert Donovan, that he was due to fly south that same night, to cover the operation to capture Cuba. Prokov passed on this information to Anatoly Gorsky, TASS correspondent and KGB agent. The KGB team in Washington sent a second secretary from the embassy to hang around the parking lot behind the Willard Hotel, where Rogers kept his car. When Rogers showed up in the morning, the Russian fell into a ‘chance’ conversation with him, and asked if Kennedy was serious about attacking Cuba. Warren Rogers had no knowledge whatsoever of Kennedy’s intentions, but he took it as his patriotic duty to assure the Russian that the American president was not a man who could be pushed around.
‘He sure as hell is serious about Cuba,’ said Rogers.
The report was transmitted to Moscow at once. At the same time the GRU office in the Washington Embassy, part of whose job was to track Pentagon radio signals, picked up an order from the joint chiefs of staff putting Strategic Air Command on DEFCON 2, an alert one stage short of war. A second intercepted signal ordered US hospitals to prepare to receive casualties.
This was the kind of information Khrushchev found convincing. None of it was meant for the ears of Moscow. Kennedy really was going to invade.
Khrushchev called Troyanovsky into his private office.
‘Find me a speech of Lenin’s that supports a tactical withdrawal.’
Then he summoned the members of the Presidium to the Kremlin. To their astonishment he announced a complete reversal of his tactics.
‘The missiles have served their purpose,’ he said. ‘They have forced the Americans to accept that Socialist Cuba is a fact of life, and that the Soviet Union, as leader of the Socialist world, is committed to Cuba’s defence. The time has now come to offer to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a cast-iron pledge from the Americans not to invade Cuba.’
The Presidium heard this in silence. They had not spoken up when Khrushchev had made the decision to send nuclear missiles to Cuba, and they did not speak up now. These were all men who had come of age politically under Stalin. They had looked on as colleagues had challenged the leader, and been charged with disloyalty. They had written on the guilty verdicts the one word, da: yes. They had signed their names. The guilty ones had then been shot. Such memories create the habit of absolute unquestioning obedience.
‘Cuba will become a zone of peace,’ said Khrushchev. ‘These are correct and reasonable tactics. Lenin himself said, “To accept battle at a time when it is obviously advantageous to the enemy and not to us is a crime.”’
The Presidium voted unanimously to approve the new plan.
As more and more evidence poured in of American preparations to invade, Khrushchev brushed aside Gromyko, who was preparing a formal letter to President Kennedy, and began to dictate a letter of his own. Pacing up and down his office, striking the air with his hands, he hectored and pleaded, accused and flattered, and Troyanovsky wrote it all down.
‘What would war give you?’ he dictated. ‘You are threatening us with war. But you will know that the very least which you would receive in reply would be that you would experience the same consequences as – as – as – those which you sent us.’
He stabbed a finger at Troyanovsky.
‘You have that?’
‘Yes, Nikita Sergeyevich.’
‘It must all be very simple. Strong, but simple.’
He resumed pacing and dictating.
‘I have participated in two wars, and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. I don’t know whether you can understand me and believe me, but I should like to have you believe in yourself and to agree that one cannot give way to passions. It is necessary to control them.’
He now spoke to Gromyko, who was listening in silence.
‘There, you see. I address him as leader to leader. As man to man.’
He continued.
‘Let us therefore show statesmanlike wisdom. I propose: we, for our part, will declare that our ships bound for Cuba will not carry any kind of armaments. You would declare that the United States will not invade Cuba. Then the necessity for the presence of our military specialists in Cuba would disappear.’
He stared at Gromyko. Gromyko nodded in silence.
‘Mr President,’ Khrushchev resumed, ‘we and you ought not to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war. The more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it.’
He jerked his hands in the air, acting out the tightening of a kn
‘That’s very clear, I think,’ he said.
‘The knot of war,’ said Troyanovsky. ‘A vivid image.’
‘Consequently,’ said Khrushchev, dictating again, pleased with his words, ‘if there is no intention to tighten that knot and thereby to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot.’
His hands moved in the air, untying the invisible knot.
Later that night, back at his own desk, Troyanovsky picked up the purple folder from the KGB. He was tired, and did not read it attentively, but it was clear to him that the KGB did not take this Ivanov seriously, and that whatever he was proposing was no longer of any immediate relevance. He wrote on it: Not urgent. Apply standard procedures. Then he added it to the pile of documents awaiting transfer to the archives.
*
Khrushchev’s letter, translated, ciphered, cabled, and deciphered, reached Washington late on Friday evening. The president read it through once, and found himself unsure exactly what he’d read.
‘Is he offering to take the missiles out of Cuba or not?’
He postponed any response until the following morning.
Over at the Pentagon, General Curtis LeMay also read Khrushchev’s letter.
‘What a lot of bullshit,’ he declared. ‘He must think we’re a bunch of dumb shits if we swallow that syrup.’
51
Pamela had been more unsettled by Susie’s prattle than she cared to admit. On the one hand she pitied her friend for the narrowness of the life she was choosing. To be married, at nineteen, to a braying fool who worked in the City. To think of sex as a treat for the boys. To choose to dress like her own mother. But at the same time, she envied her. Susie was moving on to the next stage of life, as ordained by her tribe. Marriage wouldn’t bring happiness, but it would give her a place in the world, a function, a status. What else could a girl do but marry?
Let the world end, Pamela thought. What is there in the future to wait for?
Hugo had a business dinner that evening, so Pamela ate simply and alone. Tomorrow, Saturday, Harriet and Emily were due to return.