Hitler's peace

VII

I pulled the last page off the typewriter carriage, separated it from the carbon copy, added it to the pile of typewritten pages, and then read the report through from start to finish. Satisfied with what I had written, I stapled the sheets together and placed them in an envelope. It was just after eleven o’clock. I thought that if I took the report straight over to the White House first thing in the morning, the president might add it to his next evening’s reading. And going into the hallway I placed the envelope containing the report inside my briefcase.

A moment or two later Diana came through the front door using the key I had given her to do exactly that. She had her own place up in Chevy Chase to which I had a key, and this arrangement made us feel like a really modern couple with a healthy sex life and a pet dog. I just hadn’t gotten around to buying the pet dog yet. Mostly she came to my place because it was a little nearer the center of Washington, such as it is.

She shook out her umbrella and set it in the hall stand. She was wearing a navy blue suit with gold buttons and a white blouse inside it that was low enough to remind me of one of the reasons I was attracted to her. I was grown up enough to understand the principle behind this kind of adolescent fascination. I just didn’t know why I was still such a sucker for it. Her blond hair made her look like a minor goddess, and on it she wore a broad-brimmed hat that might have been stolen from a Catholic priest, always assuming they’d gone over to wearing pink hats instead of red ones that season. I pitied the people behind her in the movie theater. That was, if she really had been to a movie. She smelled of cigarettes and perfume and alcohol, which is a combination my nose found almost irresistible. But it hardly seemed appropriate for someone who had spent her evening with Don Ameche. Unless she really had spent her evening with Don Ameche. Which might have explained everything.

“How was the movie?” I enquired.

She took a couple of Grand Inquistor’s pins out of her hat and placed them and it on the hall table.

“You’d have hated it.”

“I don’t know. I like Gene Tierney.”

“Hell looked nice.”

“Somehow I’ve always thought it would.”

She walked into the drawing room and helped herself to a cigarette from a silver box.

“Where’s it playing?” I asked. “Maybe I’ll go and see it.”

“I told you. You’d have hated it.”

“And I said I liked Gene Tierney. So maybe I’ll go and see it.”

She lit her cigarette irritably and walked over to a chair where the Post had been tossed earlier that evening. “It’s in there somewhere,” she said.

“Actually, I know where it’s playing. I just wanted to see if you did.”

“What are you driving at?”

“Only that you don’t look or smell like someone who’s been to a movie with some girlfriends.”

“All right. I didn’t go to the movies. Satisfied?”

I smiled. “Perfectly.” I picked up my empty glass, took it into the kitchen, washed and dried it, came back into the drawing room, and put it away in the cabinet. I think I even managed to whistle a few bars of some jaunty Irish air. Diana hadn’t budged. She was still standing there, arms folded across her chest and, but for the cigarette in her well-manicured hand, she looked like the school principal awaiting an explanation. That was what impressed me. The speed with which she managed to turn things around so that I was the one who was at fault.

Diana gave me another irritated glance. “Aren’t you going to ask me who I was with?”

“No.”

“So you’re not bothered who I was with.”

“Maybe I just don’t want to know.” I hadn’t meant to start anything. I wasn’t exactly a model of fidelity myself.

“I guess that’s what bothers me the most. That you’re not bothered.” She smiled bitterly and shook her head, as if disappointed in me.

“I didn’t say I wasn’t bothered. I said I didn’t want to know. Look, it’s okay. Forget I ever mentioned it. Let’s go to bed.” I took her hand. But she took it back.

“If you cared for me, you’d at least act as if you were jealous, even if you weren’t.”

That’s the true genius of women. Most of them could give Sun Tzu an object lesson in how attack is the best form of defense. I had caught her out in a lie and already I was the one who was being made to feel I had let her down.

“I do care for you. Of course I care for you. Only I thought we were beyond acting like a couple of characters in a play by Shakespeare. Jealousy is just the pain of injured pride.”

“It always comes back to you, doesn’t it?” She shook her head. “You’re a clever man, Will, but you’re wrong. That’s not what jealousy is at all. It’s not the pain of injured pride. It’s the pain of injured love. There’s a big difference. Only, for you I think pride and love are one and the same. Because you couldn’t ever love a woman more than you love yourself.”

She leaned forward to kiss me and for a moment I thought that everything was going to be all right. But then the kiss landed, chastely on my cheek, and it was as if she were saying good-bye. The next moment she was back in the hall, collecting her umbrella, and her pins, and her hat. That was the first time, when she walked out the door, leaving the key on the hall table, that I realized I loved her.