Till We Meet Again (78 page)

A great cheer went up, and Freddy heard a roomful of men calling out requests, and realized that she had been set up. Not one soul had said a word yet about introducing Jock to his sister, and Jock had not told her that she was expected to sing. She fixed him with the deadliest of her inventory of glances, but he just kept waving her up to the platform, where the band had already struck up the tune of “Hello Central! Get Me No Man’s Land,” music that they couldn’t possibly have had in their regular repertoire.

Get it over with gracefully, Freddy told herself, and found herself all but passed from hand to hand to the bandstand, where she was helped up by Jock.

“Cute,” she said to him.

“I knew you’d want to do it for the guys.”

She turned to the bandleader. “We’ve got all the music,” he assured her, “from Mr. Hampton. Been practicing for days. You just sing, we’ll follow right along.”

Freddy shook her head. Trapped was trapped. Jock had even put a barstool on the stage for her. She climbed up, and when she looked out on the ballroom full of waiting men, her heart turned topsy-turvy with memory and she launched into “Tipperary,” her voice rusty for a moment before she and the musicians caught each other’s beat. Immediately, Freddy could feel an emotion collecting in the room that was different from the emotion that had been elicited by the songs of the last war. These old songs were soldiers’ songs, not the romantic longing ballads of separated lovers that they had all danced to in the forties, but the songs that frightened, brave men had sung to themselves in the trenches twenty years
earlier. The pilots of the Eagle Squadron who hummed along with her words were joined by the music to another generation of warriors, their brothers-in-arms. She swung smoothly through “Tipperary” and then launched into “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kitbag.”

Freddy’s contralto voice, though untrained, was so much like Eve’s, tawny and irresistible, burnt-sugar sweet in the high notes, with a tough little tickle of wryness in the middle register, and an unhallowed lure hidden under its bottom octave. She lost herself in the music, feeling power growing from verse to verse. She flew from “Keep the Home Fires Burning” to the “Blue Horizon Waltz”; she soared from “Good-Bye Broadway, Hello France!” and into the skylarking of “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” her head thrown back, as she sat flinging the songs down like valentines to the listening men. She became Maddy, in another red dress, singing by moonlight to wounded French soldiers and one officer, on a night that had been her destiny. She was herself, ten years younger, singing in a packed pub to men who knew—and dismissed the knowledge—that some of them would die in the air the next day, but who demanded a song tonight. Freddy was phosphorescent, not needing the spotlight to glow on her own, a self-luminous girl who sang the songs she’d learned from Eve when she was a child, as freshly as if she’d just invented them.

Freddy came to the end of the great old songs, although the audience was bound together in a mood of entrancement, and she could have sung on for hours. She slipped off the barstool and she signaled to the bandleader to play something else while she looked for a way down from the bandstand. But Jock, who had stationed himself near her, started singing the one song she didn’t want to hear, because it meant too much to her. All the men in the room took Jock’s voice as a signal to join in. Freddy couldn’t even move her lips as the simple, unforgettable melody enfolded her.

“Smile a while, you kiss me sad adieu
,
When the clouds roll by I’ll come to you
Then the skies will seem more blue
,
Down in Lovers’ Lane, my dearie …”

“Come on, Freddy, sing!” Jock urged her. “You never stopped before until you’d given us this one.” Some of the
men of the Eagle Squadron had clambered up on the stage and she felt their arms around her waist as they swayed from side to side, roaring out the words.

“Wedding bells will ring so merrily
,
Every tear will be a memory
,
So wait and pray each night for me
,
Till we meet again.”

They started singing the song over again from the beginning, and Freddy, unable to prevent them, felt the tears rolling down her face. Oh no! I can’t take any more, she thought, and nimbly she slid out of the arms that held her, hopped down to the dance floor, wove her way rapidly through the crowd of singing pilots and their wives, and fled out of the ballroom and down the wide hallway, carpeted in wine and gold, to Wilshire Boulevard, to hail a taxi.

“Wait up! You forgot your jacket!” Jock skidded to an abrupt halt behind her, and put the fur around her shoulders. He took out his handkerchief and swabbed inexpertly at the tears on her cheeks. “Christ—I’m sorry you’re upset … I just didn’t think.”

“Well, you certainly thought of everything else,” she accused him. “Those old songs … where’d you dig up that music?”

“Come on, Freddy, you were fucking sublime! Aren’t you glad I got you to sing?”

“I have to admit … it wasn’t as awful … as I’d expected. I didn’t even know I remembered all those words,” she said, forgiving him with her glance.

The doorman brought Jock’s Cadillac convertible around, and he drove her back to her house in silence, echoes of immortal tunes filling the car so loudly that there was no room for words. It was so late that there was no traffic, and he drove, depending entirely on bone-deep reflexes, with a pilot’s usual speed and disdain for rules and regulations, in spite of all he’d had to drink. He parked in the driveway of Freddy’s house, with a wide-flung swish of gravel.

“So, the reunion’s over. Guess we won’t do that for another ten years,” Jock muttered. He sounded so regretful, she thought, more regretful than the occasion deserved.

“Maybe you should never do it again,” Freddy suggested.
“Maybe there should just be this one night and then … let it go …”

“But then I’d never hear you sing again … and I’d miss the hell out of that, Freddy, you were just the way you used to be …”

“Nothing stays the same, Jock, everything changes, and not always for the better,” Freddy said, with a note of finality in her voice, gathering up her bag and gloves and preparing to step out of the car.

“No. Wait. Stay here for another minute, can’t we just talk? We never just talk, except about business …”

“Just talk?” Freddy was puzzled.

“Yeah, about—oh, anything—the way people might talk when they’ve known each other for ten years but don’t really know each other all that well and—maybe they should.”

“Should we?” Now she was frankly amused. In all the years she’d known him, she’d never seen Jock affected by liquor, and certainly he’d never struck up an aimless conversation between the two of them. “Haven’t you had a little too much to drink, Squadron Leader?”

“Damn right I have. I’m smashed.
In vino veritas
, whatever the fuck that means.”

“Don’t you think you should go home and sleep it off? We can talk another time,” she said, repressing her laughter. He seemed so serious, not like Jock at all.

“My God, Freddy,” he cried indignantly, “you don’t even know the first thing about me, do you? You don’t even want to know.”

“Jock,” she chided him, as entertained as if he were Annie’s age and making one of Annie’s elaborately exaggerated statements. “You were Tony’s closest friend, the Longbridges consider you a family member, we’ve been business partners for five years, you’re Annie’s godfather, you were even the best man at my wedding, for heaven’s sake—of course I know you.”

“The hell you do. To you I’ve always been a member of a group—you just proved that. Don’t you think I have an existence of my own, a life—a whole damn life of hopes and dreams and feelings that doesn’t have anything to do with the Longbridge family or Eagles?” Smashed or not, Freddy thought, she heard an unmistakably honest outrage in his unexpected words that silenced her. And there was truth in
what he’d said. He turned to her, and the outline of his head and shoulders suddenly seemed unfamiliar.

“Jock …” She put out her hand as if to touch his arm in tentative apology. He saw her gesture and, with a groan, reached out and pulled her toward him. “Damn it, Freddy, has it ever for one second occurred to you that I’m so much in love with you I can’t take it anymore?”

“Jock.”
Astonished, disbelieving, laughing at his absurdity, she pushed him away. “Come on! It’s the liquor talking—that and tonight, the old friends, the music, the memories, the … glory days … not love. Look at all the ladies in your life.” Freddy’s voice grew droll, just thinking of them. “How can you even be sure that you’ve ever been in love?”

“God damn it to hell, will you listen to me! And stop snickering in that repulsively superior way. I had the bad luck to fall in love once in my life—in a church in England, five seconds after you went and got married, when you pushed back your wedding veil and I saw your face. Stupid bastard that I am, I fell in love for keeps and I’ve spent the years in between trying to get out of it—trying to make it go away, disappear, change, fade—but, just my luck, it won’t. I don’t
want
to be in love with you! Do you think it’s fun to be in love with someone who treats you like wallpaper—funny wallpaper at that—someone who thinks of you as something that came along with the wedding presents?”

“But … but …” Freddy floundered. She’d never heard Jock talk with this kind of blundering, unstoppable intensity, all his cool, tough-guy attitudes abandoned.

“Don’t ‘but’ me, I know all that shit by heart. I got there too late in your life, you were taken, your love’s been elsewhere, I’m just a pal, I’m part of your history and nobody can rewrite history, it’s too late to think of me this way—spare me the no hearts and no flowers, and no thanks—there isn’t a single ‘but’ you can pull out that I haven’t thought of a thousand times. But listen, Freddy, listen to me, I know what’s over is over, but we can rewrite
the future
. Do you know how many times I’ve rewritten the past—what if we had really met when we
should
have met? No, don’t try to stop me. Sure, I’m a little plastered—that’s how I finally dug up enough courage to tell you this, you’ve got to listen! Oh, Freddy, what if we’d gone to high school together, or college, it could so easily have happened that way, we grew up only a hundred miles apart, we were born in the same year, the
same
month
, for Pete’s sake! I would have taken one look at you and asked you to go with me to the class prom and we would have talked about nothing but planes and forgotten to dance, and by the time I took you home, you would have known that I was meant for you. Maybe you would even have let me kiss you good night. We would never have looked at anyone else again for the rest of our lives. We just missed each other
by inches
, Freddy! Damn it, can’t you even imagine how happy we would have been?”

“I suppose … it wouldn’t have been … utterly impossible … if you believe in time travel,” she admitted, unable to quite put her finger on a flaw in his reasoning. Her mind wasn’t working as logically as usual.

“I was just about to ask you something real stupid,” Jock said, his eager heart seesawing as he heard the first unaccustomed note of conjecture in her voice.

“Ask me what?”

“Only a jerk ever asks a girl’s permission,” he said. “Don’t you remember that from school?” He slid toward her and took her in his arms, and before she had a chance to protest, he kissed her on the lips, respectfully, tenderly, sweetly, but with the unmistakable dignity of a man who knows that his kiss will not be entirely unwelcome.

“Stop it,” Freddy squeaked in surprise. It had been so long since she’d been kissed that she stiffened in alarm.

“Put your arms around me, Freddy,” he said. “Go on, just try it, if you don’t like it, I’ll stop.”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Jock Hampton?”

“Kissing. That’s all, just kissing,” he said, and kissed her again.

“You said you wanted to talk,” she protested wildly, utterly unnerved by the warmth and completeness of his lips and the inadmissible beginnings of a delicious comfort that came from the strong, sure hug of his arms around her. He was so big, he smelled so good, like roasting chestnuts, his arms were so safe. Who could have guessed he’d have such lovely lips?

“Later. Kiss me back, Freddy, darling Freddy, please try to kiss me back when I kiss you. Yeah, that’s better, much better, don’t be bashful, you’re so beautiful, I love you, I’ve always loved you, you don’t have to love me right away but please let me try to make you love me, promise me you will, it’s been so long, and I’ve been so lonely for you—I’ve been
lonely for you all my life—I’ve wondered forever what it would feel like to kiss you but I never thought it would be this good.” He buried his face in her hair and both of their confounded hearts reeled as they clutched each other for balance in a world that had suddenly slipped its moorings with no more reason than the touch of lips upon lips.

Jock took Freddy’s face in his hands and kissed her, with slow, exploratory kisses along the edge of her hairline, down the side of her hot cheek to the lower corner of her ear, and then, tilting her head upward, he started to kiss the delicate skin of her neck, pushing aside the fur collar that still wrapped her closely. Freddy made herself draw back, although she was quivering with pleasure at the delicacy and lightness of his questing mouth, although she wanted to sink into the marvelous security she felt in his arms. She tried unsuccessfully to search out his eyes in the dimness of the car.

“Jock, wait! You’re going so fast, I don’t know how I feel, back up, give me a chance to sort it out, pretend it’s after the school prom, go slowly, Jock.” Freddy’s damaged self-confidence, wounded and sore, warned her that she was too vulnerable, too needy, that she must cling to whatever reality she had fashioned in long, self-questioning nights and not be carried along by the confusion of unexpected feelings his words and kisses had released in her.