Victory Read online

  Molly and Kate sit on the balcony of the yacht club, watching the small white sails tack to and fro out in the bay. They have no idea which boat is Russell’s, or who is winning, but they feel family loyalty demands that they watch the races.

  “We’re showing the flag for Russell,” Kate says, rocking Donald gently in his stroller. She smiles. “What a lot of phrases we use that come from the Navy. Keeping an even keel. Putting your oar in.”

  “All in the same boat,” says Molly, inspired. “Clearing the decks.”

  There is a faint muffled bang out on the water, and they both peer, but can see nothing to tell them whether this is signaling the beginning or end of a race.

  “Mum,” Molly says, “when are we going to London?”

  “The travel agent’s working on it. If she can find tickets that don’t cost a fortune we’ll go next week, I guess.” Kate looks at the happiness in her daughter’s face, and smiles ruefully. “Oh darling,” she says, “I do hope you won’t feel horribly let down when we come back again.”

  “No!” Molly says. Coming back is an image that has not yet been given any place in her mind; she is too busy thinking of arriving.

  “Hi, Kate!” says a hearty male voice, and they look up to see a tall, balding man in khaki shorts and a green short-sleeved shirt. He is beaming at them. Beside him is a lean, deeply tanned lady wearing several necklaces and bracelets.

  “Hi!” says Kate brightly, and Molly knows instantly that her mother has no idea who these people are.

  “Russell steered to victory!” says the necklaced lady in a voice almost as deep as her husband’s. She smiles. She has amazingly white teeth.

  “He did? I couldn’t tell. That’s great!” Kate clutches Molly as if she were a lifebelt. She says, “Have you met my daughter Molly?”

  Molly is familiar with this gambit for discovering names, and is relieved to find that it works. The man thrusts out his hand to her and says amiably, “Hi, Molly. I’m Bradenham Parker, old friend of Carl’s. This is m’wife Muffie.”

  Molly shakes his hand. Muffie Parker gives her a brief smile and nod, and leans past her to chuck Donald under the chin. “And this is your little son!” she says to Kate. “Russell’s future crew!”

  “Yes, I dare say,” Kate says.

  Molly says in a clear voice, “His name is Donald.”

  Mrs. Parker jingles a bracelet at Donald. “Hello, Donnie sweetie!”

  Donald looks obligingly angelic, and blows a bubble.

  Mr. Parker says heartily, “How are you settling in, Molly? Having a busy summer?”

  “We’re going to London next week!” says Molly happily.

  “Already?” says jingling Mrs. Parker. “You only just got here!” Her dark eyes survey both Molly and Kate critically, inquisitively.

  “Lighten up, Muffie!” says Mr. Parker. “Two weeks into our honeymoon you ran back to Boston, remember? Said you missed the cat.” He gives a sudden bray of laughter.

  “Get lost, Brad,” says Mrs. Parker. She burrows into a very large canvas bag hanging from her shoulder, and produces a pair of binoculars, through which she proceeds to stare at the water. “There they are,” she says. “Russ has let Jack take the helm. Big mistake.”

  Mr. Parker opens his mouth and shuts it again, looking reproachful, and Molly realizes that these are the parents of the abominable Jack. No wonder he is the way he is. She crouches beside Donald, pretending to amuse him, hoping they will go away. Very soon they do.

  Kate sighs. “That lady is going to spread rumors that poor dear Carl Hibbert’s new wife and daughter are already leaving him. After six weeks, my dear!”

  “Nobody will believe her,” Molly says indignantly. She pauses. “Will they?”

  “Nobody who matters,” Kate says. “I’m going to change Donald—back in a minute.”

  So she disappears with the stroller, and Molly looks out at the white dots on the grey water and thinks about England. She feels guilty that her mother is making this transatlantic trip solely on her behalf, but not guilty enough to give it up. The prospect of being in London again has filled her world with hope.

  She looks out to sea, beyond the boats. Strictly speaking this is not the sea but Long Island Sound, she knows; Long Island lies somewhere out there, between here and the Atlantic Ocean. But a haze of heat has blurred water and air so that the horizon is lost in a band of grey-white mist, and suddenly from that mist Molly hears a distant boom, like the sound of a massive gun.

  She squints into the distance. For a moment she sees through the haze the outline of a great sailing ship, three-masted, square-rigged, with a dim cloud of smoke drifting away from its side. Molly catches her breath; she has never seen anything like it except in pictures.

  Then it is gone. Molly strains to see more, but there is only the water and the sky. She feels again an odd sense of being beckoned, as if some soundless voice were calling her. Where has the ship gone?

  When they are driving home with a cheerful victorious Russell, she says to him, “Did you see that tall ship, way out?”

  “What ship?” Russell says.

  “It was on the horizon. Just like the picture in your room, the Tall Ships Race.”

  “That was six years ago—none of those ships is around now. What did you see?”

  Molly looks away, out of the car window. “I expect I was imagining it,” she says.

  Back at the house, Molly goes to her computer and finds an e-mail from Mr. Waterford.

  Of course you must keep the book, he writes. You bought it, so you bought anything that came with it. I should tell you that a piece of the Victory’s flag was sold two years ago at Bonham’s auction house in London for a very large sum. Maybe yours will send you to college. Take great care of it. Best wishes, Alan Waterford.

  Afterward there is a P.S.

  HMS Victory is still with us, you know. Perhaps you’ve been there. They keep her in Portsmouth Harbour, wonderfully restored.

  Molly stares at this, and a vigorous ambition begins to form in her mind. Then she sees that Mr. Waterford has added a second P.S. after the first.

  I must confess, he writes, that I should love to take a look at your treasure, if you should ever be passing through Mystic again.

  So Molly writes back with a promise that she will visit Mystic Seaport someday soon.

  She sits there for a moment, thinking about the mysterious sailing ship that showed itself to her so briefly, before disappearing into the mist. Did HMS Victory look like that? But HMS Victory is in Portsmouth. . . .

  Very carefully, she takes the little ragged piece of cloth out of its antique homemade envelope inside her Life of Nelson. It gives her a very strange sensation, as if it connects her in some way to all the events it has seen and survived. And perhaps to more than that. Lying there on her desk, it is a very ordinary scrap of dirty-looking material that any unknowing person would toss into the garbage, and yet Molly feels that it is almost a living thing. She has a strong urge to take it with her to Britain.

  But when the time comes to pack for their flight, a week later, Molly finds herself overcome by anxiety that something would happen to the piece of flag if she were to take it with her. Her mind keeps throwing up objections, even after she has finished packing and changed into her pajamas. If it were in her suitcase, the suitcase might go astray. If instead she put it in her carry-on bag, some security person might search the bag and accidentally damage the little piece of cloth—or, worse, take it, or throw it away. If she carried it in her pocket, she might crush it, or lose it, or her pocket might be picked. . . .

  The book lies on her bed next to the suitcase. Molly stares at it, her mind veering round in circles like a confused compass needle.

  Kate taps at the door and sticks her head in. “Are you packed? Get some sleep—we have to be up at five.”

  “Mmf,” Molly says. “I’m nearly finished.”

  “Bed,” says Kate, and goes away again.

  So Molly, forced to
instant decision, inspects her wounded book to make sure the envelope is safely tucked inside its cover, and slips it carefully onto a shelf of her favorite books, between Bridge to Terabithia and Tehanu, volumes she feels a wandering Russell or Carl would be unlikely to disturb. Now it will be safe until her return, unless the house burns down, which is one possibility she refuses to take seriously. She feels relieved that she will no longer have to watch and worry about her treasure, and she scrambles into bed in a glow of happy imaginings about the next day.

  Just before she falls asleep she realizes that she must be feeling exactly as the grownup Sam Robbins had felt, leaving his precious bit of Nelson in his daughter’s safekeeping before he sailed away once more. It is a sharing—and a powerful connection, for if Sam had taken the flag with him on that last voyage, it would never have come into Molly’s life at all.

  As this thought flickers in and out of her dozing mind, a sense of longing floods after it, full of pain, like a voice calling. But Molly does not hear, because she is asleep.

  Kate has given Molly the seat beside the window. As the big plane tilts down through a grey mist of cloud, suddenly below her Molly sees the green patchwork of fields that is unmistakably England. I’m home! she thinks. Home! And all through the long slow descent she looks for London, finding it at last only in the proliferation of the rows of houses, with the red tiled roofs that she does not see in America, and the looping curves of the River Thames. She looks out at her country with love, and Kate, busy feeding Donald a bottle of watered juice to keep his ears from popping, glances at her face and feels a rush of pleasure mixed with guilt. Molly catches her eye, and gives her a brilliant smile.

  At Heathrow Airport, Molly pushes Donald’s stroller briskly along the pathway labeled FAST TRACK, reserved for holders of the red passports of the European Union. She is smugly aware that most of their fellow-travelers, American tourists, are penned behind a barrier in a waiting throng. Kate spreads their passports before the immigration officer at his desk, and he glances from Molly’s passport picture to her glowing face. His eyes crinkle at the corners.

  “Welcome home, Molly,” he says.

  And out beyond the baggage claim area, from which Molly pushes the stroller and Kate a baggage cart which would prefer to go sideways, there in the crowd is a bobbing trio of large white balloons. Each one is decorated with a firm black letter, M and K and D, and beneath them is the neat figure and smiling bearded face of Molly’s grandfather.

  After the first close joyous embraces, and that astonishing moment of rediscovering all the beloved lost details of a familiar face, Molly feels that she has never been away from her grandparents at all. The drive from the airport to their house in Highgate, in the north of London, is filled with excited chatter, and without question or pause for thought she carries her suitcase up the stairs to the little bedroom which has been “her” room, on visits to her grandparents’ house, for as long as she can remember. Everything is the same. There at the dormer window is the ruffled white curtain, and the purple cushion on the window-seat; there across the room is the wardrobe where her spare jeans still hang, and her old sneakers wait. There is the bookshelf with her particular books that she always left at Granny and Grandad’s house, and the cupboard with the outgrown still-loved toys. She looks at the battered lamb and giraffe and teddy-bear, and realizes with pleasure that soon Donald will be able to batter them some more.

  She lies on her back on the bed, looking up at the constellations of stars that Grandad stuck on the ceiling for her when she was very small—and because she has been awake since five o’clock in the morning by American time, she falls asleep. Nobody wakes her up. They slip off her shoes and pull a quilt over her, and leave her there, sleeping in England.

  “He’s so different!” Granny says in wonder the next morning, with Donald in her arms. “In three months he’s turned into a little person. Where did that little dribbling baby go?”

  “He still dribbles,” Kate says. “Buckets. I think he’s cutting a tooth.”

  “That’s what I mean!” says her mother. “Teeth! Next thing you know, he’ll be playing football for Chelsea!”

  Molly says with sudden bitterness, “We live in America. They’ll teach him baseball.”

  “Now, now,” says Kate. “They have football like ours—they just call it soccer.”

  “Grub up!” says Grandad, advancing on them with plates of bacon and eggs. “The full breakfast for your first morning, ladies.” Long ago he and Granny had the wall between the kitchen and dining-room knocked down, and he has been busy at the kitchen end. In Molly’s memories, he is always the cook. Her grandparents enjoy reversed roles, and it is her lean, athletic Granny who is likely to be found changing a fuse or washing the car, while Grandad is baking bread. His mince pies at Christmastime are legendary.

  After breakfast, while Kate and her mother are upstairs giving Donald a bath, Grandad settles himself in his armchair with a cup of coffee—he makes excellent coffee too—and Molly sits companionably nearby, on the floor. Grandad looks down at her over his coffee-cup. He has deepset blue eyes below bristling grey eyebrows, and his neat beard is greyish-white with a darker line in the center. Molly thinks, I never noticed that before.

  Grandad says, “Well, you have a week in England, my love—what shall we do with it? Where would you most like to go?”

  Molly thinks about Lord Nelson and HMS Victory, but she has another image haunting her even more strongly. She says, “Can we go to the Round Pond?”

  “Hampstead Heath is closer,” Grandad says mildly.

  Molly cocks her head and looks up at him. “You did ask,” she points out.

  “The Round Pond it shall be, this very day,” Grandad says. “I just don’t want you to be downcast, seeing Kensington.”

  The Round Pond, which is just what it sounds like, is in Kensington Gardens in central London, very close to the apartment in which Kate and Molly used to live. All through Molly’s early childhood Kate would take her to play in Kensington Gardens, and almost until the day they left Britain they had gone for walks there, always taking bits of bread for any passing squirrel or duck.

  She says, “Well, I might be downcast seeing Merton Square, but I don’t want to go there. Just to the Gardens. Can I ring Jen, please? Maybe she can come too.”

  “Ring anyone you like,” he says, “but give me a hug first.” So Molly does, and leaves him to his coffee, and the ache of wishing that he could do something, anything, to cushion life for his uprooted granddaughter.

  Before she left Connecticut, Molly e-mailed her three friends about her sudden trip to Britain, but she has heard from none of them, so now she telephones each one in turn, with her fingers crossed. But this is August, high holiday season in Britain, when half the inland population leaves home in search of sun and sea. She calls Jen’s number, but the line is busy. At the next house she hears only Naomi’s father’s voice on the answering machine, with a pang of recognition. At Sally’s house there is no answer at all, and when she calls Jen again she finds out why.

  “Molly, dear!” cries Jen’s mother, distant in Fulham. “How lovely to hear you! Jen will be so upset—she’s in Spain with Sally’s family, at that house they have. How long will you be home?”

  Not long enough, Molly discovers, to see her best friend, who will not be back in the country until ten days from now. She thinks, as she hangs up the phone, Jen liked me a lot better than she liked Sally, she’d never have gone if I were still here, not even for a house in Spain. . . .

  But that was then; this is now.

  They put Donald in his stroller and they all go to Kensington Gardens, taking the Underground to Queensway, changing at Holborn. London is a very large city and this is a long trek; there were good reasons why Molly, living in Kensington, so often spent the night when visiting her grandparents in Highgate. But Molly is delighted to be back in a roaring, rocking underground train, rushing through the network of tunnels deep under the city, that
is so familiar a part of life for Londoners that they call it simply The Tube. Donald is alarmed by the noise, and cries as the automatic doors slide shut, so Molly crouches beside his stroller in the swaying train and pulls funny faces, and plays “Where’s Donald? . . . There he is!” until she makes him laugh. All the surrounding grownups watch, with nostalgia soft in their faces, except one thin man in a tight dark suit, who retreats behind a newspaper with a disdainful sniff.

  And the sun is shining on Kensington Gardens, which is by no means always the case, and Molly is happier than she has been for a long time as they turn from the busy streets, through the great wrought-iron gates, into the Broad Walk, with green grass and full-leafed trees stretching away on either side. Familiarity engulfs her, as if she were a stranded fish returned to the water. Although this is a weekday, the grass is littered with people: couples, families, solitary men or women—the men generally lying with their shirts stripped off, soaking up the sunshine—and everywhere children playing. Rollerbladers and skateboarders whizz along where they are allowed, on the Walk, and on the grass small boys and girls throw Frisbees or balls or chase one another about, shrieking. In one area Molly can see what looks suspiciously like a game of baseball. She does not investigate. With calm authority she leads her family toward the Round Pond, where she can see the white sails of large model yachts sailing serenely to and fro.

  It is just as she remembered it. The bigger boats are operated mostly by elderly gentlemen, wearing jackets; one man even wears a suit and tie, as if he were on his way to work at a bank. They stand godlike with their remote controls, and their graceful vessels obediently tack about the Pond, without colliding. Only one of the yachts, slightly smaller than the rest, has a younger master; he is a boy of about sixteen, standing amongst a gaggle of admiring children, and he sends his boat on longer, faster swoops out of the way of the rest. Its sails are not white, but dark brown; it looks like a hawk among swans. Molly watches enviously. Something about the sixteen-year-old seems vaguely familiar; she thinks that perhaps he reminds her of Jack, and turns away.