I and My True Love

  Jan measured the volume of sound carefully. “I didn’t know that was their plan when I took this job,” he said. “And I still don’t know what the full plan is. But there’s more trickery in it than I thought. I found that out only yesterday, after I met you at the station. It was just a simple little remark made by the man who was with me—the man who watched you meet me tonight.”

  “Then why should we do as they plan?”

  “We have to. Meanwhile.”

  Yes, she thought, until his family is safe. We have to go along with everything, pretend that all is normal. Yet, even understanding that, she could understand little.

  “What is the remark that was made yesterday?” Yesterday, he had been confident: tonight he was troubled, uncertain.

  “I’m supposed to act as normally as possible,” he repeated, “to see my friends if they’ll see me. People like Stewart Hallis, and Ebbie Minlow and Miriam Hugenberg. And you.”

  “Is this a goodwill mission? Is that the idea?” Jan had once had many friends in Washington.

  He hesitated. At last he said, “That’s the idea. Except that the remark yesterday made me realise they know you were more than a friend. They know that we were in love, Sylvia.”

  “And they still take the risk of letting you meet me?”

  “If I’m loyal to them, naturally I wouldn’t even think of taking you seriously,” he said bitterly.

  For a moment, she was silent. “So you must keep it all pretence,” she said slowly. “In the station, yesterday—”

  “There was no pretence. There isn’t any. You know that.” He grasped her shoulders, turning her body to face him. “You know that,” he said tensely and kissed her.

  “Yes,” she said. “I know it, Jan.” She began to cry, softly, gently. She was weeping for him, for the drawn anxious face, for the pain that marked his lips, for the desperate bewildered eyes. In that one moment all his guard was down, and she saw the real Jan. He was no longer the stranger. “We’ll stay together, whatever happens,” she said. “Whatever happens,” she repeated as he wiped away her tears gently.

  He nodded. He said nothing at all. He started the car and edged it out carefully into the road. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, as they left the gardens and trees behind them and the house with its welcoming lights. They were moving now into the heavy stream of traffic which lay at the end of the countrylike road, back towards Georgetown and its neat streets. “Because I want to,” he added grimly.

  She smiled for him to show she believed him. Not because they wanted him to call her. But because he wanted to do it, himself. But why should I be important to them? She wondered. Or, perhaps, Jan had exaggerated that because of his worry for her: perhaps the remark at the station, whatever it was, had meant nothing at all. And of what importance could Hallis or Minlow be? Miriam was another matter—the woman who knew everyone, whose social power was enormous, whose propaganda value was immense. But Hallis, Minlow and herself? “The friends whom you are supposed to see—are we all considered easily influenced?” she asked. She almost laughed: how Stewart Hallis and Minlow would hate to have that phrase applied to them.

  Jan said, “That’s part of it.” But what the other part was he didn’t explain. He hasn’t explained everything, she thought, but then how could he? He had only told her enough to keep her from being completely ignorant, and even that might have been too much. He had put his complete safety into her hands.

  “What would they do if they found out you had your own plans?” she asked. And the chill that suddenly spread through her body was the answer.

  He touched her hand, reassuringly. And then he switched off the radio, as if that were the signal to stop talking about these things, to stop worrying about them. But she was worrying, now, about something else. “I shall tell Payton tonight that I’m leaving him,” she said.

  “Where shall you go?” His voice was troubled.

  “Whitecraigs, I suppose.” Yet even as she said it, she knew that would be impossible. Her sisters were living at Whitecraigs now, and Jennifer’s children were there too. There wasn’t even a bedroom left free. “Or a hotel, perhaps.” Using what for money? She would take no more money from Payton: on that, she was absolutely decided. “I don’t know,” she added hopelessly. “Perhaps I’ll have to go out to Whitecraigs and see if they can fit me in.” How difficult it was to make a grand gesture. I’m going to leave you, Payton, she would say: you can divorce me for desertion, and that will save you any scandal; that’s the chief worry for you now, isn’t it? And she would go upstairs and pack the minimum of clothes and leave his jewellery and his money and walk out of his house. The grand gesture...but where would she walk?

  It was as if Jan guessed her thoughts. “You ought to stay until everything’s more or less cleared up,” he said. “I know that sounds dishonest. But it would be easier for everyone if you stayed.”

  She looked at him quickly. “Would it be safer for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I must tell Payton?” she insisted.

  “About us?”

  She suddenly realised what worried him. “Might that be dangerous—at the moment?”

  “Yes. It could be.”

  “I wouldn’t stir up any publicity or scandal, Jan. Payton would want that as little as you.”

  “I could face anything, if I were free to face it,” he said. That was his last reminder. She said nothing. She felt, suddenly, as if she were a child with a child’s idea of right and of wrong, rigidly divided. But nothing was so clear and beautiful as that: everything had its shadowed edges. Grand gestures turned to noble poses, destroying their own honesty.

  “It won’t be long,” Jan was saying as if he were trying to persuade himself. “Trust me in that, Sylvia.”

  “I trust you in everything,” she said. And watching his face as she said that, she could smile with real happiness.

  She got out of the car at the corner of her street, almost at the spot where she had entered it. Jan didn’t start the car immediately. There was a pause of at least a full minute. Time, she thought, for the waiting man to move quickly across from the shadows and be picked up again. She didn’t look over her shoulder, though, to prove herself right.

  She looked at the quiet street, the lighted windows, the peaceful houses, and she shivered as she remembered the glimpse of that other world which Jan had shown her. It can’t be, she told herself, it isn’t believable. And yet she knew it was: this street and its reality was the good dream. Jan’s world was the dream turned evil. A nightmare, he had called it, a nightmare where you are no longer in control of your actions or your desires, where every reassertion of your free will was a terrifying risk.

  She watched a man leave one of the houses, a placid man who walked confidently. Would he send Payton or Stewart Hallis to a concentration camp? Would he torture them? Kill them? Hold their families as hostages? He was a human being, but human beings behaved that way in other parts of the world. She stared at his face as he passed her. A placid man, drawing politely aside to let her keep the smooth path on the narrow sidewalk. He was humming to himself, a slightly flat rendering of “Some Enchanted Evening.” As she stared he stopped humming and gave her a small embarrassed smile. “Bad habit,” he said cheerfully, and raised his hat.

  “I liked it,” she said as she passed by. Her voice was strained and uneven, but she smiled gratefully. She walked on, feeling better somehow, towards the house with the white shutters, now pale ghostly streaks in the shadowed street.

  10

  Bob Turner’s absence from Washington stretched into three weeks.

  The first demonstration of new weapons in Nevada hadn’t been a success; a second one, given ten days later, had been more instructive to the small group of junior officers who had been chosen to study the new problems in defence. Like Turner, they were men with good combat records in Korea, who had been trained engineers before entering the Army. Like Turner, they had made the decision to stay in the
Army when their term of enlistment was over, not to follow it as a career but to complete the investment which had already been made in them. Engineers are practical: they don’t deal with flights of imagination or wishful thinking: they deal with proved facts and scientific laws and tested theories, applying them accurately and objectively. For the big jobs that come their way, they must also have vision, but a vision based on reality: a large-scale estimate of the problems to be met and beaten.

  Perhaps it was something derived from each of these disciplines that had made Bob Turner accept the further discipline of a longer hitch in the Army. “As I see it,” he had written his people in Dallas when he had made that decision, “I’ve some knowledge and a little experience of the kind that the Army needs. So they tell me, anyway, and I’m inclined to believe them as long as there’s serious trouble going on in the world. There isn’t much sense in forgetting what I’ve had to learn in these last two years and then be dragged out of civilian life again unprepared to face a major emergency. And tell Aunt Mattie when she starts giving you some more talk on Peace that I agree it’s Wonderful. Only, peace doesn’t depend on you alone, it also depends on the other fellow. If Aunt Mattie were a South Korean she’d know that. You might tell her that, too... I’ll just have to postpone building that dam to help irrigate Texas. But don’t worry. I’ll get round to it some day. We’ll have fruit orchards in the Panhandle, yet.”

  Now, with the field trip into Nevada successfully completed, the group of young Army engineers was back in Washington for more lectures, discussions and explanatory talks from gravefaced scientists. At the end of three intensive days of this tension and urgency, for the feeling of desperate need to learn had been doubled by what they had seen and heard, they were given a forty-eight hour pass to break the pressure. Wisely enough, for they were reaching the stage of looking at each other and disliking the face they saw, the voice they heard, the well-known gestures, the too-familiar mannerisms. They had been living too closely with each other; they had experienced deep emotion and hidden it from each other. It was time for a furlough. By unspoken consent, each man made his own plans and asked no one to join him. Each wanted two days of complete break with the present. Those who lived near enough to Washington travelled home. Others planned a couple of nights in New York or Baltimore, depending on the state of their finances. One or two decided to lose themselves in Washington.

  Bob Turner was one of them. Wherever he spent his leave, he would find the same loneliness. There would be the same kind of emptiness in the streets, filled with unknown faces and other people’s conversations; the same crowded restaurants where he sat as the solitary stranger; the same dark little bars with lighted glass shelves holding rows of bottles and pyramids of glasses, with the same little blondes and redheads making inane conversation, hoping for a free drink, giving a smile that cost them little and meant as much.

  Better to stay in Washington. He would wander around the buildings that formed the core of the city, the giant shapes of marble, Greek temples built with a lavish Roman hand. He was no longer a stranger with them: he could measure their beauty and proportion with the eye of an old admirer. He could notice that the grass was showing a new brightness, that the willows were tinged with yellow, the maples with red. The squares and circles and triangles of lawns and trees had become green oases among shops and hotels. All this had happened since he had left Washington. The vista of lagoon and trees and soaring monuments had changed with the new spring sky. This new apartment building had been completed, that street was being repaired, this old eyesore of wooden shacks was being pulled down. He could take the proprietary interest that made the stranger begin to have the feeling of belonging. And yet—and yet—

  By four o’clock he was ’phoning Sylvia Pleydell.

  “Why, Bob, it’s good to hear your voice. You were away for a week, weren’t you?”

  “A little longer,” he said. He hadn’t counted on her, anyway, to notice the length of his absence. It was enough to hear her friendly welcome.

  “What are you doing now?” she asked.

  “Standing in a telephone booth in a small dark bar.”

  “But the sun isn’t over the yardarm,” she said.

  “Not very far, as yet,” he reassured her.

  “You’ve got leave?”

  His smile broadened. “You could call it that. A couple of days.”

  “If you feel like it,” she said, “why don’t you come over here? There’s a good fire and an armchair and a stack of magazines and books. You’re always welcome, you know that.”

  “Yes.” You didn’t have to explain to Sylvia about the stranger in the large city, or about the soldier who liked to get away from the Army now and again. “If it isn’t a nuisance,” he added, and hoped it wasn’t.

  “Nonsense!” she said laughingly. “Come on over. I’m just sorry that I shan’t be here. Actually, I was about to leave for Whitecraigs when you ’phoned. But you’ll have this place all to yourself until Kate gets in from the Museum.” There was a pause. “If you aren’t doing anything this evening, why don’t you have dinner here with Kate?”

  He hesitated, fighting down his disappointment. “And how is Kate?” he asked, giving himself a little time.

  “I’m a little worried about her, Bob.”

  “What’s wrong? Is she homesick?”

  “It could be that. I wish I knew.”

  For a moment, he was silent. What had gone wrong? He said, “I’ll go and collect Kate at the Museum.”

  “It closes at five.”

  “I’ll make it.”

  “Thank you, Bob,” she said with a touch of emotion that added to his surprise. “And would you explain that I’ve got to go out to Whitecraigs? Unexpectedly? That would save me leaving her a note. Tell her I’m sorry...”

  “I’ll do that,” he said, still more puzzled. “Perhaps I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  “Yes—why, yes, of course! I almost forgot. Tomorrow is Miriam Hugenberg’s party, and we’ve an invitation waiting for you here. She didn’t know where to send it. Why don’t you join us at dinner tomorrow and then we’ll all go on together to Miriam’s?”

  He promised to do that, too. And then he rang off. He wondered if he was so obvious that Sylvia hadn’t bothered to send the invitation to his A.P.O. address: had she guessed he would call her as soon as he had arrived back in Washington? Oh hell and damnation, he thought, am I as obvious as all that? Why had he called her, anyway?

  The two girls sitting at the table next to his were watching him as he came away from the telephone booth. The blonde’s smile broadened into a welcome. The redhead with the clown’s white face made up her scarlet lips. Smiling to him or laughing at him? he wondered. He had been trying to laugh at himself for weeks now, ever since his first visit to the Pleydells’. He walked towards the door.

  “You’ve forgotten something,” the red-haired girl called to him, pointing her lipstick at the unfinished drink on his table.

  “Thanks,” he said, and turned back to the telephone booth to find the Museum’s address in the directory.

  “You’re welcome,” the redhead said icily, and then relaxed into good humour again as two Air Force officers, with flight pay to match the service ribbons on their chests, entered the bar.

  * * *

  The Berg Foundation for the Understanding of Contemporary Form in Painting and Sculpture had taken issue with contemporary social fashion. Instead of selecting a site as far north-west of the city as possible, it had chosen to buy a dilapidated mansion in a side street, which still survived the onslaught of commercial buildings now occupying the lower reaches of Connecticut Avenue.

  The house (built for a nineteenth-century statesman, then used as a minor legation, then as a tired business-women’s club, then as a recreation centre for Allied Servicemen) surrendered its last carved mantelpiece and ornamental door to the junk dealers, and settled into its rubble and dust with scarcely a sigh of protest. The work of clearance w
as quick. And soon, in the neatly tidied space, a four-storeyed matchbox was raised, end up, on top of another matchbox which lay on its side.

  Bob Turner examined the building with a critical eye. Nice bold simplicity, straight lines, a feeling of lightness and good humour. Were these the correct things to say? It certainly demanded attention in this quiet, tree-lined street, but how else could a new museum catch its customers? Those who came to scoff, might stay to look, and even return to visit. But only in that, could the building be called functional, for the wall of windows faced south and the summers in Washington had bright, strong sun. But no doubt shades were specially designed to keep the heat out, and electric light could always be used to let people see, and the poor Museum Director could be left to reconcile the overhead with his budget.

  Inside the heavy glass door, a grey-haired, grey-uniformed attendant gave him a freezing welcome. It was a quarter to five. “I’m calling for Miss Jerold,” Turner said quickly, before the time could be mentioned.

  The man thawed. “You didn’t seem the type who wanted to be locked in here overnight,” he said, and glanced at a mobile, balancing like a praying mantis over his head. “Miss Jerold’s in there.” He nodded towards an arch leading from the broad grey hall of mobiles and sculptures. He lowered his voice. “She’s having a bad time. The graveyard shift, we call it.”

  Turner followed the man’s nod, and entered a large room. Here the walls were greenish-blue, the pictures well spaced and carefully lighted. A small group of schoolchildren, of various shapes and ages, partially subdued by an iron-grey teacher, was clustered in front of a series of abstract paintings. And Kate was there, explaining, trying to keep a smile on her lips and a soft edge to her voice.

  A determined individualist, masculine, twelve years old, faced her accusingly. “But what does it mean?” he was asking, obviously for the second or third time.

  “Now, Billy,” the grey-haired schoolteacher began.