“That’s all right, Miss Greer,” Kate remembered to say before the last piece of authority was snatched from her. “That’s a good question, Billy. Do you remember what I called the paintings in this room when we came in here?”
Billy frowned. He remembered. But he was waiting to see the trick develop: a good question, was it? Then why didn’t she answer it?
“They’re abstracts,” a round-faced little girl said, and looked contemptuously at Billy. His frown increased, hating all women still more.
“And abstracts are designs,” Kate said. “They don’t need to have a meaning. They’re a design that the artist wanted to make.”
“Linoleum patterns,” Billy said. “My father says they’re linoleum patterns.”
“There are other patterns, too.” Kate’s smile was still there. “What about the patterns of clouds in the sky?”
“That means rain,” Billy said.
“No, it doesn’t. Not always,” another boy said.
“What about the pattern of the stars?” a girl asked, her thin clear voice trailing away at her own temerity.
“That means something,” Billy said, not yielding an inch. “The stars wouldn’t be there if they didn’t mean something.”
There was a short silence.
Kate looked at the door as if for help. She saw Bob Turner. For a moment, she was still. Then her eyes dropped, her voice seemed stifled as she said, “You mean, Billy, that the stars have a reason why they are in the sky?”
Billy granted her that.
“There’s a reason too for these pictures. The artists wanted to paint them, just that way, in no other way. That’s the reason for them.”
“Is that all the reason?” Billy asked in disgust.
“Now, Billy,” said Miss Greer, coming to life with a problem she could face. “You mustn’t speak that way.”
Kate said, “Artists think that is a good reason. When you paint, Billy, don’t you put red just where you want red, green where you want green?”
Billy was silent, obviously groping for a firm reply.
“I’m afraid our time’s up,” Kate said quickly, and she glanced at her watch as if she hadn’t been counting the minutes as they ticked so slowly away. “Goodbye, Miss Greer. Goodbye, everyone.”
The stream of children poured happily into the hall. Now it was Miss Greer’s turn for martyrdom. Turner watched them go. Then he faced Kate. She brushed a lock of hair back from her forehead. Her brown eyes looked at him almost defensively.
He said, “I’ll meet you at the stage door. When?”
She gave a little smile. “Ten minutes.”
“I’ll be waiting. You look like an art expert who needs a drink.” He gave her a small salute and left the room.
“See what I meant?” the grey-haired attendant asked him.
Turner nodded. He looked at the praying mantis swinging overhead as he pushed open the heavy glass door. “How’s your dream life, these nights?”
“Hilarious,” the man said gloomily.
11
When she came out of the museum, he noted that her clothes were simple and looked just right, and he liked the way she walked towards him. She was wearing a kind of brownish suit, and she had twisted a flame-coloured scarf into the open neck of her white blouse. Her dark hair had been cut shorter, so that it curled around the nape of her neck and the back of her ears. Her smile was whole-hearted and her first words pleased him too. “Hallo, Bob, I thought you had been transferred for good.” Someone, at least, had noticed his absence from Washington.
“Not yet,” he said, observing that when her smile went away there was a little sadness at the corners of her mouth, and the eyes didn’t keep their happy light but became hesitant, almost guarded. Sylvia had been right, he thought: Kate was troubled about something.
“Let’s walk,” Kate was saying now. So he let the cruising taxi pass, and crossed behind her to take the outer edge of the sidewalk.
“And where have you been?” she asked.
“Oh...various places.”
She was looking at him, waiting for him to go on.
He said, “Nothing particularly interesting. Just drainage problems and road-building for a new camp site.”
“And not to be talked about?” She paused. “All right, I’ll change the subject. But I thought you might have been out in Nevada seeing some of the atomic explosions.”
“How did you get that idea?”
“I read it in the newspapers—something about engineers being particularly interested in the demonstrations.”
“Are they?” He hoped he hid his annoyance. So we’re told to keep quiet, but everyone else can read all about it with his breakfast coffee. “And how is Washington?”
“We needn’t be so polite. Washington is all right. But I’m all wrong.”
“I don’t get that.”
“You saw me this afternoon.”
“I thought you handled the situation well.”
She said nothing.
“You handled it very well,” he repeated. “And I’m not being tactful. What else could you do? Tell little Billy to go jump in the Tidal Basin?”
“If I had told him to have an open mind, he wouldn’t have known what I meant. If I had given him talk about organisation of shapes, avoidance of representation, visual interest of arrangement—”
“You’d have silenced him, but made him hate abstract art for life. At least, he has gone away thinking about the subject.”
“I hope.”
“You’ll see him back, with some new objections.”
“You depress me still more. He’ll end up converting me to the linoleum-pattern idea. And then where shall I be?”
“Don’t get depressed. Give him another four years. By the time he’s sixteen he’ll think of nothing except significant form.”
She looked at him quickly.
“Yes,” he went on, “you’d be surprised how men have been thinking of that for years.”
She was laughing now.
“When I saw you facing that little mob,” he went on, “you reminded me of the first time I was pretending to be an officer. But I had a sergeant beside me, thank God. Why don’t you have a sergeant along with you?”
“I had. But she’s ill this week, with asthma.”
“Allergic to little Billy?”
Kate laughed again, “You know, I sort of liked him.”
“That’s why I said you handled the situation well. You can worry when you start hating your audience. Then you resign, or get asthma.”
“How did you become an officer?” she asked suddenly.
“Someone filled up Form BX 24 instead of C39Z, I guess. Had enough fresh air yet?” He eyed the Mayflower Hotel across the avenue. “Now, there’s an interesting-looking building. Shall we have a look at the interior? And after that, you can decide where we’ll have dinner. Will you?”
“I’d love that.” And then a shadow of a frown passed over her eyes. “Except,” she added slowly, “that Sylvia expects me for dinner. There were just to be the two of us, tonight.”
“That will be all right,” he said, “Sylvia won’t be home for dinner. She’s had an unexpected engagement. She wanted me to tell you she’s sorry.” He was totally unprepared for the effect of his words. Kate’s face tightened. She halted. For a moment, she stood looking at him. “Sylvia had to go to Whitecraigs,” he explained.
“Did she?” The voice was so unlike Kate’s that he stared. Then she noticed his bewilderment. “Perhaps the Mayflower is a good idea,” she said.
“This is probably the wrong entrance,” he said, leading her through the massive set of glass doors. “Whatever way I take, I always get lost in this place. Eventually, they send out search parties and send up flares and all is well.”
“This way,” she said helpfully, walking straight ahead.
“Well! You have been getting to know Washington.” He wondered who had been helping her to know it. He caught her arm. “Not so
far,” he said gently, and steered her towards the left.
She looked at him, and then she began to smile. It was then that he decided she was not only good to look, at, but good to be with.
“That’s right,” he said. “You ought to be subsidised to keep that smile in place.”
“It’s remarkable how you—” she began, and then she didn’t finish the sentence but pretended to look at the room they had entered. It was crowded at this hour, but they found a small table against a grey-green wall. Then she thought he had probably forgotten—he was busy trying to catch a waiter’s eye—and she sat back in the grey-green leather chair and watched the sea of faces around her, listening to the rise and fall of voices equally anonymous. Sylvia...she was thinking, I’m no help to Sylvia at all: I’m quite useless—I can’t even talk to her. Everything is strange and hidden and she’s never mentioned Jan Brovic. And yet, she goes out: unexpected invitations. And I never know where she goes. There’s always this secrecy, this sense of evasion, nothing explained, constant tension. Is this the way Sylvia always behaved, even before Jan Brovic returned?
But Bob hadn’t forgotten. “What’s remarkable?” he asked, the minute he had ordered their drinks.
She hesitated. “How you cheer me up,” she said.
“I was just thinking I’m not so good at it. At least, it didn’t last very long. The smile’s gone, and you’ve got that look of worry back on your face. What can we do about it?”
She didn’t answer.
“I can stand on my head,” he volunteered. “I can—”
That won a reappearance of her smile.
“Look,” he said, “if that job is getting you down, then throw it up. Try something else. There’s no need to be stuck with something you don’t like.”
“It isn’t the job,” she said quickly. And then she hesitated again. “I like it,” she added.
“You’re an art expert who doesn’t only need a drink. You need someone to listen to your troubles,” he remarked. “There’s an old-fashioned, and here I am. Servus!” He lifted his glass.
She nodded. “I guess you’re right.” But she didn’t talk.
I’m a stranger, he thought. We are all strangers in Washington to Kate; that’s part of her trouble. He offered her a cigarette and studied the problem of breaking down the strangeness which still lay between them. “Have you heard from brother Geoff?” he asked casually.
“I had a letter last week.” Her face brightened.
“Good news, then.”
“Yes. He might be coming home in June. If all goes well.” She hesitated, remembering the full page of the letter which had been devoted to Bob Turner. Almost shyly, she added, “You knew each other fairly well, didn’t you?”
“Fairly,” he said, with a grin, emphasising her understatement. “But he held out on me about one thing. I’ll take that up with him when he gets home.” If I’m still here, and not in Europe. “He used to talk about the ranch at Santa Rosita and all of you. He had a photograph he used to show me. ‘My kid sister, Katie. You’ll meet her when you come to see us,’ he used to say.”
Kate suddenly remembered Geoff’s odd sense of humour. “Which photograph was that?”
“That’s what I’m going to take up with him. It was a snapshot of a thin little beanpole in blue jeans and a checked shirt with its tail hanging out. There were a couple of pigtails over your shoulder, and a wide smile braced with silver.”
“That,” she said indignantly, “was years and years ago.” Then she began to laugh. “What did you expect to see when you came to dinner at the Pleydells’?”
“Not you,” he said frankly. “Talking of dinner, shall we call up the house and let the perfect gentleman’s gentleman know that we won’t be there this evening? Sylvia—”
“Did Sylvia,” she cut in quickly, “did Sylvia ask you to take me to dinner?”
“No,” he said, watching her face, “no. She did invite me to dinner at the house, but—Now don’t look at me like that! Sylvia didn’t send me to the Museum.” He was annoyed. “It was my own idea. No one told me to do anything about you. If they had, I wouldn’t have done it.” And that isn’t quite accurate, he told himself, and he became angrier still: Sylvia never needed to ask him directly. Like the damned idiot he was, he was always ready to volunteer if it would please her.
“I’m sorry, Bob. But you’re so polite that—”
“Polite?” He was a little startled.
“Well, you were, weren’t you, when you came to the Pleydell dinner party expecting to meet a thin little beanpole with braces on her teeth?”
He was silent. He hadn’t come to that party hoping to meet anyone. Except Sylvia.
“You like Sylvia a lot, don’t you?” Kate asked.
He looked at her warily. Had she guessed? Yet her voice had been quiet, and she was watching him anxiously as if she were about to ask him more questions.
“Yes,” he said as casually as possible, and wondered how to alter course in this conversation without letting the sails flap.
“How well do you know her?”
Perhaps a little explanation might help him to escape, he thought. “As much as I know anyone in Washington,” he said. “I was a stranger when I got here. Geoff had given me a message for Sylvia. I telephoned. She asked me to come and see them. I went. And I’ve been dropping in for a visit whenever I’ve some free time. You’d be surprised how tired you can get of wandering round streets or visiting museums or seeing movies or pretending you’re having a whale of a time around bars. You can kid yourself you’re having fun, but I had reached the stage when I got even tired of kidding myself. Sylvia seemed to understand all that.” Without any explanations, either. But then Sylvia had been lonely enough in her own life.
“But you like Sylvia for herself?”
“Yes,” he said. “That too.”
“And Payton Pleydell?”
Bob didn’t answer right away. “It’s difficult to know him,” he said guardedly.
“Yes. And yet he has some very good friends.”
Of a certain kind, Bob thought. He closed his lips tightly. Then he glanced quickly at Kate: she was just like Sylvia—how ignorant could women stay? Or was it their innocence? “Some men seem to like him,” he admitted safely enough.
“But you don’t?”
“I’m not his type,” Bob said most decidedly. Better get off this subject, too, he thought. So he began to speak of another aspect of Pleydell’s friends that he disliked. “His friends don’t approve much of me,” he said, smiling now. “Remember Whiteshaw, or is it Minlow? One of the crew-cut twins, anyway.”
“I get all mixed up with them too. Whiteshaw has the lighter hair, I think. Minlow is the one who resigned in protest. Yes, I’m almost sure that’s right.”
“Then it could have been Minlow who tried to convince me that America had been the aggressor in Korea.”
“I wish I had been there to hear your answer.”
“It was brief.”
“And then?” She was amused, now.
“Look,” he said, “Minlow’s a bore. Listen to one of his remarks, and you can make an accurate guess of everything he will say and how he will say it in the next couple of hours. He’s a Babbitt, new style. All his ideas are strictly off the peg. I can’t see why Payton nurses him along unless—” He closed his lips tightly. “What about another drink?”
She shook her head. “Payton is very tolerant, of course,” she said slowly.
“Payton prides himself on his tolerance.”
“Is that different?”
“Think it over,” he said. “And now, what about dinner? Here, or where?”
She pretended to study an ornamental hat tilted over blonde curls at a nearby table. “The bird-garden hat,” she said in a low voice. “Just over your right shoulder. All it needs is Dali to suspend a miniature piano on that dwarf rosebush.” And, having divided his attention, she made a quick calculation on the cost of dinner at the Mayflower
and the pay of a second-lieutenant.
“Let’s go to Georgetown,” she said. “You must be—you’re sick of eating in restaurants.”
“Look,” he said, “do you want to go back to the house?”
“Why not?”
He looked at her quickly, but she was searching for a glove on the floor. He found it.
“I gathered you didn’t like the house much,” he said, as he guided her to the street entrance of the room.
“How?”
“From the expression on your face when I talked about my visits there.”
“Oh, the house is all right,” she said. “It’s just that it’s— well, difficult to live there, somehow.”
Now he couldn’t see her face, for she was walking slightly ahead of him. But in the street, in the clear light of a spring evening, he could see very plainly.
“Why don’t you find a place of your own?” he asked her.
“I will,” she said determinedly, “as soon as—” She stopped short.
“As soon as when?”
She hesitated a little before she replied to that. And at first, he didn’t know it was the reply. “You’ve known Sylvia longer than I have. Tell me, Bob—”
“Let’s take this cab.” He raised his arm and hailed it.
“You’re being extravagant.”
“I let myself be extravagant twice a year, whether I need it or not,” he assured her as he helped her into the taxi.
* * *
The journey to Georgetown was long enough to let Bob Turner find out several things.
First of all, Kate was worried about Sylvia. About Sylvia’s health, to be precise. He would have laughed openly if the girl beside him hadn’t been so serious. There she was, looking out of the window at a procession of pillars, pediments and elms, asking her thinly disguised questions about Sylvia with a pretence of nonchalance while her face was tight with worry.
“This doesn’t make sense,” he said at last. “You’ve only to watch Sylvia and you’ll see that she’s as well-balanced as you or I. She’s always in control of herself.” But that didn’t produce the right effect whatsoever. Kate only looked at him as if she were frightened, now. “Why should you believe the person who told you all this nonsense, anyway? Whoever it was probably knew less about Sylvia than you do. Sure, you’ve only come here recently, but you’re living in the same house as Sylvia and you can see for yourself that she’s sane and sensible.”