“Perhaps I’m wrong,” she had said. “I could be wrong.”
But she hadn’t been wrong.
Suddenly, she felt cold and sick. She halted, standing uncertainly at the kerb. An oncoming taxi slowed down. She nodded, and it came to a stop beside her.
“Where to, miss?”
“Anywhere.”
He turned his head and gave her a shrewd glance. “Want to see some of the sights? You a stranger here?”
She nodded. She was a stranger here, a stranger even to herself.
“You’re too early for the cherry trees,” he said honestly.
“They’ll do as they are.”
“How long do you want to drive around? About an hour?”
She nodded.
“Okay, miss.” He swung the nose of his cab out into the traffic. “That’s Lafayette Square we’re coming to,” he said, “with Old Stonewall himself. And that’s the White House through the trees”—he pointed between the elms in the Square—“being repaired; it will look better when they get that scaffolding down. They say the floors were sagging like a canvas tent.” He talked happily all the way.
“Pity the cherry trees aren’t out,” he said as they reached the Tidal Basin. “Three thousand of them, they say. Never counted them, myself.”
The cab had stopped, but she didn’t move. She sat looking at the massed rows of trees with their twisting branches, delicate and fragile. She spoke almost to herself. “And what if they never came into blossom?”
The driver looked at her in amazement. He was an elderly man, hawk-featured, bald, hard-eyed.
“They are beautiful even now,” she told him, thinking of Payton, who preferred this intricate simplicity to clouds of white and pink. Temporary window-dressing, he had said, blurring the essential lines. Four weeks of pretty fluff and then nothing but a mess of scattered petals.
“In a dead kind of way.” He shook his head slowly, his lips pursed. “That wouldn’t be natural. That would be a waste.”
“Yes,” she said at last, and she turned to look at the river.
* * *
“Sylvia,” Kate said, coming into the hall as soon as she heard her cousin’s voice speaking to Walter, “Sylvia—oh, I was worried about you. And Dr. Formby has been ’phoning. He wants to see you again. Is there anything wrong?”
“No. Nothing at all.” Her voice was calm, decided. “Everything’s all right. And how did you get on, today?”
“I had a wonderful time. I didn’t see anything, of course, at least only in a kind of sweeping way.” Kate was smiling, now. “The car swept along and Stewart swept out his arm to point.” She was watching Walter slowly drawing the long curtains in the library.
“And I hope you weren’t swept off your feet.”
“Of course not.” Kate looked startled.
“He’s a most persuasive character, is Mr. Hallis,” Sylvia reminded her.
“Actually, I think he’s rather sweet.”
Sylvia said, “I’ve heard Stewart labelled many things, but never sweet.” She started upstairs. “Are you going out tonight to see the Marx brothers with Bob Turner?”
“He’s left Washington.”
“No! Well, that’s the Army, of course.”
“Only for a week, he said.” Walter was now in the drawingroom attending to the fire.
“Then we can spend this evening together. Payton’s dining out tonight.”
“May I come up to your room, now?” Kate glanced at the clock. It was a quarter to six.
“Now? Why, yes. If you want to,” she said, trying to hide her reluctance. After all, she would see Kate all this evening. “Hadn’t you better write home and let them know you arrived safely?”
Kate laughed. “You sound like an aged aunt rather than a cousin. Don’t worry. I’ve written a long letter and it’s mailed too.”
At this moment, Sylvia thought, I feel like an aged aunt with all kinds of responsibilities: Stewart Hallis is “rather sweet,” is he?
“I told them all about this house and everything,” Kate was saying. Then she leaned over the banisters to make sure that Walter had stopped hovering around the hall downstairs. She grasped Sylvia’s arm. “Come along,” she said in a very different voice. “We’ve little time.” And she hurried her cousin along the corridor.
“Now,” she said, inside Sylvia’s room, her back against the door as if she were holding it safely shut, “about Jan Brovic. He’s going to call you at six o’clock. Please let him talk to you, Sylvia. He needs help. He really does.”
Sylvia could only turn to stare.
“I met him this morning—I’ll tell you all about it later. But now—oh, Sylvia, you could listen to him, couldn’t you? Don’t cut him off, again. He needs your help. Let him tell you what’s wrong, anyway. You could do that, couldn’t you?”
Sylvia said nothing at all. She took off her hat, and began combing her hair.
“Are you afraid Payton would object?” Kate asked.
“Payton would most certainly object,” Sylvia said. But she was afraid of that no longer.
“Because of politics, you mean? You needn’t worry about that. It’s my own guess that Jan Brovic is trying to escape. And if he were, then Payton could help him a lot—after all, Payton knows a lot of important people, and that would make everything quicker, wouldn’t it, if Jan Brovic needed—”
“You think that if I were to ask Payton to help Jan that he’d do it?” Sylvia asked slowly.
Kate watched the expression on her cousin’s face. What have I stumbled into? she wondered in dismay. She said, as if apologising to Payton, “I honestly didn’t think that Jan Brovic meant to cause trouble. It was just that he needed help. And he seemed so alone.” She hesitated, but Sylvia said nothing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know... But honestly, Sylvia, he didn’t seem the kind of man who’d go around destroying other people’s lives. He needed your help. That was all.”
Jan never destroyed anything, Sylvia thought: there never would have been any falling in love with Jan if I had been really happy when I first met him. He destroyed nothing then. He can destroy nothing now. Payton has been the one to destroy all the ties that held me here.
“But of course,” Kate was saying, “you can’t very well see him if Payton’s against it.”
Sylvia still said nothing.
“After all,” Kate added, “he is your husband.”
“Yes,” Sylvia said, coming to life again. “He’s my husband. I married him, didn’t I? I thought he was rather sweet.” The bitterness in her voice hurt Kate. The girl’s eyes looked at her reproachfully for a moment, and then they glanced away in embarrassment.
“Just see where Minna has dumped your flowers!” Kate said, and went to pick up a vase of red roses which was set almost out of sight behind a chair. “Shall I put them on the table, or in front of the mirror? Look how they’re reflected: they’ve become a garden.” She stepped back to study them. “They’re perfect in this white room,” she said. “They bring it life.” Then she went slowly over to the door, still not looking at Sylvia. “I’ll see you at dinner,” she said.
She closed the door quietly behind her. As she went along the corridor, she heard the ringing of a telephone bell. Walter was answering the call in the library. She wondered if Jan Brovic had given his real name. She ran quickly downstairs. She didn’t like any of this, at all, she decided. Somehow, this morning, as she walked through the streets with Jan Brovic, everything had seemed fairly simple. But now, it didn’t seem simple, any more. She didn’t like any of it, but she wasn’t going to let Walter listen in to any private calls either.
As she entered the library, Walter had seemingly just transferred the call upstairs. She began walking slowly around the bookshelves: Greek philosophy, modern sculpture, nineteenth-century history; some novels, too—Gide, Dostoievsky, Proust, Huysmans; some biography—several books on Richard the Lion-hearted, she noted... Behind her, Walter loitered to rearrange a Hepplewhite winged chair in fr
ont of a neat fireplace. She picked out a book dealing with collections.
“What time is dinner, Walter?”
“When Mrs. Pleydell is alone, she dines at seven. She generally has a tray sent up to her room.”
“Tonight, we’ll be having dinner together.”
“Downstairs, miss?”
“But, of course!” You’re a wily old trout, she thought. Had you expected another easy evening? Am I supposed to feel apologetic for giving you extra work? “If that isn’t too much trouble,” she added and turned to her book. I won that round anyway, she decided, as his quiet measured footsteps left the room.
As the door closed, she sat down on the arm of a black leather couch—the one touch of unabashed modern in a room of small-scale Sheraton and precise Hepplewhite—and looked around her. She felt ill at ease, as if the library were returning her scrutiny, measure for measure. This was Payton Pleydell’s room. She was the intruder. I’ll start searching for a place of my own, she decided. Tomorrow. And then all I’ll have to worry about will be my job and my own life. That’s quite enough, too.
The telephone gave one small dull ring. The conversation was over. She rose quickly, and left.
8
If dinner that night was elaborately served (Walter’s subtle touch of protest, no doubt), the conversation was remarkably easy. Sylvia was totally unworried. There was colour in her cheeks, a smile in her eyes. The bitterness had gone from her voice; the drawn, haggard look had vanished from her face. Kate’s nervousness disappeared; and the depression that had settled over her, when she sat in the library and waited for a telephone call to end, suddenly lifted. She waited impatiently for dinner to be over, for Walter to stop hovering round them in his striped waistcoat like a slightly exhausted humming-bird. Then, she thought, we can talk a little, behave normally again.
So it came as a shock when Sylvia glanced at the clock in the drawing-room, where they had settled comfortably in front of a blazing fire, and suddenly rose to her feet. “Kate,” she said gently, “I’m going out. I shan’t be too long. Perhaps an hour. Can you find something to do here until I get back?”
“Of course,” Kate said stiffly.
“I’m going to see Amy Clark.”
There’s no need to tell me lies, Kate thought unhappily. And then she wondered if the excuse wasn’t meant for someone else. “If Payton gets back early—” she began.
“Oh, he’s usually very late. Don’t look so scared, darling. You aren’t afraid of this house, are you?”
“I’ll be all right,” Kate said. She tried to sound as casual as Sylvia. She picked up the book she had borrowed from Payton’s library, and showed its title: Art Collections in Washington. “I’m finding out all the competition that the Berg Foundation has to face,” she said lightly, and she began to read.
She heard the front door close quietly.
She had to force herself very hard to go on reading.
* * *
A few minutes after nine o’clock, she heard the front door open as quietly as it had closed over an hour ago. Kate raised her head, and looked expectantly towards the hall. But it was Payton Pleydell who had come in.
“Hallo,” he said in surprise as he glanced into the drawingroom. “All alone, here?” He dropped his briefcase and hat on the hall table. “Where’s Sylvia—upstairs?” he asked as he entered the room.
“No. She had to go out.”
He crossed over to the fire and warmed his hands, thoughtfully. “Do you know where she went?”
“To see Mrs. Clark.”
Then he turned to face her. “What’s this you’re reading?... You are taking your job seriously, aren’t you?”
“I’m rather scared of it, to tell the truth.”
“I’m sure you needn’t be. It probably sounds more imposing than it actually is, like most things in this peculiar city. How did you come to hear of the Berg Foundation?”
She repressed a smile. “Berg lived in California.”
“Really?”
“That’s where he made his money and bought his pictures. Then, when he decided to move the collection to Washington, he also made the trustees agree to appoint half of the staff from California. If they were qualified, of course.”
“Keeping it in the family, as it were.”
“I think he felt that if it hadn’t been for California he wouldn’t have been able to collect pictures in the first place.”
He looked at her with a touch of amusement: why should she be so defensive about such a very slight joke? “And did you have an interview—or are Californians taken on trust?” He smiled, this time, to show he was being humorous.
Kate looked down at the rug. She wondered what he’d think if she answered, “Did you find Harvard a hindrance when you started practising law in Washington? Or did you find the connections you made here were a drag on your present career?” But she only said, “I was interviewed in San Francisco.”
“How did you come to be interested in art in the first place, living on a ranch, miles from anywhere if I remember correctly?”
Kate didn’t answer. She was studying him, instead. He was only making conversation, probably not even paying much attention to what she said. He was talking about one thing, thinking about another. She was a nuisance: she knew that, but she wished she didn’t feel it so clearly. Why hadn’t he just gone into the library after saying good evening to her? He’d be much happier if he were sitting at his desk, opening his briefcase.
“But I’d really like to know,” he insisted, and he chose the chair facing hers. “How did you come to be interested in art?”
This is an interview in itself, she decided; or is this his way of making conversation: can he be nervous—nervous with me? “I think you’ll find quite a number of people living on farms and ranches who like pictures or music or books.”
“Are there?” he asked, a little in wonder. “I used to think that country people spent all winter whittling and waiting for the thaw to set in.”
Joke, Kate told herself firmly. “Did you ever spend any winters in the country?”
“No. We spent the winters in Boston and the summers in Maine. That’s years ago, of course, when I was a boy. A very long time ago, indeed.”
“Don’t you ever miss New England? Don’t you want to go back there?”
“Not particularly. I’ve no ties there—my parents died when I was in college. Boston has a certain rigidity about it, I find. Charming people, of course, many of them, but extremely conventional.”
Kate glanced involuntarily around the rigid pattern of the room where Robert Adam had been imitated without any break in the convention.
“I much prefer Georgetown,” he went on, “although it, too, is becoming a little spoiled. It’s rather sad, isn’t it? You discover something, but you aren’t allowed to keep it the way you discovered it.”
“But you wouldn’t have wanted it to stay a slum.”
“A slum?” He looked almost startled.
“I’m sorry—I was only quoting Stewart Hallis.”
“It was hardly a slum. The fine old houses were all there, waiting to be restored.”
“What happened to the people who lived in them?”
“They went to live elsewhere. Obviously.”
She flushed. “I mean—didn’t they hate to leave?”
“This house hardly looked the way it does now. No,” he smiled. “I don’t believe its inhabitants regretted leaving it.”
“Oh!” she said, and hoped she sounded understanding. It hadn’t been a slum and yet the inhabitants had been glad to leave. “Well,” she added, on surer ground now, “it seems to have become fashionable to live in Georgetown.”
“‘Fashionable, isn’t a word I care for,” he said gently.
I’m glad, thought Kate, that I didn’t use the word “expensive.” It really would have ended this conversation completely. And I’ve got to keep talking, or else he will guess I’m anxious about Sylvia. She glanced at him and
saw him look at the clock. He’s worried, too, she suddenly realised: he’s been worrying about Sylvia ever since he came in.
There was a pause.
She looked at him, again, and now he was watching her. She was blaming herself for having judged him too hastily: who wouldn’t appear rude if he were worried secretly? She had always been too rash in her judgments of people, too quick to like or dislike. Now, as their eyes met, she gave him an apologetic smile.
“You’re wondering why I came home early, tonight?” he asked suddenly.
“I thought the speeches might have been dull.”
“I didn’t even wait to hear them. I came away as soon as I could.” He paused and frowned. “I was troubled about Sylvia.”
Her face seemed to freeze. She wanted to swallow, and couldn’t.
He said, “I’m afraid she will have to go away for a vacation.” Carefully, he watched the new anxiety on the girl’s face. “You are fond of Sylvia, aren’t you? I can see she likes you even in the short time you’ve been together. You Jerolds are all very impulsive, aren’t you?”
“Why must Sylvia go away?”
“Dr. Formby’s report isn’t good. He insists on an immediate change, complete rest.”
“But Sylvia said he found nothing wrong.”
“Formby didn’t want to worry her.”
Kate stared at him.
He said, quietly, sadly, “She’s never been very strong. She’s been doing too much, I’m afraid. She could have a very bad crack-up. She’s living on her nerves.” He put a hand over his eyes; there was a droop of despair on the usually tight, controlled mouth. His body seemed to sag. “I’ve noticed this for some weeks now. That’s why I insisted she had to go to Formby, today.”
Kate said quickly, “Can you tell me what’s actually wrong? Is it serious?”
“Yes. It’s most serious.” But he didn’t explain, and Kate could only watch him with increasing anxiety. He dropped his hand from his eyes. “Would you help me, Kate? Sylvia is stubborn. I don’t want to alarm her, but I must persuade her to go away for a month or two. I know she won’t listen to me.” He smiled sadly. “But if you could persuade her, as tactfully as you can—well, perhaps you might save her.”