As Far as You Can Go (15 page)

She wasn’t just restless, though, he thought. There was a curious tension in her, as though she were trying to keep something in check. All her movements as she walked about were marked by a sense of strain, as though she was making a great effort not to do something violent.

She saw he was watching her and said, “Excuse me, it’s not one of my good days today.”

“I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about. I don’t have a
headache
or anything. It’s just some days I feel sort of funny. Like I wanted to burst. You know what I mean?”

“Not really, no. How do you mean, ‘burst’?”

“I don’t know. Things get me down, I guess.”

“That happens to all of us,” said Harold.

“Maybe,” she shrugged. “Don’t you ever feel, though, sometimes, you’d like to do something—I don’t know—something
wild
?
Like drive at a hundred miles an hour, maybe? Or punch a cop in the face? You know what I mean?”

“A bit,” said Harold

“I feel like that all the time,” she said. “I feel I’ll go nuts if I don’t do something. I get kind of edgy, you know? Like I was a cushion and couldn’t hold the stuffing in much longer?”

“I’m sure Mr Barlow is not interested in how you feel, Diane,” said a cold voice.

Harold turned round and saw a woman standing at the top of the stairs. As he rose, she began to come down, holding to the rail with one hand. She was a big woman, with piles of grey hair and a wrinkled face, but she didn’t look as old as he was expecting. Old people usually looked thin and wasting, but her wrinkles were crevices in a face still fat, and she looked middle-aged in a disturbing way, as though she was fifty-five or sixty and had some disease, not eighty-one and healthy, as she apparently was. She wore rimless glasses, behind which he could see black uncompromising eyes, like
pebbles still wet from a stream, and her mouth was long and thin. She was wearing a loose-fitting grey dress and a string of large pearls, one hand at her neck twisting them as she walked.

“So you’re the Englishman,” she said, stopping at the bottom of the stairs and looking at him as her
granddaughter
had looked at him, starting at his feet, then moving slowly up. Her face, too, gave no sign of what she thought of the inspection.

“Yes, Mrs Washburn,” said Harold. “I’m Harold Barlow. I’m very glad to meet you.”

She was too far away for him to go over and shake hands, and she made no move to come nearer.

“Glad to know you, Mr Barlow,” she said. “Diane, why don’t you offer Mr Barlow something to eat?”

“I’m really not hungry. Please don’t bother.”

“Go see if there aren’t some cookies, Diane,” said the old woman. “If he won’t eat any, I will.”

Diane left the room, and Mrs Washburn moved to a sofa, settling herself on it with the agility of a much younger woman.

“You got my letter, Mr Barlow,” she said.

“No, Mrs Washburn. I wrote to you four times, but I didn’t get any answer.”

“You wrote to my husband,” she said. “My husband is dead, Mr Barlow.”

“I must apologize, Mrs Washburn, I had no wish to cause you any——”

“You didn’t cause me anything,” she said. “But you got my letter?”

“No, I have had no letter from you.”

“Diane must have forgotten to mail it. Diane is a very careless girl. I’m sorry you’ve been brought all this way to no purpose. In my letter to you I said various things, Mr Barlow, but the most important one was that I am not at all interested in selling my miniature. Not interested at all.”

Diane came back into the room with a plate of cookies.

“Diane,” said the old woman, “this young man says he never received my letter. Now did you mail it, like I told you, or did you forget it? She’d forget to get up in the mornings if someone didn’t tell her that’s how life goes on, Mr Barlow.”

Diane looked at her grandmother and said, “Sure I mailed it, Grandma.”

“Well, child, Mr Barlow said he never got it. Are you going to tell me the United States Post Office has lost it?”

“It’s happened before,” said Diane.

“Well, that’s surely a pity, then. Because Mr Barlow here, he never got my letter, and if he’d’ve got my letter, he wouldn’t be wasting his time and money here now, would he?”

“I don’t know, Grandma, you didn’t tell me what you wrote him.”

“Well, I was telling him. I was saying how I’m not
interested
one little bit in selling anything that belongs to me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs Washburn.”

“I’m sorry you’ve had to come so far to hear it, Mr Barlow. But the United States Post Office and my granddaughter between them made a mess of things, I guess.” She smiled, but she kept her eyes on Diane. “I guess you could say Mr Barlow’s here on a wild-goose chase, Diane.”

“I guess so, Grandma.”

“I hoped we might be able to discuss it a little, Mrs Washburn. I mean, I haven’t told you the whole story yet.”

“And I don’t want to hear it, Mr Barlow. There’s nothing to be discussed. I don’t want to part with any of my things. They’re mine, you understand, and that’s the way they’re going to be.”

“I don’t know what you want with that old miniature thing,” said Diane. “You never look at it, do you? When did you last look at it, Grandma?”

“That’s my business, Diane. Are you sure you won’t have a cookie, Mr Barlow?”

“Thank you,” said Harold. He took one, and Mrs
Washburn
said, “I like to see a young man eating.”

“I wonder if you’d let me at least look at the miniature, Mrs Washburn? I’d like to make absolutely sure that it is the one I’m looking for.”

“No, Mr Barlow,” she said, smiling coldly, “I don’t want to give you any ideas you shouldn’t have, and it would be putting temptation in your way to see that little picture.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s like this, Mr Barlow. If you see that picture, if I
let
you see that picture, then you’ll think I’ll sell it to you in time. Now I’m not interested in wasting your time and mine, Mr Barlow, giving you false hopes. So I guess you don’t get to see the picture.”

“But that’s absurd, Mrs Washburn.” He felt himself growing red.

“Grandma,” said Diane, “don’t you think you’re playing it a little too hard? Let the guy at least see the thing.”

Harold gave her a grateful smile, but she was looking out of the window.

“I guess you can mind your own business, Diane.”

“Well, it’s your picture.”

“It sure is my picture. And it won’t ever be yours, either, Diane.” Her eyes seemed almost to crackle with malice. “It’s going to my son Henry, not to your goddam father with his idle ways. Henry’ll know how to value it.”

“Please excuse her, Mr Barlow,” said Diane, “she gets kind of excited when she thinks about my father.”

“Your father!” said the old woman.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“Mrs Washburn, are you sure you won’t reconsider your decision? It would make a very great difference to Mr Dangerfield if he at least knew where the miniature was.”

“Who’s Mr Dangerfield?” said Diane.

“He’s the descendant of the man in the picture.”

“I told you, Diane,” said Mrs Washburn, looking at her with something Harold would have called hatred, only it seemed too cold-blooded for hate. “Can’t you remember anything, child?”

“Did you tell me?” she said in a bored voice.

“Of course I told you. I told you this morning.”

Harold started, and was about to speak, but caught a glance from Diane that made him stay silent. It seemed to ask him not to expose her grandmother as a liar, to say that she would explain it all later. But a liar Mrs Washburn must surely be. The story about the letter seemed an obvious
untruth
, to put it mildly, and it was clear that Diane had not, in fact, ever heard the name Dangerfield till a few moments ago. If this was being “kind of funny”, then being “kind of funny” was a damned nuisance. He watched the old woman. She was talking about Los Angeles now, asking him
mechanical
questions about where he had been, which he answered equally mechanically. She had an impressive composure, he thought, for one who was not telling the truth. She looked as though she had a pretty lengthy history of dishonesty to support it, too. But perhaps that was being malicious.

After a few minutes of pointless conversation, in which he asked her to change her mind about letting him see the miniature, and she said she would not, he got up to go. He intended, though, to come back.

“I shall be in Los Angeles for some time, Mrs Washburn. I hope I may have the opportunity to see you again.”

“I never go out,” she said.

“I do, though,” said Diane. “Maybe we’ll meet some place. It’s a big city, but you’d be amazed how often you run into someone you know.”

“It wouldn’t surprise
me
if you did meet your friends just anywhere,” said Mrs Washburn drily to Diane. “She’s not what I’d call a good girl, Mr Barlow, would you?”

“I’d say she was all right,” said Harold firmly. “In fact, it’s been a very great pleasure to meet you, Diane.”

“Calling each other by your first names already,” said the old woman. “When I was young you had to be engaged before you took such liberties.” She laughed harshly, showing immaculate false teeth.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think you told me your
surname
.”

“She’s a Miss Washburn, Mr Barlow, and if you ask me that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

Diane turned furiously on her grandmother, who laughed and said, “Can’t take a joke, can you, child? Time you learnt.”

“Good-bye, Mrs Washburn,” said Harold.

“Good-bye, Mr Barlow. See him to the door, Diane.”

As he followed the girl up the stairs he thought he felt the old woman’s eyes on him, but when he turned to say a final good-bye from the top of the stairs she was sitting on one of the sofas, turning the pages of a magazine with one hand and twisting her string of pearls with the other.

When they were outside the house, Diane said, “I’m sorry about Grandma, Mr Barlow——’

“Harold, please.”

“—Harold. I told you she was kind of difficult.”

“Grandma Moses’s Law in operation before our very eyes,” said Harold, trying to keep his tone light.

“Yeah,” she said, flatly.

Harold had been considerably taken aback by Mrs
Washburn’s
frank hostility. She had, after all, invited him to call when he rang her up. Her rudeness must, then, have been premeditated. And there had been something about Diane’s behaviour, her small attempt to intercede for him, which seemed to come not from any sympathy for him or his errand, but from some long, probably permanent, quarrel between the two women, so that her resistance to her grandmother’s
calculated impoliteness was almost automatic. His interest was aroused.

“Does your grandmother ever change her mind about things?” he said, casually.

“Sometimes,” said Diane. She looked at him with a little smile of pity. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

“You see,” said Harold, “Mr Dangerfield, the man who wants the miniature, wants it very badly. He’s prepared to spend a lot of money for it. And it seems rather a shame that I’m not allowed even to see it.”

“I guess it is,” said Diane. “I’m sorry.”

“May I be frank?” said Harold.

“Go right ahead.”

“Your grandmother wasn’t telling the truth, was she? She had never written to me, had she?”

“No, she never wrote you.”

“And she hadn’t told you anything about me, and why I wanted the miniature?”

“She just said you wanted it. She didn’t tell me anything more.” Diane looked at the ground.

“Well, why?”

She raised her head and said, “If I knew how my
grandmother’s
mind worked, Mr Barlow, I should count myself very fortunate. If you get what I mean.”

“I think so,” said Harold. He wondered whether she could be won over as an ally. He looked at her, and she looked straight back with her pupils tiny in the bright
afternoon
light.

“She does actually have the miniature, I suppose,” said Harold.

“Oh yes, she’s got it all right. But I wouldn’t take
anything
for hopeful, Harold. When Grandma gets an idea she wants to do something, or not to do something, that’s it. She’s not exactly—you know—pliable.”

“No, I imagine not.”

“So don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

She was really very attractive, he thought, his mind going off at a tangent. Her breasts were hinting beneath the orange shirt, and he felt a sudden stir of frank sexual interest.

“And you think I can come back?” he said.

“Oh, sure.”

“Do you ever have a free evening, Diane, by any chance?”

“Most of my evenings are free,” she said, kicking at a weed by the side of the path.

He wondered why most of her evenings were free. It didn’t make sense, a girl as attractive as her not being sought out for dates.

“How about it, then?”

“If you really want to,” she said. “But don’t think it’ll help you get your miniature.”

“I wasn’t thinking about the miniature,” said Harold, truthfully. “I don’t know anyone in Los Angeles, you see.”

“I’ll be glad to show you around,” she said, drily.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “I’d like to take you out, that’s all.”

She smiled suddenly and warmly. “O.K., Harold. I knew you didn’t mean it like that, too. I just feel kind of edgy today, like I said.”

“Good,” said Harold. “Tomorrow? Shall I come and pick you up?”

“That’d be great,” said Diane. “If you don’t mind facing Grandma again.”

“I think I can just about stand it,” he said.

“I love the way you talk, Mr Englishman,” she said,
suddenly
relaxed and laughing. “I just love it.”

“O.K.,” said Harold, not minding for a change, “O.K., little American girl. About six?”

“Fine.”

They smiled at each other.

“You know,” said Harold, “I wasn’t expecting anything
so life-size and lively when I came up here. I was just
expecting
an ancient miniature. It’s a very pleasant surprise.”