Five Smooth Stones (83 page)

He moved toward a newsstand, carrying his small bag, trying to get out of the way of hurrying, train-bound crowds, feeling in his pocket for his address book with the Travis address and phone number. It might be better to take a cab and go directly to the house without phoning if Hunter didn't show; there would be someone there, and Hunter would catch up with him eventually.

He was halfway to the newsstand, glancing back to the train gate he had just left, still looking for Hunter, when someone bumped—a rather solid bump—into his midsection. He moved aside quickly, said, "Beg your pardon—" looked down and said, "God! Good God—" while Paddington Station and London roared around the shores of the island on which he and Sara Kent stood alone.

"No. Not God. Sara. It's Sara, David—"

"I—I know—" His words came thickly, as though he were drunk; he had a baffled, lost feeling. Not now, he thought, not now—if it had to happen I needed time for defenses—"I —I know—" he said again, stupidly. "Sara." And saying her name, directly into her eyes, brought the world back around them, took them from an island and set them down in Paddington Station.

"Is that all you can say, David? Just 'I know—'?"

"I'm—well, I'm shook—" He was smiling now, but the words still came thickly, stupidly. "Where—where you headed for?" People came to stations to take trains. Hunter wouldn't have told her; this was nothing but an agonizing coincidence that couldn't happen in the largest city in the world and yet had happened.

"Paddington Station. That's where I was headed for. Where the trains from Oxford come in. Where students coming in from Oxford get off trains."

People also came to stations to meet people. He hadn't been the only Oxonian on that train. "You—you meeting the five-fifteen? It's—it's already in—"

Sara was laughing now, and as she laughed she reached up and pulled off her rain hat, shaking it so that little rivulets of water fell from its creases. "David! All that studying—it's made you teched in the haid—"

Suddenly he couldn't look at her any longer, not until he could quiet what was going on inside himself that would not let him talk sanely. He stooped to pick up his bag, saw tiny feet in what had once been smart walking shoes, shoes now so dark with water and a blackish slime they might be any color. From shoes to knees soaked stockings clung to slender legs, and at the knees the skirt of a wet, defeated raincoat hung soggily.

He straightened, said: "Your feet, Sara. My God, they're soaked! You're—well, you're soaked all over—" and his voice belonged to him again, and the words came clearly without stumbling through uncertain lips.

"I—I suppose I am—" She was moving back from him, and he had to restrain himself from reaching out to her. Then he realized she was moving away only to get a wider view of the station, and her hand was on his arm.

"Over there," she said. "Near the newspaper stand. Hot tea for my wet feet, David?"

"I—no—I—sure, Sara. Sure. Good gosh, you'll catch your damned death of cold—"

She walked beside him, footsteps half running, voice lilting, words tumbling: "No, I won't—not now, David. I won't catch anything bad or nasty or sick-making now—I couldn't, David; I couldn't—"

They found a table whose enamel top bore light tan puddies from previous tea drinkers. David scrubbed it carefully with a paper napkin while Sara giggled like a child, and he glared at her defensively. "Well, for gosh sake, it was dirty, wasn't it?"

They brought their tea to the table, and David said, frowning, "Sara, your feet. You're squishing when you walk—"

"David,
will
you stop talking about my feet! Damn my feet! My feet will be all right! Can't you think of anything else except my blasted feet! I run and run and run and panic and get soaked and finally get a cab and then run like hell through the station looking for you and then I find you and all you can talk about is my damned wet feet!"

He was quiet for a moment, looking at her, not wanting to speak, just wanting now to look at her, really see her, the glowing eyes, every line of face and throat and body. Then he smiled slowly.

"Little Sara. Smallest—"

"Go on, darling. David, my darling, go on—'little love—'"

"Little love—"

CHAPTER 53

For Sara there was the joy of feeling whole again, and she tried to describe it to David. "As though I don't have any missing parts any more, like spark plugs and ignition switches, the bits and pieces that make something go."

But there was something other than the wholeness, something that marred that joy, and she kept silent about this, afraid that voicing it would give it strength. She had not felt it before, although she had sensed it in David and tried to convince him that it was false. Now she knew it was not false, that it was real and valid, and it came between them when she least wanted it, hovering over a table while they ate, her couch when they lay together, walking beside them as they strolled through a London park, her hand reaching up to tuck itself beneath his arm. Fear.

Sara Kent... the burnt child come back to the fire... closer this time... and this time a hotter fire.... What will happen in the spring when David goes back home?... What will happen then?... Take what you have now and be happy with it.... It's time now to grow up, Sara.... Forget the spring... Forget the spring....

During David's absences at Oxford she painted with a brush once again in her own hands and not the hands of a stranger, and on a morning when the rain was pounding on the skylight as forcefully as it had the afternoon she had raced to Paddington Station, she started her first abstraction, all yellows and blues and shades of rose, standing back from it every now and then to laugh delightedly. When Hunter Travis saw this one, a beautiful friendship would end with a bang. She started mental squabbles with Hunter about art—the only kind she ever really won were the mental ones—and considered giving the finished canvas to Marcia, who would love it and in sheer contrariness would hang it someplace where Hunter would be bound to see it every time he came to the house. Sara, squarest, she thought; that's you.

She showed it to David, who said, "What do you mean, 'square'? I'm the guy they invented the word for. I think it's real beeyootiful...."

She tried to hug him, never completely successful at this because her arms would scarcely reach, and he picked her up and held her against his shoulder. "The better to kiss you, my dear." When he set her down he said, "Listen, where's the picture Hunter told me about that he wants you to save for his father to see? Don't I rate a look?"

She hesitated. From the moment she had started the painting of the little black boy she had known that on that particular canvas no one's judgment, amateur or expert, would count except David's. At that time she had thought he would never see it, that she would never know if she had somehow succeeded in translating fantasy into reality.

She walked to the storage cupboard, separated the black-boy canvas from several unfinished ones, and brought it to the easel. As she set it up she said: "I haven't named it yet. I don't know what to call it. Usually I know beforehand—"

He stood without speaking for so long that any thought she had that he might like it vanished and she steeled herself for criticism. At last he moved forward, closer to the picture, a smile she could not interpret disturbing the impassivity of his face.

When he spoke it was under his breath. "That's it, baby," he said. "Baby, that's
it."
She could not tell whether he was speaking to her or the small black child on the canvas.

Later she grinned across a dinner table at him. "When I'm famous you can brag that you named a Kent canvas."

"How? What?"

"'That's it, baby.'"

***

Sara was so delighted with Jedediah after they had met a few times that David told her he was jealous, and she laced her fingers through his as they walked along Southampton Row to Russell Square. "Not really, love?"

"Nope. Not really. Just enough to keep me interested." Then he frowned down at her, half smiling at the same time. He hadn't seen any adult Londoners skipping on the street, although he'd seen almost everything else.

"Ooops!" said Sara. "I'm being conspicuous. Sorry."

The weather was still drippy when he returned to Oxford after that first trip down, leaving a suddenly solemn and quiet Sara. "You're going away again, David—"

"Gosh, hon, I've got to. They won't move Oxford down here—"

"Of course not."

"Come on, baby, don't look like that."

"Like what?"

"As though you were seeing ghosts or something."

"I am. The ghosts of my own feelings, the way they were, the way they could be again—David, you're coming back?"

"No, I'm not. I'm going to stay up there and let the blues take over, die stone cold daid of loneliness every weekend. Honest.... There's time for one more kiss, sweet... two more... three..."

But on the journey back, through a countryside still gray, he remembered his conclusions on the first journey: that he would have to assume a maturity he had not shown yet in this situation that neither time nor distance had changed. He had understood Sara better than she realized when she said, "I feel whole again." His only problem, he thought, his only li'l piece of a problem wore a too familiar face: a choice that had been there from the beginning, from a spring evening in Laurel when he had first met a girl with one arm in a green silk sling: the choice between the spiritual disembodiment of separation or the facing of the new problem that would be created in marriage.

That new problem seemed dangerously simple of solution

here, four thousand miles away from home and the conditions that would create it. He had been forced to pull himself back time and again from the quicksands of complacency. A few more years, a few more Nottingham riots, a few more thousand black-skinned people on this little island—his inner laugh was a bitter one—and he would probably feel right at home, instead of free and identifiable as a person. But now, riding in an English train compartment, the polite, brief stares of his fellow passengers recognizable as those of curiosity and not of hate or repugnance, that marriage seemed right and possible, Chuck Martin's words, "Who are you, you self-righteous idiot, to look God's gifts in the teeth?" valid and understandable.

Gramp had said once, "There ain't nothing perfect. 'Cept maybe a new baby—"

It was all a long way off, even Gramp and Chop-bone and the little house in Beauregard and the Timmins kids across the road, and Isaiah and the Jeffersons. He had not merely come to Oxford, England; he had traveled through immeasurable reaches of space to another planet where he was as all men and he and Sara were as they had been created— male and female, and what had moved on the face of the waters and created life when the world was without form and void had been love.

... And it's not that simple... not now or here or anywhere, anytime.... Pull yourself together, Champlin. Here's your station....

***

Identifying early spring in England, David decided, was a matter of bloodstream and bones, and the stirring of the spirit. "It's not just the contrast with that mess that came before. It's different," he told Marcia when she telephoned him one afternoon at Oxford.

"That it is, David. Our seasons explain us—-"

"Come on, now. Nothing does that. A complex breed, the British—"

"Not at all. Well argue it out one day. Right now I'm calling for my husband. He wants you for dinner Saturday night. Jedediah's father has come to London unexpectedly, and he wants you to meet him."

"Solomon of Zambana?"

"So biblical, isn't it? Like Saul of Tarsus, or Jehosaphat of Judah. And he's a bit of a biblical character. No beard, of course."

"Why 'of course'? I was thinking—"

"David Champlin, don't you dare!"

"All right, mum. I won't. What time? I'd sure like to meet him."

"Early; that is, for you. Lawrence wants to talk with you first."

"Have I done something I shouldn't?"

"No, pet. And it wouldn't be any of our business if you had. He just wants to discuss certain things with you. Around six?"

"Hunter—"

"Just you, my dear. Not even our dearly beloved son this time. Not even Sara."

"Gosh—"

"Sixish—?"

"I'll be running—"

***

Spring in London wasn't true; it was a miracle that couldn't possibly happen, yet it had, and David marveled, as a man does at miracles. Everything seemed illusionary: the blaze of yellow jonquils in the windowboxes of a huge, grime-blackened building wasn't the brightness of flowers, it was summer sun that had been stored within that building through the long gray winter and transplanted now to reassure the passersby that all was still ordered and well with God's plan for the seasons. In the parks the buds were a green mist against the sky and the brick and concrete, and in Trafalgar Square the lions basked, waiting for the summer the young sunlight promised.

On the Saturday he was to dine at the Travises', he and Sara ate lunch in Hyde Park, took undergrounds, and strolled through brighter streets than he had ever seen before. They shopped for clothes for Sara and a light blue pullover for him, and as they walked down Oxford Street he said: "Go ahead, honey chile. Skip. If I didn't have a gimpy leg I'd skip too."

"Like a young lamb gamboling on the green?"

"We-ell, not exactly." Then he said, "Don't say it."

"Say what?"

" 'O, Wind, If Winter comes'—"

"Stoopid. But six o'clock comes, and we have to get back so you can spruce up for whatever in the world it can be that Lawrence wants to talk to you about."

"It just about has to be some legal something or other he wants me to take up with Brad when I get back—"

***

He wondered as he walked toward the Travis house what a man was supposed to call the top guy in an African state. Chief? He'd heard that "Chief was derived from European influences. Your Highness? Your Royal Highness? Mr. Abikawai?

With the Travis house just ahead now, he began to feel nervous. What in hell did Lawrence Travis want of him? Lawrence Travis and, for God's sake, a man called Solomon of Zambana? If it was legal matter, he wished he'd brought a notebook.