I and My True Love (13 page)

The vehemence died away and became strength. “You’re afraid,” he said, feeling the sharp shiver that tightened her shoulders. “Afraid of what, Sylvia? Of our love?” He watched her face, white in the darkness. Her head had drooped backwards, lying across his arm. “I’m afraid of a lot of things,” he said gently, “but not of our love.” Strange, he thought, we are afraid of the opposites: the American doesn’t even begin to be afraid of the dangers that lie around us: all these, the American accepts confidently. “But how could you be afraid of the dangers?” he asked quietly. “You never have experienced them. You don’t even know they could exist.”

She opened her eyes, looking at him in wonder. The scarf had slipped from her head, and her fair hair had the silvered colour of ripe wheat under a bright moon. He bent over, his arms tightening around her, and kissed her, again and again and again.

“Jan,” she tried to say. Her lips answered his kisses, her arms tightened in reply. Jan, you were right. Love is never over. It never dies. It goes to sleep and comes alive again. Like the trees in the spring.

She was smiling, her eyes as bright as the stars in the cool sky overhead. “I’m not afraid, now,” she said at last.

“Not even of the foreigner?” There was a wry note in his voice. But as he expected, her answer came direct, neither shirking the truth nor disguising it.

“It was silly of me to feel that,” she said. She never had, before.

“No,” he said gently. “It was a true feeling. I’ve seen too many things. They leave their mark. I am a foreigner to you, now. I come from another world, Sylvia.” He kissed her hand, and pushed up the sleeve of her coat, turning her wrist gently to kiss the softness of her inner arm.

“But you’ll stay here,” she said quickly. “You’ll stay and remember this world again.” But he will never forget the other one, she thought as she watched his tense face.

“That is the plan,” he said. “To escape. To be free again.” He frowned, hesitating, choosing his words. “I can’t tell you everything. Not yet. But I can tell you enough. You ought to know that, at least.” He twisted the control of the radio so that the music, now swirling into gay Offenbach, was dominant and blotted out the distant voices that came from the happy house perched on its garden hill.

“We’ll go back to the day that the Communists seized power. That first week... I tried to escape—once I had got over the shock. But I planned things rashly, stupidly. I was caught. I was imprisoned, interrogated. And then I was sent to a correction camp.”

“Oh, Jan!” Her eyes were wide with horror.

“I was lucky. Others were killed. I only got hard labour. It was strange, that... When we had been free, I used to spend a lot of the summer in the country—holidays, week-ends. I used to like to get away from the city—”

“What was your job in Prague?”

“I sat at a desk and worried about commercial aircraft.” He shook his head as if that were all unbelievable now.

“In the country, where my family had a small house, I’d visit a neighbouring farm. I used to enjoy working in the fields— getting the feel of earth into my bones again. I even helped my friend to build a road to his barn. It was hard work, but we enjoyed it, all of us. We laughed and joked and sang.” Again he shook his head.

“In the correction camp I was in a road gang. But no one laughed or joked, this time. And the work was no longer work. It was a nightmare.”

She stirred helplessly. There was nothing to say.

“I was released after two years. That puzzled me a little. I was brought back to Prague and told to stay there. I had to report twice a week. I was watched. So were all the others in our family.”

“Is your father still alive? And your brother and sister?”

“Yes. My sister’s husband died three years ago. She has two children.” He paused. And then he went on, “Yes, we were all watched. I found it difficult to get work. I had become an untouchable. Almost a year ago, there was a sudden release in the tension. I was offered a job in an export business firm. I was watched, now, in a different way. I was being tested. I was sounded out, approached in a quiet, friendly fashion. A couple of months ago, I was offered the chance to go to Washington. As one of them.”

She thought, once it was the Nazis we meant when we used to talk of “them”; and now... Must there always be a “they” or a “them”?

“I let myself be persuaded, not too quickly, not too slowly. But I made my own plans secretly. With my brother. We no longer had any illusions about the people who controlled our lives. If I came to America, and then spoke the truth, the family would be arrested. So this time we made slow and careful plans for an escape—their escape. Soon, I ought to hear that they’ve reached safety. With all luck, I ought to hear it within the next two weeks.”

“They’re making their escape now?”

“They were to start the day I reached Washington.” There was no controlling the excitement in his voice. “They are travelling less quickly than I did, of course. And they are going different ways: a party of that size is difficult to manage. But they’ll be safe, soon. And then I’ll be free, free to speak out, free to act.” He crushed her hands.

Then he controlled himself. He said gently, hesitantly, “You will come with me this time? Wherever I go?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have nothing to start with—no money, no job. It will be difficult at first.”

“I’m going with you, Jan.”

He held her in his arms, and he said, “No more doubts?”

“No more. I love you, Jan.”

“But you loved me six years ago.”

“Yes... But even if you didn’t want me now, I’d still leave Payton.”

“Why?” He was startled at the intensity of her voice.

“Because I’ve been living a lie, and it was Payton who made it a lie. I found that out today.”

“Tell me,” he urged her, and he listened to the story of Payton’s illness. “He will deny it,” he said when she had finished.

“But I’ll never be able to believe his denial. What kind of life would I have, feeling this constant resentment, this suspicion, this coldness? I’ve gone on living with Payton—living?” Her voice faltered and she shook her head. “I’ve gone on staying in Payton’s house, one of Payton’s possessions. And why did I stay? Because I admired him. Because he needed me. Because I was trying to make up for my betrayal, when I fell in love with another man. Six years of penance... And today, I found he had won it through a trick. My respect for him is gone. If I stayed on now, my self-respect would be gone: I’d only be staying for the money and position he could offer me. I need more than that from life.”

“He will tell you that he still needs you.”

“Yes.”

She watched the lights of a car searching along the road ahead of them. Then it stopped, edging into the side of the road, and a man and woman came out. The woman was laughing as she waited for the man to lock the car, and gave him her hand as they started towards the lighted house. He helped her carefully to climb the steps that led up through the garden, and the lamp over the entrance glanced on the gold of her pretty sandals as she lifted the hem of her wide floating skirt. He was laughing too, as they disappeared up towards the house, his arm around her waist.

“Oh, why didn’t we meet long ago”—Sylvia said, asking the bitter question that so many lovers have asked, “when I was free and could have walked openly with you?” She still watched the garden steps, the pool of light where the woman’s slippers had gleamed so gaily and confidently. Then she looked at the trees, shadowing the road, drawing it into darkness and dangers. “We must go soon,” she said. “When will we meet again, Jan? In a week, or two, when you’ve heard you are free?”

“Before then,” he said. “I’ll keep on seeing you.”

“But”—she was startled—“won’t they be suspicious if you see me? I’m not the kind of contact they will approve of... I would be the kind of person who’d weaken your allegiance to them, wouldn’t I?”

For a moment he said nothing. “I am supposed to act as normally as possible,” he said at last. “They don’t object to my friends. If they watch, at first, it’s because they want to make quite sure about me.” The music from the radio had ended. A voice, urgent, insistent, advised all to sell their old cars now now now when the market was good good good. Jan turned the radio’s knob quickly. A voice, advocating Hunnyspread, golden, delicious, with that tangy zestful flavour, was cut through suddenly by Bach’s G Minor chords.

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.