I and My True Love (14 page)

She got out of the car at the corner of her street, almost at the spot where she had entered it. Jan didn’t start the car immediately. There was a pause of at least a full minute. Time, she thought, for the waiting man to move quickly across from the shadows and be picked up again. She didn’t look over her shoulder, though, to prove herself right.

She looked at the quiet street, the lighted windows, the peaceful houses, and she shivered as she remembered the glimpse of that other world which Jan had shown her. It can’t be, she told herself, it isn’t believable. And yet she knew it was: this street and its reality was the good dream. Jan’s world was the dream turned evil. A nightmare, he had called it, a nightmare where you are no longer in control of your actions or your desires, where every reassertion of your free will was a terrifying risk.

She watched a man leave one of the houses, a placid man who walked confidently. Would he send Payton or Stewart Hallis to a concentration camp? Would he torture them? Kill them? Hold their families as hostages? He was a human being, but human beings behaved that way in other parts of the world. She stared at his face as he passed her. A placid man, drawing politely aside to let her keep the smooth path on the narrow sidewalk. He was humming to himself, a slightly flat rendering of “Some Enchanted Evening.” As she stared he stopped humming and gave her a small embarrassed smile. “Bad habit,” he said cheerfully, and raised his hat.

“I liked it,” she said as she passed by. Her voice was strained and uneven, but she smiled gratefully. She walked on, feeling better somehow, towards the house with the white shutters, now pale ghostly streaks in the shadowed street.

10

Bob Turner’s absence from Washington stretched into three weeks.

The first demonstration of new weapons in Nevada hadn’t been a success; a second one, given ten days later, had been more instructive to the small group of junior officers who had been chosen to study the new problems in defence. Like Turner, they were men with good combat records in Korea, who had been trained engineers before entering the Army. Like Turner, they had made the decision to stay in the Army when their term of enlistment was over, not to follow it as a career but to complete the investment which had already been made in them. Engineers are practical: they don’t deal with flights of imagination or wishful thinking: they deal with proved facts and scientific laws and tested theories, applying them accurately and objectively. For the big jobs that come their way, they must also have vision, but a vision based on reality: a large-scale estimate of the problems to be met and beaten.

Perhaps it was something derived from each of these disciplines that had made Bob Turner accept the further discipline of a longer hitch in the Army. “As I see it,” he had written his people in Dallas when he had made that decision, “I’ve some knowledge and a little experience of the kind that the Army needs. So they tell me, anyway, and I’m inclined to believe them as long as there’s serious trouble going on in the world. There isn’t much sense in forgetting what I’ve had to learn in these last two years and then be dragged out of civilian life again unprepared to face a major emergency. And tell Aunt Mattie when she starts giving you some more talk on Peace that I agree it’s Wonderful. Only, peace doesn’t depend on you alone, it also depends on the other fellow. If Aunt Mattie were a South Korean she’d know that. You might tell her that, too... I’ll just have to postpone building that dam to help irrigate Texas. But don’t worry. I’ll get round to it some day. We’ll have fruit orchards in the Panhandle, yet.”

Now, with the field trip into Nevada successfully completed, the group of young Army engineers was back in Washington for more lectures, discussions and explanatory talks from gravefaced scientists. At the end of three intensive days of this tension and urgency, for the feeling of desperate need to learn had been doubled by what they had seen and heard, they were given a forty-eight hour pass to break the pressure. Wisely enough, for they were reaching the stage of looking at each other and disliking the face they saw, the voice they heard, the well-known gestures, the too-familiar mannerisms. They had been living too closely with each other; they had experienced deep emotion and hidden it from each other. It was time for a furlough. By unspoken consent, each man made his own plans and asked no one to join him. Each wanted two days of complete break with the present. Those who lived near enough to Washington travelled home. Others planned a couple of nights in New York or Baltimore, depending on the state of their finances. One or two decided to lose themselves in Washington.

Bob Turner was one of them. Wherever he spent his leave, he would find the same loneliness. There would be the same kind of emptiness in the streets, filled with unknown faces and other people’s conversations; the same crowded restaurants where he sat as the solitary stranger; the same dark little bars with lighted glass shelves holding rows of bottles and pyramids of glasses, with the same little blondes and redheads making inane conversation, hoping for a free drink, giving a smile that cost them little and meant as much.

Better to stay in Washington. He would wander around the buildings that formed the core of the city, the giant shapes of marble, Greek temples built with a lavish Roman hand. He was no longer a stranger with them: he could measure their beauty and proportion with the eye of an old admirer. He could notice that the grass was showing a new brightness, that the willows were tinged with yellow, the maples with red. The squares and circles and triangles of lawns and trees had become green oases among shops and hotels. All this had happened since he had left Washington. The vista of lagoon and trees and soaring monuments had changed with the new spring sky. This new apartment building had been completed, that street was being repaired, this old eyesore of wooden shacks was being pulled down. He could take the proprietary interest that made the stranger begin to have the feeling of belonging. And yet—and yet—

By four o’clock he was ’phoning Sylvia Pleydell.

“Why, Bob, it’s good to hear your voice. You were away for a week, weren’t you?”

“A little longer,” he said. He hadn’t counted on her, anyway, to notice the length of his absence. It was enough to hear her friendly welcome.

“What are you doing now?” she asked.

“Standing in a telephone booth in a small dark bar.”

“But the sun isn’t over the yardarm,” she said.

“Not very far, as yet,” he reassured her.

“You’ve got leave?”

His smile broadened. “You could call it that. A couple of days.”

“If you feel like it,” she said, “why don’t you come over here? There’s a good fire and an armchair and a stack of magazines and books. You’re always welcome, you know that.”

“Yes.” You didn’t have to explain to Sylvia about the stranger in the large city, or about the soldier who liked to get away from the Army now and again. “If it isn’t a nuisance,” he added, and hoped it wasn’t.

“Nonsense!” she said laughingly. “Come on over. I’m just sorry that I shan’t be here. Actually, I was about to leave for Whitecraigs when you ’phoned. But you’ll have this place all to yourself until Kate gets in from the Museum.” There was a pause. “If you aren’t doing anything this evening, why don’t you have dinner here with Kate?”

He hesitated, fighting down his disappointment. “And how is Kate?” he asked, giving himself a little time.

“I’m a little worried about her, Bob.”

“What’s wrong? Is she homesick?”

“It could be that. I wish I knew.”

For a moment, he was silent. What had gone wrong? He said, “I’ll go and collect Kate at the Museum.”

“It closes at five.”

“I’ll make it.”

“Thank you, Bob,” she said with a touch of emotion that added to his surprise. “And would you explain that I’ve got to go out to Whitecraigs? Unexpectedly? That would save me leaving her a note. Tell her I’m sorry...”

“I’ll do that,” he said, still more puzzled. “Perhaps I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yes—why, yes, of course! I almost forgot. Tomorrow is Miriam Hugenberg’s party, and we’ve an invitation waiting for you here. She didn’t know where to send it. Why don’t you join us at dinner tomorrow and then we’ll all go on together to Miriam’s?”

He promised to do that, too. And then he rang off. He wondered if he was so obvious that Sylvia hadn’t bothered to send the invitation to his A.P.O. address: had she guessed he would call her as soon as he had arrived back in Washington? Oh hell and damnation, he thought, am I as obvious as all that? Why had he called her, anyway?

The two girls sitting at the table next to his were watching him as he came away from the telephone booth. The blonde’s smile broadened into a welcome. The redhead with the clown’s white face made up her scarlet lips. Smiling to him or laughing at him? he wondered. He had been trying to laugh at himself for weeks now, ever since his first visit to the Pleydells’. He walked towards the door.

“You’ve forgotten something,” the red-haired girl called to him, pointing her lipstick at the unfinished drink on his table.

“Thanks,” he said, and turned back to the telephone booth to find the Museum’s address in the directory.

“You’re welcome,” the redhead said icily, and then relaxed into good humour again as two Air Force officers, with flight pay to match the service ribbons on their chests, entered the bar.

* * *

The Berg Foundation for the Understanding of Contemporary Form in Painting and Sculpture had taken issue with contemporary social fashion. Instead of selecting a site as far north-west of the city as possible, it had chosen to buy a dilapidated mansion in a side street, which still survived the onslaught of commercial buildings now occupying the lower reaches of Connecticut Avenue.

The house (built for a nineteenth-century statesman, then used as a minor legation, then as a tired business-women’s club, then as a recreation centre for Allied Servicemen) surrendered its last carved mantelpiece and ornamental door to the junk dealers, and settled into its rubble and dust with scarcely a sigh of protest. The work of clearance was quick. And soon, in the neatly tidied space, a four-storeyed matchbox was raised, end up, on top of another matchbox which lay on its side.

Bob Turner examined the building with a critical eye. Nice bold simplicity, straight lines, a feeling of lightness and good humour. Were these the correct things to say? It certainly demanded attention in this quiet, tree-lined street, but how else could a new museum catch its customers? Those who came to scoff, might stay to look, and even return to visit. But only in that, could the building be called functional, for the wall of windows faced south and the summers in Washington had bright, strong sun. But no doubt shades were specially designed to keep the heat out, and electric light could always be used to let people see, and the poor Museum Director could be left to reconcile the overhead with his budget.

Inside the heavy glass door, a grey-haired, grey-uniformed attendant gave him a freezing welcome. It was a quarter to five. “I’m calling for Miss Jerold,” Turner said quickly, before the time could be mentioned.

The man thawed. “You didn’t seem the type who wanted to be locked in here overnight,” he said, and glanced at a mobile, balancing like a praying mantis over his head. “Miss Jerold’s in there.” He nodded towards an arch leading from the broad grey hall of mobiles and sculptures. He lowered his voice. “She’s having a bad time. The graveyard shift, we call it.”

Turner followed the man’s nod, and entered a large room. Here the walls were greenish-blue, the pictures well spaced and carefully lighted. A small group of schoolchildren, of various shapes and ages, partially subdued by an iron-grey teacher, was clustered in front of a series of abstract paintings. And Kate was there, explaining, trying to keep a smile on her lips and a soft edge to her voice.

A determined individualist, masculine, twelve years old, faced her accusingly. “But what does it
mean?”
he was asking, obviously for the second or third time.

“Now, Billy,” the grey-haired schoolteacher began.

“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.