I and My True Love (3 page)

“Is anything wrong, Sylvia?” She didn’t usually question him like this.

“No.”

“I tried to reach you earlier this afternoon,” he said reproachfully.

“I was meeting Kate at the station.”

“Dutiful of you. And how is Kate? Presentable?”

“Charming, I think.”

“Well, that’s a relief. Tell her I’m sorry about the party, but this is unavoidable. Who’s coming tonight anyway?”

“The Clarks...”

Amy Clark was a friend of Sylvia’s. Martin Clark was a Foreign Service career man who had never left Washington and lived on his salary.

“Stewart Hallis,” Sylvia went on.

He liked Hallis, a successful lawyer in the international field, and a very eligible bachelor. “That’s tactful,” he conceded.

“Lieutenant Turner—the one who knew Kate’s brother in Korea.”

“That’s a stroke of genius.” Perhaps Turner would stop admiring Sylvia from a distance and concentrate on someone nearer his own age.

Sylvia was saying dutifully, listlessly, “And Miriam Hugenberg.”

“Well,” he said encouragingly, “that doesn’t sound too difficult an evening.” There was no one whose feelings would be hurt if he arrived late. “Practically a family gathering. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

He put down the ’phone, glanced impatiently at the clock on his desk, and said, “Now, are these the latest figures available? What about that subsidiary February report?”

“You thought it wasn’t reliable,” Miss Black said.

“Let me see its analysis again.”

He studied it carefully. Nothing really definite there... “What we want are facts and figures, not opinions,” he said irritably, yet pleased that his judgment had been right in the first place.

Miss Black’s sharp eyes expressed her agreement and approval. She began, quickly, methodically, to gather together the exact papers he required. “I’ll stay here until the meeting’s over,” she said.

He nodded, still frowning slightly. He passed a well-kept hand over his thinning grey hair. His face looked white and tired but his worry, once the frown left his brow, was well hidden. When he rose, he stooped a little as if to apologise for his height. His clothes were as quiet and restrained as his manners. His movements like his words were economical. But at the door he paused to give Miss Black a smile of thanks, a small smile that lightened his severe gaunt face for a brief moment. Then the door was shut quickly, firmly, decisively.

He works too hard, Miss Black thought. But who doesn’t? She looked at the opened files which lay in disorder and for which she felt wholly responsible. She made a pretence of a sigh, but it wouldn’t have deceived anyone.

* * *

The ’phone call from Payton had come just as she had reached her room. Sylvia put down the receiver, trying to calm her resentments. That silly listing of the names of the guests—as if to prove he were interested in the little dinner party for Kate, as if he hadn’t been told yesterday about the guests who were coming. Perhaps he hadn’t been listening, though. He listened to very little nowadays, except to his friends who were all men, who were all interested in the problems that interested him. Or that silly way of calling her dutiful because she had gone to meet Kate. Why hadn’t he asked about the luncheon and the speeches? That had been pure duty, commanded by him. It was good for Payton to have a wife who could appear on a platform for the right occasions, earn him some credit, and save him so much boredom.

Then she broke off her small revolt as quickly as it had begun. She had tried a real revolt once—six years ago. It might have succeeded if only—oh, why even think of it now?

She dropped her hat and furs on a chair, and sat down on the edge of the chaise longue. At first, she sat tensely, seeing nothing, her mind a blank, her emotions deadlocked. Then she lay back, staring up at the ceiling as if to find the answers to her problems there. “Jan,” she said softly, “oh Jan, why did you come back?” She began to cry, quietly and steadily.

* * *

The room had darkened. It must be getting late. She sat up, and switched on the lamp which stood at her elbow. Its small shaded glow fell on the silver and velvet frames clustered together on the small table beside her. Formal photographs, favourite snapshots enlarged, the little gallery of people who hedged her life and kept it in its own neat garden.

There was her father, Thomas Jerold, sitting on the wide porch of Whitecraigs, looking proudly out over his Virginia meadows as if his daughters hadn’t ever caused him worry and heartbreak. And there was her mother, Millicent, who fluttered around doing good work for every cause except that of her own family. And here were Annabel and Jennifer, her two older sisters, as they had been ten years ago when she married Payton: beautiful, yes, and disarmingly innocent. (But even in 1941 there had been scandals and high gossip—Annabel was acquiring the second of her four husbands and Jennifer was thinking of divorcing her first.)

And over here was a collection of snapshots of the California Jerolds. George, her father’s brother, who had left Virginia for a ranch in the foothills of the Sierras; Margaret, his light-hearted, competent wife with her Philadelphia sense of duty; the three children—Geoffrey who was now in Korea, young Hank still at college, and Kate who had come to conquer Washington.

Examples and warnings, she thought bitterly.

She picked up her husband’s photograph. This was how he had looked when she had married him. For love? Yes. For love. For a quiet kind of love, with respect and admiration lending it strength. Payton had been thirty-seven, then: tall, good-looking in his quiet way, distinguished: a civilised man of taste, thoughtful, tolerant, cool, detached, the opposite of the young men who had crowded Whitecraigs and become engaged to her sisters. (For each of their marriages there had been several engagements and countless rumours.) Yes, she had admired Payton. She had been grateful to him, too—he hated scandal and gossip, yet he had never criticised her sisters. And she had been flattered—the ignorant girl of twenty who was noticed by the intelligent man of thirty-seven, the man who had never been interested in women. He still wasn’t.

That’s been our trouble, she thought, for I’m a woman. Yet he chose to marry me. And, that time of his illness—he loved and needed me then. Or was it the possession of me that he needed? But why? To make his life seem complete? To reassure himself that he is a normal man? But our life—our life isn’t complete or normal. A wife isn’t a collector’s item, a porcelain figure, Sèvres circa 1790, in pride of place on a Latrobe mantelpiece.

“No!” she told herself sharply, “no! Stop thinking this way, don’t even let yourself start imagining such things.” She set down the photograph on the table beside her, turning it from her.

Once, she reminded herself, you persuaded yourself that he didn’t love you, that you owed nothing in return. Once, six years ago, you let yourself fall into love, into a love that wasn’t cool or detached or even chosen. There was no reason in it, just a madness which later she could blame on the war. And no one had known about it—except Amy Clark. Payton had never even guessed. But when he fell ill, desperately ill, just at the time Jan went back to Europe, that had been the end of the madness. For there was Payton, needing her, expecting her, asking for her. What else could she do but stay? And Jan went alone, and she was left with only the miserable sense of deception, the guilt of betrayal. As if to cleanse herself, she had become the completely dutiful wife, forcing herself into the pattern of living that Payton had wanted. He had won, every way. She gave up all hope of intense happiness. That was only a dream, a dream she had shared briefly with Jan, a dream that Payton’s illness had ended, pulling her roughly back into reality.

There was a gentle knock at the door and Kate entered. She was already dressed for dinner.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Kate said, half retreating. “Am I too early?” She looked in amazement at Sylvia’s black suit and then at Sylvia’s face.

“What’s the time? Oh heavens, I’ll be late! Come in, sit down. Keep me company while I dress.” She’s been lonely, Sylvia thought guiltily.

“I just wondered when dinner was. I went looking for Walter to find out, but I got lost downstairs.” And Walter scares me stiff, Kate thought.

“People are coming at half-past seven.” Sylvia began undressing rapidly. “Did you have time to rest?”

Kate smiled. The idea of resting seemed comic. “I’ve unpacked. I’ve ruined the beautiful room.”

“It’s got to be lived in,” Sylvia said as she moved into the bathroom. “Switch on some lights. Make yourself comfortable. I shan’t be long.” She had a quick shower and washed the stains from her cheeks where the tears had dried. What is over is over, she told herself: no more tears, no more self-pity, no more admissions. No more weakness. That’s all over.

She entered her little dressing-room and pulled on her clothes. Then she came back to the bedroom to brush her hair before the mirror. Kate was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching her.

“You dress very quickly,” Kate said.

“You learn that trick in Washington. Just look at my engagement pad beside the telephone if you don’t believe me.”

“Do you really enjoy it, Sylvia?”

“I’ve got accustomed to it, I suppose. Wouldn’t you enjoy it?”

“I don’t know. It’s all very different from being a student in Berkeley.” Kate laughed. “It’s kind of odd to step into someone else’s house in another part of the country. It’s a different design of living. Of course, this is all extra sort of special.” She looked around the bedroom. “When I find a room of my own, it will be much more like a college room in Berkeley.”

“There’s no hurry to find that room. Boarding-houses can be dreary.”

Kate said slowly, “I don’t think it would be very good for me to live here too long. Oh, I suppose I’d love it,” she added quickly, seeing the black look appearing on Sylvia’s face, “except I might lose that self-confidence you talked about.”

Sylvia finished applying her lipstick, and picked up an earring. She fitted it carefully on to her ear. “Lose it?” she said at last.

Kate, who had been smiling, suddenly looked embarrassed. She had expected Sylvia to smile, too, instead of looking so startled. “Oh,” she said, trying to make up for her blunder, “I suppose I’d learn a lot, too. I’d learn how to face a dinner party and a crowd of strangers. Sylvia, what
will
they talk about? Politics? I don’t know anything worth saying on it.”

Sylvia fixed her other ear-ring and then looked critically at the effect in the mirror. “It wasn’t that kind of self-confidence I meant,” she said slowly. “It wasn’t that kind at all.” Strange, she was thinking, but those are two kinds of self-confidence: she looked at Kate and then she looked back at herself in the mirror.

“Perfect!” Kate said with delightful honesty, watching Sylvia’s reflection. She looked down at her own dress. “Am I all right?”

“Very much so.” I ought to have mentioned her dress before, Sylvia thought. And I almost forgot my promise about the perfume. “What about smelling good?” She smiled, as she handed over a crystal bottle. Yes, she thought, a touch of Kate is what I need: she makes me feel young again.

Young again? But am I so old? Thirty isn’t old. She looked once more at her reflection in the mirror. Her skin and hair and figure were young enough, but her eyes—there was no smile hidden in them, no eagerness, no expectancy, only a certain— wariness? And there was Kate, barely eight years younger, yet almost of a different generation. What have I let happen to me in these last six years? she wondered. But she knew the answer: gradually, yet surely, she had slipped into Payton’s routine. “Pattern of living,” Kate had called it. Of living? Or of existence?

“When we are all dressed up like this,” Kate was saying, “we ought to go dancing.”

“Dancing?” Sylvia looked at her, startled. She half smiled. “That might be fun,” she admitted, but she could hear Payton’s amusement filtering through her own voice. She glanced at the clock. “Five minutes to spare. Not bad, not bad at all. Let’s go, now. We’ll have to juggle the place cards around. We’re one short for dinner. Payton has been detained. One of those meetings.” Her voice was casual as if this happened often enough.

“What
is
Payton, exactly?” Kate asked as they left the room. “Oh I know he’s something in the State Department, but that’s always sort of vague, isn’t it?” She glanced at Payton’s door as they passed it. The idea of separate rooms still amazed her: why have a wife at all if you couldn’t see her through the day and then didn’t have her beside you at night?

“He isn’t actually in the State Department. He’s just attached to it, as one of their expert advisers on trade. Mostly about European commerce. He used to be an international lawyer, but he’s given up his own practice now.” Sylvia led the way downstairs, and as they reached the half-way landing, she turned to add, “To tell you the honest truth, I don’t know very much about his work nowadays. Payton is—well, he’s careful. Security-conscious. He doesn’t really trust any woman except his own secretary. And she’s”—Sylvia half smiled—“well, she isn’t exactly feminine.”

“I see,” Kate said. “I don’t ask questions about Payton’s work.”

“Unless you want to hear the perfect non-committal answer. And another thing—you don’t have to worry about any serious political conversation at the dinner table. We don’t talk politics except in a general kind of way, where it’s anyone’s guess. You’ll never meet a real politician in this house. Payton keeps all that for his club.”

“Oh!” Kate said, disappointed. Washington without politicians? She followed her cousin into the Wedgwood blue and white dining-room.

“We’ll put Stewart Hallis at the head of the table,” Sylvia said, picking up the place cards and rearranging them. “That always flatters him.”

“What is he?”

“International lawyer. He’s hoping to follow Payton’s footsteps, I think. Expert adviser. Then—” Sylvia shrugged her shoulders. Then what? Payton’s ambition was too high to let himself talk about it.

“Then?” Kate asked.

“Then I’ll place you on Stewart’s right.” She looked at Amy’s name, and moved it away from Stewart Hallis’s left. He didn’t like Amy Clark. She studied the cards in her hands thoughtfully, and placed them carefully. “I’ll put Lieutenant Turner as far away from you as possible, then he won’t think I’ve asked him here for your benefit and he’ll calm down and take some notice of you. The guest on the other side of the table always seems better value than the one you get landed with. I know, we’ll give him Miriam Hugenberg, hyacinth-blue hair and all.”