Nothing So Strange (4 page)

One lunchtime he threaded his way deliberately amongst the tables towards
mine. “I’ve been wanting to ask you something,” he began, sitting down. “I’ve
been thinking I ought to return your parents’ hospitality. Of course I don’t
have a house where I could very well ask them to dinner….”

“Oh, they know that—they wouldn’t expect it—”

“But perhaps a hotel—I wondered if you could tell me any particular
place they like.”

My father liked Claridge’s and my mother the Berkeley, either of which
would have cost him at least a week’s pay. So I said: “They really don’t care
much for dining at hotels at all…. Why don’t you ask them to tea? I know
they’d love that.”

“Tea?… That’s an idea. Just afternoon tea—like the English?”

“My mother
is
English.”

“Tea and crumpets, then.”

“Not crumpets in the middle of June. Just tea.”

“And what hotel?”

“Does it have to be any hotel? Why don’t you make tea in your lab? Mathews
does.”

“Mathews? You know him? We might invite him too.” I didn’t know what he
meant by “we” till he added: “Would you help?”

“With the tea? Why yes, of course.”

It was fun making preparations. I had never been inside his laboratory
before, or even seen what “Dr. Mark Bradley” looked like on his letter box.
It was an ugly room on the top story of the Physics Building, with less
scientific equipment in it than I had expected and a rather pervasive smell
that I didn’t comment on because there was nothing to be said in its favor
and doubtless nothing that could be done about it. I tidied the place up a
bit, dusted the chairs, and soon had the kettle boiling on a tripod over a
Bunsen burner. Mathews came, talked, drank tea, and had to leave for a
lecture. My parents had promised to be there by four, and I was a little
peeved by their lateness, not because it really mattered but because I could
see it was making Brad nervous. He kept pacing up and down and looking out of
the window. Suddenly he cried “They’re here!” and rushed out and down the
stairs. But when he came back there was only my mother with him. She was full
of apologies; she had been shopping and hadn’t noticed the time; and also my
father couldn’t come owing to a meeting in the City that had lasted longer
than usual. “Of course you shouldn’t have waited for me.” Then she looked
appraisingly round the room, sniffing just as I had. “What a jolly little
place! How secluded you must be here—almost on the roof! And all those
wonderful-looking instruments—you simply
must
tell me about
them.”

There were only a couple of microscopes, a chemical balance, and a Liebig
condenser, but he went round with her, exhibiting and explaining, answering
in patient detail even the most trivial of her questions, and all without the
slightest trace of nervousness or reticence. It looked to me like a miracle,
till I remembered that Mathews had said he was a good lecturer.

Then we had tea, and I knew that it
was
a miracle, because all at
once he was actually
chatting
. She asked him most of the questions I
had wanted to ask him, and he answered them all. About his early life in
North Dakota, the farm near the Canadian border, droughts, blizzards, hard
times, bankruptcy, the death of both his parents before he was out of grade
school, and his own career since. She asked him such personal
things—had he left a girl in America, did he have enough money? He said
there was no girl and he had enough money to live on.

“But not enough to marry on?”

“I don’t want to marry.”

“You might—someday.”

“No.”

“How can you be certain?”

“Because of my work. It takes up so much of my time that it wouldn’t be
fair to any woman to marry her.”

“She mightn’t let it take up so much of your time.”

“Then it wouldn’t be fair to my work.”

“Isn’t that rather … inhuman?”

“Not when you feel about your work as I do.”

“You mean as a sort of priesthood—with a vow of celibacy
attached?”

He thought a moment. “I don’t know. I hadn’t figured it out quite like
that.”

But the oddest thing was yet to come. About six o’clock a boy put his head
in at the doorway, grinned cheerfully, and asked if he could go home. “I’ve
fed the cats and mice and fixed all the cages, sir.”

Brad said: “You’d better let me take a look first.” He excused himself to
us and was gone a few minutes; when he came back my mother was all ready for
him. “What’s this about cats and mice and cages? Is that what the smell
is?”

He smiled. “I hope it doesn’t bother you. I’m so used to it myself I
hardly notice it.”

“But what do you have them for?”

“I don’t have them at all—they belong to the man next door. I keep
an eye on them when he’s out. He uses them for his experimental work.”

“You mean—” She flushed a little. “But of course, that’s very
interesting. I’d like to see your menagerie. Could I?”

I hoped he would have more sense and I tried to signal danger to both of
them, but without effect. I didn’t know him well enough, anyway, to convey
signals, and somehow at that moment I didn’t even feel I knew my mother well
enough. She had a spellbound look, as if she were eager for disaster. Brad
just said: “Sure, if you like, but I warn you, the smell’s worse when you get
close.”

We walked down a stone corridor and into another room. It was full of
cages, numbered and tagged and placed methodically on platforms round the
walls. The cats had had their milk and were sleepily washing themselves; they
purred in anticipation and rubbed their heads against the wire when he went
near them. My mother looked hypnotizes as she followed him from cage to cage.
She asked him how the cats were obtained. “I suppose the University buys them
from somebody,” he answered. “Most of them are strays—they’re often
half- starved when they first come here. We feed them well, of
course—they have to be healthy before they’re any use.”

Without reply see suddenly opened the door of one of the cages. A black
and white cat squirmed eagerly into her arms and tried to reach up to her
chin. See fondled it for a moment, then put it back in the cage. “What a pity
I have to,” she whispered.

“You like cats?” he asked.

“I adore them. Do you?”

“Yes. Dogs too.”

It wasn’t a very intelligent end to the conversation but I could see it
was
the end. My mother was already putting on that glassy look she has
when see is saying charming things and thinking of something else at the same
time. I’ve often seen it at the tail end of a party. “I think perhaps I ought
to be going…. So nice of you to ask me here and tell me everything. We must
have you to the house again soon.”

He saw us down to the street, where Henry was waiting. In the car my
mother was silent for a while, then she said: “It was my fault. I shouldn’t
have poked my nose in.”

When I didn’t answer she added: “I suppose they have to do it.”

“
He
doesn’t. They weren’t his.”

She was silent again for some time, then asked suddenly: “Do you think you
understand him?”

“Not after the way he talked to you today.”

“Why, what was wrong about that?”

“Nothing, only I’d always thought he was reserved and shy.”

“He is.”

“Not with you. He told you more in five minutes than he’d tell me in five
years.”

“Wait till you’ve known him five years. You’ll be a better age.”

“So you think that’s why he doesn’t talk to me as he does to you? Because
I’m too young?”

“Perhaps. Darling, don’t be annoyed. And I might be wrong too. I’ve never
met scientists before. They must be queer people. The way they can
do
such things … and yet have ideals. The distant goal—he’s got his eyes
fixed on it and he can’t see anything nearer…. And all his hard life and
early struggles haven’t taught him anything. He doesn’t realize that even in
the scientific world you’ve got to get about and make friends if you want to
be a success. He lives like a hermit—anyone can see that. It would do
him good to fall in love.”

I laughed. “Mathews says he’s scared of women altogether.”

“Mathews?”

“The man next door to him.”

“Oh yes … the one who … yes, I remember….”

“All the same, though, he wasn’t scared of
you
.”

She cuddled my arm and answered: “No, darling, it was I who was scared.
He’s a
peculiar
man.”

Ever since schooldays I have kept a diary of sorts, mostly
the jotting
down of engagements, never anything literary or confessional. Brad makes his
appearance the first day I saw him; there’s the record: “Dinner Chelsea
Professor Byfleet. Gave a lift home to American boy researching at Coll.
Shy.” The entry for the day on which my mother came to tea is similarly
brief. Just: “Tea in Brad’s lab. Mother. Cat.” And about a week later comes
this: “End of College Term. Cat.”

What happened was that I got home from an afternoon walk to find my mother
and Brad in the drawing room. They were talking together and my mother was
nursing a black and white cat which immediately she thrust into my arms.
“Look, Jane! It’s the same one! Brad just brought it—he’s given it to
me!”

“It’s lovely,” I said, and I noticed she had called him Brad. So I said:
“Hello, Brad.”

“Hello,” he answered.

She went on breathlessly: “And it wasn’t what we thought at all…. Tell
her, Brad, unless….” She began to smile. “Unless you think she’s too young
to know.”

My mother and I adored each other, but ever since I was about fourteen she
had talked
to
me as if I were her own age, but
of
me as if I
were still about twelve; and when this happened before my face I often got
confused and said just what a twelve-year-old would say.

I did then. I said: “I’m not too young to know anything.” Brad took it
seriously. “I should say not. There’s nothing indecent about it.”

“Oh, don’t be silly—I was only joking,” my mother interrupted. “Tell
her.”

“It’s nothing much. Apparently you both thought those animals in the room
next to my lab were kept for vivisection. Anything but. All they have to do
is to reproduce, reproduce, and keep on reproducing. Probably quite pleasant
for them. Mathews is doing some new research in Genetics—he breeds a
succession of generations to find out how certain characteristics crop
up.”

Now that I had the explanation the fact that even jokingly I had been
considered too young to know it made me almost feel I was. I said, in a
rather asinine way: “Wouldn’t Mathews mind you taking away his cat?”

“He hadn’t begun any records of this animal, so any other would do just as
well. He said so. Technically, of course, I’ve stolen the property of the
University of London. How about calling the police?”

We all laughed and I handed the cat back to my mother.

“Mind you,” he went on, “don’t think I’m a sentimentalist. There’s a lot
of nonsense talked about cruel scientists—I’ve never met any myself.
Certainly at the College the men who have to do vivisections
occasionally—”

My mother broke in: “You mean that it
does
go on there? I thought
you said—just for breeding—”

“You must have misunderstood me—all I said was that the animals
you
saw, the ones Mathews keeps—”

“All right, all right, let’s not talk about it any more.”

“But you do believe me when I say that scientists aren’t cruel?”

Brad was like that, as I found so many times afterwards; he could never
let well enough alone.

My mother said: “Many people are cruel. Wouldn’t you expect
some
of
them to be scientists?”

“Statistically, yes….”

“Then I’ve won my argument. Have some tea.”

I said good-by to him long before he went because I had to go upstairs and
pack; I was leaving for a holiday in Ireland the next morning. I think he
stayed till my father came home just before dinner.

My mother wrote while I was away, just her usual gossipy
letters; one of
them mentioned Brad and said he had been up to the house for dinner. “We had
more music and sat up talking till late. He’s really beginning to be quite
human….”

I was in Ireland over a month and returned to London for the beginning of
the autumn term. It was September, and in a few weeks, if they followed their
usual plan, my parents would return to America. I wondered what it would feel
like to be on my own in London; I was halfway thrilled at the prospect.

I didn’t see Brad for a few days; then suddenly he met me as I was leaving
a lecture. We shook hands and he asked about Ireland. “Did you climb any
mountains?”

“Not exactly mountains. We hiked about, though. There were plenty of
hills.”

“Did you visit Donegal?”

“No. Should I?”

“Someone told me that in the mountains there you get quartzite with a
capping of sandstone—obviously the result of denudation….” He went
on, when I didn’t answer: “Geology’s one of the things I wish I knew more
about. Do you enjoy walking?”

“Yes, very much.”

“Would you care to take a walk with me next Sunday?”

I said I would and he looked me up and down as if for the first time he
were reckoning me physically. “Good legs and good boots are all you
need.”

“Shoes,” I corrected. “And I don’t know
anything
about geology, but
I’d like to.”

I thought he might be relieved to feel there was always a topic in
reserve.

We went to Cambridge by an early train because he had to
call at the
Cavendish Laboratory there to leave some papers. It was the first time I had
been to the university town and I wouldn’t have minded sight-seeing, but
apparently this was not part of his program; we ignored the colleges and
began a brisk walk along the riverbank. After what Mathews had said, I was
quite prepared to cover the miles without comment or complaint, but as a
great concession, doubtless, we picked up a bus at some outlying village and
the bus happened to be going to Ely. The way I’m telling this sounds as if I
were having fun at his expense all the time; and so, in a quiet way, I was,
because people who are too serious always make me feel ribald inside. Not
that he was as serious as I had expected. We didn’t discuss geology
once—perhaps because there isn’t much geology between Cambridge and
Ely. There were just large expanses of mud everywhere, and especially by the
river, for heavy rain had fallen and the sky was full of clouds threatening
more. Ely was like a steel engraving, but inside the Cathedral the octagon
window had the look of stored- up sunshine from a summer day. I said it would
be strange if some of the medieval stained-glass experts had actually
discovered how to do this, and he assured me gravely that they couldn’t have,
it was scientifically impossible. I then gave him a short lecture on English
Perpendicular, to which he listened as if he thought me clever though what I
was saying relatively unimportant. “But of course you’re only interested in
scientific things,” I ended up.