Nothing So Strange (9 page)

My father had left for the City, John told me; also that my mother was out
shopping and would not be in to lunch. So I lunched alone, then went to the
library, listened to the radio (wireless), played phonograph (gramophone)
records, then got out my history notes and tried to concentrate on Stubbs’s
Select Charters. It wasn’t particularly easy.

My mother came home in time for tea, and I couldn’t help thinking how
beautiful she looked, with her face flushed from the cold and her hair a
little wind-blown. And there was a quality in her eyes, too elusive to
describe, but “trancelike” occurred to me even though I had never seen anyone
in a trance; a sort of serene observance which, if there is any difference
between the words, must be a less active and more ritual thing than
observation. She pulled off her gloves with long slow movements, gossiping
meanwhile about her shopping and the special shortcakes she had been able to
get at Fortnum and Mason’s, and the trouble Henry had had to avoid skidding
on the slippery roads. “It wasn’t really a day for driving—more for
taking a walk.”

That was my cue, if I had wanted one, to tell her about my own walk on the
Heath with Brad and his change of mind about Vienna. But I wondered also if
she had deliberately given me the cue, and that made me decide to say
nothing. I just watched her, as she poured tea, and thought how close you can
be to someone you love, so close that you dare not go closer lest you break
that final shell of separateness that is your own as well as the other’s
precious possession. Dusk came into the room; she went over to the fire to
poke it into a blaze, and as she did so, carrying the poker and chattering
all the time, she looked like a gay sleepwalker, if there ever has been such
a person.

Presently she asked me what I thought of Framm.

I said: “He wasn’t a bit funny, as we thought, was he?”

“Darling, nobody is ever funny like that.”

“Did Brad listen to the radio with you?”

“
Brad
? Why?”

“I saw him come in from the hall just after you.”

“Perhaps he was in the billiard room.” She began to laugh. “I’ll ask him
if you like.”

Ask
him? I saw the flush on her face deepen as she caught my eye.
She added: “I mean—when I see him—or write to him. Or don’t you
think I’ll ever see him again?”

I said: “It was all settled he should leave London this evening.”

“I know, but things sometimes happen at the last minute. A most absurd
rush, if you ask me. Why couldn’t he have more time? And so close to
Christmas…. Maybe he just won’t go—I wouldn’t blame him.”

“Framm’s leaving tonight too, so it seemed a good idea for them to go
together.”

“
It
seemed,
it
seemed. All so impersonal. People are human
… or don’t scientists think so?” She lit a cigarette and offered me her
case. Her hand was trembling. “Your father would worry about that.”

“You mean your hand trembling?”

“Darling, we really are in two different worlds today. I was cold in the
car, I’m still a bit shivery…. No, I meant he’d say I oughtn’t to encourage
you to smoke.”

“He lets me have drinks at parties.”

“But you don’t drink much, I’ve noticed. I’m very glad.”

“I don’t smoke much either.”

“I know. You don’t do anything to excess. And you’re truthful and decent
and growing up charmingly. Really, I’m very happy about you, Jane.”

“I don’t always tell
all
the truth.”

“Who does?”

“I’d like to be able to, though.”

“One of these days you’ll fall in love, then we’ll see.”

“See what?”

“Whether you do
that
to excess … and also if you tell all the
truth about it.”

“I wouldn’t want to fall
half
in love.”

“Wouldn’t you? It’s pleasanter sometimes.”

“Not if you’re in love with someone who’s in love with you.”

“Oh, don’t be too sure. That doesn’t always make it plain sailing. Or
plain telling, either.”

John came in with the week-old
New York Times
that had just
arrived. It reminded me to ask if there were any definite plans for her
return to America with my father.

“We’ll spend Christmas here anyway. After that I don’t know. New York’s
impossible in January and February, it simply means going straight to
Florida. Harvey likes Florida, of course.” Calling my father Harvey was a
sure sign she was thinking of something else.

She went on: “Oh Jane, darling, don’t bother me for plans. How can one
make them so far ahead? Things are all going to pieces, anyhow … in Europe
… everywhere…. They’re building up for another war.”

I said, deliberately: “I wonder how that would affect Brad in Vienna.”

“He’s an American, he’d be neutral. Of course I know that wouldn’t stop
him from getting into trouble. You might not think it from the shy manner he
has, but he’s very impulsive.”

“I know that.”

“Such a one-idea’d creature. All or nothing. No compromise … and
sometimes so impractical.”

“I know that too.”

“But a very delightful person.” The cat had followed John into the room
and was now curling about our legs. “To give somebody a cat, for instance.
I’ll never forget John’s face when Brad brought it that afternoon. It broke
the ice, though. After that we got to be friends quite fast.”

“The cat and you?”

“No, darling. Are you still in that other world of yours? The cat and I
were friends instantly. Some men take a little longer.”

“I was in Ireland.”

“So you were…. I saw quite a lot of him while you were away…. More
than when you came back…. I don’t know why. It’s a pity he’s so poor …
poor and proud … it’s a frightening combination….” The cat purred loudly
into the silence that followed. Then John re-entered and some kind of spell
was broken. “Mr. Waring just telephoned to say he wouldn’t be in to dinner,
madame, and he might be late, so please not to wait up for him.”

“I certainly shan’t—in fact I’ll have a snack in my room and go to
bed early. I need some rest after last night…. What about you, Jane?”

“I’ll be all right. I’ve got work to do, or else I’ll find someone to go
to a movie with.”

“You’re not thinking of going to the station to see Brad off?”

“No, of course not—he wouldn’t want me.”

“It isn’t exactly that, but….” She didn’t know how to finish the
sentence, and then I sensed, almost with certainty, that she knew of Brad’s
change of plan, or at any rate suspected it; and that out of simple affection
for me she didn’t want me to hang about Victoria Station in the cold, looking
for someone who wouldn’t turn up. At least I think that was her motive. As I
said, you get so close, but the very closeness brings you up against the
barrier.

The mail always came to the house early; John used to sort
it and bring it
to the bedrooms. There was a letter for me the next morning with a London
postmark and addressed in a writing I didn’t recognize, yet as I tore it open
the thought came to me, clairvoyantly if you like, that I had never seen
Brad’s writing before.

It said: “My dear Jane—” (and he had never called me that before,
either- -in fact I don’t think he had ever called me anything after the first
few Miss Warings at the beginning)—“Thank you for coming to see me, and
the walk and talk on the Heath. I’m just leaving for the boat train at
Victoria to join Hugo Framm—we shall be in Vienna the day after
tomorrow. After all, I’ve a right to change my mind as often as I like, and
he needn’t know how narrowly I missed the chance of working with him. When I
say work, by the way, that’s just what I mean,
work
. So don’t expect
me to write too often, but there’s a warm welcome if ever you come to Vienna,
as perhaps you might some day—who knows?— In great
haste—Brad.”

I took the letter downstairs but didn’t mention it; not that they would
have dreamed of asking to see it, but it might have seemed peculiar if I
hadn’t offered to let them.

We never talked much at breakfast; my father would read the papers and
sometimes make comments on the news; if he didn’t, or if we had nothing much
to say in reply, nobody thought anybody else was surly.

However, this morning he folded the paper at last and put it by his plate
with a gesture I knew meant he was going to read something from it; first of
all, though, he spread marmalade on a piece of toast and crunched off a big
corner. “Well, well,” he said, still crunching, “our friend will be halfway
across France by now….”

I looked at my mother.

He went on: “It says here ‘Professor Hugo Framm left for the Continent
last night accompanied by his young protégé, Dr. Mark Bradley, who will spend
some time in the professor’s Viennese laboratories….’”

My mother put her hand to her face for a moment and when she took it away
she had on that glassy smile, as if she were about to say hello to a
maharajah.

“I shouldn’t have thought it was important enough to put in the paper,”
she said.

“It wouldn’t have been,” replied my father, “but for Framm’s instinct for
publicity. This is how it goes on…. ‘Asked what would be the subject of
their work together, Professor Framm replied: “I don’t know yet, but Dr.
Bradley is an excellent chess player, so I shall certainly put him on to
something difficult”’—Newspapers go for things like that. Incidentally,
I didn’t know he was a chess player.”

I said: “Neither did I.”

“Nor I,” said my mother.

Then she rang the bell for more coffee.

I have tried to tell all this as it looked to me then;
which is perhaps
the best way when nothing happened afterwards to make completely certain any
of the things that were conjectural at the time. Of course, as I grew older,
I balanced the probabilities more maturely; for instance, it seems to me now
far less unthinkable that my mother was capable of a love affair. When you
are young you tend to feel that things like that can only happen in newspaper
cases, and that your own family has some special exemption from frailty; then
as you live on, you learn, and what you principally learn is a frailty in
yourself that makes you include others for sheer companionship. I know now,
looking back on it all, that it was the first major “situation” in which I
felt myself involved, and that I was so anxious not to blunder that I tiptoed
all around it, deliciously thrilled as well as troubled, whereas nowadays I
would probably cut in with a few straight questions to somebody.

And yet I am rather sure that the affair, in any downright sense, never
came to anything. Perhaps only because Brad left in time. I think they were
both in love, but after the first shyness he may have been more breakneck
about it than she, partly from inexperience, but chiefly because my mother
had a very realistic valuation of what life could offer; she loved comforts
and gaiety and society; I don’t believe she would ever have been happy with a
poor man in spite of what she said.

I think it possible that after Brad had met Framm at the party and had
definitely decided to go to Vienna, she saw him alone and persuaded him
against going; that he then asked for some rash show-down, perhaps even
suggested her running away with him. Of course she wouldn’t consent to that;
what she really wanted was for things to go on as they had been, agreeably
and perhaps dangerously, with Brad taking her about everywhere and my father
an appeased if not entirely deceived spectator. It wouldn’t have been heroic,
but it was the sort of thing my mother could have carried off with
virtuosity, if only Brad had been willing. I would guess that he was not. Yet
after the argument between them she probably thought he would change his mind
(as he actually did, before he changed it back again), and this gave her that
trancelike happiness the next day, that confidence that somehow or other she
could always hold him where she wanted and on her own terms. I know she was
dumbfounded when he left, and for a time quite shattered.

Had I been a little responsible for his second change of plan? Perhaps. I
have often thought that the walk and the talk we had on the Heath may have
just tipped the scale.

Neither of them ever discussed it with me afterwards, but three years ago,
when my mother was dying from the effects of a motor smash in Texas, my
father said something under stress of great emotion. It seemed she had been
driving too fast, alone and at night, and the police sergeant who had reached
the scene of the accident met us at the airport and told us she had given as
an excuse that she was hurrying for a doctor to attend her son who was ill.
Of course she may have been half out of her mind when she said this, but I
also think it possible that she didn’t know how badly she was hurt and was
just trying to talk herself out of a traffic summons. It would have been like
her.

As we left the hospital when it was all over, my father mumbled: “It was
like that with the radio that time. Did you ever try to get America on the
set we had in London?… You couldn’t.” I didn’t tell him I had known that
all along.

Again I was in the little room on the twenty-fifth floor
with Mr. Small. I was much more aware of my surroundings than on the first
occasion; I noticed how the desk between me and him had kick marks on the
front and cigarette burns on the top, how dirty the windows were, and how
last month (and it was already the eighth of July) had not yet been torn off
the pictorial calendar.

“Ah, good morning, Miss Waring.” He half rose and bowed; I smiled and sat
down as before. He opened his briefcase, riffled through its contents, then
found some papers which he laid on the desk. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to
bother you again, but something cropped up.”

I said it was all right to me, no bother at all. But as a matter of fact
it had been; I was leaving New York that night and had many last-minute
things to do. I suppose I could have ignored the letter and pretended
afterwards that it didn’t reach me in time, but I had a curiosity to know
what Mr. Small still wanted—indeed, it was more than curiosity, there
was a touch of apprehension that had grown since my earlier visit.