The Hidden Target (5 page)

“What’s happening to higher education?”

She laughed again, lost most of her nervousness. “About last, night—I’m really sorry—I hope I didn’t hurt you too badly.”

“Oh, that! Forget it.”

“But I don’t make a habit of—”

“Of course you don’t. Are you enrolled in this class? What’s it like? I mean, what did you get out of the course? I was auditing it, trying to see whether I should think of taking it next year.”

“What courses have you been taking?”

“None so far. I only reached London two days ago. I’m just in the process of trying to decide.”

“Decide what?” She was definitely interested.

They had come into the open, a square patch of ground with a broad walk leading into Gower Street. A batch of white-coated medical students, two with stethoscopes proudly displayed from bulging breast pockets, swept past. “Everyone seems to know where he’s going—except me,” he said with a rueful smile. “That’s my problem. Do I hang around London, take a summer course? Or wait for the fall? Come on, I need your advice. Say—why don’t you have lunch with me?”

She looked regretful. “Sorry—I’m meeting a friend.”

“I’m sorry, too. Perhaps another time?” He paused at the entrance to Gower Street. “Tell me one thing: where’s a good place to eat?” Nothing here but grey houses and college buildings.

“Good in food, or good in price?”

“I can’t get both? Okay, okay. Someplace cheap, but clean. Is it too much to hope for a real hamburger?”

“Would spaghetti do? Or a BLT?”

What the hell’s that? he wondered. “Either,” he told her.

She considered for a fraction of a second. He’s really alone, she thought as she remembered her first week, when she had been overwhelmed by the strangeness of everything. “Don’t you know London at all?” He looked so self-possessed; it was a relief to find he was as naive as she had been.

He shook his head. “But I have a good map in my pocket.”

“Why don’t you join us for lunch?” she asked impulsively.

“No. I don’t want to impose—”

“You wouldn’t. My friend and I see each other every day. Come on.” She began walking down Gower Street.

“He’d object perhaps to—”

“Not a he. It’s she. Oh, there will be men around. There always are. But it’s no big deal—just a café near Charlotte Street, half Italian, half American, and filled with students. The hamburgers are awful—the beef is ground into paste. But the bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich is for real. By the way, I’m Madge Westerman.”

“And I’m James Kiley.”

“From where?”

“Chicago four weeks ago, arrived in London from Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam.”

“Paris?” She was impressed. “I’m envious.”

“It isn’t too far off, nowadays,” he reminded her.

“I know, I know. But...” She sighed. “It’s maddening. Here I am, about to end a year in London. And just across that little bit of water there’s the rest of Europe—Paris and Rome and Venice. Maddening because
when
will I ever get so near to them again?”

“Surely you could—”

“No,” she said abruptly, “I can’t.” She pushed aside a heavy strand of hair from her brow. “I’m here on a scholarship. It ends next month.” Then she pretended to laugh. “Back to the coal mines. Scranton—that’s where my people live.”

“Why don’t you get a job in England, save up, fly over for a week in Paris? It’s worth it. Expensive, though, as I found out. It was a relief, in a way, to get to Holland and stop figuring what the dollar had sunk to.”

“Holland—what’s in Holland except tulips and dikes and windmills?”

“More than you think. I had a pretty good time there.”

“Well, I’ll even have to pass up Holland. Because I’m a foreign student in London, I can’t take a job here unless it contributes to my studies. That’s the law. I can’t see myself applying for a job to teach a British family how to speak English, can you?” She was laughing again. Then she turned serious, remembering his first approach to her. “If you are thinking of taking a course on the history of the English novel because you’d like to be a writer, forget it. It will only depress you: hundreds and hundreds of novelists in the last three centuries, and only half a dozen remembered.” She corrected herself. “Well, only half a dozen are read. All the rest—just names to be memorised for examinations.”

“Did you ever think of writing a novel?”

“Who doesn’t? How about you?”

“Oh, I’d settle for some articles being published.”

“So you
are
a writer?”

“Not yet.” He hesitated, then sounded as if the admission was dragged out of him. “Actually, I’d like to be a free-lance journalist who writes about international incidents. That’s one way of travelling and seeing the world, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, and sighed again. “What kind of incidents—” But they had come to the door of Matteoti’s Café; yellow curtains over its windows rippled by an electric fan, warning of a small interior packed with people. At one table near a wall he saw Nina O’Connell. Her eyes looked at him in disbelief, and then she recovered herself.

What’s it to be? he wondered. Freezing temperature or mildly sunny? Easy does it, he warned himself. So far, all goes well. Keep it going, Kiley.

He shook hands—slightly freezing temperature, he noted, as she merely nodded a how d’you do—and pulled out a cane chair and looked around the room. “I’m overdressed,” he said with a grin. Flannels and tweed jacket, clean shirt and tie, were definitely out of style this season. “Ought to have remembered myself as a student.”

“Where?” asked Nina, curiosity beginning to melt the ice.

“Berkeley.”

“Oh! I was there, too. In 1977.”

“After my time,” he said regretfully. And smiled. It was a warm, generous smile that had won him approval before now. It had its usual effect.

The ice melted rapidly. There was an answering smile, small but friendly. “Let’s order. I’m starved,” said Nina.

I have been accepted, he thought. Tentatively, at least. Keep conversation light and general. Let Madge tell her all about me later. She will.

***

The two girls walked slowly down Gower Street. “You liked him, didn’t you?” Madge asked, eager for reassurance. James Kiley had been fun to meet. She wished he had arrived nine months earlier.

“As far as we got to know him,” Nina conceded, and then relented. “Yes—he’s better than I thought.” Not the usual pattern of young men who had been hanging around her this year. “At least he didn’t dog our footsteps for the rest of the afternoon.” It had been a long lunch, with extra coffees and
tortelloni
being ordered just to keep the table.

“Well, he did want to get to the Admissions Office and find out about courses and costs. If he does decide to enrol, you’ll be seeing him next term, Nina.”

“If I’m here.”

“Why shouldn’t you be?”

“I’ve just about had it with the Women’s Residence.”

“You’ll feel differently after the summer.”

“What summer? Three weeks at a time with four of father’s old friends? Oh—I just hate feeling I’m all packaged and delivered.”

“And I’ll be looking for a job in Scranton,” Madge reminded her.

“Why not cut out for California?”

“I don’t know anyone there.”

“You soon will.”

But there were always those three, four, five weeks when you wondered if you’d stay lost and lonely forever.

Nina was laughing. “Just look at the way you picked up a strange man today.”

“I didn’t!”

“He picked you up?” Nina’s laughter had faded.

“No, no. It was just accidental.” And Madge plunged into a full description of what had happened.

Nina relaxed. She was two months younger than Madge, but somehow she always had to do the protecting. “He’s almost as unsettled as we are,” she said, and felt sympathy for a fellow sufferer. “But I think he’ll do something about it. Not like us, who talk and talk and stay undecided.”

“Well,” Madge said, tactfully avoiding any mention of Nina’s adequate allowance, “he does have the means to travel. I wonder if I inherited money when I was twenty-seven, would I have the courage to blow it all in one year?” Just a small inheritance, James Kiley had said, nicely embarrassed when the subject of cash flow and life style had somehow risen: enough to let him do what he wanted to do for twelve months.

“You know what? I don’t think he will be here next year. I think he’s deciding right now to take off like a bird. And why not?” Nina ended gloomily. “He’s free. Free to do what he likes.”

“That mad friend of his—Tony Something or other—”

“Shawfield.”

“Well, if I were James I’d take Shawfield up on his offer. Imagine—around the world in eighty days in a camper. Isn’t that something?” Madge’s eyes were filled with dreams.

“Yes,” said Nina, “it’s wild.”

“So why isn’t he jumping at the chance?”

“Because he has more sense than we have. You heard him: he’d have to find out what kind of camper, what kind of route, what kind of arrangements, what kind of people his friend was corralling for a trip like that.”

“You take the fun out of travelling.”

“Well,” Nina said, the expert on foreign countries, “you just don’t step on a flying carpet and away you go. There are visas and inoculations and officials at frontiers.”

“But you loved every moment of it, didn’t you?”

Yes, thought Nina, I loved every moment of it. Geneva, Paris, Rome, Venice... But you can’t go travelling alone. What’s the fun in that? “Look—don’t get angry—you always do, you know, but not this time, Madge. I’ve got some spare cash, so let me lend you—”

“No.” Madge’s voice was sharp.

“But I can’t go travelling by myself. The two of us would have a wonderful time. You know we always laugh at the same things. And it’s only a loan.”

“No.” Madge’s voice was less on edge. “I get my bank statement tomorrow. I hope. Or the next day. Then I’ll know how I stand.” Probably cut off at the knees, she thought. Still, I might juggle something around. I could sell my books; and my winter coat—that would save me packing it home. “Tomorrow, he said he’d meet us for lunch if we didn’t mind. Do you?”

“No.”

“But will you be there?”

“Perhaps. Will you?”

“Yes,” Madge said. “I like him. He’s different.” Then, as they turned the corner away from the busy street and headed towards a quiet green square, she remembered to ask, “Are you keeping that date with Barry and Jack tonight?” Nina had been undecided at breakfast.

“I think I will. You’re included, you know.”

“Can’t possibly.” Madge hefted the books in her arms. “I’ll be cramming all the rest of this day—and every day for the rest of this week.”

“Except for lunch, of course,” Nina suggested. She might smile, but she was feeling that elder-sister attitude worrying her again. She didn’t like the role yet someone had to look after Madge, the perpetual innocent. Not that James Kiley was any real danger: he’d take one look at student life, recall his Berkeley days, and be off to wider horizons. Wider horizons... She looked around her, everything neat and quiet, buildings solid and asleep, iron railings. An attack of summer fever, she thought as she repressed a sigh.

In silence, the two girls climbed the steps into the hall of the Women’s Residence. “Irish stew,” Nina said as the smell of cooking hit them. “If it boils for so many hours, why is there always so much water in the gravy?”

They fell into silence again and climbed to the second floor. Nina halted at her door. “I’m going to start packing.”

“A bit early, aren’t you?” Madge called over her shoulder. Nina shrugged, went into her room, four walls which she had tried to brighten with her posters, a back-view window blocked from sunlight by the opposite houses. “Couldn’t be too soon,” she answered both Madge and herself. But of course it wasn’t possible to start packing: trunk and suitcases would have to be hauled up from some lower depths. Even gestures were thwarted, she thought as she stared at herself in the small looking-glass. Could be worse: her eyes could squint, her front teeth could be broken, her hair could be thin and falling out in patches.

Then she looked down at the letter from home that had come this morning and lay unopened on the dressing-table. It was addressed in Beryl’s writing—a stepmother just nine years older than she was. (“That’s the good thing,” Francis O’Connell had said cheerfully. “You two can be really close friends.”) Slowly, Nina opened the envelope. Beryl and Francis were leaving for a summer at the Maryland shore. Time to get out of hot Washington. All well. Much love. Hoped to see Nina in September when Francis and Beryl would be in London for a few days. Ever, Beryl. And a postscript from Daddy: See you in September, kitten. Have a splendid summer. Keep us posted. All love always.

The Maryland shore, easy commuting distance for Francis O’Connell, pleasant house parties for Beryl to arrange. And, thought Nina, not even the smallest hint of an invitation for her. She could hear Beryl saying, “Francis, darling, you know it would be useless. Nina is having much too good a time. We really can’t drag her home just to please us.” At least she hoped her father had to be persuaded about that. She wasn’t sure any more. She tore the letter into small pieces. Would she have gone to Maryland? Perhaps not, to be absolutely honest. But it would have been nice to have been asked.

Oh, well—tonight could be amusing. She’d better call Barry and warn him to find another girl, unless the prospect of a threesome didn’t bore him and Jack. It wouldn’t. She never had any trouble with two beaux to her string. Safer that way, actually. Less satisfactory for them perhaps, but a respite for her.

***

At the small bar in the Russell Arms, James Kiley sat over a beer and thought about today’s encounter. It had gone well. Tomorrow, a third meeting. And after that, a stepped-up schedule concentrating on Nina O’Connell who had no examinations to keep her occupied: dinners as well as lunches, a movie, a theatre, sightseeing (he was the stranger, wasn’t he?) at Hampton Court or the Tower or what have you; and of course an exchange of life stories, of future hopes as well as of past disappointments. All of it laying a strong foundation for friendship and trust. That’s what she wanted now, he was sure of it: she had too many men chasing after her, too many macho types obsessed by sex. So he’d play the opposite, keep her interested, let her think she made the decisions. It wouldn’t be too difficult. The opportunities were there for him to take; all he was doing was to make the most of them. She liked him. He was sure of that. There was an attraction between them that was hard to explain. But it was there.