“And Bobby...” Rona was saying. “We must call the hospital.” She was entering her own world again.
“Yes, we’ll do that,” Paul said reassuringly. “By the way, did you get a doctor for that throat of yours? What did he say?”
Rona almost smiled. “I wasn’t to talk much,” she said.
“Okay, I’ll do the talking for the rest of today,” he said. He smiled, too. But as he lit a cigarette, his hands were unsteady, and he found he couldn’t talk. All he could do was to sit silently beside Rona in the taxi, to pretend not to be watching her face.
As they approached the street where Rona’s apartment lay, she looked at him. “I’ll need some clothes,” she said. “I can’t go on borrowing Peggy’s.”
He redirected the cab driver. “Shall I wait down here?” he asked her, as the taxi drew up at her door. “Or shall I come up and telephone the hospital while you pack?”
“Yes,” she said. “I don’t want to go up alone.” She looked at the steps and hesitated. She thought, this is the first memory I destroy, this is the first piece of self-pity to be discarded. She went up the front steps, opened the door, and started climbing the stairs. Last night, she began to think in spite of herself, last night... But Paul’s voice was behind her, making small jokes, asking questions, forcing her to listen to him, drawing her thoughts away from everything except the present.
Even his voice, telephoning in the hall, reassured her. She snapped the lock of the small suitcase quickly, made certain that she had packed everything she needed, and then went to join him in the hall. I’ll sub-let this apartment, she was thinking, I never want to sleep here again.
“It’s good news?” she asked Paul, seeing the relief on his face, the real smile in his eyes.
“Yes,” he said. “The worst is over, now.” He took the suitcase.
She stood for a moment, looking at the hall. It’s all over, she was thinking, the worst and the best. All over. Then under the shadow of the hall table, she saw something. She picked it up. It was Scott’s hat. This was where he had dropped it last night...
“Will it ever be over?” she cried suddenly, her face tense, her body stiff with fear. She threw the hat away, and turned and ran into the kitchen. She began to cry, at first quietly and then with a deep terrifying sobbing.
Paul dropped the suitcase. He followed her, and halted at the door. I may lose her forever, he thought. If I do what I want to do, I may lose her forever. He remembered the fear in her arm as he had held it in Orpen’s room, the way she had taken her hand so quickly from his as they reached the foot of the fire escape, the refusal of all physical help, all physical touch.
I may lose her forever, he thought again. But he stepped forward and took her in his arms. He felt the warmth of her slender body, saw the soft dark hair and the white brow, the curve of the smooth cheek. He stood, holding her, until the sobs had quieted. And even when she had stopped crying, they stood together in silence.
At last, she drew back. She looked up at him, then. She saw the worry in his eyes, the drawn lines at the side of his mouth. He turned away abruptly and went into the hall. He stood waiting for her at the door, the suitcase in his hand. He avoided her eyes. And when he spoke, his voice was studiedly impersonal.
You’re a fool, he was thinking, a fool to be afraid you might lose her. You never had her to lose.
By the time the long ride to the Tysons’ apartment was over, he believed that. But he had control of his emotions again, and he could force a smile and even make a joke or two.
I’ll wait at the apartment, he decided, until Jon arrives to take charge. And then I’ll fade out. But this time—and he was thinking of that morning—this time, I’ll stay out.
27
“It will take about six weeks,” Jon was saying to Roger Brownlee and Paul Haydn. “Then Bobby will be up and around. If all goes well,” he added. But it’s got to go well, it’s got to... At least, Bobby now had a chance. Last night, he hadn’t even that. Only twenty hours ago—Jon glanced at the clock disbelievingly. And then he became aware again of his visitors. “Sorry,” he said, “I’ve been talking ever since you got here. I guess I’m sort of lightheaded.” He smiled apologetically and brought over the drinks he had poured. “God!” he said suddenly. “A disaster hits like a cyclone, doesn’t it?” And when you get through it, you can’t quite believe that this was really you, in a certain place, at a certain time. He looked at the clock again and shook his head.
“I won’t stay long,” Brownlee said. “I only—”
“No, no. It wasn’t that,” Jon said quickly. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened to twenty hours of my life. But there’s no answer to that, is there?”
“Except that you got through them,” said Brownlee. He glanced at Paul Haydn, who was silent. Ever since Brownlee had arrived, Paul had scarcely spoken. “I hope I didn’t trouble you by coming up here, but I decided against phoning my news to Paul. I thought I’d better see him to tell him what happened this afternoon. And frankly,” he admitted, looking at Paul, “I wanted to find out how Rona was. I’ve got a lot of guilt about her. She ran into more trouble than any one of us could have guessed.”
“Rona seems much better than I expected,” Jon said. “In fact, I’m a bit amazed. But women are...” Again he shook his head helplessly. He was thinking of Peggy.
“Yes,” Brownlee agreed. “I remember a Frenchman telling me during the war—he had been connected with the Resistance in occupied France—that the biggest surprise to him in the whole campaign had been the women. They could take more punishment than men. He’d send a girl on a dangerous mission—they did a lot of night courier jobs—and she’d run into trouble, nothing too serious but just enough to fray a man’s nerves into making a false move, and she’d not only get through her brush with the Gestapo, but next morning she’d be standing in her kitchen, trying to cook a dinner and blaming the Boches for the scarcity of vegetables.”
Paul Haydn said, half-angrily, “It isn’t as easy as that.” If the Frenchman had been in love with the girl, he wouldn’t have talked so glibly about her.
“The Frenchman didn’t say it was easy,” Brownlee said, watching Haydn. “He only admitted he wouldn’t have been in a state of mind to remember what went into a soup pot.”
Jon looked in the direction of the hall. “Listen!” he said gently. Barbara was having supper in the kitchen. She was laughing, that long series of rippling gurgles which drew a smile even at this distance to the faces of the men in the living-room. “Rona’s cooking seems kind of comic,” Jon said.
“She’s going to stay here meanwhile?” Brownlee asked. “What are your plans for the summer?”
“I’ve decided to take that job at summer school, after all.” Doctors’ fees, hospital bills—insurance was never enough, somehow. “Peggy can take the children to the country as we arranged. That will be the best thing for Bobby. It might be a good thing for Rona too. But then, there’s her job at Trend... It all depends on what she decides to do. She’s welcome to stay with us as long as she wants. In fact, we need her.”
“That sounds like a solution,” Brownlee said. One solution, he thought, as he looked at Paul Haydn. “What’s worrying you, Paul?” he asked frankly.
“Is she still in any danger? From Orpen’s friends?” That isn’t the only thing that’s worrying you, Brownlee thought. He answered evenly, “She might have been. But Orpen’s dead. And anything he told her won’t be important now. We know more than he had time to tell her. And they know that we know.”
There was a pause. Jon was looking startled, as if he hadn’t realised that there might still be danger for Rona.
Paul stared gloomily at a faded rose on the carpet.
“Judge for yourself, Paul,” Brownlee said. “Here’s the story I came to tell you. Perhaps it will stop you worrying. When I left you and Rona, I pounded my way up the fire escape. It took a little time, for I’m no good at heights, and it was a rickety kind of staircase. Normally, I woul
dn’t have climbed it for a fifty-dollar bet.” He lit a cigarette and his face became serious, although there was still a touch of humour in his voice. “I reached the window, and scrambled in with some difficulty, and ruined a perfectly good suit. But Orpen didn’t seem to be appreciative of my efforts. He ignored me completely. He was rushing between the two rooms, selecting papers and books, thrusting them into a suitcase. I must say the humour of the situation struck me—here were his friends trying to smoke him out, and there was I, one of the people who hate his guts, trying to persuade him to get down that fire escape. The door was beginning to kindle, and little leaps of flame were running along the cracks. In a few minutes, the whole door would go up in a sheet of fire. But he didn’t see the funny side, at all. He didn’t even see that, if I had come to steal his damned suitcase, I should have knocked him on the head and made off with it down the fire escape. True, I was interested in the suitcase. But I was much more interested in Comrade Orpen himself. He was worth fifty suitcases. Perhaps he knew that.”
Then Brownlee’s voice became grim. “The smoke was increasing. Just as I thought I’d really have to hit him on the head and carry him out, the firemen came up the escape and started hacking away at the window frame. One of them shouted to us to come out. I obeyed, because you just don’t argue with a fireman when he has a job to do. But Orpen was trying to open a safe he had hidden at the back of a bookshelf. So a couple of men jumped into the room and grabbed him and forced him back toward the fire escape, just as the door disappeared and the flames entered his room. Orpen was shoved out on the fire escape beside me. I started climbing down. Orpen was yelling, “The suitcase, the suitcase.’ One of the firemen, perhaps to humour him, perhaps to get him down without any trouble, said ‘Okay, fellow. Here she comes,’ and he threw it through the window at Orpen’s feet.”
Brownlee paused. “I was looking back at Orpen. I saw the suitcase land and snap open. Orpen bent to close it, but he moved too quickly and he fell against it. The suitcase toppled on the edge of the fire escape and everything began to spill out of it. Something heavy—a steel box, I think—smashed down a few steps and then bounced between the railings into the courtyard. And the loose things scattered around at his feet, and hundreds of sheets of paper floated around and then blew over the tree in the yard. I began to laugh. Yes, I was laughing. And at that moment, he straightened up, still holding the lid of the suitcase so that it dangled from his hands. He looked at me. Then he looked at the city. He dropped the suitcase. And then he swung himself over the rail, and he let go, and he fell.”
There was a pause.
Then Paul said, “Did he know who you were?”
Brownlee shook his head. “No. I could have been—anybody.”
“Was that his reason?” Jon asked.
Brownlee said, “I don’t know. I’ve thought of ten reasons. By tomorrow, I’ll have thought of another five. Yet there’s one reason I keep coming back to. It’s the only one that makes any sense when I start thinking myself into Orpen’s character, Orpen’s beliefs. Then, I see his death as a confession. A confession of heresy, a confession of treachery to the Party.”
Paul leaned forward. “That’s almost what Rona said. She called his death an admission of guilt. To them. Not to us.”
“What else did she say?” Brownlee asked quickly.
“Not very much. To be quite frank, I was trying to get her mind away from Orpen. She did mention a telephone call, though. She seemed to think it was important.”
Brownlee nodded as if he had already learned about that. For a moment or two, he sat quite silent. Then he said, “Rona was right. Orpen was trying to justify himself by that call, but his friends didn’t believe him. Their reply was to put their plan into operation right away. The attempt to burn his room and destroy his records was a very plain answer.”
“A cold-blooded answer,” said Jon. He was thinking of his pupil Robert Cash, who would never believe this story. Cash was a romantic beginner in Communism, still seeing it in its most idealistic stage. Even Scott Ettley had been only half a Communist compared to the professional like Orpen. But Orpen had travelled the full road. He not only understood but accepted its final logic. “Yet Orpen must have thought of escape. The suitcase—his attempt to gather his documents together... Why didn’t he go on down that stairway, search for all the papers that had been scattered, and then disappear as he had plann—” Jon broke off. “But of course,” he added, “where could he go? What could he do? He rejected our world, and his world had condemned him. Is that it?” He looked at Brownlee for confirmation.
“Partly. But only partly. You are forgetting that Orpen was the complete Communist: he was a fully initiated member of a fanatical primitive religion. Recently, he had obviously committed some heresy. Whatever it was, it must have been something that the Party feared so much that it had to be rooted out at once and destroyed. Orpen was in the last stage of his revolt—perhaps it even had become only a protest against the sentence passed on him—when he packed that suitcase and thought of escape. But as he stood on that narrow iron platform with the empty suitcase dangling from his hand and watched his escape fail so ludicrously, his revolt was over. And with the end of his revolt, he returned to complete obedience. The Party was everything and he was nothing. He was guilty; even the suitcase which he now dropped at his feet was a witness against him. His escape and rebellion would have weakened the Party, just as his death would strengthen its discipline. So he admitted his guilt, fully, calmly, obediently. And he not only accepted the sentence that had been passed on him, but he went out to meet it. He executed himself.”
Again there was silence in the room.
“And what was in that suitcase?” Jon asked at last.
“It gave the FBI a fine paper-chase.”
“You don’t know if there was anything valuable after all?”
“We won’t be told,” Brownlee said with a smile. “Nor will we be told what the safe contained.”
“Then the room wasn’t burned out?”
“Only badly damaged. The firemen pumped a lot of water into it.”
“That’s going to be disappointing for Orpen’s friends,” Paul said thoughtfully.
“Yes. The police stopped one man trying a little too hard to get up to see the remains. He said he was a reporter. Another tried to climb the fire escape with a camera. I shouldn’t be surprised if a lawyer has appeared on the scene by this time, claiming to represent Orpen’s estate and wanting all his private papers intact.”
“Then there is something valuable in the safe,” Jon said.
“Looks like it.”
Paul said, “One day we’ll see the results when we pick up the morning paper and read about some new exposure of the enemy working underground—a sabotage plan discovered, a propaganda ring shown up, a carefully staged riot prevented, an attempt to create a ‘revolutionary situation’ beaten. And we’ll make a guess or two that we saw the beginning of that. It’s about all we’ll ever know.”
“That’s about all,” Roger Brownlee agreed. “But the evil that men do lives after them... Orpen isn’t dead yet, to a lot of people.” He rose, and held out his hand. “You at least can forget him,” he said to Jon.
“I’ll see you to the door,” Jon said.
“I must go too,” Paul said.
Jon looked at him. “No, you don’t. I’ve got some things I want to talk to you about.”
But Haydn followed them into the hall.
“Did you hear of Paul’s idea about giving up his job?” Jon asked. “He says he’s going to leave Trend. Isn’t that drastic? I’m against it.”
Roger Brownlee halted at the kitchen door. “Yes, he told me today.” He looked at Barbara in her high chair, and Rona sitting opposite her. “Hello, you two! How’s that egg custard, Barbara?” Ghastly, he thought, as he looked at the yellow goo in the rose-painted dish. But then he wasn’t an egg custard or milk pudding addict. Barbara seemed to be thriving on it, though. She turned he
r round pink face to smile at him as she took another spoonful. She aimed for her mouth but the spoon jabbed against her cheek. “Keep your eye on it,” he advised her. “It goes in the front door. I’ve tried for years, but the ear is no good at all.”
“Funny man?” Barbara asked Rona, and let her jawline be wiped free of custard.
Rona looked at the men grouped in the doorway. “Yes,” she said, and she began to smile.
“That’s Barbara’s polite way of trying to evade the fact that she didn’t understand one word you said,” Jon explained. Then he grinned as he added, “She must like the look of your face, though, or she wouldn’t have been polite.”
Brownlee said, “The only women who like the look of my face are always under two years old.” He was watching Rona as he spoke. “Goodbye,” he said, giving them both a warm smile as he turned away.
“Frankly, Paul,” he said, stopping in the hall to continue Jon’s discussion, “I don’t think you should give up your job, yet. I don’t know—and I hope I’m wrong—but I’ve a hunch that a lot of us may have to give up our jobs soon enough.” Then he moved towards the door. “After all, you’ve been doing useful work at Trend, and we need loyal editors. No good letting the Blackworths and Murrays have a clear field. That’s how your boss Weidler sees it, I’m sure. I know you were pretty upset this morning and wanted some action, but...” His voice faded.
* * *
Rona, watching Barbara finish the custard and try to scrape the rose off the plate, heard the distant goodbyes being made. Suddenly, she rose and went to the kitchen door. “Paul,” she called. “How does the story end?”
Paul came back. “The story?”
“The hippopotamus with the hat and the cherries and the bow?”
“Blue bow,” Barbara prompted.
“She’s been asking me all morning to finish it. And I can’t.”
Paul said awkwardly, “I guess I—I don’t know the end. I got stuck, too.”
Behind them, Barbara said, “Tell me a story, tell me a story.” She tried to struggle down from the high chair.
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