I and My True Love

by Helen Macinnes

  “I have to find a room.”

  “You could stay here, meanwhile.”

  “I can’t live out of a small overnight case. Besides—you and Amy have done enough for all of us. It’s time we were all standing on our own feet again.” She looked down at the gaily chequered tablecloth, at the flower-painted plates. They reminded her somehow of Santa Rosita. “At this moment,” she admitted, “I feel like taking the first train to California. Only, I can’t run after Sylvia. She wants to cut herself free of everything in the past, doesn’t she? That’s why she was so calm yesterday, when we were all so upset. She felt she was ending one life and beginning another.” But could we end and begin so neatly, so simply? Ragged edges overlapped.

  “Is that why she didn’t go to Whitecraigs?” Martin asked, as if he were answering a problem that had puzzled him.

  “Have you ever been to Whitecraigs?”

  “No.”

  “I have. Once.” She looked up at him, then. “It’s strange, isn’t it? There are some families and some friends—well, you can’t turn to them when you’re in trouble, even if you’re fond of them. They’re too—too self-occupied.” She paused. “Don’t blame Sylvia too much, Martin. I did, to begin with. I’m sorry now. She’s—she’s alone. She’s always been alone.”

  “Why do you think I blame her?”

  “Well, you and Amy are happy,” she said slowly. “And when you’re happy, the rules are easier to follow.” She seemed to look at what she had said, studying it from all angles. “Yes, that’s about right, I think... You don’t approve of what Sylvia has done, do you?”

  He had been watching her with a smile in his eyes, but now the smile faded. “Did I show that yesterday?” he asked quickly.

  “No. No, not at all. That’s why I liked the way you helped her.”

  “The trouble is that I’m not looking at the problem from only one angle. It isn’t just a matter of Sylvia’s freedom to choose the man she’s in love with. There’s another question too: how free can any of us be, as long as our actions affect other people? Affect a hundred and fifty million other people? Sometimes, voluntarily, we have to put a limit to our own free will.”

  Kate stared at him.

  “You don’t get it?” he asked. Then he pulled the newspaper in front of her. “Emphasise the word ‘trade’ in that paragraph, and then remember Pleydell’s job.”

  All Kate’s confidence ebbed away. Her eyes answered him. Then she grasped at one small hope. “But the word ‘trade’ is so general—think of all the departments and offices and bureaux and people dealing with it.”

  “I’m thinking of them,” Martin said quietly. “They’ll have to be cleared of suspicion. I was only hoping it could be done without publicity.”

  “You mean, this paragraph is only the beginning?”

  “It could be.”

  “But there’s no mention of Pleydell’s name.”

  “Not yet.”

  She was aghast. “Sylvia,” she said at last. “It will all point straight to Sylvia.”

  “And Brovic,” he added.

  “I’d be really worried,” she said, “if Jan Brovic were a Communist. But he isn’t. I’m not supposed to tell you that, but he isn’t.”

  He didn’t seem surprised. He had picked up a spoon and was examining it carefully.

  “Did you know?” she asked in amazement.

  “No one can know,” he said, “until Brovic comes right out into the open.”

  “But you believe he isn’t a Communist?”

  “Belief won’t help him. Sylvia believes him. You believe Sylvia.” He thought of himself, a couple of days ago, when he had picked up the telephone and heard Brovic’s voice warning him about the trade treaty. The irony hit him now. He had persuaded his superiors to take the warning as a serious possibility. And someone had started talking. (Thank God, he hadn’t identified Brovic except as a “reliable source.” Would Brovic have risked the warning if it hadn’t been reliable?) And someone else had repeated the talk until it had reached outside. And now the talk had reached the newspapers. And Brovic, Sylvia and Brovic, would suffer.

  He flung the spoon down on the table and rose. He walked to the window. “Belief won’t help him. We have to deal with facts. Jan Brovic is here on a mission from a country run by Communists. He’s made no statement that he is out of sympathy with it. Just go around saying you believe he isn’t a Communist, and see what will happen to him.”

  She nodded. Then she looked up at Martin. “And Sylvia?” she asked. What would happen to Sylvia?

  He turned away sharply. He glanced at his watch. His words became tense, clipped, almost angry as he pretended to misunderstand her. “In half an hour she’ll be arriving in Chicago.” He paused. “Sorry,” he said, as if he had suddenly heard his own voice. “I’m short-tempered this morning.”

  Now she saw all the worries he had hidden so well. He came back to the table, fussing a little with his chair and the newspapers, as if to divert her attention. “I’ll get back here as soon as possible,” he said, and gave her shoulder a reassuring grip as he left.

  * * *

  She waited, watching the sunlight playing on the green-frosted trees outside, the small clouds blowing up to cover the cold spring sky. Then, when Martin had left Amy and called goodbye to her from the hall, she rose and went into the bedroom.

  Amy was sitting up in bed, the flush on her cheeks intensified by the pink bed jacket round her shoulders. The breakfast tray was pushed aside, the newspaper was crumpled. There was an air of mutiny in the pretty little pink and white room. Amy looked at her angrily. “Martin says I can’t go to church. Martin says I’ve to stay in bed this morning. Martin says it’s pointless to worry when we can take no action. And Martin’s hiding something from me. I’m getting very cross with Martin.”

  “I don’t think you should be,” Kate said gently, removing the tray to a safe chair, and sitting down on the edge of the bed. “Not with Martin.”

  Amy looked at her hands, fine, small-boned, a little roughened by work in spite of the cream she spent on them. “No, not with Martin,” she said at last, her voice softening. “But I’ve got to be cross with someone. Because I’m so damned useless. Why have I got to be so useless at this moment? Slow-moving, heavy-witted—”

  “You were useful to me yesterday,” Kate reminded her. “You calmed me down when I arrived here. I was just about to go to pieces, but you pulled me together again.”

  “Will you stop trying to cheer me up? I’m tired of all this sweetness and light.”

  “Well, what do you want in its place? Sourness and gloom?”

  Amy looked up at her ruefully. “I’ve had a bad night. Because Martin had a bad night. Every time I woke up, he was awake, lying awake pretending to be asleep so as not to worry me. But people when they aren’t sleeping lie too still, they breathe too quietly. So I knew all the time. But I had to pretend, too, that I thought he was asleep so as not to worry him. Sometimes, really, love is hell.”

  She stared down at her hands again. “Why does everyone worry, bother, pester him? When they’re in trouble, of course,” she added bitterly. “Otherwise if things are going well then men like Martin don’t get much attention. They aren’t witty enough and amusing like Stewart Hallis, they haven’t money and charm like Payton Pleydell, they aren’t interesting young idealists like Minlow and Whiteshaw. They’re just ordinary dependable men who do an honest job well, and don’t cause people worry and tears.”

  She looked up, almost accusingly. “Time and time again, I’ve sat at a dinner party and watched Hallis ignore Martin as if his opinions were valueless. Payton Pleydell would brush his judgment aside. And Minlow—he would sneer openly. He’s an expert sneerer, is Mr. Minlow, at everything except his own ideas.”

  “Amy!” Kate said, appeasingly. “You mustn’t, you really mustn’t—”

  “Don’t stop me. Let me get all this out. It’s been boiling up for the last four years. And I need an audience.
I tried a monologue, this morning, but it only ruined my breakfast. Now, where are we?” She looked angrily at Kate.

  “Let’s concentrate on Martin, instead,” Kate said gently.

  Amy’s taut face relaxed. “All right,” she said at last, her voice quiet, too. “Sarah Bernhardt Clark,” she murmured.

  She turned her cheek against the pillow and let her eyes close. How odd, she was thinking, how odd life can be... When I was Kate’s age, not much older, I nearly killed myself. Because Jan Brovic didn’t live with me. How ridiculous it seems, now. “How odd life can be, Kate,” she said. “You know, when I was just about your age...” Ridiculous and even unimportant now. Her voice faded away, and she let herself slip slowly, smoothly, into gentle sleep.

  * * *

  By afternoon, the Clark apartment was back to normal. Amy, clear-eyed and placid, had risen and dressed and was once more in complete charge of the house and her own emotions. She was in the kitchen, finishing the preparations for dinner, when Bob Turner arrived.

  “Hallo!” she said, not even bothering to hide her surprise.

  “I had a couple of hours free, so I took the chance—” He listened to the emptiness of the apartment. “Is Kate here?”

  “I sent her out to find that room she’s fussing about. She should be back soon. Martin’s still at the office. Come in, Bob, come in! You’re just in time to help me with K.P.” She laughed, watching his face.

  “Sure.” He looked at her, half relieved, half puzzled. Then he laid his cap thoughtfully on the hall table. “How’s Kate?”

  “Well, I’m glad someone is worrying about Kate,” she said frankly. “She went into a tailspin yesterday. But she came out of it. Better than I would have done at her age, frankly. You don’t go in much for dramatics, do you?”

  Bob Turner looked polite but bewildered.

  “You and Kate and all the rest of the young people I meet nowadays,” Amy went on, “you don’t dramatise yourselves very much, do you?”

  He watched her with a touch of amusement edged with annoyance. Young people... What age did she think he was? “It would be a waste of energy,” he said.

  She reflected on that. “True. And it’s often a bit of a curse, too. But where’s your vanity, Bob? Don’t you all want to be the centre of the stage, don’t you feel the world revolves round you?”

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t.”

  “And you admit it? No lost generation lament? Ah, well... then there’s hope for us all, yet. Do I sound bitter? I’ve just been reading an article in today’s paper. The writer is plunged in gloom. He looks at the young men and women in our colleges, in the services. Do you know what?”

  “No.” He imitated her mock seriousness.

  “All of you are fear-ridden. You’ve no minds, no independence left. You’ve been dominated by hysteria.”

  Bob’s grin widened. “Sure. That’s our trouble.”

  “You don’t seem to realise the seriousness of all this, Bob. The writer’s a full-fledged fifty if he’s a day, an expert on everyone aged twenty or thereabouts.”

  “What does he want us to do?” He suddenly became serious. “Produce the same crop of grafters and traitors as his own generation?”

  “You aren’t showing the proper respect. Oh, I’m sure the expert wouldn’t like that. That’s the trouble with experts: they get so accustomed to being treated with respect.” She cleared a place on the couch. “Sit down and look out for stray knitting needles.”

  “What about that K.P. job?”

  She laughed, shaking her head, lowering herself carefully into a chair. “I was just making you feel completely at home. What were your early K.P. days like?”

  So he began to tell her of his first meeting with the Army, while he watched with some amusement the way she held a cushion over her lap, with pretended carelessness, to try and camouflage her figure.

  “Was it really as comic as that,” she wanted to know, “or have you forgotten the grim bits?”

  “Some things stay grim.” But why pick at a wound until it starts bleeding again? “It’s strange, though, what you can laugh at. Afterwards.”

  “Distance lends enchantment to the view?”

  “Not exactly.” There were some views he could do without. “It lends a touch of comedy, perhaps.”

  “I wonder if, in a week or two, I’ll laugh at the way I move around now? I take about half an hour to climb our stairs. And yesterday, I went down to the drugstore at the corner. Three people, including an elderly gentleman, passed me on the street just at our front door. By the time I had got to the drugstore, they were half-way down Connecticut Avenue.” She looked at him severely. “That isn’t funny,” she told him. “Not one bit.”

  The telephone rang.

  “Probably Martin,” she said quickly. “Give me a hand, will you, Bob? And this isn’t funny either, at the moment. Later, do you suppose I’ll talk gaily about the time when I needed a bulldozer to haul me out of a chair?”

  “I’ll answer the ’phone,” Bob said as he helped her carefully to her feet. “I’ll tell him you’re coming.”

  “I don’t walk as slowly as all that,” she said a little sharply. “And Martin will wait for me,” she added with a smile as she left the room. She was right, for the telephone kept on ringing until she reached it.

  Bob Turner paced around the small room. No mention of Sylvia, he thought. Heartless? No, not Amy. She had probably done what she could, and now she was instinctively concentrating on what was to be the future. She needed all her courage for that. “Later,” she had said, and he remembered the way she had glanced round the room. “In a week or two,” she had said, and again she had looked round. As if to reassure herself that she would be coming back here. Or did she feel a doubt when she said the word “later,” and then force the growing fear away from her with a joke? Amy would make a good soldier, he thought.

  The telephone call was subdued and brief. But Amy didn’t come back into the living-room. She had gone into the bedroom. Then he heard Kate’s footsteps at the door. He opened it, even as she was ringing the bell.

  She stood quite still for a moment, her eyes widening with surprise. The frown on her brow cleared away, the slight sad droop of her lips vanished. He took her hand and drew her into the apartment.

  “Well, did you have any luck?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She didn’t sound too excited about it. “I found a room. It will do meanwhile. At least, it’s my own.”

  “Brave new world.”

  She smiled then. “Oh, Bob, it’s good to see you.” They stood looking at each other. He let go her hand as Amy returned.

  “I found a room, Amy,” Kate said quickly. “It’s furnished. Partly, at least. I’ve taken it for a month. That will give me time to look around for something that’s better value. What you want and what you get don’t always match, do they?”

  “Here’s a chair,” Bob suggested, noticing Amy’s white face.

  “I gave Martin’s name as a reference, was that all right?”

  Amy nodded. She was scarcely listening. She hadn’t even seen the chair Bob had offered. “I’ve just had a ’phone call,” she said. “From Jan Brovic.”

  Kate looked at her, and then at Bob.

  Amy said, “Kate, he wants you to meet him.” She held out a slip of paper. “Here’s the address I noted down.”

  Bob Turner, his face set, his mouth tight, said, “Don’t go, Kate.”

  Kate studied the slip of paper. “What did he say, Amy?”

  “He wants to talk to you.”

  “A message for Sylvia?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Bob said, “How do we know it was Brovic who telephoned? How do we know even that?”

  “It was Jan’s voice.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Amy looked at him with a little smile curving her lips. “Yes,” she said very quietly.

  “But how did he know Kate was here?” Bob persisted.

  “He ’
phoned Joppa Lane and Walter gave him our number.”

  “Then it’s urgent.” Kate looked at the scribbled instructions again. 15 Fargo. Ring bell for Carson. “I’ll go,” she said.

  “He said you were to be careful,” Amy told her.

  Bob said, “I’ll make sure of that.”

  “No, you can’t possibly come with me, Bob. You’re in uniform,” Kate said, “and if—”

  “I’m coming with you. Are you ready?”

  Kate looked at Amy.

  “Yes,” Amy said, “go at once. He said—he said his time was short.” She picked up a ball of pale blue wool and hunted for her knitting needles. Then she settled herself in the chair by the radio.

  As they left her, her head was bent over her work. The radio was playing a Beethoven quartet. The little room, green-lit with the last rays of the afternoon sun, was warm-shadowed, comforting.

  “The C sharp minor,” Bob said, listening to the music fading as they went downstairs. “Where’s that coming from, I wonder—the Mellon Gallery?” And I wish I were there with Kate sitting beside me: that would be a reasonable way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Then after that, we’d have dinner some place, sit and talk—this being Washington with its own laws about Sunday entertainment—talk quietly about ourselves, build up our own world. He glanced at Kate, troubled and unhappy. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I didn’t know much about music. I liked it, but I couldn’t understand the jargon. The G minor quartet. The F major. I used to go about wondering what was so minor about the G, and what made people think that the F was a major work.”

  That had little effect.

  “Look, Kate, do we really have to go to see Brovic?”

  “Yes.”

  “By cab or on our own two feet?”

  “It isn’t far. We could walk.”

  “Fine. Let me take charge of this.” He slipped the piece of paper out of her hand, glanced at it, stuck it into his pocket. “What’s been happening, anyway?” he asked, keeping his voice unconcerned. A gossip column is a gossip column, he thought. Certainly it didn’t amount to all the worry he saw in Kate’s face. “What about telling me some of it? I’m just the guy who’s on the outside looking in. The glass isn’t too good, or there’s too much steam in the room, or the window needs cleaning, or something. Anyway, I can’t see much. Do you want me to see?”