Kate said, “He was a nice man even if his name wasn’t Bill.”
Bob caught her arm. “Just in case Walt looks back at us,” he said. He glanced at the others in the street: a man who walked slowly and gloomily, a woman who was airing a dog without much enthusiasm from either of them, a group of Easter-bonneted young women, three brisk young men taking the world in their stride.
“It all looks normal, innocent,” Kate said. But so it had looked five minutes ago when she had stood at a window and watched two men meet. She shivered.
“I’ll ’phone the Clarks, and then we’ll eat somewhere around here,” Bob said. “I’ve got to report in, by eight o’clock, so we haven’t much time.” Already in his mind he was arranging what they had to do.
“Will you help me draft a letter to Sylvia?” Kate asked.
“If you want help with that.”
“I do.” She was calm now, thoughtful. “You’ll have to help me disguise what I say, and yet make it clear. As for Amy and Martin—we can’t tell them much, can we?”
“No.” He noticed the way in which she avoided even speaking Jan Brovic’s name. He took a deep breath of relief. “The first thing I’d like to do, actually—” He hesitated.
“Yes?”
“Would be to send Sylvia a telegram. She’ll get it as soon as she reaches Santa Rosita. A letter might not get her in time.”
“In time?” Kate asked slowly.
“We’ll have to word it carefully,” he said, avoiding an answer to Kate’s question.
“I can’t tell her he has gone,” Kate said hopelessly. “I just can’t do it, Bob.”
He held her hand, now, reassuringly. Sylvia will learn soon enough from the newspaper reports, he thought. Cruel? Yet a telegram or a letter would be just as cruel. Nothing, nobody, could make the cruel less cruel. “If we knew what train she took out of Chicago—” But they didn’t. They didn’t even know if she had yet left Chicago.
“Yes,” Kate said.
They walked on in silence for almost a block.
“I keep thinking of Sylvia travelling west,” Kate said suddenly. “Travelling west and not knowing any of this.” Her voice faded.
Bob nodded. He had been thinking of Jan Brovic. Could I face a death sentence so calmly? he wondered. It was one thing to fight back from a foxhole, to wait for the next assault with a carbine and grenades beside you. But to walk across a harmless street in a friendly city and deliver yourself into the hands of your enemy? And Brovic hadn’t even been worrying about himself, then. He had only been worried about Sylvia: would she doubt him, thinking that he had betrayed her? Would she remember him with revulsion turning to hate? Yes, that was Brovic’s fear. But Bob thought gloomily, people can live on hate; they can live on hate or live with love. Either way, they can live.
“What will she do?” Kate said, almost to herself. She looked up at Bob in despair. As if, she suddenly realised, she expected him to answer the unanswerable question. “I’m putting all my troubles on to you, Bob,” she said at last.
“I haven’t been complaining,” he said, and he tightened his grip on her hand.
* * *
Afterwards, they had a sandwich at the Statler Coffee Shop, in a corner shielded from the street by a green screen of plants rising high from the floor. And the bright room—gay with flowered hats, and young couples in splendid isolation, and older couples struggling with children, and out-of-town visitors talking about the cherry trees or Mount Vernon, about contacts or contracts—was crowded enough to shield them too. And Bob, saying that they had done what they could, that it was no good to worry about things over which they had no control, was drawing Kate back to her own life.
She was aware of this, even if it wasn’t done obviously. At first, she had said to herself, “Poor Bob, he really is trying so hard.” Then she had thought, I’ve got to make him feel he has succeeded. And at last, to her own surprise, she found he actually had. Not altogether, but watching his face as he spoke now about his own plans, she knew he hadn’t meant to turn her mind completely away from Sylvia and Jan Brovic. He hadn’t done that for himself, either. What they had experienced today, they wouldn’t forget. But all he wanted now was a working balance, something to let them deal with their own lives again. How well I know him, she thought in surprise.
“The future is vague,” he was saying, “but that’s the way life can be in the Army. There’s always some waiting to do. Waiting and wondering. You don’t always know what you’ll be doing, where you’ll be in six months’ time, so perhaps that’s why you concentrate on making today as definite as you can.”
“When will you be through with your present course?”
“In three weeks.”
“So soon?”
“There’s a chance I’ll be given an instructor’s job for the next few months. With luck”—and he looked at her, then—“I shan’t be stationed very far from here.”
“You’ve come to like Washington?”
He grinned. “I’m beginning to feel its attractions.” He glanced at his watch and offered her another cigarette. “Time for one more,” he said, “before I leave you with the Clarks.” And I’ve still a lot to say to her, he thought. It was important, somehow, that he should say these things now.
“Kate—” he began, and then he saw that she had retreated into worry again. She might be wondering how she’d face the Clarks, how much she’d tell them. “You keep Amy quiet while I have a word with Martin,” he advised her. “We’ll let him decide what Amy should know.”
She nodded and tried to smile.
“Are you free on Wednesday night?” he asked. “Keep it for me, will you? And next Saturday.”
She nodded again.
“And every Wednesday and Saturday for the next three weeks?”
She gave a real smile, now. “Yes,” she said. Then her smile died away. Three weeks, she was thinking, weren’t too long. “How can you bear to see me again?” she asked suddenly.
“How can I what?” He looked at her, startled out of his own thoughts. “You’ve an original line, Kate, I must say.”
“No. That isn’t my line. Nor is it the one you’ve been seeing me in, practically ever since we met. I don’t go around weeping, worrying and looking for someone who’ll keep listening to my troubles. That’s what I’ve done with you—”
“Not exactly,” he said gently. “We had a fine time together on Friday night when we were left to ourselves. We’ve done some laughing together.”
“You’ve seen me at my worst,” she said ruefully. “If I were you, I’d pay this cheque, shake hands, say, ‘Well, it’s been odd knowing you,’ and then run for my life.”
He threw back his head and laughed so that the little groups of people at the neighbouring tables were startled into surprised smiles and open glances.
“There’s your answer,” he said, still smiling. “Was it emphatic enough?”
She nodded.
He said, “Now you answer me this. Does a man get to know a girl better when they’ve been through some real trouble together, or doesn’t he?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said, serious again. I’ve known Bob a very short time, she thought. Counted in days, it’s been short. And yet I seem to have known him so long.
“I have,” he said, equally serious except for the little smile that still lingered in his eyes as he watched her tackle the problem so resolutely. “I thought of it, today, when I was coming to the Clarks’. I was thinking that it was strange to find myself in this section of Washington. When I used to visit, before, it was in the direction of Georgetown. And when I went to Georgetown, it was always to relax, to try and feel I was a civilian again in a civilised house, to try and escape from the streets and the sense that I didn’t belong here. But today, I knew I wasn’t going to relax comfortably when I entered the Clarks’ apartment. I knew I wouldn’t have even gone there if I hadn’t been worried about you.”
She looked up at him.
“Yes, about you,” he repeated. “So I began thinking about you and me. And about the other girls I’ve known. And that was strange, too. You can know a girl for a long time, take her out to dinner, dancing, the theatre, and how much do you know her? You know what she looks like when she’s wearing her prettiest dress; you know how she can smile and laugh when you’re having a good time together; you know what she says, and the way she can say it, when there’s nothing but an evening of fun and games ahead of her. The same goes for yourself. You’re on your best behaviour, shaved, brushed, money in your pocket, and determined to please. Who wouldn’t make a good showing, then?”
Kate’s eyes had widened, her lips had parted softly, but she kept silent and only the small nod of her head told him to go on.
“So I started thinking another step beyond that. You could meet a girl long enough and still not even begin to know her. It isn’t time that matters between people. It’s depth. You don’t begin to enjoy fully until you’ve known depth. It’s only then that people become real. They are no longer just a face, a name, a pitch of voice, a collection of movements, a selection of tastes. You no longer just see them, hear them or admire them. You also begin to sense them, to feel their reactions. You begin to know them. And that’s important, somehow. It’s important to me, anyway.”
He stopped, and his eyes left the yellow tablecloth where he had been drawing a step-by-step design with a fork as he had argued out his thoughts, and he looked at Kate. “When we go out on Wednesday, and Saturday, and all the other Wednesdays and Saturdays, and you’re wearing a party dress and your best smile, I’ll enjoy myself twice as much just because I’ve seen you when you were facing trouble. And without knowing people that way, there isn’t much chance for any real happiness. Without depth, pleasure stays pleasure, all very well and better than nothing but never quite measuring up to what you had hoped for... Do I make any sense?”
“Yes,” she said slowly, honestly. “Yes, that’s how it is.”
For a moment they sat quite still, watching each other.
“Well, that’s settled,” he said suddenly. He looked at his watch and then at the last half-inch of cigarette which he dropped into the ashtray. “We just made it,” he added with a smile.
She didn’t have to ask what was settled. Her eyes were still watching him as she rose to her feet. The touch of his hand on her arm, as they walked between the tables, was light and sure.
26
It was a journey in emotion as much as a journey through unknown places.
At first, Sylvia had welcomed it as a chance to be anonymous, to feel secure from telephones and newspapers and talk, to make a complete break with all the past. She was shut inside a speeding train with strange faces, strange voices around her. Outside, the shape of the land was different, the trees and fields and rivers were different, the houses were different. Even the people seemed different, in their way of dressing, in their expression and voice: surface differences, perhaps, but powerful enough, based on the way they lived; on the sky above them that brought rain or drought, deep snow or mild winters; on the shape of the land itself, on its wealth or its poverty.
And as she looked at a farm lying too near a swollen river, at a holding where the earth was cracked with erosion, at a town whose growth had trickled into sleep, at a city that had drawn too many people into its reach, she saw that all this strangeness was only a difference in problems, the problems that each man had to face every day of his life. Wherever you travelled, there was no escape from them.
And she looked at the prosperous places, at the hundreds of miles of rich, ploughed fields; at the freshly painted houses and repaired barns and gleaming silos; at the stretches of smooth roads and wooded hillsides; at the massed factories, large as palaces and as imposing; at the huge encampments of automobiles waiting to take the workers to their outflung colonies of new houses sheltering under a forest of television trees. And as she looked at all that, she saw the perpetual problems.
They were the one constant in all these miles of difference. The problems were always there.
First, what shall I live on?
And where shall I live, to solve what shall I live on?
And how shall I live, to solve where shall I live?
Some people stopped there. It used up a lot of energy and determination even to reach that point. But their problems were solved if they worked hard enough at them. If they faced the challenge, that in itself was a victory.
And others went on from there. Now their problems started with why. Why should I do this, why ought I, why must I? These weren’t so easily solved. The challenge had become more difficult to answer. And could you ever hope to answer it if you had never faced the first challenge—the questions that began with what and where and how?
Then what did you do, twice defeated?
Escape?
As I am doing, she thought... Then she resisted that idea. She wasn’t escaping in that sense. She was in search of a new life, of a life with new meaning. But what if you brought nothing to a new life except the desire to be happy? What had she brought except her love for Jan and her trust in him? Except a vague idea that there would be some unpleasantness first, and then some patient waiting until they were married, and then happiness. In Washington, she had been so intent on cutting herself free from the life she had known that she had never thought of the future except in the vaguest of terms. The future was there, ahead of her, mysterious and wonderful, a life undefined except in terms of Jan. Was that enough? Yes, she told herself. Yes. It was enough to trust.
Enough? Only if all problems were ignored, as those who escaped ignored them. But then you had to go where no one knew you. Better still, as you retreated, you found a place where everything was foreign so that you couldn’t be measured by the challenges you had refused. Then you could laugh at the challenges, call them stupid, call the people who had faced them dull, conventional, materialists, if only to prove yourself right. Was that the end of all retreating—a meagre self-justification, which few believed and you least of all in your less self-congratulatory moments? What then?
But I am not escaping, she told herself. And she wondered why she should be tormenting herself with these thoughts. Perhaps it was the journey, this long travel through thousands of miles, through millions of other lives. She ought to have brought a book to read, something to keep her attention riveted on a page of print. Instead, she had chosen to look out of a window and plan her future, and she had only become aware of the present as it was being lived, the present which must be based on the past to form a future with some certainty: we are, because we were, therefore it’s possible we shall be.
And I shall be, too, she told herself. Not just a dependent on Santa Rosita, someone who has to be nursed along while she waits for her life to take shape with Jan. I’ll find a job, she decided. I’ll learn about the what and the where and the how of life. These are the disciplines you’ve got to learn first, or else you never are free from your own sense of inadequacy.
What kind of job? It wouldn’t be very grand. Something simple at first, something she could tackle. And with each little victory, she could face something more difficult. Perhaps by the time Jan and I can get married, I’ll be able to feel less inadequate, I’ll be able to fight along with him for our future instead of accepting it as a vague dream, taken on trust.
She looked down at her white hands, slender and delicate, lying against the fine wool of her grey skirt. Then she glanced at the woman beside her, dozing in a reclining seat, her cheap gaberdine suit already crumpled, her crisply laundered blouse with its unnecessary frills bulging out like the dinner shirt of a drowsing elderly gentleman at his club, her mouth half open, her glasses slipping down her small blob of nose, her round placid cheeks curved in peace. Across the aisle, a dark-haired man, glossy, flamboyantly dressed, a diamond ring on his little finger, sat frowning at the countryside. Beside him, looking at a magazine, bored with it and her companion and herself, was a pret
ty blonde with a deep sun tan, wearing an inappropriate dress and a piece of mink around her shoulders. In front of them, was an old man, quietly dressed, quietly smiling. And a young woman reading to a child on her knee. And over there were two young soldiers, asprawl and asleep.
She looked back at the dark-haired man and his diamond ring. A job, she thought, wasn’t only to be valued in economic terms: or else, those of us who had money would sleep with a smile on our faces like the woman at my shoulder. What has made her so content? Does she demand little, and so she is content with little? That’s what the cynic would say, if only to make himself feel superior. I would like to ask her. I’d like to ask all these people what they do for a living, and why some can smile so easily and why some look at you with worried self-absorbed eyes.
She looked at the reflection of her face in the window. I’ve learned something on this journey, she told herself, even if it’s only to be interested in strangers. Payton would be shocked.
Payton...
Quickly, she picked up one of the magazines that lay beside her. How strange we can be, she thought, for she was trembling. Am I still so afraid of him? And I was always afraid, a little afraid?...
She looked up to find that the woman beside her had opened her eyes. The woman was watching her. Not hostilely, not critically. Rather with the half-conscious stare of someone whose mind had just wandered out of sleep and wasn’t yet focusing properly.
“Still travelling through these mountains?” the woman asked, and then she flushed a little as she remembered how Sylvia had preferred not to talk. So she pulled her jacket into place and smoothed her hair, straightened her glasses and lifted the newspaper from where it had fallen at her feet. If she doesn’t want to talk I’m sure I don’t, the woman thought as she glanced along the aisle.
“We’ve left the Rockies behind us,” Sylvia said. “We’re coming to a desert of stone.” She looked slightly awed at the twists and corkscrews and columns of red rock that rose precipitously from the waves of hard-packed earth and melting snow. The giant peaks and the forests were gone; the slopes of grass, white-covered, and the ice-blue torrents had given way to a land that was fiery and hard and brittle.
I and My True Love Page 29