“It’s not Moscow, for God’s sake,” said Vera. “It’s only over there.”
They stayed after everyone else had gone, and the smoke and the smell of pork and cabbage grew cold. They drank kümmel and made perfect sense.
“But Vera” – Lottie tried to be serious – “what are you going to do now that you are twenty-one?”
“I don’t know. Find out why one aspirin was missing from each tin.”
When they reached the hotel, drunk on friendship and with nothing to worry about but what to do with the rest of the day, Kevin was there. He sat with his habitual patience, in the hotel lobby, wearing his overcoat, reading a stained, plastic-covered, and over-confident bar list – the hotel served only coffee and chips and beer. He was examining the German and French columns of the menu with equal forbearance; he understood neither, and probably had no desires.
One day, she would become accustomed to Kevin, Lottie said to herself; stop seeing him, as she had nearly grown used to mountains. She thought, crazily, that if it had been Dr. Keller or any other man here to take her away, she would have clung to his hands and wept all over them. He looked so reassuring. She thought, A conservative Canadian type, and the words made her want to marry him. The confidence he assumed for them both let her know that if she had not worked on her thesis it was Dr. Keller’s fault; he had prepared her badly. If she had been taken ill, it was because of a virus no one had ever heard of at home. When she saw the shapeless overcoat and the rubbers over his shoes that would make people laugh in Paris, she did not care, and she was happy because he could not read anything but English. That was the way he had to be.
“We can’t talk here,” she said. “Come upstairs.”
“Is it all right?”
“Oh, they don’t care.”
He followed her up the stairs. He was ill at ease. He was worried about the hotel detectives.
“It’s a lovely room, Kevin. Wait till you see the view, like a Flemish painting. And so warm. They leave the heat on all night. In Paris …”
From the doorway, looking around, he took in the half-drained basin with its greasy rim, the carton she used as a wastebasket, her underthings drying on a wire hanger, the table covered with a wine-stained cloth, the unmade bed. Lottie thought he was admiring her anemones. “My crazy neighbor gave them to me,” she said. “The old boy from the military hospital. The one who’s been writing the poem for Vera and me.”
“No,” said Kevin. “You never mentioned him. You mentioned this Vera just once. Then you stopped writing.”
“I wrote all the time.”
“I never got the letters. One of mine was returned. I guess the mail system here isn’t exactly up to date.”
“It must have been returned when I was too sick to go to the post office. You have to show your passport.”
“I know, but I got just this one letter. If Vera hadn’t been writing and telling your mother not to worry, I’d have been over before. It was a long time of nothing – not even a card for Christmas. Vera said how hard you were working, how busy.” He left the door ajar but consented to sit on the unmade bed. “So, when I got the chance of a free hop to Zurich, a press flight …” He looked as if he would never grow old. The lines in his face might deepen, that was all. “I knew you’d had this flu. That can take a lot out of you.”
“Yes. It was good of you to come and see how I was. How long can you stay?”
“One, two days. I don’t want to interfere with your work.”
Vera had said, “You’ve kept him on the string since you were sixteen. You’ll bring it off.” Ah, but it was one thing to be sixteen, pretty but modest, brilliant but unassuming. Her frail health had been slightly in her favor then. She had made the mistake of going away, and she had let Kevin discover he could get on without her. She held his hands and pretended to be as conscious as he was of the half-open door. They had never been as alone as at this moment and might never be again. They were almost dangerously on the side of friendship. If she began explaining everything that had taken place, from the moment she saw the holly in Paris and filled out her first police questionnaire, then they might become very good friends indeed, but would probably never marry.
“What I would like, Kevin – I don’t know if you’ll think it’s a good idea – would be to go back with you. If I stay here, I’ll get pneumonia. It’s a good thing you came. Vera was killing me.”
“Her letters didn’t sound like it. Who is she, anyway?”
“A girl from home. A Ukrainian. She got in trouble, and they sent her away. Forget Vera.”
“They could have just sent her to Minneapolis,” said Kevin.
“Too close,” said Lottie. “She might have slipped back.”
“I guess you’ll be glad to get out of here,” said Kevin, as the bells struck the hour. He left her and returned to the hotel near the station, where he had taken a room. He could not rid himself of the fear that there might be detectives.
As she had promised, Lottie accompanied Vera to Germany. Kevin was with them. Once her passport was stamped, Vera thought she would go to Paris and help Al out of whatever predicament he was in, perhaps for the last time. “I liked it in Rome, where it was sort of crazy, but Paris is cold and dirty, and now he’s twenty-six,” said Vera.
“You mean, he should settle down,” said Kevin, not making of it a question, and without asking what Vera imagined her help to Al could consist of.
Vera was hypocritically meek with Kevin, though she smiled when he said “Ukarainian,” in five syllables. Lottie saw that if Vera had for one moment wavered, if she had considered going home because Lottie was leaving, the voice from home saying “Ukarainian” had reminded her of what the return would be. That was Vera’s labyrinth. Lottie was on her way out. Kevin held Lottie’s hand when Vera wasn’t looking. He was friendly toward Vera, but protective of Lottie, which was the right imbalance. Lottie guessed he had made up his mind.
They walked on a coating of slush and ice – they had left the sun and the rivers on the other side.
In a totally gray village nothing stirred. Beyond it, on the dirty, icy highway by some railway tracks, they came upon a knot of orphans and a clergyman. The two groups passed each other without a glance. In a moment the children were out of sight. Answering a remark of Kevin’s, Vera said they were ten or eleven years old, and unlikely to remember the air raids eight years ago. The sky was low and looked unwashed. On the horizon the dark blue mountains were so near now that Lottie saw where they rose from the plain. “Appenweier” – that was the name of the place. It was like those mysterious childhood railway journeys that begin and end in darkness.
“Are you girls by any chance going anyplace in particular?” said Kevin.
They turned and looked at him. No, they were just walking. Vera was not even leading the way.
“Well, I’m sorry then,” said Kevin, “but as the saying goes, I’ve had it,” and he marched them to the bombed station, and onto a train, and so back to France.
If that was Germany, there was nothing to wait for, expect, or return to. She had not crossed a frontier but come up to another limit.
Vera packed some things and left some, and departed for Paris. She and Lottie did not kiss, and Vera left the hotel without looking back. Her room – because it was cheaper – was instantly taken over by the mad neighbor. Kevin spent the evening, supperless, and part of the night with Lottie. Vera also must have been an inhibiting factor for him, Lottie decided – not just the phantom detectives. He might have taken Lottie to his hotel, which was more comfortable, but he thought it would look funny. They had given Vera a day’s start. Kevin and Lottie were leaving for Zurich in the morning, and from Zurich flying home. Lottie did not think this night would give her a claim on Kevin, but when she woke, at an hour she could not place – woke because the Arabs were quarrelling outside the window, got up to shut the window and, in the dark, comb her hair – she thought that a memory of it could. Vera had left a parcel of
food. If she had not been afraid of disturbing Kevin, she would have spread it on the table and eaten a meal – salami, pickles, butter, and bread, half a bottle of Sylvaner.
Kevin now rose, obsessed by what the people who owned the hotel might be supposing. He smoked a cigarette, refused the wine, and put on his clothes. He and Lottie were to meet next morning at the station; there was some confusion about the time. Kevin remarked, with a certain pride, that as far as he was concerned it was now around seven at night. He had brought a travelling clock to lend to Lottie so that she could wake up in plenty of time to pack. He set it for six, and placed the clock where she could reach it.
Lottie made a list not of what she was taking but of what she was leaving behind: food, wilted anemones, medicine, all Vera’s residue as well as her own. The hotel maid would have a full day of it, and could not get away with saying “À quoi bon?” Lottie could not make herself believe that someone else would be sleeping in this room and that there would be no trace of Lottie and Vera anywhere. She rose before the alarm rang, and stood at the window with the curtain in her hand. She composed, “Last night, just at the end of the night, the sky and the air were white as milk. Snow had fallen and a thick low fog lay in the streets and on the water, filling every crack between the houses. The cathedral bells were iron and muffled in snow. I heard drunks up and down the sidewalk most of the night.”
This could not be a letter to Kevin; he was there, across the city, and had never received any of the others. It was not a letter to anyone. There was no sense to what she was doing. She would never do it again. That was the first of many changes.
LINNET MUIR
In Youth Is Pleasure
My father died, then my grandmother; my mother was left, but we did not get on. I was probably disagreeable with anyone who felt entitled to give me instructions and advice. We seldom lived under the same roof, which was just as well. She had found me civil and amusing until I was ten, at which time I was said to have become pert and obstinate. She was impulsive, generous, in some ways better than most other people, but without any feeling for cause and effect; this made her at the least unpredictable and at the most a serious element of danger. I was fascinated by her, though she worried me; then all at once I lost interest. I was fifteen when this happened. I would forget to answer her letters and even to open them. It was not rejection or anything so violent as dislike but a simple indifference I cannot account for. It was much the way I would be later with men I fell out of love with, but I was too young to know that then. As for my mother, whatever I thought, felt, said, wrote, and wore had always been a positive source of exasperation. From time to time she attempted to alter the form, the outward shape at least, of the creature she thought she was modelling, but at last she came to the conclusion there must be something wrong with the clay. Her final unexpected upsurge of attention coincided with my abrupt unconcern: one may well have been the reason for the other.
It took the form of digging into my diaries and notebooks and it yielded, among other documents, a two-year-old poem, Kiplingesque in its rhythms, entitled “Why I Am a Socialist.” The first words of the first line were “You ask …,” then came a long answer. But it was not an answer to anything she’d wondered. Like all mothers – at least, all I have known – she was obsessed with the entirely private and possibly trivial matter of a daughter’s virginity. Why I was a Socialist she rightly conceded to be none of her business. Still, she must have felt she had to say something, and the something was “You had better be clever, because you will never be pretty.” My response was to take – take, not grab – the poem from her and tear it up. No voices were raised. I never mentioned the incident to anyone. That is how it was. We became, presently, mutually unconcerned. My detachment was put down to the coldness of my nature, hers to the exhaustion of trying to bring me up. It must have been a relief to her when, in the first half of Hitler’s war, I slipped quietly and finally out of her life. I was now eighteen, and completely on my own. By “on my own” I don’t mean a show of independence with Papa-Mama footing the bills: I mean that I was solely responsible for my economic survival and that no living person felt any duty toward me.
On a bright morning in June I arrived in Montreal, where I’d been born, from New York, where I had been living and going to school. My luggage was a small suitcase and an Edwardian picnic hamper – a preposterous piece of baggage my father had brought from England some twenty years before; it had been with me since childhood, when his death turned my life into a helpless migration. In my purse was a birth certificate and five American dollars, my total fortune, the parting gift of a Canadian actress in New York, who had taken me to see Mayerling before I got on the train. She was kind and good and terribly hard up, and she had no idea that apart from some loose change I had nothing more. The birth certificate, which testified I was Linnet Muir, daughter of Angus and of Charlotte, was my right of passage. I did not own a passport and possibly never had seen one. In those days there was almost no such thing as a “Canadian.” You were Canadian-born, and a British subject, too, and you had a third label with no consular reality, like the racial tag that on Soviet passports will make a German of someone who has never been to Germany. In Canada you were also whatever your father happened to be, which in my case was English. He was half Scot, but English by birth, by mother, by instinct. I did not feel a scrap British or English, but I was not an American either. In American schools I had refused to salute the flag. My denial of that curiously Fascist-looking celebration, with the right arm stuck straight out, and my silence when the others intoned the trusting “… and justice for all” had never been thought offensive, only stubborn. Americans then were accustomed to gratitude from foreigners but did not demand it; they quite innocently could not imagine any country fit to live in except their own. If I could not recognize it, too bad for me. Besides, I was not a refugee – just someone from the backwoods. “You got schools in Canada?” I had been asked. “You got radios?” And once, from a teacher, “What do they major in up there? Basket-weaving?”
My travel costume was a white piqué jacket and skirt that must have been crumpled and soot-flecked, for I had sat up all night. I was reading, I think, a novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner. My hair was thick and long. I wore my grandmother’s wedding ring, which was too large, and which I would lose before long. I desperately wanted to look more than my age, which I had already started to give out as twenty-one. I was travelling light; my picnic hamper contained the poems and journals I had judged fit to accompany me into my new, unfettered existence, and some books I feared I might not find again in clerical Quebec – Zinoviev and Lenin’s Against the Stream, and a few beige pamphlets from the Little Lenin Library, purchased second hand in New York. I had a picture of Mayakovsky torn out of Cloud in Trousers and one of Paddy Finucane, the Irish R.A.F. fighter pilot, who was killed the following summer. I had not met either of these men, but I approved of them both very much. I had abandoned my beloved but cumbersome anthologies of American and English verse, confident that I had whatever I needed by heart. I knew every word of Stephen Vincent Benét’s “Litany for Dictatorships” and “Notes to be Left in a Cornerstone,” and the other one that begins:
They shot the Socialists at half-past five
In the name of victorious Austria.…
I could begin anywhere and rush on in my mind to the end. “Notes …” was the New York I knew I would never have again, for there could be no journeying backward; the words “but I walked it young” were already a gate shut on a part of my life. The suitcase held only the fewest possible summer clothes. Everything else had been deposited at the various war-relief agencies of New York. In those days I made symbols out of everything, and I must have thought that by leaving a tartan skirt somewhere I was shedding past time. I remember one of those wartime agencies well because it was full of Canadian matrons. They wore pearl earrings like the Duchess of Kent’s and seemed to be practicing her tiny smile. Brooches pinned to their cashme
re cardigans carried some daft message about the Empire. I heard one of them exclaiming, “You don’t expect me, a Britisher, to drink tea made with tea bags!” Good plain girls from the little German towns of Ontario, christened probably Wilma, Jean, and Irma, they had flowing eighteenth-century names like Georgiana and Arabella now. And the Americans, who came in with their arms full of every stitch they could spare, would urge them, the Canadian matrons, to stand fast on the cliffs, to fight the fight, to slug the enemy on the landing fields, to belt him one on the beaches, to keep going with whatever iron rations they could scrape up in Bronxville and Scarsdale; and the Canadians half-shut their eyes and tipped their heads back like Gertrude Lawrence and said in thrilling Benita Hume accents that they would do that – indeed they would. I recorded “They’re all trained nurses, actually. The Canadian ones have a good reputation. They managed to marry these American doctors.”
Canada had been in Hitler’s war from the very beginning, but America was still uneasily at peace. Recruiting had already begun; I had seen a departure from New York for Camp Stewart in Georgia, and some of the recruits’ mothers crying and even screaming and trying to run alongside the train. The recruits were going off to drill with broomsticks because there weren’t enough guns; they still wore old-fashioned headgear and were paid twenty-one dollars a month. There was a song about it: “For twenty-one dollars a day, once a month.” As my own train crossed the border to Canada I expected to sense at once an air of calm and grit and dedication, but the only changes were from prosperous to shabby, from painted to unpainted, from smiling to dour. I was entering a poorer and a curiously empty country, where the faces of the people gave nothing away. The crossing was my sea change. I silently recited the vow I had been preparing for weeks: that I would never be helpless again and that I would not let anyone make a decision on my behalf.
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