As Far as You Can Go

by Julian Mitchell

  Diane laughed. “There sure isn’t much room left. But people just pour into L.A. I guess it’s one of the most rapidly expanding cities in the U.S.”

  “I can believe that,” said Harold, thinking of the street map, of the suburbs called Malibu and Long Beach and San Fernando and Santa Ana and Whittier and Encino and Pomona and Ontario and, and, and, and.

  “You know, this was nothing but a little Indian village once,” said Diane, shading her eyes with her hand as she looked over the city. “And not so long ago, either. There was some kind of Spanish mission somewhere—they came up from Mexico. And now look at it.”

  “What I don’t understand,” said Harold, “is how people ever get around it. I mean, it’s too big, in square miles, for anyone ever to be able to comprehend it all.”

  “Yeah,” said Diane. “Well, you know what they say about L.A. Six suburbs in search of a city. Only it’s more like sixty.”

  “It’s like a raft,” Harold said, suddenly struck by the idea. “You know how children are always building rafts? How they work away and hammer planks together, and then they’ve got a terrific raft, but it’s so heavy that they can’t move it down to the water? Well, that’s how I feel about Los Angeles. It’s too big to live in.”

  “Gee,” said Diane, looking at him with admiration. “Are you a writer or something?”

  “No,” said Harold, pleased with the effect of his image. “It was just something that suddenly struck me.”

  “It’s kind of a nice idea, all the same,” said Diane. “I guess the way I’ve always thought about L.A. is that it’s a collection of parts which never quite came together. I mean, it has no real centre, for instance. Have you been to downtown L.A. yet, Harold?”

  “Yes. What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s too small, too small for a city the size of L.A. It ought to be bigger.”

  “Yes, I suppose it should.”

  “But I don’t really feel I’m an Angelino,” said Diane. “Living up here in Beverly Hills, you get to feel L.A. is some place you visit once in a while, that’s all.”

  “I like this bit along the hills,” said Harold. “I spent a couple of days looking for somewhere to stay, and this part seemed much the nicest.”

  “The smog’s not so bad up here, either,” she said. “And it’s not far to the beach. Do you like to swim, Harold?”

  “Yes. I’m not very good, though. I thought everyone in California had his own swimming-pool.”

  “Not everyone,” said Diane. “I kind of prefer the sea, I guess. I like to ride the surfs.”

  “I’ve never done that.”

  “You should while you’re here. It’s just great.”

  He imagined her in a swimsuit, without a bathing-cap, the long blue-black hair plastered down with water as she surfaced after a dive. It was a pleasant image, and he smiled at her, thinking she was a good thing to find on the trail of the Dangerfield miniature. But there were one or two matters to be cleared up before he could start relaxing with a pretty girl on the golden beaches he’d seen in so many films.

  For one thing, though Carter Washburn was clearly not around, and was probably dead, his wife, or widow, was still alive, and living in the same house in which Carter Washburn had lived. And yet no one had answered any of the four letters he had written inquiring about the miniature. For another, the woman he had spoken to on the phone, Mrs Washburn, hadn’t seemed at all keen to meet him. It didn’t sound as though the acquisition of the Hilliard was going to be an easy matter after all.

  Yet having come six thousand miles from home, from Craxton Street and Peterham and Helen Gallagher and Dennis Moreland, Harold was beginning to think of going back. There lay the Pacific. He could go no farther west. Obscurely he wished to end his holiday with pay before he needed to: he had seen so much that he wanted time to think, to reflect, to remember. California was his turning-circle, like the one above the Washburns’ house. Besides, everything had been too easy—the search for the pictures, the interviews with their owners, the successful buying, the failure to move the big wheel of Austin, Texas. It was all outside him: he never felt concerned, involved, with what he was doing. If this was seeing how far he could stretch without falling over, then the sensation wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, and old Dangerfield was a fraud. But of course it wasn’t stretching at all: it was coasting along. In spite of enjoying himself, Harold was constantly aware of a nudging irritation at the back of his mind. He would suddenly be depressed at his failure to be doing something worthwhile, something big, and the gloom he had often felt in Craxton Street, thinking about his future, was the same gloom in America. He didn’t, fundamentally, like being a flibbertigibbet: his conscience disapproved of his frittering his time away “having fun”.

  Now he wanted to complete his work for Dangerfield and go back to England and start again. There must, somewhere, be a job that would give him a sense of purpose.

  He turned to the girl and said, “I expect Mrs Washburn has told you why I’m here.”

  “Kind of,” she said.

  They left the terrace to simmer in the sun, and went into the drawing-room. There were two enormous sofas, covered with some white material, and scattered with gold, violet and pale blue cushions in careful disarray. At the far end of the room there was a low desk of modern design, and the rest of the furniture was modern, too, though the pouffes and chairs and tables were not of the kind Harold would have chosen. It was all too fussy for his taste. There were ashtrays on the tables, the sort in which one didn’t dare to stub one’s cigarette in case one upset the whole mess on the floor. On the walls were some bright but unoriginal pictures of cliffs and sea. They looked as though they might have been painted by a talented member of the family.

  “This is a very nice place,” said Harold.

  Diane shrugged and pushed back some of the long black hair. He noticed that she wore no nail varnish.

  “Grandpa built it,” she said. “I guess it was pretty modern for before the war.”

  “Is your grandfather still alive?”

  “Oh, no. He died about ten years ago. But Grandma keeps on going. She’s pretty old, too. But she won’t ever die, she’s too strong, too tough. That kind outlive their great-great-grandchildren.”

  There was a bitterness in her voice that kept Harold silent. Diane moved restlessly about, patting cushions.

  “How old is she?” said Harold at last.

  “Eighty-one.”

  “Gosh.”

  “‘Gosh’” she imitated, and laughed. “Is that what Englishmen say when they’re surprised? ‘Gosh’?”

  “Yes,” said Harold, annoyed. He was constantly having to remember not to use English idioms. Americans tended to giggle at perfectly ordinary phrases like “nice chap”, and if he let so much as a single “I say” escape him, it took about half an hour before he could re-establish himself as a serious human being.

  “You know,” he said, trying to regain the advantage, “I have invented a new law. It’s called Grandma Moses’s Law, and it states that all American women grow stronger as they grow older, and that American widows grow stronger at twice the speed of American wives.”

  “You’ve got something there,” said Diane. She didn’t seem to think Grandma Moses’s Law was very funny, though. She fiddled with an ashtray, then she said, “You want to buy that old miniature thing of Grandma’s, that right?”

  “Yes. I’ve come a very long way to try and persuade her to part with it.”

  “Well, you’ll be lucky,” she said. “Grandma’s kind of funny about her things.”

  “Is she very fond of it?” said Harold.

  “I guess so.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I tell you, Grandma’s kind of odd. It’s hard, sometimes, to know what she’s feeling. You’ll see.” She got up and began to walk restlessly about the room, tapping the ash from her cigarette into every available ashtray, not smoking at all, her eyes turning continually to the head of the stairs. Harold wa
tched her with cautious attention. She was certainly attractive, but he didn’t want to make a faise move. The trouble with American girls, he had decided, was that they expected you to behave according to a certain code, and he didn’t yet know what the code was. As a result he was always doing the wrong thing, staring when he wasn’t supposed to, not staring when he was.

  She wasn’t just restless, though, he thought. There was a curious tension in her, as though she were trying to keep something in check. All her movements as she walked about were marked by a sense of strain, as though she was making a great effort not to do something violent.

  She saw he was watching her and said, “Excuse me, it’s not one of my good days today.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about. I don’t have a headache or anything. It’s just some days I feel sort of funny. Like I wanted to burst. You know what I mean?”

  “Not really, no. How do you mean, ‘burst’?”

  “I don’t know. Things get me down, I guess.”

  “That happens to all of us,” said Harold.

  “Maybe,” she shrugged. “Don’t you ever feel, though, sometimes, you’d like to do something—I don’t know—something wild? Like drive at a hundred miles an hour, maybe? Or punch a cop in the face? You know what I mean?”

  “A bit,” said Harold

  “I feel like that all the time,” she said. “I feel I’ll go nuts if I don’t do something. I get kind of edgy, you know? Like I was a cushion and couldn’t hold the stuffing in much longer?”

  “I’m sure Mr Barlow is not interested in how you feel, Diane,” said a cold voice.

  Harold turned round and saw a woman standing at the top of the stairs. As he rose, she began to come down, holding to the rail with one hand. She was a big woman, with piles of grey hair and a wrinkled face, but she didn’t look as old as he was expecting. Old people usually looked thin and wasting, but her wrinkles were crevices in a face still fat, and she looked middle-aged in a disturbing way, as though she was fifty-five or sixty and had some disease, not eighty-one and healthy, as she apparently was. She wore rimless glasses, behind which he could see black uncompromising eyes, like pebbles still wet from a stream, and her mouth was long and thin. She was wearing a loose-fitting grey dress and a string of large pearls, one hand at her neck twisting them as she walked.

  “So you’re the Englishman,” she said, stopping at the bottom of the stairs and looking at him as her granddaughter had looked at him, starting at his feet, then moving slowly up. Her face, too, gave no sign of what she thought of the inspection.

  “Yes, Mrs Washburn,” said Harold. “I’m Harold Barlow. I’m very glad to meet you.”

  She was too far away for him to go over and shake hands, and she made no move to come nearer.

  “Glad to know you, Mr Barlow,” she said. “Diane, why don’t you offer Mr Barlow something to eat?”

  “I’m really not hungry. Please don’t bother.”

  “Go see if there aren’t some cookies, Diane,” said the old woman. “If he won’t eat any, I will.”

  Diane left the room, and Mrs Washburn moved to a sofa, settling herself on it with the agility of a much younger woman.

  “You got my letter, Mr Barlow,” she said.

  “No, Mrs Washburn. I wrote to you four times, but I didn’t get any answer.”

  “You wrote to my husband,” she said. “My husband is dead, Mr Barlow.”

  “I must apologize, Mrs Washburn, I had no wish to cause you any——”

  “You didn’t cause me anything,” she said. “But you got my letter?”

  “No, I have had no letter from you.”

  “Diane must have forgotten to mail it. Diane is a very careless girl. I’m sorry you’ve been brought all this way to no purpose. In my letter to you I said various things, Mr Barlow, but the most important one was that I am not at all interested in selling my miniature. Not interested at all.”

  Diane came back into the room with a plate of cookies.

  “Diane,” said the old woman, “this young man says he never received my letter. Now did you mail it, like I told you, or did you forget it? She’d forget to get up in the mornings if someone didn’t tell her that’s how life goes on, Mr Barlow.”

  Diane looked at her grandmother and said, “Sure I mailed it, Grandma.”

  “Well, child, Mr Barlow said he never got it. Are you going to tell me the United States Post Office has lost it?”

  “It’s happened before,” said Diane.

  “Well, that’s surely a pity, then. Because Mr Barlow here, he never got my letter, and if he’d’ve got my letter, he wouldn’t be wasting his time and money here now, would he?”

  “I don’t know, Grandma, you didn’t tell me what you wrote him.”

  “Well, I was telling him. I was saying how I’m not interested one little bit in selling anything that belongs to me.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs Washburn.”

  “I’m sorry you’ve had to come so far to hear it, Mr Barlow. But the United States Post Office and my granddaughter between them made a mess of things, I guess.” She smiled, but she kept her eyes on Diane. “I guess you could say Mr Barlow’s here on a wild-goose chase, Diane.”

  “I guess so, Grandma.”

  “I hoped we might be able to discuss it a little, Mrs Washburn. I mean, I haven’t told you the whole story yet.”

  “And I don’t want to hear it, Mr Barlow. There’s nothing to be discussed. I don’t want to part with any of my things. They’re mine, you understand, and that’s the way they’re going to be.”

  “I don’t know what you want with that old miniature thing,” said Diane. “You never look at it, do you? When did you last look at it, Grandma?”

  “That’s my business, Diane. Are you sure you won’t have a cookie, Mr Barlow?”

  “Thank you,” said Harold. He took one, and Mrs Washburn said, “I like to see a young man eating.”

  “I wonder if you’d let me at least look at the miniature, Mrs Washburn? I’d like to make absolutely sure that it is the one I’m looking for.”

  “No, Mr Barlow,” she said, smiling coldly, “I don’t want to give you any ideas you shouldn’t have, and it would be putting temptation in your way to see that little picture.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like this, Mr Barlow. If you see that picture, if I let you see that picture, then you’ll think I’ll sell it to you in time. Now I’m not interested in wasting your time and mine, Mr Barlow, giving you false hopes. So I guess you don’t get to see the picture.”

  “But that’s absurd, Mrs Washburn.” He felt himself growing red.

  “Grandma,” said Diane, “don’t you think you’re playing it a little too hard? Let the guy at least see the thing.”

  Harold gave her a grateful smile, but she was looking out of the window.

  “I guess you can mind your own business, Diane.”

  “Well, it’s your picture.”

  “It sure is my picture. And it won’t ever be yours, either, Diane.” Her eyes seemed almost to crackle with malice. “It’s going to my son Henry, not to your goddam father with his idle ways. Henry’ll know how to value it.”

  “Please excuse her, Mr Barlow,” said Diane, “she gets kind of excited when she thinks about my father.”

  “Your father!” said the old woman.

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  “Mrs Washburn, are you sure you won’t reconsider your decision? It would make a very great difference to Mr Dangerfield if he at least knew where the miniature was.”

  “Who’s Mr Dangerfield?” said Diane.

  “He’s the descendant of the man in the picture.”

  “I told you, Diane,” said Mrs Washburn, looking at her with something Harold would have called hatred, only it seemed too cold-blooded for hate. “Can’t you remember anything, child?”

  “Did you tell me?” she said in a bored voice.


  “Of course I told you. I told you this morning.”

  Harold started, and was about to speak, but caught a glance from Diane that made him stay silent. It seemed to ask him not to expose her grandmother as a liar, to say that she would explain it all later. But a liar Mrs Washburn must surely be. The story about the letter seemed an obvious untruth, to put it mildly, and it was clear that Diane had not, in fact, ever heard the name Dangerfield till a few moments ago. If this was being “kind of funny”, then being “kind of funny” was a damned nuisance. He watched the old woman. She was talking about Los Angeles now, asking him mechanical questions about where he had been, which he answered equally mechanically. She had an impressive composure, he thought, for one who was not telling the truth. She looked as though she had a pretty lengthy history of dishonesty to support it, too. But perhaps that was being malicious.

  After a few minutes of pointless conversation, in which he asked her to change her mind about letting him see the miniature, and she said she would not, he got up to go. He intended, though, to come back.

  “I shall be in Los Angeles for some time, Mrs Washburn. I hope I may have the opportunity to see you again.”

  “I never go out,” she said.

  “I do, though,” said Diane. “Maybe we’ll meet some place. It’s a big city, but you’d be amazed how often you run into someone you know.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if you did meet your friends just anywhere,” said Mrs Washburn drily to Diane. “She’s not what I’d call a good girl, Mr Barlow, would you?”

  “I’d say she was all right,” said Harold firmly. “In fact, it’s been a very great pleasure to meet you, Diane.”

  “Calling each other by your first names already,” said the old woman. “When I was young you had to be engaged before you took such liberties.” She laughed harshly, showing immaculate false teeth.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t think you told me your surname.”