I and My True Love (23 page)

But Sylvia shook her head. “I can’t tell him, meanwhile.” She watched Kate’s face. “I hate all this deception as much as you do. So does Jan. Kate, please believe—” She stopped speaking, laying her hand in warning on Kate’s arm. The library door had opened. And once more, they drew together. Suddenly, Sylvia kissed her cousin’s cheek. “Don’t worry about me,” she whispered. “I’ll be happy yet.” She hurried silently towards her room as if she would find safety there behind its locked door.

Kate stood quite still, listening to the solitary footsteps downstairs. They had crossed the hall to the drawing-room, and had halted there. Then, firmly, they approached the staircase. Payton ascended three steps, and paused. But he didn’t come upstairs. The footsteps retreated, back into the hall, back to the library; and its door closed.

He knows, Kate thought suddenly, he knows he has lost Sylvia. And the anger in her died away, and in its place came pity and fear.

16

It had begun to rain just after five o’clock; now, although the storm had passed, the night air held a raw dampness, the lawn was sodden, the crocuses and daffodils were splattered with mud, and the paths winding under the scattered lights on the glistening trees were pooled with water.

But Miriam Hugenberg fought this attack like a well-schooled general. Even as the first black clouds had given their warning, the long buffet table had been moved away from the covered patio adjoining the main terrace, now bleak with its wet flagstones and dripping bushes, into the warmer comfort of the long reception room. Furniture had been altered in its arrangement, or ruthlessly carted off to the basement to make space for the guests who would now stay indoors. The string quartet had been installed in a corner of the gallery surrounded by hydrangeas, where they wouldn’t interfere with the flow of either guests or conversation. And Miriam, herself, in full regalia—sapphires and tiers of tulle to match her blue hair— put on a brave smile that ignored all changes, and stood at the entrance of the grey and gold room to note all those who came and those who had been so careless as to forget.

The more ingenuous of the guests, who still believed that the engraved invitation meant what it said, arrived promptly at nine o’clock. By half-past nine, they had been joined by those who came to do their duty and get the damned thing over with as soon as possible. By ten o’clock, the crowd was beginning to thicken like clots in Devonshire cream, and the first arrivals no longer made desperate conversation to cover their solitary eminence but could head straight for the supper table before the caviar all disappeared. Champagne frothed briskly into shallow, wide-mouthed glasses held by deep, narrow-mouthed people. There were those who hadn’t come to eat or drink, but merely to talk, in humorous groups or serious corners, with quiet head-together murmurs or the rich full periods of aspiring orators. Certainly everyone was talking, and in twenty different languages.

“It’s going well,” Miriam Hugenberg welcomed Sylvia Pleydell. “I always know a party is going well when I can’t hear the music. Only one incident, so far: Jugoslavia resented something Rumania said, but Sweden intervened. What a divine dress, darling, you always wear that dull shade of blue so well. Do see me later, when I’ve got rid of this awful receiving line... Dear Payton, how are you? I needn’t ask: you look so handsome. Quite the most distinguished man I’ve shaken hands with tonight.”

Payton Pleydell bowed, but for once he looked embarrassed.

Then it was Kate’s turn. “My dear Carrie
—how
sweet you look!” Miriam’s quick eye approved of the flame-coloured chiffon, with a black velvet stole carried for safety. “And don’t hide your pretty shoulders, even if most of us have to come disguised.” She smiled, conscious of her own exposable arms. “Now do go over and try to make the Arabs look happy, will you?... And here is Lieutenant Turnbull! But where’s your uniform?”

“Turner, ma’am,” Bob said firmly, and squared his shoulders in the dinner jacket he had hired for the evening.

“The Army is a complete disappointment, tonight,” his hostess told him. “Only one colonel has turned up and he really isn’t Army—at least he never wears a uniform. Ah, well... If you can fight your way through the Central European bloc, you may find some caviar still left. Thank heaven I ordered enough champagne to float the
Queen Mary.”
The small white-gloved hand pulled him delicately over to her right, deposited him there beside Kate; then, with no break in its sweep, it returned to welcome the next guest.

“The conveyor-belt system,” Bob said. “Come on, Kate and Carrie. What’s it to be? Sheiks, caviar or champagne?”

But Kate was looking around her anxiously. “Where’s Sylvia?”

“Encircled over there by a crowd of friends. Payton’s found a couple of diplomats for a high-level talk. We’re on our own, I think.”

Kate looked round the crowded room again. “Let’s explore,” she suggested. “How many rooms are there full of people?” And where was Jan Brovic?

“We can find out. I’ll go first and clear a path.”

* * *

“Well, have you explored enough?” he asked her fifteen minutes later, after they had struggled through five crowded rooms. “What about staking out a claim over there? It looks like a quiet corner. We may even be able to hear ourselves think.” He lifted two glasses from a passing tray. “Come on, Kate. Quick.” He reached the small love-seat, pushed back against the wall behind an opened French window, and had Kate sitting there, just before two men earnestly arguing in French could occupy it. “Sorry,” he said to them firmly, raised his glass to Kate and gave a small bow which imitated Payton Pleydell so neatly that she choked.

“Damn!” she said. “Now everyone will think I’ve never had champagne before in my life.”

“Have you?”

“We grow it,” she said, indignantly.

“California, my apologies.”

“And don’t laugh... If you chill California champagne just twice as long as the French stuff, it tastes the same. Practically.”

“Who knows after the third bottle, anyway?” He raised his glass and bowed again.

“Don’t!” she pleaded.

“Everyone else is bowing around here. And no one is going to outbow Texas.” He performed again.

“Stop it,” she said, “please, Bob. Or I’ll get a fit of giggles. And this isn’t a laughing kind of place, is it?”

“All right,” he said, and looked around the room. “But why you should worry about a lot of ruptured diplomats and their spavined wives—my God, the more brains some people have, the worse they look. Do you see what I’m seeing?”

“The frightening thought is that ugliness may not even be an excuse for brains. If Lincoln was right, then it wasn’t.”

“I’ve lost the trail, there.”

“Well, Mr. Lincoln wouldn’t appoint a man to an important job because he didn’t like the man’s face. Someone said, ‘But, Mr. Lincoln, a man isn’t responsible for his face.’ And Mr. Lincoln said, ‘After forty, we’re all responsible for our faces.’... Don’t concentrate on that group over there, Bob: no wonder you’re depressed. Look—there’s a more cheering batch near the door, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Bob agreed, but unwillingly. “They look human, at least. I’m a simple man. I don’t ask everyone to be raging beauties. I just ask them to be human.”

“Minlow is handsome, isn’t he?”

“Minlow—is he here? He would be,” Bob said gloomily.

“No, I haven’t seen him. I was just arguing with you. You think people are all right if they look human. You don’t like Minlow. Yet he looks human.”

“With that blank façade? Either he has nothing at all behind it, or he has a hell of a lot to conceal. Both ways, I’d rate him zero as a human being.” He frowned at his empty glass. “Guess I’ll need another drink,” he added, looking around him. “Minlows and Minlows... Are they all his uncles and his sisters and his brothers and his aunts?”

“You didn’t want to come to this party, did you?”

“Not particularly.”

“But in a way it’s fun,” she tried. “Crystal chandeliers, gay dresses, music, flowers, and people doing nothing but gossip and laugh. It’s amusing to watch them perform. Isn’t it?” She looked at him in amazement. “Aren’t you enjoying
any
of it?”

“I’m enjoying this part,” he said returning her look. “I like that colour you’re wearing.” The stole had dropped from her shoulders, and the line of her arm curved smoothly up over the slender shoulder to her white firm neck.

“I bet you say that to all the girls you drink champagne with.”

“It’s been a long time, then, since I said it.” He was suddenly grim-faced.

“Yes,” Kate said slowly. She looked at the bright room. “There’s a war on and this doesn’t make sense.” She twisted her glass round, turning its slender stem between her forefinger and thumb, and watched the swirl of bubbles. “That’s why you wouldn’t wear your uniform tonight, isn’t it?”

“I’m now looking straight across at the men whose governments supplied the bullets to shoot at me and the propaganda to label me a bloody fascist imperialist warmonger. What does Hugenberg expect me to do—go over and kiss them?”

“Yet Miriam’s convinced this is the way to have peace— people all being friendly together.”

“And if she converts some of these people to friendship, you know what will happen to them? They’ll be recalled to correction camps. Is that friendly of her, I ask you? She’s putting out her efforts at the wrong level. Sure, I used to think that if the people could get together, then we’d be all right. But I forgot some people don’t have any say in their government at all.”

“They’ll deny that, of course.”

“Then they are admitting that they’re responsible for hidden arrests, secret trials and forced confessions.”

“You’ve got them coming and going,” Kate said with a smile.

Bob grinned suddenly. “I’m not that clever. They caught themselves in their own cleft argument.”

“There’s Miriam now,” Kate said, and then regretted it. For there was Jan Brovic, too, flanked by two quiet, watchful men who listened politely to Miriam. One of them smiled and nodded, and then pointed to the Renoir that hung behind them. Miriam clasped her hands together as her mouth said “Oh!” delightedly.

“Well, I’m certainly glad they’ve got that point cleared up about the use of pink in a portrait,” Bob said bitterly. “If you can discuss painting and music and literature, if you dress correctly, and eat politely, and don’t belch, if you can fake tears in your voice when you talk about the minority problems of America—why, you could get away with murder. Look at Miriam going into her sweetness-and-light act. My God, it sickens me. Can’t she even imagine what lies underneath the surface?” Then he added, more quietly, “Seems to me I’ve met that fellow...” He was watching Jan Brovic carefully, searching his memory. Union Station, the day the train was late...

“Let’s go out on to the terrace,” Kate suggested. “We
can
be sick together there in peace. I’ll hold your head if you hold mine.”

He rose quickly, with relief, laying aside their glasses, taking her arm as they stepped through the French windows. He looked at the quiet, dark garden. “Thanks for this,” he said. “But won’t you catch cold?” It was still damp underfoot.

“When I start sneezing, you can take me indoors again; only, this time, let’s choose a better scenic point. After all, there are other members of the United Nations to look at. Why concentrate on the cynics?”

“True enough,” he admitted. His voice was natural again. He could even smile. He drew the velvet stole closely around her shoulders, and now that his eyes were accustomed to the long dark terrace—the scattered lamps from the desolate garden seemed lightless after the blazing shimmer of the room—he found a corner sheltered by a massive pillar. The breeze that fanned the terrace, as if hurrying to dry it for the guests, didn’t reach them here. He lit a cigarette for her.

“Thanks,” he said again. “And don’t worry. My blood pressure is under control now.”

“I wasn’t worrying: I was just trying to make up my mind.” How quick he was to notice, she thought. Just those few seconds by the light of a match and he had noticed the frown on her face.

“About what?”

It may have been the anonymous feeling that the darkness gave, it could have been the steady touch of his arm against hers, but she had the impulse to tell him all she knew about Jan Brovic and Sylvia. Then she fought the impulse down. It wasn’t any business of Bob’s. It wasn’t her business, either. People were supposed to be free to choose. Free even to choose disaster? And yet—

“About a story I heard,” she said at last, so absorbed in her own thoughts that she didn’t notice he had been measuring the pause.

“It must have been a long one,” he said jokingly.

“No. But I don’t know how it is to be solved.”

“Stories don’t always have solutions. Often, they just drift away, like some people’s lives.”

“This one won’t drift away.”

He tried to see her face clearly, but he could only sense its worry.

She said, “I don’t know all the story. That’s the trouble. So I can’t see the solution. If I did, then I’d know what was right to do, what was wrong.”

“Has someone got to do something? Why not let it develop naturally?”

“And then feel guilty for the rest of my life because I didn’t act in time?”

“Well, if it’s as serious as that—” Again, he tried to make out the expression on her face. His eyes, now accustomed to the shadows, could only see that she was watching him intently. “More problems?” he asked gently.

“More problems,” she admitted. A small smile showed her pretty teeth for a moment. “How old are you, Bob?”

Startled, keeping his face serious with an effort, he said, “Twenty-three. Practically decrepit.”

“I’m twenty-two,” she said despondently. “Sometimes, I feel as if I were fifty.”

“Is that what Washington has done to you?” he asked with a laugh, but she didn’t respond.

“I’ve never been in love, not really in love,” she said slowly. “That’s my trouble: if I knew what it was like to be willing even to die for someone, then I could know what to do now. Or what not to do.”