I and My True Love (5 page)

“People like that didn’t make money,” Kate said. “They just had it.”

“Well, provided they passed it around,” Miriam Hugenberg said virtuously, “what’s against that? The trouble now is that everyone’s too serious, too earnest.” She smiled for the young lieutenant. He’s a nice boy, she decided, really most attentive in the way he looks at you.

“What we need are more parties given by Miriam,” Hallis said.

“Exactly,” she said, refusing to be routed. “At least, I’m not a hypocrite. I don’t live richly and preach poverty like some of the gimlet-eyed liberals who crowd my parties.”

“Ah...” Stewart Hallis decided not to be offended. Miriam was definitely the type to treat with tolerant amusement. “Do I preach, Miriam? How dull for you. But you bear it remarkably well.”

“Why, Stewart, I wasn’t talking about you,” Miriam said with a velvet smile. Martin Clark repressed a grin, thinking that old Miriam had picked up a trick or two of diplomacy, after all, on her travels. Gimlet-eyed liberal...he must remember that phrase. Miriam was saying, “And, of course, you’re coming to my reception on the twenty-third?”

“How many people, this time?” Sylvia asked tactfully.

“Hundreds. I’m giving it for that U.N. delegation, so I’ve simply asked everyone. It will be a completely international affair. The iron curtain will simply dissolve away for four hours at least!”

“But will they all come?”

“Of course, they will.” Miriam’s slight stare reminded the table that her name still carried weight. “Besides, if they don’t come, they’ll be snubbing the U.N. rather pointedly.”

It wouldn’t be the first time, Bob Turner thought bitterly.

“We’ll all have a wonderful evening,” Miriam went on enthusiastically, “and stop worrying about that silly atomic bomb.”

“I wish that was all we had to worry about,” Martin Clark said quietly.

“Is it true that March seventeenth is the probable date?” Amy asked, smiling. “The young men round the embassies seem to be betting on it.”

“I heard it was the twenty-third,” Miriam said. “That’s precisely why I chose that date for my party. Such nonsense!”

Hallis turned to Kate. “I’m afraid you’ve come to Washington at rather a bad time. All kinds of hysteria... a spy beneath every bed, an atomic bomb at any hour.”

“Hysteria?” Bob Turner looked pointedly around at the circle of unperturbed faces.

“And what does the Pentagon have to say?” Hallis asked, as if he had guessed that a counter-attack was being mounted. His words were as bland as his smile, but there was a glint of mockery in his voice.

Turner eyed him thoughtfully. The others, it seemed, hadn’t noticed this neat little bit of sniping. Or, Turner wondered, am I imagining it? “That’s not my line, sir,” he said and waited.

“Doesn’t the Army allow any opinions?” The words were still smooth, as simple as Hallis’s pretence of innocent wonder, but the subtle sneer had deepened.

“Facts are more reliable, I’d imagine.” A heavy attempt at irony, Turner thought, but I can learn. It had some effect, though. Hallis stopped smiling. He even hesitated.

And before he had decided which dart to throw, Miriam Hugenberg had leaned forward to say with a flutter of eyelashes, “But, Lieutenant Turnbull, what do you and your friends really feel? Are we all going to be atomised next week, or what?”

Everyone looked at Turner politely. Whatever he said would be disbelieved by Hallis and twisted by Miriam for her own amusement. The Clarks and Sylvia were sympathetic, and yet out of touch somehow. Only Kate Jerold looked as if she wanted to hear him speak. He cleared his throat nervously, and as they still waited, he said, “For this summer, at least, we probably won’t be attacked. We—”

“Don’t tell me—Korea set back the Soviet timetable!” Hallis was laughing now. “Yes,” he said genially, “I’ve heard that one.”

“But it could be true, couldn’t it?” Kate was puzzled.

“We have to justify Korea in some way,” Hallis told her, cheerful and bland, sharing this secret with her by giving a warm smile.

Bob Turner said nothing more. His lips closed tightly. He concentrated on selecting a cluster of grapes from a bowl of fruit that was now being passed round by the remarkably self-effacing Walter. What did Walter think of this way to spend an evening? Or didn’t Walter ever let himself think?

“If we had been thrown out of Korea,” Clark said sharply, “the picture would have been considerably altered. After all, that invasion of Tibet wasn’t any mistake in direction. Its timing would have been good, if we had folded up just then in Korea under the first Chinese attack.”

“Tibet...” Miriam Hugenberg said. “Who wants Tibet, anyway? You can give it back to the lamas as far as I’m concerned.”

“I wish we could,” Clark said morosely.

“How easy life would be,” Amy suggested, “if the Poles had Poland and the Czechs had Czechoslovakia, and the Rumanians had—”

“Guess whom I met yesterday?” Miriam broke in.

Sylvia prepared to rout young Svenson and Betty Meyer and Jimmy Dalziel (and his house) all over again. She looked up from the peach she had just peeled.

“Jan Brovic!” Miriam said, and looked round in triumph. “Didn’t any of you know he was back in Washington?” Her eyes sparkled with pleasure at the sudden silence. “He was looking very well. A little bit older, a little more serious, but still the same old Jan. Except, of course, he’s no longer wearing that dashing uniform with all its ribbons.”

Stewart Hallis said, “But surely he would have let me know he was here.” He began carving up the peach on his dessert plate. “Are you certain it was Brovic?”

“Oh quite! He raised his hat to me and smiled. I was in my car, and before I got the chauffeur to find a place to stop, he had disappeared. So I didn’t talk to him. But it was Jan all right.”

“Yes,” Clark said shortly. “He’s back in Washington on a diplomatic passport.”

“You mean he’s connected with the present Czech régime?” Hallis was disbelieving.

Amy stared at her husband. “And you never told me, Martin!”

“Well, considering he’s chosen the other side of the iron curtain, I don’t see why any of us need pay any attention to him.”

“Isn’t that rather brutal?” Hallis said, “After all, he had a lot of friends in Washington.”

Clark’s blue eyes returned Hallis’s look of dislike. “And what would you propose to do?”

Hallis didn’t answer. “It’s difficult,” he said, side-stepping the question. “It’s extremely difficult.”

“Nonsense.” Miriam fluttered her hands to dispose of the matter. “Jan was my friend; he’ll continue to be my friend. What do you say, Sylvia?”

Sylvia looked at them blankly.

Amy said quickly, “Frankly, I used to think he was wonderful. That was before I met Martin, of course.” She laughed, a little nervously Bob Turner noticed, and then she rushed on, talking now—so it seemed—for the benefit of Kate and Bob who had never known Jan Brovic. “All the women thought he was pretty wonderful. And the funny thing was that most men liked him too. He had been one of the Czech flyers with the R.A.F.— Battle of Britain and that kind of thing. And in 1945 he was sent over here with a goodwill mission—to get support and friendly feeling for the Czechs, I suppose. Not that they needed it, then. We were entirely for Benes.” She took a deep breath.

“Well, Jan Brovic certainly did his share of winning our friendly feelings,” Miriam said cheerfully. “So why cold-shoulder him now? He’s still the same man.”

“But the régime isn’t still the same régime,” Clark said. “That’s the trouble. Doing a propaganda job for Benes is one thing. Doing a propaganda job for Communists is another, especially when their ideas of propaganda are elastic enough to take in a lot of outside activities.”

“Spying, you mean?” Hallis was quick to ask. “Now, Clark, let’s not join the fear-and-suspicion boys. There’s too much witch-hunting nowadays. Of course,” he added reflectively, finishing his peach, “it is all very distressing. Very distressing indeed.”

The gimlet-eyed liberal, Clark repeated to himself: the master of the high-sounding cliché, of the parroted phrase. Proving what exactly? That Hallis was a very fine fellow, an admirable character. “Then you intend to see Brovic?” Clark couldn’t resist asking. Like hell he would: Hallis might adopt a noble attitude when he had an audience, but he had never yet done anything to damage his career. Mr. Hallis came first, then.

“We have to admit that there’s a wave of reaction sweeping America,” Hallis said with obvious distaste, eyeing Clark. “We will be forced, no doubt, to ignore Brovic. I admit that; but I also admit that I, for one, am ashamed of it.”

“Forced?” Clark picked out the loosely used word. “Who’s forcing anyone except his own moral judgment? As for a wave of reaction—I seem to remember that quite a number of us in 1939 felt a wave of reaction against the Nazis. Was that bad? Were you ashamed of it?”

“Let’s stick to our original argument,” Hallis said with marked patience. “Analogies are always dangerous.” He looked at Kate and shrugged his shoulders.

“The truth is,” Amy said quickly, “we’re all upset, each in his own way, to think that Jan Brovic, of all people, is now a Communist. I can scarcely believe it, myself.” She smiled to her husband: darling, she wanted to tell him, let’s not get forced into an argument by Stewart Hallis. He will evade the real issues and make you seem a hopeless old reactionary, and you’ll spend half the night marching up and down our bedroom, while you try to solve what makes people like Hallis tick. As if it mattered.

“After all,” Amy went on, “Brovic was a friend of young Masaryk, wasn’t he? Then his father lived here for years before Czechoslovakia became a nation. Why, Jan was even sent over to school here. He went to Exeter, didn’t he? And then he had a year at Princeton before he went back to the university in Prague.”

There was a deep silence: everyone waited for someone else to speak. Kate looked at Sylvia, expecting her to take control of the conversation. But Sylvia was sitting quite still, scarcely listening. She had pushed aside her dessert plate, the peach lying in golden quarters. Then she said slowly, “I’m afraid we’re boring Kate and Lieutenant Turner.” She looked around the table as if she were ready to rise. But Hallis had helped himself to some grapes, and was peeling them with cautious skill.

“Not at all,” Kate said helpfully. “What did this Jan Brovic look like to be so attractive to everyone? Or was he very ugly? Sometimes ugly men are very attractive.”

Miriam laughed. “My dear,” she said, “he was tall and dark. About twenty-five, I think, at that time. Grey eyes? Yes, grey eyes, even features—but strong, you know. Nothing effeminate about Jan. And he really had such an amiable smile. He was so dependably charming, as if he really meant what he said.”

“And he had just the suspicion of a limp,” Amy added. “He had been badly wounded in the leg. That made him most romantic.”

Kate was looking at Sylvia again. At the station...

“Yes,” said Clark, “heroes who get their jaws shot off never seem so romantic somehow.”

Bob Turner had been covertly watching Sylvia for most of the evening. But now he looked sharply at her as he remembered the station and the tall man, dark-haired, who had limped as he walked towards Sylvia. But why hadn’t she said she had seen him? Miriam had given her the cue. Except, of course, she might have decided that Brovic had better be ignored and couldn’t quite admit it. “He sounds like a man who has put himself in a difficult situation. Why did he come back here anyway?” Turner said quickly, trying to draw the others’ attention in his direction, to turn the conversation eventually away from Brovic. “I suppose the Czech government has its own reasons.”

“Why else would he be allowed to come?” Clark asked moodily.

“I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt,” Hallis said, and chose a grape with maddening deliberation. Then he looked back at Sylvia again. She hasn’t said one word about Brovic, he thought, and yet she had known him as much as Miriam or Amy Clark. How very interesting...

“I don’t see what harm he could do, anyway,” Miriam said with a shrug of her thin shoulders. “Perhaps his arrival is a sign that the Czechs really want to be friends again. It’s a gesture of goodwill, that’s what it is.”

Clark smothered a weary sigh. Bob Turner restrained himself.

Hallis was looking up at the ceiling. Brovic, he remembered, had been a constant visitor to this house at first, and then—yes, there had been a sudden break in his visits. A few months later, he had left Washington. And Pleydell had never mentioned his name since. Nor Sylvia. “How stupid of me,” Hallis said, “I never thought of that. It’s an interesting possibility.” He finished the last grape.

Sylvia rose abruptly.

Miriam Hugenberg beamed with pleasure as she prepared to follow her. “Oh, I have occasional flashes of brilliance, darling,” she told Hallis.

“Indeed you have,” Stewart Hallis said, looking at the diamond and sapphire necklace around the heavily powdered throat. He rose and bowed.

“Well,” he said to the other two men as they sat down again, “I suppose we ought to talk about something we can agree on. It will be easier, anyway, now that the ladies aren’t present.” He glanced at Turner. “Surely there is something we could agree on?” he added humorously.

“What about brandy and cigars?” Clark asked and won a small laugh all around.

“Tell me,” Hallis said to Turner, his voice pleasant, his eyes serious, “did I hear Sylvia mention you were an engineer before you entered the Army? Where were you? M.I.T.?”

“No. At Case.” And, somehow, the conversation became something he could cope with efficiently—they began discussing the Shasta water reclamation project—and Hallis was both intelligent and interested. It’s a pity we didn’t get talking this way when Sylvia and Kate Jerold were here, Turner thought as he finished an explanation and found it well received. Then he smiled at his conceit. But, just then, another thought struck him. He looked at Hallis with new understanding. He was smooth. Very smooth. He might be twenty pounds overweight, disguise it with specially cut clothes, but he was pretty light on his feet.

Turner’s smile became a broad grin. So Hallis would tolerate no opposition when it came to women?