Nothing So Strange Read online

  I don’t know what made me bring that up, but I realized it was the second time that day I had mentioned something that I often go months without even thinking about.

  He said, as he pulled the blinds and then the curtains: “I’d like to see London again sometime.”

  “You probably could, when the war’s over.”

  “They say it’s considerably changed.”

  “I’ll bet our part hasn’t. Hampstead Heath and round about there.”

  “Several bombs fell near the house, I’ve been told,” he said thoughtfully. It was still “the house” to us both. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No thanks—I’ll be asleep very soon, I’m terribly tired. Good night, John.”

  After he had gone I stood at the window, pulling aside the blinds just enough to see that it had begun to snow. The two great cities, each with its own flavor, hold you like rival suitors, perversely when you are with the other; and that night, as I watched the pavement whitening, I thought of those other pavements that were called roadways, and the subways tubes, and the whole long list of equivalents Brad and I once compiled as we tramped across Hampstead Heath on a day when other things were in our minds.

  * * * * *

  I first met him at Professor Byfleet’s house in Chelsea, but I didn’t catch his name when we were introduced, or perhaps we weren’t—the English are apt to be slack about that sort of thing, they are civil but not solicitous to strangers, and when you visit one of their houses for the first time it’s hard not to feel you are among a family of initiates, or else a dues-paying but nonvoting member of a very closed-shop union.

  This dinner at the Byfleets’ wasn’t anything important, at least by comparison with many we went to; Byfleet was an anthropologist who wanted my father to finance an expedition to New Guinea, so he doubtless thought he’d have us meet his friends. I suppose they’d all been told we were rich Americans, with the blow softened by adding that my mother was English. My father never did finance the expedition, anyhow.

  As I said, I don’t remember actually meeting Brad, but when we got to the table I noticed him some way further down on the other side, next to my mother. Now and again I glanced at him, and with a rather odd feeling that I had seen him somewhere before, though I couldn’t be sure; he was good-looking in a restrained way, with dark, deep-sunken eyes, a long straight nose, and a chin that was firm without being aggressive. There was also a mood of gravity over him, tempered by a sort of intermittent nervousness as if he were waiting for a chance to say something, not because he wanted to, or had anything to say, but because he thought everyone must be wondering why up to halfway through dinner he hadn’t spoken a word. I hoped my mother would soon take pity on him, but his other partner moved first, and I could see that the more she tried to draw him out the more he drew himself in. She was one of those voluble unkempt Englishwomen who invade a conversation rather than take part in it, and have a conspiratorial smile for the maid or butler, just to show they’ve been to the house before.

  I missed what was happening across the table for a while, for my own neighbor engaged me, a hearty professor of biology who mentioned, apropos of the veal cutlets, that man had only scratched the surface of his possible gastronomic repertoire, that practically the entire insect world was an untapped storehouse of taste novelties, that dried locusts made an excellent sandwich, that there were many edible caterpillars fancied by the Chinese, and that native tribes in the Andean foothills pick lice from each other’s heads and eat them with gusto. He seemed surprised when I wasn’t upset, and after I had accepted another cutlet he confessed that he often opened up like that to jeunes filles whom he found himself next to at dinners, because in the event that they were bores their distress at least made them momentarily entertaining; but he could see I was not a bore, so perhaps I would now talk about something serious. I said I could never talk seriously to any man with one of those bristly little toothbrush mustaches, and was it true that in certain crack regiments of the British Army men were compelled to have them? He answered, Good God, how should he know, better ask our host, who was a recognized authority on totem and taboo. After that we got along fairly well, and presently he paid me what many Englishmen think is the supreme compliment; he said he wouldn’t have guessed I was American.

  Suddenly I was relieved to see that my mother, across the table, was talking to her nervous neighbor. I knew then that everything would be all right. She was adept at putting young men, indeed men of any age, at their ease; she didn’t mind if they talked politics or business or art or sport—even if they were intellectual she never tried to match them at it, and if they weren’t she would make them feel a freemasonry existing between her and them in a world, or at a table, of highbrows. Actually she was cleverer than she pretended—not that she was especially modest, but in her bones she felt that men do not like clever women, and what she felt in her bones counted more than anything she could think out with her intelligence. She had had an upper-crust education composed of governess, boarding school, then finishing school abroad, and probably she had forgotten 95 per cent of everything she had ever learned from textbooks; but she had done nothing but travel and meet some of the world’s most interesting people for almost twenty years, and the result was a quick-minded knowledgeableness unspoiled by knowledge. It made her understand politicians rather than politics and diplomats rather than diplomacy. She talked plenty of nonsense, and it was easy to trap her, though not always to prove that she was trapped; and she would go on discussing a book she said she had read but manifestly hadn’t, or she would break up a dull conversation with some fantastic irrelevance for which everyone was secretly grateful.

  After dinner I wasn’t anywhere near the nervous man, but when the party broke up it appeared we were scheduled to drop him where he lived, which was in our direction, and because we were also taking two other guests on their way, he sat in front with Henry. We dropped these others first and then he moved inside, but there was hardly time for talk before he began urging us not to drive out of our way, his place was only a short walk from the main road, anywhere near there would do. But my father insisted: “No, no, we’ll take you right up to your door”; so Brad had to direct Henry through a succession of side streets, and eventually gave the stop signal in the middle of a long block of four-story houses with basements. He said good-night and thanked us, bumping his head against the top of the car as he got out.

  “North Dakota,” my father said, as we drove away.

  “Yes, he told me too,” said my mother. “I’d have known it was somewhere in the Middle West from his accent.”

  “Thank goodness for that,” I said, and mentioned the Englishman’s compliment to me.

  My father smiled and seemed in an unusually good humor. He wasn’t always, after parties at other people’s houses. He said: “I find my own Kentucky drawl a great help with the English. It makes them think me tough and guileless, whereas in reality I’m neither.”

  “And in reality you haven’t even got a Kentucky drawl,” said my mother.

  “Haven’t I? How would you know?… Well, coming back to Dakota. I had some talk with him after the ladies left the table. Seems he’s a research lecturer at your college, Jane.”

  “Then that’s where I must have seen him before. I had an idea I had.”

  “A young man of promise, from all accounts,” my father went on. “Byfleet spoke highly of him.”

  My mother commented: “If we’d had any sense we’d have dropped him at the corner as he asked us. He probably didn’t want us to know the sort of place he lives in.”

  “Oh nonsense. A boy like that, making ends meet on a few fees and scholarships—nobody expects him to stay at the Ritz. Probably has to count every penny, same as I did when I was his age in New York. It’s good for him, anyway, till he gets on his feet…. Brains, good looks, and a tuxedo—what more does he need?”

  “He’s very shy,” my mother said.

  “That’ll wear off.�
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  “So will the tuxedo. It was frayed at the cuffs already.”

  My father looked interested. “You noticed that, Christine? I’ll tell you what I noticed—he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, and he was hoping you’d rescue him from that Hathersage woman he was next to, but you didn’t till nearly the coffee stage…. Must read her new novel, though. They say it’s good.”

  That was typical of my father; he respects achievement and is always prepared to weigh it against not liking you, so that in practice he likes you if you are successful enough. Julian said that once, and he was successful enough; doubtless therefore in those days my father thought Brad was going to be successful enough. I remember arguing it out with myself as we drove home.

  * * * * *

  I saw Brad the morning after the Byfleet dinner; we ran into each other at the College entrance in Gower Street. I suppose this was really our first meeting; he would have passed me with a nod, but I made him stop. “So you’re here too?” I said.

  “Hi, there. Sure I am.”

  “That was a good party last night.”

  “Er … yes….” Then suddenly, with an odd kind of vehemence: “Though I don’t like big parties.”

  “It wasn’t so big. Were you bored?”

  “Oh no, not a bit. I’m just no good at them. I don’t know what to say to people.”

  “Neither do I. I just chatter when I’m chattered to.”

  “I wish I could do that…. Or no, perhaps I don’t. It’s a terrible waste of time.”

  “For those who have anything better to do. Do you think you have?”

  He looked as if he thought that impertinent. I think now it was.

  “Yes,” he answered, smiling.

  “That sounds rather arrogant.”

  But now he looked upset. He didn’t like being called arrogant.

  “No, no, please don’t misunderstand me…. I guess I just tell myself it’s a waste of time because I can’t do it. Especially amongst all the big shots—like last night. I don’t know why I was asked.”

  “Why did you go?”

  “Professor Byfleet has helped me a lot, I didn’t like to refuse.”

  “He probably asked you on account of my father, who’s an American too.”

  “I know. He told me. He asked me what my work was, but I was a bit tongue- tied. I’m afraid I made a fool of myself.”

  “I don’t think you did. It’s by talking too much that most people do that.”

  “Personally I agree with you.” There was no inferiority complex about him, thank goodness. The truculence and the humility were just edges of something else.

  “Anyhow,” I said, “he liked you.”

  “Did he?” Because he looked so embarrassed I couldn’t think of anything else to say. He fidgeted a moment, then glanced at his wrist watch. “Well, I must be off to my lecture….” His second smile outweighed the abruptness with which he left me standing there.

  When I got home that night I told my mother I had seen him again. She said, with a flicker of interest: “Really? I think Harvey had better ask him here sometime—some evening we’re just ourselves——”

  * * * * *

  But of course there wasn’t often such an evening. My parents both liked company; my mother preferred musicians, artists, society people, and my father balanced this with businessmen, lawyers, politicians. Without much snobbery, he had a very shrewd idea of who was who and who really mattered; and in England he felt that he still mattered himself, not merely because he was rich, but because few English people appreciated the changes in America that had put him out of favor. So also English and foreign politicians listened to his advice, not with any idea of taking it, but as an act of educating themselves in some mythical American viewpoint which they believed he represented, and they were doubtless relieved to find him a generous host and a reliable keeper of secrets. I didn’t have a feeling that I was ever completely close to him, or that, inside his own private world, he had ever got over the death of his only son by a former wife during the First World War.

  As I said, he wasn’t much of a snob, and though he had a connoisseur’s appreciation of titles and liked to say “Your Excellency” once or twice and then call the man Bill, he wouldn’t have me presented at Court or “come out” in any accepted social sense. It just happened that when I was sixteen I began having a place at table if there were a dinner party, though at first I would go up to bed soon afterwards; then when I enrolled at the College that seemed to make me adult enough to stay up as long as I liked. Most people, no doubt, took me for older than my age, just as they took my mother for younger if they met her without knowing who she was.

  Ever since I was a child we had come over to England for the summer; once we took a house in Grosvenor Street, with real flunkeys, but my mother thought that was a bit too grand, so next time my father chose Hampstead, at the top of the hill as you climb from the tube station, and that suited them both so much that they never looked anywhere else. For many years it had even been the same house, which my father would have bought if the portrait painter who owned it had been willing to sell. There was a studio attic overlooking the Heath, with a huge north window, and from the other upstairs rooms you could see the London lights at night and as far as the Crystal Palace on a clear day.

  I used to have a favorite walk—it was along the Spaniards’ Road to Highgate Village, then back downhill and up again through Parliament Hill Fields. I loved it when it was crisp and sunny and windy enough for the little ponds to have waves and for the roads to look like bones picked clean. There’s no place in New York as high as Hampstead Heath and as near to the center of things, except of course the roofs of high buildings, where you look deep down; but from the Heath you look far over, which is different. My father once said you couldn’t climb a mere four hundred feet anywhere else in the world and feel higher.

  We had good times at that hilltop house, and when Christmas was over in New York and we were packing for Florida (where my father got out of the land boom in time to keep a fortune), already I was looking forward to April and the ocean crossing. Sometimes we spent Easter in Paris, which was exciting, but I never wanted to stay there long. Then when I was twelve my father thought it was time I gave up governesses and started a proper education, so we tossed up whether it should be over here or over there. Out of compliment to my mother he asked her to flip the coin, intending (so he told me afterwards) to give way if the result disappointed her too much. But it didn’t, and I went to a boarding school in Delaware for three years, spending only a few weeks in London during the summer vacation. After that my father told me to choose a college myself, anywhere I liked.

  I suppose to have been born in England means something, even the way it happened to me. It was in April 1918, when the Germans looked quite likely to win that war. My father had been shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic a good deal in those days; I have never been able to find out quite what he did, except that it was connected with the war and was apt to be so important that he traveled under another name with secret service people watching him. Anyhow, during one of these hush-hush visits he met my mother and during another he married her. He took her to New York, soon after which my grandmother fell ill; my mother then went back to England to stay only a few months, but she postponed returning as she postponed so many things, with the result that she was actually driving to Waterloo Station to catch the boat train for Southampton when she realized she was too late. Thus I became a Cockney, one might say, accidentally; and also, if it meant anything, I had done a good deal of traveling even before I was born.

  * * * * *

  I saw nothing of Brad for some time after the Byfleet dinner; his tracks didn’t cross mine at the College and I didn’t particularly look for him or them. I did, however, meet a man named Mathews who had a laboratory next to his in the Physics Building and shared with him certain amenities. Mathews was amused when I asked if they were friends. He laughed and said: “What’
s that word you used? Friends? The fellow doesn’t have time for such nonsense. Works his head off, goes nowhere, cares for nothing but crystals under a microscope or whatever it is. Sometimes I take him in a cup of tea. He says thanks very much, but I don’t do it too often because it makes him feel obligated. Once, by way of returning the favor, he insisted on buying me a lunch at an A.B.C. And I don’t like A.B.C.‘s.”

  “Does he talk to you?”

  “Only about work. I sometimes think he tries out his lectures on me. You might not think it, but he’s a good lecturer. He also writes a few things for the scientific magazines….”

  “Doesn’t he have any hobbies … fun?”

  “Oh yes. Once a week, on Sundays, he finds some hill to climb…. Very invigorating.”

  “You mean Hampstead and Highgate?”

  “He wouldn’t call them hills. Nothing less than Dorking to Guildford with a final run up the Hog’s Back. I went with him once. Never again. Eighteen miles at four miles an hour. Not my idea of fun. But then, perhaps it isn’t his either. Perhaps he does it for self-discipline or mortifying the flesh or something. He told me he never let rain stop him.”

  I wasn’t surprised at that because I like walking in rain myself. A few days later (and it was raining, by the way) I saw him coming out of the A.B.C. after lunch. He wore no hat or mackintosh and after standing a moment in the shop doorway to put up his coat collar he suddenly sprinted across the road towards the College entrance. Then he saw me and changed course, still at a sprint. He went out of his way to greet me. “Oh, Miss Waring…. I’d been wondering if I should meet you before … before we meet again.”

  That didn’t seem to make too much sense, so I just smiled till he went on: “I’m coming to your house next Thursday. Your father invited me—he says there’ll be nobody else there. That shows he did notice what a fool I was at the party.”