As Far as You Can Go (20 page)

Harold began to see more in the old woman than a
possessive
matriarch. He had thought her refusal to let him see the miniature probably came from a refusal to think about the time when it would, inevitably, pass out of her possession once and for all. He imagined that when you became very old your possessions became very precious to you, they meant you were still alive. And though this could be a damnable nuisance, it was understandable, too. After all, what did you have to show you weren’t dead but your own private things? You probably lived in someone else’s house—your son’s or your son-in-law’s, say—and depended on the someone else to feed you and look after you and send for the doctor when you were ill, and, eventually, to bury you. No wonder you wanted to have a few relics of your own existence, your own
identity. But Mrs Washburn didn’t, it seemed, ever let such petty thoughts enter her head. She knew she was old, she even boasted about it, and if she knew she was old, then she knew she hadn’t got much longer to go: she probably just wanted to enjoy her things while she was still alive. And then she had this really very interesting past, what with two
husbands
and Red Indians and all the rest of it. He looked at her with new respect. She was, after all, a human being and a lively one, not just an obstacle in his way. If he was ever to get the miniature, he might as well start taking her seriously now. Besides, human beings usually had weaknesses, while obstacles often didn’t.

But now was not the time for further investigation. She got up, and tucked at her false breast openly in front of him, and said, “Well, I shall go to bed now, young people. It was nice meeting you again, Mr Barlow. Don’t you be too late now, Diane. You’ve got to get up in the morning.”

“O.K., Grandma. Good night.”

“Good night, Mrs Washburn.” Harold watched her climb the stairs, slowly, it was true, but without any appearance of effort. Then he decided to take a risk. “Mrs Washburn, are you sure you won’t reconsider letting me see the miniature?”

She stopped and looked down at him, her hand fingering her pearls. She looked rather triumphant, he thought.

“I might yet, Mr Barlow,” she said. “It depends how the mood takes me. Good night.”

She went into her bedroom.

“Was that a silly thing to say?”

“I don’t know. Grandma’s funny. She seemed to take it all right, though. She may decide she likes you.”

“Why does she sleep upstairs, when it would be easier for her, at her age, to sleep in that room by the kitchen?”

“She always has slept up there. The day Grandma can’t climb the stairs, that day she’ll die. And I guess she likes to be near the front door, so she can hear when I get home, and
when my goddam beau goes away again. We have about ten minutes before she comes out again and asks me to bring her a glass of water.”

“Diane, will you think it very rude of me if I leave before ten minutes is up? I do very much want to see that miniature, and I don’t want to put her against me.”

“Oh, sure,” said Diane. But she moved away from him.

“Look, I couldn’t have enjoyed this evening more. You will come out with me again, won’t you, Diane?”

“That depends whether I think you’re more interested in me or that picture.”

“Oh, I prefer life to art any day.”

“I’m glad to hear
that
,”
she said. “Make sure it stays that way, then.”

He went over to her and kissed her rather more passionately than he had meant to. Somehow things seemed to get rather out of hand when there wasn’t a steering-wheel in the way.

“There’s one thing,” she said, freeing herself.

“Yes?”

“I hope you’re on the level, Harold Barlow. I mean, if you’re making up to me just to get round Grandma, I don’t want any part of it, you understand? I don’t give a damn about any goddam miniature. But I think you’re kind of nice.”

“I think you’re absolutely splendid,” said Harold.

“Well, bear it in mind. I’m telling you, I’ve some
experience
in judging a boy’s motives.”

He looked at her, at the long black hair and the tight blue bodice, and the slim legs and elegant ankles, and he said, “Diane, you’re quite right about my motives. But I promise you that I’m not that dishonest. At least, I don’t think I am. I don’t mind admitting that I do very badly want to see, and if possible buy, that miniature. I’m not really sure why. The man in it is no relation of mine at all. Perhaps it’s your grandmother—her obstinacy. She interests me, I admit. But all that has nothing to do with you and me.”

“Well, and what about you and me?”

“I really don’t know yet. I mean, we’re not exactly teenagers, are we? Do we have to be definite and all that right away?”

“No,” she said, and smiled. “Not if you don’t want to be. I like you, Harold. And I even believe you. Some of it, anyway.”

They kissed again, less passionately, more thoughtfully, less like teenagers. It was really just as good that way.

“If you don’t want Grandma out here for her glass of water,” said Diane, “you’d better make tracks.”

“O.K.,” said Harold. He gave a quick good-bye kiss. “It sure was swell.”

“A most enjoyable evening, Englishman.”

“Good night.”

She said good-bye at the door, loudly, making gestures at her grandmother’s door, and smiling.

Harold drove away feeling thoroughly happy. She was a real girl, beautiful, vivacious, undemanding. He wondered if he was deluding himself. He was beginning to feel certain tremors and shakings which might mean anything, flu, a cold, love, lust. They were exactly the same for Diane, assum ing them to be either love or lust, as they had been for Helen, and for Ann Killian, and for a good many girls in between. How did you tell which was the real thing? And was there a real thing? Or was it all a fraud, like God? But even supposing it was a fraud, it might still work, the way people got kicks out of religion in spite of the fact that it was fraudulent, not to say farcical. If you believed in Rain Gods you got a kick and occasionally some rain: if you believed in love you got a kick, and maybe one day you might actually feel what your imagination had set up as the ideal. Not for long, perhaps, but it might be worth it. All of which left the question exactly where it was: how did you tell the difference between the real thing and the thing for Ann Killian and Helen Gallagher?

Musing happily about such things, he had a drink in the bar of the hotel and went to bed. Ever since he had arrived in Los Angeles he had stopped dreaming of the fire. Tonight he dreamed a mixture of happiness and fear, waking to wonder what it was that had woken him. There had been something about a woman with only one breast—that’s origin was clear enough. And there had been another woman, a girl. But the faces vanished even as he was waking, and he was soon asleep again.

A
FEW DAYS LATER
Harold received two letters from England. The first was from Dennis Moreland and went:

Harold laughed once or twice to himself, then looked thoughtful, though his head was empty. He was doing his best, after all. He hadn’t seen the miniature yet, but the way things were going there was a good chance of seeing it soon.

He opened the other letter, not recognizing the
handwriting
. It was an invitation to Helen’s wedding. He
supposed
her mother must have sent out the invitations. It said that his company was requested to view the proceedings, which would be held in a fortnight’s time. Quick work, indeed. The man’s name meant nothing to him at all: Colin Marshall. He must have met a Colin Marshall somewhere at some time in his life, the name sounded like a middle-class version of John Smith. But if he had ever met one, he had blotted out the memory. He decided to send her a wedding present of some handsomeness, partly to embarrass her, partly to ease his conscience. The spider was making tentative jabs again. He had bought several Indian blankets in Arizona. He would choose the nicest of them and send it off airmail, which was so expensive that the spider would have to shut up. He felt a good deal of relief that Helen was off his conscience and into the arms of this Marshall person. She had been something of a lurking shadow over his life, and at times, looking at Diane, he had been reminded of how badly he had behaved with her distant predecessor in his affections, and wondered if he was to be trusted with someone so nice.

The differences between Helen and Diane were so many and various that he was continually telling himself that Diane could not possibly be his type. After all, there were endless books which told one that there was a particular kind of girl
one was always looking for (when it wasn’t secretly one’s mother), and only a master of double-think could have made Diane and Helen kindred spirits. For instance, while Helen was pretty, her prettiness was a sort of
competent
prettiness, the handsomeness of a girl who could be expected to make an excellent mother and chairwoman of the local Women’s Institute: and the idea of Diane sharing recipes for chutney with other married ladies was simply ludicrous. Her
shoulders
weren’t as good as Helen’s, it was true—they were rather bony: and she didn’t have the dramatic curve into the waist that had been Helen’s outstanding feature. But such points were marginal. The difference was something much more important, much more profound. It was a difference in attitude to life, basically. Helen would never let herself go, would always be thinking of what happened next, of how long there was before they
must
go to sleep if they were going to be up in good time in the morning. She was practical, and unhappy when the sensible ordinary way of doing things was disturbed. To Diane it could not have mattered less what happened next: she was always too busy with the present to bother about the time, to care whether she was going to get enough sleep or not. Not that she was all gaiety and
liveliness
: at times she would be very quiet, rather apathetic, apparently absorbed in some private meditation. And she could be difficult, quick-tongued, harsh, as though driven to restlessness by some inner pressure she could not control. She could be kaleidoscopic in her moods, shifting suddenly from the high gear of laughter to a gloomy indifference that baffled him.

In fact, Harold was intrigued by her. His first impression of a pretty girl who was rather sexy had given way to a jumble of images, whose only consistent feature was that Diane’s eyes seemed always to have tiny pupils. He was puzzled by his own feelings: after the evening they had gone dancing on the Strip he had seen her every day, but somehow
had failed to come at all close to her. They would kiss and fondle each other, but though she seemed to enjoy it as much as he did, there was the sense that somehow he wasn’t really getting through to her, that she was holding something back. The block she had talked of was tangible, then, as though there was a polythene bag round her feelings. He never felt that she was fond of him: he was just, it seemed, another of the boys who had tried to set her alight, and he was as
unsuccessful
as any of them.

But if he was failing with her, she was certainly succeeding with him. If he wasn’t yet blazing, there was certainly a warm glow whenever he thought about her, and he thought about her most of the time. He felt curiously light-headed and happy, everything seemed suddenly to be good, the weather, Los Angeles, life in general. And he felt strangely virtuous when he was with Diane, as though her presence was some kind of blessing, so that he could only do right. “Right” and “good” weren’t words he liked to use very much, and when he did use them he was careful to treat them lightly, almost casually: but now they seemed to be the only words which described what he felt. Which certainly hadn’t been the case with poor Helen: there it had been much more a matter of grim pursuit and grim victory. Now there didn’t seem to be any pursuit: he saw Diane as often as possible, but it wasn’t a question of hunted and hunter, it was more as though their being together was somehow natural and—and right. Not having experienced this feeling before, Harold was doubtful if it was love. And even if it was, he had known her such a short time that it would be dangerous to hope that twin souls were now being entwined or that this was the Big It, or any of the rest of the romantic junk. As he had reflected before, the whole thing was an illusion, anyway: it was only if you believed in love that you felt it, so the whole thing was a matter of self-deception.

Yet there was a lot to be said for self-deception. And,
believing himself to be absolutely clear about his own motives and feelings, he allowed himself to call what he felt for Diane “love”. Since he could not spend all of every day with her, he began to daydream. If this was love, then
presumably
the next step was marriage. That was all right, though, because when he was with her everything seemed so natural: it was obvious that if that was how things were
between
them, they should try and make it a permanent state. Although Diane’s feelings dropped out of account at this stage of the daydream, he was able to imagine her agreeing to marry him. It would be very simple. They would be standing at the turning-circle above the Washburns’ house, and he would be holding her, gently (there was to be no crushing of breasts and panting for Harold), and he would say “Diane, when shall we be married?” And she would say, “For ever.” This reply pleased him enormously, and he imagined the scene so often that it almost came to seem that it had actually happened.

However, the reality of the situation prevailed. Diane was always curiously distant when he wanted her to be closest, and the phrases he had been planning to say to her had to be kept back for future use. Anyway, they seemed wholly
inadequate
in her presence, and required her to be word-perfect in her responses, which she wasn’t.

One day they had gone to Disneyland, and wandering along the sidewalks they had seen a theatre that advertised old movies. They went in, and to his disappointment Harold found that it was simply a room with six screens, all of them tiny, on which six very old silent shorts were playing at once. However, it was dark and he put his arm firmly about her shoulders as they watched a flickering melodrama. There was a villain with a fierce moustache, an innocent victim, who might well have been Mary Pickford for all Harold knew, and a lover who spent most of the time clasping his hands and looking piteously at the camera.

“I liked that,” said Diane, as they came out.

“The trouble with old movies,” said Harold, “is that they make you feel everyone is so isolated. I suppose it’s because they couldn’t get more than one person on to those midget screens without it looking like a crowd.”

“Yeah,” said Diane. “It’s like when you’re lying in bed and thinking about Elvis Presley or Tab Hunter or someone, and it’s marvellous, only you’re there in bed, and they’re stuck inside your imagination, and never the twain shall meet.”

“It’s like when I’m thinking about you,” said Harold. “I plan marvellous things to say to you, Diane, but somehow they come out all wrong, or there’s no opportunity to say them.”

“Gee,” she said, laughing and taking his hand. “Do I spend a lot of time in your head, honey?”

“I’m afraid you do, yes.”

“I’m not afraid,” she said, and she swung his hand as they walked, “in fact, it’s a privilege.”

“But I might be raping you, hour after hour.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think you’re too nice for that.”

“But I’m in love with you,” said Harold.

“Are you now?” she said. “Harold, don’t spoil it. I was getting to like you. If you go and fall in love with me, that’ll just ruin everything.”

“Well, really,” said Harold. He was deeply offended.

“Well, really, what?” said Diane. “Jesus, I hardly know you. This is the fifth time we’ve been out together. Do you expect me to fall into your arms like Mary Pickford?”

“I’m sorry I spoke,” said Harold.

“You don’t have to be,” she said.

But the rest of the afternoon was ruined.

Another time she took him to a baseball game in the Colosseum, not that he was interested, but she insisted that he learn how American games were played.

“It’s cultural,” she said.

So they went to the enormous stadium, and as the lights came on and the diamond shone dazzlingly green she tried to explain what was happening. The Dodgers were playing the Braves. Harold understood practically nothing, but he liked the crowd, eating hot-dogs and pop-corn just as he had always imagined, and the figures in white below him,
performing
like automata, going through some arcane ritual.

On the way home he said, “Diane, I can’t say I
understood
any of that, but I like being with you anywhere.”

“You’re kind of fun to have around yourself,” she said. “If I ever come to England you must take me to a cricket game.”

“I hope you’ll come often,” he said.

“I might,” she yawned. “Not while Grandma’s alive, though. I don’t see her doing any travelling.”

Harold tried to find the right words to say he hoped he might marry her and that she would come to England to live with him, but it was too difficult, and she didn’t seem very receptive to that kind of suggestion. Besides, why should he go back to England? Might not the opportunities for living at full stretch be greater in America? Perhaps he could settle in Los Angeles. The sense of freedom that he enjoyed in America was almost certainly due to the fact that he had a lot of money to spend for the first time in his life, but there was also something about the States that he couldn’t yet define, but which he found attractive. It was partly an easygoing quality which might prove delusory. Partly, too, it was the fact that he wasn’t in England. But it was more than these: it was a sense that what happened in America, what people did, whom they elected, mattered. Having at first been offended by the ordinary American attitude to England, he now began to see why his own country appeared cute and small and unimportant. The Americans thought it was finished, a great little island on its way down. And it was because they could
think of England, once so dominating, as essentially a minor place in the world, that Americans were on top: at least, that might explain it. Their confidence was exhilarating after living in a country where it didn’t really matter whether the Tories or Labour got in because they were all second-rate, anyway, they were all dim, they had no real say in the world any more. It was election year, and to be in America while the parties were lining themselves up, while primaries were being bitterly fought, with the conventions coming soon, was to feel that the future of the world, not only of America, could depend on one’s vote. Harold wished very much that he had a vote to cast. And then there were simpler things, things which made life easier, more comfortable, like shops that stayed open till late at night, and intelligent licensing laws (in California, anyway). And there was the landscape, the emotion he had felt in the desert: it was a sense of bigness.