As Far as You Can Go (32 page)

There didn’t seem anything to say to that. Harold watched some gulls wheeling over the cliff, and a submarine making its way out to sea.

“You’re sure you’re going home?” said Tony. “Diane has never brought any of her friends here before. Her mother is very fond of her, but we don’t see her much. It is too far, Los Angeles, and besides, she has a new family now. I would have liked for Diane to live with us, but her grandmother——Mrs Washburn is a woman who does not argue. She acts. So Diane did not come to live with us. And Diane’s father, he is no good, a wastrel.”

“I’ve never met him,” said Harold.

“You’ve missed nothing. He would probably not wish to see you. If Diane has a father now, it is myself.”

“Yes,” said Harold. “I think that’s probably true.”

“So,” said Tony, “I ask you these questions. I feel I must know what you and Diane are to each other. Do you love her?”

“I suppose so. It doesn’t really make any difference. Diane won’t marry me till her grandmother dies.”

“If you love her, you must wait. Mrs Washburn cannot live for ever. She is an old woman.”

“Diane says that she will never die. She certainly doesn’t look as though she’ll ever die. And I think Diane is very fond of her. She has been mother and father to her, really, in spite of everything. Diane looks after her, and I think perhaps she looks after Diane, too. Don’t you think?”

“I don’t understand,” said Tony.

“Well, Diane is a very beautiful girl. If she had wanted to marry, she could easily have done so before now. I don’t think she minded very much when her grandmother frightened the boys away when they got serious.”

“So she has frightened you away, too, Harold?”

“Not yet. Not quite. But if I delivered an ultimatum to Diane, if I said she must marry me now and forget her grandmother, she would say no. She’s said it already. I don’t think she wants to get married. I think she’s happy in a sad sort of way, living up there at the end of the canyon. Some people prefer
not
to be in the main stream of things.”

“You may be right,” said Tony. “She should have lived with us. Living with an old woman is not good for a young girl.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“But you are not prepared to deliver this ultimatum, Harold? You are not prepared to ask her to leave with you?”

“I’ve delivered it, Mr Campanella. She says I must wait. And I’m not prepared to spend a lot of time hanging around, waiting for Mrs Washburn to die.”

“If you are really in love,” said Tony, “then time means nothing. You can go away and live your life and wait for the old woman to die, then you can come back.”

“I suppose so. I hadn’t thought of it, actually. I’m not sure if I’m that sort of person.”

“It is what my father did,” said Tony. “He waited in the United States five years. He was a poor man in Italy, very poor. And in America he was still a poor man, but not so poor. And after five years he had saved enough money to send my mother the ticket to New York. She had waited for him. He had waited till he was able to bring her over.”

“It’s not a question of money,” said Harold.

“Money, an old woman, what is the difference?”

“If Diane loved me, she would marry me. But she doesn’t. I don’t think she
can
love anyone. Subconsciously she wants to stay with her grandmother.”

“Subconsciously?” said Tony. “Bah to subconsciously. You love or you do not love.”

“Then she doesn’t love,” said Harold.

“I am sorry,” said Tony gently. “I think you are probably a nice kid, Harold. And she is a nice girl, too. I think you are probably wrong about her. But if that is the way you feel, then you had better go back to England, go back home. There are other girls in the world.”

“It’s nice of you to take it like that,” said Harold.

“I have seen something of life,” said Tony, rather
pompously
. “I know what I’m talking about.”

They watched the ships for a few minutes more, then they went back to the Campanellas’ house, Tony driving with a mixture of dangerous dash and still more dangerous dawdle, his hands frequently off the wheel as he talked about San Diego and what a good town it was to live in.

There were eight Campanella children, and they ran round the large house in a minimum of clothing, shouting and screaming and generally making life difficult for serious conversation. Diane’s mother seemed not to notice the
confusion
, and Tony clearly enjoyed and encouraged it. Mrs Campanella sat in the kitchen preparing vegetables for dinner, occasionally making a half-hearted swipe at a child that got in her way or tried to eat what it wasn’t supposed to eat. Her pregnancy was just beginning to show, and she made no effort to hide it, wiping her hands on her overall where it was loose above her belly. There was the
unmistakable
smell of young children in the house, of excretion and washing-powder and drying diapers. Harold didn’t like the smell much, but he recognized it as necessary and inevitable. Diane seemed to enjoy it, rather, and played with her
half-brothers
and -sisters with a happy absorption that brought a slight flush to her cheeks. It was sad to watch her being so happy with someone else’s children, thought Harold, and all the sadder that they were her mother’s and that she was playing the aunt, the spinster aunt. She was much too young for the role. It didn’t make sense. She had made Harold stop at a supermarket on the outskirts of San Diego to buy a small
present for each child, and the way she had chosen the presents made her seem the disappointed younger sister of her mother, not the beautiful oldest daughter. She had fussed like an old maid over the toys, dithering and dickering, and for a moment she had been quite alien from the fresh direct girl of the Beach Club or the sharp-witted girl of the drive-in diner.

But perhaps these thoughts were misleading, perhaps he was imagining all this, because he had talked to Tony on the cliff-top and had felt about her in a particular way at that particular time. Feelings came and went, and no one feeling was more valid than any other when you were in love. If he was in love. Even that now seemed doubtful.

While they waited for the early dinner, after which Harold and Diane were to drive home to Los Angeles, he watched her with her mother. Diane could be so many things, but here she was simple enough, trying to help, trying to manage the children, trying in every way to show her mother that she loved her and wanted to be loved in return. But Mrs
Campanella
seemed not to notice. She accepted the things Diane handed her without thanks, paid no attention to Diane’s success in reducing the volume of childish noise, and seemed quite unaware that her daughter was going out of her way to be nice.

“You’re not overdoing it, are you, Mom?” said Diane on one occasion.

Mrs Campanella looked surprised. “Why, no, honey, you know me. I never overdo things. The doctor says I’m one of the strongest women he’s ever seen.”

One of the miracles of modern science, Harold thought to himself wryly.

“Here, let me do that,” said Diane, taking a pan from her mother and stretching up to put it on its shelf.

“I can manage,” said Mrs Campanella.

The more Diane tried, the less she seemed to achieve.
After a while her mother said, “Why don’t you and Harold go and sit on the porch, Diane? I can get on in here better when I’m alone. It makes me nervous, having all you people watching.”

They went out on the porch. Tony was on the lawn fiddling with a sprinkler and joking with his two eldest boys, squirting them playfully to make them squeal with delight. At any moment Harold expected the whole family to come out and take a shower on the lawn; it was the sort of thing a large rowdy family like the Campanellas could do without any selfconsciousness, and without a thought for the neighbours.

“You have a nice trip?” said Diane.

“Yes,” said Harold. “We looked at the harbour, and then we looked through glasses at the hotel where Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe were all so funny.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of wonderful, isn’t it? I guess it’s the last old frame hotel on the west coast.”

“Did you have a nice talk with your mother?”

“Oh, yes, it was fine. She wanted to know if we were engaged or anything.”

“So did your stepfather.”

“I said I guessed we weren’t.”

“I said something like that, too. It seems a pity, in a way, but there it is.”

She looked sharply at him and said, “What’s the matter with you now, Harold?”

“Nothing’s the matter. Tony seemed to think I ought to go away and make my fortune and come back and collect you when Grandma dies.” He paused and watched the scene on the lawn. A large dog, also part of the Campanella
household
, was barking furiously at the sprinkler. What Harold and Diane were saying couldn’t have been heard by anyone. “I told him I didn’t think I was that kind of person.”

“I told Mom you were just a friend.”

“Just friends, just good friends?” said Harold. “Not quite,
not quite so pat, Diane. I love you, if I’ve ever loved anyone. I just don’t happen to be the sort of person who can sit around and wait while you waste the best years of both our lives looking after your grandmother.”

“It’s not a waste,” she said angrily. “Just because she’s old doesn’t mean she hasn’t as much right to live as you or I.”

“I didn’t say that. I just think she doesn’t have the right to live at your and my expense, which is the way you want it.’’

“That’s selfish, Harold.”

“I think it’s you who’s being selfish, actually, if anyone is. I don’t think you want to get away from her.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It doesn’t matter, darling.”

“It does matter. I said I have obligations to her, and they mean more than anything I owe myself. How does that make me selfish?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Listen, Harold, you can’t just say a thing like that and then leave it. Let’s get it cleared up, right now.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. All right. If you feel you owe her more than you owe yourself, all right. But what about me? What about any of the people who may want to marry you? It’s not selfish to want to marry the girl you love. I don’t think you really ever want your grandmother to die. Because if she died you would be free, and then you wouldn’t know what to do. You don’t want to be free. You don’t want to live a normal married life, like your mother’s. You’re probably frightened of having children or something.”

“You’re crazy,” she said. “Of course I want to have kids. I love Mom’s family.”

“Quite. Because they are here, and the youngest ones could well be your own, you feel you don’t have to have any of your own. Wait a minute, I got that muddled.”

“I understood,” she said. “After we get back tonight, Harold, you needn’t hang around any more. If that’s what
you think about me, and you say you’re in love with me, then the hell with you and the hell with love, and I don’t want any part in it.”

“I think that will suit both of us,” said Harold. He hadn’t meant to say all that, but it was too late now.

“You’re nuts,” said Diane. “Where on earth did you get all that stuff, anyway? From your friend Eddie?”

“Eddie’s dead. He was killed yesterday in that big smash on the San Diego Freeway.”

“Gee, I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t know. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to think about it, to be honest.”

“That’s terrible, really terrible. It’s awful.”

“He was speeding in the wrong lane in a stolen car. I don’t see what else he deserved.”

“You mustn’t say that, Harold. He was a screwball, but he had some kind of interesting ideas. He was alive, too, you could feel it. Kookie, but alive.”

For a moment he thought he might tell her about Chuck and his grief the previous evening. Then he decided against it. Eddie and Diane should never have met, to start with. And he wasn’t going to let Eddie get between him and Diane, befuddling the truth with a wash of sentimental thoughts about early death.

He was too late, though, to stop it.

“You should have told me, honey,” said Diane. “No wonder you’re saying all those things. I knew something must be wrong.”

“I was telling the truth, that was all.”

“No, you’re real upset, I can see that. I’m sorry, Harold, really I am. Let’s forget what we said just now, O.K.?”

“All right,” said Harold wearily. They seemed to move from one false position to another. But it would make the drive home a lot easier, there was that to be said for it.

Tony mixed some Martinis, which he called “knock-out
drops”, and they drank them standing on the porch. Harold and Diane were manœuvred together, so that Tony and Eleanor, as Mrs Campanella was called, could watch them. Harold felt embarrassed and false, but it was too late to try and get at the truth, or to try and explain it to anyone. To leave L.A. wouldn’t be flight, it wouldn’t be surrender, or not only flight and surrender; it would also be the most graceful way out of an impossible situation.

The youngest members of the family stayed up for dinner, which made it one of the messiest meals Harold had ever sat through. Joviality, however, reigned. Bottles of Italian Swiss Colony wine were opened and drunk with a lot of
lip-smacking
. Everyone ate enormously, especially Eleanor, who said she had two mouths to feed, and she didn’t want either of them getting hungry. Tony roared with laughter at his own jokes. Diane became the aunt again, helping the
children
eat, criticizing their table-manners. After dinner, Tony offered Harold a cigar, and they stood outside on the lawn while Diane and her mother did the washing-up.

“Dishes are woman’s work,” said Tony.

Harold felt he was a man after his own heart. Tony told him about the automobile business in San Diego, and offered to let him have a new car at a cut rate. Harold said he didn’t really need one just at the moment, but thanked him all the same.

It was time to leave. He said good-bye to Eleanor and patted the heads of the nearest children, hoping he wouldn’t catch any disease. He had never had mumps, and was frightened lest such obviously healthy children might carry germs around with them, too tough to catch anything themselves. Tony clapped him several times on the shoulder and told him to drop by if he was ever that way again.