I and My True Love (9 page)

“Seemingly.” Stewart Hallis could arrange his working time to suit himself. His offer to escort Kate today had been a grand gesture of such independence. If I know Stewart, Sylvia thought, he was up at six o’clock this morning clearing off urgent matters from his desk. But that, of course, he would never admit. He was the young man at college who graduated Summa Cum Laude without ever appearing to do a stroke of work: just natural brilliance, the naive would say admiringly. “And, Minna, if Lieutenant Turner ’phones again, get him to leave his number so that Miss Jerold can call him back.” After all, she thought, Mr. Hallis mustn’t have his own way too much.

“Yes, Mrs. Pleydell.” Minna picked up the tray. “You eat like a sparrow. A sparrow would eat more than you.”

But Sylvia, remembering the outsize helpings that Minna thought barely normal unless repeated, wasn’t going to be drawn into any discussion about the size of the human stomach. She smiled, glanced at the clock and began to dress rapidly. She was still wondering where Kate had got to.

* * *

Kate, the book now held quite openly at an intricate map, had reached a point of no return. I look like the complete tourist, she told herself angrily. The streets had enticed her. She had twisted and turned, following a pediment here, an oriel there, a medallioned wall, doorways with fanlights and sidelights, Georgians and Federal and some odd afterthoughts. Now she had come to a busy modern street with drugstores and food markets and neon lights. She remembered vaguely that Sylvia had driven along part of this street yesterday when they were coming from Washington. And then they had branched up to their right. But where?

Oh, she thought despairingly, this book’s no good at all. It’s even lost Twenty-ninth Street. Completely.

She began again. Now, here’s M Street where I’m standing. (Even that baffled her. How could you remember a street so anonymous as M?) And there’s Twenty-eighth Street. But where’s Twenty-ninth Street?

She decided to ask. It would be quicker than walking in the wrong direction. She stopped a woman who had just come out of a drugstore. “Would you please tell me—”

“I’m a stranger here, myself. Difficult at first, isn’t it?” The woman shook her head. “Better ask a policeman,” she suggested brightly.

I suppose there are lots of strangers in Washington, Kate thought, but there don’t seem to be any policemen. She looked at the map again. Someone else came out of the drugstore. “Would you please—” She stopped short. The man raised his hat politely. His grey eyes looked from the map back to her again. He was tall, dark, serious-faced. And then, as he saw a startled look of recognition come into Kate’s eyes, he looked more closely, and he smiled. Watching that smile, Kate began to understand what Miriam Hugenberg had been talking about last night.

“The girl in the green suit,” he said. “You were at the station, yesterday.”

She nodded. She was trying to imagine him in uniform with a row of medals. “You’re Jan Brovic.”

“Sylvia told you?” He was surprised, and yet relieved.

“No. People were talking about you last night.”

“Were they?” His smile disappeared. “And what’s the problem, now? That book’s not much help. I used to get lost with it regularly when I first came here.”

“I’m trying to find Joppa Lane. That’s where I’m staying. I’m Kate Jerold.”

He thought for a moment. “One of the California cousins?”

She nodded. Had he known Sylvia so well as that?

“Well, you aren’t very far lost,” he told her. “I’ll show you the way. That’s easier than giving you directions.” He glanced over his shoulder as he spoke.

She hesitated.

“It’s all right.” He was a little amused, now. “I shan’t walk up to the door with you. Besides, I’ve got to talk to you.” And now he was serious. “I want you to tell Sylvia all I say. She won’t listen to me. I’ve just been telephoning her.”

“Then should I listen to you?” she asked, equally serious.

“I’d rather not stand here,” he said. He glanced along the street as if he were watching for something.

“Are you being followed?” she asked incredulously. And somehow she fell into step beside him.

“A nervous habit.” His voice was suddenly bitter. “Actually, I think I’m alone this morning. I slipped out to call Sylvia from a drugstore.” What had made him think that by coming over to the outskirts of Georgetown he might even persuade Sylvia to meet him for a few minutes? As he used to persuade her? He remembered the way he would walk through this district hoping for the odd chance of seeing her; even, on nights when there was no hope of that, waiting in Joppa Lane and watching her lighted windows. Or sometimes, he would call her. From that very drugstore. And if she could, she would slip out of the house to mail a letter, to buy cigarettes...

“Won’t they allow you to ’phone her?” “They”—she was already taking sides. I’m crazy, she told herself, and she nearly left him. “They” belonged to him: she had better not forget that.

“Yes. But then I’d have to say what they want me to say.”

She looked at him quickly.

He was studying her face. “I can trust you,” he said.

“Look, Mr. Brovic,” she began angrily and then hesitated. More quietly she finished, “I don’t like your new friends. I’m
not
on your side. So you can’t trust me one bit.”

“Did I say they were my friends?”

She watched his face.

“You see how far I trust you?” he said.

“I don’t understand,” she said slowly. “I don’t understand anything.” She hardened her voice again.

“Some day I’ll be able to explain. But first, I need help. Sylvia’s help. That’s what I want you to tell her. Only that. Will you? I’ve got to see her.”

She studied his face. “Couldn’t anyone else help you? Must it be Sylvia?”

“Yes.”

“But why Sylvia?”

He didn’t speak.

“Is it fair to come back like this?” she asked suddenly.

“Life is never very fair,” he said grimly.

She was remembering Sylvia’s face last night at the dinner table, Sylvia’s silence. “But she may not want to see you again.”

“I know she does.”

“Then why shouldn’t she—” Kate broke off. “I just don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“How old are you, Miss Jerold?”

“I’m twenty-two.”

“No, you couldn’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Well,” she said, her annoyance rising, “well, I must say—” Then she halted, calming down. “You know, I almost begin to believe you.”

“Why?”

“Because you aren’t very clever.”

He half smiled and considered that. “Sometimes I am,” he said. “I was clever enough to get out of Czechoslovakia. But, I admit, I’m not really a clever man as a rule.” His smile broadened. “And why don’t I seem clever at this moment?”

“You made me angry with you. If you wanted my help you should be flattering me.”

“Only, if you’re like Sylvia, you’d be all the angrier. And then I’d have been still more stupid.”

“I didn’t say you were stupid.”

“But not clever,” he reminded her. “Was that praise?”

“Perhaps. After all, have you ever known a very clever man whom you could really trust? I mean clever,
not
intelligent. There’s a big difference.”

“Where do you get your ideas?” he asked. “No, don’t get angry again—I like them. Only at twenty-two, unless you’re a miracle, you don’t get ideas like that. Honestly, do you?”

She began to smile. “My father has so many ideas that some spill over,” she admitted. She began to laugh. “He’d be amused, too, if he heard me.”

“You’re a devoted family?”

“I suppose you could call us that.” The word was too emotional for her taste. She added, “We have our little revolts but we stick together when there’s trouble.”

“I have a family in Czechoslovakia.”

She looked at him curiously.

He didn’t follow that up. His lips tightened; he walked on, suddenly moody and silent.

What is he trying to tell me? she wondered. She glanced at his face anxiously, feeling somehow that she ought to understand more. And if ever she saw a man who was desperately worried, who needed help, then it was Jan Brovic.

He stopped at the next corner. “Just up there, to your right,” he said. He raised his hat. “Goodbye, Kate.” He had given up trying to persuade her.

“Goodbye.” She hesitated, watching his eyes. They were troubled, hopeless. And yet they didn’t look at her bitterly. “I’ll tell Sylvia,” she said suddenly.

The look of relief on Brovic’s face was almost painful to watch. “Tell her,” he said at last, “tell her I need her help. I’ll call her this evening. At six?”

Kate nodded. Then she turned quickly away and began walking along the uneven sidewalk towards the white shutters of Payton Pleydell’s house.

6

Walter let Kate into the grey-green hall. He opened a door very well indeed. The hum of a vacuum cleaner turned to a whine that ended in silence, and the solid Minna came out of the drawing-room with a nervous side glance at Walter.

“Miss Jerold,” she said in a hushed voice, and Kate followed her into the small room that was called the library. Minna pointed to the telephone on the slender Sheraton desk. “He called twice. The lieutenant.” She searched in her capacious pocket and found a scrap of paper. “This is the number.”

“And I’m to call Lieutenant Turner?”

“Yes. He said it was urgent. And Mr. Hallis will be here at half-past eleven. And Mrs. Pleydell will be home this late afternoon.” Minna sighed with relief: all the messages had been remembered. The worry left her face and now she could smile.

“Thank you, Minna.”

Minna’s smile widened, then left her face completely as she scurried silently back towards the drawing-room. In a few minutes the hum of the vacuum cleaner began again. In the hall, Walter shifted around a small silver salver and the amethyst vase of pink tulips on top of the satinwood table. Kate closed the library door firmly before she went over to the telephone. Walter could arrange a table very well indeed, too.

She had to wait for a little, before she could be connected with Robert Turner. He had a good telephone voice, she decided, clear and pleasant, with no affectations to be accentuated. He sounded delighted to hear from her, and yet he was a little formal.

“Could I call you back at lunch-time?” he asked, which was an original way to start talking to a girl who had just ’phoned him at his own request.

“I’m going out to lunch,” she said.

“Then I’ll have to be fairly brief. I’m sorry.”

She said she understood.

“It’s about this evening—the Marx brothers are off.” He spoke hurriedly, and his voice faded as if he had looked round at someone else in the room beside him.

“Too bad. What else is showing?”

“I mean, everything’s off. I’ve just had orders. I’m leaving Washington this afternoon.”

“Oh!” She felt more disappointed than she could explain.

“Only for a week. Could you give me a rain-check?”

“Of course.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“It’s perfectly all right.”

“When do you start work at the Berg Foundation?”

“Next Monday.” He certainly was a man who knew how to stretch a brief ’phone call, she thought with amusement.

“What are you doing there, anyway?” His voice was more natural now, as if the other person had gone from the room.

“I straighten the pictures on the wall.”

“And apart from that?”

“I’m an assistant to an assistant’s assistant.”

“And apart from that, too?”

“If you don’t hold it against me—” she hesitated, and then admitted, “I’m cataloguing prints. And I give little lectures each week. Strictly for beginners only.”

“That’s just my level. I’ll join one of your tours on my first day off,” he promised.

“Oh, no! By the way, I’m sorry about last night.”

“So am I. We didn’t get much chance to talk.”

“I mean—I’m sorry about that yawn. I really was tired.”

“What I was saying didn’t amount to much anyway, I guess.” He laughed suddenly. “To tell the truth, I got it all out of a book.”

“Who doesn’t?” she asked, and they both were laughing now.

Then suddenly, he was serious, back to the stiff shy manner again. “I’ll see you when I return to Washington, I hope.”

“I hope so,” she said, sensing the time allowed was now over. “Goodbye. Good luck.”

“Goodbye.”

He’s rather nice, she thought. Even over a telephone, there’s a warmth that can’t be hidden. Even when he’s shy and stiff in his manner, there’s a friendliness underneath ready to smile out at you. I don’t suppose anyone would call him handsome, but he’s pleasant to look at. And you remember his face, too; even as he talks over a ’phone, you can see it, with its wide brow and greyish-blue eyes and well-shaped head and the ears that—well they didn’t actually stick out but they were just a little, a very little, noticeable.

But the door opened, and Walter came in, destroying her picture of Robert Turner.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Hallis is waiting in the drawing-room.”

Drawing-room... It still made her smile a little—it wasn’t only a room where the ladies withdrew from the coarse males— but Walter said it so determinedly that one would have to be apologetic if one called it a living-room. “Thank you,” she said. “I shan’t be a minute.”

Walter’s bow was perfect, neither too much nor too little.

She ran upstairs to find a hat and fix her hair. She scribbled a quick note for Sylvia. “Back at four,” she promised.
“Must
see you. Love. Kate.” And she remembered, too, to leave the guide-book in her room. Stewart Hallis, somehow, wouldn’t really care to escort a guide-book around.

* * *

Hallis was elegant, as usual, in a double-breasted flannel suit. He looked approvingly at Kate dressed in green, a soft shade which emphasised the glow of her skin. And the dark brown cashmere sweater was excellent for her eyes as well as for a successful colour scheme. The simple string of mock pearls at her neck was good, and so were the beige chamois gloves and plain high-heeled shoes.

“Do I have to take this?” She held up her felt hat.