This Was Tomorrow (3 page)

“But isn’t there something you can take—”

“I’ve taken lots of things. But last summer in Berlin I saw what it was going to be like. We were there during the Purge, you know, when they killed off a lot of people they didn’t want in the Party. There was some shooting in the streets—not at
me—and wholesale executions, and it was all very nasty. We all reacted to it, of course. Bracken lost pounds in just a few days, and Dinah kept losing her dinner. Anything she ate—right away it came up, like being seasick. There’s no way to make anyone who wasn’t in Berlin then understand what it did to you. The air was thick with evil and terror, and you were helpless—like the dream where you try to run and try to scream and can’t move or make a sound. I’m only dwelling on it because I learned then what to expect.”

“Did you have to lie down flat and breathe carefully?”

“Luckily not when anyone was looking. It almost caught up with me once, but we had got back to the hotel and I sat very still on a sofa and just missed it. They were all feeling so sick themselves they didn’t notice. But it showed me how much good I’m going to be when any real excitement starts.”

“You’ll have to tell them.”

“I can’t possibly.” There was a long silence. “It’s only a question of how long I can stand up to it,” he said with a sigh. “Sylvie, darling, I’m ashamed of myself. I’ve never admitted to anyone before that I’d read up on the fever. Everybody thinks I believe just what I’ve been told, which wasn’t more than half of it. Maybe I am all right, maybe I’ll never have another attack. But you see—
I
know I can go down again tomorrow, and each time I lose ground. But I have to pretend I don’t know that, see?”

“Except to me,” said Sylvia.

“Except to you, now.”

“It must have been a lonely sort of thing to carry round with you, Jeff. How long have you known?”

“Years. Will you swear on a stack of Bibles never to mention again anything we’ve said here today?”

“No, I won’t swear. Because you’ve told the truth about yourself, and that’s very good for you.”

“Like a kind of pill.” He nodded wryly.

“You’ll find people have to tell the truth in this house, Cousin Sue lived here so long.”

“You think she had something to do with this?”

“I think she did.”

“I can almost believe it,” he said thoughtfully. “I threw myself on her mercy—I asked for some
sign
—and then I saw you standing there—”

“Yes, why did I come, just then? I didn’t know you would arrive today.”

Their eyes held in a long, probing stare.

“Well, why did you come?” he said, and she answered, “I brought her some flowers. It—just seemed like a good idea to bring her some flowers.”

“Sylvie—”

“Yes, Jeff?” She stretched out a hand to him along the sofa, and he closed his fingers on her long cool ones. “I’m here, Jeff. I always have been here. I always will be.”

“I can’t—” He swallowed. “I can’t—”

“Darling, don’t worry about it. I’m not so hell-bent on getting married.”

With a rueful little sound, half sob, half laughter, he leaned towards her and hid his face against her shoulder. After a moment she moved cautiously to put her arms round him, and held him there, her cheek against his straight dark hair, and neither of them seemed to breathe. Then she said, “Besides, we don’t have to talk about being in love, do we? We can have good times just as we are—just as we’ve always been.”

“That’s not fair to you,” he said, his face still hidden. “Pretty girl like you has to get married.”

“Who says?” said Sylvia.

“If only you hadn’t grown up to be such a
pretty
girl,” he grumbled against her shoulder. “Got a lot of beaux?”

“Depends what you call a lot.”

“Bet you could get married tomorrow if you only crooked your finger.”

“I’m hard to suit, I reckon.”

He sat up slowly, without self-consciousness, and looked down at her, his arm along the back of the sofa.

“That’s right,” he said. “You go on being hard to suit. That way you’ll get something better than anything you’ve seen yet.”

“There’s nothing better than this, Jeff. Just you and me, together again, and we can lick anything that comes. Even Germans.” Her fingers tightened briefly on his and then withdrew. “I’m going home now and leave you to yourself for a while. Wash your face and brush your hair and change your shirt and come to dinner. Seven o’clock, remember?” She rose, and he remained looking up at her remotely, unsmiling, from the sofa. “Can you find your way alone?”

“Blindfolded.”

“I’ll run along and tell them to lay another place.”

She was gone, lightly, with a wave of her hand from the doorway.

Jeff sat still. He was certainly very tired, all of a sudden, which he was used to—and he was at peace in himself, which was a less familiar feeling.

The silence of the house closed in on him again, as it were protectively, until with a little clink and rustle Hagar arrived with the tea-tray, remarking that Miss Sylvie had said to bring it in now. He found himself wishing that Sylvia had stayed to drink it with him, and raised the teapot to pour his own.

“I’m to go over there for dinner,” he said, as Hagar reached the door.

“Yassuh, she done tol’ me dat too,” said Hagar cheerfully as she went.

“Oh, and Hagar—I’d like to have the room I always had—Grandfather Dabney’s.”

“Yassuh, she done tol’ me—”

“Told you to get it ready for me, I know!” He took the words out of her mouth with a smile, and waved her away.

When he had drunk two cups of China tea and eaten three of Hagar’s fresh cookies, he rose, intending to look round the house before he washed and changed, and mounted the stairs. Turning to the left, he entered the large front bedroom which had been Great-grandmother Tibby’s when Sue was a girl—the
room where they had first hidden Sedgwick, wounded, under the bed, while Yankee soldiers searched the house for him, and Great-grandmother Tibby, sitting up in the bed above him in a becoming lace jacket, had stoically gone on eating her breakfast from a tray—the bed where, a lifetime later, he himself had been born.

He went in with his quiet, loose step, and stood before the mantelpiece looking up at the portrait of Tibby’s Julian, which hung there. The likeness to himself was such that he might have been Julian’s own son—the long chin and large, humorous mouth, the wide-open, reflective grey eyes, the thick, brushed-looking dark hair with no wave in it. Guess I’m what they call a throw-back, Jeff concluded after a long scrutiny of the canvas. I wonder who Sylvia goes back to. Aunt Sue always said Aunt Felicity was the beauty in their day—how did she put it? The words came obediently from his memory:
Her
eyelashes
were
so
dark
and
heavy
they
always
seemed
to
make
her
lids
a
little
weary
—
it
gave
her
a
sweet,
sleepy
look,
Sue said. Sylvia had eyelashes out to here, but she looked anything but sleepy…. Please, he said confidentially to Sue, without speaking aloud, can’t you let me off this thing about Sylvia? Do I
have
to be in love with her till it hurts?

He turned and left Tibby’s room and went on to the next one, which was above the garden and which had always been Sue’s since she and Bracken’s mother had shared it as girls. Glass and silver gleamed on the dressing-table. The white ruffled bed was complete to its counterpane and bolster. He wondered if her dresses still hung in the clothes closet, and knew that he could not bear to look or to ask. Again he had the unreasonable feeling that the room was not empty—was not, that is, bereft. She wasn’t gone from it—not for ever.

Hagar came quietly out of the room across the passage behind him, and paused in the doorway.

“You want I should put heh things away mo’?” she asked anxiously. “Like the perfume an’ such?”

“No—don’t disturb it. I like it this way.”

“Don’ seem like she
could
be gone.” Hagar glanced wistfully through the door.

“We won’t be so lonesome,” he said gently, “if we leave it the way it is.”

“Yassuh. I laid you out a clean shirt afteh travellin’. An’ I put yo’ things in the little bureau by the window.”

“That’s fine, thanks.”

But she lingered in the doorway as he passed her and entered his own room.

“Don’ look like you aimed to
stay long, suh—or is you got anotheh bag at the station still?”

“Not this time, Hagar. But I’ll be back.”

“Long time sence you been heah fo’ Christmas, suh.”

“Well, that kind of depends on the folks in New York,” he said kindly. “We’ll see.”

“Sho’ goin’ to be kinda quiet round heah at Christmas ef you don’ stay.” She went away, her head down.

He closed the door on himself, and after a quick, loving look round the room he stripped back the white counterpane, kicked off his shoes, and lay down on the bed, sinking luxuriously into the big pillows, remembering…. The top shelf of the bookcase he could see from where he lay was full of the books he had read on his first visit—books about the War Between the States, and maps, so that it was all as real to him as yesterday, realer even now than the more recent war in France where his mother had been a nurse—realer than the idea of another war shaping up across the Atlantic…. Even the notebooks in which he had written down what appealed to him most were still there. Sue hadn’t moved a thing. She had left it for him to find, as though she had known that some day he would be here like this without her, groping….

Tomorrow he would get out the books and look at them again. He wondered how his childish notes would look to him now. Once he had even thought of trying to write a book about what Aunt Sue had told him, for printer’s ink was in his blood and bones. Tomorrow he would look at the notebooks again. Tonight he was having dinner in England Street, with
the Sprague cousins. He wondered if it would be all right to ask them to show him a portrait of Felicity, whose eyes had always looked a little sleepy—or would they suspect that he only wanted to know if Sylvie resembled her as he did Julian? It wouldn’t prove anything, would it, if she did? Separated by two generations of time, Julian and Felicity had never fallen in love with each other….

Please, he said again to Sue, though his lips never formed the words, Please get me out of this. It doesn’t matter about me, but don’t let’s have Sylvie get hurt, and I’m no good to her. You knew about the fever. Why did you do this? You must have known about our letters too. But it almost looks as though you
meant
us to fall in love. You knew about Bracken and the paper, though. You knew I couldn’t stay here as though I hadn’t got a job to do for Bracken. Besides, you knew what a thin time Dinah’s had so often, because of marrying a newspaper man and the risks they take. You wouldn’t wish that on to Sylvie, would you, with me? Somebody has loaded these dice, Aunt Sue. It wouldn’t be you, would it? …

There is something rather special about being one of a large, congenial family, Jeff was thinking as they all sat down to dinner that night in the Sprague house—not the self-conscious, artificially odd sort of family that gets into semi-biographical books and plays, and is exploited in a certain type of memoirs—but a family which is accustomed to behave normally, which accepts its inter-relationships without dramatizing them, which enjoys its reunions and is without jealousies and favouritisms and feuds. The Days and the Spragues were all intelligent members of the human race, thought Jeff—able to get along with each other and themselves with a minimum of fuss and why-was-I-born carryings-on, even in the younger generations. They were too clever to be idle and too busy to sit round searching their souls. And they had before them in their elders
an example of good manners and domestic harmony they could only hope with a bit of luck and management to duplicate in their own lives.

Freshly arrived from that sultry summer in Nazi-dominated countries where everyone seemed always looking over his shoulder, and where seeds of suspicion and betrayal were deliberately sown in the schooling of children to spy and eavesdrop in their own homes in the name of the Party, Jeff looked gravely round the candle-lit dinner-table in Williamsburg, counting his blessings anew. At one end was his Uncle Fitz, his mother’s brother, charming as the tuneful songs he wrote—songs which were being sung all over the world now, for a public suddenly enlarged by the radio. At the other end, slender, doe-eyed Gwen, the dancing-girl from the wrong side of the tracks, who loved Fitz so much still that her days sang with it, and who had so fitted herself into the quiet pattern of the family’s ways that no one ever thought now how once they had dreaded her advent in their circle. Across the table was his Cousin Stephen, so lean as to be bony, so much a dancer that his every move had a fluid ease as though he was strung on invisible wires reacting to inaudible music—but a speciality dancer, mind, nothing arty or effeminate. Stephen wore clothes when he danced, and shoes, and trained like an athlete, and his standard routines were things for an acrobat to respect. His slight, loosely-hung body was deceptive—one New York critic had remarked that Stephen Sprague was made of cat-gut, whalebone, and piano-wire. He never tired or flagged, he never even seemed to be breathing hard, and no matter how many times they called him back for another encore he never faked it. He did things with hats and walking-sticks and balloons that were sheer conjuring, as he danced. And he sang—not very musically, but with a damnable off-beat authority—whenever he felt like it. His wide, crinkling grin, which drew deep lines down his long, otherwise solemn face and flashed a set of perfect teeth, was the disarming, unconceited grin of anybody’s kid brother.

And the fifth at the dinner-table, on Jeff’s right hand, was Sylvia.

Stephen had shaken up a cocktail to celebrate Jeff’s arrival, and there happened to be pumpkin pie, which you don’t get in Europe. Jeff told them all about Cousin Verity’s wedding, which he had attended in London just before he sailed—and they were all more than ever interested in the English bunch now that it was almost certain that Sylvia and Stephen would go to London with the new show after its New York run. And oh, yes, said Jeff, Cousin Virginia at Farthingale was writing her reminiscences, if they could bear it—all about life in England in the good old days before the war, when American girls married English dukes and English girls married German princes, and everybody lived fabulously with the most fantastic amount of money to spend, and servants in droves, and dinners in nine courses with a wine to each course, and costume balls, and Royalty at house-parties, and nothing to worry about, ever, before 1914—or shall we say before 1912, when the Balkans began….