I said, deliberately: “I wonder how that would affect Brad in Vienna.”
“He’s an American, he’d be neutral. Of course I know that wouldn’t stop him from getting into trouble. You might not think it from the shy manner he has, but he’s very impulsive.”
“I know that.”
“Such a one-idea’d creature. All or nothing. No compromise…and sometimes so impractical.”
“I know that too.”
“But a very delightful person.” The cat had followed John into the room and was now curling about our legs. “To give somebody a cat, for instance. I’ll never forget John’s face when Brad brought it that afternoon. It broke the ice, though. After that we got to be friends quite fast.”
“The cat and you?”
“No, darling. Are you still in that other world of yours? The cat and I were friends instantly. Some men take a little longer.”
“I was in Ireland.”
“So you were…. I saw quite a lot of him while you were away.… More than when you came back…. I don’t know why. It’s a pity he’s so poor…poor and proud…it’s a frightening combination.…” The cat purred loudly into the silence that followed. Then John re-entered and some kind of spell was broken. “Mr. Waring just telephoned to say he wouldn’t be in to dinner, madame, and he might be late, so please not to wait up for him.”
“I certainly shan’t—in fact I’ll have a snack in my room and go to bed early. I need some rest after last night…. What about you, Jane?”
“I’ll be all right. I’ve got work to do, or else I’ll find someone to go to a movie with.”
“You’re not thinking of going to the station to see Brad off?”
“No, of course not—he wouldn’t want me.”
“It isn’t exactly that, but…” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence, and then I sensed, almost with certainty, that she knew of Brad’s change of plan, or at any rate suspected it; and that out of simple affection for me she didn’t want me to hang about Victoria Station in the cold, looking for someone who wouldn’t turn up. At least I think that was her motive. As I said, you get so close, but the very closeness brings you up against the barrier.
* * * *
The mail always came to the house early; John used to sort it and bring it to the bedrooms. There was a letter for me the next morning with a London postmark and addressed in a writing I didn’t recognize, yet as I tore it open the thought came to me, clairvoyantly if you like, that I had never seen Brad’s writing before.
It said: “My dear Jane—” (and he had never called me that before, either—in fact I don’t think he had ever called me anything after the first few Miss Warings at the beginning)—“Thank you for coming to see me, and the walk and talk on the Heath. I’m just leaving for the boat train at Victoria to join Hugo Framm—we shall be in Vienna the day after tomorrow. After all, I’ve a right to change my mind as often as I like, and he needn’t know how narrowly I missed the chance of working with him. When I say work, by the way, that’s just what I mean, work. So don’t expect me to write too often, but there’s a warm welcome if ever you come to Vienna, as perhaps you might some day—who knows?—In great haste—Brad.”
I took the letter downstairs but didn’t mention it; not that they would have dreamed of asking to see it, but it might have seemed peculiar if I hadn’t offered to let them.
We never talked much at breakfast; my father would read the papers and sometimes make comments on the news; if he didn’t, or if we had nothing much to say in reply, nobody thought anybody else was surly.
However, this morning he folded the paper at last and put it by his plate with a gesture I knew meant he was going to read something from it; first of all, though, he spread marmalade on a piece of toast and crunched off a big corner. “Well, well,” he said, still crunching, “our friend will be halfway across France by now….”
I looked at my mother.
He went on: “It says here ‘Professor Hugo Framm left for the Continent last night accompanied by his young protégé, Dr. Mark Bradley, who will spend some time in the professor’s Viennese laboratories.…’ ”
My mother put her hand to her face for a moment and when she took it away she had on that glassy smile, as if she were about to say hello to a maharajah.
“I shouldn’t have thought it was important enough to put in the paper,” she said.
“It wouldn’t have been,” replied my father, “but for Framm’s instinct for publicity. This is how it goes on… ‘Asked what would be the subject of their work together, Professor Framm replied: “I don’t know yet, but Dr. Bradley is an excellent chess player, so I shall certainly put him on to something difficult” ’—Newspapers go for things like that. Incidentally, I didn’t know he was a chess player.”
I said: “Neither did I.”
“Nor I,” said my mother.
Then she rang the bell for more coffee.
* * * *
I have tried to tell all this as it looked to me then; which is perhaps the best way when nothing happened afterwards to make completely certain any of the things that were conjectural at the time. Of course, as I grew older, I balanced the probabilities more maturely; for instance, it seems to me now far less unthinkable that my mother was capable of a love affair. When you are young you tend to feel that things like that can only happen in newspaper cases, and that your own family has some special exemption from frailty; then as you live on, you learn, and what you principally learn is a frailty in yourself that makes you include others for sheer companionship. I know now, looking back on it all, that it was the first major “situation” in which I felt myself involved, and that I was so anxious not to blunder that I tiptoed all around it, deliciously thrilled as well as troubled, whereas nowadays I would probably cut in with a few straight questions to somebody.
And yet I am rather sure that the affair, in any downright sense, never came to anything. Perhaps only because Brad left in time. I think they were both in love, but after the first shyness he may have been more breakneck about it than she, partly from inexperience, but chiefly because my mother had a very realistic valuation of what life could offer; she loved comforts and gaiety and society; I don’t believe she would ever have been happy with a poor man in spite of what she said.
I think it possible that after Brad had met Framm at the party and had definitely decided to go to Vienna, she saw him alone and persuaded him against going; that he then asked for some rash showdown, perhaps even suggested her running away with him. Of course she wouldn’t consent to that; what she really wanted was for things to go on as they had been, agreeably and perhaps dangerously, with Brad taking her about everywhere and my father an appeased if not entirely deceived spectator. It wouldn’t have been heroic, but it was the sort of thing my mother could have carried off with virtuosity, if only Brad had been willing. I would guess that he was not. Yet after the argument between them she probably thought he would change his mind (as he actually did, before he changed it back again), and this gave her that trancelike happiness the next day, that confidence that somehow or other she could always hold him where she wanted and on her own terms. I know she was dumbfounded when he left, and for a time quite shattered.
Had I been a little responsible for his second change of plan? Perhaps. I have often thought that the walk and the talk we had on the Heath may have just tipped the scale.
Neither of them ever discussed it with me afterwards, but three years ago, when my mother was dying from the effects of a motor smash in Texas, my father said something under stress of great