Nothing So Strange (3 page)

I saw Brad the morning after the Byfleet dinner; we ran
into each other at
the College entrance in Gower Street. I suppose this was really our first
meeting; he would have passed me with a nod, but I made him stop. “So you’re
here too?” I said.

“Hi, there. Sure I am.”

“That was a good party last night.”

“Er … yes….” Then suddenly, with an odd kind of vehemence: “Though I
don’t like big parties.”

“It wasn’t so big. Were you bored?”

“Oh no, not a bit. I’m just no good at them. I don’t know what to say to
people.”

“Neither do I. I just chatter when I’m chattered to.”

“I wish I could do that…. Or no, perhaps I don’t. It’s a terrible waste
of time.”

“For those who have anything better to do. Do
you
think you
have?”

He looked as if he thought that impertinent. I think now it was.

“Yes,” he answered, smiling.

“That sounds rather arrogant.”

But now he looked upset. He didn’t like being called arrogant.

“No, no, please don’t misunderstand me…. I guess I just tell myself it’s
a waste of time because I can’t do it. Especially amongst all the big
shots—like last night. I don’t know why I was asked.”

“Why did you go?”

“Professor Byfleet has helped me a lot, I didn’t like to refuse.”

“He probably asked you on account of my father, who’s an American
too.”

“I know. He told me. He asked me what my work was, but I was a bit tongue-
tied. I’m afraid I made a fool of myself.”

“I don’t think you did. It’s by talking too
much
that most people
do that.”

“Personally I agree with you.” There was no inferiority complex about him,
thank goodness. The truculence and the humility were just edges of something
else.

“Anyhow,” I said, “he liked you.”

“
Did
he?” Because he looked so embarrassed I couldn’t think of
anything else to say. He fidgeted a moment, then glanced at his wrist watch.
“Well, I must be off to my lecture….” His second smile outweighed the
abruptness with which he left me standing there.

When I got home that night I told my mother I had seen him again. She
said, with a flicker of interest: “Really? I think Harvey had better ask him
here sometime—some evening we’re just ourselves——”

But of course there wasn’t often such an evening. My
parents both liked
company; my mother preferred musicians, artists, society people, and my
father balanced this with businessmen, lawyers, politicians. Without much
snobbery, he had a very shrewd idea of who was who and who really mattered;
and in England he felt that he still mattered himself, not merely because he
was rich, but because few English people appreciated the changes in America
that had put him out of favor. So also English and foreign politicians
listened to his advice, not with any idea of taking it, but as an act of
educating themselves in some mythical American viewpoint which they believed
he represented, and they were doubtless relieved to find him a generous host
and a reliable keeper of secrets. I didn’t have a feeling that I was ever
completely close to him, or that, inside his own private world, he had ever
got over the death of his only son by a former wife during the First World
War.

As I said, he wasn’t much of a snob, and though he had a connoisseur’s
appreciation of titles and liked to say “Your Excellency” once or twice and
then call the man Bill, he wouldn’t have me presented at Court or “come out”
in any accepted social sense. It just happened that when I was sixteen I
began having a place at table if there were a dinner party, though at first I
would go up to bed soon afterwards; then when I enrolled at the College that
seemed to make me adult enough to stay up as long as I liked. Most people, no
doubt, took me for older than my age, just as they took my mother for younger
if they met her without knowing who she was.

Ever since I was a child we had come over to England for the summer; once
we took a house in Grosvenor Street, with real flunkeys, but my mother
thought that was a bit too grand, so next time my father chose Hampstead, at
the top of the hill as you climb from the tube station, and that suited them
both so much that they never looked anywhere else. For many years it had even
been the same house, which my father would have bought if the portrait
painter who owned it had been willing to sell. There was a studio attic
overlooking the Heath, with a huge north window, and from the other upstairs
rooms you could see the London lights at night and as far as the Crystal
Palace on a clear day.

I used to have a favorite walk—it was along the Spaniards’ Road to
Highgate Village, then back downhill and up again through Parliament Hill
Fields. I loved it when it was crisp and sunny and windy enough for the
little ponds to have waves and for the roads to look like bones picked clean.
There’s no place in New York as high as Hampstead Heath and as near to the
center of things, except of course the roofs of high buildings, where you
look deep down; but from the Heath you look far over, which is different. My
father once said you couldn’t climb a mere four hundred feet anywhere else in
the world and feel higher.

We had good times at that hilltop house, and when Christmas was over in
New York and we were packing for Florida (where my father got out of the land
boom in time to keep a fortune), already I was looking forward to April and
the ocean crossing. Sometimes we spent Easter in Paris, which was exciting,
but I never wanted to stay there long. Then when I was twelve my father
thought it was time I gave up governesses and started a proper education, so
we tossed up whether it should be over here or over there. Out of compliment
to my mother he asked her to flip the coin, intending (so he told me
afterwards) to give way if the result disappointed her too much. But it
didn’t, and I went to a boarding school in Delaware for three years, spending
only a few weeks in London during the summer vacation. After that my father
told me to choose a college myself, anywhere I liked.

I suppose to have been born in England means something, even the way it
happened to me. It was in April 1918, when the Germans looked quite likely to
win
that
war. My father had been shuttling back and forth across the
Atlantic a good deal in those days; I have never been able to find out quite
what he did, except that it was connected with the war and was apt to be so
important that he traveled under another name with secret service people
watching him. Anyhow, during one of these hush-hush visits he met my mother
and during another he married her. He took her to New York, soon after which
my grandmother fell ill; my mother then went back to England to stay only a
few months, but she postponed returning as she postponed so many things, with
the result that she was actually driving to Waterloo Station to catch the
boat train for Southampton when she realized she was too late. Thus I became
a Cockney, one might say, accidentally; and also, if it meant anything, I had
done a good deal of traveling even before I was born.

I saw nothing of Brad for some time after the Byfleet
dinner; his tracks
didn’t cross mine at the College and I didn’t particularly look for him or
them. I did, however, meet a man named Mathews who had a laboratory next to
his in the Physics Building and shared with him certain amenities. Mathews
was amused when I asked if they were friends. He laughed and said: “What’s
that word you used?
Friends
? The fellow doesn’t have time for such
nonsense. Works his head off, goes nowhere, cares for nothing but crystals
under a microscope or whatever it is. Sometimes I take him in a cup of tea.
He says thanks very much, but I don’t do it too often because it makes him
feel obligated. Once, by way of returning the favor, he insisted on buying me
a lunch at an A.B.C. And I don’t like A.B.C.‘s.”

“Does he talk to you?”

“Only about work. I sometimes think he tries out his lectures on me. You
might not think it, but he’s a good lecturer. He also writes a few things for
the scientific magazines….”

“Doesn’t he have any hobbies … fun?”

“Oh yes. Once a week, on Sundays, he finds some hill to climb…. Very
invigorating.”

“You mean Hampstead and Highgate?”

“He wouldn’t call
them
hills. Nothing less than Dorking to
Guildford with a final run up the Hog’s Back. I went with him once. Never
again. Eighteen miles at four miles an hour. Not my idea of fun. But then,
perhaps it isn’t his either. Perhaps he does it for self-discipline or
mortifying the flesh or something. He told me he never let rain stop
him.”

I wasn’t surprised at that because I like walking in rain myself. A few
days later (and it
was
raining, by the way) I saw him coming out of
the A.B.C. after lunch. He wore no hat or mackintosh and after standing a
moment in the shop doorway to put up his coat collar he suddenly sprinted
across the road towards the College entrance. Then he saw me and changed
course, still at a sprint. He went out of his way to greet me. “Oh, Miss
Waring…. I’d been wondering if I should meet you before … before we meet
again.”

That didn’t seem to make too much sense, so I just smiled till he went on:
“I’m coming to your house next Thursday. Your father invited me—he says
there’ll be nobody else there. That shows he
did
notice what a fool I
was at the party.”

“It also shows he doesn’t think any less of you for it.”

“I hope so … but I also hope he doesn’t think I really
mind
other
people. What I mean is, I wouldn’t like him to put himself out for me.”

There wasn’t much I could say. It didn’t seem at all likely that my father
would put himself out for such an unimportant person; on the other hand, it
was rather rarely that we were ever at home without a crowd. Afterwards I
found that it was my mother who had arranged it.

That Thursday evening began rather well, despite the fact that our
landlord dropped in to dinner uninvited. Or perhaps partly because of it, for
the talk got on the subject of painting, and that led to music and then my
mother went to the piano and played Chopin. She was a fairly good amateur
pianist and liked to play if there were no notable musicians present; she
also sang, the
diseuse
style—you called her an English Yvette
Guilbert if nobody else said it first. That evening I thought she sang rather
better than usual and I told her so.

“And what does Mr. Bradley think?” she asked from the piano stool.

It was a silly question because it invited flattery and she might have
known he wasn’t the type to have it ready. He just looked uncomfortable and
walked over to the piano. “I can sing too,” he said.

My mother jumped up laughing. “Why, of course—that’s wonderful. Take
over.”

“No, no—I don’t play the piano. Can you accompany for me?”

“Depends what the song is.”

“I expect you know ‘John Brown’s Body’ or ‘Annie Laurie’….”

I then felt a bit uncomfortable myself, chiefly because of the painter,
who was ultrasophisticated about art and might consider songs like that very
naďve; also I thought he’d think Brad had bad manners in putting a stop to my
mother’s singing. I don’t really mind if people have bad manners, but I don’t
like an American to have them in front of an Englishman, or vice versa for
that matter. My mother, of course, carried it off gaily, starting at once
into “Annie Laurie,” and somewhat to everyone’s surprise Brad turned out to
have a rather good baritone. Halfway through my mother joined with him and
made it a duet. They went on after that, singing other songs together, after
which Brad asked her to sing some more on her own, so everything was all
right. He said good-night about eleven, leaving the rest of us to conduct the
post- mortem.

“Well, well,” said my father. “We haven’t had so much music since Cortot
came here.” Maybe he meant that to be ironic.

“He wasn’t so shy this time,” said my mother.

The painter asked who Brad was and what he did. My father answered: “A
young scientist from one of our prairie states; he’s working at University
College where he got a Ph.D. last year.”

I hadn’t known that before.

“Nice voice,” said the painter.

My father smiled. “It’s remarkable for one thing at least, it sings more
readily than it talks.”

“On the other hand, Waring, when it does talk it talks sense. While we
were visiting your gent’s room after dinner I asked him what he thought of
the landscape in the hall—of course he didn’t know it was mine. He said
he didn’t understand why a modern painter would ignore the rules of
perspective without any of the excuses that Botticelli had, and I thoroughly
agreed with him. I’m fed up with that pseudoprimitive stuff I went in for
years ago.”

My father said: “I wouldn’t have thought he knew anything about
Botticelli.”

“He knows how to sing too,” said my mother. “I mean
how
to
sing— though I don’t suppose he’s ever been taught. His breathing’s
exceptionally good.”

“He takes long walks,” I said. “Maybe that helps.”

Anyhow, the whole evening was a success, after all my fears that it
wouldn’t be.

From then on I’d see him fairly often, but not to say more
than a few
words to. I sometimes went to the A.B.C. shop where he had his regular lunch
of a roll and butter and a glass of milk, we smiled across the crowded room,
or he’d stop to say hello if my table was on his way to the cash desk. Twice,
I think, I joined him because there was no place elsewhere, but he was just
about to leave, so there wasn’t much conversation. And another time the
waitress said when she came to take my order: “Dr. Bradley isn’t here yet.
It’s only seven past twelve and he never comes in till ten past. We tell the
time by him.” She must have thought I was looking for him.