Nothing So Strange (5 page)

“No, that’s not true. Your mother played some Mozart to me the other
evening—it was the first time I really liked classical music.”

“She loves Mozart.”

“Of course when she was younger she had time and opportunity to cultivate
a sense of beauty—that’s hard for the average American.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s Americans who do cultivate things, as a
rule.”

“Then she just
has
them—was born with them, perhaps.
Generations of aristocratic background.”

“My mother’s people wouldn’t like you to call them aristocrats. They’re a
fairly well-known Yorkshire family—commoners, but we can trace
ourselves back for a few centuries without much trouble.”

“She happened to mention a sister—Lady Somebody, I forget the
name.”

“That’s nothing. Tides don’t mean aristocracy. All my aunt did was to
marry a man who got knighted—that can happen to anyone.”

“You sound rather cynical about it.”

“I’m not. But it’s amusing, sometimes, the way Americans make mistakes. My
aunt and uncle were once visiting us in Florida and the local paper called
them English blue bloods. They’re no more blue-blooded than you are.”

“Speaking scientifically?”

“No, speaking snobbishly. If you want the snob angle, at least get it
right. Of course I don’t mean you, I mean the Florida paper. Personally I
don’t think much of titles.”

“Because you come of a family that’s proud of its age rather than
rank?”

“I guess you’re right. It’s probably an inverted snobbery. We certainly
think we’re superior to a lot of these businessmen baronets.”

“You say ‘we.’ Does that mean you feel yourself more English than
American?”

“When I’m talking to you I do. When I’m talking to an Englishman I feel I
want to chew gum. It’s the perverse streak in me.”

“Does that mean you feel American when you’re with your mother?”

“Sometimes…. Though she’s not so terribly English. I’ve met Russians and
Irish that are more like her. She’s more true to herself than to any
nationality. Not that I mean she doesn’t act, sometimes. But when she does,
she doesn’t really mind if you see through it. And you can act back. She
doesn’t mind that either.”

“I’m afraid I’m not much good at acting.”

“I wasn’t meaning you personally.”

“I’m sorry. I thought—perhaps—well—”

“I was just talking generally. I’m sorry if you—”

“How did we get onto this argument, anyway?”

“I forget.”

He thought for a moment, then said: “We were discussing beauty—the
sense of beauty—”

“Were we?”

“Mozart, it started with….”

“Oh yes, you said you were beginning to like classical music.”

“I think I
could
like it, if I heard more. It’s strange
how—if you’re in a certain mood—the awareness of beauty comes
over you—”

“It comes over me in
any
mood. I mean, it can
put
me in the
mood. When we were in the Cathedral just now, for instance….”

“Yes—but it didn’t get me as much as Mozart.”

“Maybe we should have asked the organist to play some Mozart.”

“I’ll ask your mother when I’m next up at the house.”

“Yes, do…. You come up quite often now, don’t you? While I’ve been
away…. I’m so glad.”

We returned to Cambridge by bus and he called at the Cavendish again to
pick up something—“results,” he said, that he had left there in the
morning for a check. When he glanced over them later in the train I tried to
tell from his face whether everything had been satisfactory, but he looked
neither pleased nor displeased—only preoccupied. Presently, as he put
the papers away, he said: “Well, that’s that.”

“What is?”

“A month’s work and it turns out to be wrong.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. It’s not an emotional matter.”

“But a whole month! Couldn’t you have found out you were wrong
sooner?”

“Perhaps not—though the Cavendish does have better facilities. Might
save time in the future if I had access to them more often.”

“Couldn’t you work there?”

He smiled. “You don’t know how lucky I am to be able to work anywhere. You
should have known me the last time I went inside a cathedral.”

“Where was that?”

“St. Patrick’s, New York.”

“Are you a Catholic?”

“No. I used to go in for warmth and rest when I was looking for a job.
That was in 1931.”

“You’ve come a long way in five years.”

“It’s not how far you come that counts—it’s the direction you take
and whether you ever find the right track.”

“Do you think you’ve found it?”

“I think I know where to look for it. And a few wrong answers won’t put me
off.”

There was a sort of grittiness in his voice that made me think he was
fighting down disappointment over his wasted month. He added almost
ferociously: “The trouble is, I don’t
know
enough. I’m trying to build
too high without scaffolding….”

After that day at Cambridge I thought I was bound to have
crossed some
sort of barrier, and that henceforth I could count on seeing him fairly
regularly, either at the College or at the house; but in fact a rather long
interval elapsed, so that I stopped Mathews once and asked how Brad was. He
said he was wearing himself out as usual, or rather more than
usual—indeed, he’d given up one of his teaching classes in order to
devote more time to his own work.

“Can he afford that?”

“Evidently. Or else he’s making himself afford it.”

“Do you know what work it is?”

“Vaguely. Some sort of mathematics. But you can’t know much about other
people’s work nowadays, not when they get past the elementary stage. Even
genetics has its mysteries. Why don’t you come and see my mice? I don’t have
cats any more—they’re not quick enough on the job. And besides, they’re
apt to attract visitors.” He always joked about my mother’s acquisition.

I went up with him. “I wouldn’t disturb him while he’s busy,” he said, as
we passed Brad’s door. I hadn’t had any such intention, but the warning made
me ask what special reason there was for all the high pressure.

He said he thought something had “happened” at Cambridge. “He goes to the
Cavendish there fairly often. He told me after one trip that a physicist was
no damned good unless he was also a mathematician, so that’s what he’s doing
now, I suppose—in what he calls his spare time…. Come and see these
creatures again when you feel like it. Perhaps he won’t be so busy.”

He was, and I didn’t bother him. But one afternoon, inside the College
near the Physics Building, I met my mother walking along as if she had far
more right to look surprised than I had. She asked if I were going up to see
Brad. I replied: “Certainly not. Have
you
just been to see him?”

“Darling, why ‘certainly not’?”

“Because he hates to be interrupted when he’s at work. It’s a thing I’d
never dream of doing…. But I suppose you
have
seen him?”

“Yes, but not in the way you think. I’ve been to one of his lectures.”

“
What
?”

“I don’t see any reason against it. He has a beginners’
class—anybody can join who enrolls. I’ve enrolled. It’s interesting.
And he explains things so wonderfully. One ought to have something serious in
life, oughtn’t one?”

“What does Brad say about it?”

“Brad?… yes … it suits him, doesn’t it?… Or perhaps it’s just that I
never did like Mark and I couldn’t go on calling him Mr. Bradley—Dr.
Bradley, I mean…. Anyhow, I think the less formal we all are the better.
That’s what the trouble is with him—he’s
too
formal—he
doesn’t seem to believe in any pleasure, amusement, relaxation…. But I have
an idea I’m beginning to convert him—gradually.”

She looked so adorable as she said it that I laughed. “And he’s managing
to convert you a little at the same time, eh?”

No, she answered, he was not converting her—not really. He was only
showing her something she had already been aware of in life, or had guessed
existed. Physics was a symbol rather than the thing itself. “I’ve often
thought I have a rather empty existence—just dinner parties and social
engagements and treading the same old beaten path—London, New York,
Florida. I’ve never been completely satisfied with it. Even when I was a girl
I wanted to be a nurse.” (This was news to me, and it may have been true, but
my mother was always capable of reinforcing an argument with some happy
improvisation.) “Darling, you at least ought to understand, because you’ve
chosen to do something worth while instead of wasting your time as so many
girls in your position would. Surely it’s the happy medium we must all strive
for. For instance, he
ought
to waste a little bit of his time, and
I’ve quite an ambition to make him do it—I’d
love
to make him
break a rule—just one little rule….”

“Did he break any at the lecture when he saw you?”

“Not him. He’s so different when he’s lecturing. Not a bit
nervous—and yet still shy.”

“Did he know you were going to be there?”

“Of course. I
enrolled
—didn’t I say that? I asked him if he
thought it would all be above my head and he said no, it was as elementary as
he could make it—he’s not exactly the flatterer, is he?… But never a
smile or a look during the lecture—I was just one of his students. And
when he finished he picked up his papers and dashed away as if he was afraid
of someone chasing him.”

“Perhaps he was.”

“Now darling, are you trying to make fun of me?”

I wondered if I were; it wouldn’t have been surprising, for my mother and
I got a good deal of amusement out of each other. But I had a curious feeling
that we were both more serious than we sounded, and that the badinage was a
familiar dress to cover something rather new in our relationship.

She said, as if it finally clinched the matter: “Well, he’s coming to
dinner on October tenth. I
did
chase him to ask him that. He said he
couldn’t make it earlier because he’s working for some examination that
finishes on the ninth.”

“But will you still be here? I thought the end of September was when you
and Father—”

“We’re staying a few extra weeks this year. We thought it would be nice
not to leave you too soon.”

I said I was glad, which was true enough, though of course I knew I’d be
perfectly all right on my own.

It wasn’t a party on the tenth, but that rare “just
ourselves,” with not
even a chance visitor after dinner except Julian Spee. Julian was a rising
English lawyer; still in his middle forties, he had already taken silk and
found a seat in Parliament; there seemed nothing to stop him from whatever he
aimed at, which was probably high. He was handsome in a saturnine way, a
brilliant talker, unmarried, and an accomplished flirt. He lived in a house
not far from ours, facing the Heath, and had formed a habit of dropping by
whenever he felt like it, whether we had a party or not. He was sure of his
welcome and one knew he was sure. I think he liked my mother more than most
women, and she in turn was flattered by his attentions and always willing to
give advice about his love affairs. A pleasantly romantic relationship can
develop in this way, and it had done, over a period of years. I wasn’t at
ease with Julian myself, because I never felt he was quite real, but on the
few occasions when he hadn’t treated me as a precocious child I had been
aware of his attractiveness. My father, who collected him as he collected all
celebrities, once said that in any other country but England you would have
taken him for a homosexual, to which my mother replied mischievously: “And in
any other country he would have been.” As often it wasn’t very clear what she
meant.

My father had got back from Germany that day, tired from the trip and
gloomy about affairs over there. He didn’t any longer attend to ordinary
business matters, but if something cropped up of a kind in which his personal
acquaintance with politicians and diplomats might help, the job was usually
passed on to him. I think the Nazis were interfering with some of his
“interests”; the State Department hadn’t been able to do much, and because he
had once met Hitler during the twenties he’d been called in like a rainmaker
after a prolonged drought. But big shots were always apt to disappoint him
after a while—Lenin had, and Lloyd George, and Mussolini, and Ramsay
MacDonald, and now it was Hitler’s turn. Roosevelt hadn’t yet, but one felt
sure he would. My father was too rich to care for money for its own sake
(despite the Marazon disclosures that did him so much harm); he knew, as
moderately rich men didn’t, how little you could bribe those whose real
currency was power, and this in turn made him flatter poor men who became
powerful. But of course, because they were powerful, sooner or later they let
him know that he had only money. I think now (though I knew nothing much
about it then) he must have been having this kind of experience in Germany,
and it hadn’t been pleasant.

Fortunately Brad’s mood that night was at the other extreme. With his
examination over even he couldn’t help relaxing, the more so under the
influence of good food and my mother’s gaiety. Then, somehow or other, when
we were in the drawing room afterwards and Julian had joined us, the
conversation grew personal and the atmosphere changed. Julian had met Brad
before, and they had seemed to like each other well enough, in spite or
perhaps because of their obvious oppositeness. But now I sensed a hostility
between them which my father was quietly fanning; it was as if he were
holding his own unhappy thoughts at bay by encouraging both my mother and
Julian to put Brad on the spot. Soon they were in the thick of a discussion
of Brad’s ambitions, what he wanted to do in life, his ideal of science as
something to be lived for, and so on. All ideals sound naďve when brought out
under cross-examination, but my mother had a special knack of creating
naďvete in others—something in the way she used wits rather than brains
for an argument, certainly not knowledge, which she didn’t have much of about
most things. But she was always fluent, and couldn’t endure to wait while
others hesitated or pondered, so she would tell them what she thought they
were going to reply, and it was often so deceptively simple that the other
person would agree in a bemused way and presently find himself defending some
vast proposition more suitable for a school debating society than anything
between adults. I think this must have happened to Brad that night, for he
got to telling us eventually that scientists were actuated by a desire to
“save” humanity, and that science, in due course, would do this in spite of
other people whose chief concern was worldly success. (Which was probably a
dig at Julian.)