As Far as You Can Go (14 page)

In two minutes he was in the desert again, cruising comfortably along at sixty-five, singing “California, here I come.”

I
T WAS VERY STILL
at the top of San Domingo Canyon, the sun beating down from a hard blue sky on sage and juniper, the occasional cypress, the raw excavations where new houses were being built. After the continual roar of the city, the silence was like a glass of iced tea, refreshing, scented, transparent. Beneath it ran the perpetual susurrus of cicadas, like a stream going over a fall, a ground bass, as it were, to the stillness. There was no human noise, no mechanical noise: merely the sun beating down, and the cicadas humming, the arid grass, brown and inflammable, hiding million upon million miniature insects. It was as though the earth was a kettle, and the sun the fire, and the insects the myriad little bubbles in the water.

Harold paused by his car and breathed two or three times deeply. The air was clear up here, away from the smog of the city, but it was the silence he was breathing. A pause seemed to have come over everything. It was as though something were about to happen.

And perhaps it is, he thought.

He walked along a short concrete path to the door of number 1745. It was the last house in the canyon before the road ended, a few feet farther up, in a turning-circle. The walls were of white plaster, and on the side facing into the hill, which was the side Harold approached from, they were windowless. He could see nothing but the white plaster and the white door, with the numbers in brass, and a small bell, which he rang once.

The bell was a sharp slash through the heavy stillness. After it there was only its echo ringing in his head, and then
the gradual awareness that the ground bass was still there, that the cicadas were rubbing their legs together as though nothing had happened. From the house there was no sound whatever.

He was about to ring again when the door opened and a girl of twenty-one or-two stood framed between the white posts.

“Mr Barlow?”

“Yes. Good afternoon. Are you Mrs Washburn?”

“Good heavens, no,” said the girl. She gave a nervous laugh and said, “Grandma will be up in a moment. Won’t you come in, Mr Barlow?”

She wore blue jeans and an orange shirt that hung outside them, stopping just at the curve of her hip. The jeans were tailor-made, slim and narrow without being too tight. Her hair was blue-black, very glossy and long, hanging down over her shoulders, hiding her ears. Her eyes were grey, the pupils very small and sharp against the sunlight, like those of an animal of the night caught in the beam of headlamps. She had a small mouth and wore no lipstick, and her long full nose led to an equally full round chin. She was shorter than Harold by two inches or more, and he liked that in a girl. After looking straight into his eyes, she glanced down at his feet, slowly raising her eyes to take him all in, scrutinizing his clothes, shape, carriage, finally looking straight into his eyes again, the pupils so tiny that he could not guess what her judgment of him might be, her mouth straight and without expression, the whole face dispassionate, rather bored, cool. And pretty, very pretty. Almost, Harold thought, beautiful.

He shifted his feet uneasily and looked right back at her. She dropped her eyes, and stood aside to let him pass into the house.

“Grandma’s still sleeping,” she said. “She always takes a nap after lunch. Why don’t you come on in and wait awhile? She won’t be long.”

“I don’t want to disturb her,” said Harold. “But she did say to come this afternoon. She didn’t mention any
particular
time. If it’s inconvenient, I can easily come back later.”

“It’s not inconvenient,” said the girl. She made an
impatient
gesture. “Don’t bother about a thing. Grandma gets up when she wants to. No one disturbs Grandma.”

She led the way down the stairs to the drawing-room. Carpets were fitted wall-to-wall throughout, it seemed, silencing all footsteps. The stairs led directly into the
drawing-room
which ran the full length of the house, one end being the full height, too, the other, he supposed, having bedrooms above it. The wall which ran the full height of the house was completely filled with glass.

“Good gracious,” said Harold. “You can’t see anything from the road. I hadn’t realized this was such an exotic house.”

“It’s all right,” said the girl. “You get a good view on days when it isn’t too smoggy.”

Half Los Angeles was visible, and the coast from Palos Verdes to Santa Monica, a forest of oil derricks in between, and the Pacific, looking, from here, drowsy and calm.

“It’s an astonishing city, Los Angeles,” said Harold. “I mean, it’s so big, to start with. You drive and drive and drive, and you’re still within the city limits.”

“Yes,” said the girl. “My name’s Diane, by the way.”

“Harold. How do you do?”

She opened a door in the wall of glass and they went out on to a terrace. The sun beat down on them, and the stones of the terrace threw the heat hard back at the sky.

Los Angeles was astonishing indeed. The day Harold arrived he bought a street map, and felt thoroughly
discouraged
. What he had already seen was big enough, but apparently there were enormous unguessed stretches behind the hills, vast suburbs and networks of road. The city was surrounded by hills, but the ridges were almost invisibly far
from each other, and the houses seemed to inch their way into them, a huge lake of buildings that flooded up canyons, spilling over passes into small plains, stretching and spreading and stretching and spreading, as though there was no reason it should ever stop. And over it all hung the sweaty blue sky and the smog. Vast roads linked the innumerable parts with gigantic fly-overs and bridges and clover-leaf junctions, the freeways continually jammed with traffic, all travelling quite fast, cars six abreast, nose to bumper. It was said that when there was a minor accident, immediately it became a major one, fifteen or sixteen cars piling into one another, the speed and density of the traffic leaving no room whatever for mistakes.

“You know,” said Harold, “someone ought to tell all the people in the east that the limit of westward expansion has been reached. They don’t seem to have got the word back along the pioneer trail that the Pacific has been discovered and America doesn’t go on for ever after all.”

Diane laughed. “There sure isn’t much room left. But people just pour into L.A. I guess it’s one of the most rapidly expanding cities in the U.S.”

“I can believe that,” said Harold, thinking of the street map, of the suburbs called Malibu and Long Beach and San Fernando and Santa Ana and Whittier and Encino and Pomona and Ontario and, and, and, and.

“You know, this was nothing but a little Indian village once,” said Diane, shading her eyes with her hand as she looked over the city. “And not so long ago, either. There was some kind of Spanish mission somewhere—they came up from Mexico. And now look at it.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Harold, “is how people ever get around it. I mean, it’s too big, in square miles, for anyone ever to be able to comprehend it all.”

“Yeah,” said Diane. “Well, you know what they say about L.A. Six suburbs in search of a city. Only it’s more like sixty.”

“It’s like a raft,” Harold said, suddenly struck by the idea. “You know how children are always building rafts? How they work away and hammer planks together, and then they’ve got a terrific raft, but it’s so heavy that they can’t move it down to the water? Well, that’s how I feel about Los Angeles. It’s too big to live in.”

“Gee,” said Diane, looking at him with admiration. “Are you a writer or something?”

“No,” said Harold, pleased with the effect of his image. “It was just something that suddenly struck me.”

“It’s kind of a nice idea, all the same,” said Diane. “I guess the way I’ve always thought about L.A. is that it’s a collection of parts which never quite came together. I mean, it has no real centre, for instance. Have you been to
downtown
L.A. yet, Harold?”

“Yes. What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s too small, too small for a city the size of L.A. It ought to be bigger.”

“Yes, I suppose it should.”

“But I don’t really feel I’m an Angelino,” said Diane. “Living up here in Beverly Hills, you get to feel L.A. is some place you visit once in a while, that’s all.”

“I like this bit along the hills,” said Harold. “I spent a couple of days looking for somewhere to stay, and this part seemed much the nicest.”

“The smog’s not so bad up here, either,” she said. “And it’s not far to the beach. Do you like to swim, Harold?”

“Yes. I’m not very good, though. I thought everyone in California had his own swimming-pool.”

“Not everyone,” said Diane. “I kind of prefer the sea, I guess. I like to ride the surfs.”

“I’ve never done that.”

“You should while you’re here. It’s just great.”

He imagined her in a swimsuit, without a bathing-cap, the long blue-black hair plastered down with water as she surfaced
after a dive. It was a pleasant image, and he smiled at her, thinking she was a good thing to find on the trail of the Dangerfield miniature. But there were one or two matters to be cleared up before he could start relaxing with a pretty girl on the golden beaches he’d seen in so many films.

For one thing, though Carter Washburn was clearly not around, and was probably dead, his wife, or widow, was still alive, and living in the same house in which Carter Washburn had lived. And yet no one had answered any of the four letters he had written inquiring about the miniature. For another, the woman he had spoken to on the phone, Mrs Washburn, hadn’t seemed at all keen to meet him. It didn’t sound as though the acquisition of the Hilliard was going to be an easy matter after all.

Yet having come six thousand miles from home, from Craxton Street and Peterham and Helen Gallagher and Dennis Moreland, Harold was beginning to think of going back. There lay the Pacific. He could go no farther west. Obscurely he wished to end his holiday with pay before he needed to: he had seen so much that he wanted time to think, to reflect, to remember. California was his turning-circle, like the one above the Washburns’ house. Besides, everything had been too easy—the search for the pictures, the interviews with their owners, the successful buying, the failure to move the big wheel of Austin, Texas. It was all outside him: he never felt concerned, involved, with what he was doing. If this was seeing how far he could stretch without falling over, then the sensation wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, and old Dangerfield was a fraud. But of course it wasn’t stretching at all: it was coasting along. In spite of enjoying himself, Harold was constantly aware of a nudging irritation at the back of his mind. He would suddenly be depressed at his failure to be doing something worthwhile, something big, and the gloom he had often felt in Craxton Street, thinking about his future, was the same gloom in America. He didn’t,
fundamentally
,
like being a flibbertigibbet: his conscience
disapproved
of his frittering his time away “having fun”.

Now he wanted to complete his work for Dangerfield and go back to England and start again. There must, somewhere, be a job that would give him a sense of purpose.

He turned to the girl and said, “I expect Mrs Washburn has told you why I’m here.”

“Kind of,” she said.

They left the terrace to simmer in the sun, and went into the drawing-room. There were two enormous sofas, covered with some white material, and scattered with gold, violet and pale blue cushions in careful disarray. At the far end of the room there was a low desk of modern design, and the rest of the furniture was modern, too, though the pouffes and chairs and tables were not of the kind Harold would have chosen. It was all too fussy for his taste. There were ashtrays on the tables, the sort in which one didn’t dare to stub one’s
cigarette
in case one upset the whole mess on the floor. On the walls were some bright but unoriginal pictures of cliffs and sea. They looked as though they might have been painted by a talented member of the family.

“This is a very nice place,” said Harold.

Diane shrugged and pushed back some of the long black hair. He noticed that she wore no nail varnish.

“Grandpa built it,” she said. “I guess it was pretty modern for before the war.”

“Is your grandfather still alive?”

“Oh, no. He died about ten years ago. But Grandma keeps on going. She’s pretty old, too. But she won’t ever die, she’s too strong, too tough. That kind outlive their great-
great-grandchildren
.”

There was a bitterness in her voice that kept Harold silent. Diane moved restlessly about, patting cushions.

“How old is she?” said Harold at last.

“Eighty-one.”

“Gosh.”

“‘Gosh’” she imitated, and laughed. “Is that what Englishmen say when they’re surprised? ‘Gosh’?”

“Yes,” said Harold, annoyed. He was constantly having to remember not to use English idioms. Americans tended to giggle at perfectly ordinary phrases like “nice chap”, and if he let so much as a single “I say” escape him, it took about half an hour before he could re-establish himself as a serious human being.

“You know,” he said, trying to regain the advantage, “I have invented a new law. It’s called Grandma Moses’s Law, and it states that all American women grow stronger as they grow older, and that American widows grow stronger at twice the speed of American wives.”

“You’ve got something there,” said Diane. She didn’t seem to think Grandma Moses’s Law was very funny, though. She fiddled with an ashtray, then she said, “You want to buy that old miniature thing of Grandma’s, that right?”

“Yes. I’ve come a very long way to try and persuade her to part with it.”

“Well, you’ll be lucky,” she said. “Grandma’s kind of funny about her things.”

“Is she very fond of it?” said Harold.

“I guess so.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I tell you, Grandma’s kind of odd. It’s hard, sometimes, to know what she’s feeling. You’ll see.” She got up and began to walk
restlessly
about the room, tapping the ash from her cigarette into every available ashtray, not smoking at all, her eyes turning continually to the head of the stairs. Harold watched her with cautious attention. She was certainly attractive, but he didn’t want to make a faise move. The trouble with American girls, he had decided, was that they expected you to behave according to a certain code, and he didn’t yet know what the code was. As a result he was always doing the wrong thing, staring when he wasn’t supposed to, not staring when he was.