Neither Five Nor Three (Helen Macinnes) (21 page)

* * *

At dinner, they talked a great deal; and Scott explained and argued patiently. Yes, he agreed, Thelma was an idiot. And Murray was a fool. The others? Surely Rona wasn’t going to let a crackpot like Charles influence her? Or perhaps she had so disliked the apartment that everyone became equally dislikeable.

“No,” Rona protested, “I felt I could have liked many of them, if they had stayed normal people. But they aren’t. They are laughable. Laughable and frightening, too. I didn’t imagine anything. I just happened to be feeling observant today, that’s all.”

Scott said with a smile, “Rona, don’t, go round talking that way. People will think
you
are laughable. And you aren’t.”

“But I wasn’t the only one who felt it. There was a woman who left very angrily. She wore a red hat with a white bow on it.”

“Oh yes, I heard her go. Her boy-friend deserted her for the little girl who sang.” Scott was amused.

“Well, Paul Haydn felt it.”

“Haydn?”

Rona bit her lip. “I’m sure he did. Just as I was so sure you did, too.”

Scott said, “Well, perhaps you’re right about this thing. Perhaps they are a crowd of Communists. I guess I’m not quick enough to know.”

“Frankly—”

“Yes?”

“I don’t think you are.”

He was startled. Then he began to laugh.

“I mean it, Scott. You’re much too honest to realise when people are deceiving you.”

“Who is deceiving me?”

She hesitated. “Nicholas Orpen,” she said slowly.

“Rona,” Scott’s voice was firm, “Nicholas Orpen is my friend. I’ve known him for years, ever since he taught me at college. He isn’t a crook or a cheat. He’s a man of sincere convictions. He believes in the good of mankind. He’s honest. He’s had a lot of rough treatment in his life, but because other people turn on him is no reason for his old friends to turn on him. I don’t agree with his politics, just as I don’t agree with many of my friends’ ideas on religion. But that doesn’t make me avoid them. So why avoid Orpen? He isn’t a criminal. Besides, even if he once stood up and said he was a Communist, that doesn’t mean he is a Party member now. I don’t discuss these things with him, but I did hear he’s been out of Party affairs for several years now. So why worry? Is it some scandal you’re afraid of?”

“No. Much more than scandal,” Rona said impulsively. “I’ve been thinking about Blackworth.”

“Who?”

“Blackworth—the assistant editor at
Trend
who got fired just before Paul Haydn came home. I’ve been thinking about him. I’ve been reading all the issues of
Trend
in which he was acting as Feature Editor. And I don’t like what I read, Scott. Oh, it isn’t just a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with the writers that Blackworth published. It’s much more than that: they are a kind of—a kind of corruption. Thoughts
can
be corrupted, Scott. And then standards of behaviour get corrupted, too. That’s what frightens me—not scandal.”

“Oh, Rona, come! We are mostly intelligent people with fairly reliable judgments. We don’t corrupt so easily.”

“Blackworth was corrupted,” she said quietly. “Because what he did to Weidler was complete treachery. Look, Scott, an editor has got to trust all his assistants and associates. He’s got to delegate a lot of power. He’s got to be able to trust the men who take his money. And Blackworth betrayed that trust. Isn’t that corruption? If Blackworth had been honest, he would have resigned from
Trend
and gone to work for a Communist magazine.”

Scott rose from the table. “Time we were getting you home,” he said, calling the waiter for the bill. “We’re beginning to talk in circles.”

“I’m not,” Rona said. “I’m just getting things straight.”

“Fine,” he said. “We’ll go on from this point, another night. But there’s just so much politics that I can take at one sitting.” He was frowning now, counting the tip.

“Yes, Scott,” Rona said wearily. She rose and left the restaurant. On the sidewalk she waited for him, looking up at the lighted apartments above the shops. The windows were unshaded. She could see the rooms on the second floor quite clearly—bookcases, a vase of flowers, pictures on the walls, the colours of the ceilings. In one room, people were moving around, quite heedless of any eyes that might be curious. Let them all look, what is there to be ashamed of? No, she thought, we aren’t a secretive people. We don’t go around hiding our lives. Or our thoughts. Or our intentions. We are what we are, take us or leave us. Foreigners think we are fools. Simple, they call us; naïve; big-mouthed. But, at least, we aren’t hypocrites. Is that why, at first, we can be so easily deceived? Is that why we get so angry when we start finding out that something is being hidden from us?

Scott came out, at last. “Still so serious?” he asked.

“I was wondering which made Mr. Hull angrier—the bombs on Pearl Harbour, or the fact that the Japanese were waiting in his office outside to continue talking about ‘peace’?”

“How did you ever reach Hull’s office?” He took her arm, and they started walking toward the car.

She looked up at the unshaded windows again. “By way of the second floor.” She pointed. “And by Thelma’s party this evening.”

He looked puzzled. “I don’t follow. But if you are still worrying about the people you seem to have met at Thelma’s, then forget them. They aren’t important.” He smiled and shook his head.

“They think they are. If they didn’t take themselves so seriously, I’d stop worrying about them.”

“They were more of a joke than anything.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s later than I thought,” he said in surprise.

“Too late for our movie?”

He looked up. She saw that he had forgotten his earlier invitation. He said, awkwardly, “It’s getting pretty late.”

She put aside her disappointment. “Well, come up and have a drink at my place. That won’t take so long.”

He hesitated.

“Or have you any other plans for the rest of this evening?” she asked. “I seem to get in the way, these last months, don’t I?”

“You’re talking nonsense tonight,” Scott said with a laugh. “It’s been a hard day, you know. I was only thinking of that.” He pulled her more closely to him as they walked, slipping his arm around her waist. Then his voice changed, and he said, “Rona, I blame all this on Paul Haydn. You’ve been worried and upset ever since he got back.”

“Scott, that’s—” She stopped, drawing herself away from his arm, turning to face him.

“Yes, you have. That’s our whole trouble recently. What’s wrong, Rona? Don’t I measure up to his standards?”

“Scott, you’re—”

“You’ve changed. You don’t love me the way you once did.”

“
I’ve
changed? No, I haven’t.”

“Do you mean
I
have?” He gripped her wrist.

“You aren’t the same,” she admitted slowly, painfully.

“I love you, don’t I?” he asked, almost bitterly.

She said, again slowly, quietly, “Yes. Yes and no. Oh, Scott, what’s happening to us? Something is standing between us, something, something.”

“Paul Haydn.”

“He
isn’t
!” Her anger broke out of her control. At this moment, she hated Scott as much as she loved him. She struck his arm away from her wrist. She turned and ran.

Scott Ettley looked after her in amazement. “Rona!” he called, “Rona!” Then he began to run after her. But before he could reach her, a Madison bus had halted at the corner; its doors opened and Rona jumped in. The bus was already moving away from the corner as he reached it. He rapped on its side, but it didn’t stop. He stood, looking after it, cursing.

“Too bad,” a man said at his elbow. “But give a bus driver a green light and there’s no holding him. Write the company, why don’t you?”

“Who asked you?” Scott said and turned away. He walked quickly back toward his car, his face flushed, his mouth tight. He cursed the driver again. He cursed the interfering idiot at the street corner. He cursed himself.

When he got into the car, he sat still for some minutes. And now, he was only thinking of Rona. I’ve lost her, he thought wearily. I’ve lost her... Then he roused himself. “I haven’t,” he said aloud, “I haven’t lost her. And I won’t. I’ll give up a lot, but I won’t give up Rona.”

He started the car, and drove slowly towards Rona’s street. Her windows were in darkness. But even if they had been lighted, he couldn’t have stopped. It was half-past ten. At eleven o’clock, he had to be at Nicholas Orpen’s. (Thelma had been quite explicit about that. “Eleven o’clock, without fail,” she had said.) He would call Rona tomorrow. Early. Perhaps even later tonight, after the visit to Orpen was over. He glanced up at the dark windows once more. No, he would call her tomorrow, perhaps even at midday. She would have to learn a little discipline too.

As he drove away from her street, back to his apartment where he could leave the car safely and then walk to Orpen’s, he had lost the fear that had gripped him outside of the restaurant. He was still thinking of Rona. But now he was half-amused, half-angry.

11

By eleven o’clock on Sunday night, Third Avenue was already half-asleep. Only the bars and cafés were still lit. A few taxis, their tyres jolting over the trolley lines, sped under the shadows of the El. The small shops lay in darkness; the genuine Second Empire tables, the Biedermeier chests, the positively real antiques, the crystal candelabra and painted porcelain vases, the sun-spray clocks and gilt spindle-leg chairs, all huddled together in the black windows. Keeping them company, the garbage cans stood waiting at the closed entrances to the walk-up apartments overhead.

A man in shirt-sleeves was having a quick cigarette at a darkened doorway. A woman waited patiently while her dog nosed round a curb. A group of people straggled home from a neighbourhood movie. Two policeman walked slowly, steadily, covering their beat. A man and a woman passed, arguing. Four people in evening dress waited at a corner for a taxi. A drunk went his lonely way. A cat prowled, alert and suspicious. An elevated train roared, half-empty, up the avenue.

Scott Ettley left Third Avenue, entered the street where Nicholas Orpen lived, and approached a drab row of houses standing grimly across the road from a blank soot-grimed wall of garages and warehouses. Farther east, new apartment houses had their uniformed doormen and smart chauffeurs; westward, beyond Third Avenue, the brownstone houses had been converted into expensive small apartments. But here, the row of brownstone houses hadn’t been painted for years; there were no window boxes, no bright-coloured doors. The steps were peeling, the railing sagged, the basement area was heaped with overflowing garbage.

It was a forlorn stretch of street, dark and forsaken at night except for the parked automobiles that hugged the curb. Orpen’s front room was on the top floor. Its windows, heavily shaded, showed only a crack of light. The other windows of the house were in darkness. Here, most people went to bed early. If, to begin with, Orpen’s neighbours had been surprised by his late visitors, they had learned to accept that as normal. “He’s a writer,” they would say with a shrug. That explained a lot of things. And in New York few questions were ever asked, anyway.

Scott Ettley gave his accustomed ring and waited. The door opened automatically, letting him into a cramped hall, poorly lit by one bulb, cluttered with a shabby baby carriage and a battered tricycle. There was a box telephone on the wall at the foot of the steep staircase, but Orpen had installed his own upstairs: he didn’t like exercise.

Scott climbed the narrow stairs, treading as quietly as possible on the cracked linoleum. There was always the smell of cooked food hanging around each narrow landing. From behind the closed doors of the apartments which he passed, there was either deep silence or heavy snoring. The other tenants in the house had work that took them out early in the morning. Often, they would be rising, getting breakfast, even as Orpen was going to bed. (“He’s a writer,” they’d say with a shrug. He wore tweed jackets and old flannel trousers, even on Sundays. He kept no holidays, either. Or perhaps every day was a holiday to a writer. A lazy kind of life, sitting around.)

Orpen’s door stood closed. But as Scott knocked, again using his own signal, it opened at once. He entered a comfortable room, well furnished with a massive desk, a table, armchairs, bookcases, and an excellent phonograph with a huge horn. Heavy curtains were drawn across the windows. Reading lamps gave a quiet look to the whole room. The pile of records near the phonograph, the books on the mantelpiece and chairs, the heap of folded newspapers and magazines on the table, all increased this feeling of peaceful living.

Orpen was taking off his glasses, polishing them quickly before he put them on again. Behind him, on the desk near the windows, were pages of manuscript covered carefully by a huge sheet of blotting paper. He was a man of less than medium height, slender, with a thin quiet face. Just a very ordinary-looking man, with a slow, gentle way of talking. His sparse hair was mid-brown, his eyes a mid-grey. His skin was sallow. (There were days on end when he never left his two small rooms.) Yet his movements were quick, decided. His gestures were emphatic. His accent, carefully trained, was indefinable.

Now, as he took Scott’s outstretched hand and gave it a quick, brief shake, he could have been—with his friendly smile, his watchful eyes, his tweed jacket, his background of books—a middle-aged professor at a New England college. He might have discarded his instructorship at Monroe, but he had never discarded its ways.

“Come in, come in,” he said, closing the door and locking it. He waved Scott to the most comfortable chair, and opened two cans of beer that stood waiting on the table.

“Well?” he asked, when he too was settled in an armchair facing Scott. With an impatient movement, he switched off the lamp beside him. “My eyes,” he said wearily. “I’ll have to get stronger glasses.” Then he sat, quite motionless, watchful. Scott waited, but it was he who had to speak first.

“Thelma gave me your message,” Scott said uneasily. He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was six minutes past eleven.