Nothing So Strange. James Hilton
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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 naïve; 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,”