This Was Tomorrow (2 page)

Sylvia had always performed docilely in their childish theatricals at home, enduring an agony of nerves and stage-fright the other two knew nothing of, but she begged off going to dancing school with them in New York. She had a better singing voice than Rhoda’s, but she begged off having it trained. Fitz was puzzled but patient. There didn’t seem to be anything in particular that his youngest wanted to do. “Maybe she’ll just get married,” Gwen suggested hopefully, for it was Gwen’s idea of the thing for a woman to do.

That Christmas party had been planned before the Wall Street crash was dreamed of, and the family fortunes weathered the storm under Bracken’s unhysterical management. Jeff spent the next four years working with a tutor to catch up on his studies, making a trip abroad every summer to accompany Bracken on his annual tour of his European news bureaus. And what with one thing and another, it was the spring of this very year 1934 before he got back to Williamsburg to see the Rockefeller Restoration buildings they had all heard so much about, and Sylvia wasn’t there.

A great deal had happened in the Williamsburg family during that four years. Rhoda, after a sensational debut on Broadway, had just got married, boom, and wouldn’t dance any more, like her mother over again. She not only wanted to
live in Connecticut and raise a family, she wanted to spend her evenings at home, with no curtain going up at eight-thirty every night. She explained all this in passionate detail to an outraged, stranded Stephen who was not in love himself, and was not getting married, and loved the very smell of a theatre—any theatre, any curtain going up, any call of
“
Overture!
”
So what happened then? Sylvia got roped in.

She was prettier than Rhoda ever was, the greatest beauty the family had produced since Aunt Sue’s mother Felicity, and she had a lovely light, true singing voice. And she could learn. She had to. Stephen wanted a dancing partner, and the whole thing was good publicity after the near calamity of Rhoda’s marriage. Sylvia photographed like a dream from any angle, danced and sang like a trouper, and hid her shyness behind a calculated composure which deceived almost everybody. Jeff got glimpses of what it cost her, through the long letters she wrote him during that four years’ separation. The times Jeff was in New York and they might have met, Sylvia was in Chicago or Cleveland or Detroit with Stephen and a show. They moaned at each other down the long-distance telephone, past the three-minute limit, and he would be off to Europe again before her tour ended, and the letters went on,
building up an intimacy of allusion and confession and personal exposition that made it seem as though they knew each other a great deal better than was warranted by the amount of time they had actually spent together.

They were cousins, they had been children together, but something more than kinship had lilted and vibrated down that telephone wire to Chicago or Cleveland or Detroit. They were, he had realized a few months ago, the last time his Cunarder had slipped down the New York harbour on the way to Southampton, falling in love with each other’s letters. And the old, inevitable, nagging admonition which had dogged his impulses for years presented itself promptly:
Better-not.
The nicest things, the things he wanted most, always turned out to be Better-nots. He had come to accept the relentless tabu with a philosophy beyond his years.

So he had tried to let the idea of Sylvia slide as it were through his reluctant finger-tips, as a lot of other ideas had gone before it. It was just one thing more that was not for him, and let’s see, now, what was there to put in its place? He was committed to the summer in Europe with Bracken, who was getting very gloomy about the Nazis, and it was in Austria that they were caught by the cable saying Aunt Sue had died. Bracken as her executor knew the terms of her will. The money was to be divided between Stephen and Rhoda and Sylvia, and the house was to be Jeff’s, because he was the only son of Miles Day, who had married his Cousin Phoebe and died before his child was born. And it was much too late to say Better-not to Aunt Sue.

He had supposed ruefully that Sylvia’s success as Stephen’s partner would entail a lot of proposals from eligible men, Hollywood offers, and all the things well known to go to a girl’s head, and he had waited for signs in her letters. But there weren’t any signs. Her letters remained quite the same, a little fuller of anecdote and incident, but hiding nothing, holding nothing back. Single-minded, single-hearted, the same Sylvia still. And it wouldn’t do. But how was he to make her understand that now, without seeming to take too much for granted of things never spoken in words—without betraying his own secrets too, and laying himself open to her quick intuition, her exaggerated loyalty, her inevitable pity? Aunt Sue might have known the answer, if he had the wit to find it here in the tranquillity she had left behind her. But now, before he was ready at all, while he was still shaken and bemused by the impact of his arrival, here was Sylvia, waiting for him to be glad to see her. It was almost as though Aunt Sue were suggesting—

Because of the uncordial silence he had allowed to follow her greeting, without having moved or spoken in reply, Sylvia’s smile had died away, and her eyes dropped from his face to the work-basket on his knee.

“Oh, Jeff, I’m sorry, you want to be alone. I’ll come back later.”

As she stepped backward from the door he rose, setting down the basket.

“No, wait—please come in, I was dreaming, I guess—” He moved quickly towards her and she paused uncertainly, on one foot. “It felt very queer, your just suddenly being
there
like that, as though—” He held out both hands to her and she laid the flowers across them, smiling up at him. “I feel like a bride,” he said helplessly, holding them.

“Brides are prettier,” said Sylvia. “Welcome home, Jeff.”

“Thanks, I—” He laid the bouquet on a table just inside the door, took her firmly by the shoulders, and bent to kiss her cheek—and a quick turn of her head brought their lips together briefly. “How are you?” he said inadequately then, looking down, while she stood radiant, looking up.

“I’m fine. And you?”

“I’m all right, I guess. Just—trying to get used to things.”

“Perhaps you’d rather I didn’t stay now. We didn’t know you were coming today. I just keep flowers in the house because she always had them, and—have you noticed how it feels as though they were all living here still?”

“Yes, I was noticing that, among other things. I wasn’t alone.”

Their eyes went to the portrait of Tibby above the mantelpiece, and she returned their gaze, alert and listening, like a third person in the room.

“That’s what Cousin Sue always said.” Sylvia’s voice was very low. “That she wasn’t alone here. I think towards the end she used to talk to them—I think they came back for her—”

Jeff was moving away from her slowly down the room, and he sat down on the sofa as though he was suddenly very tired. Sylvia came up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t be sad, Jeff.
We’ll
miss her—but all the rest of them were waiting for her—”

“I wish I’d come back sooner, that’s all.”

“We talked a lot about you, she and I.”

“What sort of things?”

“About how different it would have been if your father hadn’t died, for one thing. So that you had grown up a Day here in Williamsburg instead of the strange, broken-up life you’ve had.’

“They’ll never forgive poor Mother for that, will they?”

“Oh, Cousin Sue
forgave
her, it wasn’t that. But she was always afraid that you might lose touch altogether, I think, and not
want
the house as much as she wanted you to have it. In fact, I practically promised her to see that you came and lived in it some of the time—every now and then.”

“The house isn’t in the pattern for me, Sylvie,” he said gently, and raised his hands to hers on his shoulders. “Aunt Sue didn’t quite understand. She shouldn’t have done this to me, she must have known better. I can’t think what she was up to, leaving me the house. She knew I couldn’t just come and live in it.”

“Why can’t you?’

“Because I’m booked up.”

“How do you mean?”

“Think, Sylvie, think! Bracken has turned sixty, it’s time I began to take hold of things for him. He counts on me, it’s my job, I can’t leave the newspaper now, before I’ve even started. Bracken has got to take things easy sooner or later, and that’s where I come in, it’s what I’m trained for, it’s all he thinks of now that there’s another war coming—”

“Another—!”

“Yes, I shouldn’t have brought that up, I suppose.” He rose from under her hands, and moved restlessly round the room, pausing at a window with his back to her. “But we’re going to get one. A daisy.”

“Us too?”

“What do you mean, Us too? If we don’t fight it on the Rhine we’ll have to fight it here, on the Atlantic Coast.”

“The Germans?
Again?
”

“Again. So you see”—he turned from the window and looked her straight in the eyes—“I can’t lay any plans.”

“But you—couldn’t—”

“Couldn’t get into the army. Don’t I know that! But I’m supposed to be a journalist, a foreign correspondent, if necessary a war correspondent when I grow up, remember?”

“Even if—”

“Look, Sylvia, how much do you know about this set-up, anyway? Bracken’s got no son, you see. Dinah lost her baby and couldn’t ever have another. About the same time my mother had a baby she didn’t really want—I was born several months after my father died, and let’s face it, she wasn’t really in love with him, anyhow. She left me with Dinah in New York and went back to Europe, she thought for a few weeks—but one thing led to another, with the war and all, and she went on to Belgium as a nurse and finally married Oliver—they’d been in love for years. At the end of the war Dinah took me to England—I couldn’t remember my mother, of course, I was about two when she went away—and somehow I was donated to Bracken to carry on
our
family traditions instead of Oliver’s. Oliver has nothing much to leave, and Bracken is rolling. You can’t inherit a British Army commission, but you can inherit a newspaper. Don’t think I’m sounding mercenary, I’m putting it to you from their point of view, not mine, I was never consulted. And don’t think I’m squawking, either, I think the world of Bracken and I’d go out and die for Dinah any day before breakfast. But it all goes to show why I’m caught the way I am. If Bracken hadn’t counted on me, he would have been training someone else to take his place.”

Sylvia looked back at him gravely, measuring out her words.

“But with the kind of job I’ve got and the kind of job you’ve got, it isn’t going to leave us a chance to see much of each other here in Williamsburg.”

“I guess that’s about it.” They stood with the room between them, face to face with the thing that had happened to them against the odds. “Well, it’s nothing new, is it,” he said at last. “We ought to be getting used to it by now. Please don’t look like that, I know it sounds heartless, but—Sylvia, don’t let’s take each other—too seriously, will we. Because it will never do. You can see that, a big girl like you.”

“You mean because we’re cousins and mustn’t fall in love.”

“Oh, that. No, I don’t think that has much to do with it. What we really ought to remember is that I’ve got a rheumatic fever heart, and—that’s not a very reliable thing to have.”

“But I thought you were all well now.” She looked frightened.

“I’m supposed to be. And nobody mentions my heart, you know. So if ever we start to run for a bus, or the going gets tough on a Sunday walk, nobody must say, Be careful—remember Jeff’s heart.”

“I see.” There was a long silence, while she walked carefully round the end of the sofa and sat down facing the unlighted fire. “And—if ever you should want to get married?” she asked steadily.

“That’s one of the times somebody—meaning me—says Better not.”

“But I thought you—”

“Sure, sure, nobody’s warned me about it lately. Only it’s
my
heart, after all, and I wanted to know a little more about it than they seemed willing to tell me. More than they wanted me to know, maybe. So I read up on rheumatic fever. And now I know.”

“Oh, Jeff, you’re
not
all right?”

“Now, don’t, for God’s sake, look sorry for me! I might live to be a hundred, like Grandmother Tibby. But if I loved somebody enough to want to marry her, I’d want to be a lot surer than I am now that she wouldn’t have an invalid on her hands for the last seventy-five years of it!”

“I don’t think you ought to feel that way, I—”

“Darling, we’re slipping,” he said quietly. “I know how it is with you, because I’ve got it too. But it mustn’t be like that. If we’re going to make each other miserable about it, I mustn’t come here at all.”

“Cousin Sue would be very disappointed if you didn’t,” she said unargumentatively. “And so would I.”

All the cards were on the table now. So soon. But it would have to be like that, he thought, you couldn’t fool Sylvia any
more than you could fool yourself. And that was what she had become, against his will—his other self, the one you talked to in the dark when you couldn’t sleep, the one who never talked back, except to comfort and uphold. And there she sat, within his reach, waiting, willing, and not afraid. He had only to ask her, and he need never be so alone again. But that was against the rules. Looking at her helplessly from across the room, he perceived that he wasn’t the only one. Sylvia wanted the same thing he wanted. It was not just himself that he denied.

“Aunt Sue knew very well that I couldn’t stay here,” he said gravely. “Not for long. Never anywhere for very long.”

“How soon?” she asked quietly. “This war.”

“There’s a sort of superstition about 1938. Writing on the pyramids, or something. Actually, it will come when Germany is ready to start it.”

“But—if your heart still bothers you—”

“Well, that’s another drawback to this job I’ve got.” He came and sat down on the other end of the sofa. “You see, comes this war, and little old Jeff sets out into his first air raid to do a big story for the paper, and what happened? I’ve got a right to be scared, anybody’s entitled to that, and the heart is beating fast, but that’s not all. The strain goes on a little too long, we’ll say, or I have to run for a doorway or throw myself flat in the gutter—and then something slips loose inside my chest and the thing is beating up behind my ears, I can’t breathe, I don’t see straight, I start to wobble, and the only way to stop it is to lie down flat on my back and breathe carefully till it slips back into the groove again. That’s going to be very useful in the middle of this air raid we’re talking about. In other words, I won’t last five minutes in a war. But Bracken doesn’t know this. And I can’t bring myself to tell him. Not yet. I just go on, waiting for it to happen.”