Kate could not prolong her stay beyond the original two weeks, and May 22 was at hand. What with reading the letters at Somerville, interspersed with the Whitmore novels, all of which Somerville had, and on alternate days reading the Hutchins novels in the Bodleian—not to mention the talks and strolls with Phyllis—Kate would barely manage to finish up on schedule. She had to return in time for the last of Leo’s baseball games. The St. Anthony crisis appeared to have achieved a quietus, at least for the present. Meanwhile, in Oxford, Kate found herself coming to alarming conclusions about Max. One evening she would argue them away as idiotic fancies, the next they would appear to her the height of rationality. She might have continued alternating between these two possibilities indefinitely had she not returned to the hotel one evening about nine-thirty to find a message asking her to call Mr. Reston.
Kate dialed the number provided, and found herself speaking to Merton College. “Mr. Reston, please,” she asked, uncertain what, or how, or why Max was there. But when Mr. Reston came on the phone, it was not Max, but Herbert Reston.
“I hope I’m not calling back too late,” Kate said.
“Not at all. I just arrived this morning and had a word with Hugh; he suggested we might like to meet. He suggested, further, that you seemed most entranced with the college gardens, so I thought perhaps you would like to meet with me in the garden here. I shall come by and pick you up.”
“Quite unnecessary,” Kate said. “I’ll meet you at the lodge in a few minutes, if you aren’t too tired for so late a conversation.”
“Not a bit. I’m only sorry there isn’t time to arrange something more civilized, but alas, I must be in London again tomorrow. I’m only here for the night. In a few minutes, then.”
In England, of course, in what they call the summer term, it remains light until ten at night. One forgets, Kate thought, walking toward Carfax, how far north England is, kept temperate by that marvelous phenomenon the Gulf Stream. Herbert Reston was there before her, waiting at the lodge, and the first thing Kate noticed about him was how little he resembled Max.
They walked together toward the garden, which overlooked Christ Church Meadow, and seemed to Kate everything lovely she had ever thought of in connection with England. “I haven’t been invited to dine in hall,” she said to Herbert Reston, “which is a minor ambition of mine, but I’m not sure this isn’t lovelier, particularly since the college is closed to visitors.”
“The garden is lovely, but I know what you are thinking, all the same: that I look nothing like Max. I’m friendly, bald, and roly-poly, while Max is tall, slim, and debonair. It has always been a trial to me.”
“Max said you live in America.”
“I spend much time in America, and much time here. Medical science, these days, is an international pursuit, I’m glad to say. Shall we sit down?”
“Forgive me,” Kate said, dropping into a seat in her best ladylike manner so that he, too, might sit. “My thoughts have been wandering. You are kind to find a moment for me.”
“You are a woman who has managed over the years to make a most marvelous impression on Hugh, which is singular indeed. He’s not given to being impressed, one way or the other, as a rule. A failing, I fear, of the scientific mind when confronted with a personality rather than a theorem. Max has complained of it often.”
“Were you good friends when you were boys?”
If Reston found the question odd, he did not show it. “Oh, yes, before we went off to school, naturally, and even at our prep school, where we were Reston major and minor, though from the first, major was so much smaller than minor, a fact I, major, had long since learned to live with. Max resembles our father, who was tall and thin, I our mother, who was small and, in later years, on the tubby side. Perhaps she would always have been plump, but doubtless young ladies know how to control these tendencies. Now that I think of it, my sister resembles me rather than Max, but she isn’t nearly as tubby even today. One of my early memories of Max, actually, is when we were moved out of the night nursery to make room for my sister, and Max said, ‘I don’t so much mind sharing a room with Bertie, so long as I’m allowed to read after he’s snoring.’ Max was an infant at the time and couldn’t read at all; we all thought he was frightfully stuck up, and from what people tell me, he still is. Not that I wasn’t fond of him then as now.”
“Max probably wouldn’t be noticed at Oxford, but he does rather stand out in America. Haven’t you seen him lately?”
“Since I do the major part of my work in Chicago, and Max didn’t come to our nephew’s wedding, I haven’t seen him all that recently. Max dislikes weddings. He always sends a lavish gift and is thus not only forgiven but encouraged in his bad manners.”
“So he explained to me. Mr. Reston, I’m afraid this will seem to you to be a very odd conversation, but as, you say you leave tomorrow . . . I’ve become fascinated with your mother’s two friends from Somerville, Dorothy Whitmore and Cecily Hutchins. Perhaps Hugh has told you. Would you tell me something about your mother? She’s rather vague, somehow, compared to the other two. Oh, dear, I do hope that doesn’t sound rude. Of course, I’ve never met any of them, and the letters of the other two are only at Somerville because of her kindness.”
“Don’t apologize. I think the years at Oxford and those few years in London were the happiest of my mother’s life. It was not long after the war, you know, and my father swept her off her feet. I don’t think it occurred to her to wonder what she would be doing twenty years hence. By then, Aunt Dorothy was dead—we always called her that—and Cecily Hutchins was in America writing novels. Oh, she enjoyed us children when we were young, I think, and she and my father lived a very gay life; one did, it seems, in the twenties. I remember in 1938 or so Aunt Dorothy’s posthumous novel being made into a film, and Max and I were given leave from school to come down to London to see the opening. Mother arranged about the scholarships left to Somerville by Dorothy’s will.” Reston sighed. “When one’s an adolescent one doesn’t really talk to one’s parents, though I think Max talked a bit more, but I did have the sense that she came alive rather just, after Dorothy’s death, when there was the literary estate to be administered. Dorothy left Max first editions of all her novels, and she left me money toward a motorbike. I remember being faintly offended, though of course, I was pining for a motorbike. I also knew I ought to have been sorrier about her death than I was. Adolescents are such egocentric beasts. Now I wish I’d got to know her better.”
“Did she visit you often?”
“She did. We saw her rather a lot after Cecily Hutchins left for America. But somehow it was always Max she talked to. Also, the two of them liked horses, which I never did. I used to bounce about in the saddle, and the first chance the horse had it would always bounce me off. Max, you know, was born grown up, like his namesake, Beerbohm.”
“Was he named after Beerbohm?”
“Oh, I always suspected so, but my mother denied it. She said it was an old family name, but I never found it anywhere. Aunt Dorothy thought it was perfect.”
The evening had closed in. Through the tall trees Kate could still see the sky, light against their dark branches, but day was over. “Do you remember,” she asked, “when Max was born? Remember exactly, I mean?”
“Not a bit. Children weren’t invited to consider the facts of life, not even in the twenties. I was four and shipped off to stay with Grandmama at the sea. When I returned there he was, established in Nanny’s arms and looking as though he owned the place. Max managed to look like that even at the age of several weeks. I remember Nanny showing Max off to visitors and saying, ‘You wouldn’t believe it, it’s that fair.’ By the time my sister came along three years later, I thought the whole process a frightful bore. By then, of course, I knew where babies came from. When I asked my mother about Max, she said she’d found him under a gooseberry bush in the garden. Like most children, I managed not to make the mistakes my parents made with me when I became a father, even if I made every other one in the book; my children knew where babies came from even when they were so young they couldn’t have cared less. Life is odd, isn’t it?”
“Very odd,” Kate said, “and you’re kind as can be to talk to me. Do you find Oxford much changed from one visit to the next?”
“Oh, yes, Oxford changes. That’s another way Max and I are different. He doesn’t like change, while I at least admit it’s inevitable, if not always in exactly the form we would choose. But I must say, you in hall would be most welcome. I hope to see it someday.”
They began to walk back toward the gate. “Are you staying in England long?” Kate asked.
“Back to Chicago for me, alas, since it’s beastly hot there right now. But I do hope we can meet again. Miss Fansler. You’ve made me think of my long-lost youth, and that hasn’t happened in dog’s years.”
“You’ve been kindness itself answering one impertinent question after another. Do you think your mother would have liked to be a scholar?”
“Heavens, no. She was brought up bilingual, and took her degree in French. She used to read madly through everything, and take in all the ideas without getting a fact straight. She wasn’t a scholar like the other two. They might have stayed at Oxford with fellowships if they hadn’t decided to go off to London to live on nothing and write and work for the League of Nations. It was Mother’s good luck they did decide to go, because otherwise she’d have lost them sooner. Good night, Miss Fansler; better still, au revoir.”
Kate said good night, and wandered off deep in thought.
She was at Somerville so early the next morning that she had to loiter under the beeches waiting for the librarian to open up. She determined to seek in the papers, particularly in the letters, the evidence she was by now fairly certain would be there. It was not simple marital devotion which made her, pacing the path, think of Reed. She could hear him already warning her against leaping to a conclusion. But she wasn’t leaping; she was approaching a conclusion with all the deliberation of a dog stalking a woodchuck. “Not theorizing ahead of your data, are you, Kate, as they say in the literature?” She could hear his voice as though he stood beside her. “Certainly not,” she answered, startling the librarian, who came rushing up with a tale about a stalled bus and an impertinent bus driver. The librarian lived in North Oxford.
Once safely hidden in a bay with the papers, Kate looked particularly at the war years. There had been a male unit of the signal corps in France. Whitmore’s letters home reported riding with a sergeant, who shared her passion for horses, on work horses borrowed from the French farms nearby. There might have been a man from before the war. But it was likely that anyone she would have met or loved at home would have been acceptable to her family, and Kate, hot in pursuit of a theory, was seeking a lower-class lover.
The question was, where had Whitmore met him? If she had really been, as she seemed, of a leftist turn of mind, she might have met him in a socialist club somewhere. But that was the sort of thing likelier to occur in the thirties, certainly. Kate, who could have told you exactly what sort of church group would have met in what town and why in Victorian England, was uncomfortably vague about the social life in the twenties outside of London literary circles. Anything, of course, was possible, but Kate inclined toward the theory of the wartime lover. Perhaps he turned up again in London after being demobilized and taking a series of unsatisfactory jobs. He might, after all, have worked at anything. The point was, the point had to be, that he had returned to Whitmore in London and become her lover. Why didn’t they marry? Perhaps marriage didn’t suit her; perhaps the man was married already, and this was only the drunken reliving of a wartime romance. Perhaps she was one of those independent types who wanted a baby and didn’t want a husband, and took care the father shouldn’t know who he was, or that he was. Questions of paternity had an odd effect on one’s pronouns.
The London years when the three were there together were, unfortunately, the least documented. Seeing each other regularly, they had little reason to write, and their letters to their families (at least Whitmore’s) were by now of the perfunctory rather, than the confessional sort. Wait a minute, there ought to be some dates here. Kate went to consult Who’s Who. Max had been born in 1926, his brother Herbert in 1922, the same year (though at the other end) as his parents’ marriage.
Cecily had moved to America with Ricardo in 1925. Therefore, if there was any discussion of the whole matter between the three of them, some at least of those letters ought to have been with Cecily’s papers and ought, at this very moment, to be sitting safely in the Wallingford. Kate could not be certain, but she was willing to wager a considerable sum that they were not at the Wallingford or, perhaps, anywhere else.
Hold on a minute, Kate said to herself; hold on. Are you going to expound this highly libelous theory to anyone? Once in anyone’s head, the idea will be very hard to get out, and there isn’t a particle of evidence. Well, wasn’t there? The whole story was so straightforward Kate, indeed, had to prevent herself trying it out on the librarian. But one must remember this was not a literary exercise of the sort that used to be undertaken, with such enthusiasm, in a search for the parentage of Shakespeare or Prince Albert, or that was still undertaken in an attempt to establish the authorship of Héloïse’s letters to Abélard. The ramifications of this particular little problem were legal, and brutish, and nasty, and Gerry Marston’s family might have something to say about it, not to mention the law and the courts. Go slow, Kate. Can you find one shred of evidence?
She thought, as her mind dashed about after phantoms, of the letter from Leo about the soccer game, and the discussion with Phyllis and Hugh that had followed. Hugh had talked of: the lower classes. A phrase, after all, with a meaning in England it simply would not have in America. One might speak of hard-hats, or blue-collar workers, or domestic servants, but apart from snobs and fools, no one minded who one’s parents had been. But in England, where one mentioned antecedents, where the lower classes wore different hats and talked differently, whether or not you’d been to a public school changed your life. Kate recalled having read in an English paper that boys were chosen at the age of twelve as likely prospects for professional soccer, and trained for that career, frankly and openly. Professional football teams in America were not even allowed, legally, to approach a boy in college. Would someone with Max’s taste and Max’s conservative turn of mind want to trade in a father who was the younger son of the younger son of a duke for a working-class member of the armed forces and a feminist girl whose morals were no better than they should be?
Again Kate drew herself up. What about a will? Had Whitmore made a will? Of course she had; the librarian had told Kate all about it on the first day. Those were the scholarships at Somerville Herbert Reston had referred to. Dorothy Whitmore had left the royalties from her books toward a scholarship fund for a girl who had had to work before she came to Oxford. Here fate had played a beautiful trick, for the posthumous novel had been so successful, and sold to the films; the scholarship fund now paid the way for five or more girls every year. But surely it was important that the money was for girls who had to work. There was a sympathy for the working classes that nothing could argue away. No doubt Frederica had offered to adopt Max, had already adopted him, had said: There is no need for you to leave him any money. How much money, in any case, did Whitmore have? Could anyone have guessed that North Country Wind would be a best seller and made into a successful movie? Going to the window to look out on the tennis lawn and the flower beds beyond, Kate thought suddenly of Graves wandering around Somerville in his pajamas and dressing gown, being saluted by the man who would become his moral tutor because he, Graves, was an officer. “Social life was dislocated,” Crackthorne had written. Yes, indeed; it had to have been the war.
She had to try this out on someone. She would lay the whole business before Phyllis. Phyllis had a sharply clear mind and a forthright manner. If Kate was pursuing chimeras, Phyllis, bless her, would be the first to say so.