This Is Not for You by Jane Rule Page B

looked at either one of us which, under the circumstances, was unnerving because it left me isolated with what seemed after a time to be my own fantasy When I got up to get off at Marble Arch, she followed me down the sidewalk and right into the hotel lobby. I saw Andrew standing by the counter at the theater ticket agency. As I hesitated, she did, too, just at my elbow. Andrew looked up, saw us and hesitated. I ran to him.
    “For a minute there, I thought you’d brought a friend,” he said.
    “She’s real then?” I asked, turning quickly to look back.
    “It must be some sort of circus,” he said. “There. She’s going over to join that company of dwarfs.”
    “Get me a drink,” I said, “before they get out the feathers and ask me to join.”
    “Not a chance,” Andrew said smiling. “This cowboy saw you first.”
    We didn’t stay at the Cumberland. Andrew wanted to go to Chelsea to a pub, then on to a little restaurant he had discovered several years before. We took a bus, then walked along the Embankment in a warm, late afternoon, Andrew liking the ground under his feet after five days aboard ship.
    “Isn’t it marvelous?” he said, taking my arm. “You aren’t at work yet, and I have a week before I have to be at Cambridge. I want to really do London. I’ve only been here a day or two at a time since the war.”
    “Were you here in the war?”
    “Down in Sussex mostly, then into Holland, but I got into London quite a bit, and I always thought I’d come back here after the war to see what it was really like. It’s still a sad, war city, though, isn’t it?”
    We were looking at a great crater in the earth that has since been turned into a garden. In 1952 the tidying and high-fence building were still going on.
    “Was it as bad as you thought, getting away from home?” I asked, perhaps because the sadness in his face seemed abstracted; he wasn’t really looking at what he saw.
    “Yes. I had a badly symbolic thirtieth birthday just before I left.”
    “You’re thirty? It never occurred to me that you were that old.”
    “Oh, don’t you begin at it, too!”
    “It’s just that you don’t look… or seem…”
    “My father’s words exactly. A case of retarded development. Here I am, thirty years old with nothing to my credit but a B.A. in philosophy, some Boy Scout badges for an occupation war, and some business experience as my father’s ashtray emptier and my mother’s barman at charity luncheons. He’s quite right, of course. I’m not trained to do anything, and he doesn’t dare imagine what my experience would recommend me for. I’m not even married.”
    “Then he shouldn’t object to your getting a Ph.D. That will train you—”
    “But not for the job I’ll have to do. I told the old bastard he’d live forever and never turn over anything to anybody. And that’s true, but it’s not the way he sees it. ‘Poor old England,’ he said, ‘now the remittance men are going the other way’.”
    “I’m afraid I’d like your father,” I said.
    “How can that reassure me?” Andrew asked, “but it does. Come on. I’m thirsty for one of those filthy English gins.”
    While we drank, Andrew got out his appointment book and a fan of tickets he had bought while he was waiting for me. Around those he began to block out our “doing” of London, as careful of our feet and our stomachs and the variable English weather as he was of the interests we were willing to share. I did remember to reserve an evening for seeing you, but you had already promised John you’d go to an important party with him. Between us, we managed not to see each other for the week Andrew was in London. We were not exactly awkward about him. You had no patience with negative loyalty of any kind. If anything, I think you were comforted by my being able to go on liking him during the time that you couldn’t. But our experiences of Andrew were so different that it was hard to talk about him.
    I was not