Nothing So Strange Read Free

know what made me bring that up, but I realized it was the second
time that day I had mentioned something that I often go months without even
thinking about.
    He said, as he pulled the blinds and then the curtains: “I’d like to see
London again sometime.”
    “You probably could, when the war’s over.”
    “They say it’s considerably changed.”
    “I’ll bet our part hasn’t. Hampstead Heath and round about there.”
    “Several bombs fell near the house, I’ve been told,” he said thoughtfully.
It was still “the house” to us both. “Can I get you anything?”
    “No thanks—I’ll be asleep very soon, I’m terribly tired. Good night,
John.”
    After he had gone I stood at the window, pulling aside the blinds just
enough to see that it had begun to snow. The two great cities, each with its
own flavor, hold you like rival suitors, perversely when you are with the
other; and that night, as I watched the pavement whitening, I thought of
those other pavements that were called roadways, and the subways tubes, and
the whole long list of equivalents Brad and I once compiled as we tramped
across Hampstead Heath on a day when other things were in our minds.
* * * * *
    I first met him at Professor Byfleet’s house in Chelsea,
but I didn’t
catch his name when we were introduced, or perhaps we weren’t—the
English are apt to be slack about that sort of thing, they are civil but not
solicitous to strangers, and when you visit one of their houses for the first
time it’s hard not to feel you are among a family of initiates, or else a
dues-paying but nonvoting member of a very closed-shop union.
    This dinner at the Byfleets’ wasn’t anything important, at least by
comparison with many we went to; Byfleet was an anthropologist who wanted my
father to finance an expedition to New Guinea, so he doubtless thought he’d
have us meet his friends. I suppose they’d all been told we were rich
Americans, with the blow softened by adding that my mother was English. My
father never did finance the expedition, anyhow.
    As I said, I don’t remember actually meeting Brad, but when we got to the
table I noticed him some way further down on the other side, next to my
mother. Now and again I glanced at him, and with a rather odd feeling that I
had seen him somewhere before, though I couldn’t be sure; he was good-looking
in a restrained way, with dark, deep-sunken eyes, a long straight nose, and a
chin that was firm without being aggressive. There was also a mood of gravity
over him, tempered by a sort of intermittent nervousness as if he were
waiting for a chance to say something, not because he wanted to, or had
anything to say, but because he thought everyone must be wondering why up to
halfway through dinner he hadn’t spoken a word. I hoped my mother would soon
take pity on him, but his other partner moved first, and I could see that the
more she tried to draw him out the more he drew himself in. She was one of
those voluble unkempt Englishwomen who invade a conversation rather than take
part in it, and have a conspiratorial smile for the maid or butler, just to
show they’ve been to the house before.
    I missed what was happening across the table for a while, for my own
neighbor engaged me, a hearty professor of biology who mentioned, apropos of
the veal cutlets, that man had only scratched the surface of his possible
gastronomic repertoire, that practically the entire insect world was an
untapped storehouse of taste novelties, that dried locusts made an excellent
sandwich, that there were many edible caterpillars fancied by the Chinese,
and that native tribes in the Andean foothills pick lice from each other’s
heads and eat them with gusto. He seemed surprised when I wasn’t upset, and
after I had accepted another cutlet he confessed that he often opened up like
that to jeunes filles whom he found himself next to at dinners,
because in the event that they were bores