From this, the talk moved to the probable future of China without Mao, and the only thing they could agree on was that it was impossible — given the almost total lack or communication between East and West — for a Western observer to guess which way China would turn now. The political situation apparently remained unsettled there, but what would finally shake out when a new equilibrium was reached? Another strong central figure like Mao, or an essentially faceless bureaucracy, as Russia tried for a while after Stalin? No one would even risk a guess. Bradford said, “You know Eugene White, don’t you? He’s with Asian Affairs at State. He told me they’ve been giving serious consideration to taking on tea leaf readers.”
Laughing, Edward said, “Appropriate, anyway.” The fight with his wife was safely gotten by, and the rest of the evening was pleasant and amiable.
Wednesday was the meeting with the former Italian Premier, which took place in the garden of the Italian Embassy. The Premier was an incredibly ancient and shriveled old man, who walked with a stick, and whose hands trembled all the time. Evelyn had come along for this meeting, and she felt both disgust and pity when the old man insisted on the gallant gesture of kissing her hand, his own hand communicating its tremor all the way up her arm.
The meeting was fairly brief, the discussion taking place with an interpreter, and in the limousine afterward Bradford looked at Evelyn with a proud smile on his face and said, “That man is two years older than I am.”
They dined Wednesday night at the home of the American Ambassador, with a dozen other guests, all American diplomats, including Edward and Janet Lockridge. Evelyn recognized three of the women she had seen at Carrie’s last Saturday.
She herself returned to Carrie’s Thursday afternoon, Carrie having phoned to say that this was a special occasion, an entirely different type of person today, “not that dull group you saw last week.” Being at loose ends with Bradford off for his third meeting with Kwong Lan Quey, Evelyn promised to come.
And it really was a different group today, led by an internationally known Italian movie producer, a short round man with a bushy black moustache, plus his internationally known Swedish movie star wife, a tall voluptuous blonde with little English and apparently nothing of any other language, plus the internationally known male American movie star who was to appear opposite her in her husband’s next Italo-French co-production, to be shot in Yugoslavia in September. They were all in Paris for contract-signing, and were at Carrie’s because there was apparently some sort of semi-secret past acquaintanceship between Carrie and the producer, both of whom spent the afternoon making broad hints and shushing one another.
It happened that Evelyn had met the American movie star several times already — a tall rugged man with the necessary cheek-wrinkles to allow him to head the cast in westerns — which he clearly didn’t remember and about which she didn’t remind him. The meetings had taken place during Bradford’s second Presidential election campaign, the one he lost. Presidential campaigns have an irresistible fascination for movie stars, who can be found lurking in the wings behind every candidate, impatient to get close enough to tell him which is his good side. This gentleman had been among the Hollywood contingent of Bradford’s last campaign, had made several contributions of gratifying size, had gone on brief speaking tours, and had signed whatever was put before him. No one likes to be reminded of the losing crusades one has returned from, so Evelyn acknowledged the introduction as though it truly were their first meeting, and he responded with a kind of hearty automatic gallantry that would probably have been as offensive to a European woman as last week’s Frenchman’s oiliness had been to Evelyn. But hearty automatic gallantry is a frequent fact of American life, and Evelyn hardly even remarked it this time.
Thursday evening, Bradford was more depressed than she’d ever seen him before. “I played him well,” he insisted grimly. “I haven’t lost that much, dammit, I know when I’m doing well and when I’m doing poorly. I played him as well as I’ve ever handled anything in my life, and there’s just nothing happening. I’m fishing, and there’s no fish in that lake.”
Later in the evening he said, “But why would he set this up if he didn’t have something to say? There has to be fish in the lake, or why did he invite me to come fishing?”
Friday they drove to Deauville, where a beach estate had been put at Bradford’s disposal. Evelyn swam in the Channel, in the Cote Fleurie, and Bradford sunned himself and tried to put aside his depression. It was just the two of them — plus the servants who came with the house and the inevitable guards — and it was almost like being at home in Eustace. For the first time, Evelyn truly missed Dinah.
It was two hundred kilometers back to Paris — one hundred twenty-five miles — and they left Sunday morning because Bradford’s final meeting with Kwong Lan Quey was to be today, beginning at one. On the drive back, Bradford said, “A dreadful possibility has occurred to me, and I only hope I’m wrong.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ve been trying to understand why he would want these meetings unless he had something to say. But there might be a reason. God alone knows what the political situation in China is at the moment, without Mao. Is it possible he thinks it will do him some political good at home if he’s had publicized meetings with an American, even an unofficial American like me? Is that all there is to it? God, I hope not.”
“What good could it do him?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He shook his head, and she saw that the suspicion was weighing on him, aging him. If he was right in what he suspected, he was being cruelly used, but far more than that, his high hopes, his desire to be useful and to have still some small part in increasing the possibilities of peace, had been pointlessly and brutally mocked. She wished there were something she could do, at the least something helpful she could say, but there was nothing.
She waited for him at the hotel, since he’d said this final meeting would definitely not last as long as the others, and it did not. He was back by two-thirty, grim-faced. “I was right,” he said, and would talk no more about it.
They took a late-morning plane the next day, Monday. Bradford had refused to speak to the press in Paris, although at Kennedy he agreed to make a statement but not to answer questions. While Evelyn stood to one side, watching him with helplessness, he grimly announced the results of his meetings with the Chinese official. He told of his growing suspicions, and of his finally having stated those suspicions to the Chinese, who neither admitted nor denied them. “He only suggested that unless I wanted to appear a gullible fool in the eyes of the world I would not repeat my conclusions in public. Well, I am a gullible fool. I was gullible in the quest for peace, and I cannot think of a nobler gullibility. But Kwong Lan Quey was also gullible, in that he thought he could use an American politician to further his own political career, and his gullibility contains not the slightest element of nobility. I may lose a little face as a result of all this, but I am an old man, and retired, and I don’t much matter anyway. But if Kwong Lan Quey was hoping to use the Paris meetings to further his career by demonstrating his ability to deal at a diplomatic level with Americans, he has failed. After this, there isn’t one American, I doubt there’s one European, who would be interested in talking with Kwong Lan Quey on any subject whatsoever.”
He went on to say that there were hopeful signs in the affair, that if a Chinese politician thought it worthwhile to demonstrate himself capable of diplomatic relations with Western politicians it was a fairly good indication of some sort of thaw in China, of at least the possibility that China was beginning to be ready to come out of her shell and meet with the rest of the world. With at least that small hopeful conclusion to offer, he didn’t consider his trip to have been entirely worthless after all.