John Robert took a sip of the mixture. It seemed to go instantly to his head. Hattie still stood, rather wide-eyed, holding her glass. ‘Drink,’ he said; and as he said it he felt like some old enchanter.
Hattie sipped the drink. It went straight to her head too. ‘Oh!’
John Robert rambled back to his place and they both sat down.
Hattie said, ‘It’s nice.’
‘Do you miss America?’ he asked her. He did not often ask such direct, even such interesting questions. He felt as if he had never really questioned her before.
Hattie considered. She took another sip of her exciting drink. ‘I don’t think I believe in America. I think it’s a fiction. I mean it is for me. I imagined it.’
This was the most thought-provoking observation John Robert had ever elicited from her, it seemed to him very meaningful. ‘Yes. I feel that too in a way, though I’ve lived there much longer than you, of course, I grew up in England. Why is it, do you think?’
‘I don’t know - I’ve only just thought of this idea,’ said Hattie. ‘Perhaps it’s just a sort of transferred image of the largeness of it and the empty spaces - as if a human being couldn’t survey anything so huge. It’s as if one has to make a special effort on its behalf for it to be there at all. One would never feel like that about Europe. And then there’s the lack of past. I suppose all this is obvious really.’
The notion that Hattie was very intelligent had never figured in John Robert’s obsession about her. Of course she was not a fool. But she patently did not regard herself as particularly clever, and John Robert had never speculated on the point. Perhaps she was clever, perhaps (the terrible thought came to him) Hattie might one day become a philosopher. Was philosophical talent inherited? He could think of no examples. Keeping his head he said, ‘The physical being of the country has always seemed to me unconvincing, as if for real landscape we had to go elsewhere. That may be a matter of scale or because the country hasn’t been worked for so long. We recognize ourselves in our work.’
‘But it applies to the wild places too. I mean the Alps are more real than the Rockies. I’ve always felt the Rockies are a kind of hallucination. I wonder if it’s to do with the sort of paintings we’ve looked at.’
John Robert never looked at paintings but he was prepared to pick up the point. ‘Artists offer us shapes. European art had a good start. Is it the apparent shapelessness of America that strikes us here? That could affect us as a transferred image, to use your good phrase. What is shapeless is unreal.’
‘Some people like that,’ said Hattie. ‘I mean they think what’s shapeless is more real, more sort of informal and spontaneous, like a wild garden or dropping in for lunch.’
‘Good,’ said John Robert appreciatively, ‘but perhaps we should put the problem the other way round. Isn’t the trouble with us too that we don’t quite feel American. Do you feel American?’
‘No. But I am half American, and I value that. I’ve got an American passport.’
‘Perhaps what we’re feeling short of isn’t the landscape at all, it’s feeling American, and that makes us feel unreal. And then if there are two things, one real and one unreal, we have to take it that we are the real one, so we transfer the unreality to the other.’
‘Feeling American is terribly special. It’s such an achievement. It’s so miraculously solid, like something demonstrated and proved.’
‘Whereas being English isn’t. So we are the ones who are turning out to be unreal!’
‘No, no,’ said Hattie. ‘I won’t let you turn it round like that! America is something imaginary. California is imaginary.’
‘Oh California — ’
‘Of course I love the Rockies, I love Colorado, the lovely feeling of the snow at night and the aspens red and then mauve, you know, and the light - but I think I like the ghost towns best — ’
‘Not the wild country or the big cities but the ruins.’
‘Yes - somehow those derelict places - the old empty broken houses and the old mine workings and the wrecked wagons and the wheels lying in the grass - because it’s all so sort of recent and yet so absolutely gone and over, it seems somehow more touching and more past and more intense and more - real — ’
‘So you’ll believe in America when it’s all over!’
‘It’s ridiculous,’ said Hattie. ‘After all I’ve been - happy - In America.’ She paused here as if about to add wistfully: haven’t I?
‘Do you feel English?’
‘Oh no, how could I? I don’t feel I’m anything; that is to say, I suppose I’m unreal, whatever I am!’
John Robert saw for a moment, as in an insipid wedding photo, the strained anxious faces of Whit and Amy. Perhaps they had actually given him such a photo once. I could have made things different, he thought, and yet could I; it always seemed, for everything I ever thought of, too late. I left her in an empty desert of a childhood, that is her unreal America. And must she not now be recompensed? But not by me. Pain which had been mercifully and briefly absent returned. Then he remembered Tom McCaffrey. He had forgotten his mission, his plan, his final solution. Should he now hesitate, wait, reconsider? He had not rehearsed any speech and everything came out vaguely and casually. Later on he thought that this was probably the best way.
‘I must be off. By the way, you’ve got an admirer.’ He rose to his feet as he spoke.
Hattie, who was not expecting him to go, jumped up too, putting down her glass which was now almost empty. ‘Oh really, what sort of admirer?’
‘What sort do you think? A young man. Tom McCaffrey. He’ll probably ring you up. That’s what young men do these days.’
‘McCaffrey! He must be related to Mrs McCaffrey.’
‘Her son, well, step-son, the youngest one. Anyway I thought I’d warn you! I’d like that. He’d make you a nice husband!’ The last bit was intended to sound jocular but could not help seeming a bit portentous.
However, Hattie did not take it in, she was trying to imagine how he knew she existed. ‘But he can’t even have seen me!’
‘A lot of people have seen you, a lot of people are interested in you.’
‘How horrid.’
‘Anyway, I thought I’d mention his name in confidence, you know, as an introduction, so that you won’t just send him away.’
‘But I don’t want an admirer! It must be a joke!’
‘You are not a joke,’ said John Robert, and all his awkwardness returned. He said, ‘Well, if you don’t want an admirer, what do you want?’
‘I want a black cat with white paws!’ Hattie said this in a jesting tone, but now she was maladroit and awkward too. She added, ‘But of course, that’s not serious, I couldn’t have one, I mean unless I lived somewhere like here, and I don’t, and even here - there are foxes in the garden - did you know? - I wonder if a fox would attack a cat?’
‘Better no cat,’ said John Robert.
‘Better no cat.’ Suddenly for a moment it looked as if Hattie was going to cry, there was a kind of little gauzy hazy cloud in front of her eyes. She said, ‘You asked me what I missed. I miss my father. But that’s different. The cat made me think of him.’