Nothing So Strange Read Online Free PDF Page B

altogether.”
    “Mathews?”
    “The man next door to him.”
    “Oh yes … the one who … yes, I remember….”
    “All the same, though, he wasn’t scared of you .”
    She cuddled my arm and answered: “No, darling, it was I who was scared.
He’s a peculiar man.”
* * * * *
    Ever since schooldays I have kept a diary of sorts, mostly
the jotting
down of engagements, never anything literary or confessional. Brad makes his
appearance the first day I saw him; there’s the record: “Dinner Chelsea
Professor Byfleet. Gave a lift home to American boy researching at Coll.
Shy.” The entry for the day on which my mother came to tea is similarly
brief. Just: “Tea in Brad’s lab. Mother. Cat.” And about a week later comes
this: “End of College Term. Cat.”
    What happened was that I got home from an afternoon walk to find my mother
and Brad in the drawing room. They were talking together and my mother was
nursing a black and white cat which immediately she thrust into my arms.
“Look, Jane! It’s the same one! Brad just brought it—he’s given it to
me!”
    “It’s lovely,” I said, and I noticed she had called him Brad. So I said:
“Hello, Brad.”
    “Hello,” he answered.
    She went on breathlessly: “And it wasn’t what we thought at all…. Tell
her, Brad, unless….” She began to smile. “Unless you think she’s too young
to know.”
    My mother and I adored each other, but ever since I was about fourteen she
had talked to me as if I were her own age, but of me as if I
were still about twelve; and when this happened before my face I often got
confused and said just what a twelve-year-old would say.
    I did then. I said: “I’m not too young to know anything.” Brad took it
seriously. “I should say not. There’s nothing indecent about it.”
    “Oh, don’t be silly—I was only joking,” my mother interrupted. “Tell
her.”
    “It’s nothing much. Apparently you both thought those animals in the room
next to my lab were kept for vivisection. Anything but. All they have to do
is to reproduce, reproduce, and keep on reproducing. Probably quite pleasant
for them. Mathews is doing some new research in Genetics—he breeds a
succession of generations to find out how certain characteristics crop
up.”
    Now that I had the explanation the fact that even jokingly I had been
considered too young to know it made me almost feel I was. I said, in a
rather asinine way: “Wouldn’t Mathews mind you taking away his cat?”
    “He hadn’t begun any records of this animal, so any other would do just as
well. He said so. Technically, of course, I’ve stolen the property of the
University of London. How about calling the police?”
    We all laughed and I handed the cat back to my mother.
    “Mind you,” he went on, “don’t think I’m a sentimentalist. There’s a lot
of nonsense talked about cruel scientists—I’ve never met any myself.
Certainly at the College the men who have to do vivisections
occasionally—”
    My mother broke in: “You mean that it does go on there? I thought
you said—just for breeding—”
    “You must have misunderstood me—all I said was that the animals you saw, the ones Mathews keeps—”
    “All right, all right, let’s not talk about it any more.”
    “But you do believe me when I say that scientists aren’t cruel?”
    Brad was like that, as I found so many times afterwards; he could never
let well enough alone.
    My mother said: “Many people are cruel. Wouldn’t you expect some of
them to be scientists?”
    “Statistically, yes….”
    “Then I’ve won my argument. Have some tea.”
    I said good-by to him long before he went because I had to go upstairs and
pack; I was leaving for a holiday in Ireland the next morning. I think he
stayed till my father came home just before dinner.
* * * * *
    My mother wrote while I was away, just her usual gossipy
letters; one of
them mentioned Brad and said he had been up to the