Vinson was very patient, very understanding, very kind, but he could not arouse Christine out of the numb lethargy in which she moved through the long days. He tried. He tried very hard to help her. He had a theory that the best way to get over the shock of an accident was to talk about it, and Christine sometimes felt that she would scream when he talked once more on the subject of the hitch-hiker, and how Christine must not feel responsible for his death, because if a man was foolish enough to take lifts on the highway he deserved all he got.
He was very forbearing. He did not upbraid her for her careless driving – although he would not let her drive the new car -and he never reminded her that she had promised him that she would never stop for anybody on the road. Utterly cast down, guilty and despairing, Christine found herself wishing that Vinson would be cross with her. His tolerance of her reckless mistake, his assurance that he would pay anything to get the best defence for her if she were charged with dangerous driving, his easy acceptance of her story about the hitch-hiker all piled reproach upon miserable reproach into her secret thoughts.
Vinson had come back determined, as she had been when she left England, to start their marriage off again more happily and forget the sorry time they had been through. He was expecting his promotion to come up at the next selection board, and he was always reminding her of that, promising her that she should be a captain’s wife, as if he were offering candy to make a child happy.
Christine moved dully and purposelessly through the long days, and the nights when she lay awake, haunted by her thoughts. The only thing she saw clearly was that Vinson must never know about Tommie. It would be the end of even this pretence at marriage that they had between them now.
She did not let Vinson see her cry. She did her weeping after he was asleep, or when she was alone in the house in the afternoon when the day seemed never-ending. The only time she wept before him was one Saturday morning when they were sitting late over breakfast and the letter came from Margaret. Christine opened the letter unthinkingly and had read half through it before she came to the bad part.
‘Did you ever meet our friend Tommie Burns on the boat?’ Margaret wrote. ‘I wonder if you heard about the terrible thing that happened to him. He was hitch-hiking to New York – just the sort of crazy thing he would do – and he was killed by some fool of a woman driver who gave him a lift.’
Christine did not move. She sat stiffly at her end of the kitchen table with tears rolling down her face, unable even to raise a hand to wipe them away.
‘What’s the matter, honey? What on earth’s the matter?’ Vinson got up and came to her.
‘It’s nothing.’ Christine crumpled the letter in her lap. ‘A letter from Margaret. Somebody – somebody that she and I knew is dead, that’s all.’
‘Somebody you were fond of?’
Christine shook her head.
‘Well, you mustn’t cry for that. Your nerves are all upset these days, honey, that’s what it is.’ Being an American, that was a thing he could understand in a woman. ‘I wish you’d go see a doctor.’
If it were as simple as that. If only she were a neurotic woman who could go to a doctor and get solace from injections of sterile water and egotistical hours of lying on a couch and being psycho-analysed.
Once she drove with Vinson past the narrow little red-brick house in Georgetown that looked like a slice of a house instead of a house. Vinson liked to drive through Georgetown whenever he was in that part of Washington. He liked to point out its old-world beauties to Christine and tell her that when they had made their million that was where they would live. What would he have said if Christine had turned to him and said: ‘When you were in Coco Solo I lived in that red house with the white door for a week with a man I was in love with’?
The white door had a black-and-white notice on it saying FOR RENT. Down the hill of Thirty-Fourth Street and over the crossing of Volta Place, two fire-engines sped with sirens screaming, as Christine had so often heard them come screaming through the night from the fire station on Q Street.
‘When you were in Coco Solo, Vinson,’ she would say, ‘I lived for a week in that silly red house with a man I was in love with.’
Because she would never say it, it was interesting to toy with the idea of how Vinson would react. Would he really have said and done all the things she had told Tommie he might if Tommie did not stay away from her? She would never know now, any more than she would ever know whether he would have tried to make her give Timmy away or have him destroyed. All her problems had been solved, very neatly, by tragedy.
Admiral Hamer would be on the selection board which would either make Vinson a captain or leave him a commander for another year; therefore Admiral and Mrs Hamer must be invited for cocktails.
‘Oh, Vin, why?’ Christine said. ‘Surely if they want to make you a captain they’ll do it whether you pour the old man full of martinis or not.’
‘That has nothing to do with it,’ Vinson said stiffly. ‘It’s simply a friendly, courteous gesture that we should make at this time. You ought to get to know Mrs Hamer better. I’d like to have them just sit down here with us and feel at home.’
It seemed an unlikely picture, but Vinson was bent on it, so Christine acquiesced. She would have to make some delicate canapés and polish up the silver tray, but she would not wash the white paint of the mantelpiece as Vinson said she must.
‘Why should I? Good Lord, you talk as if they were royalty. A house is supposed to look lived in, and you can’t have fires without getting smudge marks. Everyone knows that, even Mrs Hamer, I should think, though she doesn’t know much.’
‘What’s come over you, Christine? You used to be so particular about the house.’
‘That was before … That was when I… Well, I felt like it then. Now it doesn’t seem to matter any more.’
‘It matters very much. I want you to wash the mantelpiece.’
‘I’ve got better things to do.’ It would not take her half an hour to clean the paint round the fireplace, but it had now become an issue.
She would not do it, and so on the day the Hamers were invited, when Vinson came home he fetched a bucket of water and a cloth and a tin of scouring powder and went on his knees to wash the paint. He did not do it reproachfully. He did it quite happily, humming tunelessly while he worked, and imagining Mrs Hamer saying to the Admiral what a nice trim house the Gaeglers had, everything spick and span in true Navy fashion.
Christine was in the kitchen in her dressing-gown, putting out the canapés. Mrs Meenehan came in to tell her that there was a soap sale on at the supermarket, and insisted on showing her how to cut radishes to look like little crowns, although Christine preferred to cut them like flowers in the way she knew.
‘I had a letter from my friend Mary Grady,’ Mrs Meenehan said. ‘She sent you her regards, and said how much she’d enjoyed meeting you and your cousin. How is that handsome cousin of yours, by the way? Is he still around? I thought he was just the most charming man. It was so nice for you to have him to squire you while the Commander was away.’
Mrs Meenehan had a carrying voice. She could stand outside her back door and talk in her normal tones, and Christine could hear her quite easily from her own house. When she was close to you, she did not bother to turn down the volume any more than she ever turned down the television set.
Had Vinson heard? Was he going to be suspicious now? Frightened, Christine began to think of how she could lie her way out of this.
When Mrs Meenehan had gone, Vinson came into the kitchen to empty his bucket.
‘Finished cleaning?’ Christine asked brightly to disguise her uneasiness.
‘Just about. It looks much better now.’
‘It looked all right before, I thought.’
Vinson ignored this. ‘What was Mrs M. saying about your cousin?’ he asked. ‘You didn’t tell me a relative of yours had been here.’ His voice sounded casual, but Christine was afraid.
‘Didn’t I?’ She tried to speak airily. ‘I suppose I must have forgotten. There were so many other more important things.’
‘Who was he? Nice guy?’
‘Not particularly.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Why?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Vinson went over to the refrigerator. ‘I thought you might like to tell me about him, that’s all.’
‘There’s nothing to tell. He was a bore.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Vinson seemed satisfied. How easy it was to lie. How frighteningly easy to deceive. Christine hated herself for telling yet another lie, and suddenly she hated Vinson for being so easily deceived. How silly of him to be so unsuspecting. He with his dramatic jealousies over nothing at all could not now recognize it when he had a real cause for jealousy. Now that the moment of danger was past, her relief quickly turned to annoyance. Her nerves were strung up into a hot taut thread of irritation.
Vinson turned and said: ‘I wish you’d go up and take off that dressing-gown and get ready.’
‘Don’t fuss,’ Christine snapped. She would have liked to scream at him.
‘But you forget,’ he said earnestly. ‘The Admiral will be here in half an hour.’
‘Oh, damn the Admiral!’ Christine burst out. She had thought this so many times, but never risked saying it. She would think it many times again. She saw her future in sudden desperation.
‘I’m sick of the Admiral!’ she cried. ‘I’m sick of Mrs Hamer too – and all of them. I’m sick of the whole Navy!’
‘And sick of me?’ Vinson asked calmly, taking the ice trays to the sink.
Christine drew in her breath. So the crisis was here. For a moment she could not answer; then she said jerkily: ‘Vin, it’s no good. I can’t go on.’
‘What’s that? I can’t hear you with the water running.’
When he turned off the tap, she told him about Tommie. There seemed nothing else to do. It was the time now to finish everything.
Vinson listened without a word until her degrading story was done. It was degrading now. The romance and the glory were faded, dead as Tommie was dead. It was just the sorry little story of an unfaithful wife.
Vinson was sitting at the kitchen table, tracing the pattern of the plastic cloth. Christine went and stood before him at the end of the table, like a prisoner before a judge.
‘Well,’ she asked wearily, ‘now what?’
‘Nothing,’ he said without looking up. ‘I knew this already.’
‘You knew?’
‘Yes, I knew. Chet Staples, a civilian who works in the Navy Department, told me he’d seen you with this man at a party, and – oh, some of the things he’d heard. Chet’s the kind of guy who likes to break that sort of news.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me you knew?’
‘I was waiting for you to tell me about it.’
‘And if I never had?’
‘I knew you would, Christine. You’re honest.’
‘I’m not honest!’ she said passionately. ‘How can you say that after what I’ve done to you? How can you be so -so calm about this, Vin? What’s wrong with you? Don’t you care?’
He looked over her head out of the kitchen window where the tulip tree held out bare branches to a cold drizzle of rain. As if he were speaking to himself, he said: ‘I’ll leave it to you to guess how much I care.’
‘This is the end then – isn’t it? We can’t go on together with this between us.’
‘We couldn’t have gone on with this as a secret between us. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t told me. But you have, and so – no, this isn’t the end. Could be it’s the beginning of something a bit better for us?’ He put it as a question, looking at her with a shy pleading, like a child that does not know if it is going to be praised or scolded.
‘Could be?’ Christine felt her face lifting in a smile. As Vinson rose to move towards her, the front-door bell struck him rigid, his kiss arrested in mid-air.
‘My God – the Admiral!’
‘Let them ring. Let them think we’re out, or dead, or -’
‘For Christ’s sake, Christine!’ Vinson gripped her arm hard and turned her towards the door. ‘Get upstairs at once and make yourself look like something. Don’t you understand? It’s the Admiral!’
Christine kissed him lightly and picked up the skirts of her dressing-gown. ‘Yes, dear,’ she said, and ran upstairs smiling, as the bell pealed again, and a hand that could be only Mrs Hamer’s pounded the brass knocker on the door.