Sitting beside McAlpine, she felt their separation in his silence. Even if she talked about each step he would take in his career and dazzled him with predictions of success, it would not bring him back to her. Something had happened. Something he concealed from her. What had really happened to him? Who had been taking him so steadily away from her? He had been taken, because it seemed to her he had found nothing wrong with her. And nothing was the matter with her. When she woke up in the morning everything was in its place – her clothes, her food, her furniture, the maid’s soft respectful voice, and the telephone calls coming from her friends. When she attended a Junior League meeting and spoke in her firm cultivated voice, she knew by the envious faces of her friends that there was nothing much the matter with her. Her sense of style, the way she wore her clothes, her laugh, the way McAlpine in the beginning had shown his eagerness to have her love – it all added up to the same thing. Night after night now, when she left him she would undress and sit by her window looking out at the street; and she would know someone was taking him from her.
She would be alone in her room. It would snow. And she would sit by the window wondering where McAlpine had gone and with whom, and then she would be reminded of one lost thing after another. She would remember how, when she was a little girl, her mother had wanted her to study ballet and she had refused, and ten years later when she had wanted to be a ballet dancer they had told her she had lost her opportunity; she was a little too old. One lost triumph after another, all trivial and irrelevant, would float in her mind; the time when she had bought a brown suit for a tea party and three other girls at the party had worn brown suits and so, of course, no one could notice hers; and the boys she had once quarrelled with, whose affections she had lost; and her mother, who had died young.
All the lost things of her life would fill her thoughts on those nights when it snowed and she sat by the window wondering if McAlpine had really gone back to his hotel after leaving her, and if he would dream of having her in the bed beside him. Or if, instead, he would be meeting Foley somewhere, more likely than not in that awful Chalet Restaurant, which was open all night, where he would sit around in the company of alcoholics who wanted to get rid of their women. Or maybe they would tease him about having been with her. She would be talked about. How unbearable it was to be talked about! But how much more unbearable that he should persist in having a place in his life where she could not enter, a low-brow drinking place for men which represented, no doubt, a taste he had picked up in the war. She longed to sweep it out of his life, but as yet she couldn’t; and yet any fool could see that she and her friends could do more for him in one hour than such a low-brow crew could do in six years. In her own bed, watching the shadowed corners of the room, she would twist and turn and assure herself that the only thing wrong with her was that she didn’t have enough to do. She could join a dramatic group, she could study interior decorating, or found a political study club, and yet really be working for Jim. And even now in the taxicab, why couldn’t he see that she only wanted to help him in the smallest details of his life, and that if she couldn’t she was lonely and that her cool Carver style only concealed her loneliness? She longed to feel his arm come around her.
“I’m hungry,” she said in that hearty clear tone she couldn’t help using. “I’d like some seafood. I know a place on Dorchester. No décor, Jim, but it serves the best lobster Thermidor in town.”
It turned out to be a barren little room. A draft came from the swinging doors every time they were opened, and they had to eat with their coats on. And the lobster Thermidor wasn’t remarkable, either.
“Nothing is right for us these days, eh, Jim?” Catherine asked pointedly. But McAlpine laughed. In such weather nothing was right for anybody, he said; and with that remark he fled from intimacy with her, and she knew it and frowned and watched his eyes. There were no tablecloths on the tables. The cutlery was like kitchenware. But the cheque would be solid and substantial, and he would resent it, thinking of his bill at the Ritz.
“Jim, what is it?”
“What?”
“I don’t know. You’re not really with me, are you? Where were you at the hockey game?”
“Sitting beside you,” he said, trying to laugh.
“No. Your thoughts. In your thoughts where were you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I can tell by your eyes. I can always tell, Jim. They’re always looking over my shoulder, and you’re not really listening.”
“Oh, come now! That’s nonsense.”
“Well, right now, for example.”
“I was thinking of a horse.”
“A horse? Whose horse?”
“Wolgast’s,” he said, with a little smile. “Wolgast’s white horse.”
“Wolgast? That mug. Is he your bookie now?”
“No. But there was a white horse once he wanted to own.”
“If he owned a horse it would soon be ruled off the track. Every race would be fixed.”
“No, it wasn’t a race horse. Just a white horse that took him places.”
“Who cares where Wolgast goes?”
“I mean it had just struck me that there’s a white horse for everybody. Call it possessions – security – a dream… There’s such a horse for your father – one for me – the guy, the girl next door.”
“So?”
“So, it’s bad if someone takes your horse.”
“And that’s why they used to shoot horse thieves,” she said lightly. “You’re downright strange tonight, Jim.”
“The chances are,” he said half seriously, feeling his way, “I might always seem like a stranger to you, Catherine.”
“And you and I might never really meet,” she said quietly. And she remembered that night at the Murdock party when he had said they could always be good comrades; a fine intellectual friendship; the pain she had felt at those humiliating words! And now, whether he complained about the lobster Thermidor or the icy draft from the door, he tried to withdraw from her still further. She ached with desire to possess his secret so she could deal with it – so she could struggle fiercely against whoever it was that had taken him from her. But not to know who was defeating her was to be shut out of his life completely and to have the emptiness in her mind and heart deepened and the intolerable anguish made more intolerable because she had to hide it.
Going out, they crossed the road, ploughing through the snow, wheeling helplessly against the mountain wind and waving at taxis sweeping by. The wind moaning and the air heavy with unbearable cold forced them to hang on to each other, weaving along the sidewalk. It was twenty below. McAlpine never wore heavy underwear, and Catherine had on her nylon stockings; they huddled together and became one form. And while they held on to each other for warmth the tension between them became a vast unbearable irritation, and finally Catherine suggested that they duck into the old Ford Hotel. They hurried into the warmth of the lobby and smiled with relief at being able to let go of each other.
They waited by the door, watching for a taxi bringing passengers to the hotel. It was really no trouble at all. In five minutes they were at the Château. Catherine insisted he come in and get a hat. Her father appeared in a blue polka-dot dressing gown and chuckled and produced a black Homburg of his own. It was the right size, too. He said, “The men in the black Homburgs can all wear each other’s hat. Keep it, my boy.” They had a few stirrup cups because it was so cold out. McAlpine had four stiff drinks from a bottle of Dewar’s, two for each block on the way to the hotel. He left wearing Mr. Carver’s hat.
On the street he felt warm and exhilarated. But he was afraid he might go down Crescent Street and humiliate himself if Peggy had company, so he entered the Ritz lobby and telephoned the Chalet and asked if Foley was there. Of course Foley was there, and he explained to him that he didn’t want to see Wolgast, and Foley offered to meet him in the Chicken Coop on St. Catherines and have some coffee.
It was extraordinary how warm and exhilarated he felt in the cold air on the way down to St. Catherine. And there was Foley waiting in the Chicken Coop with Commander Stevens, and they seemed to be exhilarated, too. They sat down and ordered chicken pies, and a coffee for McAlpine, who was grinning brightly.
“You didn’t notice my new hat,” he said. The restaurant warmth had hit him; it was the warmth and not Mr. Carver’s excellent whisky, he was sure, and he said, “Excuse me,” and got up to go downstairs to the washroom. The stairs were steep, yet he didn’t fall. It was incredible how easily he got down the stairs and locked himself in the washroom. But he couldn’t vomit; he could only sit there in deep meditation. Someone shook the door angrily. Finally he opened the door and stepped out and bowed to a pale-faced stranger supported by a powerful sailor who eased him gently into the chamber and glared at McAlpine.
McAlpine looked at the flight of stairs and knew he could never climb them, and so he leaned against the wash basin and waited and smiled thinly at the hostile sailor.
In five minutes Foley came hurrying down the stairs. “What’s the matter, Jim? The waiter brought our chicken pies,”
“I still think I should go in there,” McAlpine said, nodding at the privy.
“Then go in,” Foley said, and he rattled the handle of the door.
“Just a minute, friend,” said the sailor, the companion of the pale-faced incumbent. “Someone’s in there.”
“Well, my friend here has to go in there.” Foley said, shaking the door irritably.
“Well, I’ve got a friend in there.”
“My friend’s not going to stand around here all night,” Foley said angrily. “Tell you friend to get the hell out.”
“Tell your friend to take his time,” the sailor said.
“The hell you say! Your friend’s certainly taking his time.”
Foley and the sailor bristled and glared and elbowed each other belligerently. Foley wanted to fight. But McAlpine tugged weakly at his arm.
“I’ve been in there, Chuck,” he whispered. “It didn’t do any good. I’m just waiting here till I can climb the stairs. Don’t let your chicken pie get cold.”
“If you’re all right, Jim.”
“My respects to the Commander. His pie will be cold, too.”
“I’ll give you about five minutes,” Foley said, and he hurried up the stairs.
McAlpine waited until the pale man had come out and had been assisted up the stairs by his own devoted friend. Alone at the foot of the stairs he looked up longingly. It was the steepest flight of stairs he had ever seen. If only he could climb those stairs, everything would be all right. Peggy would not get into trouble. She would quit her wandering. She would turn to him.
And while he reached out for the banister and put his foot on the first step, looking up and concentrating, he had a moment of beautiful clarity. Since he had talked to Wolgast he had been confused in his thinking. It was not a matter of reasoning with Peggy or frightening her. That wouldn’t save her. If she was indifferent to the opinion of Wolgast or Wagstaffe and the fact that the whole town was turning against her, nevertheless she was not indifferent to him, James McAlpine. And how did he know she was not indifferent? The hours he spent in the room on Crescent Street were becoming a part of her life. Each day in his secret struggle with her, he was making gains so imperceptible and subtle that he himself had underestimated them. The main thing was to be always in that room when she came home from work. He began to climb the stairs. His head raised, his eyes fixed fanatically on the top step, he climbed with a slow, heavy, powerful determination, as if he were on his way to her room.