“TRY to keep the poetry separate,” said May. “The rest can be arranged later.” She made her way around the boxes of books and china to the doorway, and called up the stairs. “Clem! When you’re finished up there, you could help Nettie with the books.” She had a powerful, almost insistent voice and she evidently assumed that her husband heard her, for she came back into the living room without waiting for his reply and knelt down on the rug beside Nettie. “I can make a start on the china.”
“Is Shakespeare poetry?” asked Nettie, peering into a box.
“No, he belongs with the set of Elizabethan dramatists —the old leather ones. But let Clem lift the heavy books.” May was uncoiling newspaper from around a jug. Her broad, tawny head was lowered over the china into a shaft of sunlight, and its brilliant color made her actions seem less businesslike than usual. “Dreadful to think this will all have to go back to town in the autumn. Still, I’m glad
we came early this year, in spite of the cold. And perhaps Clem can take long weekends when the summer comes, and be less in town. It’s hard on him to travel so far for just the two days. And you, too, Nettie, now that you’re living in town. Don’t forget—whenever you like, Clem can drive you up for the weekend.”
“Thank you,” the girl said. She had filled the lowest shelf of the bookcase and now sat back on her heels to survey it.
“Nettie, are you all right?”
Nettie blew some dust off A Shropshire Lad and looked at May over the end of the book. “Yes, of course.”
“You seem a bit pale.” May lowered her voice slightly. “Aren’t you well? Would you like an aspirin?”
“I’m fine. Really.” Nettie turned back to the shelves with a load of books. She had rolled up the sleeves of her heavy blue sweater, and her thin forearms were grubby from the books. An imprecise black pigtail dangled between her hunched shoulders.
May eyed her for a moment with determination rather than concern, but was distracted by steps on the stairs. “Here’s Clem, anyway. He can fill the top shelves.”
“What is it I’m supposed to do?” her husband asked—apparently as a formality, since he went straight to the books and began stacking them on upper shelves. “Why on earth Meredith? … And Galsworthy—Oh, for God’s sake, darling.” He turned round to May with a book in his hand.
“Dear, I’ll be here for almost six months, you know. Mostly with just the children.”
“No reason to lose your head completely.” He placed the book alongside the others. “Who was that on the telephone?”
“Oh, the Bairds are back—that was Sarah. They opened their house last week. Sent you their love. I asked them for dinner tomorrow night.”
“I thought you had to collect Matt from your mother’s tomorrow.” Their elder boy was spending a few days at his grandmother’s, thirty miles away.
“I’ll be back before dinner. And Marion can have everything ready—I’ve asked her to stay a little later tomorrow evening.”
Clem grunted. Nettie had only completed the two low est shelves, and he was already stooping to fill the middle of the bookcase. He was tall and light on his feet and looked less than his age, which was forty-two. He had an air of health and confidence as he handled the books, lifting them from the box, glancing at their titles, and ramming them quickly along the shelves. He, too, had rolled up his sleeves, and his arms as they moved back and forth contrasted with Nettie’s fragile and ineffectual ones.
“Here’s Byron,” he said, handing Nettie a book. He looked down at her for the first time, and pulled on her plait of hair. “What’s this floppy thing?”
Self-consciously, she put up her left hand, the book in
her right. “I haven’t had time to do it properly.” They resumed their work.
I suppose, Nettie thought, as she made a space between two books and fitted Byron into it, that I am in love with Clem. Love is so much talked and written about, you might expect it to feel quite different; but no, it does correspond to the descriptions—it isn’t commonplace. More like a concentration of all one’s energies. There seems to be a lot of waiting in it, though. I am always waiting for Clem to come into a room, or for other people to go out: Clem, whom I’ve known all my life and who is married to my cousin May. (Her hands, patting the books into an even row, trembled. ) I’ve been close to him a thousand times, and this is the first time it has made me tremble. Would I have discovered that I loved him, if he hadn’t drawn my attention to it? And is that really only a week ago?
Now Clem, too, had to kneel, and her cheek came level with his shoulder. He smiled at her, a brief, open smile. Nettie reached up, still pushing the books into line, and the sweater rose above her skirt, showing a white, ribbed strip of her skin.
May rose, and took up a stack of plates. “There. I’ll leave these in the kitchen and Marion can wash them later, with the lunch dishes.” She moved across the room and out of the shaft of sunlight. Her back looked, once more, entirely businesslike. She had a slow, deliberate way of walking—as if she had once been startled into precipitate
action and had regretted it. It was the walk of a woman who dealt with men in a straightforward way and must suffer the consequences. Her steps sounded down the uncarpeted corridor.
Clem got to his feet and rummaged in the last box. “What are these?” He held up a book he did not recognize.
“Those are mine. I thought I’d leave them for the summer. I’ll take them up to my room.” Nettie got up, wincing, and rubbed her knees.
He pulled the books out one at a time, flicking open the front covers. “Annette Bowers … Annette Bowers … A. Bowers … Annette Bowers.” He brought them to her, stacked between his palms, and put them into her grasp without releasing them. “Annette Bowers. I love you.”
“Not.”
“Yes, I tell you,” he said, shaking his head and widening his eyes in imitation of her. “Did you know that—somewhere in India, I think—there are people who shake their heads as a sign of assent, instead of nodding them?” Without lowering his voice, he went on: “What have you thought about all week?”
“You,” she said gravely, with her hands about the books.
He leaned forward and kissed her brow. “Now, take your books upstairs, there’s a good girl,” he said.
She walked past him and out of the room.
“Oh, Clem, help her,” May said, coming from the kitchen and passing Nettie in the corridor.
“I can manage,” said Nettie.
May came back into the living room and sat down in an easy chair. She crossed her legs and lit a cigarette. “Do you think Nettie’s all right?” she asked Clem.
He was piling the abandoned wads of newspaper into an empty carton. “Why not?” he asked.
“Oh, sometimes she seems such a … waif. Perhaps we should do more for her, now she’s living away from home.”
He had fitted the empty boxes, ingeniously, one inside the other. “We have our own lives to lead,” he said.
May left early in the morning. Having meticulously calculated time and distance on a piece of paper, she could tell the hour at which she would reach her mother’s house, how long she must, in order not to seem hurried, linger over lunch there, and when she and Matt might reasonably be expected home. Seated neatly dressed at the wheel of the car, she gave an impression of carrying away with her all the order and assurance of the house.
Nettie, untidy in a dressing gown, received last instructions with a series of nods whose very frequency betrayed inattention. May has our day all planned, she thought, as well as her own. She has allowed for everything except what will happen. The engine started, and Nettie waved. When the car disappeared, she turned back to the house abruptly, dissociating herself from Clem.
“Can we play dominoes?” asked Kenny, the younger boy, who had been left in her charge.
“When I’m dressed,” she said.
“Doesn’t it seem a pity,” Clem said, “to waste a day like this inside?”
“We could go for a walk along the beach,” said Nettie, still addressing herself to Kenny.
“I’d rather play dominoes.”
“All right, let’s play dominoes first. We could go for a walk after lunch.”
While they played dominoes, the day deteriorated. They sat down to lunch with a Sunday halfheartedness, Clem short-tempered from not having had his way and Kenny petulant from having had his. Marion, the maid, came and went between the kitchen and the dining room, as though they were, all three, fractious children who needed supervision. The cold meat that had seemed a good idea in the morning now simply contributed to the day’s feeling of being left over.
After lunch, Nettie proposed again the walk that now nobody wanted, and out of sheer perverseness they walked on the deserted beach. Nettie wore a raincoat and Kenny a waterproof jacket with a broken zipper. A wind had come up, releasing little swirls from sand that had been tightly packed all winter. The sky hung over the low-lying land, huge as a sky in a Dutch painting. Clem could not light his cigarette, although he persisted in trying. Nettie struggled to fold the flapping triangle of her scarf over her hair. After she had accomplished this, Kenny put his hand in hers, but when Clem took her hand on the other side the child pulled away and ran ahead of them down the beach.
“Children know everything,” Nettie said.
“Well, they have a kind of insight into fundamentals. I don’t think one can call that knowledge.” He would not let her withdraw her hand from his. “You look such an orphan in that raincoat.”
“I always look a bit like that, apparently.”
“That’s what May said.”
“What did she say?”
“That you looked a waif. That we should do more for you.”
“What did you say?”
“I looked preoccupied and said we had our own lives to lead.”
Freeing her fingers at last, she put both her hands in her pockets and they walked a little way in silence.
He looked at her, faintly amused. “What should I have said?”
“I don’t know. Did you mean that when you said it? I mean, what did you feel?”
“You’d be happier if I had felt a liar and a hypocrite?”
“That, at least, would be a redeeming feature.”
He shrugged. “I rather thought I’d redeemed myself by telling you about it.” He was a little bored. “I see no object in hurting people unnecessarily.”
“It would be all right if it were necessary?”
“You say all the wrong things,” he observed. “You have no experience—you’re thrown back on your intuitions, like Kenny. That’s why you make these judgments on yourself and others.”
She spread her hands, distending the pockets of her raincoat. “I’m afraid of this. Of not knowing what will happen next.”
“Ah, well,” he said, offhandedly, “you would have come to some things pretty soon in any case, if only out of curiosity. As for the other things, you simply attract them by worrying about them. What you fear most will happen to you—that is the law.”
No one had spoken to her in this way before, and for a moment she actually imagined the words sternly inscribed in a statute book. Now Clem thrust his hands into his pockets, which had the effect of making Nettie, repudiated, distractedly bring out her own.
“Watch for shells!” Kenny roared from the horizon.
Neither of them replied. Presently Clem laughed and looked at her, and touched her shoulder with his. “You’re a fool,” he said, more kindly.
“But what have I done wrong?”
“You got born twenty years too late.”
So immense and so complex did the gulf between them appear to her that it was a shock to have it simply stated as a matter of bad timing on her part. She had once been told that the earth, had it been slightly deflected on its axis, would have had no winter; and the possibility of a life shared with Clem appeared to her on the same scale of enormity and remote conjecture. Inexperienced, as he had pointed out, she had no means of knowing if his remarks were excessively unfeeling. She knew him in his
daily life to be a reasonable man; from ignorance, she assumed that his conduct now would represent the same proportions of logic and compassion.
“Let’s go back,” he said. He cupped his hands and shouted to Kenny. Of Kenny’s response, only the word “shells” could be distinguished. They retraced the pattern of their steps on the sand, the wind now at their backs.
“The Bairds are coming for dinner,” Clem remarked.
“I met them once, last year.”
“Vernon is rather a bore, but I like Sarah. She has the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.” He glanced round to be sure that Kenny was following.
Nettie, annoyed, said nothing. Her dim recollection of Mrs. Baird became tinged with antagonism—a plump, middle-aged woman bullied by her husband.
“I have never heard her say an unkind thing,” Clem continued, “about anybody.”
Nettie reflected that this, when said of a woman, made her sound totally uninteresting.
“You can entertain Vernon at dinner,” Clem said.
“How?”
“Simply by listening to him, I should think. He likes shy young things. Although you’re not exactly shy, are you? It’s rather as though you were afraid we might all find out what you think of us.” They climbed up a bank onto the road. “I wish we were alone,” he said, as though their entire conversation had been irrelevant. He opened a gate and held it for her.
“There’s Marion,” Nettie said.
Marion had come out of the house and was standing in the drive. She put her hands to her mouth and shouted to them.
“She can’t be collecting shells, too, can she?” Clem made a gesture of not hearing, and Marion shouted again. This time, as in the case of Kenny, one word only was distinct.
“The damned telephone,” he said. “You bring Kenny. I’ll go ahead.”
Nettie waited by the gate for Kenny, who was walking —inexplicably—backward. Clem had disappeared into the house. Marion stood by the door, holding it almost closed against the wind. When Nettie came up the steps, Marion still grasped the doorknob—as if, Nettie thought, one could not enter the house without first being brought up to date on its contents.
“Matt has a temperature.”
“Is that May on the phone?”
“Yes. They can’t drive back today—Kenny, turn round at once or you’ll fall over something—Matt has a temperature of a hundred and two.”
Nettie dressed for dinner with great care. Instead of bending hurriedly before the speckled mirror above her chest of drawers, she propped the mirror by the bed, in the strongest light, and sat in front of it. She combed her hair and wound it into a circle at the back of her head and
fastened it there. She brushed the shoulders of her black dress, and clasped a string of pearls around her neck, and put on high-heeled shoes. When she was quite ready, she sat once more on the bed and took her hair down, and put it up again in the same way.
As she came downstairs, the hallway was cold from the passage of night air. The Bairds had arrived. Sarah Baird had let Clem take her coat and was standing at the foot of the stairs in a dark-blue dress; her eyes, shining from the brief drive, were very fine indeed. Vernon looked up as Nettie joined them. From the slight surprise in his face, Nettie thought that she had been right, after all, to do her hair a second time.
“Ah, here she is,” Clem said.
Sarah turned and, although they scarcely knew each other, kissed Nettie. So did Vernon. “Are you warm enough in that dress?” Sarah asked her.
“It’s wool,” said Nettie, speaking for the first time.
Clem put away Vernon’s hat and shut the closet door. “There’s a fire in the living room,” he said. He laid his hand lightly on Nettie’s shoulder as they moved away.
Clem poured out drinks, and they sat down by the fire. Clem rattled the ice in his drink and talked about Matt’s temperature. He had been trying to telephone May all evening; the telephone, on a party line, was being used.
“You must tell them it’s an emergency,” Sarah began indignantly.
Nettie, leaning back in a deep chair as the others bent
forward to the fire, reflected that Matt’s temperature was, socially, a godsend to them all. Sarah, it seemed, moved with complete ease among children’s temperatures, virus infections, the possibility—not to be ruled out—of measles. Briefly, she took charge of the conversation. “Try not to worry,” she said, implying that one must by all means worry, though possibly not to distraction. The Bairds had four children, all of whose temperatures had, at one time or another, considerably outclassed Matt’s.
She really is quite stupid, Nettie decided, believing—erroneously—that fine eyes could not atone for stupidity.
Looking away from Sarah, she was disconcerted to find Vernon watching her. If he were capable of interpreting her scrutiny of Sarah, she wondered, would he mind? Or was it just that he took an interest in other women? But his interest gave the impression of being so general that it almost amounted to fidelity. And immediately she asked herself, “Is Clem like that? Has he done this before? Will he do it again?” The last of these questions pained her so much that she left all of them unanswered. Of course with Clem it was not the same at all, utterly different, the comparison was meaningless … But in what way different?
“I know what’s different,” Vernon said suddenly. “You’ve changed your hair since I last saw you.”
“And since I last saw you,” said Clem, turning a little to smile at her. She thought that his tenderness, after the day’s indifference, was like a warning.
“Clem could try the telephone again,” Vernon said, “before we sit down to dinner.”
When Vernon pushed Nettie’s chair in to the table, he rested his hand, as Clem had, briefly on her shoulder. It troubled her to sit in May’s place, and for that reason she took no responsibility for the meal, allowing the dishes to pass without offering to serve them, behaving as less than a guest. She was grateful to Vernon for requiring—as Clem had predicted—nothing more than a hearer. He seemed content that she should stare down onto the polished table beside her plate so long as her head was slightly inclined toward him. Once, she looked up, and Clem, who was talking to Sarah, lifted his eyes. Studying the table again and tracing the grain of the wood with her finger, she thought there had been no intimacy in his look, only a reflection of her own preoccupation, and a sort of recalcitrance. She felt that she could not breathe properly, and she disappointed Vernon by uttering a sharp sigh. The tabletop bore the damp mark of her lifted finger.
“Of course, I’m an incurable romantic,” Vernon was saying. He made it sound like a disease.
“Of course,” she said.
After dinner, they went back to the fire. The living room was furnished, as rooms in summer houses often are, with the mistakes and discards of a town apartment. Unabashed, these had assumed a certain style of their own. The rug was a deep cocoa color, worn pale and thin near the door and by the sofa. The chairs, with one or two defections, tended toward dark green. There was a mosaic coffee table, made by a relative, and two ash trays that had seemed a good idea one hot afternoon in Cuernavaca. The same
rash expedition to Mexico was responsible for a black and brown painting in which a man and woman stared at each other with unmistakable resentment.
When the telephone rang, Clem put his coffee cup and saucer down on the uneven mosaic, where they rocked a little, and went into the hall. They heard him speaking loudly, as people do on a long-distance call even when the connection is good.
“He doesn’t sound alarmed,” said Nettie.
Sarah said: “One never knows. With these things.”
Clem’s voice went on, with long pauses. Instinctively they watched the doorway, but it was Marion, not Clem, who first appeared there, startling in a coat and hat. She gave a polite but meaning glance at Nettie, who with a little gasp of recollection sprang up from her chair and left the room.
In the drawer of the hall table there was an envelope that May had marked “Marion,” and this Nettie now passed on stealthily. “I hope it’s right,” she said, having no reason to doubt it.
Marion, infinitely more assured than Nettie, put the envelope in an immense black handbag. “I’ll be over tomorrow,” she said. “And I hope Matt’s all right.”
“Yes. Thank you. Good night,” said Nettie. She closed the front door. Clem, sitting on the stairs with the telephone receiver in his hand, was still talking, but with a terminal inflection. As she passed him, he reached out and touched her dress. Matt must be better, she thought.
When she came back into the living room, Vernon was
leaning forward as if he had been speaking earnestly. Sarah, Nettie noted, look confused. Nettie did not sit down, but started to assemble the empty cups on a tray.
“Let me help,” Sarah said, taking up the coffeepot.
“Don’t bother, really. I’ll just leave them in the kitchen.” Nettie was halfway to the door.
“Matt is better,” said Clem, appearing in the doorway. “It’s a throat infection, apparently.”
“I knew it,” Sarah said.
“His temperature is down.”
“I’m so glad.” The coffeepot waggled slightly. “Perhaps I should have spoken to May. What is she planning to do?”
“She’s going to call me in the morning. It depends how he is—she may stay there a day or two.”
Nettie took a firmer grip on the tray and walked on down the corridor. “Be careful,” she said over her shoulder to Sarah, who at once followed her with the coffeepot. “There’s a step.” She pushed open the kitchen door with her elbow. “Can you find the light? On the left. Thanks.” The light fell, dazzling, on aluminum saucepans and a huge white refrigerator. “Just put it anywhere. I’m not going to wash them tonight.”
Sarah kept the coffeepot in her hands, but came across the room. “Nettie,” she began, with as much solemnity as haste would allow. “We would be so pleased if you would come home with us.”
Nettie put the tray down carefully by the sink. Taking up the sugar bowl, she walked past Sarah and put it away
in a cupboard. “Because of the ants,” she remarked apologetically. She returned to the sink and started to pour away the dregs from the cups. “I don’t understand,” she said. Blankly, she felt this to be true. It was her own stillness she did not understand.
Sarah came and stood at the sink, so that it was impossible not to look at her. She had a flushed, uncomfortable expression and Nettie noticed that her eyes were not only pretty, but even kind. “No, of course. But Vernon feels—People around here gossip so. Unprincipled, really. You shouldn’t be exposed to that.” Sarah grew impatient before Nettie’s empty look. “And, of course, we’d love to have you.” Her voice ran down.
It is really quite easy to have the advantage over people, Nettie thought—if you can be bothered. You just have to keep quiet and look at them. “I’ll have to see what Clem thinks,” she said at last. She finished stacking the rinsed dishes and dried her hands. She exchanged a hopeless little smile with Sarah. “You go ahead,” she said. “I’ll put the light out. Watch the step.”
In the hall, she stopped to straighten a mirror. She felt that she had unlimited time at her disposal. She could hear voices raised in the living room, and for a moment stood still with a child’s pleasurable horror in listening to a grown-up quarrel. She stared into the mirror, exasperated —as Sarah had been—by her own unresponsiveness; to see her feelings reflected in her face would have made them clearer to her. But here was, simply, a strained, alarmed expression made the more unfamiliar by the care
with which it had that evening been powdered and embellished.
As he entered the room, she heard Clem’s voice, cold and angry. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“But don’t you think …” Sarah’s voice wavered anxiously. It was her fate that evening not to be understood.
Clem broke in. “Good Lord, she’s like a daughter in this house. What an extraordinary idea. Perfectly extraordinary. In fact,” his voice rose on a short, humorless laugh, “if we didn’t know each other so well, I would say it was—downright insulting.”
“Oh dear,” Sarah said. Vernon had not said a word.
Nettie came further into the room and glanced at Clem. She saw that he had managed to be genuinely angry—angry in some way with her, too. She felt chilly, and walked past him to the fire.
There was an arduous silence. The fire flared and crumbled, and flared again. Resting her arm on the mantelpiece, Nettie stayed with her back to the room, in an attitude of unintended pathos.
“Oh, hell,” said Clem, concedingly. He laughed, more encouragingly, and reached into his pocket for cigarettes.
“Why are things so complicated?” Sarah asked generally. Nettie looked round at her with compassion.
“Let’s all sit down and have a brandy,” Vernon suggested.
“That’s a rather better idea,” Clem said. “Sarah—never mind. No harm done.”
She gave a nervous, relieved little laugh. “Oh, Clem.
I can’t tell you how sorry—No, Vernon, of course we can’t. It’s so late. Clem, we must be going.” Suddenly active, she discovered her handbag beneath a cushion on the sofa. “Here it is.”
“Are you really leaving?” asked Clem. He took her arm. They went into the hall. Vernon followed them, but stood back at the door to let Nettie pass. They did not look at one another.
Clem was bringing coats, and Vernon’s hat, from the closet. Sarah kissed Nettie again and drew on her gloves. “Be sure to let me know how Matt is.” She let Clem kiss her cheek. “I do hope it isn’t anything serious,” she said. “Clem, dear, do forgive—”
“No harm done,” he repeated. He smiled with complete good will; he almost looked pleased.
Vernon took Nettie’s hand briefly and released it. He followed Sarah into the garden, and Nettie stood where he had left her, behind the open door. Clem, holding the door handle, watched them go to their car. He called good night, and waved once or twice with his free hand. Sarah called out that the grass was wet. A car door, improperly closed, was banged several times before Vernon started the engine.
When the sound of the car receded, Clem closed the front door and switched off the outside lights. He linked across the lock a small gilt chain in which May had complete confidence. Now, thought Nettie, he will hesitate and smile. Instead, he turned at once with a grave, concerned face, and took her into his arms.
They stayed this way, in silence, until Nettie drew back and leaned against the door. Clem moved forward slightly, holding her with his left arm and supporting his right on the panel above her head. “Don’t shake,” he said at last, speaking against her hair. “It isn’t complimentary.” His left arm tightened. She felt him smile. “In fact, if we didn’t know each other so well, I would say it was—downright insulting.”
“What a summer for roses,” said May. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” She laid her sewing on her knee, and took off her glasses, and sighed. As if to make her last remark irrefutable, she closed her eyes.
Clem, in a garden chair, glanced up from the Sunday paper. “Are you tired?” Without waiting for her reply, he folded the pages in his hand and dropped them on the grass beside him. “I don’t know why we read this—nothing but advertisements, and it makes one’s hands black.”
“I am tired, yes,” May pursued. “I was gardening all afternoon.”
Anyone would think gardening was a penance, Nettie observed to herself. She was sitting on the lawn, a book open in her lap. She thought that May contrived with her exhaustion to dispirit them all. The warm afternoon, the garden, the tray of empty glasses on the grass, succeeded in conveying foreboding and dissatisfaction; even the roses seemed to threaten violence, brimming over their plots of earth or arrested, scarlet, on the white wall of the house. Love, she thought, lowering her head over her book, is
supposed to be enriching; instead I am poisoned (she exaggerated to hurt herself) with antagonism. Here she caught herself up—I am being an Incurable Romantic, she thought, and smiled. And yet, when I can be with him, just see him, I am happy. And I care more for him than for myself—I suppose that is enriching. I would literally die for him—only, no one wants that; they would rather you went on living and behaved reasonably. It has all happened too quickly. I keep thinking there will be a pause, I will find the place again, get back to being as I was, but that never comes. And yet the surprising part, too, is that it doesn’t make more difference. I would have thought such things made one wordly; instead, one becomes more vulnerable than ever.
Lifting her eyes from the unturned page, she could see at her right Clem’s legs and the side of his chair. His clothes, the wicker chair, the very newspaper he had flung down seemed involved in his personality. He is not vulnerable, she reflected. One can even see that from the way he sits, or moves, or reads the paper. He does not need my good opinion, as I need his. If he loves me, it is as a kind of indulgence to both of us. I cannot trust him completely —but, after all, one would not trust anyone completely; it would hardly be fair to them. It is the discrepancy that hurts—that I should be so aware of him, order my life, think, speak, clothe myself for him.
“Nettie, that color doesn’t suit you,” May remarked lazily. “If you’ll forgive my saying so.”
“Oh, really?” said Nettie, in an unforgiving voice.
“You should wear more blue, with your eyes. Don’t you think, Clem?”
Clem looked down at the back of Nettie’s head. “What color are her eyes?” he asked.
Only Nettie laughed.
“What a tiring day,” May said with a certain determination. “Let’s hope there won’t be a storm before you get back to town.”
Clem looked at his watch. “We should leave soon, if we want to arrive before dark.”
“And be sure to give Nettie dinner somewhere, or she won’t eat anything.”
She speaks, Nettie thought, as though I were not here.
“I generally do,” Clem said. “We have dinner and then I take her home.”
We have dinner, Nettie repeated to herself, and then he takes me home. Every Sunday evening of this spring and summer. Occasionally they went to Nettie’s small, cluttered apartment, but more often to Clem’s large and empty one. Saturday’s unopened mail and newspapers lay on a little table outside the front door of the apartment, and, inside, the hallway echoed as it would not have done in winter, and smelled of floor polish. Most of the windows were closed and all the blinds were drawn. There were so many doors that two people must feel slightly unsafe until they had entered one room, closed one door behind them.
“That’s all right then,” May said. She yawned, but resumed her sewing. “Nettie,” she began again, “why don’t you bring a friend next weekend? Someone your own age. Some nice young man.”
“Thank you, no,” replied Nettie, turning a page at last.
“You must know some.”
“Well, they are stupid.”
“If you are so critical,” May observed comfortably, “no one will ever love you.”
“And if you’re so tired,” said Clem, conveying disbelief, “why do you go on sewing?”
“Darling, it has to be done, and I’d rather get on with it. I don’t dam your socks for amusement, after all.”
I would love to darn his socks, Nettie thought. She could not tell whether this marriage was worse than other people’s, although it would have gratified her to think it was. Why do men ever marry, she wondered. I can understand that women must have something of the sort—it is our nature, she thought vaguely—but why men? (She had forgotten about the socks.) Because nothing better has been worked out? But they don’t even expect anything better; the limitations are flagrantly justified, like restrictions in a war, in the interests of national security. She told herself reprovingly, It is an institution—but this produced a mental picture of a large brick building not unlike a nineteenth-century prison. If he and I had been married, she wondered, would it have had to deteriorate into this? May and Sarah discussed their husbands as though they were precocious children—“Clem is very handy in the
house,” as one might say “He hardly ever cries” or “He sleeps right through the night.” Let me go on believing, she asked, looking at his canvas shoe, that love isn’t merely getting along with someone. She thought that once she accepted such a compromised version of love she would never reach back again to this. (She had excessive confidence in the instructive power of experience.)
Clem’s foot moved. Nettie looked up. “Here’s Matt,” she said.
Matt came from beyond the roses, swinging a small black box camera by its strap. He was eleven, lanky and dark, with an earnest face that reflected his mother’s resolute honesty and her total lack of irony. The three on the lawn watched him approach. Unnerved by their attention, he started to speak while still at a distance. “I’m going to take a picture.”
“Oh God,” said Clem.
“The camera was your idea,” May remarked.
“You wanted to give him a guitar.”
“I don’t want to be in it,” Nettie said, closing her book.
“Don’t be silly,” said May.
“Who’d want a picture of her?” Matt snorted foolishly. Nettie, injured, looked away.
May sighed. “Nettie, what’s wrong now? He’s only teasing. You should be able to ignore that, at your age.”
Nettie saw no reason to expect that what had been intolerable to her in childhood should be acceptable now.
“Daddy, smile.”
“I don’t feel like smiling.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’ve got to smile.”
“Put the tray out of sight,” May said.
Immobilized, they stared into the sunshine. The camera clicked. Matt came up to them, twisting the knob to the next number. “It probably won’t come out—there was too much light. And Daddy moved. And Nettie looked as if she was going to cry.”
“My love,” Clem said, keeping his eyes on the road and slowing to let another car pass. “You mustn’t.”
Nettie wiped her eyes with a shredding Kleenex. She moved along the seat away from Clem until she was propped in the corner.
“Make sure that door is closed” was all he said.
If I could only think of something else, she told herself —something that wouldn’t make me cry. She attempted one or two seemingly arid subjects, but they led her back to tears. It was like trying not to be sick. Unable to stay at such a distance from him, she changed her position slightly, taking her weight off the car door. “It was so awful today,” she said.
“Didn’t seem any worse than usual.”
“Well—I suppose it’s worse for me than for you.” She hoped he would contest this.
“Yes, I suppose it is,” he agreed.
“I don’t think I can come for weekends any more.” Until she spoke, she had not considered this possibility.
“Nettie,” he said, irritated into using her name, “that’s something you must decide for yourself.” After a moment,
he added with ill-timed practicality: “What would I tell May?”
“You could always tell her,” said Nettie, “that I’ve fallen in love. With someone my own age.” Almost immediately, however, she threw away this advantage and laid her hand on his knee. “Oh, Clem, what will happen?”
“Darling, I don’t know.”
“But it can’t go on and on like this.” His silence seemed to ask, “Why not?,” and to answer it she made a little explanatory gesture with her free hand. “Without any meaning,” she said. “Anything to hope for.”
“But it has been like that from the beginning,” he pointed out, genuinely puzzled. His eyes were still on the road. “You knew that. I never promised you anything.”
She was ashamed of him for this remark. She had not intended to charge him with obligations. It also occurred to her that an obligation was not the less incurred for being unacknowledged. She took her hand from his knee (he shifted his leg slightly, as though liberated from an uncomfortable pressure), and moved back against the door.
He glanced at her. “You aren’t pleased?”
“Why should I be pleased? You’re not trying to please me.”
“I don’t like to see you so upset.”
“Why shouldn’t I be upset? You want it every way. When shall I be upset if not now?”
“But, Nettie, what can I say? I am married, I do have two children. May is forty-three—she can’t be asked to begin her life over again.”
“I know, I know.” The Kleenex had shed some flecks of white on her eyelashes. “I don’t expect—I know we can’t be married.” (Though we might as well be, with this deplorable conversation, she thought.) “It isn’t that.”
“What’s in God’s name is it, then?”
“I just want you to understand.”
“Well of course I understand,” he said crossly. “How could I help it?”
She had not thought of understanding as an involuntary acquisition. “I meant—to be kind.”
“Damn it, I am kind,” he responded, raising his voice. After a moment he said, less harshly: “Aren’t I?”
“Not really, no.” Sensing a passing relaxation of his annoyance, she struggled for words, as if speaking on a long-distance call with only moments to reach him. Giving this up, she turned her face toward the window and wiped her eyes again, this time with the back of her hand. I do cry rather a lot, she conceded.
The Sunday-evening traffic was heavy, and the road not wide, and they moved along slowly. From a car that had drawn level with them, a little girl was watching Nettie curiously. Clem drove for a while in silence. Eventually, he turned his head once more and said: “Look, pull yourself together. We can talk about it at dinner.”
Nettie clasped her hands in her lap. “I want to go straight home,” she told him, as she might have said: “I am going to die.” “To my place.”
Clem watched the traffic again, frowning. He allowed it to move past him, to the great disappointment of the child
in the neighboring car, who was swept ahead and disappeared, still gazing at them, around a bend in the road. At the next intersection, he put his arm out to signal and turned the car off the main road.
“What are you doing?” Nettie asked, as aloof as curiosity would allow.
He did not reply. They passed, still slowly, through a shopping center and a housing development. Presently they came into a suburban street lined with trees and with large, unfenced gardens. Clem drew the car in to the curb, and switched off the engine. Two boys were riding bicycles down the sidewalk, and a man washing his car turned to look at them in the fading light. Nettie stared into her lap.
Clem put his arm along the back of the seat without touching her. “Now what’s all this about?” he asked her.
She smiled faintly. “You sound like a policeman.”
“But, darling, what ever is it? I only said the weekend seemed no worse than usual, and you tell me you never want to see me again.”
What cowards men are, she thought. “It can’t be that incomprehensible,” she said.
His fingers touched the back of her neck. She inclined her head further, away from his hand. The tears returned to her eyes. An Irish terrier ran up to the car from a nearby garden and began to bark at them. The man washing his car called sharply: “Casey!”
“Don’t cry.” But this time it seemed that he said it for her sake and not his own.
“No,” she said, apologetically, the tears now falling for his sympathy. “I’m sorry, I suppose it’s the strain.”
“Well, of course,” he replied, quite gently. “Of course.”
“You don’t know how isolated one feels. You have so many—attachments.”
“You make me sound like a vacuum cleaner.” He smiled. With his other hand he lifted a strand of damp hair back from her cheek.
She went on. “Perhaps it is all ordinary—what one should expect. I have only this to go on, so I don’t know. It seems terrible. Because you are—have lived longer,” she emended gracefully, “you have a clearer idea of what will happen. I can’t see anything but a disaster … if this were carried to its logical conclusion.” Her voice trembled.
His hand moved patiently along the exposed slope of her neck. “Life,” he remarked, “is not strong on logical conclusions. Perhaps fortunately. But I do forget about your age. Because you are the youngest of us, you are the most important. And May would agree with that.” (Her position seems to have been completely reversed, Nettie noted.) “You have no experience to guide you. As you say, I know so much more.”
She smiled again. “‘I said an elder soldier, not a better.’”
He turned her toward him and drew her head against his shoulder. She did not resist or relax, and he sat with his arm around her. “Are you really going to leave me?”
She sighed. “Does it look like it?”
“On the contrary. I don’t know what’s going on in here.” He touched her head.
“Casey! Come here!” shouted the man with the hose.
“Shall we move on before this dog loses all its illusions?” he asked her.
“But we haven’t decided anything.”
“We can talk about it at dinner.” He released her. She sat up straight and put her hands to her hair. “You look all right,” he told her, starting the engine. At the sudden sound, the dog barked again. Clem swung the car round in the middle of the street, and they returned the way they had come.
Now he is driving too fast, Nettie observed. She took a mirror out of her purse. She did not look back at the square receding gardens and white houses. We disturbed their Sunday evening, she thought, and upset their dog. When she lifted her head, they had already reached the main road. “My eyes are all red,” she said.
“If you want to wash your face, we could go home first.”
“We may never get there if you drive like this.”
“Are you frightened?”
“No, but I suppose I don’t want you to get killed,” she said.
He smiled and slowed down. But when she next looked at him, his face was very serious—very sad, she realized with a little shock, Clem’s sadness seeming far more incongruous, far less bearable, than her own. “What are you thinking?” she asked him.
“I was thinking,” he replied, “if I died, how bad it would be for you. No one would understand that you were the person most to be comforted.”
The telephone bell, which had been ringing in her sleep, woke her at last. When she lifted the receiver, it continued to vibrate indignantly in her grasp, like a baby that has been left crying in the dark. She opened her eyes. The room was scarcely light, the first sun thinly outlining the drawn blinds. She tried to think who she was—she could have been any one of a dozen people.
“Hullo,” she murmured, pressing the receiver insecurely against her ear and lingering over the word.
“Nettie,” said Clem.
“What’s wrong?” she asked at once.
Disconcerted by this abrupt understanding, he hesitated. “I’m going up to the house,” he said.
“But this is Wednesday.”
“I’m not going to the office. I’m going up to the house. May telephoned me late last night.”
Nettie raised herself on her elbow. Her hand, holding the telephone, shook from the awkward position. “She knows, do you mean?”
“From something she said, I think so.” For a moment, neither of them spoke.
“It’s serious, isn’t it?” said Nettie, trying to compel her own responses. They were silent again, and then she said unhelpfully: “My dear.”
“I’ll call you from the country,” he said. “After I’ve talked to May.”
“What will you say to her?” Her words sounded in her own ears flat and forced. I have not realized it yet, she told herself remotely, as one who after an accident watches his own blood flow and feels no pain.
“I will have to see how it is,” he said.
“Do you want me to come?”
“I think not.”
“Call me as soon as you can.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Remember …” she began.
“What?”
“About my love.”
“Yes.”
“No one will ever love you so much.”
“No, I know,” he said with slight impatience, as if this were irrelevant. After a moment he added: “Yes. It has been worth it.” His tone was historic, she thought, like a farewell.
She put the telephone down and lay back on the pillow. The lengthening, reddish light was already the light of a very hot day, but she shivered and drew the sheet up to her shoulders, and could not get warm. I suppose I will realize it quite soon now, she thought with detachment. He said: “It has been worth it.” What has it been worth? What is to happen to me? What am I to suffer? Calamity has a generalizing effect, and as yet she could foresee her
suffering only in a monumental way and not in its inexorable, annihilating detail. She considered her resources, ranging her ideas, her secrets carefully against the unapprehended future. But ideas don’t supplant feelings, she thought; rather, they prepare us for, sustain us in our feelings. If I understand why I am to be hurt, then does that really mean that it will hurt me less? I know that I risked—invited—this, wounded May. I have disturbed the balance. There is balance in life, but not fairness. The seasons, the universe give an impression of concord, but it is order, not harmony; consistency, not sympathy. We suffer because our demands are unreasonable or disorderly. But if reason is inescapable, so is humanity. We are human beings, not rational ones.
She thought of Clem with a slight surprise, her predicament now seeming a thing itself, scarcely connected with him. If she instinctively wished for deliverance, it was for deliverance of an unfamiliar and pragmatic nature—much as a sailor on a sinking ship might hope to see the Coast Guard rather than his wife and children. Clem cannot help me, she thought; we are not contending with the same elements. He was amusing himself with me, really. He did not want to be inconvenienced in this way; the inconvenience will be the greatest of his burdens. (She felt this almost with gratitude, relieved of the additional weight of Clem’s grief.) They will make it up. They will be very solemn with each other, and May will use words like “relationship,” and they will make it up. For a while they will hold each other’s hands in public, and Clem will come
home from the office on time. Once she has established her advantage, May will behave admirably toward me—she will be able to watch herself behaving admirably, like a person in a play. She will expect me to behave admirably back at her, but I have loved him too much for that. Or am at too great a disadvantage. Perhaps they will send me off somewhere, for a trip. (She even considered this possibility with a certain interest, wondering where she might go and what clothes she would need.) And Clem will manage to persuade himself that that is the best possible thing, that nothing could be better for me at this moment than to go ten thousand miles and be alone. He may miss me after a while, in the one particular way, but as long as he doesn’t have to see me he will be all right. She dwelt for a moment, still painlessly—almost, in fact, with a smile —on Clem’s resilience. Her eyes traveled listlessly around the room. I have nothing of his, she thought, nothing he gave me—not even a photograph, and he will look different now that he has stopped loving me. I couldn’t prove, if I had to, that he ever existed for me—it’s like that awful story about the walled-up hotel room in Paris. I shan’t be able to say his name to anyone, not even to say that I miss him. It is just as he once said, no one will be able to sympathize with what I’ve lost—but that sounds like a funeral: “Profound sympathy in your recent loss …” In any case, even if they knew about it, people wouldn’t sympathize. With a thing like this, they don’t sympathize unless you die. And that would be exceptional.
The sun was up now, although the room was still half
dark because of the lowered blinds. It will be hot for him on the road, she thought. If he left immediately, he will be well on the way by now. He should arrive before lunch. It is an hour since he called me, and still I feel nothing; perhaps, after all, it need not be so terrible. These things happen all the time, and people survive them; they are exaggerated in retrospect, and in literature. She closed her eyes. I have not even wept, and I always cry so easily. Perhaps I can sleep, and when I wake it will seem more distant than ever. But why am I so cold, she wondered again. Why can’t I get warm? She moved her arm, which had been rigidly clasped across her body, and felt it tremble. Beneath her, the bed was like stone.
She had not even finished dressing when he arrived. She had meant, of course, to take especial care with her appearance but had slept, instead, right through the morning —probably from the exhaustion of the last few days. When she awoke, there was barely time to take her shower and put the coffee on; not even time to make her bed. It was only because his train was a little late that she managed to get into her clothes before the doorbell rang.
He had taken a train that got him to town about noon; it was the only possible one, on Sunday. The day before, when he telephoned her from the country, he had said: “I’ll leave the car with May and the children.” It was one of the things she had wondered about when she put the phone down, trying to discover what position he had taken
with May. It had been a short and comfortless conversation, because the telephone at his summer house was on a party line. And yet, she thought, if he had something definite to tell her he could have driven to another town, called from a drugstore. She had by then passed two days of silence and suspense since he left town on Wednesday to talk to May, and the overstated nonchalance of the telephone conversation made her frantic. “But can’t you tell me anything?” she cried, as he prepared to hang up. After an admonishing silence, he had said only: “When I see you on Sunday.”
She finished buttoning her dress and pushed her feet into a pair of sandals before she opened the door. Her face still glistened from the shower, her uncombed hair hung down her back, secured at the neck by a frayed ribbon; these things, absurdly, were uppermost in her mind as she turned the doorknob.
Clem on the other hand, was neatly dressed in a light summer suit; his collar and tie had admirably withstood the long journey in a hot train. He seemed a little browner, and his eyes were bright and slightly reddened as though he had slept badly. He came in without speaking, and she closed the door after him. He was holding a brief case, which he put down in a corner of the tiny hall. When she turned from closing the door, he said her name, and put his arms around her with such intensity of feeling that she had no time to raise her own and stood within his embrace as if she did not submit to it. Love, however, was too
strong for her, and she moved her cheek against the side of his head. I will have to know soon, she thought, what he has agreed to do.
“I left the coffee on,” she said, unclasping his arms and stepping aside. She went into the kitchen without glancing at him, and turned the gas off. He came and stood in the doorway. She still could not look at his face, which she knew must explain everything to her. “Shall I make you some lunch?” she asked.
“Just coffee.”
She was lifting down the cups and saucers. “If you take the coffee in, I’ll bring the tray.” He stood back to let her pass, and she went into the living room and put the tray on a table in front of the sofa. “Thanks. Oh, not there; that won’t stand heat—yes, there, on the tile.” Sitting on the sofa, she poured his coffee and her own, and they drank in silence.
“You haven’t had breakfast, then?”
She looked at him now, over the rim of her cup. “I only just woke up.” In case that should sound unfeeling, she added: “I was exhausted.” She was suddenly reminded of her appearance. She put her cup down and raised her hand to her head. “I haven’t even done my hair.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Let me do it while you have your coffee. It won’t take a minute.” She started to rise from the sofa.
“No, don’t go,” he said, taking her hand. She sat down again, still watching him. He held her hand in both of his
for a moment, and then pressed it against his mouth and burst into tears.
She let him put his head on her breast, withdrawing her hand so that she could take him in her arms. She leaned back on the sofa, slightly breathless from his weight and from the pressure of his head, which was quite hard. In spite of the discrepancy in their ages, she felt protective—almost dispassionate—as she held him and moved her hand consolingly up and down his shuddering spine. She also regarded him with a certain amount of vulgar curiosity—she had never seen a man weep before, and was young enough to consider it a monument in her experience. In addition, she was unable to rid herself of the notion that he wept for what he was about to say. Relieved of speculation, she found herself invested, instead, with the kind of momentary self-possession that is summoned up in a doctor’s waiting room. She breathed, through the salt smell of his hair, the steam of the coffee and even regretted that her cup had to get cold. Her eyes, uptilted by her attitude, rested on the pale-green wall opposite her. She reflected that in love one can only win by cheating and that the skill is to cheat first. (Having coveted neither the advantage nor the skill, however, she had no justification for disputing—as she did—the defeat that confronted her.)
He raised his head and shifted his position so that he too leaned back on the sofa, although his shoulder still pressed on hers. He held her right hand in his own, and with his left felt for his handkerchief and blew his nose.
He closed his eyes, frowning, and she could see that he was studying how to begin. She tightened her clasp on his hand and said kindly, almost politely: “Don’t worry. Just tell me.”
He opened his eyes and sat up a little. “How good you are,” he said.
This struck her as the sort of compliment one pays to a child, to encourage its behavior in the desired direction. It comforted her not at all that her judgment of him should remain thus pitilessly detached—that she saw him, perhaps, more clearly and with less admiration than ever before. The insight was useless to her, trapped as she was in the circumstance of love. She knew that sitting there with her hands clasped about his and her eyes on his face she represented, accurately, a spectacle of abject appeal. In any case, it was a habit of hers—possibly through the fear of loss—to appear most propitiating when she most condemned.
“Nothing has been decided,” he said, putting away his handkerchief with a faint air of getting down to business. “I can only tell you what we feel about it.”
At the word “we,” she lowered her eyes and kept them fastened to the design of interlocking fingers in her lap. Aware of having somehow blundered, he had already lost the place in his text; it was asking too much of her that she should prompt him.
After a pause, he said abruptly: “I think I told you I no longer loved my wife.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I only said that once, didn’t I?”
“Several times,” she answered, unaccommodatingly.
“Several times, then,”—he agreed, with a touch of impatience. “In any case—I see now that I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, that it wasn’t true.”
She thought that the digressions in the minds of men were endless. How many disguises were assumed before they could face themselves. How many justifications made in order that they might simply please themselves. How dangerous they were in their self-righteousness—infinitely more dangerous than women, who could never persuade themselves to the same degree of the nobility of their actions.
“What are you thinking about” he asked her.
“Men,” she said absently.
Taken aback by the plural, he stopped to assemble his thoughts once more. She was not being very encouraging, lowering her eyes and offering him monosyllables in this way. But there was no reason why she should encourage him, and he reminded himself of that; he was nothing if not fair.
“Why did you say it, then?” She looked up briefly. “If it wasn’t true?”
He said slowly: “I thought it was true when I said it. I’m trying to say that I don’t feel quite the same—I mean, not as I did.”
She was silent, watching her fingers uncurling from his
and the tiny white dots on her blue dress waver with the trembling of her knee. The words seemed so loud that she thought their echo could diminish only over a lifetime, would go on sounding within her forever: “Not as I did.” “Not as I did.”
“I would always care about you,” he went on, now anxious to be understood, as it were, once and for all. “But it can’t be as it was … I’d like to think we can go on being fond of one another, that you can think of me as someone who …” He paused for a moment and then continued, unconscious of irony, “who showed you what love is.” He withdrew his hand from her slackened grasp and lifted her chin so that she looked at him. “Darling, please. Please try to understand.”
“I do understand, I do really,” she said earnestly—almost in a tone of reassurance. “It’s only that I cannot bear it.”
He withdrew his hand and leaned forward with a little sigh, his elbows on his knees. Having been compelled to look at him, she now could not stop doing so. When he turned back to her, he was unnerved by that intent, expectant stare. Spreading one of his palms upward on his knee in an apparent appeal to common sense, he met her eyes and said, reasonably: “My dear, we have to come to terms with this.”
“Yes, to terms,” she said. “But whose terms—isn’t that the point?”
“Don’t.” Bending forward again, he took a sip of his
cold coffee. “I hate to hear you talk like that.” He did not know how to show her that she was simply adding, uselessly, to an already difficult situation. After a silence, he asked: “Do you have anything to drink?”
She got up and put the cups and saucers back on the tray: “Is Scotch all right?” She went into the kitchen, and in a few moments reappeared carrying a bottle and a glass full of ice. He saw that her hand shook as she set the glass on the table.
“You mustn’t exaggerate the importance of this,” he told her.
She let him take the bottle from her and fill the glass. “But it does seem rather important,” she answered, apologetically. She sat down again and watched him drink, so obviously awaiting his next pronouncement that he took an extra sip of whisky to gain time.
“Yes,” he went on. “It seems—is—dreadful, if you like. But darling, I mean that you have everything ahead of you. At your age, this isn’t a—matter of life and death.”
She thought that it would, in fact, be easier to die than to get used to being without him. (But that, perhaps, was not a fair way of putting it, since it is really easier to die than to do almost anything.) The possibility of taking her own life was, however, something to be held in reserve, like a pain-relieving drug that can only be resorted to in extremity. It interested her to think that her words and actions would then assume an authority they could never command so long as there remained the possibility of
their repetition; it seemed hard that one should have to go to such lengths to make one’s point.
If, on the other hand—as he suggested—she was merely beginning a series of similar experiences, she could scarcely feel encouraged. She sensed that she would never learn to approach love in any way that was materially different, or have the energy to go in for more than a little halfhearted dissembling. Up to this, she had led a life sheltered not from rancor and mistrust but from intimacy; nothing could convince her that this first sharing of her secret existence, more significant even than the offering of her person, represented less than it appeared to. That circumstances might oblige him to withdraw from her she perfectly understood; that he actually felt himself to be less committed appalled her. It confounded all her assumptions, that something so deeply attested should prove totally unpredictable.
She remembered her uncombed hair. Startling him, she got up quickly from the sofa and went into the bedroom. She stood at the dressing table, releasing her hair from the knot of ribbon, and then, with her hand on the hairbrush, stared into the mirror. After a moment, forgetting what she had come for, she sat down on the side of her unmade bed, propped one elbow sidewise on the pillows, and leaned her jaw on her hand.
When he appeared in the doorway, she made a small explanatory gesture with the hairbrush, which still dangled from her right hand, then reached across and replaced it on the dressing table. He leaned for a moment against
the doorframe, and when he came into the room she curled her legs up on the crumpled sheets and drew back on the pillows, allowing him to sit at the foot of the bed. They passed, in this way, some minutes of that hot afternoon. Both had the sensation of leaving behind them, simply by changing the scene, the antagonism in the living room.
At last he reached out and took her hand again, as though needing for a little longer to be in touch with her. He frowned into space, and only turned his head when she spoke.
“Tell me,” she asked him, in a voice that was now shaken and fatigued, “what we are going to do.”
The hand holding hers opened briefly and closed again. “There aren’t many possibilities … We shall see less of each other. Not meet at all, perhaps.” Incongruously, he added: “I will hate that.”
After a pause she repeated, as if he had not answered her: “Tell me what to do.”
He lowered his troubled, abstracted look to her head. “You could go abroad for a while,” he said. “That might help.”
They looked at each other. Her hand grasped his convulsively. “Tell me,” she insisted, almost whispering, “something that won’t be hard, or lonely.”
“My dear,” he said. Even to him, it was inconceivable that her love should not be reciprocated. In compassion, he kneaded her fingers for a moment with his own. “What
should I tell you? How happy I’ve been with you? How many things you’ve done for me? That, in a way, you’ve brought me back to life?” He let her hand go so that she could lie back on the pillows, and stretched himself exhaustedly along the foot of the bed with one arm beneath his head. Staring at the ceiling, he said: “I owe you everything.”
This admission seemed to her to set the seal on the dissolution of their love: total indebtedness could only be acknowledged where no attempt at repayment was contemplated. She closed her eyes on some sustained crest of pain. Tears of desolation moved haltingly from the corners of her eyelids and disappeared into the hair above her ears. She was scarcely aware of shedding these tears, drawn as they were from weakness and the accessible surface of grief; no such ready means of human expression could give the real nature of sadness.
“I think I should go home,” he said listlessly.
“Why?”
“We’re just exhausting ourselves, like this … Let’s hope we can see things more clearly tomorrow.”
She gave a small regretful smile, her eyes still shut. ‘I think I must hope to see them less clearly.“She felt him sit up and lower his feet to the floor. She opened her eyes as he rose and came round the bed to stand beside her.
“If I leave,” he said, “you might get some sleep.”
“Stay a minute,” she said, still with that faint smile. She put her hand up to the now creased edge of his jacket.
“I’m going to be so unhappy when you go, and I want to postpone it.”
He sat down again, on the edge of the bed. Ineptly, he smoothed back her hair, and then drew his finger along the wet mark between her eye and ear. With an air of helpless simplicity, he said to her: “I’m sorry.”
“My love,” she said, in the same hushed voice. “It hurts me so.”
“I know, I know.” His fingers passed irresolutely down her head and began to spread out the tangled hair on her shoulder. “I know,” he said again, half to himself. “It isn’t easy.”
He looked at her with such bewilderment that she raised her hand and laid it for a moment on his shoulder before letting it fall, hopelessly, across her body. After that she lay perfectly still, with her eyes on his face. This submissiveness and the slow familiar movements of his hand only served to emphasize the constraint of their attitudes. Neither of them spoke; the stillness in the room was the passionless, critical silence of a sickroom. He lifted her hand aside and unfastened the belt of her dress as gently and carefully as if she had had a serious accident, and he was ministering to her.