Elizabeth stayed in the shower for a long time. Her rage and shock, her fighting inward cry—How dare you?—gradually melted into fear and shaky surprise. She fussed at the old-fashioned plastic shower curtain that hung in a full circle inside the bathtub. It clung to her wet limbs, seemed to reach out on the moving air to ensnare her as she wept into the gentle downpour of hot water. She crouched down and pasted it to the sides with wet, her feet squeakily trembling and sliding, and the cast-iron tub ringing with the almost imperceptible, shimmering tone of a gong.
How could David behave that way toward her? It wasn’t possible; it wasn’t the man she knew. For more than twelve years now, he had shown her nothing but respect, sometimes devotion, even reverence, always patience. However urgent his passions, however quick his temper, he had never shouted at her, never touched or even approached her roughly. It was inconceivable, what had just happened.
She stood up, and with her movement the shower curtain came free again on the little tug of shifting air, sucking at her long leg, her hip, wrapping around her like a slick, awful shroud. She held it at arm’s length, clenching her teeth with annoyance. And then she reached up and snatched the curtain back around the track, swirling it open, rings clattering, and twitched it to the outside of the bath where it dripped in a column onto the gray shine of the painted bathroom floor. She glanced toward the raised window sash with its thin white curtain and its roller blind half-down, then reached for the hot tap to make the water warmer against the night air. Nobody could see her from outside, she decided, maybe her shadow against the ceiling, nothing more. The spray bounced everywhere, droplets skittering and building into streams that slid unnoticed along the old tilted floor toward the door to the bedroom. The mirror was a mottled shine of steam between the dim, paperhatted candlestick lights on either side, and steam coiled and snaked in front of the window screen where the fog came in, cooling it.
Elizabeth’s blonde hair swam down over her head and her shoulders, glued to her like seaweed to a mermaid, darker depths showing through, like stippled markings of tar. Rivulets of water lifted over her tipped-up nipples and coursed away in broken beads, splashing again on her knees and on her thighs. Her lips burbled and shook through the sheet of water sliding down her face and down her hair; her nose dripped and turned red. Still the tears flowed and still she felt the hurt. It came from deeper and deeper inside her, the sense of insult, the sense of failure, the sense of loneliness.
‘Please,’ she sobbed, ‘please, someone.’
Eventually the hot water gave out. She felt the temperature changing, and she didn’t want it to happen, but her hopelessness was so great that she waited too long to turn off the taps. The chill drenched her and it shut her up. She turned off the water fast, with both pale, strong hands, so that the clammy exposed pipes shuddered and clanged in her grip.
She eyed the bottom of the tub. Not a trace of blood. The last of the water slipped down the drain, and she bent to examine the insides of her thighs. None. When she found the stinging little wound with her fingertips, she winced, but her fingers came away clean, bloodless, wrinkled with wet.
She thought, It’s only a graze, not even very painful.
She wiped her eyes again with her fingertips, and now her fingers showed crumbs of soaked mascara. Then she began to try to remember what had happened between her and David. Exactly what had happened.
She tugged a big blue towel from the rail. It was thin from twenty summers’ use and coarse from drying on the line behind the rose trellis outside the kitchen. Her soft white bathrobe hung from the hook on the back of the bathroom door, but she left the robe there. It was an act of penance.
As she cinched the towel around her breasts, she thought about how last week she had proposed buying new towels. David had shrugged dreamily, If you think we really need them. So she had said, What about letting Norma put them through the dryer? And David had made a face, humorous, clownlike, It’s up to you, sweetheart. It’s nice having just the sea air on the towels, isn’t it? It reminds me of here.
She took another, smaller towel and rubbed her hair dry with it, squeezing water from the length in bunches.
You raised the temperature, she told herself. You raised it on purpose. And then the coyness set in. What is that? Where does it come from, the coyness? And she thought that if she herself couldn’t understand the coyness, it must be at least as hard for David to understand it, even after all these years.
Coyness was the wrong word, Elizabeth realized. Even that implied it was some game, some strategy of hard-to-get that she employed on purpose whereas, in fact, it caught her by surprise, every time it happened—the sudden reversal of feelings. It began with, first, the sense of inertia, passivity, lying there trying not to think about what she wanted, whether she wanted anything at all. Then the uncertainty, her mind floating in the dark, building into barely controlled panic as she got further and further away from her body just when her body was supposed to become the focus of something, of everything. The revulsion followed, which came from—well, she just didn’t know what the revulsion came from.
Actually, it wasn’t revulsion, either. It was—resistance. She couldn’t keep it down. Whenever anything came at Elizabeth from outside, she felt, first of all, that she had to ward it off, say no to it. She knew this perfectly well about herself. Then once she had succeeded in certainly holding a thing there, outside, at arm’s length, she could decide about it. But with love, with physical lovemaking, that didn’t work. Lovemaking had to take her by surprise if it was to take her at all. The trouble was that most of the time she saw it coming and stopped it. She had become conscious of lovemaking, alert to it, and she had adopted such a complicated attitude, without ever intending to and which she had come to regret, that making no attempt to stop lovemaking was the same as asking for it, and that asking for it was—not suited to her sense of herself, to her sense of what was dignified, attractive, seemly.
Tonight, she had wanted to believe that she was heading nowhere in particular with the ride in the jeep, the dinner at the Summer House. It wasn’t that she really thought she could trick herself, but she wanted to court David innocently, as if they were not planning on sex in particular at all, as if they were children playing and finding things out for the first time. As if they were pure in heart. Not clamoring for a craven satisfaction that was sullied by universal, unbeautiful clamoring. As if they were the only ones in the world. This was terribly important to her, Elizabeth realized, the sense that what happened between them was new, original. Everybody must want that, she thought, because that is an essential beauty of—love. Innocence. Lack of a motive.
David had assumed that she wanted money, that she wanted control of the foundation. That it was to be some kind of crass exchange between them. She had thought she could get past that, his misunderstanding her. Because without knowing herself exactly what it was that she did want from him, she accepted that maybe his offer was only a sign, only a symbol—of his feelings. She was after his feelings. Sharing them somehow.
But when her courtship had succeeded, everything quickly became so particular, so familiar; and it felt to her like naked appetites baying for base food. Jaded, perverse, insatiable. She couldn’t bear to think of either herself or David that way. She wanted out, screaming out, from her own well-planned seduction. She was suddenly disgusted by everything. By herself.
Her nightgown lay in a puddle by the door, gauzy white, limp. She dragged it to one side with a hooked toe as she thought about David trying to force her to continue with the thing she had started. Then she bent, picked the nightgown up and hung it on the hook with her bathrobe so it would dry. She concluded that somehow, really without intending to, she must have been asking him to force her—to force the whole question of their married life. She certainly must have seemed to him to be asking for that.
She had always preferred to avoid discussion when it came to lovemaking; discussion was far too explicit, too graphic. It was—reductive. David understood her, she thought; at least, he acknowledged her inclination by following it. Really, David understood a lot, Elizabeth thought. He followed most of her inclinations, in whatever subtle, unspoken way she required, as if it gave him—she sighed with alarm as she thought it—pleasure.
But tonight he had resorted to—whatever that was. Brute strength. She shuddered. And she thought with a kind of embarrassed desperation that really she did have the lovemaking thing so messed up now that probably she needed him to break through to her somehow, to rescue her from the solipsistic nightmare she had built up—her complicated, neurotic feelings about sex.
The tears started again, tears of frustration, anger, self-accusation. She hated herself for what she had done to them both. And she felt in the dark flopping of her heart that she had with her elusiveness, her inadvertent denials, cheapened everything for both of them. She ran a comb through her hair, seeing nothing in the misted mirror, tugging, grimacing.
I’ll find the right, the charming, the heartwarming way of explaining to him, she thought. When he sees me wrapped in this towel, he’ll know right away how I feel. And then I’ll be able to talk to him.
As she reached for the door handle, she wondered in the most matter-of-fact, anthropological way whether the incomprehensible train of her responses to her husband was some vestigial animal behavior, a result of evolution, hardly attributable to her conscious being: the female of the species resisting in order to avoid being burdened with more offspring than she could cope with. Elizabeth would be quick to concede that she had difficulties coping with offspring.
But she felt a breeze of confidence, opening the door, when she thought of the new investment she had begun to make in the children during David’s absence this summer. She had seen how much joy David had in his relationship with them, the wild antics on the lawn, never missing a day at the beach, the ice-cream and the trip to see the boats every night. It had given her profound, unexpected pleasure, and she had thought, There should be more of that. More time together, maybe even more children. She felt certain that she had seen the point of all the difficult and lonely hours there, before her very eyes, in David’s intense familial affection. She had fed off it and used it to bring about a new feeling in herself. There was the life they had made and intended, suddenly evident before her, palpable. She had even wondered as she watched the three of them, though she quickly dismissed it, if she could somehow manage one more pregnancy.
She peered into the dark, cold bedroom.
‘David?’
It surprised her that he wasn’t there. Elizabeth always took refuge in the bathroom because, there, it was as if she was still in the bedroom with David, in a private place within the privacy of their marriage. To the children, to Norma, or the servants, she was in the master bedroom, and only she and David knew if she had made a temporary retreat to some deeper seclusion. She would never, for instance, flee the room, forgo the protection of their outward bond, until they had resolved things between themselves. But tonight it had taken her a long time to regain her composure, and David hadn’t waited for her. She thought it had never happened before. He had even left the door ajar.
The children are asleep, she told herself. What difference does it make if he’s gone out of the room? We were both upset. She felt a tremble in her lungs as she remembered his face, the abject look, her anger. Oh, God, she thought as she crept out into the hall.
‘David?’ She felt her way toward the guestroom, pushed the door back onto the pale, flowered gloom. The high iron bedsteads with their white-tufted spreads stood straight and hard, side by side, empty, neat. The shadow of the door flashed across the wardrobe mirror.
She turned toward David’s old room at the back of the house. She could see better now as she tiptoed up the three little steps, her eyes fixing on the black window, curtains open, above the dark wooden bunk. Gordon ought to move down here, she thought. He’s too old for David’s sisters’ rooms; I shouldn’t let Norma keep him up there, in her nursery.
And then she climbed the stairs to the third floor, doubtfully, just to check. The towel felt skimpy and outlandish. She listened at the children’s open door, clutching the twist of terrycloth across her chest, drinking in their undisturbed breathing. The floor creaked as she leaned around the door. She was cold. And beneath the ordinary, sighing rhythm, now Gordon, now Hope, she felt a thrumming anxiety, out of kilter.
She didn’t see David curled on the foot of either bed. Why would he be? Yet she had pictured it.
I’ll get dressed, she thought. Maybe he’s on the sofa downstairs.
And so she went back to the master bedroom, hunted for jeans because although she never wore them she thought, What else do you put on in the middle of the night? And because she already foresaw, with a startled sense of adventure, that she might be setting off into the fog alone. I don’t care where he is, she told herself, pulling what felt like a fleece off the closet shelf. I’m going to go out and find him and tell him—I’m sorry. She pulled the fleece over her head. It came halfway to her knees. It smelled of David.
As she started down the stairs, she had a wild impulse to laugh, at the ridiculous drama of running out into the night in her husband’s enormous, flapping clothes. At the thrill of letting herself. But a sob crowded out the laugh, and she felt wild with fear.
‘I’d rather die than lose David,’ she said out loud, glancing around at the empty living-room with its stiff, disapproving furniture, tearing through the dining-room into the dark kitchen. She threw open the screen at the back door, stepped out into the liquid night, felt the heavy wet of the lawn through her espadrilles. Both cars were in the driveway. She pushed open the gate in the white picket fence and began to walk uncertainly toward town.
The walk will calm you, she told herself. And yet she couldn’t get her breath and she couldn’t find a natural stride. The moist night air felt suffocating. It was a dreadful physical effort to move her legs, to keep going for another block, to cross the slippery lane of cobbles which bruised her feet as she tried to grip them with her arches. This is not a bad dream where you can’t operate your body, she told herself. You’re just tired. It’s late.
She rested on a bench near the whaling museum. She was sweating, but she felt cold, as if the fleece couldn’t warm her. What’s the point? Even if I could see where I was going in the fog and in the dark, David could be anywhere. He could be heading back to the house by now. She didn’t want to admit to herself that she was wishing David would find her, that she felt he must know where she was. He doesn’t even know I’ve left, she said to herself.
The fog glowed around a yellow street light, and Elizabeth ached for wanting David to find her.
Then she got angry with herself and stood up and walked home.
She thought about Hope flying along the beach that morning, screaming at seagulls. I was just that age, she considered, when it dawned on me that I wanted all Daddy’s attention for myself. That’s when it started.
And she remembered how ferociously she had strived to elbow her mother out of the way. That was the whole sensation of childhood to Elizabeth, elbowing past her mother, getting to the sunshine, the front row. She had been sure she could do it—win her father’s approval. Mummy never knew how to please Daddy, she thought, shaking her head. It had seemed obvious to Elizabeth from a tiny age. Mummy minded too much every time we had to move; she minded too much when they had to miss a party, if they lost at bridge. Really, she was childish. Elizabeth could still hear the rumbling complaint, the cliché army bark, I was a military man when we got married. What on earth did you expect? She had taken note of her mother’s failure to plan, to stay cool, her inability to keep her own counsel. Mummy had no self-restraint, she was stuck on having fun. It had all been so obvious.
But when her mother finally sloped off with a handsome younger staff sergeant who shared her love of cocktails and dancing, Elizabeth couldn’t savor the triumph. Her father’s undivided attention was far too much for her, his rage and his uselessness and his bottomless need. She couldn’t answer it. Elizabeth, who had thought herself to be self-contained, sophisticated, adult, had fled, just like her mother. And she couldn’t explain it, but her father’s approval no longer seemed to matter. She used to tell herself that maybe she had never really wanted it anyway or maybe she had wanted something else, something from the wider world. Maybe there was something she wanted from her mother after all. Her mother who was out there in the wider world, who was maybe enjoying some other, easier kind of happiness, who had gotten the better of them both after all, whom Elizabeth had never seen again.
When she had come home occasionally from her abortive attempts to attend college, to study at Juilliard, there he had been, a mountain of flesh in a chair in front of the television, disappointed, disappointing, abandoned. She couldn’t stay with him. But she could never really forget about him, either. He bellowed inside her, threatened to bring her down.
Maybe Mummy could have warned me, Elizabeth thought. But then, why should she, her rival? Who pushed her out, who vanquished her.
Maybe I can warn Hope.
And then Elizabeth thought, I really ought to tell Hope that the feeling of Daddy’s awesomeness has never gone away, even though I’ve outgrown my adoration of Daddy and even though Daddy is dead. Inside me, the feeling has never relented—that I might not be able to please the man I used to look up to in my girlhood. The man who no longer exists, who maybe, it turns out, didn’t exist to begin with.
He never did give me his approval; I just forced myself to stop wanting it. How can I rescue Hope from that? Elizabeth wondered. From the feeling that there is some standard you can never reach? That you could only, maybe, stop wanting to?
She stepped up onto the weather-silvered wooden porch between the hydrangeas at the front door. The screen was closed, the door open.
Don’t expect David to be there, she told herself. Don’t expect it.
The living-room was empty and dark. The piano loomed at her from the bay of windows across the room.
For instance, Elizabeth thought, walking to the piano and wilting down onto the bench in her sad mess of hair, no matter how hard I practiced, I couldn’t bring my music to life. Only a few times. A few times I felt the music as my own energy, natural, authentic. This is how I know this music, how I hear it in my imagination! She could remember that she had shouted that in her heart as she played. Once or twice, maybe. But the shell that she had made for herself was so hard, the perfect shell, of how it should be. The armor of repetition, knowledge, boredom. She had intended to rise through that to something new, something fresh. But in the end, it was as if the music couldn’t get out. The armor was too complete, too hard; the plan itself was too good. It should have freed her, all that work. But it was never enough.
Maybe it was a kind of stage fright, Elizabeth thought, the standard I would never reach. And the habit of practice, the iron shell around me, took over from the thing itself. It was almost a way to avoid really playing, with everything inside me exposed. And the—joy—wasn’t there. The pleasure. What else is music for? Did I try to persuade myself music was for anything else?
And suddenly Elizabeth, with all her exhausted intelligence, saw the connection in her life about pleasure. How she tended to put it off, postpone it for so long that it became something to be avoided rather than something to have. She had never yet felt that she deserved pleasure, she thought. Well, when? What task was arduous enough to entitle her to a reward?
David is made differently, she thought. He grasps with his instincts, outright, unashamed. He has an athlete’s sure, untroubled touch. He just—gets it right. Maybe the first time. He doesn’t plan; he just reacts. And he can feel with his mind, or think with his body; they are linked up.
She felt herself beginning to panic. She thought, Don’t be silly. For God’s sake calm down. He’s gone out for a walk, she told herself. To clear his head. You were really hard on him. He’d be hard on himself. He would hate what he did. I have to tell him how much I…How sorry I am. I have to tell him that—I still think he can save me. Anyway, nobody else can even understand me. She tried to laugh at this, inside her head. It was the kind of thing that David would find funny, her sense of herself as completely impossible. If she could put it in just the right way.
Why, she asked herself, don’t I ever do what I want to do? What I imagine I will do? Why does everything come out ruined, imperfect? Where does it go, the beautiful plan, the conviction, the idea of what I am trying for?
I have to make him understand that I meant all the things he thought I meant when I met him in the jeep at the airport and arranged dinner out. He didn’t misread me. I wanted to draw him closer. I meant it to be—physical and—intimate—like it used to be—sometimes. When we had the children.
Elizabeth got up from the piano and went into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and crouched down a little to look inside. The light buzzed. She took a strawberry from one of the green cardboard boxes and put it in her mouth, snapping the stem off and twiddling it between her fingers. Cold, she thought. They taste more when you leave them out. But then I guess they don’t keep. She took another and then another. About six. They’re nice and sweet, she thought. I should have washed them. Well, so what?
With the stems cupped in her left hand, she put her hip against the door to hold it open and reached for a hunk of Cheddar cheese. She put the cheese in her left hand with the strawberry stems and took a bottle of white wine from the door. Then she swung around, pushing the refrigerator door closed behind her with one foot, and fumbled her food loot onto the kitchen table. She went to the kitchen door and switched on the light, got a wineglass and a tin can of crackers from the cupboard across the room, took a knife from the drawer by the sink on her way back to the table.
It was perfect when Gordon was born, she thought. Or maybe before. I guess in Italy. I couldn’t do anything at all, in Venice. I was too tired to walk anywhere. Too pregnant. It didn’t matter.
And she remembered as she poured wine into her glass that they had sat for three whole days at Florian’s, perfectly happy, watching the pigeons, the slowly stirring crowd, the lines of tourists that shrank and swelled in front of San Marco, the glinting, timeless light on this or that section of stone colonnade in its revered distress and dirtiness, on this or that curve of mysterious, distant mosaic. Sometimes the piano trio had been so corny that they laughed out loud; sometimes it had moved them. Both together. They had felt everything both together, exactly the same. Sleepy, fat, half-smiling, Elizabeth thought. Smug with what we’d done, with what was coming. We felt so rich with it that we could just sit and watch Venice go by. Life was all around us, on offer, its very best efforts. And we were selfishly delighted by it, without moving. We were right at its heart.
She balanced a slice of cheese on a Bremner Wafer and lifted it to her mouth, cut another slice as she chewed. I could only have canarino, she thought. I took everything completely seriously when I was pregnant. David thought they had invented canarino for me when I said no to coffee, no to tea. Until he ordered me one back at the Cipriani after supper and the waiter said, ‘Due?’ That’s when David found out it was a real drink—and that he liked it.
He said something beautiful, pretending he was talking about Italian cuisine, laughing, in that fake guidebook tone of voice that he read with from the Michelin about the incredible works of art we never went to see.
‘When you’ve had absolutely everything you want, when you are full, and contented, and happy, canarino is the perfect drink. It is really nothing at all. But it stretches time out, by mixing it with water. The lemon peel, twisted in the style of the Veneto, gives a touch of bitterness and tints the water the warm yellow evoked by the name so as to remind you that you are still on earth.’
‘What happens if you eat the peel?’ I was laughing, too.
‘Oh, no! The cup is always returned with the peel still in it. Never, never eat the peel. It isn’t food. Only tourists eat the peel.’ Then he added, ‘Canarino is the drink for those who want nothing changed, nothing added, nothing altered.’
Maybe if I had told him then how scared I was about the baby, he would have—what? What would he have done? But when we were together, I didn’t feel scared. It was in London that I felt scared. Because I knew I couldn’t control him. I knew David might be anywhere when the baby came. There were so many demands on his time, so many people he had to deal with.
So I said, that night in Venice, ‘I asked the doctor to schedule a Cesarean on the due date.’
I remember he raised his eyebrows. Polite curiosity. That was how he signaled to me, This is your show. Whatever you want. Go ahead, I’m listening.
‘I don’t want you to be away when the baby comes,’ I said. I was calm. My voice didn’t shake at all. ‘It seems like the safest option.’
Did he have an opinion? I never knew. And I never told him that I had no idea what I wanted.
Elizabeth drained her wineglass. She laid one more Bremner Wafer on her tongue, let it dissolve there, chewing it just a little. Then she put the plastic lid back on the can, pushed the cheese back into the package, corked the bottle, brushed the cracker crumbs onto the floor. Methodically, she put things back into the refrigerator, the cupboard. She left her wineglass in the sink with the knife.
I’d rather die than lose David now. It went through her head sickeningly. Why did I say that? It’s just how I feel. It’s that important.
Even though she also knew, in the simplest way, that she was afraid now to place herself in David’s hands. Afraid about sex, about everything, life in general. Why am I still afraid? she wondered.
But after all, Elizabeth thought, there are reasons. I need to tell him. Renew—whatever that was—the feeling I once had that, with him, things were all right. No matter what.
There are certain kinds of pain, she reflected, that a husband can’t protect a wife from. I should never have expected him to. Besides, he never knew what I expected. I didn’t know myself what I expected. My mother didn’t tell me. Anyway, I wouldn’t have listened to her. I was never good at girlfriends. I was all about men, all about Daddy, all about David. There was nobody to tell me about motherhood—how it eats you alive. Suddenly, there was David, on the other side of a canyon. I’d had this experience, here was this infant, and we were separated completely. Nobody told me it would be like that.
And she remembered how hard she had tried to claim him back to their private harmony after the baby was born. Even now, she could feel the strain. It had never come about. David belonged to everyone else, she thought. He just gave himself away to them. He couldn’t stop. He never even thought.
So there we were, all alone, scared to death, shut in, cut off, Gordon and me. God, I loved that baby. In the beginning, he took me over heart and soul, drained my blood. Of course it had to stop. I wasn’t—able to cope. It was too extreme. It wasn’t normal. I had to have more help. Much more help. I had to let other people care for him.
The crowds went through her head. All the people working in the house. All the people working with David. The whole world out there disturbing and destroying. She had tried to fend them off. She had gone on wanting David’s attention for herself. I was just too weakened. I had no—charisma. No charm. I needed more from him, something extra to bring me back to life. Instead, there was everyone else, the paid help, the staff existence, the hired army, the scheduled everything, the entirely planned eternity.
And then there was Hope. What I got, in the end, was Hope. That did me in.
David wasn’t even there when Hope was born. Elizabeth could remember the phone call on the morning of the Cesarean.
‘I’m sorry about my deal. It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever tried to do. The biggest thing anyone has ever tried to do. Don’t postpone anything for me, sweetheart. I might not get back by tomorrow anyway. You have to do what’s best for you and the baby. It’s between you and the doctor.’ He had been cheerful, businesslike. ‘I don’t want to louse things up. Don’t you remember they wouldn’t even let me into the theater when Gordon was born? I’ll be the first visitor at your bedside. I can’t wait.’
She had been relieved to be put under, to have everything taken out of her hands. The hard part was waking up again afterwards. A mother of two.
After that, it was all about being a mother, Elizabeth thought. It was as if, without even knowing it, I had been forced to make a choice between David and the children. Life, the world, circumstances, chose for me, willy-nilly, chose the children. Shackled me to them, uncomprehending, stunned.
David, who knew so much about women, knew nothing about mothers and babies. He never understood me again. He never saw that I was not the woman he had married, that part of me tried to migrate into the children, but was lost, wandering. I didn’t even understand myself. He went on chasing that other untrammeled creature, a phantom. And I tried to resurrect the old image. False. It was false, a mirage. Our life was a mirage. I should have told him how it really felt. I should have tried to teach him. There were things he simply could not figure out. We were so ill-informed.
Now it all seems perfectly clear to me. It’s taken a long time, but I can see everything.
She turned off the lights and went back upstairs. She could easily see her way along the hall now, and a bird was starting to call, alone, persistent. She didn’t even look into the master bedroom, but went straight to David’s room at the back of the house and lay down on his old bed. It was too short for her, and the blue-striped Indian cotton bedspread felt damp. She curled up on her side, nosing into the pillow, the mildew, then she tucked her hands between her thighs just above her knees and closed her eyes.
Tomorrow, we’ll go to the beach with the children. The fog will probably lift by mid-morning. And afterwards I’ll ask Norma to take Gordon and Hope out to dinner at the Ropewalk. David and I can eat here alone. We’ll grill some swordfish. This whole awful scene is for the good. We need to talk it through. We’ll make a bond of it.
She fell asleep with the light coming onto her face through the window from the garden.