That night, Reisden told Anna Fen that Jay was dead. She sat in her private sitting room, on one of her deep, pillowy couches beside him, still in the gauzy deep-cut dress that she had worn to the dance, with the butterflies still in her hair. She snatched up one of the chintz pillows and screamed into it silently, and the butterflies trembled on their wires while she sobbed. When she let the pillow drop, her makeup had run, black runnels down her cheeks like theatrical tears; but her face was square and lined with real grief. She turned to him. “Please, hold me, just hold me.”
He held her in the dark perfumed silence of her house. Outside in the heat the frogs sang.
“I had red silk knickers,” she said, “and he used to have me get dressed up like a housemaid and wear those underneath. Usually we met in your barn. That night he had me come over to your house.”
“You were there,” Reisden said.
“I was upstairs and so was he when we heard the first shot. He got up—I mean—you know what I mean. He said he’d go find out what it was. I heard his voice from downstairs, he was shouting to someone, and there were more shots. And he kept shouting. He sounded surprised and then mad. He didn’t come back.” She shook her head. “I knew, didn’t I? I waited for him, then I went straight down the backstairs and out the kitchen door. No one noticed me because I was wearing a housemaid’s uniform. I just walked home. If—if everything had been all right, I thought he’d come to my house.” She gave one more shuddering sob and then another, and cried in his arms for Jay French.
She cried in his arms, and the room was dark and perfumed, and the couch was as deep and soft as a featherbed, and eventually she turned and sobbed, rather more pointedly, as if for an audience, against his chest. Reisden knew what was expected of him; Mrs. Fen wanted comforting. It was a long time since he had been shocked at what happened after funerals. He should have done it. Every muscle in his body was tight for a woman; why not, why not? The easy and pleasant and generous thing would have been to give her what she wanted, what his body wanted too. But it didn’t happen; he gave her confusing signals and watched himself doing it and wondered why; he was charming and tender and just a little obtuse, and inwardly furious at himself. When he had left her, he walked back down Island Hill Road, past the Clinic, where Perdita’s window was dark, and stood by the edge of the water on the Knights’ shore, watching the last lights go out, one by one, on the other side of the lake. He picked up some of the flinty stones on the edge of the shore and cast them savagely out over the water.
And while he stood there, a light went on in the ground floor of the Clinic, someone no more able to sleep than he; and he heard a piano, and the music was the waltz they had danced to. He did not know whether to be afraid or exultant. He felt everything, fear and joy, want of her, need of her, need to protect her against himself, delight, estrangement from himself, as if they were data points charting a reaction, distinguishable but not separate. He could not say what he was but only I am. In his confusion it took him a full minute to realize that Perdita had broken her promise to Harry.