Charlie had no chance to talk with Harry until they were back at the Clinic. He took Harry into the small parlor and looked out the window. Gilbert was out on the lawn with Reisden and Perdita; for the moment she was safe.
“You must take special care of Perdita just now,” he said hesitantly to Harry. “She is young and may have her head turned.”
Harry looked out the window, his hands clenched. “You mean him.”
Charlie said nothing.
“He’s—” Harry pounded his fists against each other. “I tell you, Charlie, I don’t trust him as far as I could throw him. The thing is, we have to know that Richard’s dead. We have to get Gilbert to declare him dead, or find his body, or even find Jay French and get him to tell that Richard’s dead.”
Charlie’s skin crawled cold. Jay French was found.
“Which is more important, Richard’s death or your life with my niece?”
“She isn’t realistic about getting married,” Harry said, “she isn’t the way she used to be. He tells her she’s going to be a famous musician and she laps it up. She’s distracted from me.”
He doesn’t answer me, Charlie thought, and looked out the window too. Reisden and Perdita were standing together, talking. “You must be very kind to her,” Charlie said urgently, “but stay close to her, close. Look after her, Harry. She is only a girl.”
“She’s got to stop listening to him,” Harry said, “or she’ll be no girl of mine.”
🙚🙚🙚
Reisden and Perdita sat with Gilbert Knight on the Clinic verandah. Gilbert fanned himself with a paper fan with the name of an ice supplier on it; and then, because it was a hot day, he fell asleep. The two of them sat together without speaking. They were sitting on the same glider, on opposite ends of it, and whenever Perdita moved, Reisden felt the motion. He watched her. Before yesterday he would have taken her hand, or she his.
“Come,” said Reisden, “I want to talk with you. No, not here on this thing; come walking.”
They walked down through the fields. The path of the fire was still clear in the swath of leafless trees by Mrs. Fen’s fence and in the ruins of her barn. But the burnt fields had grassed themselves again; now they were sunburnt green, and burning in the fields instead, in among the green, were tall candles of purple flowers. They stood among the loosestrife. Perdita was a woman in a white dress, her long hair up. She knelt among the purple loosestrife and her dress was dappled with the reflections of its indescribable hot color.
She is in love with Harry Boulding, Reisden told himself, and engaged to Harry. I am in love with Tasy, who’s dead. No. I was in love with Tasy, who died. He could not define what he felt for Perdita, only admit it. It was as though feeling was an island he had come to after a long voyage. He was too new to it, unused to the ground and the air and a little bit in love with every inhabitant, as one is in a new country. So not in love at all; no, simply astonished with her in all his senses; it was as though he could feel her skin at a distance, smell and taste her from across the room, as if she were surrounded with light.
When this enchantment moderated, she would still be kind and loving, a creative and intelligent musician; but she belonged here, which was part of her charm, and he did not; and she loved Harry.
He picked one of the flowers and looked into its heart, full of colors for which there were no words, and didn’t look at her.
“My dear, thank you for last night. It was a wonderful experience, which should happen once only.” The words were the right ones, exactly what he should say; but they sounded wrong and weak to him, as if he were an old roué making morning-after excuses to some former virgin. “I mean—” He didn’t know what he meant, or couldn’t explain it to her. “I feel stupid. I was trained as a diplomat, but it seems not to have stuck. Last night commits us to nothing: we do not have to go on, or to avoid each other, or even to feel inordinately guilty. I would like to like you and to have your friendship and trust, as I think I have had, and to feel the same friendship for you. I don’t want us ever to be awkward together,” he ended, and the whole speech felt like a badly written formal letter. It was the truth but it didn’t feel even close enough to be an effective lie.
She was still kneeling among the flowers. He sat down near her, not too near.
“How could I prefer . . . anyone else to Harry, how could I prefer you, and still love Harry as I should?” Her voice was so quiet he could hardly hear it.
“You didn’t prefer me, you kissed me. You love Harry.”
“Yes. But—” She looked him full in the face. “There shouldn’t be any buts.”
“You love him, but he wants you to give up your music. I’m simple in comparison. I want you to go on. You don’t love me as you love him, and I don’t love you as he loves you, but I know where music stands with you and he doesn’t. So I’m easier. And we were shocked, we had found Jay. ”
He watched her face as she considered and rejected that excuse.
“It had started before then,” she said in a low voice. He didn’t want to take her through any of this.
“No, no. You love him, my dear, and you want to keep your promise to him. But you couldn’t. So last night you decided you were in love with someone else, and then you could go home and play the piano. My dear, it is a cheat; you don’t need a grand love for that. You simply need to win one from Harry, and you will.”
Her cheeks were red. “That sounds as if I’ve been selfish and I’ve used you for Harry’s sake.”
“The someone else you decided you were in love with was me. That was a compliment to me, no hurt. And I needed to know I could fall in love with someone else, so I chose you; I couldn’t have chosen anyone but you. I needed you.” Impossible to say this to anyone without taking hands; Reisden did not take hers, and that was the only lie in what he was saying, that if he as little as held her hand it would not be true any more.
“You needed me?”
He lay back in the grass and the flowers; they rose around him and he did not have to see her. “I want you to have your life; you’re simple for me, you see; I think I can help you make that come out right, and in doing that I shall be able to feel I have—“ he hesitated over the word, then used it —“loved someone without hurting her. You see that is important to me.” He heard a rustle in the grass beside him; she sat beside him. Her knee brushed his shoulder. There should be no sensuality in those places of the body, but he moved away. She reached out her hand toward him, then drew it back.
Neither of them spoke. High up in the blue sky, the wind moved the clouds. The cicadas sang like their blood in their ears.
“When I am married to Harry,” she said quietly, “I will live in the house with Gilbert and you. It will be strange never to touch you, not for the rest of our lives.”
“I won’t be there,” he said quickly.
“No, you have to be there. Harry and I would go away.”
“Child, you don’t understand. I'm not Richard Knight. I have always told you so.”
She looked out into the air. He could read her disbelief in her drawn-down brows. Ask me how much I’m lying, child, and I won’t be able to tell you. So don’t ask me; believe me. She passed one hand back of her neck, as though she would toss long hair back; but it was all smoothed up and pinned.
“I will go away,” he repeated.
“I wish that you were Richard!” she said suddenly.
“Not worth thinking about, Perdita.” She would have been eleven when he married. Twelve. And if she had been a few years older, a woman in Paris, the woman he had seen last night? Not worth thinking about. He would have Paris, but not here and not her. He wanted somebody. He had to be careful of her.
“I don’t want to become Richard,” he said, “but to find out what happened to him. Will you help me? Would that be too difficult?”
“I would do anything for you,” she said, and he thought she was very young.
“I want to look at where he disappeared, in the Clinic, if it still exists.”
They got up from the ground. He didn’t help her up, which was another awkwardness. She led the way across the fields of burning purple flowers up the rise of the hill to the Clinic, through the side door, up some shadowy narrow stairs, and down a corridor. In the rooms on either side the children were taking their afternoon naps. The doors were open to let the breeze pass through, though there was no breeze. Only one of the doors was closed, and she opened it and stood aside to let him pass through.
“You won’t stay?” he asked.
“No, I want to go think, I guess.”
He nodded, wanting not to show disappointment, not wanting to be disappointed; then said “Yes” because she wouldn’t see the nod.
She stood a moment at the door. “What we did last night? I meant to do it. I’m not sorry. I don’t know what to think of myself. But I’m not.”
She left him alone in the room from which Richard Knight had disappeared.
Yes, he thought, I meant it too.
🙚🙚🙚
Harry Boulding, when Charlie had gone, indeed looked after Perdita, and with horrible results. He saw his foolish uncle fall asleep, leaving Reisden and his Perdita together. The two of them walked off together across the fields, as if by prearrangement. From upstairs he spied on them. Staring out a window on the south side of the Clinic, he saw them together in the purple-stained field, not so much as touching, but that man lying in the grass casually, stretched out while she sat next to him and talked with him, as intimate as kissing. Harry’s heart sank into itself and became small and hard.
🙚🙚🙚
Napping on the sunny verandah, Gilbert had a dream. It was a pleasant dream. He dreamed he was at a funeral. He didn’t know who the funeral was for, so he didn’t feel mournful, rather very happy because Richard was with him. Because it was at night they were wearing evening dress; the top of the closed coffin was covered with candles, big and white, in shining candlesticks. Many people Gilbert knew were there and he pointed them out to Richard. Miss Emma Blackstone from next door was eating éclairs. Her sister Lucy was talking with Gilbert’s sister Isabella and his brother Clement, who were as real and alive as she was, dressed in evening dress too, Clement talking nineteen to the dozen the way he always had and Isabella in her favorite checkered dress wearing Mother’s diamond earrings, nodding her head and eating a piece of white cake.
“Whose funeral is this?” he asked Richard. “It seems just like a party.”
Richard only smiled.
When Gilbert went up to the coffin and read the silver shield on the lid, it said Richard Knight; but when he turned around to protest to Richard, Richard was still there and shook his head, laughing. “You know I'm not Richard Knight.”
Some people trundled the coffin away, but they somehow left the candles, and then waiters opened champagne and gave everyone at the party slices of white cake. Gilbert’s was a wonderfully flavored wedding cake, thick and light, rich and sweet, with white icing roses on top. It tasted a little bit like the apple cake his mother used to make. Eating it, Gilbert was struck by a splendid idea. He tapped his glass and everyone listened to him. “I know how to give everyone what they want!” he shouted happily, but at that moment the bubbles of the champagne made him sneeze and he woke up.