Tea was good. Nan ate avidly. She heard the hard crust of bread beneath her teeth with pure delight and felt the tea flow hotly down her throat. She’d been hungry.
Lucy sat opposite her talking quickly, obviously happy that Honor was not there too.
All I have to do, Nan thought with a certain amount of complacent cunning, is to be wide-eyed and funny. All I have to do is say, Oh yes! and open my eyes wide and pretend to need people. That makes them feel important. I’ve always known this. I knew it when I was six and Father with his silky beard would tell me how he wanted to protect me. I know it now when Daniel dances with me as if I were made of porcelain. I know it when poor Lucy scolds me.
She is not scolding me now except in her own way. I have made her happy by talking of concerts we have heard together, pictures we have seen, people we have laughed at. She knows nothing about me.
Timothy is the only one who knows anything about me. He’s the only one I love. It’s because he stands alone, I think. He is not like Father or young Dan or Lucy and all the others, taken in by my cringing will to be loved, my need to be needed.
Oh, hurry, hurry, she prayed, her face smiling vaguely. Something is getting ready. Something is forming, slowly, surely, through all this strange summer. I am learning. But what is it?
She stood up. Lucy had begun to sob and Nan stood looking down at her, seeing the straggly brown hair, the fat hands clenched over the face, and beyond them—and more importantly—the blue waters of the ageless lake.
What is she crying about? Tea was good. I was good. What does it matter that Joe and his Sue are not married, if my own Timothy is not married to his love, if Daniel and his quiet sister Honor are not married, even? All that is immaterial. I am not shocked by Susan. I am not jealous of Sara. I am but faintly interested in the gawky Tennants. Lucy, this poor harried weeping wreck, is not much more than an interruption. I do not care anymore, ever, if I wound her sensitive feelings.
“I’m sorry, Lucy,” she heard herself saying. She listened to her own warm sympathetic voice with a terrible glee. “I must stay with him,” she heard herself say. “He may need me.”
Poor stupid blind woman, she thought. You hear me talking of my brother. You think I love him, perhaps incestuously. Do you not know that I’m waiting for something else? You must think I stay here in this place you hate with such a venomous jealousy because I am held by an unnatural love for Timothy. You can never see that it is my love for him that is freeing me.
They walked on without speaking. Behind them the little terrace of the café settled into silence and a striped cat leapt up on their table and licked at the plates where a butter pat had been.