They were the two loveliest people in the world, Sue decided, but the loveliest. She stood numbly as the introductions were made, then followed Honor out onto the long sunny terrace, Sue’s mind still thrilled with the vision of the tiny fair-haired woman with Tim’s arm lovingly around her.
How can anyone that famous be so little? Sue thought. Why she’s hardly bigger than I am. And she looks so young, as young as the pictures on her books. But she can’t be, Sue argued. I got my first book of her poems just as I’d finished Shelley, that was at least six years ago and I know she’s in all the anthologies of modernist poets at school. She had to be forty, more. But she can’t be, she looks no older than Sara. Oh dear, I wonder if I’ll have done anything to be so famous by the time I’ve lived that long?
She sighed, rubbed her forehead. She now felt suddenly very tired and so sleepy she could hardly move. Her eyes hurt when she looked toward the wide and glittering lake that lay almost at their feet, yet also far, far below. Beyond the lake the hard black bulk of the mountains on the other shore felt almost like a physical blow.
How could she act in a way that made her seem so light and silly with all this sound around her and such a bad cold in her head?
“I really had no idea,” she protested. Her own voice was now so husky it startled her.
“You mean about Nan?”
“Yes, that she was—that she is—what she is. I never thought I’d meet her. I have all her books. And plays! When I was in Chicago a year ago I saw Hunter, No More! four times. I thought it was wonderful!”
“Yes,” Honor allowed. “She’s swell. Maybe not quite Shakespeare but . . .?”
“Oh, some of those early sonnets, and anyway, no one’s Shakespeare except Shakespeare. And what other woman has ever written a play in verse that has run for weeks and months all over the world?”
“Okay, sure,” Honor laughed. “I’m just as enthusiastic as you are and wait until you get to know her. But . . .?” She looked hard at Sue, who stood leaning heavily against the table.
Sue was frowning under her thick dark brows, remembering those sonnets, those fine ringing lines.
“But, Sue,” Honor continued. “You look like you have a fever. How do you feel? Did you find those hankies?”
Sue nodded. She was still overwhelmed with bewildered awe that she was in the same house as was Anne Garton Temple. She shook her head, trying then to answer Honor’s question.
“No, really, I feel quite all right, thanks,” Sue said, but then she sniffed.
“Yes?” Honor asked, still examining her quizzically.
“Yes, really. It’s just that I forgot to eat any breakfast and now I’m in sort of a blur, with it’s all being so queer and exciting and . . .”
“Oh, HELL-OH-oh!”
The girls looked up. On the balcony that stretched across half the length of the long house, a woman leaned over who was now waving at them. She had a nice smile and Sue smiled back at the woman, who had thick light-brown hair that was piled messily into a tousle at the back of her head. This was a big woman, from what Sue could see, with heavy breasts and broad shoulders.
This can’t be the one who thinks I’m bad, Sue thought. She seems so friendly, so kind.
“Oh, hello, Lucy,” Honor called up to her, with more easy geniality than Sue expected of her. “Lucy, this is our friend Susan Harper. Sue, Mrs. Pendleton.”
“You poor child! Don’t stand there breaking your neck looking up at me, but then I would stand in the most uncomfortable place for everyone!”
Lucy Pendleton spoke so warmly, her mouth was wide, her eyes bright blue, and she seemed to smile with her entire face. “Isn’t it time for lunch?” she asked. “I’ve had such an absorbing morning but I’ll be right down and try to do something useful,” she said, then disappeared.
Sue looked at Honor, lifting her dark brows inquiringly. Honor was busy pushing deck chairs and arranging them around the table.
“She’s a painter,” Honor explained. “Watercolors. Friend of Nan’s. Pick a comfortable chair, Sue, and sit right down. Everything will be out in a moment. You really look like you could do with a little nourishment.”
Sue, after a moment of internal protest, did then sink gratefully into a chair. It felt so good to be sitting down. This was the first time she could remember being seated since, what? Was it two weeks ago on the train they’d taken to Munich? The thought of eating, though, made her feel a little queasy. She let her head lie back against the striped canvas back of the chair, pulling her feet up under her to sit on them, as she had as a child.
Honor now strode across to the gratings in front of the living room windows and called down, “Hey!”
“Yes, Mr. Kelly,” she said. “I called. And you can tell that to Mr. Timothy Garton, also that rat Daniel Tennant, and tell them Sara says lunch is almost over and she thinks this is a very strange way for a newly arrived guest to behave to say nothing of . . .”
“Yes, Miss Tennant!” someone called.
Then there was a bang, then the subdued scuffling of feet through the cellar and Honor laughed. “Having a quicky, I suppose,” she said aloud to no one in particular, then she walked over and sat down, then closed her eyes as if she were too bored to leave them open a moment longer.
Why does everyone here talk to Joe as if they know him better than I do? Sue wondered. She was without resentment, simply startled by the new ways she was seeing him in their having arrived at this place. There were tones in his voice she’d never heard before. She wondered why he was so different. She wondered also that she didn’t seem to care very much.
She opened her eyes at the sound of footsteps and was horrified to see the tiny Nan Garton almost tottering under the weighty bulk of an enormous salad bowl.
“Oh, Miss Garton!” she exclaimed as she scrambled awkwardly out of the deck chair and dashed across the terrace to help. “You musn’t carry all that! Please let me carry it!”
“Why, thank you, Susan,” she said.
Susan, she thought. She called me Susan. As she took the bowl from Nan’s hands, Sue felt almost overcome by the strangeness of this. Anxiety gripped her; had she taken the bowl too roughly from this woman? Never in her life had she seen anything so lovely, so fragile, as the woman who stood quietly and was now smiling at her. Her voice seemed to vanish. Had she really called her Susan?
“Oh, Lucy!” Nan Garton smiled affectionately at her friend who now approached. “How did it go today? Did you do good work?”
“A wonderful morning, Nan dear. And you?”
“I wrote hundreds of postcards,” Nan said, even gaily. “For the first time in my life I’ve had the courage to write, ‘Having a wonderful time! Wish you were here!’”
Susan smiled at the malicious way Nan Garton had rolled out the phrases that had never before sounded as silly as they did now, though they also sounded real.
“Ah, there’s Sara,” Lucy said, hurrying toward her as Sara walked carefully across the terrace with a tray of cheese on one arm and a great bowl of fruit held in the fingers of the other.
“Can I do something to help, Sara dear?” Lucy asked. “Or am I too late, as usual?”
“Never too late,” Sara said, dryly. “Yes, please take this tray, if you will. And do forgive me, everybody, for having lunch so late.”
She looked around and smiled impersonally just as Tim, followed by the two boys, all came to the table bearing rows of beer bottles.
“It’s our fault, I’m afraid,” Joe Kelly smiled, offering this in his softest voice.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry. Joe Kelly, Mrs. Pendleton. Lucy, you remember my speaking of our friend who’s at Oxford this year?”
Lucy smiled at Joe. “I wonder,” she asked and as she was speaking she began helping herself to salad, then cutting a piece of the yellow-white cheese with great holes in it. “I wonder if you know any of the men who were at Balliol or Merton ten years ago or so? My nephew, you see . . .?”
Susan liste
ned as this mild chatter went on all around her and to the steady splash of water from the old fountain. She tried to eat. She was surprised that she was hungry and that she would have enjoyed the food but that her throat felt not sore but stiff. She thought she might be feeling better or maybe it was only the excitement that was getting her to forget her cold.
She looked again at Nan Garton’s small and very vivid face in such contrast to the slow queenly Honor. Sue smiled to see them sitting side by side, the one’s feet barely reaching the ground, the other’s seemingly so long as to stretch halfway across the stone terrace.
Then she looked at the smooth face of Sara Porter, whose expression was remote. Her heart thumped suddenly at the thought that Sara might be able to help her, that she might tell Susan what to do. Of course, so far it had been rather hard to see anything of her but perhaps sometime during the afternoon there would be a few minutes. She would simply say, “Mrs. Porter, what do you think I ought to do? Joe and I really love each other, but Joe . . .?”
“More beer, Susan?” Tim was looking at her half-empty glass and was leaning forward with the bottle toward her, struggling slightly as he rose from his chair.
“Here!” Dan said, pushing Tim back, and without even moving his body he stretched one long arm across Susan with the bottle poised above her glass.
“Cuff or plain?” he asked.
Sue, who really doubted she could swallow another sip, was simply thrilled to her very marrow at the sound of his deep voice and said, if breathlessly, “Oh, cuff, but definitely!”
He poured. She raised her glass and smiled at Joe over its white foam.
vi
It was now after lunch and Lucy Pendleton and Honor and Nan Garton stood together almost silently to wash the dishes in the kitchen. Sara had disappeared. Moments later Tim, too, was gone.
Joe Kelly stood dreamily in the hot sun on the outer edge of the flower-bordered terrace that ran the length of the house. He felt pleasantly full of fresh sweet nourishment that held no reproach, and he thought not of the ugly food he’d been eating while all the hidden people in that hideous place were starving. He thought of going into the shaded room, of lying down without speech or much thought to await digestion and the setting sun.
Sue was already inside, he knew, curled like an attractive foetus around a small striped cushion in the blue chaise, eyes shut, her mouth closed softly. Joe had stood looking at her before he’d come out onto the terrace, seeing with a new tenderness the smudges under her lashes and the way her delicate bones showed under the tight little yellow sweater, poor kid! Perhaps Sara was right; she was just too little to go bumming around the countryside with him.
He’d then looked up, almost shamefaced, at Dan Tennant, walking through the room from the kitchen. Right then Joe had begun to softly whistle.
“Shhhush!” Dan hissed, and Joe had, for a moment, felt angry, as if Joe didn’t know his own girl was sleeping.
Joe scowled, then relaxed, as the green door closed and Dan disappeared. The young chap was right, after all. He, Joseph Kelly, was a thoughtless bastard. Then he grinned in complacency. He stretched and then ambled like a great heavy cat, a tom, out into the sun.
Below him the lake lay, mile after hard, shimmering mile, under the steep vine-covered terraces of the hill. He felt that he could easily throw a football in a curve wide enough to fly over the vineyards at his feet and have it land well out into the Léman. He could imagine the ripple, circling out and out, lapping tinily at the walls of the Château de Glérolles, growing weaker as they widened, coming at last in a faint diminishing curve to the far shores and the gloomy beach of Saint-Gingolph in France.
Joe spat richly and was astounded to see how foolish were his dreams of ever hitting the lake with a football or any other projectile. He peered nervously over the ledge of the terrace and saw, about twenty feet below, a square water basin set into the slope and on its edge, sat Dan, who was holding one long hand in a ruminative way, under the steady spout of water. He was wearing a pair of dirty white trunks and dark glasses.
Joe debated calling down to him, but felt sleepy and, besides, he wasn’t sure he liked this cub-brother of Sara’s. Dan might be all right when he got smoothed out a bit or else maybe learned not to be so damned smooth, Joe couldn’t decide.
Like most of those who’d gone to Western colleges, Joe had an instinctive and almost self-righteous distrust of the clothes, the manners, the general self-assurance of the men who’d gone to Eastern schools. He knew that this, too, was partly by tacit agreement that he, as a Westerner, would remain as he was, less polished, but he liked those mannerisms none the more for that. The hair, for instance. Why the hell didn’t Dan Tennant cut his hair and wear it short, like a man? Instead it was long and swept back in obviously nurtured waves from his high forehead and temples.
He looked pansy, Joe thought, and spat again, this time scowling.
Dan looked up, waved and smiled and suddenly seemed so like Sara that Joe found himself grinning down at him, caught up by a wave of affection.
“You got a cigarette?” Dan called.
Joe put his fingers to his lips, tipping his head backward toward the silent house then nodded. He then straddled the thick bed of zinnias and great gleaming daisies and slid down the steep slopes to the basin where Dan waited. The grass felt coarse beneath him and he remembered to vaguely worry about stains on these, his only pair of slacks.
Dan watched Joe inscrutibly from behind his dark glasses, all the while flapping one hand somnolently in the murmurring water.
Why the hell doesn’t he say something? Joe wondered, feeling annoyed at the silence of this young pup, lording it over everyone because he’d gone to a big school in the East.
“Oh, I say, I’m sorry!” Joe said, and was rather startled to hear his own Oxonian accent, as intense as it was new. He fumbled in his pockets for cigarettes and matches.
Dan took the one Joe offered, lit it, then lit Joe’s, too, with his dripping hand. “Thanks,” he said.
“If you’ve got shorts,” he said, pausing to smoke, “why not strip? Sara doesn’t care.”
“She can’t see us, can she?”
“No, but she and Tim have to be careful about the peasants. We’re foreigners here. There’s no use our abusing the priviledge, so forth.”
Dan’s off-hand tone said he knew all about it, which exasperated Joe Kelly, who was deciding he’d sweat himself sick before he’d strip and be like this fellow. He dragged deeply on his cigarette, then asked, as if casually, “Been here often?”
“First time, but not, by God, the last. I came over from Grenoble about ten days ago. I should be there at school still but Sara said there was an empty room and . . .” Dan flopped limply off the edge of the basin and stretched his long thin limbs over the hot grass, sighing audibly with contentment.
Joe smiled to himself in triumph. “I’ve been here several times, damn near five, six. Lucky enough to have a long vacation here last year.”
“Yes,” Dan said. “Sara mentioned that she got a lot of work out of you. And she would. Nothing like my dear little older sister for slave driving. Well, I do envy you. My God, what a view.”
Well, Joe thought, this Tennant chap isn’t that bad. He began unbuttoning his shirt, then his slacks. He got out of his clothes, then rolled them into a shape that would cushion his head.
They lay, simmering quietly, sweat beading then cooling on each one’s clean skin. Each man breathed slowly. Their eyes would open then close like those of a silent bird. Joe spoke once to say, “There’s a lake steamer.” Dan asked once in a soft grunt for another cigarette.
In the cool dim living room there was no noise except that of an occasional stuffy sigh from Sue, who was deeply asleep. She stirred only once or twice. Occasionally a frown would cross her face at some dream or a twinging muscle, then it fell still again.
Timothy slipped expertly over the second step, which was the one that creaked, and tiptoed past her, walki
ng out through the sun-luminous curtains and onto the blazing terrace. He stood blinking for a moment, walked to the edge, and looked down.
There past the sturdy ridged stems of daisies swaying faintly in a small afternoon breeze on the slope past the thick grass lay Dan and Joe Kelly, sleeping.
(They are beautiful, he thought, lying like young dogs or carved amber bulls. God, am I already so old that I grow lyrical over the bodies of youth? I wish I could paint them, or do I? Is it better to say what I see, what I mean by seeing them, with opening buds, with the quick cruel upthrust of a crocus, the all-absorbing yellow of a tulip? One petal? The sensual sprawling orchid and its raw sex. Yes, they are all beauty. And I pity them to be so young and to not know what I now know, never to know what I know with my Sara, with the only woman.
Shall I go and tell them there is no need for them to look further, no use in trying other bodies or searching other minds? Shall I let them know that only I, in all the world, have found what all men look for, for the first time since the world began? They’d be right to think I’m crazy, I am crazy, but I’m sane, too, for the first time since my world began.)
A drink, Tim thought, might be more to the point. I’ll wake them and we’ll see. He then squatted down among the flowers, selecting a large-headed, thick, and heavy zinnia that he tossed. It fell lumpishly on Daniel’s relaxed belly.
The boy awoke slowly and peered upward toward Tim’s round and silver head. He squinted, then told him, “Hi,” sleepily.
Joe, only half awake behind his eyelids, pulled himself unwillingly from a dream of a talk with Sara. In the dream there was Tim, the finest man he knew, leaning in from behind her like Cardinal Richelieu behind the queen. Joe was standing before them stalwartly, explaining in round Oxonian phrases, like a self-assured poetical don, the reasons he needed to send Sue packing.
He was only half awake and could see the dream so clearly. “And for another thing,” he was saying in a loud clear voice, “I am only twenty-one or -two, there’s no real proof of my birthdate on the orphan registers and Judge So-and-So and Doctor Such-and-Such have staked a lot to get me to Oxford on this Rhodes and . . .”
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