"If you want to use a euphemism, yes."
"And Dina?"
"Sick too -- using the same euphemism. Pretty, healthy, stable in her way. But that's the way of a child. That's how she'll stay."
"I wonder."
What do you mean, you wonder?"
She sat on a couch, drawing up her legs. "You're not sick -- in that way."
"If I am, I hope it doesn't show. But Sheila and I have no children."
"Why not?"
"Don't be dense."
"I think you're wrong. I think your children would be normal."
"And their children?"
She shrugged. "You know the difference between heredity and environment. If environment, illness, anything like that was the cause of what happened to your mother -- "
"It can't be."
"Why not?"
"Because of Dina."
She questioned me briefly but rather thoroughly about my mother, about Dina, about me.
Presently she smiled, and her smile was warmer now. "I knew you were sorry for yourself, Val," she said. "It shows. I didn't know you had so many good excuses for being sorry for yourself."
"Excuses?" I said.
"Oh, sure. Even if you're no psychologist, you know that self-pity is self-destruction. If you've only one leg and everybody else has two -- too bad, but self-pity can only make your situation worse."
"Thanks for the lecture," I said.
She smiled. "Don't do that," she said. "That's self-defense. You're putting up a barrier. It's not in the least necessary, because I'm not trying to psychoanalyze you . . . "
"What else are you doing?"
She got up again and began to move about. I tried not to watch her, because she affected me almost as she would affect a lusty seventeen-year-old boy who had been in solitary confinement for a year. Yet it was impossible not to watch her.
"This is only 1966," she said. "It's not long since psychiatry was born. Clever men found out that many things which had always been assumed to be straightforward physical ailments were actually caused by mental factors. And, of course, they went too far. Now almost everything short of a broken leg or diptheria is supposed to be psychosomatic. Quite soon now other clever men will start swinging the pendulum again. Things in the blood other than alcohol can cause disturbances -- "
"Obviously," I said.
"And a great deal of what used to be called madness can be very simply dealt with."
"Loop it out of existence," I retorted. "It's easy."
"No, not that . . . I think there's something quick and easy that could cure Dina. Not your mother. She really is psychotic. Dina is . . . well, she just needs a certain stimulation -- I think. I can't be sure. It depends on whether there's anything fundamentally wrong in the heredity line. Hers and yours."
"Is there a way of finding out?"
She looked at me with sudden suspicion, and relaxed instantly. "There's a way I could find out about you," she said. "And your children, It's a rather curious way to find out such a thing . . . But it would be infallible. It would settle whether there was any chance of your passing on . . . what you're afraid you might pass on."
"Will you do it?" I asked quickly.
She smiled and looked away. "You don't know what you're asking."
"What do you mean?"
"And because you don't know what you're asking . . . Turn around, Val."
Perhaps I was slow, but I hadn't the faintest idea what was coming. I thought she was going to hypnotize me or drug me, though where she'd get the drugs was quite a question.
A moment later she said: "All right. Turn back."
She was on the thick carpet, naked, her marvelous body twice as marvelous as even my heated imagination had been able to picture it.
She beld out her arms to me, yet like a fool I hesitated.
"This way?" I said stupidly.
"This is part of it. But if you're reluctant . . . "
I ran to her.
Chapter Five
I had read and heard of acts of love which were not merely sex, which were more even than the consummation of true love: timeless moments when two people met and were reborn. I had not believed such things could happen.
I didn't even love Miranda, and quite certainly she didn't love me. Yet what happened then and there shocked us, drained us, and left us two different people.
Although I was aware of none of the details, which were unimportant and probably quite conventional, I knew that she was as much taken aback as I was. I also vaguely understood why: it was only a few minutes before that I had made her see me as something more than a character in a play, and now we were together with a background of silent thunder.
We didn't discuss it; we didn't try to explain it or explain it away. It was not love, it was not passion. It was destiny. It was one of the moments, big or small, after which things are never quite the same again.
And we recognized this, dimly, yet with no possibility of pretense that nothing particular had happened.
Miranda's reaction didn't really surprise me, though I couldn't understand it. "Val," she said softly, "without meaning to, I've done something more tragic than Greg could ever manage to do."
I didn't reply. What was there to say to that?
She jumped up. "You must stay till I come back," she said.
Before I could emerge from euphoria -- which I had no particular desire to do, anyway -- she was gone.
I slept. When I awoke, Miranda was leaning over me, wearing her white bikini.
"You needn't worry," she said. "Your children will be entirely normal. There isn't the slightest doubt."
Only in that moment did I realize how much I wanted children -- more than that, wanted Sheila and me to have children. Always when Sheila had said or hinted that things would be different if we had children I had been irritated at the irrelevance. Things would be different if I were seventy-five feet tall, or if Sheila were a man, or if I were a millionaire, or if we could have children.
All I said was: "You had that tested -- that way?"
She nodded. "In the circumstances, it was the only way. I could hardly . . . " She checked herself.
"You went to the copse."
"Perhaps."
"What about Dina?"
"I think I'll be seeing Dina." She was evasive. "I'll do something . . . she won't remember what, and it'll be better if nobody else knows."
She didn't want to talk any more. "I mustn't see you again, unless . . . No, I shan't see you again, Val. You're not going out tonight, and I . . . Goodby, Val."
She ran from the room. And I knew somehow that she meant goodby -- not au revoir.
By the time Sheila drove up, twenty minutes later, I had carefully removed all evidence that Miranda had been in the house. I left my own glass where it was, but washed hers and put it away.
I just didn't know how I'd act and how Sheila would act after what had happened. Not only had I been faithful to Sheila since we got married, I had been faithful to her since the day we met.
After hearing her mini drive up and stop, I waited in the hall. Sheila might guess what had happened the moment she saw my face . . . Belatedly I realized I should have found something to do, instead of simply standing waiting for Sheila with no prepared explanation of what I'd been doing all afternoon.
She came in and said: "What's her name, Val?"
"Miranda," I said. It would have been fatuous to ask what she was talking about, whose name she meant, and even more fatuous to ask how she had found out.
"Why did you do it, Val?" Sheila asked quietly. She should have waited for an answer, but she surrendered some of her advantage by going on: "I thought . . . with Dina out of the way for a while, we might have had a chance. Dina's the root of all the trouble, you know. All of it. You don't think so, but you don't have to put up with Dina at her worst, all day."
So we were talking about Dina, not Miranda, and the heat was temporarily off.
"Lots of people have in
-law trouble," I said rather weakly.
"Yes, but not this kind of trouble," said Sheila bleakly. "If she was a cripple, I could speak to her plainly and reach some kind of understanding. If she was old I could at least try to manage her. But she's just . . . well, you know."
"I know."
"I hate her, Val, do you know that? She does. Of course, she hates me, so we're even. But she hated me first."
Some people could ignore dislike. Sheila wasn't one of them. She couldn't be indifferent.
She went back to Miranda then, trying to work up the fury she had felt earlier. But it was too late. And I had realized with relief that she wasn't talking about Miranda and me in the lounge an hour ago, but Miranda and me in the Red Lion earlier.
"Did you have to humiliate me, Val?" she demanded. "Did you have to take her where everybody knows you, and me? Couldn't you have taken her to some hotel out of town?"
"You've got it wrong, Sheila," I said.
"Of course. Obviously. What else could be expected? She's a rich client, the daughter of the Earl of Shoreditch."
"She's one of the giants," I said.
"The what? Oh, those kids. Don't be ridiculous. I hear she's about the same height as me."
"I mean, she's with them. Listen, Sheila. There's something very strange happening here in Shuteley, something fantastic. This afternoon Jota was killed. I might have been killed too, but instead I killed my opponent -- "
"Killed?" She stared at me. "Jota dead?"
I explained what had happened. She listened, yet I knew I wasn't getting through to her. It wasn't that she disbelieved what I said. It was rather that she was the kind of woman, the kind of womanly woman, who saw her own family and household and everything that affected them in technicolor and everything else in black and white. The giants were all black and white, except Miranda, who had lunched with me at the Red Lion. Besides, she wasn't a giant.
It might have made a difference to Sheila's attitude, I thought, if Miranda had been six feet four. Then she'd have been a freak and anything I did might have been laughed off as temporary aberration, as if I had fallen desperately in love with the fat lady of a traveling circus.
"Anyway," I said, "they'll be gone tomorrow."
"How do you know?"
"I told you. Greg said -- "
"And you believe everything you're told?"
"Sheila, these giants know things. One of the things . . . "
"Well, go on."
"They say," I muttered, "that I needn't worry about my children. That there's no reason why they shouldn't be normal. And I believe it's true."
Sheila's head came up quickly. For a moment there was radiance in her face. She had fought against my decision, not so much became she wanted children, though she did, as because she believed we needed them.
Then the radiance died. "Who told you -- Miranda?"
"As a matter of fact, yes."
"And anything she says must be true?"
"It's not like that."
"Isn't it?" She paused, and then asked: "Is she very beautiful?"
"Very. But she'll be gone tomorrow too."
"So you have to make hay while the sun shines?"
The phone rang. "I'll get it," I said at once, too quickly, for Sheila looked at me calculatingly. Invariably she answered the phone, even if I was at home, because I wasn't often called at home and if I was, her answering it gave me a chance to think or pretend not to be home.
She was doing me an injustice this time, for the possibility that Miranda might be calling had not crossed my mind.
It was, in fact, Jota.
"Haven't much time," he said. "I'm out for a stroll with some of the giants . . . Val, something happens tonight. They haven't said anything definite -- I guessed from the way they talk about tomorrow, as if everything's going to be different."
He wasn't telling me anything I didn't know.
"Good? Bad?" I said.
"They're excited. That's all I can say. Except -- they seem to think they're going to do me a good turn. I think now they let me stay with them so that they'd know where I was and could keep an eye on me. One other thing -- go out. Take Sheila with you. Go right away. Don't waste any time."
"Why?"
"I don't know why. Think they tell me everything? But I gather you're supposed to stay at home tonight. It's taken for granted. It's assumed you must stay at home."
"Then I suppose I must," I said.
"Don't be an idiot. Why give in? They think you'll stay at home. So go out. Don't be a vegetable."
"Jota," I said. "What you and Greg were saying to each other . . . that must be important. What exactly did you mean when -- "
Jota chuckled and rang off.
"So it wasn't Miranda," said Sheila. "What a disappointment for you."
"Sheila," I said, "lets go out for dinner."
"And we'll happen to run into Miranda."
"Don't be silly. You pick the place. Right out of town somewhere. Sheila . . . I love you.".
She looked at me doubtfully, suspiciously. But I met her gaze fair and square.
It was hypocritical, telling Sheila I loved her so soon after what had happened. I was quite certain that what had happened between Miranda and me would never happen again. She had called it tragic . . . anyway, she had called something tragic. We had met without meeting, and then suddenly in an explosion of feeling we had fused in one way and been blown apart in another.
"We never go out to dinner," Sheila said.
That reminded me: Miranda, not just Jota, had said "You're not going out tonight." That was another of the things she knew. It wasn't in the cards that I would leave the house again that day.
"We're going this time," I said. "Go and get yourself all dolled up. There isn't a girl in Shuteley who can hold a candle to you when you really try."
"Except Miranda, of course."
"Miranda isn't in Shute!ey. I don't think she's anywhere."
Although this puzzled Sheila, it also seemed to satisfy her.
I rushed Sheila. She wanted to spend hours getting ready, as women do. She took it for granted she'd have a bath and do all the other things that had to be done, and we'd get out about seven or eight or nine.
But I thought, I had a feeling, that if we didn't sidestep fate, we'd lose the chance. Maybe twenty giants would arrive and keep us at home by force.
And as we closed the front door and walked to the car -- my car -- I was certain there had been something behind that feeling, for I felt myself wakening up. A moment before I had felt tired and rather disinclined to go out after all, and if I hadn't been hustling Sheila, if there had been any easy way to change my mind, I'd have been quite content to stay at home watching television instead.
We drove to Shutdey and southwards across country to a new roadhouse, the Orbit, on the nearest main road. We had been there just once before, for a drink.
We talked only casually. Miranda wasn't mentioned, nor the giants, nor Jota, nor Dina. And all the chill between us gradually melted. I realized in wonder that I liked being with Sheila, that we were going to enjoy ourselves. It had been like this before we were married, and for a short, a very short time afterwards.
I was happier than I had been for years. Sheila and I would have children. We'd become a family. There must be some solution to the problem of Dina, if we really worked on it. Perhaps it would be a tough one -- she might have to be shown, with brutal directness if necessary, that if Sheila and I couldn't live our lives in peace with her around, Dina couldn't be allowed to stay around.
Curiously, although I completely accepted Miranda's statement that I could have normal children, I left her promise that something would be done about Dina entirely in the air. I didn't even think about it again. That I could have a family without fear was, after all, not hard to believe. It had been doubts that had been set at rest, not certainties. Dina turning into a normal teenager was something more in the nature of a miracle.
A mile or so short
of the roadhouse, Sheila said: "We're far too early, Val. There won't be a soul there, and it's too soon for dinner. Let's stop for a while."
So I drove off the road.. .
Married couples abandon pre-marital parked-car behavior for a hundred excellent reasons. Kids stay parked for hours, not necessarily misbehaving themselves, because they've nowhere else to go. After marriage, many couples try to recapture magic moments in cars parked at favorite spots . . . but even if they stay in love, it can't be the same.
Snow White and the Giants Page 8
