Mentally Steve winced at the repetition of a name that he did not like, and that seemed oddly unsuitable for the girl to whom it was attached. “How did you happen to find her?” he asked casually.
“It’s a funny thing you should ask me that,” Ollie said. “Because to put it the right way round, she found me.”
“How did she do that?”
“Rode into town one morning on one of them big oil trucks,” Ollie said simply.
Steve stared at him. But before he could make any spoken comment, he saw the swing-door at the back of the restaurant begin to open.
“You were lucky,” he said, and with easy adroitness turned the conversation into a different channel. “You would need someone good with the kind of Labour Day business you must have had.”
“Steve,” Ollie said, “you wouldn’t believe it if I told you how many cars—oh, hello, honey. When you’ve set that down for Steve here, go rustle a cup of coffee for me, and one for yourself.”
That Ollie should be on friendly terms with this man in no way surprised Psyche, because Ollie was on good terms with everyone he had ever met. His suggestion that she join them, however, caught her completely unprepared. It was not without precedent, but in this instance she had not expected it.
“I’ll get your coffee right away, Ollie,” she said. “But after that, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to yesterday’s accounts.”
“What did I tell you, Steve?” the little man said. “Isn’t she a wonder? Always working. Now you listen to me, honey. I’m the boss, and I just told you to get yourself some coffee.”
So I was not imagining things. Psyche thought swiftly. They were talking about me when I came through from the kitchen. Which is all the more reason why I should not make a fuss about this coffee business. This man is already curious about me. I must do nothing to aggravate that curiosity.
“All right, Ollie,” she said, smiling. “Thank you.”
Steve, seeing her smile for the first time, discarded any lingering doubts he might have had on one score. She was as out of place at Oliver’s as she would be in an oil truck.
After she had gone to get the coffee, he turned to Ollie with no further pretense. “Is she as attractive as she looks?”
Ollie, forgetful that a newspaperman might have an impersonal rather than a personal interest in her, looked smug. “You’re interested, aren’t you? I thought you might be. That’s why I wanted you two to get together. It hit me that you’d maybe be more her type than the guys she gets to meet here most of the time.”
“She doesn’t go out much on dates?”
“She doesn’t go out that way at all. But don’t get me wrong, it’s not because she couldn’t.”
“No,” Steve said thoughtfully. “It wouldn’t be because she couldn’t.”
Psyche knew in advance that when she came back this time the tall man with the disturbing eyes would stand up, and that she would have no choice but to take the place he offered in the booth beside him.
Because it happened exactly as she had known it would, she slipped into the place against the wall gracefully and without hesitation, but she was more aware of the man beside her than she had ever been of any man in her life.
“You don’t take sugar, do you, honey?” Ollie said. “Well, you don’t need it.”
Steve shifted a little so that he could look directly at Psyche. “I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?”
Her face and voice equally composed, Psyche said, “I don’t think so.”
“I have an idea it was about three years ago.”
“No. That simply isn’t possible.”
It could not have been three years ago, Psyche knew, because at that time she had been walking barefoot on a slag heap. But if he were not entirely mistaken, if he had seen her somewhere more recently, this could only have happened when she was in the city. On the one occasion when she had gone into the city with Nick, she had stayed in the car. During her time at the Scarlettis she had not left the house. Which left Bel. He might have seen her while she was at Bel’s place, either on the street, or in one of the large stores. Either alone, or with Bel.
He was still looking at her. “You were wearing white,” he said slowly.
Oh, God, Pysche thought, if I was with Bel, don’t let him remember. Don’t let him find out anything about me that he can’t see for himself. This could be enough, and will have to be enough.
“I really think you’re mistaken,” she said.
“If Steve says a thing’s so, it likely is, honey,” Ollie told her.
“He’s human, isn’t he?” Psyche asked.
“My guess is, yes,” the little man said. “But that’s something you could maybe tell better than I could, honey.”
“Ollie, you’re impossible!” Psyche said. Then, because she saw that they were both laughing, she began to laugh, too.
After that, it seemed perfectly natural to be exactly where she was, and with the company she found herself in. She felt as though she had been on her way toward this moment for a long time, as though she had in a sense created it herself. Here and now was her world as she wanted it to remain, in perfect proportion. Even when she learned that the man was in newspaper work, the original unease, which had gone hand in hand with instantaneous physical attraction, did not come back. She could trace no similarity between him and the reporters who had come to Bel’s place after Kathie died. There quite simply was no similarity. And he had, apparently, dismissed his earlier idea that this was not the first time he had seen her.
Steve, in the course of easy, casual conversation, attempted to learn something about her. That he should, at the end of nearly an hour, have learned nothing at all, sharpened rather than dulled his interest in her; for he had conducted too many “casual” interviews to interpret her evasions as other than deliberate. Lovely to look at, parrying his oblique inquiries as skilfully as he made them, she presented him with a challenge from which, for a variety of reasons, he no longer had any wish to turn aside.
He looked at his watch. “Ollie,” he said, “do you chain your white slaves down, or can they escape occasionally?”
“Steve,” Ollie said, “it’s not everyone I’d tell this to, but sometimes I even push them out on to the street.”
Steve looked at Psyche. “If I were to drive past this afternoon at two o’clock, would I be likely to find you out on the street and in need of rescue?”
Unaccountably afraid to say yes, yet hesitant to say no for fear this might mean the end of something that had not really even begun, Psyche spread her hands helplessly in front of her. “I—I have work to do.”
“You’ve forgotten,” Ollie said. “This is your afternoon off, honey.”
It was not her afternoon off, and Ollie, Psyche knew, was quite as aware of this as she was herself. He is behaving, she thought with inner amusement, like the mother of an ugly duckling. It had, apparently, really bothered him that she had never gone out with any of the men who had asked her. But then he did not know about Nick. Nobody, if she could help it, was ever going to know about Nick. She had told Bel. That had been in her other life. Nick did not belong, and never would belong, in this new life.
“Even if it wasn’t your afternoon off, honey,” Ollie said, “there isn’t much to do at this time of year.” With a sweep of one short arm, he asked her to witness the truth of this in a restaurant empty and quiet in the morning sunlight.
Psyche turned to Steve. “All right,” she said quietly. “You’ll find me in need of rescue at two o’clock.”
With a smile that Psyche knew she would be unlikely to forget, he said, “Good. And, by the way, you had better bring a coat with you.”
Psyche’s dark eyebrows drew together in a small frown that was a question in itself. “A coat? It’s as hot as midsummer today.”
Steve stood up. “You’re going to help me with my homework. I’m taking you out to the arena.”
“Oh, no!” Psyche murmured. But he did not hear her
because he was now speaking to Ollie.
3
WHEN the man drove up the main street of the little town at two o’clock, it was to find it caught in the doldrums of early afternoon. With the exception of the slim figure in blue standing outside the log front of oliver’s, it was temporarily empty of all other life. A Few Parked cars stood at the curb. Dead leaves, drifted from the side streets, lay in meaningless patterns across the deserted road. The only thing with any significance at all, in the scene as he saw it, was psyche. And briefly he thought of her as an actress against the backdrop of a play in which she was palpably miscast, in which she seemed painfully alone, not only at the moment, but in all ways.
If it had been winter, he could have allowed himself the impersonal gesture of putting a rug around her when she got into the car. As it was, there was nothing he could do for her, and he was astonished that he should so much wish that there was.
“I see you didn’t forget your coat,” he said, as they passed through the quickly reached northern fringe of the town.
“No,” Psyche said, “I didn’t forget.”
“Have you been out to the arena very often?”
“This will be the first time,” Psyche told him quietly.
He spared a glance from a road that now ran between sun-soaked fields of yellow stubble interspersed with trees brilliant with colour. “Most people would have been curious, if nothing else.”
“I am not most people.”
This, he felt, was a truth too self-evident to call for comment. “I think you’ll find it interesting,” he said.
“I’m sure I will,” Psyche said, but only because she wanted to please him.
She had deliberately refused the knowledge that the big wooden arena, where ranking figure-skaters practised during the off-season, was a place to which she could have gone at any time since she started to work at Oliver’s. It was not a walk any longer than many others she had taken in other directions. But the memory of a frozen dawn and a small school rink was too painful to be willingly resurrected, even after the passage of more than seven years.
And now, when the man backed his car off the highway and came to a stop beside a sandy path leading to a door in a blank wooden wall, she could feel tension a hard knot within her.
They sat midway up the tiers of wooden benches encircling an oval rink. The spectators were few, and widely scattered. The skaters were equally scattered, each, attended by his or her own private coach, appropriating a section of blue-white artificial ice bounded by invisible but definite limits.
“Cigarette?” Steve asked.
“No thank you,” Psyche said. She wanted to smoke very badly, but could not trust herself to hold her hands steady. For here was not only fluid grace beyond anything she had previously imagined, but hurt as fresh as when it had been inflicted on her.
The man lit a cigarette, and put the packet back in the pocket of his trench-coat. And as he did so, he noticed her hands, clasped together so hard that the knuckles were white and a flush of colour had run up under long, unvarnished nails. Without appearing to do so, he glanced at her face, and saw reflected there the same tension he had seen in her hands. He was too good a judge of people to doubt the actuality of an emotion whose source entirely defeated him. In this place there was, as far as he could see, no cause for it at all. Nevertheless he knew that he could not, for the time being, begin again on an attempt to crumble her defenses.
Without premeditation, he laid his hand over hers, and held them until he felt them relax.
For Psyche, the warm, strong pressure of his fingers thawed cold that had been a hidden part of her for longer than she could remember; cold that stretched back a long way beyond the specific unhappiness evoked by her present surroundings.
She looked up at him, with a smile breath-taking in its brilliance, and asked, “Is this the way you always do your homework?”
“Always,” he said, his grey eyes teasing her.
This, Psyche thought, is what it feels like to be happy. I’ve never known before. “What are you really supposed to be doing here?”
“Something that I am not trained to do,” he told her, “but that I have been asked to do because I am here. A matter of economic expediency on the part of my newspaper, and weak-mindedness on my own part. I am expected to hazard a guess as to whether any of these skaters are potential Olympic material.”
“A year ago,” Psyche thought, “I would not have known what he was talking about. If it had not been for Kathie I would never have heard of the Olympic games, much less been made to trace their history, on my own, back across the centuries to Mount Olympus. I would not have known what the word ‘potential’ meant. Kathie—Kathie, why did it have to end like that for you?”
She stared directly at the man beside her, searching the lean, hard planes of a face whose only open betrayal of sensitivity was in the lines of the mouth. “What would he think if I were to tell him about Kathie?” she wondered. “Would he condemn her? Would he condemn me? It is a risk I can not, and will not, take.”
“You are probably much better qualified than you pretend to be,” she said.
“A little, perhaps. But not much.”
“You must have done some sports reporting?”
“Practically none. Spot the best skater on the rink for me. You’ll be doing me a favour.”
He had removed his hand from hers, but Psyche had difficulty in concentrating on the rink. Finally, she said, “The girl over there, I think. The one in red. I don’t know anything about it, but she seems to me to be the best.”
“For someone who doesn’t know anything about it, you’re doing very well. You’ve picked last year’s national champion from amongst some very close contenders.”
“Have I? It’s the way she moves. She makes it seem so easy.” The boys and girls at the school had made it look easy, too. A delusion. It was not easy at all.
“Change your mind about a cigarette?”
Relaxed now. Psyche nodded. “Yes, thank you. Can you skate?”
“I used to. But not this kind of thing. Hockey.”
“You were probably very good,” Psyche said, as she leaned toward the light he held for her. He would, she thought, be good at anything he did. If she were to continue to walk the tight-rope of a present with no admissible yesterdays, she would have to be very careful.
“Well, that’s it,” he said. “They seem to have finished for today. We can go now.”
Rather than being relieved. Psyche found that she was disappointed, a reaction she could not have credited in advance. Unconsciously wistful, she watched the gaily clad figures glide one by one toward the exit from the ice, as she and the man descended a flight of steps.
They were almost at the rail, when she stopped, and said, “Look, there are more coming on now.”
“Locals,” Steve told her. “Using the ice for an hour or so before it is flooded again.”
“How lucky they are!”
Something in her expression, as she said this, made Steve think of a waif with her face against the glass of a shop filled with toys forever beyond her reach. The impression was so vivid that he spoke almost without thinking. “Would you like to skate for half an hour before we go?”
“I can’t skate,” Psyche said abruptly.
“Why not?”
“My ankles are too weak.”
One of the first things that had struck him about her was the co-ordinated grace with which she walked. “I don’t believe it. We’ll see if we can rent some skates.”
“No! I don’t want to!”
If she had not opposed the idea he would have been glad enough to withdraw from it. Now, his curiosity about her again fully aroused by a refusal much too emphatic for its context, he turned to a rink attendant standing near them, and said, “Can we rent skates here?”
“Yes, sir,” the man said. “If you’ll just come with me, I’ll see what I can do for you.”
“Steve—please!” Psyche said franti
cally. “I told you I can’t skate!”
“You’ll have to convince me,” he said calmly.
Psyche, as they walked along a corridor beneath the tiers of seats from which they had just come down, knew without being told that his light clasp on her arm would tighten at once if she tried to pull away from it. In agony, she saw that she had three alternatives.
She could flatly, and if necessary, rudely refuse to go any further with this idea of his. In which case she might never see him again.
She could explain, and it would have to be in detail, why she recoiled from the very thought of putting on a pair of skates. The truth would find him sympathetic, she was certain, but it was the last thing she wanted to tell him.
The final, and it seemed only possible alternative was to suffer a re-enactment of humiliation she had never been able to forget, and live through it as best she could.
Without another word, she allowed herself to be led into a windowless room lined with benches and lockers.
As if from a great distance, she heard Steve talking to the attendant. Then she was sitting down, and her shoes were being gently but deftly removed from her feet.
“You won’t have much difficulty in fitting me,” the newspaperman said. “The lady, however, as you can see, has a very slender foot.”
“I think we can find something for her,” the attendant said. “We buy, second-hand, what are originally very expensive boots and skates.”
“Good.”
“I have an eight triple, sir, that might be just right.”
For Psyche the immediate present could no longer be clung to. Only the past remained. It was like a nightmare in which, after having struggled with terrible effort up a steep mountain slope, one begins to slide inexorably backwards and downwards, one’s brief glimpse of the mountain top no longer a spur but a symbol in itself of its unattainability.
The stars, glittering, cold, immeasurably remote in a navy-blue sky, drew a pale radiance from snow that crunched harshly beneath her boots, a sharp, dry tearing of a frozen silence broken by no other sound.
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