When I was level with him he stepped in front of me. "Would you kindly permit me," he said with iron-clad politeness, "to drive you home? I wouldn't want to see you get drenched to the skin." As he spoke, a few heavy preliminary drops were already coming down.
I hesitated. Why was he doing this? It might be only the same formal motive that prompted him to open car doors - almost an automatic reflex - in which case I could accept the favour just as formally, with no danger; but what would it really involve if I got into the car? I studied him: he had clearly had too much to drink, though clearly also he was in near-perfect control of himself. His eyes were a little glazed, it was true, but he was holding his body stiffly upright.
"Well," I said doubtfully, "really I'd rather walk. Though thank you just the same."
"Oh come along Marian, don't be childish," he said brusquely, and took my arm.
I allowed myself to be led to the car and inserted into the front seat. I was, I think, reluctant; but I did not particularly want to get wet.
He got in and slammed his own door and started the motor. "Now perhaps you'll tell me what all that nonsense was about," he said angrily.
We turned a corner and the rain hit, blown against the windshield by sharp gusts of wind. At any moment we were going to have, as one of my great-aunts used to say, a trash-mover and a gully-washer.
"I didn't request to be driven home," I said, hedging. I was convinced that it hadn't been nonsense, but also acutely aware that it would look very much like nonsense to any outside observer. I didn't want to discuss it; in that direction there could only be a dead end. I sat up straight in the front seat, staring through a window out of which I could see little or nothing.
"Why the hell you had to ruin a perfectly good evening I'll never know," he said, ignoring my remark. There was a crack of thunder.
"I don't seem to have ruined it much for you," I said. "You were enjoying yourself enough."
"Oh so that's it. We weren't entertaining you enough. Our conversation bored you, we weren't paying enough attention to you. Well, next time we'll know enough to save you the trouble of coming with us."
This seemed to me quite unfair. After all, Len was my friend. "Len's my friend, you know," I said. My voice was beginning to quiver. "I don't see why I shouldn't want to talk with him a little myself when he's just got back from England." I knew even as I said it that Len was quite beside the point.
"Ainsley behaved herself properly, why couldn't you? The trouble with you is," he said savagely, "you're just rejecting your femininity."
His approval of Ainsley was a vicious goad. "Oh, SCREW my femininity," I shouted. "Femininity has nothing to do with it. You were just being plain ordinary rude!" Unintentional bad manners was something Peter couldn't stand to be accused of, and I knew it. It put him in the class of the people in the deodorant ads.
He glanced quickly over at me, his eyes narrowed as though he was taking aim. Then he gritted his teeth together and stepped murderously hard on the accelerator. By that time the rain was coming down in torrents: the road ahead, when it could be seen at all, looked like a solid sheet of water. When I made my thrust we'd been going down a hill, and at the suddenly increased speed the car skidded, turned two-and-a-quarter times round, slithered backwards down over someone's inclined lawn, and came to a bone-jolting stop. I heard something snap.
"You maniac!" I wailed, when I had ricocheted off the glove-compartment and realized I wasn't dead. "You'll get us all killed!" I must have been thinking of myself as plural.
Peter rolled down the window and stuck his head out. Then he began to laugh. "I've trimmed their hedge a bit for them," he said. He stepped on the gas. The wheels spun for an instant, churning up the mud of the lawn and leaving (as I later saw) two deep gouges, and with a grinding of gears we moved up over the edge of the lawn and back onto the road.
I was trembling now from a combination of fright, cold, and fury. "First you drag me into your car," I chittered, "and brow-beat me because of your own feelings of guilt, and then you try to kill me!"
Peter was still laughing. His head was soaking wet, even from that brief exposure to the rain, and the hair was plastered down on his head, the water trickling from it over his face. "They're going to see an alteration in their landscape gardening when they get up in the morning," he chuckled. He seemed to find wilfully ruining other people's property immensely funny.
"You seem to find wilfully ruining other people's property immensely funny," I said, with sarcasm.
"Oh, don't be such a killjoy," he replied pleasantly. His satisfaction with what he considered a forceful display of muscle was obvious. It irritated me that he should appropriate as his own the credit due to the back wheels of his car.
"Peter, why can't you be serious? You're just an overgrown adolescent."
This he chose to disregard.
The car stopped jerkily. "Here we are," he said.
I took hold of the door handle, intending, I think, to make a final unanswerable remark and dash for the house; but he put his hand on my arm. "Better wait until it lets up a bit."
He turned the ignition key and the heartbeats of the windshield-wipers stopped. We sat silently, listening to the storm. It must have been right overhead; the lightning was dazzling and continuous, and each probing jagged fork was followed almost at once by a rending crash, like the trees of a whole forest splitting and falling. In the intervals of darkness we heard the rain pounding against the car; water was coming through in a fine spray around the edges of the closed windows.
"It's a good thing I didn't let you walk home," Peter said in the tone of a man who has made a firm and proper decision. I could only agree.
During a long flickering moment of light I turned and saw him watching me, his face strangely shadowed, his eyes gleaming like an animal's in the beam from a car headlight. His stare was intent, faintly ominous. Then he leaned towards me and said, "You've got some fluff. Hold still." His hands fumbled against my head: he was awkwardly but with gentleness untangling a piece of dust that was caught in my hair.
I suddenly felt limp as a damp kleenex. I leaned my forehead against his and closed my eyes. His skin was cold and wet and his breath smelled of cognac.
"Open your eyes," he said. I did: we still had our foreheads pressed together, and I found myself at the next bright instant gazing into a multitude of eyes.
"You've got eight eyes," I said softly. We both laughed and he pulled me against him and kissed me. I put my arms around his back.
We rested quietly like that for some time in the centre of the storm. I was conscious only that I was very tired and that my body would not stop shivering. "I don't know what I was doing tonight," I murmured. He stroked my hair, forgiving, understanding, a little patronizing.
"Marian." I could feel his neck swallow. I couldn't tell now whether it was his body or my own that was shuddering; he tightened his arms around me. "How do you think we'd get on as ... how do you think we'd be, married?"
I drew back from him.
A tremendous electric blue flash, very near, illuminated the inside of the car. As we stared at each other in that brief light I could see myself, small and oval, mirrored in his eyes.
10
When I woke up on Sunday morning - it was closer to Sunday afternoon - my mind was at first as empty as though someone had scooped out the inside of my skull like a cantaloupe and left me only the rind to think with. I looked around the room, scarcely recognizing it as a place I had ever been before. My clothes were scattered over the floor and draped and crumpled on the chairback like fragments left over from the explosion of some life-sized female scarecrow, and the inside of my mouth felt like a piece of cotton-wool stuffing. I got up and wavered out to the kitchen.
Clear sunshine and fresh air were shimmering in through the open kitchen window. Ainsley was up before me. She was leaning forward, concentrating on something that was spread out in front of her, her legs drawn up and tucked under her on the chair, her h
air cascading over her shoulders. From the back she looked like a mermaid perched on a rock: a mermaid in a grubby green terry-cloth robe. Around her on a tabletop pebbled with crumbs lay the remnants of her breakfast - a limp starfish of a banana peel, some bits of shell, and brown crusts of toast beached here and there, random as driftwood.
I went to the refrigerator and got out the tomato juice. "Hi," I said to Ainsley's back. I was wondering whether I could face an egg.
She turned around. "Well," she said.
"Did you get home okay?" I asked. "That was quite a storm." I poured myself a large glassful of tomato juice and drank it blood-thirstily.
"Of course," she said. "I made him call a taxi. I got home just before the storm broke and had a cigarette and a double scotch and went straight to bed; god, I was absolutely exhausted. Just sitting still like that takes a lot out of you, and then after you'd gone I didn't know how I was going to get away. It was like escaping from a giant squid, but I did it, mostly by acting dumb and scared. That's very necessary at this stage, you know."
I looked into the saucepan that was sitting, still hot, on one of the burners. "You through with the egg water?" I switched the stove on.
"Well, what about you? I was quite worried, I thought maybe you were really drunk or something; if you don't mind my saying so you were behaving like a real idiot."
"We got engaged," I said, a little reluctantly. I knew she would disapprove. I manoeuvred the egg into the saucepan; it cracked immediately. It was straight out of the refrigerator and too cold.
Ainsley lifted her barely nubile eyebrows; she didn't seem surprised. "Well, if I were you I'd get married in the States, it'll be so much easier to get a divorce when you need one. I mean, you don't really know him, do you? But at least," she continued more cheerfully, "Peter will soon be making enough money so you can live separately when you have a baby, even if you don't get a divorce. But I hope you aren't getting married right away. I don't think you know what you're doing."
"Subconsciously," I said, "I probably wanted to marry Peter all along." That silenced her. It was like invoking a deity.
I inspected my egg, which was sending out a white semi-congealed feeler like an exploring oyster. It's probably done, I thought, and fished it out. I turned on the coffee and cleared a space for myself on the oilcloth. Now I could see what Ainsley was busy with. She had taken the calendar down from the kitchen wall - it had a picture of a little girl in an old-fashioned dress sitting on a swing with a basket of cherries and a white puppy - I get one every year from a third cousin who runs a service station back home - and was making cryptic marks on it with a pencil.
"What're you doing?" I asked. I whacked my egg against the side of my dish and got my thumb stuck in it. It wasn't done after all. I poured it into the dish and stirred it up.
"I'm figuring out my strategy," she said in a matter-of-fact voice.
"Really Ainsley, I don't see how you can be so cold-blooded about it," I said, eyeing the black numbers in their ordered rows.
"But I need a father for my child!" Her tone implied I was trying to snatch bread from the mouths of all the world's widows and orphans, incarnate for the moment in her.
"Okay, granted, but why Len? I mean it could get complicated with him, after all he is my friend and he's had a bad time lately; I wouldn't want to see him upset. Aren't there lots of others around?"
"Not right now; or at least nobody who's such a good specimen," she said reasonably, "and I'd sort of like the baby in the spring. I'd like a spring baby; or early summer. That means he can have his birthday parties outside in the back yard instead of in the house, it'll be less noisy...."
"Have you investigated his ancestors?" I asked acidly, spooning up the last strand of egg.
"Oh yes," said Ainsley with enthusiasm, "we had a short conversation just before he made his pass. I found out his father went to college. At least there don't seem to be any morons on his side of the family, and he doesn't have any allergies either. I wanted to find out whether he was Rh Negative but that would have been a little pointed, don't you think? And he is in television, that means he must have something artistic in him somewhere. I couldn't find out much about the grandparents, but you can't be too selective about heredity or you'd have to wait around forever. Genetics are deceptive anyway," she went on; "some real geniuses have children that aren't bright at all."
She put a decisive-looking checkmark on the calendar and frowned at it. She bore a chilling resemblance to a general plotting a major campaign.
"Ainsley, what you really need is a blueprint of your bedroom," I said, "or no, a contour map. Or an aerial photograph. Then you could draw little arrows and dotted lines on it, and an X at the point of conjunction."
"Please don't be frivolous," she said. Now she was counting under her breath.
"When's it going to be? Tomorrow?"
"Wait a sec," she said, and counted some more. "No. It can't be for a while. At least a month anyway. You see, I've got to make sure that the first time will do it; or the second."
"The first time?"
"Yes," she said, "I've got it all worked out. It's going to be a problem though, you see it all depends on his psychology. I can tell he's the sort that'll get scared off if I act too eager. I've got to give him lots of rope. Because as soon as he gets anywhere, I can just hear it, he'll go into the old song-and-dance about maybe we'd better not see each other any more, wouldn't want this to get too serious, neither of us should get tied down and so on. And he'll evaporate. I won't be able to call him up when it's really essential, he'd accuse me of trying to monopolize his time or of making demands on him or something. But as long as he hasn't got me," she said, "I can have him whenever I need him."
We ruminated together for some moments.
"The place is going to be a problem too," she said. "It's all got to seem accidental. A moment of passion. My resistance overcome, swept off my feet and so forth." She smiled briefly. "Anything prearranged, meeting him at the motel for instance, wouldn't do at all. So it's either got to be his place, or here."
"Here?"
"If necessary," she said firmly, sliding off her chair. I was silent: the thought of Leonard Slank being undone beneath the same roof that also sheltered the lady down below and her framed family tree was disturbing to me; it would almost be a sacrilege.
Ainsley went into her bedroom, humming busily to herself, taking the calendar with her. I sat thinking about Len. I was again having stirrings of conscience about allowing him to be led flower-garlanded to his doom without even so much as a word of warning. Of course he had asked for it, in a way, I supposed, and Ainsley seemed determined not to make any further claims on whoever she singled out for this somewhat dubious, because anonymous, honour. If Leonard had been merely the standardized ladies' man I wouldn't have worried. But surely he was, I reflected as I sipped my coffee, a more complex and delicately adjusted creature. He was a self-consciously lecherous skirt-chaser, granted; but it wasn't true as Joe had said, that he had no ethical sense. In his own warped way he was a kind of inverted moralist. He liked to talk as though everyone was out for nothing but sex and money, but when anyone provided a demonstration of his theories in real life, he reacted with scalding critical invective. His blend of cynicism and idealism had a lot to do with his preference for "corrupting," as he called it, greenish girls, as opposed to the more vine-ripened variety. The supposedly pure, the unobtainable, was attractive to the idealist in him; but as soon as it had been obtained, the cynic viewed it as spoiled and threw it away. "She turned out to be just the same as all the rest of them," he would remark sourly. Women whom he thought of as truly out of his reach, such as the wives of his friends, he treated with devotion. He trusted them to an unrealistic degree simply because he would never be compelled by his own cynicism to put them to the test: they were not only unassailable but too old for him anyway. Clara, for instance, he idolized. At times he showed a peculiar tenderness, almost a sloppy sentimentality, towards
the people he liked, who were few in number; but in spite of this he was constantly accused by women of being a misogynist and by men of being a misanthropist, and perhaps he was both.
However, I could think of no specific way in which Ainsley's making use of him as she had planned could damage him irreparably, or even much at all, so I consigned him to whatever tough-minded, horn-rimmed guardian angels he might possess, finished the granular dregs of my coffee, and went to dress. After that I phoned Clara to tell her the news; Ainsley's reaction had not been very satisfying.
Clara sounded pleased, but her response was ambiguous. "Oh, good," she said, "Joe will be delighted. He's been saying lately that it's about time you settled down." I was slightly irritated: after all, I wasn't thirty-five and desperate. She was talking as though I was simply taking a prudent step. But I reflected that people on the outside of a relationship couldn't be expected to understand it. The rest of the conversation was about her digestive upsets.
As I was washing the breakfast dishes I heard footsteps coming up our stairs. That was another variation of the door-opening gambit employed by the lady down below: she would let people in quietly without announcing them, usually at times of disintegration like Sunday afternoons, doubtless hoping that we'd be caught in some awkward state, with our hair up in curlers or down in wisps, or lolling about in our bathrobes.
"Hi!" a voice said, halfway, up. It was Peter's. He had already assumed impromptu visiting privileges.
"Oh hi," I answered, making my voice casual but welcoming. "I was just doing the dishes," I added inanely as his head emerged from the stairwell. I left the rest of the dishes in the sink and dried my hands on my apron.
He came into the kitchen. "Boy," he said, "judging from the hangover I had when I woke up, I must've been pie-eyed last night. I guess I really tied one on. This morning my mouth tasted like the inside of a tennis shoe." His tone was half proud, half apologetic.
We scanned each other warily. If there was going to be a retraction from either side, this was the moment for it; the whole thing could be blamed on organic chemistry. But neither of us backed down. Finally Peter grinned at me, a pleased though nervous grin.