‘And get hit over the head myself by his pals who might be on the terrace? Imagine yourself. You’d throw the heaviest thing you could, then shut the door!’
‘Yes, a woman might.’
“Then I’m not very noble. Or manly.’ Ingham got up. ‘Think about it for a bit. Till tonight. I thought you might like to be alone for a while today.’
‘I think I would. I’ve got a couple of letters to write. I’ll just sit in the sun and be lazy.’
A minute later, he was gone, walking down the carpeted corridor towards the wide staircase. He felt worse than ever, worse than when he had been lying to her. He stopped before he reached the bottom of the stairs, and looked up, wondering if he should go back, now, and talk with her. But he could not think of anything he could say that he had not already said.
He drove quickly back home, thinking only of talking with Jensen.
Jensen was home. The smell of turpentine was powerful in the warm air. Jensen was reheating a pan of boiled coffee. Ingham told him about his talk with Ina.
‘I don’t know why you told her,’ Jensen said. ‘You can’t expect her to understand. She doesn’t understand this part of the world. Anyway, women are different.’ He poured the coffee through a strainer into two cups. ‘A man may not like causing a death, but it can happen. Mountain-climbing. A mistake with the rope, a slip and fwit!—your partner, maybe a good friend, is dead. An accident. You could say what you did was an accident.’
Ingham remembered his arm with the typewriter drawn back, his effort to get a perfect aim. But he knew how Jensen meant ‘accident’. 1 told you why I told her. Last night I asked her to marry me. She practically said she wouldn’t or couldn’t until I told her the truth about that night. She knew I wasn’t telling the truth, you see.’
‘Um-m. Now Adams is going to hear about it. It wouldn’t surprise me if he told the police. Not that you should worry.’
‘I asked Ina not to tell him.’ But Ingham couldn’t remember that Ina had given him a promise that she wouldn’t. ‘Yes —’ Ingham stretched back on Jensen’s sloppy bed, and pushed off his tennis shoes. ‘Is it social responsibility or bloody meddling?’
‘Bloody meddling,’ said Jensen, staring with nearly closed eyes at his canvas in progress. The picture was of two enormous soles of sandals with the tips of brown toes showing. A reclining Arab’s face was tiny between the sandals.
‘I’m going downstairs to sleep.’ Ingham said, ‘despite your good coffee. I had a bad night last night.’
‘Don’t let her upset you! Good God, I see she’s upsetting you!’ Jensen was suddenly rigid and spluttering with anger.
Ingham laughed. ‘I want her, you see. I love her.’
‘Um-m,’ said Jensen.
At his sink, Ingham washed his face, then put on pyjama pants. It was ten to twelve. He didn’t care what time it was. He lay down on his bed and pulled the sheet over him, and after a minute threw it off, as usual. One last cigarette. He made himself think for a few minutes about his book. Dennison was having his semi-realized crisis. His appropriations had been discovered. Dennison was stunned, though not completely puzzled, by the public’s attitude. What was worse for him was that a few of his friends were shocked that he was a ‘crook’, and had dropped him, though even these, later, were going to repay the money he had given them. Ina had had an idea the other night: have the money repaid with interest, over a long period if need be, so that Dennison’s bank could not say he had cost them the money his stolen money would have earned. It was going to amount to a fantastic lot of money. Ingham put out his cigarette.
He turned on his side and shut his eyes, and suddenly he thought of Lotte. It gave him as usual a pleasant-painful jolt. He thought of getting into bed with her at night, every night, always a delicious pleasure to him, whether or not they made love. He had never tired of Lotte physically, in those two years, and he remembered thinking that he saw no reason why he should ever tire of her, despite what some people said about boredom always setting in. He had never quarrelled with Lotte. It was funny. Maybe that was because they’d never talked about anything at all complex, such as what he’d just been talking to Ina about—and he’d always been quite content to let Lotte have her own way. He supposed Lotte was happier now, with the extrovert idiot she had married. Maybe she had even decided to have a child.
Ingham heard the front door being opened, a wooden squeak against the threshold. Fatma, he thought, damn her.
A knock on his door. ‘Howard? Anybody home?’ It was OWL.
‘Just a minute.’ Ingham pulled on his pyjama jacket. He hated being seen in pyjamas. He started to put on his sneakers and gave it up. He opened the door.
‘Aha I Sleeping late. Sorry if I disturbed you.’
‘No, I went back to bed. I had a lousy night.’
Adams wore neat Bermuda shorts, a striped shirt, and one of his little canvas caps. ‘How so?’
‘The heat, I suppose. Gets worse and worse.’
cAh, that’s August I Have you got a few minutes, Howard? It’s reasonably important, I think,’ he said briskly.
‘Of course. Sit down. Would you like a drink or a beer?’
OWL accepted a beer. Ingham got two cans from the bucket of water on the floor. The foam spewed up. They were not very cool, but Ingham didn’t apologize.
‘I had breakfast with your girl,’ OWL said with a chuckle. ‘If that sounds funny, I met her on the beach this morning. I invited her for scrambled eggs.’
‘Oh.’ OWL hadn’t noticed his car, Ingham gathered. Ingham sat down on his bed.
OWL had taken the chair by his table. CA bright young woman. An exceptional girl. She goes to church, she told me.’
‘Yes, so did I tell you. I think just recently.’
‘Protestant. Called St Ann’s, she said. She told me about her brother, too.’
What was he leading up to?
‘She’s a little worried about you.—She said she’d tried to talk you out of living here and get you to take a bungalow. Just for your own comfort.’
‘I’m not uncomfortable. I can understand that a woman wouldn’t like it.’
‘She tells me you’ve got a very nice apartment in Manhattan.’
Ingham resented the remark, as if it were somehow an intrusion on his privacy. And what would OWL think if he knew John Castlewood had killed himself there, and if he knew why?
‘Ina’ll be leaving in another week or so, she told me. You’re staying on, Howard?’
‘I’m not sure. If my book is finished—the first draft—I suppose I’ll go back to New York.’
‘I thought maybe you’d be going back with her.’ Adams smiled pleasantly, and put his hands on his bare knees. ‘Anyway, I’d hang on to her, if I were you.’
Ingham sipped his beer. Is she so keen to hang on to me ?’
‘I would think so,’ OWL said with a sly wink, ‘Would she have come to Tunisia, if she weren’t pretty sold on you? But I hope you’ll be honest with her, Howard. Honest in everything.’
Ingham thought suddenly, Ina hadn’t told Mm much about her feelings for Castlewood, speaking of honesty. She might have given a fuller accounting. ‘Perhaps adults, people as old as we are, always have some secrets. I don’t know that I want her to tell me everything about her past. I don’t know why some things can’t remain private.’
‘Maybe. But one’s heart must be open to the one we love, to the one who loves us. Open and bare.’
As always, listening to OWL, Ingham saw the actual thing, the heart, cut open, full of limp valves, blood clots, as he bad seen hearts in butchers’ shops. ‘I’m not sure I agree. I think actions in the present count more than those in the past. Especially if the other person wasn’t even in that past’
‘Oh, it doesn’t have to be so long past. Just an honest attitude, that’s all I mean.’
Ingham smouldered gently. He drained the last drops of his beer and set the can down a little hard on the crate that he used for a night-ta
ble. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘I hope I’m honest enough to satisfy Ina.’
‘We’ll see.’ said OWL, with his happy, paunchy smile. ‘If she leaves before you or if you both leave together, we’ve got to have a big send-off. I’ll miss you both.—Would you like to have some lunch at Melik’s, Howard?’
‘Thanks, Francis. I think I’d like some sleep more than anything.’
When OWL was gone, Ingham drank a big glass of water, and tried the bed again. He felt as if he seethed inside, deeper than even a sleeping pill could touch, if he had had one. It was a sensation like repressed anger, and Ingham detested it. He heard Jensen’s soft tread on the outside steps, and was delighted when Jensen tapped on his door.
‘Wasn’t that our mutual friend OWL?’ Jensen asked.
‘Correct. Have a stone, my friend.’
‘How did you guess?’ Jensen went to the kitchen. ‘And you?’
‘I don’t mind if I do.’
Jensen sat down. They drank.
‘OWL is urging me to confess, and he doesn’t know I’ve already done it.’ Ingham said. ‘Imagine confessing something that you might not have done?’
‘OWL should go back to New England, or wherever it is.’
‘And of course he’s urging me to hang on to Ina.’ Ingham flopped back on his bed. ‘As if his advice would influence me in something like that!’
‘He’s a funny little fellow. “What a funny little man you are,” as Bosie said to the Marquis.’ Jensen laughed with sudden mirth.
And Ingham smiled, too. ‘I’ll go by the Reine around seven and see how Ina’s doing.’
‘I have never seen such meddling people—maybe not Ina, but I can see you depend on what she thinks. Do you know what I would do to the man who stole Hasso? I won’t put into words what I would do, and I would do it slowly, and I wouldn’t give a damn what anybody thought of me for doing it.’
Ingham drew comfort from Jensen. “It’s not entirely Ina and OWL. I think I live through the same kind of crisis in my book. That happens.’ Ingham had told Jensen about Dennison.
‘Oh, yes, that happens. You don’t mind if I have another stone? Or a pebble?’
24
INGHAM went to find Ina at seven o’clock. He had slept a couple of hours, had gone for a swim, and had written three pages in an effort to make it seem a day like any other. But he felt odd, and had come to no conclusion as to what he should do if Ina’s attitude was this or that. The church business bothered him in an amorphous way. How much was she involved with the church? And it was not so much the situation now that he thought about, but future ones, in which she might take an attitude with which he couldn’t cope, in which she might go off on tangents that would make him feel like someone from another world—which would be in fact true.
He rang Ina’s room, and she sounded in a good mood and said she would be down in ten minutes. Ingham sat down on a lobby sofa and looked at a newspaper.
Ina came down in a pale pink dress. She had a white chiffon scarf in her hand.
‘You look marvellous,’ Ingham said.
“The scarf is in case we go for a walk. The breeze.’
‘You’re counting on a breeze?’ Her perfume, as usual, pleased him. It was so much more interesting than jasmine. ‘Would you like to go somewhere in particular, or should I think of something?’
‘Francis rang up and asked us for a drink. Do you mind?’
‘No.’ Ingham said. They got into Ingham’s car. ‘What’s Joey’s news?’
‘Nothing much. He’s painting. Louise comes over nearly every day.’
‘She lives near by? I forgot.’
The car rolled on to the nearly silent sandy lane that curved towards Adams’s bungalow. Adams’s terrace light was on, and he greeted them at the door before they had time to knock.
‘Welcome! I’d suggest the terrace but it’s much cooler inside. Ha-ha! I Come in and see!’
Adams’s terrace faced the gulf and had a glider, table and chairs. There were canapés of cheese and black olives on the mosaic table in the living-room.
Ingham hoped Adams wouldn’t want to join them for dinner. Then he thought it might be better if he did join them. Why was Ina so cheerful? Ingham wasn’t sure how to interpret it. Had she given him up? Had she ‘understood’ and decided to tell him so? Whatever she said tonight, Ingham thought, he would ask her just one more question about John Castlewood: had she liked or loved him merely because he had loved her? Castlewood’s declaration of passion had been a surprise to Ina, she had written. It often seemed to Ingham that women fell in love with men who were already in love with them, men whom they wouldn’t otherwise have noticed.
Adams entertained Ina with bits of Arabic lore, of which he had so much. Such as that the Mohammedans expected their messiah to be born a second time, and via a man, hence the baggy pants that they wore in expectancy. And there was talk of the Arab refugees west of the Jordan River. It was astounding how much wreckage had resulted from a war lasting only six days.
CI hope you’ve extended your leave from your office, Ina,’ Adams said, refilling Ina’s glass from his silver shaker. He had offered them daiquiris (‘Jack Kennedy’s favourite cocktail’) which he had made before they arrived and stored in his refrigerator.
‘ Yes, I cabled today. I’m sure I can have another week, because I promised to come back if something urgent turned up.’
OWL’s smile took in Ingham. He beamed goodwill on both of them. ‘You said something about going to Paris, didn’t you, Howard?’
Had he? ‘That was if I finished my book.’
1 think I said I’d thought of it.’ Ina said.
“With Howard? Good-1 think he’s getting restless.’ said OWL.
Ingham wondered what had given him that idea. OWL, as the talk drifted on, glanced from one to the other of them, as if trying to perceive what they had ‘decided’, how much in love they were, how happy or maybe not so happy. And Ingham more and more sensed a detachment in Ina. Here in OWL’s living-room, where he had so often sat having friendly, ordinary conversations with OWL, Ingham tried to brace himself to turn loose of Ina—in an emotional sense—because he felt that was what she was going to suggest. How much would it hurt? And would it be his ego or his heart that would be hurt? Ina looked at him, smiling with a slight amusement, and Ingham knew she was a little bored, like himself.
‘I think I’m within two days of finishing.’ Ingham said in answer to Adams’s question about his book.
‘Then you should have a real holiday with a change of scene. Yes, Paris. Why not?’ OWL bounced on his heels, as if he were seeing a vision of a classic honeymoon, blissful, in Paris.
They left after two drinks. OWL had showed no sign of wanting to come with them.
‘He’s sort of an angel, isn’t he?’ Ina said. ‘Very fond of you.—You’re awfully quiet tonight.’
‘Sorry. I think it’s the heat. I thought we might try the Hotel du Golfe tonight.’
The restaurant of the Hotel du Golfe—where Ingham had looked so often for letters that never came, letters from John and Ina—was nearly full, but they were able to get a well-placed table for two.
‘Well, darling,’ Ingham said, ‘did you think any more about what we were talking about today?’
‘Of course I thought about it. Yes. I understand things are different here. I suppose I was making too much of it.—I really didn’t mean to be telling you what to do.’
And yet in a way, that was what Ingham wanted.
‘If it doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t bother you,’ she added.
Did she mean it ought to ? Ingham gave a laugh. “Then let’s not talk about it any more.’
‘Do you want to go to Paris? Next week?’
Ingham knew what that meant. She had taken him back, accepted him. Go and maybe come back to Hammamet? But he knew she didn’t mean it that way. ‘You mean, go on to New York from there?’
‘Yes.’ She was calm, quite sure
of herself. She smiled suddenly. ‘I don’t think you’re bubbling with enthusiasm.’
‘I was thinking I’d like to finish my book before going anywhere.’
‘Isn’t it as good as finished?’
It was, and he was the one who had said so, but he did very much want to finish his book here, in that crazy room where he was now, with Jensen’s paintings and Jensen upstairs. Not going to Paris wouldn’t necessarily mean losing Ina. ‘If you could stay here—if you could bear it, the heat, I mean, I could be finished in less than a week.’
She laughed again, but her eyes were gentle. ‘I don’t think you’ll finish in a week. But you may not want to go to Paris.’
‘And you want to go to Paris instead of staying here. I understand.’
‘Just how long do you want to stay here, darling?’
The waiter was showing them a skillet with two raw white fish in it. Without knowing a thing about the fish, Ingham nodded his approval. Ina might not have seen the thing. She was watching him.
‘I’d like to stay till I finish. I really would.’
‘All right, then, you stay.’
An awkward silence.
‘I’ll see you next in New York then,’ Ingham said. ‘That won’t be terribly long.’
‘No.’
Ingham knew he might have said, knew she was expecting him to say, something more affectionate. He was suddenly unsure about the way he felt. And he knew this stuck out all over him. He could make it up later, he told himself. It was just a sticky moment. His uncertain feelings gave way to a sense of guilt, of a vague embarrassment. He thought of the day in the bungalow at the Reine, when he’d suddenly had a hunger for Henry James, felt that he couldn’t live through the rest of the day and the evening, if he could not read some prose by him, and he had driven to Tunis and bought the only thing he could find, a Modem Library edition of The Turn of the Screw and The Lesson of the Master. He wanted to tell Ina about that, but what had it to do with tonight, with now?
They had a brandy after the meal. The evening, externally, improved. There were no more difficult moments. But Ingham continued to feel unhappy within himself. Phrases 6f OWL’s tripe drifted through his mind maddeningly. That and the happiest recollections of being in bed with Ina. He thought of being married to Ina, living in a comfortable apartment in New York, being able to afford a maid to make life for both of them easier, entertaining interesting people (he and Ina tended to like the same people), and of maybe having a child, maybe even two. He was sure Ina would want a child. He imagined his work developing, burgeoning, in that atmosphere. So why didn’t he jump at it?