Harry had turned from the fire and picked up a magazine from the drum table. The magazine was an old Maclean’s left over from the last time the lodge had been occupied, October of the previous year. The sight of the date sent a spasm of pain across Harry’s eyes. Last year, he thought. Last year at this time I was happy. I owned the world. Only last year...
On a sudden impulse he folded the magazine and threw it with vicious accuracy into the center of the fire. It began to smolder.
“Now what the hell did you do that for?” Hepburn said.
“I don’t know.”
“There was an article in it I wanted to read.”
“Sorry.” The magazine had caught fire. Harry watched it burn with a kind of bitter satisfaction. Last year was over. “It’s late. I’m tired. I’d better be going to bed.”
“I’ve just made you a drink.”
“I don’t want it.”
“You need it, Harry-boy.”
“No thanks. It’s been a long day. Good night.”
“Take it easy, Harry-boy.”
“Oh yes. Sure.”
He dragged himself upstairs, leaning heavily on the banister as if his legs had withered. A minute later Turee heard the dropping of shoes, the squeak of springs, a long sigh.
Hepburn handed Turee his drink. “What’s the matter with him, anyway?”
“What he said. A long day.”
“Baloney. I’ve never seen Harry tired in my life.”
“Now you have.”
“There must be a reason. Something’s up with Thelma, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“Thelma’s a funny girl, if you ask me.”
“I don’t have to ask you,” Turee said, staring gloomily into the fire, trying to imagine what Thelma was doing right now. Planning? Weeping? Having second and third thoughts, or sleeping peacefully in the conviction that she’d been absolutely right the first time? It was impossible to tell.
“But I guess all women are.”
“Not all. Nancy’s different.” Turee believed this, and would continue to believe it until the next time he and his wife had a misunderstanding.
“You’re prejudiced.” Hepburn finished his drink and laid his empty glass decisively on the stone mantel. “Well, anyway, thank God I’m not married. On which cheerful note I shall depart.”
“Go ahead. I’ll turn out the lights.”
“Perhaps you’d better leave a couple of them on in case Ron...”
“Oh. All right.”
“Goodnight, Ralph.”
“Goodnight.”
Hepburn hesitated, stroking his chin. He was already beginning to need a shave, his eyes were red from too little sleeping and too much drinking, and his flannel shirt was dirty and lacking a button.
Why, he looks like a bum, Turee thought. Maybe he is. Maybe they all are, and this is no place for me. I should be home with my family, not up here pretending to be like the rest of them.
“Go to bed and get some sleep,” he said roughly, irritated by his own thoughts. “God, what a night this has been.”
“It’s not finished.”
“Well, finish it.”
“O.K., but don’t go into one of your famous grouches. That’s not going to help. We’re all in this together.”
Five
The following morning, a few minutes after eight o’clock, Turee was awakened by the heavy pounding of the lion’s-head knocker on the front door and the simultaneous ringing of the old cowbell that served as a mess call. Making little noises of distress, he reached for his shoes and put them on. This was all the dressing he had to do because he had, like the others, slept in his clothes. It was part of the tradition of these weekends at the lodge, originated many years before by Harry Bream. (“Makes me feel sporty,” Harry had said. “Roughing it and all that.”)
Feeling somewhat less than sporty, Turee stepped out into the hall, where he met Winslow, wild-eyed and trembling, his back pressed against the wall.
“My God,” Winslow croaked. “I’m dying. Dying.”
“There’s some bromo in the bathroom.”
“My God. That bell. Tell it to stop. My ears...”
“Pull yourself together.”
“I’m dying,” Winslow said again and slid down the wall like a puppet whose strings had broken.
Turee stepped fastidiously around him and went on down the staircase. The encounter had done nothing to dispel the feeling he’d had the previous evening, that he didn’t belong in this place, with these people. Though they were old friends, they seemed, under stress, to have become strangers, and their ways of living — or, in Winslow’s case, dying — were alien to him. As he walked down the stairs the air from the room below rose up and struck his nostrils, and it seemed to him subtly poisonous, smelling of stale drinks and stale dreams.
He drew back the heavy wooden bolt on the front door and opened it, half expecting to see Ron.
During the early morning hours the wind had died down and the temperature had dropped. The ground was covered with hoarfrost glittering so whitely in the sun that, by contrast, Esther Galloway’s skin looked very dark, as if she had quite suddenly and unseasonably acquired a tan.
She appeared to have dressed in a hurry and not for a trip. She was hatless, the shoes she wore were summer shoes without toes, and the Black Watch plaid coat she had clutched around her was one Turee remembered from a long way back. Esther always made such a point of elegance that it was a shock to see her looking quite ordinary, if not actually dowdy.
“Why, Esther.”
“Hello, Ralph,” she said crisply. “Surprise, surprise, eh?”
“Come in.”
“I intend to.”
He held the door open for her and she came inside, peeling off her gloves and agitating her head as if to shake the frost out of her hair.
“My ears ache. I drove with the windows open to help keep me awake. Silly, I guess.” She laid her gloves on the mantel between two empty glasses left over from the night before. Then she picked up one of the glasses and sniffed with distaste. “Gin. When will Billy Winslow ever learn?”
“That’s a difficult question.”
“Did you have a nice party?”
“Not very.”
“Ron — he’s not here, of course?”
“No.”
“No word at all?”
“None.”
“Damn his eyes.”
Some time during the early morning the fire had gone out, and the room was so cold that Esther’s breath came out in little clouds of mist like smoke from a dragon’s mouth.
Turee thought it suited her mood admirably.
“Damn his beady little eyes,” she said. “All right, start making excuses for him, as usual, why don’t you?”
Turee didn’t answer because he was afraid of saying the wrong thing and there seemed no possible right thing.
“The way you fellows stick together, it’s a scream really.”
“Sit down, Esther, and I’ll go and put on some coffee.”
“Don’t bother.”
“It’s no bo—”
“MacGregor’s coming over in a minute to set the fires and make some breakfast.” She turned and looked carefully around the room, one nostril curled very slightly. “The place needs an airing. It smells.”
“I hadn’t noticed.” He had, though.
“I didn’t expect him to be here, of course. I don’t even know why I came except that I couldn’t go back to sleep after you called last night, and I hate waiting, waiting and doing nothing. So I drove up here. I don’t know why,” she repeated. “It just seemed a good idea at the time. Now that I’m here I realize there’s nothing I can do, is there? Except possibly help nurse a few hangovers. How’s yours?”
“I don’t have one,” he said coldly.
“It couldn’t have been a very good party, then.”