“Mrs. Ellis and Miss Scott have known each other for quite a long time, long before Mrs. Ellis’s marriage.”
Why did I say that? she wondered. She can easily find out if I’m lying. She looked steadily at Mrs. Nash, making no attempt to hide her dislike. She won’t, though. She hasn’t got the wit or the guts.
Mrs. Nash looked at Cass with that absolutely infuriating superciliousness achieved only by chambermaids who have lately become great ladies. “How strange that is,” she murmured.
“Not at all,” Cass said, recklessly, “they both worked in the same factory.”
Mrs. Nash watched her, the faintest tremor occurring somewhere around her upper lip. Cass smiled and looked briefly at Mr. Nash. “Did you and your wife meet in Belfast?”
“No,” said Mr. Nash, smiling — and Cass felt, with a surge of amusement and horror, how much his wife despised him at that moment—“we met in Dublin, while I was there on a business trip.” He took his wife’s limp hand. Her pale eyes did not move, her pale face did not change. “The most important trip I ever made.”
Ah, yes, thought Cass, I don’t doubt it, for both of you. But suddenly she felt weary and inexplicably sad. What in the world was she doing here, and why was she needling this absurd little woman? The music changed, becoming louder and swifter and more raucous; and all their attention returned, with relief, to the dance floor. Ida and Ellis had begun a new dance; or, rather, Ida had begun a new cruelty. Ida was suddenly dancing as she had probably not danced since her adolescence, and Ellis was attempting to match her — he could certainly not be said to be leading her now, either. He tried, of course, his square figure swooping and breaking, and his little boy’s face trying hard to seem abandoned. And the harder he tried—the fool! Cass thought — the more she eluded him, the more savagely she shamed him. He was not on those terms with his body, or with hers, or anyone’s body. He moved his buttocks by will, with no faintest memory of love, no hint of grace; his thighs were merely those of a climber, his feet might have been treading grapes. He did not know what to do with his arms, which stuck out at angles to his body as though they were sectioned and controlled by strings, and also as though they had no communion with his hands — hands which had grasped and taken but never caressed. Was Ida being revenged? or was she giving him warning? Ellis’ forehead turned slick with sweat, his short, curly hair seemed to darken, Cass almost heard his breathing. Ida circled around him, in her orange dress, her legs flashing like knives, and her hips cruelly grinding. From time to time she extended to him, his fingers touched, her lean, brown, fiery hand. Others on the floor made way for them — for her: it must have seemed to Ellis that the music would never end.
But the juke box fell silent, at last, and the colored lights stopped whirling, for the band was coming on again. Ida and Ellis returned to the table.
The lights began to dim. Cass stood up.
“Ida,” she said, “I promised to have one drink, and I have, and now I must go. I really must. Richard will kill me if I stay out any longer.”
Her voice unaccountably shook, and she felt herself blushing as she said this. At the same time, she realized that Ida was in an even more dangerous mood now than she had been before her dance.
“Oh, call him up,” Ida said. “Even the most faithful of wives deserves a night out.”
Cass, very nearly, in her fear and despair, sank slowly into her seat again; but Ellis, mopping his brow, and gleaming, was more cheerful than ever. “I don’t think that’s necessarily so,” he said — and wrung from the table the obligatory laugh—“and, anyway, Mrs. Silenski is responsible for a very heavy investment. Her husband is very valuable, we must take good care of his morale.” Ida and Cass watched each other. Ida smiled.
“Will Richard’s morale suffer if you do not get home?”
“Unquestionably,” said Cass. “I must go.”
Ida’s face changed, and she looked down. She seemed, abruptly, weary and sad. “I guess you’re right,” she said, “and there’s no point in putting it off.” She looked at Ellis. “Walk her to a cab, sweetie.”
“My pleasure,” said Ellis.
“Good night, all,” said Cass. “I’m sorry I have to run, but I must.” She said, to Ida, “I’ll see you soon—?”
“Shall I expect to see you at the usual place?”
“If it’s still standing,” Cass said, after a moment, “yes.” She turned and made her way through the darkening room, with Ellis padding behind her. They gained the street, she feeling limp and frightened. Ellis put her into a cab. The cab was driven by a young Puerto Rican.
“Good night, Mrs. Silenski,” Ellis said, and gave her his wet, hard hand. “Please give Richard my best, and tell him I’ll be calling him in a couple of days.”
“Yes, I’ll tell him. Thank you. Good night.”
He was gone, and she was alone in the cab, behind the unspeaking shoulders of the Puerto Rican. Idly, she sought out his face in the glass, then looked down, lighting a cigarette. The cab began to move. She did not look out. She sat huddled in the darkness, burning with a curious kind of shame. She was not ashamed — was she? — of anything she had done; but she was ashamed, as it were in anticipation, of what she might, now, helplessly, find herself doing. She had been using Ida and Vivaldo as smoke screens to cover her affair with Eric: why should not Ida use her, then, to cover from Vivaldo her assignation with Ellis? She had silenced them, in relation to Richard — now she was silenced, in relation to Vivaldo. She smiled, but the smoke she inhaled was bitter. When she had been safe and respectable, so had the world been safe and respectable; now the entire world was bitter with deceit and danger and loss; and which was the greater illusion? She was uncomfortably aware of the driver, his shoulders, his untried face, his color, and his soft, dark eyes. He glanced at her from time to time in the mirror — after all, she had glanced at him first; and her mood, perhaps, had set up a tension between them, a sexual tension. She thought, again, unwillingly, of the ginger-colored boy on the dance floor. And she knew (as though her mind, for a moment, were a clear pool, and she saw straight down into its depths) that, yes, yes, had he touched her, had he insisted, he could have had his way, she would have been glad. She would have been glad to know his body, even though the body might be all that she could know. Eric’s entrance into her, her fall from — grace? — had left her prey to ambiguities whose power she had never glimpsed before. Richard had been her protection, not only against the evil in the world, but also against the wilderness of herself. And now she would never be protected again. She tried to feel jubilant about this. But she did not feel jubilant. She felt frightened and bewildered.
The driver coughed. The cab stopped for a red light, just before entering the park, and the driver lit a cigarette. She, too, lit a fresh cigarette: and the two tiny flames almost seemed to be signaling one another. Just so, she now remembered, as the cab lurched forward, had she wandered, aimlessly and bitterly, through the city, when Richard first began to go away from her. She had wanted to be noticed, she had wanted a man to notice her. And they had: they had noticed that she was a sexual beggar, no longer young. Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself! And terrifying that the terms of love are so rigorous, its checks and liberties so tightly bound together.
There were many things she could not demand of Eric. Their relationship depended on her restraint. She could not go to him now, for example, at two in the morning: this liberty was not in their contract. The premise of their affair, or the basis of their comedy, was that they were two independent people, who needed each other for a time, who would always be friends, but who, probably, would not always be lovers. Such a premise forbids the intrusion of the future, or too vivid an exhibition of need. Eric, in effect, was marking time, waiting — waiting for something to be resolved. And when it was resolved — by the arrival of Yves, the signing of a contract, or the acceptance, in Eric, of a sorrow neither of them could name — she would be locked out of his bed. He would use everything life had given him, or taken from him, in his work—that would be his life. He was too proud to use her, or anyone, as a haven, too proud to accept any resolution of his sorrow not forged by his own hands. And she could not be bitter about this, or even sorrowful, for this was precisely why she loved him. Or, if not why, the why of such matters being securely locked away from human perception, it was this quality in him which she most admired, and which she knew he could not live without. Most men could — did: this was why she was so menaced.