She turned suddenly to put her head in my lap. She looked up at me. “Let’s do that, Gevan. Let’s really and truly do it, you and me. The hell with all of them.”
She made it sound so good and so easy.
“And leave all this? Mottling says you’ve been taking a big interest in the company.”
“Poo! He’s been trying to bring me into the discussions. It’s therapy, I guess. I can’t contribute anything. He can run the company with my help or yours, dear. We wouldn’t ever have to come back.”
Yes indeedy, off we would sail and in a couple of years we’d be able to speak fondly and tolerantly of good old Ken, and we’d be grateful to good old Stanley for keeping our dividends nice and fat. We’d just rove the blue seas and tie up at the fun places at the fashionable times, and make love, and drink too much, but always with adorable and enchanting people. And when the sex and sensation bit started to go a little dead, we could always give it a booster shot by taking exactly the right sort of couple on a little cruise, some adorable, enchanting pair too vulnerable to tell tales, and with some trading around and with some of the practices of the voyeur, we could put our romance right back on the up-beat, yes indeedy, and we would push the good old machine until finally the parts wore out, at which time the medics could gut her like a trout and carve away portions of me, and we would then want a larger and more comfortable boat and somebody to run it for us while we sat in adjoining deck chairs astern, soft, fat, brown as saddles, and without one bloody word left to say to each other or one itching thing to do to each other, yes indeedy. Bliss without end.
She must have anticipated what I was going to say, because she got up suddenly and said. “I’m restless, darling. Let’s go for a walk.”
We walked in darkness on the soft fresh grass. She found my hand in what seemed a most natural way. An airways beacon swept the south horizon. We walked past the garages and servant quarters, and down a tidied slope of lawn toward a pale caligraphy of young birches at the edge of the woodland. The first stars were out.
We stopped near the woods. “I’m ashamed,” I said.
“So am I, darling! So am I! But we’re the only ones who know about it, aren’t we? Who have we hurt? A dead man? You see, we’re not really ashamed of what we did. We broke a convention, dearest. We violated the code. We jumped the gun. We’re ashamed because we didn’t let what they call a decent interval elapse, that’s all. The act wasn’t shameful. Such a great need can’t be shameful. It was just the timing, darling. Don’t you see? We’re going to be together anyway. Nothing can stop that, and we both know it. I’ve never stopped loving you and needing you, Gevan. So we have no reason to be ashamed.”
“You make it sound reasonable, Niki. You’ve got that wonderful talent for making anything you want to do sound reasonable.”
“You didn’t use to be like this. Gevan. Why do you have to pick at things? Just enjoy, enjoy. You don’t have to think so goddamn much, do you?”
I made a sound like a laugh. “Somebody else told me the same thing a little while ago.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter. You don’t know her.”
She shrugged and turned away from me and looked up at the night sky. “I love the quiet out here. We’re the only two people left in the world, darling.”
“How dandy.”
She spun back and put her hands on my shoulders. “You’re still hostile toward me, darling. God knows I can’t blame you, after the fool thing I did, and the way I almost lost you forever. But don’t I deserve a chance to make it up to you? Isn’t it worth it to you to give me a chance? Try to feel a little bit of kindness, dearest. This hostility is like a sickness, you know. It even carries over to Stanley.”
“Mottling! What the hell has he got to do with this?”
“I’m trying to make you see your own confusion, Gevan,” she said, sliding her hands down to my wrists. I sensed your immediate antagonism toward Stanley, and until I figured it out, it worried me. You see, you know I like and trust him. So now I believe that in some emotional irrational way, you have a compulsion to fight him just in order to spite me.”
“For God’s sake, Niki!”
“I’m trying to get you to be honest with yourself. That’s the only way we can start off right, darling. A second chance is such a rare thing, it’s worth every effort. I hurt you terribly. Yes. But I hurt myself too! Can’t you see that? The four years were just as horrid for me as they were for you. You don’t have to keep on trying to punish me now by... by doing hostile things like working against Stanley, who is really so terribly capable. You really have no real objection to him.”
“He seems too damn plausible. He’s driven too many good men away. I’m dubious about his management policies. What’s that got to do with us?”
“Everything, because those are rationalizations to make your emotional hostility seem based on logic.”
At my slight tug she released my wrists. I lit cigarettes. In the quick glow of flame I looked at the oval flatness and good high bones of her cheeks, and the shadowed eyes. It was getting cooler. We began to walk slowly back up the slope toward the home my brother had built for his bride.
“You’ll have to give me a second reading on this,” I told her. “We talk about us, and we get over into this Mottling running the company. Where is the connection? What the hell difference does it make to you whether Mottling or Granby or Joe Sandwich runs the outfit?”
She walked with her head bowed, scuffing the grass with her sandals. “I want to say it exactly right, because everything I say, you take the wrong way, you know.”
“Take your time.”
After a long silence she sighed, stopped and faced me. “Maybe it’s all too involved and too female to explain. Reasons sort of overlap. In the first place, Ken wanted Stanley to be in charge. And, you can sneer at me if you want to, but I do feel obligation and loyalty toward your brother. It didn’t work, and that wasn’t entirely his fault, and he tried desperately hard to make it work. We both did. He was a good man. We both know that.”
“I’m not sneering.”
“Thank you for that, Gevan. Secondly, it’s... it’s like a test for us. You haven’t been here long enough to learn anything pertinent about Stanley. So if you fight him, it’s because you’re fighting me. And what can we build on that kind of feeling? If you keep on trying to fight me, what will our life together be like? And there’s the last thing, and maybe the most important, Gevan. I do know, more than most people, that grave sense of responsibility you have. So suppose you got Stanley out. You know Granby couldn’t handle it. So you wouldn’t go away with me. You’d stay here and back him up and help him and get more and more enmeshed. And I would have to stay here, because you would be here. But, Oh God, how I want to get away from here forever, with you. This is where I bitched up my life, Gevan. I don’t think we can be happy here. And we need happiness. We need it so terribly.”
I looked toward the dark house. Nothing in the world seemed safe and tangible. I thought of what Uncle Al had said about her motivations. The Lime Ridge house looked like a big, brooding trap. Ken had built it and it had caught him. Something had broken him in a shadowy merciless way, and something else had killed him too cleverly. Everything was shifting, implausible. This woman was someone I had never known and never would know.