“Well,” she said, “what now?”
He studied the landscape to see if there was anyone in the near distance he might hail; the area was oddly desolate.
“It’ll have to be on the left side this time,” he said, holding out his hand.
“Have you hurt yourself?” she asked. “I can’t say how sorry I am.”
He saw no point in denying it — he had long since stopped perceiving himself as a hero — though he was embarrassed at the extent of her apparent concern, the exaggeration of real feeling.
“Sit down and rest a few minutes,” she said, sliding back a few feet so that the leaves of a large oak screened some of the rain.
“We ought to get some care for that ankle,” he said.
“If I don’t mind, why should you? It’s very beautiful here, isn’t it, very still and very beautiful.
The view, what he could see of it from where they sat, did not strike him as beautiful. It merely satisfied expectation. Nature, it was true, never seemed to him as beautiful or surprising as art. One had the difficulty of course of only being able to see patches of it at one time, fragments of some presumably larger design. He mentioned this heresy to her and got a blank look in return, an almost shocked stare. He resisted apology.
When they got back to the cottage Max and the others still hadn’t returned. There was a message for an L. Turpin on the desk in the workroom that someone had called, though the name of the caller was not given (the note was barely legible), nor was there a return number. He asked Sylvie, who was in the living room reading a copy of Vogue, if she had taken the phone call for him. Her manner was vague though earnest. She could tell from studying the handwriting that the note to him was not her work. Not only hadn’t she answered the phone, she said, she had no recollection of having heard it ring. Who else was in the house? he asked.
Marjorie sat in the workroom with her injured leg propped up on a stool, holding an unlit cigar in her long fingers as a prop.
Terman was trying to figure out Tom’s next move and thought it possible, or not impossible, that his son was somewhere on the grounds of the Kirstner estate.
“You are distracted, aren’t you?” she said. “Tuppence for them.”
He said he was thinking of food and Marjorie said she thought there was some fruit in a cut glass bowl in the dining room, granny smiths, bananas, and dark grapes.
Terman went into the dining room and returned empty-handed, something else impelling him, something he couldn’t remember or had never quite known.
“Wasn’t my fruit any good?” she asked.
He glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes to seven — another day irretrievably gone. “When are they coming back?” he asked, the question rhetorical.
She shook her head in a self-amused way, smiling charmingly at him. “I wonder if you could get me an aperitif,” she said.
Fixed on something else, he only partly heard her request, wary of her demands, thinking that no matter the language she was asking him to make love to her.
“I’d like something to warm me up,” she said.
They could hear Sylvie upstairs talking on the phone in French, complaining about something.
Marjorie put her finger over her lips, enjoining him to silence. When Sylvie’s conversation was completed, Marjorie said, “You are forgetful, you know. I’m worried about you.”
Sylvie came downstairs, stuck her head in the room then disappeared somewhere outside.
Terman poured a glass of Rafael for Marjorie and made himself a Scotch, not bothering to put in ice or water, wanting to feel the heat of the liquor in his chest. He tossed down the drink and poured himself a second, before delivering the aperitif to Marjorie.
She acknowledged his service with a wink. “Would you change the compress on my ankle, my friend?” she asked in her peremptory way. “You don’t really mind, do you?”
He was unwrapping the compress when he heard a car pull into the driveway and he momentarily observed himself, bent devotedly over her outstretched leg, from the viewpoint of someone coming in them. “The swelling is down,” he said. “It can’t be too serious.”
“My dear, everything is too serious,” she said with a wink. “It’s such a bore, isn’t it?” It was as if an understanding had been established between them, an unacknowledged intimacy.
After dinner Terman sought out Isabelle who was sitting some distance from him at the large table. “I’m going back to London,” he whispered. “There’s no more for me to do here.”
“I understand,” she said coldly.
“Would you like to go?”
“Are you asking me to come with you?”
He noticed that Marjorie, leaning on a cane by the kitchen door, was watching them.
“That’s what I’m asking,” he said. “I don’t understand what else you thought.”
“Are we having a fight?” she asked.
“Let’s go into another room and talk.”
“I don’t want to,” she said, brushing off his arm.
He walked away, then came back to her. “It would please me if you came along,” he said.
She followed him outside to the car, neither consenting nor refusing, smiling apologetically to whomever she passed. Marjorie was watching them from the kitchen.
“You look very sexy tonight,” he said. He was holding the passenger door open for her (or for anyone) when he had an intuition that someone was observing them from the woods just beyond the garden.
“I’ll go with you,” she said, “but I have to get my things first and say goodbye to the others, which will take a few minutes. Is that all right? I know how impatient you get, but it’s not my nature to accept people’s hospitality without thanking them.”
He sat in the car and watched her walk back toward the house, full of frail determination, glancing over her shoulder to make sure that he hadn’t gone off without her.
Max came out after several minutes, followed by Isabelle who turned around to say something in the doorway to someone else. He heard Marjorie’s authoritative voice, heard his name mentioned.
“Wish we could have had more time together,” Max was saying, his face at the window like a Halloween mask, “but as I’ve told you more than you want to hear I’m not my own man.” He let himself into the back seat of the car, lowered his voice to the sympathetic tone he used for playing the good guy, the one who if not pressured by forces outside his control would give Terman everything he wanted. Terman, seeking comfort, let himself be gulled. It was not what Max said that was so persuasive but the undiguised need to persuade that worked its charm.
“The women are watching us,” Max said. “Regard.”
Indeed, Marjorie and Isabelle — Marjorie leaning on her cane-were standing silently just inside the doorway, looking out at the car. “What did Marjorie say to you about me?” he asked.
“I don’t think your name ever came up,” Terman said.
“You did spend some time with her, did you? And she had nothing, either good or bad, to say about yours truly?”
The two women, Marjorie’s hand at the small of Isabelle’s back, approached them.
“A bit frightening, the two of them in tandem, don’t you think?”
Isabelle looked into the back seat where Max was sitting and said hello.
“We’re talking shop,” Max said.
“Are you?” said Marjorie, offering them a road show version of her unconvincingly merciless grande dame. “I had the impression that Terman and Isabelle were going to London and we had come to the car to say goodbye to them.”