“I don’t want him to apologize to me,” she said, beginning to feel slightly foolish. And honesty made her add, “He already did.”
“Then,” Wellington said, not picking that up and adding to her discomfort, for which she was grateful, “as soon as the site is finished, I’ll take you on a sort of tour of it myself. All right?”
“I don’t want that either,” she said. “I just want to know what’s going on, I want you to start telling us things.”
“But not on the phone,” he said.
“I don’t care how you tell me, just stop acting as though you were the only one involved!”
“Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry, it just never occurred to me you would go riding up in that area at this time of year. And I didn’t think you would be interested in a simple change of site.”
Everything he said was so reasonable; she felt the solid ground slipping out from under her, and she struggled to retain it. “I saw a light last night,” she said. “In the woods. So I went investigating this morning.”
“Without saying anything to me?”
Baffled, she said nothing for a few seconds, then: “What?”
“You knew I had people in that general area. If you’d asked me about the light, if you’d told me about your plan to investigate, I would naturally have told you about the construction right away.”
She didn’t believe that, but she let it go, saying instead, “Why build anything anyway? We’re going to Paris.”
“Not permanently,” he said. “Besides, it was started before that decision was made. It was begun last Friday, actually, while you and Bradford were away at Elizabeth’s funeral. That was when the demolition was done.”
“Demolition?”
“The easiest way to dig a hole,” he said, “is with explosive. We took advantage of Bradford’s absence to do it the easy way.”
The thought entered her mind that Wellington was making a profit somewhere. It suddenly seemed to her that he was doing a lot of unnecessary fancy-work around the fringes of this thing, and why would he do it unless there was some way he was fudging money out of the government? Took advantage of Bradford’s absence, did he? And maybe he was taking advantage of the whole situation. Disliking Wellington as much as she did, it was easy to attribute that kind of motivation to him. Building a complicated underground base of operations at the same time the man they’re supposed to be watching is going to leave in five days.
“Thank you, Wellington,” she said coldly. “Thank you for the explanation.” And hung up.
iv
The only times she felt real these days were when she was naked in Robert’s apartment. It was strange, that difference in her, strange and delightful. Though she’d never been exactly a prude with Fred, it was true that the intervals she’d spent wearing absolutely nothing during their marriage had been almost nil. She’d worn nightgowns to bed, and though she might sometimes have been nude during sex, she had always put on either the nightgown again or a robe immediately afterward.
But now it was different, astonishingly so. She loved going without clothes in Robert’s apartment, padding around the room or standing at the kitchen-closet to make coffee or just lying on the bed. Sex was a large part of it, of course, her avidity for his body was still getting stronger all the time, was enough now to make her smile suddenly and at odd moments when they were miles apart, was enough to make her much less inhibited and more inventive in bed than she’d ever been before — they had done together so far two things she had previously never done with anyone — but that wasn’t all the reason. There was also a feeling of freedom that came with stripping away her clothing, as though the garments were symbols of the morass of responsibility in which she was mired; without them, she could pretend for a while to be nothing but a female body, desirable and desiring, and that she was someone for whom it was all right to think only of pleasure.
That moment, late at night, when it was necessary for her to get ready for the ten-minute drive back to Eustace, back to the place that was no longer home, was always a bad one, and it seemed at times she was just as bothered by the necessity to get dressed, to blanket herself in weighted layers of cloth, as she was by the prospect of leaving Robert, though of course the two regrets were so entwined it was impossible to tell them apart.
As for Robert, as the week went by leading to the Paris trip, he grew more and more silent, more and more withdrawn. And yet it wasn’t as though he didn’t care about her; he was, if anything, more tender and passionate than before, but he seemed to have to struggle to push those emotions to the surface, as though he was suffering an emotional weariness against which he had to fight at all times. But she could understand that; she would be able to understand any reaction to their situation by now, five weeks since Bradford had first told her his plan to go to Red China. She took what warmth she could from Robert, and didn’t blame him that it wasn’t more.
Sunday night was very bad. The next morning, she and Bradford would drive to Hagerstown, would fly from there to Dulles International Airport in Washington, and from there would take a commercial flight to Paris. How long they would be gone she didn’t know, nor how long till she would see Robert again, nor where she and Bradford would travel from Paris, nor where or when their voyaging could ever finish. She needed Robert more tonight than she’d ever needed him before, and yet tonight he was at his most withdrawn. He didn’t want to talk, it almost seemed as though he couldn’t talk, that he was only capable of holding her, his arms tight around her as though in a wordless attempt to keep her from leaving. She needed words tonight, needed reassurance, but had to settle for this passionate aching silence.
She left at two in the morning, weighed down by her coat and all the clothing beneath it, Robert’s silence still nagging in her ears, and when she got into her car out front she wanted to turn it the opposite way from Eustace and just drive and drive until she passed through some force or field or barrier and became someone entirely different, someone who didn’t have all of this responsibility. Instead of which, she started the engine and set out on the well-worn track toward home.
There were two traffic lights along her route through Chambersburg, and tonight she caught the second one red. Just as it was about to turn green again, the passenger door of the Mustang opened and a man slipped into the seat beside her.
For a second she was too stunned to know what to do, and she was just reacting to the fact that he was Oriental when he said, in slightly British-accented English, “Drive on, please. Don’t be alarmed, I’m on your side.” And he gave her a smile he no doubt meant to be reassuring.
Which, in an odd way, it was. He was a slightly stocky man, middle-aged, his coarse black hair worn straight and long. He was wearing a black topcoat, and under it she could glimpse a dark suit, white shirt and narrow dark tie. The mildness of his manner and the civilized discretion of his clothing were also reassuring, but the most reassuring was his having said, “I’m on your side.” So he was one of Wellington’s men. She nodded, faced front, and pressed the accelerator. The Mustang traveled under the green light and on down the empty street.
There were now automobile headlights in the rearview mirror, about a block back. There had been none before.
The man said, “I have a message for your grandfather. It is very important. He trusts you, so we trust you.”