Evelyn could feel Greg staring at her, hopelessly lost. Glancing at him, she patted the air in a small sign to let him know she would explain everything later.
The Vietnamese who had talked on the phone came out of the office carrying BJ’s gun. He held it up by the barrel, showing it to Evelyn, and gave a friendly smile, which amazed her. With his other hand, he waggled a finger back and forth, as in disapproval, and very slowly said, “Bad. Bad.”
It took her a few seconds to realize the word was in English, and then she was flustered, understanding that the man was attempting to make a small joke, to help her relax. Her returning smile was far too sunny, and she said, “Oh, yes, it’s very bad. Yes, you’re right, I hate guns.”
The Vietnamese nodded and smiled, and put BJ’s gun away in his hip pocket. Then he grew serious again, glanced at his companion, and the two of them went over to BJ. They bent over him, one on each side, and Evelyn could hear them murmuring to him, but whether it was English or Vietnamese she couldn’t tell. In either case, there was no response from BJ, so after a minute they took him under the arms, gently lifted him to his feet, and walked him away to their car. He went without protest. At the car, they opened the passenger door and one of them clambered into the small seat in the back, sitting sideways with his feet up. The other urged BJ into the passenger seat in front, then closed the door and walked around to get behind the wheel. He waved through the windshield at Evelyn, who found herself waving back, and then backed the Renault in a tight U-turn and drove it on out of the yard.
Greg said, “I’m going to be a very old man before you get done explaining all this.”
“You’re probably right,” Evelyn said, smiling at him. For some reason, she felt rather good, much better than she’d felt all week. She supposed it was the release of tension through action, however pointless and incomprehensible the action might be. And it was also a relief to have finally spoken out to Wellington, and not only that, but to make him back down!
“Start soon,” Greg said, meaning the explanation.
“Right. On the way back to the house.”
They walked slowly, but they still had to pause for a minute by the slanted sundial for Evelyn to finish the explanation. Greg said, “This started the day I was married.”
“That’s when I told your father, yes. It started a week before that, when Bradford first asked me to go with him.”
Greg turned to look up at the house. “Bradford Lockridge,” he said. “My God, it seems impossible. It doesn’t seem right. He’s supposed to be safe from rotten things like that.”
“When you see him—”
“Oh, sure! I won’t let on.”
“Good.”
“I won’t tell Audrey till after we leave, so she won’t have to pretend.”
“Fine,” Evelyn said, and the front door of the house opened, and Bradford was standing there.
Greg’s face lit up in a sunny untroubled uncomplicated smile. “Bradford!” he called. “I could hardly wait to see you! Have you seen Audrey? Isn’t she beautiful?” He went striding toward the house, chipper, happy, seeming very very young, and Evelyn followed.
iii
All day long, she had labored under the feeling she’d been cheated somehow, she was the victim of something unfair. Today, Tuesday, the sixth of November, was her twenty-seventh birthday. She should be cheerful today, she should be surrounded by people anxious to make a special occasion out of her day, she should have no problems to distract her mind.
It was unfair, and because life was being unfair Evelyn too became unfair. She shouted at Dinah three times before lunch, in each case puffing some tiny misdemeanor all out of proportion, so that in the afternoon Dinah stayed silently and mournfully out of the way, and Evelyn walked around with a load of guilt on top of everything else.
Bradford had forgotten her birthday, that was another thing, for the first time in her life. Whether it was because of the uncertain memory given him by his illness or the steadily increasing irritation he obviously felt at the delay in leaving here she didn’t know, nor did it really matter. Her life was being taken from her, that was her feeling, in small mean chunks, and today she found herself very resentful of Bradford for imposing this responsibility on her. Normally she understood that the responsibility was her own decision, that if she was in the role (stock in so much of fiction and so much of life) of the younger person who has sacrificed herself to the care of someone older, she had done it herself, and gladly, without Bradford’s request or desire. But today that awareness was only annoying, and to be thrust aside; she wanted to blame someone, and she didn’t want the someone to be herself.
An additional source of trouble was Howard, whose rage with the rest of the family was increasing day by day. There was no one he could really get at among the malingerers, but his fury had to find release somewhere, and more and more he was letting it out at Bradford, costumed as irritation over Bradford’s abandonment of The Coming of Winter. It was natural and to be expected that he would prod Bradford on the subject, and it was probably true that he did feel annoyed by it, but the pressure of his more generalized rancor was forcing him to be harsher with Bradford than he’d ever been before. Bradford seemed unaware of him at times, at other times remained haughty and aloof, but every once in a while lashed back with un-Bradford-like viciousness, accusing Howard of being a coat-tail rider, attacking him with small-minded nastiness.
The situation couldn’t last much longer, and her birthday only hammered home the truth of that. Some more stable, long-term solution had to be found. Evelyn knew that already some members of the family hoped that Bradford would merely die and thus solve the problem for them, and today for the first time she saw that she herself could eventually come to the same way of thinking. To actively want Bradford dead would be horrible, but the impulse was already within her, and unless something happened soon to change the situation it would have to eventually surface.
She said as much to Howard that evening, as the two of them rode in his Mercedes toward Chambersburg to meet Robert. He listened soberly, driving with both hands high on the steering wheel, and said, “I know what you mean. We’re all of us turning nasty, I can feel it. And right now, the farther we get away from the estate the better I feel.”
“I know. Isn’t that awful?”
“Something has to be done,” he said, “and I can’t even get the bastards together to talk about it. We’ll all snap like BJ, and Brad will be the last one walking around loose.”
“I wonder if he’ll ever be all right again,” she said, meaning BJ, and Howard only shrugged. She had phoned James Fanshaw Sunday evening, from Robert’s place, and he did exist, he was Wellington’s brother-in-law and Meredith Fanshaw’s nephew, and he had already arranged for BJ to go to a sanitarium on Long Island. He had also contacted the Army, to let them know where BJ was.
Robert had had to explain to her, Sunday night, how Wellington, down in Washington, had known so fast about BJ. Obviously his Vietnamese had continued using the Chinese equipment to tap Bradford’s phones, including interior calls, and had heard Jimmy’s call to her. They must have some direct line to Wellington’s office, and they’d passed the word to him at once, and he’d told them what to do. Once again, the speed and the prior planning of the professional.