He edged into the room and shut the door gently behind him. He’d patted down his hair, though it had dried unevenly, and she could see that he’d scrubbed his hands to remove the tar, or most of it, anyway. “I see the leaks have stopped — or slowed at least.”
“It’s an improvement, yes,” she said.
“As soon as it stops, I’ll get back up there and fix it permanently.”
She watched him move round the room, shrugging out of his jacket, unbuttoning his shirt, pulling the chair to him to sit and remove his trousers, a man getting ready for bed, the most pedestrian thing in the world, and intimate, deeply intimate, her man, her husband, and what had she been thinking? They were married. Man and wife. She loved him. He loved her. “If you like,” he said, stripped to his underwear now, the hard muscles of his legs flexed against the grip of the cotton cloth, his arms hanging loose at his sides and the heavy spill of his abdomen suspended before him, “I can empty these buckets. It won’t take but a minute.”
“No,” she said, “no need to bother.” She sat up, pushed back the covers so he could see her there in her nightgown. Her throat was bare. Her hair ran loose over her shoulders. She was breathing steadily, easily, the cold and damp nothing to her, nothing at all — she was in Italy, that was where she was, and the sirocco had swept out of Africa to dry the ditches and scorch the fields. “Come to bed, Will,” she said.
* * *
Next morning, he was up before her, up and out the door, thundering down the stairs to the kitchen and breakfast and then to his gum boots and mackintosh and the shovel that roughened his hands and tore at the muscles of his back and shoulders till he was so stiff some evenings he could barely straighten up. She wanted to massage him, rub his shoulders, ease his burden, but more often than not she was asleep by the time he came to bed. Last night was different. She was awake and present and after he’d turned out the light and come to her, his weight straining the mattress and she slipping helplessly toward him as if down a gentle sloping hill, she’d tried to be a wife to him, tried to open up, feel him, but she couldn’t seem to let herself go. He groped at her, his fingers seeking her out, rucking up her nightdress, fastening on her breasts, the bulk of him rising up, pressing at her till she wasn’t so much aroused as embarrassed — her shrunken breasts, her ribs that were like the stony reefs the tide exposed, the poor wasted shanks of her legs — and all she could think was that he was embracing a corpse. You’re so thin, he murmured, working at her, working, kissing her throat, her ears, the parting of her hair, and in his moment of passion he actually took hold of her chin and pressed his mouth to hers until she spoke his name aloud, firmly, harshly, and turned her face away.
She felt ashamed of herself. Felt weak and inadequate. And as she lay there now listening to the rain that still hadn’t let up, the rain that had become a burden, a weight that lay over everything, squeezing and compressing the air till it might have been raining inside her, raining in her lungs and her heart and her brain too, she thought of him out there on the road in the thick of it, his back aching, his shoulders on fire, plunging the shovel into the wet yielding earth as if it mattered, as if anything mattered. She forced herself out of bed, the first long spasm catching her by surprise. She coughed, heaved for breath, coughed. The pitcher, the glass, the little brown bottle, the spoon with its residue. And then her clothes. She took a long while dressing — no matter how low she might have been she had to think of Edith, of setting an example, because if she didn’t do it, who would? — and then she drew up a chair to the mirror, combed out her hair and pinned it up.
The light was poor, but even so, even at a glance, she could see how reduced she looked. Her skin was porous, gray, stretched as tight as the lamb’s hide Adolph had tacked up on the side of the barn, while her eyes seemed larger, disproportionately so, as if her features had sunk into them. She pinched her cheeks to bring up the color, but nothing came, and she resorted to her rouge, twin dabs of it worked into the hollows of her cheeks, but the effect seemed worse somehow. No matter. She had a duty to perform and that duty involved Will, her husband, who was out there in the rain, working for increase and profit, working for her.
It was ten-thirty in the morning by her pocket watch when she came downstairs, and it was past eleven by the time she’d brewed a full pot of coffee and wrapped up half a dozen sandwiches of lamb and onion in a towel she positioned beside the coffee in the depths of a straw basket. Then she put on her coat and hat, took up her parasol and went out the front door, down the steps and into the rain.
The footing was bad, but she’d expected that — what she hadn’t expected was the feeling of release that swept over her as soon as the door pulled shut behind her. She was out of doors, only that, and it came to her that it was the first time she’d been out in days. The house loomed at her back, but she never turned her head. She was watching her feet, concentrating on keeping her balance in the roiling sepia mud that clung to the toes of her boots and sucked at her heels. The rain drummed at the parasol. Everything smelled of fresh-turned earth.
She found Will just beyond the second outcrop, wielding his shovel in a torrent, Adolph and Jimmie pitching in beside him, and it was like the day of the lobsters, only the wheelbarrow was filled with a yellow soup of diluted mud and all three of them looked hopeless. “I brought hot coffee,” she said. “And sandwiches.”
“You shouldn’t have come out here in this,” Will said even as he jammed the shovel into the ground and moved toward her, Adolph and Jimmie setting down their tools and moving too now, as if they’d been awakened from a dream.
“I know how hard you’ve been working,” she said, her feet sliding in the muck, her shoes ruined and stockings soaked through, “and I just felt you could do with a boost, something to warm you, all of you.” She couldn’t set the basket down — it would have been washed away, sluiced over the side of the path and flung down into the ravine that was roaring now with its burden of crashing rock and churning yellow water — and she was having difficulty in trying to hold it out to Will and at the same time keep the parasol upright. In that moment she saw how absurd it was to have brought the basket to them — where would they drink their coffee or eat the sandwiches that would turn to paste the minute they took them up? There was no cover, no place to sit, the rain beating down without remit, everything in motion, gray above, dun below.
But they came to her, crowding in under the poor protection of the parasol, and they held out the cups she provided so that she could pour for each of them in turn and they took the sandwiches and lifted them to their mouths, their eyes gone distant as they chewed.
She wanted to say something about the conditions, how they really ought to think about giving it up for the day before someone got washed into the ravine or buried beneath a mudslide, but instead she turned to Will — Will, with his mustaches dripping and the crown of his hat collapsed round his ears — and clucked her tongue. “You poor man,” she said.