“She couldn’t know that. She was fond of Reggie Gale. He was in love with her, and willing to give the baby his name,” Cohn said.
After a glance towards the desk, he got up and walked over to the window. He stood there for several minutes with his back to the room until he heard a movement behind him. Dr. Harshom had got up and was crossing to the cupboard.
“I could do with a drink,” he said. “The toast will be the restoration of order, and the rout of the random element.”
“I’ll support that,” Cohn told him, “but I’d like to couple it with the confirmation of your contention, Doctor, after all, you are right at last, you know; Ottillie Harshom does not exist, not any more. And then, I think, it will be high time you were introduced to your grand daughter, Mrs Cohn Trafford.”
Time Out
A person awaking should, in my opinion, glide smoothly back into coordination, otherwise he feels that there is some part of him that hasn’t got back in time.
And if there’s another thing I dislike, it’s the sharp drive of a woman’s elbow, well, come to that, anybody’s: elbow among my ribs, more particularly if that woman happens to be my wife. After all, it’s part of a wife’s job to learn not to do these things.
In the circumstances my response came clear out of the subconscious.
“Well, really I…” said Sylvia. “I know I’m only your wife, George, but, well, really!”
My time lag caught up.
“Sorry,” I said. “But, golly, what’s the matter anyway?”
“I don’t know,” Sylvia admitted. “But I’ve got a feeling there’s something wrong.”
“Oh gosh!” I said, and switched on the light.
Naturally, everything looked just as usual.
“Intuition?” I suggested.
“You needn’t sneer at me, George. What about that Sunday I knew we were going to have an accident with the car?”
“Which Sunday? There were so many,” I said.
“Why, the Sunday we did have one, of course. I felt just the same way about it as I do now.”
I sat up in bed. The clock had been a wedding present. After a while I calculated that it was trying to indicate 3:15 A.M. I listened. I couldn’t hear anything anyplace. Still, you know what intuition is.
“I suppose I’d better have a look. Where did you think it was?” I asked her.
“What was?” she said.
“Whatever you heard.”
“But I didn’t hear anything. I told you it’s just a. feeling that something’s wrong.”
I relaxed and leaned back on the pillow.
“Would I do something about that?” I asked.
“What can you do? It’s just a feeling.”
“Then why on earth?” I began.
At that moment the light went out.
“There!” said Sylvia triumphantly. “I knew!”
“Good. Well, that’s over then,” I said and pulled up the bedclothes.
“Aren’t you going to look at it?” she enquired.
“A blown fuse can keep till morning even if you’d not left my torch someplace,” I told her.
“But it may not be a fuse,” she said.
“To hell with it,” I muttered, getting comfortable again.
“I should have thought you would want to know,” she suggested.
“I don’t. I just want to sleep,” I said.
When I woke again the morning was nice and bright. The sun was shining in and painting a part of the opposite wall with pale gold. I stretched a bit in warm comfort, and reached for a cigarette. As I lit it, I remembered the light. I pushed the switch on and off a few times without result. That cute electric clock still seemed to be saying 3:15. My watch said seven o’clock. I lay back, enjoying the first few puffs at the cigarette.
Sylvia slept on. I allowed the temptation to drive my elbow into her ribs for a change to pass. She manages such a decorative and confiding appearance when she sleeps. Just then she said: “Ughhhh,” and pulled the sheets over her ear. She is not one who greets the dawn with a glad cry.
At about the same moment it occurred to me that there was something wrong with the day a sort of public holiday quality. As a rule one can hear a sort of background buzz of traffic from the main road, an occasional car in our own road, milk bottles clinking, and can feel a general sense of stir. This morning all that was missing even the bird sounds. A disturbing air of peace lay over the neighbourhood. The more I listened, the more unnatural it seemed. At length it drove me to get up and go to the window. Behind me Sylvia murmured and pulled the bedclothes more closely round her.
I think I must have stood looking out the window for several minutes before I turned back. Then I said: “Sylvia. Something funny’s been happening.”
“Ugh,” she remarked.
Dropping the understatement, I said: “Come arid look. If you don’t see it, too, I must be going crazy.”
The tone of my voice got through to her. She opened her eyes.
“What is it?”
“Come and look,” I repeated.
She yawned, pushed back the covers and manoeuvred off the bed. She thrust her feet into a pair of mules decorated for some incomprehensible feminine reason with feathers, and pulled on a wrap as she staggered across.
“What?” she began. Then she suddenly dried up, and stood staring.
We live in a suburb. It’s a nice suburb, nice sort of people. The houses are pretty much alike, all with their garages and gardens. Not large houses, not large gardens, either, though quite large enough for the husbands to look after. We stand on a slope, and from the bedroom window we look down upon the backs of a similar row of houses which front upon a road parallel with ours and have gardens running up toward us. The end of our garden is separated from the end of the one opposite by a high wooden fence which is continuous along all the properties. Across the roofs of the opposite houses we can see the huddle of more industrial parts beyond. On fine days we can see a considerable distance further, to low hills where houses similar to our own stand out among trees and gardens; but more often the two residential areas are hidden from one another by the haze thickened with smoke that rises between them. It is not, perhaps, an inspiring view across the tall chimneys, municipal towers, and the beetle backs of several movie houses, but it does give us a sense of space and a big stretch of sky. The trouble with it this morning was that it gave us little else.
Just beneath us lay our lawn and flower beds. Then the hedge which cuts off the vegetable garden. There the rows of beans, peas, and cabbages should have run down past a pear tree on the left and a plum tree on the right until they reached the raspberry and currant department. But they didn’t. They began, but about halfway down their edge there was a brown, sandy-looking soil in which a coarse grass grew in large or small patches and lonely tufts. It was a dune land, save that it lacked any noticeable hillocks, and it stretched on and on, undulating gently into the distance until it met brownish-green hills far away.
We stared out at it in silence for some little time. Then Sylvia said in a choked voice: “Is this some kind of joke, George?”
Sylvia has two reactions to any sort of unpleasant surprise. One is that if it utterly fails to amuse her it must be some form of joke. And the other, that whatever it concerns, I must somehow be responsible for it. I do not pretend to know what she thought I might have been doing in order to spirit away a whole landscape, but I was able to reply with truth that no one could be more surprised than I.
Whereupon she gave a kind of gulp, and ran out of the room.
I stood where I was, still looking out. On the left was the Saggitts” garden, running down alongside our own, and cut off in the same peculiar way. Beyond that was the Drurys, at least there was part of theirs, for not only was it cut off on a line with ours, but there was no more than a six foot wide strip of it to be seen; beyond was the sandy soil.