She reaches out to the roller and tears off a length of tissue. The parched, leaf-mould smell of the paper reminds her of something from the past — trees, summer, a boy — but it is gone before she can fix it. The flush is operated by a chain with a wooden handle polished and worn thin from use.
— oh, such a dream!
We were upon some golden mountain top,
The two of us, just we, and all around
The air was blue, and endless, and so soft!
She wonders at herself and how she fairly fled just now from the bedroom and her husband in a confusion of unwonted shyness, of shame, almost, that was more pleasurable than not, and now — could it be? — there is already a heat beginning to glow again in her lap. What came over her? And, more amazingly, what came over him? She puts a hand between her thighs and probes inside herself with squeamish fingers. She expects to find all raw and sore there but does not. She lifts her fingertips to her nostrils and sniffs. There are only her own familiar pungencies. Was it a dream? Surely not. Surely something so intensely felt must have been real.
She thinks again of the dying old man.
Loosened, released, she rises from the cascading bowl and walks to the window and peers at what she can see of her face in the cracked looking-glass in its worm-eaten wooden frame. Who if not her husband was that monstrous man who made such love to her in the dimness of the dawning bedroom? And if her husband, how transfigured! Her limbs are shaking still from the awful weight of him. The things he did to her, the things he had her do! Never, never in all her life—! In the glass with its diagonal crack her face is slashed into two ill-fitting halves and a lopsided eye looks back at her quizzically, with a sceptical cast. The morning beats around her like a pulse, the cistern gurgles. The warmish afterglow of her own spicy stink lingers on the air. Through the little window the glare of daylight startles anew, making her squint. The light out here in the country, the hue of headaches, is different than in the city, brighter, more intense, as if there is shining behind it another light, mysterious, unvarying, with an acid cast. The water, coiling from the tap like running metal, shatters on her knuckles in silvery streels. She seems to herself gathered up, somehow, enfolded and gathered up. The burning in her belly is growing more intense, a sullen fire. She lowers her head with eyes shut fast and braces her hands on the sides of the handbasin and leans forward heavily on locked elbows, trembling in remembered pleasure that seems a part of pain. She would swoon if I were not there to hold her up with arms of air. This is how it always is when Dad has done what he does with a girl, the old lecher. I am remembering Tyndareus’s wife, and, later, that trollop her daughter — another Helen! — who caused all the trouble at Troy and brought great Ilium low. Not to mention the nameless ones, countless in number, before and since, betrayed, spurned, forgotten.
Adam is waiting for her in the bedroom. He has dressed. He wears a white shirt and a preposterous pair of rough tweed trousers, of a rusty colour, much too tight for him, that she has never seen before — they cannot be his, he must have found them somewhere in the room. He always does strange things at Arden. Coming here he still speaks of coming home. He is sitting sideways on the bed. This bed — it is wider than a single but far too narrow for the two of them; last night she said she was afraid he would turn in his sleep and squash her against the wall and kill her, as it is said babies are sometimes suffocated when their sleeping mothers roll on top of them. At the mention of babies they both went silent, and he looked away though she made herself stare at him, her eyes narrowed, daring him to say something, but he would not, of course. She looks now at the things of his in the room, that aeroplane, the hurley stick, and in her mind she curls a lip. He is propped on an arm and smiling up at her as if in entreaty. What does he want? She wishes he had gone downstairs. She would like to be alone. She does not want to dress in front of him. She feels still a vestige of excited shame, recalling the dream of their love-making. For she has decided it was a dream, after all. What else could it have been, her seeming to wake and find him looming over her arrayed in light, unspeaking, urgent, his arms outstretched and his hands on her breasts — what else?
When you return, who will you be but you?
What other you is there that I might love?
Again now he moves a hand towards her, the hand he had been leaning on, its fingers scurrying crablike playfully over the sheet. She likes his hands, foursquare and always warm, but now she does not want to be touched and draws back an almost imperceptible inch from the edge of the bed. He makes a smiling frown. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “Did Duffy spot you in my shirt?”
She considers this. She has had cause before now to remark the cowman’s seeming freedom of the house, his way of popping up at inappropriate moments in unexpected places, with his beetling brow and his bold, undeflectable stare. What if he did see her, scampering out of the bathroom and up the steps with her backside on show? Well, let him see, she does not care.
“Did you go in yet to see your father?” she asks. Her overnight bag is open on the floor, things spilling out of it as if stalled in a desperate scramble to escape. “How is he?”
He stops smiling but continues to frown, his upper lip protruding over the lower. As always when he dips his head a wing of hair falls forward on his brow and he lifts a hand impatiently to brush it back. His hair is soft and pale. His eyes are pale too, a limpid blue, like her own, but uncanny, somehow, uncanny, that word again. In her dream he was himself and yet not, a figure of cold fire, burning her; his mouth was gold.
“I don’t know how he is,” he says. “He’s just there, not doing anything. I hope he is not suffering but how am I supposed to know?” He pauses, and picks at something on the sheet. “I burst into tears at the bedside.”
“Did you?” is all she says, as if she were thinking of something else. He wonders if she will ask to see him, the dying man.
She walks to the window and pulls up the muslin blind and secures its string by winding it on a hook screwed into the sill and stands looking out. It is supposed to be possible to see the sea from here but she never can. “Poor thing,” she says, and neither of them is sure whom she means, Adam’s father or Adam. Below, there is a different field from the one the bathroom window looks down on, or maybe, she thinks, it is the same one but from another angle. Beyond it there is no wood, though, only a long, lush slope — surely even grass should not be that unreally bright shade of green — behind which rise the roof and single chimney of Ivy Blount’s cottage. Three black-and-white cows are desultorily at graze. A tiny bird flits down from a bough as if not flying but falling, a quick, brown leaf, and then can be seen no more. There is something less than real about the look of this place, especially in summer; it all seems got up, to her. Everything is too flat, somehow, the distances especially but the nearer hills, too, and all laid over with a weak lavender wash, like a badly done backdrop.