Almost convulsively, she clutched the papers close against her table flat and black-hidden bosom.
“You can’t say it’s right, Mr. Merrill, and you’re a friend of his! Surely he knows that woman’s reputation! A small-town floozy like her, marrying a nice, loyal man like Mr. Wheeling and just wrecking him! Why! She’s had affairs with every white man on the island, and now it’s Mr. Holden she’s got! And we don’t even know about the natives she—”
“You came from a small town, didn’t you, Miss Harriwell?”
“Yes!” she flared. “But I didn’t marry into the service and then make a drunken hulk out of a good, clean boy just because living with him where his duty called wasn’t as glamorous as I thought it would be! I didn’t taunt him with my lovers until—”
I rose abruptly to my feet. “I’m going up to the hotel.”
“I have only the best interest of the service—”
“You should know by now, Miss Harriwell, that I’m not a sympathetic audience for information best disseminated on rest-room walls with other four-letter words.”
“Mister Merrill!”
I walked past her. “Good night,” I said, and I went down to my car.
A shower and a change of linen in the lighter breezes across the evening-shadowed hills near the hotel helped smooth me out a little. So did the regular 7 o’clock highball, cool and good in the almost empty bar, washing some of the powdered-alum taste out of my mouth.
The bar would never be entirely empty so long as Jim Wheeling was on the island. Two early couples sat near the concert grand, their murmuring indistinct beneath the drifting melody caressed from the instrument by the deceptively gentle-looking native at the keys; a table of four was almost silent in the arch to a balcony. Jim Wheeling was completely silent, squalling heavily and alone at a table near the bar. He ignored my entrance and kept his eyes fixed on the lobby arch. In his unshaven face and the soiled wrinkles of the white suit on his massive frame were the unmistakable marks of prolonged drinking.
I rolled the whiskey and crushed ice across my tongue and peered at my own reflection in the back-bar mirror, and I thought: You’d be a fool, boy, to sign an issue slip for a face like that. The mirror, like everything else, was old and excessively clean and unchanging. It shimmered with the face I didn’t like. I swallowed the mouthful of whiskey and sneered at myself.
“Guru!”
The voice was behind me, a trifle husky, the feminine kind to disturb you and please you and leave you a little uncertain of how anything was meant.
“Robert — it’s Guru! Let’s be nice and talk to him.”
I took another sip and looked up into the mirror. Catherine Wheeling, accompanied by Holden, was sweeping toward me. She moved directly to my side; in not the slightest way did she recognize the presence of her husband. Conversation in the bar paused in mid-phrase, then continued a little self-consciously.
“We’ve decided to talk to you. Guru.” Catherine Wheeling slid a full figure in a neatly tailored white slack suit on the stool beside me and brushed her long fingers slowly down my sleeve.
“Oh, lovely,” I said.
“Listen to him,” she laughed, turning to Holden. “Now he’s going to be sarcastic, Robert. Did you learn that at tea-and-crumpets school, Guru?”
“Don’t call him Guru,” said Holden quietly. Behind him, Jim Wheeling suddenly lurched to his feet and, swaying, scowled at the three of us.
Catherine ignored her husband, kept her eyes on Holden.
“Please tell me why not?”
“His name is Merrill,” said Holden. “Call him Merrill.”
“But he’s a Guru, darling. He’s a spiritual leader for us. Don’t you see?”
“I see you’re obscene.”
The native bartender, Billy X., stood patiently through all this, his dark high-boned face waiting very still over the white mess jacket. But Catherine Wheeling always refused to recognize the possibility that those she held to be lesser beings, like bartenders and fourth assistants, might have ears and, very often, excellent minds.
“We’ll drink with you, Guru Merrill — there you see, Robert, I please you with his proper name.” Her eyes darkened swiftly, raking Holden’s impassive face. “I’m always doing something to please you — you of all men! Isn’t that fine?”
Holden did not move or reply. His frosty gray stare settled on Catherine’s and so the two of them remained for a moment between the challenge and the most peculiar reaction I’ve ever witnessed. Suddenly, Catherine’s head jerked so sharply one would have thought, from a distance, that she’d been slapped. She whirled toward me, recovering like a champion — which she was not. Unless they’re offering different titles this season.
“We’d so very much like to be uplifted, Guru,” she smiled. Her own particular smile. “But let’s sit at a table. Shall we?”
She turned and gave the order, and Holden said, “You’ve had enough, haven’t you?” She turned back to him; it was a very complete sort of movement, as if her whole body turned on him and came up to point like a good dog when the birds are near. She slowly brushed her palm back over the long and whitely parted hair that looked so darkly alive, and she looked from Holden to me and back to Holden with the green eyes like rain-washed glass.
Then she turned her head, just her head, and said over her shoulder to the bartender: “Make mine a double, Billy X., and send it to the table.”
We followed her free, long-legged walk away from the bar. There was nothing else to do without risking an even bigger scene. Holden, short and wiry, paced softly along beside me.
Wheeling had not moved from where he stood by his table, leaning his weight on one fist driven down against the ash-littered top. Now he followed us with his eyes, his body still as a statue. Catherine’s choice was a withdrawn corner at the edge of a window opening wide above the lowering hills and beyond the red-roofed administration buildings to the inky convergence of sea and sky. We settled down with every questioning thought in the room slyly probing toward us.
Wheeling moved. His progress across the room was pitiful. Once the hard-bodied university athlete and “bright young man” in the service — before he married Catherine — he stumbled toward us, upsetting a chair and jarring a table. No greetings were exchanged when he fell into a chair in our group.
Holden carefully fitted a cigarette between his lips and offered the case to Catherine. She accepted, lighting with matches from a pocket in the white suit, ignoring Jim Wheeling’s fumbling offer of flame from his lighter. The drinks were brought and we lifted our glasses. No one looked openly at Wheeling, and he saw no one but Catherine.
“Let’s not say chin-chin or cheers, or anything like that,” smiled Catherine, watching me. “Guru wouldn’t mean it. Let’s just drink.”
“Sorry about this afternoon,” Holden said to me. “I don’t imagine you really needed me. Did you?”
“You’re too modest,” Catherine said, with that same smile. I did not like that smile at all. Not on anyone, and particularly not on Catherine. It was just a careful application of well-trained muscles around the mouth, “You know Guru worries about you. Robert.”
“Robert’s quite a big boy now,” I said. “When he’s more himself, he makes his own reports.”
“You think that’s biting and cryptic, Guru?”
“Not particularly.”
“Yes, you do. Hut it isn’t. Not really. If it weren’t for me, your Miss Harriwell would suffer agonies. She’d have no one to talk about — except perhaps those marvelous natives, those cock-fighters.”