“You shouldn’t go to sleep in the sun without something over your eyes, sir. It’s hard on them.”
“I don’t think I’ve been asleep. I don’t think so.”
The letter had fallen on the floor. He leaned over and picked it up with an odd feeling of pity and revulsion and love. My wife, he thought. Martha...
Forbes moved the chair out of the sun and brought out Charles’s lunch on a tray. While he ate, Charles thought about Martha. The letter made her seem closer, and more real to him now than she had seemed all the time he was seeing her every minute of the day. Absurd as it was, he couldn’t help thinking that at any moment she might come out to the porch. She would walk right over to him and kiss him on the mouth. Her hair would be down her back, windblown and smelling of the sun. He would be indifferent, even brutaclass="underline"
“Beat it. Can’t you see I’m trying to eat?”
“Oh, Charles, please! I’m afraid. I’ve been so lonely for you.”
“Well, you’ll have to wait until I finish my lunch.”
Pipe dream, he thought, a nonsensical little pipe dream. But he was breathing faster, and when Forbes came out again, Charles was surprised to find he’d eaten everything on the tray without knowing it.
He settled back in the chair once more. He thought, why couldn’t it happen? Why can’t I make it happen? I know her better now. I understand her. If I can keep hold of my nerves, if I can stop myself imagining things about her...
He saw himself arriving home, very fit and strong again, secure in the knowledge that at last he understood her difficulties and her weaknesses and that his understanding meant he could control her. Her sense of guilt, of insecurity, her self-consciousness, he would help her overcome them all. He would be harsh, if necessary, and tender; he would continue to love her but he would remain independent and detached.
He realized now that Martha was a more simple person than he was, and that he had made an error in imagining into her nature the complexities of his own.
When MacNeil came out again three days later he was amazed to see how well Charles was looking and how vigorously he moved around the cottage.
He told him so, and Charles smiled and said, “It must be the fresh air.”
“It must be,” MacNeil agreed. He was pleased but a little uneasy at the sudden change.
Before he left, he spoke to Forbes alone. “Anything special happen around here?”
“No,” Forbes said. “He’s just been sort of mooning around like this.”
“Mooning?”
“You know — as if he had a lot of nice things to think about and thought about them.”
“Odd,” MacNeil said. It was more than odd, it was downright suspicious that Pearson, who was an incurable worrier, should suddenly forego his worries in favor of a lot of nice things to think about.
“He said something about going home pretty soon,” Forbes said.
“He’s only been here a week.”
“And this morning he phoned his office and had a talk with his secretary. Business details.”
MacNeil thought of Mrs. Pearson’s letter. He would have given his right hand to read it, but he reminded himself sternly that it was none of his business. Besides, Pearson might tell him about it eventually.
When he had gone, Charles went down to the beach and lay on the sand. Martha went with him. She wore two dabs of cloth for a bathing suit and when she lay down beside him, she put her head on his shoulder. They stayed like that without moving or talking until he said, “Come on upstairs.”
“But what will people...?”
“To hell with people. Come on upstairs.”
So they went upstairs.
How simple it was. How simple they were. Children of nature.
I must not kid myself, he thought, becoming suddenly aware of the sand gritting against his shin and the cool wind blowing off the lake. I must not drug myself with fantasies.
But the warning didn’t seem to mean much. The words were such cold, cruel words to use on such charming children of nature.
During the night he awoke, wet with sweat and exhausted. Forbes heard him moving around and came to the door of his bedroom.
“Anything the matter, Mr. Pearson?”
“No,” Charles said. “I’d like a drink of water.”
“Sure.” Forbes went and got the water. He was still dressed. Though it was after two, he hadn’t been to bed yet. He thought it was odd that Charles didn’t notice this and comment on it.
But Charles didn’t appear to be noticing anything. His eyes were bright and empty-looking, and his face had an exalted gentleness about it that reminded Forbes of an uncle of his who had got religion. The uncle had seen the light and was always gazing at it, blind to anything that lay between it and himself.
“Anything else, Mr. Pearson?”
“What?” Charles blinked and his eyes came suddenly into focus again. “Good Lord, you haven’t been to bed. What time is it?”
“Ten after two.”
“Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Not in the country. There’s too much noise.” Forbes hesitated. “No — human noise, I mean, that you can stop or reason with. In the city when you hear a streetcar, that’s all right. You know somebody’s running the streetcar, somebody human. But when I listen to that damn water...”
Charles looked up in surprise. Forbes talked about himself so seldom that it was difficult to consider him as an ordinary human being, with doubts and weaknesses. He seemed always the same — a sturdy, brown-skinned little man, impervious alike to change, weather and emotion. Built like the best watches, Charles thought, shockproof, water-resistant and anti-magnetic.
“...when I listen to that damn water,” Forbes repeated, “it makes me think that I should be believing in something — God or hell or the pixies.” He smiled but there was malice behind his eyes. “Do you, Mr. Pearson?”
“I don’t quite know.”
“It just struck me you did.” He edged toward the door. “Do you want your light out now?”
“All right.”
“Good night, sir.”
“Good night.”
Charles stayed awake in the dark. He tried to think of Martha but her image wouldn’t come so easily this time, and the noise of the lake began to bother him.
I should be believing in something.
Chapter 12
The next afternoon MacNeil called at the Pearson house. He could no longer restrain his curiosity. Every free minute that he had, he found himself speculating about the Pearsons. The sudden improvement in Charles worried him. Extreme and sudden changes were not unusual in anaphylactic personalities, but the cause could generally be traced, and in Pearson’s case there didn’t seem to be a cause. His wife’s letter, perhaps. Or the fresh, pollen-free air. But neither of these was sufficient, MacNeil thought, to account for the almost psychopathic dreaminess in Pearson’s eyes. “He’s been sort of mooning around,” Forbes had said. Yet there was secretiveness, too, in Pearson’s expression. MacNeil tried to remember where he had seen just such a look, and he finally placed it. It was when he’d come across one of his own sons in a dark corner of the tool shed attempting to button his trousers very quickly.
“Good God,” MacNeil said, and pressed the front doorbell long and viciously.
He hadn’t considered this angle recently because he’d become accustomed to thinking of Pearson as a sick man. Yet, the very fact of his sickness might be, MacNeil decided, the basis for his present state. Pearson, as an invalid, had had no relations with his wife for some time. Now that he was getting stronger, he wanted to have. He couldn’t, of course, go to bed with a woman who, he believed, had tried to kill him, so his mind made the necessary adjustment. She hadn’t tried to kill him, she was innocent, he had wronged her. Pearson had, in fact, changed the sets for a new scene.