Far off the black dog was running in the dust of the car, running and falling behind. Finally he abandoned the chase and stood in the road alone at the edge of some trees.
That was spring. Franca spent that summer with her mother at the sea. They had a small house faded by the weather on the edge of potato fields. Parked in front was the car, an English Morris they’d bought from the garage man, its paint gone to chalk in the sun. There was a garden, a bathroom in which water came, crippled, from the faucets, a view of the vanishing dunes.
They had long lunches. They drove to the sea. They read Proust. In the house they went barelegged and without shoes, their limbs tan, their eyes the same gray, their lips smooth and pale. The calm days, companionship, the sun leached all care from them, left them content. One passed them in the morning. They were in the garden, a beautiful woman watering flowers, her daughter standing near her holding along her forearm and stroking slowly a long white cat. Or the house when they were gone: the windows silent, brief bathing suits spread on the woodbox, the robins with their dark heads and weathered bodies hurrying across the lawn.
There was a wooden table outside at which they sat in the sun. Small yellow bees were eating the cheese rinds. Nedra’s palms lay flat on the smooth, hot boards. It was the beginning of August. The sea was singing. Above it was borne a silver mist risen that morning in which, in the empty hours just after lunch, a few children shouted and played.
They visited Peter and Catherine. Dinner beneath the great trees. Afterwards they sat and talked of Viri. Nedra had partly unbuttoned her dress and was rubbing her stomach. It aided digestion, she said. Overhead, the airliners crossed in darkness with a faint, lingering sound, their lights passing among the stars.
“I had lunch with him last month,” she said. “He’s a little tired from… you know, life. It hasn’t been easy for him, I don’t know exactly why.”
“Oh, I think there’s quite a simple reason,” Peter said.
“One is so often wrong…”
“Yes, but you and Viri—any two people when they separate, it’s like splitting a log. The pieces aren’t even. One of them contains the core.”
“Viri has his work.”
“But it’s you who’s carried off the sacred part. You can live and be happy; he can’t.”
“He’s really better now,” Franca said.
“We haven’t seen him for a long time.”
“He’s much better,” she assured them.
“He’s still living in the house?” Catherine asked.
“Oh, yes.”
They had talked about food and old friends, Europe, shops in town, the sea. Like a businessman who keeps important matters till the end, Peter asked, “What about you, Nedra?”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ve had such a good dinner, and I have such a comfortable bed…”
“Yes…”
“I’m thinking. I suppose I’m not used to giving an answer to that kind of question, especially to someone who will understand me.” She paused. “How do I seem?”
“Peter,” Catherine explained, “Nedra doesn’t want to talk about it.”
“The fact is,” Peter said, “I don’t want to disappoint you, but you seem wonderful; you seem the same as ever.”
“The same as ever… No. We’re none of us the same. We’re moving on. The story continues, but we’re no longer the main characters. And then… I had a strange vision a few days ago. The end isn’t like those woodcuts of a skeleton in a black cloak. The end is a fat Jewish man in a Cadillac, one of those men smoking a cigar, you see him every day. The car is new, the windows are rolled up. He has nothing to say, he’s too busy. You go with him. That’s all. Into the dark. Why am I talking so much?” she asked. “It’s the brandy. We must go.”
During the days, though, she was utterly at peace. Her life was like a single, well-spent hour. Its secret was her lack of remorse, of self-pity. She felt herself purified. The days were cut from a quarry that would never be emptied. Into them there came books, errands, the seashore, occasional pieces of mail. She read them slowly and carefully, sitting in the sunshine, as if they were newspapers from abroad.
“I feel very sorry for her,” Catherine said.
“Sorry? Why sorry?”
“She’s an unhappy woman.”
“She’s happier than ever, Catherine.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, because she doesn’t depend on a man, she doesn’t depend on anybody.”
“I don’t know what you mean by depend. She’s always had one.”
“Well, that’s not depending, is it?”
“She’s a woman bound to be unhappy.”
“Isn’t it funny?” Peter said. “I feel just the opposite.”
“You don’t know that much about women.”
“I saw her arranging flowers the other day.”
“Arranging flowers?”
“Yes.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing, except that I don’t think she’s unhappy.”
“Peter, I don’t know anything about what you may have seen, but a woman who leaves her home is bound to be unhappy, now, isn’t she?”
“Well, Nora Helmer left home.”
“I’m talking about real life.”
“So am I.”
“What you’re saying simply doesn’t make sense.”
“Catherine, you know perfectly well that in great works of art there is a truth that transcends mere facts.”
“If you’re talking about Nora… you mean Ibsen’s Nora?”
“Yes.”
“One doesn’t know what happened to her. You can form your own conclusions. Isn’t that so?”
“I like what Nedra represents,” he said.
“Of course you do.”
“I don’t mean that. You know exactly what I mean.”
“Yes, I think I do.”
“Damn it!” he shouted.
“What?”
“I’m talking about something else, don’t you understand? A certain courage, a kind of life.”
“I think it’s something you imagine.”
“A woman’s realm.”
“Why this sudden interest in women?”
“It’s not sudden.”
“It seems to be.”
“Men’s lives bore me,” he said.
8
PETER DARO HAD ONCE, AS A YOUNG man, lived in the Hotel Alsace in Paris where Oscar Wilde had died. In the very room, in fact; he had slept in the very bed. All that had disappeared.
He was a man of habit and a single comic expression: his mouth turned steeply down in mock dismay. It served all purposes, confusion, disbelief. He came from the city by train on Friday evenings, the axles creaking on the worn, disintegrating cars. Voices at the stations as they stopped in the mist, the exuberance and crudeness as policemen, steamfitters got off at their towns. Then the long, jolting ride through the flatlands, the fields at last appearing, restaurants he recognized, shops. Catherine sat waiting in the car; they drove home beneath the heavy, summer trees.
Their house was open, barnlike, unprotected. Its awkwardness was appealing, like a traveler stranded without money. The dirt road widened before it to form an island in which there was a cemetery of leaning stones, names that had faded, men drowned at sea. The car turned in to a drive of smooth pebbles. The lights were on inside, fires burning in the grates, the pale retrievers barking.
A creature of habit and, yes, eccentricity. He cooked the dinner, his children playing in their rooms upstairs. His wife was in the front room talking to Nedra. The platforms of the small stations were empty now, darkness was falling, the little houses everywhere were alight.
He moved about confidently; fresh scallops and cold, white Graves. He knew how to make things—a drink, a fire, dinner, what kind of stove to have. From his house one looked out on long, empty fields in which gulls sometimes stood.