She bent her head and kissed the bristly, little-boy’s hair, smelling the dry, fresh, forgotten odor of childhood. She was conscious of Dora watching her.
She took a deep breath and held back the tears. She released the boy, making herself smile at him. “Robert,” she said, “what a nice name! How old are you?”
The boy went back and stood next to his mother, silent.
“Tell your grandmother how old you are, Bobby,” said Dora.
“My grandmother is fat,” the boy said.
“That’s your other grandmother,” Dora said, “that’s the one who was here last year.”
“Four,” the boy said. “My birthday is in the wintertime.”
There was the sound of a key in the lock and footsteps in the hallway. Then Tony came into the room. He stopped when he saw Lucy, and looked, puzzled, politely, not recognizing her for the moment, from her to Dora. He was in the same clothes that he had been wearing the night before and they looked rumpled, as if he had slept in them. He seemed tired and he needed a shave and he blinked once or twice, coming out of the darkness of the elevator shaft into the bright sunlight of the living room. He was carrying a pair of smoked glasses in one hand.
“Daddy,” the boy said, “Mummy says I can go with Yvonne this afternoon to her sister-in-law. She has three birds in a cage.”
“Hello, Tony,” Lucy said. She stood up.
Tony shook his head, quickly, two or three times. “Well, now,” he said softly. He didn’t smile.
“Your mother and I have been having a visit,” Dora said.
Tony’s eyes traveled from their faces to the whisky glasses set down before them. “So I see,” he said. He smiled. But the smile was chilly and withdrawn. “What a nice idea,” he said. He put out his hand and Lucy took it formally. Then he turned to the boy. For a moment, he stood in silence, seeming to be studying his son, puzzled, intense, loving, as though searching for some minute, hidden secret in the soft, pleased, welcoming child’s face.
That’s something she neglected to tell me, Lucy thought. How much he loves his son.
“Robert,” Tony said gravely, “how would you like to be a messenger this morning?”
“It depends,” the boy said cautiously, sensing dismissal.
“How would you like to go in and tell Yvonne that your father would like some bacon and eggs and a large pot of coffee?”
“Then can I come back here?” the boy asked, bargaining.
Tony looked at his wife, then at Lucy. “Of course,” he said. “In fact, we insist that you come back in here.”
“That’s what I’m going to tell Yvonne,” the boy said. “In fact, you insist.”
“Exactly,” Tony said.
The boy ran out of the room toward the kitchen. Tony watched him soberly as he went through the door, then turned back toward Lucy and Dora.
“Well,” he said, “where do we begin?”
“Look,” Dora said, “I think I’d better get out of here. I’ll dress and take Bobby with me and …”
“No,” Lucy said, more loudly than she wanted to speak. The idea of staying alone with Tony in the shabby, provisionally furnished room, waiting for Dora and the boy to leave, was unbearable to her. She needed time and neutral ground. “I think, if you want to see me, Tony, it’d be better if we made it later.”
“Whatever you say,” Tony said agreeably.
“I don’t want to interfere with your schedule …”
“My schedule today,” Tony said lightly, nodding pleasantly at her, “is to entertain my mother. Still …” He looked around him with a mild grimace of distaste. “I don’t blame you for wanting to get out of here. I’ll tell you what. There’s a bistro on the corner. If you don’t mind waiting a half hour or so …”
“Good,” Lucy said hurriedly. “That’ll be fine.” She turned toward Dora. “Good-bye, my dear.” She wanted to kiss the girl in farewell, but she couldn’t bring herself to make the gesture under Tony’s watchful gaze. “Thank you so much.”
“I’ll take you to the door,” the girl said.
Clumsily, feeling more awkward than she had felt since she was a young girl, Lucy picked up her bag and her gloves and, leaving Tony standing in the middle of the room, looking rumpled, tired, and coldly amused, she followed Dora into the hallway.
Dora opened the door and Lucy hesitated, half in, half out. “Do you want to tell me anything?” she whispered.
Dora thought for a moment. “Be careful,” she said. “Be careful of yourself. Maybe it would even be a good idea if you weren’t waiting in the bistro when he gets there thirty minutes from now.”
Impulsively, Lucy leaned over and kissed the girl’s cheek. Dora didn’t move. She stood there, motionless, waiting, no longer friendly.
Lucy pulled back, and nervously started putting on her gloves.
“You have to walk down,” Dora said. “It’s a French elevator. It only carries passengers going up.”
Lucy nodded and started down the steps. She heard the door close behind her and she walked carefully down in the darkness, her heels making a cold clatter on the stone steps. The vacuum cleaner was still being used somewhere in the building and the jittery, throbbing noise, like giant insects in a dream, pursued her until she reached the street.
17
SHE WALKED AIMLESSLY FOR fifteen minutes, looking at the strange shop windows without really seeing what was in them, then hurried back to the corner of the street on which Tony lived. The bistro was there as he had said and there were several tables on a little terrace outside, under an awning, and she sat down and ordered coffee, to give herself something to do while waiting.
The scene in the apartment had unnerved her. Through the years, she had thought, of course, from time to time, of seeing Tony again, but in her imaginings of the encounter, it had usually been at a moment of drama—with her on her deathbed and Tony summoned to her side, youthful, gentle, forgiving in the face of the ultimate farewell. Then there would be the final expression of love, a last, healing kiss (although the face to be kissed had always stubbornly remained a thin, thirteen-year-old face, browned by the sun of that distant summer)—and then a miraculous recovery and a lasting reconciliation and friendship after it. She had also had a recurrent dream, less frequent in recent years, of Tony standing at her bedside, watching her sleep, saying, in a harsh whisper, “Die! Die!” But the way it had actually happened had been worse than either the bitter dream or the naive deathbed fantasy. It had been so accidental and confused and unpromising. She hadn’t really been certain that she had recognized him at the bar and she had been embarrassed because she was sitting at a night-club table with two college boys whom she had allowed, however innocently, to pick her up. And then there was the unhealthy impression of the shabby apartment and the disappointed wife, with her confessions of unhappiness and her despair for the future. And there had been the unexpected ache of seeing the little boy, with the almost familiar face, the mild, grave, inherited eyes, in a confusion of generations, seeming to condemn her once more across the years, putting a new and heavier burden of responsibility on her all over again. And then Tony himself—prematurely gray, prematurely weary, unpleasantly distant and careless with his wife, incuriously polite, unmoved and cool with herself. It was true, Lucy warned herself, that she might have been influenced by the unappetizing and perhaps distorted picture of Tony that Dora had given her before he came in. There was a good chance that Dora, nursing wifely grudges, especially after a night which her husband had spent away from home, might have misrepresented the case considerably. But even so, and making all allowances for Dora’s possible exaggerations, the impression Tony had made on her was a disturbing one.