It had to happen, she thought, with the roaring in her ears and the numbing pain of the blows, it was all arranged a long time ago.
When she slid down to the floor at the base of the wall, the pretty black dress splashed with blood and rumpled around her knees, Oliver stood above her for a moment, looking down at her, his face gentle and lost, framed by the upturned warlike collar of his coat.
Then he turned and went out of the house.
She lay there for a long time, long after she heard the door close behind him. Then she stood up and with housewifely thrift turned out all the lights in the living room, and switched the heat down before she went up to her room.
She didn’t leave the house for ten days after that because the bruises took that long to heal.
20
IT WAS GETTING LATE and Ozières was still an hour away and Tony decided to stop for lunch. The graves of unloved fathers, he thought, are better visited on a full stomach.
He pulled the car into the driveway of a small hotel which stood by itself in open country. There was an arbor of plane trees with tables set under it, in the shade, and there was the usual collection of signs at the entrance to the hotel to indicate that various organizations, representing the gluttons of France, had put their mark of approval on the restaurant.
He stopped the motor and sat for a moment, stiff from the ride, with his forehead burning from the glare of the sun and the rush of wind. He looked over at Lucy, waiting for her to open her eyes. Her face was calm and there was a little smile on her lips, as though she had been dreaming of happy evenings, dances in her youth, secret pleasures of the past. Tony felt a flicker of annoyance. She oughtn’t to look like that, he thought. On a day like this, there should be some hint in the way she looks that her memories are touched by sorrow and include suffering. Resilience, he thought, is a recessive characteristic in the Crown line, transmitted only to the females of the family.
Lucy opened her eyes.
“Lunch time,” Tony said.
She looked at the hotel and the arbor of the restaurant and the apple orchard beyond it. “What a pretty little place,” she said, masquerading as a tourist.
They went into the garden and Lucy said, “You order for me, please. I want to freshen up a bit.” Tony sat at a table, watching his mother walking across the washed gravel between the tables, noticing the straightness of her back and the surprisingly youthful shape of her long legs and the smart, high-heeled shoes which she had worn, because when she left her hotel that morning she hadn’t known she was going out into the country. There were two men sitting at another table, eating langouste, and Tony saw them stop eating for a moment and follow Lucy with their eyes, approvingly, until she disappeared into the hotel. How long have men been looking at her like that, Tony wondered. More than thirty years? And what has it done to her?
The waitress came over and he ordered trout and salad for them both, and a bottle of white wine. At least, he thought, I might as well have a good lunch out of this day.
He was sorry he had come now. He had been surprised into it, and he had been curious, and his natural inclination at all times was to be polite, to seem to be agreeable and do what people asked him to do. But now he was disturbed and uncertain and the memories that his mother had brought with her were hurtful and shameful ones. And, somehow, she made him feel old and reminded him that by the age of thirty he had wasted a great portion of his life. Without saying anything about it, it was as though they had joined in the ride up into Normandy to judge the man he was today against the possibilities of the boy he had been the last time they had been together. And the judgment, on his side as well as on hers, was a disapproving and negative one.
She has come a long way, he thought, to give me pain.
The thing that troubled him most about his mother, he realized, had been the expression on her face just before she awoke, when they drove up and stopped in front of the restaurant. That soft, secret, reminiscent female smile. It made him remember the moment when he had looked through the slit in the blinds as a boy and had seen her in Jeff’s arms. Her head had been turned toward the window, her eyes closed, her lips parted slightly in the kind of smile he had never seen on anyone’s face before that, selfish, devouring, impervious to any other claims but the claims of her own pleasure, shocking in the power of its relished emotion and its egotism. That smile had haunted him, and it had become for him the sign and danger signal of the entire sex. Whenever he was with a woman he kept looking for that smile, or a hint or hidden indication of it, like a gambler watching for a marked card or a soldier searching for a mine. It had made him reticent and cold, an observer rather than a participant, and had prevented him from giving himself completely in any relationship. The women he had known had sensed this quality of watchful aloofness. None of them had understood exactly what it was or what was behind it but he had been accused, in varying tones of hysteria, of being suspicious, frozen, incapable of love. Looking back at his connection with the female sex, it now seemed to him like one long and bitter arraignment, in which the accusers changed from time to time, while the accusation, grave and damning and unanswerable, remained always the same.
None of the women whom he had once been intimate with remained his friends and he had grown accustomed to seeing a set and vengeful expression on their faces when they met him anywhere by accident. He had left America in 1947 because a girl whom he had loved, he thought, very much, had refused to marry him. “I love you,” the girl had said, “but I’m afraid of you. You’re not all present, at any time. Even when you’re kissing me, you seem to be making some sort of qualification about me. There’ve been times when I’ve caught you looking at me, and some of them have been damn queer times, too, when the look on your face has chilled my blood. I never can get over the feeling that you’re always on the verge of moving off. I can’t get hold of you, and I’m sure, in my bones, that one morning I’d wake up and you wouldn’t be there. You’re an escaper and it isn’t only from me or from women, either. I’ve watched you with men, too, and I’ve talked to them about you, and finally, everybody has the same damn feeling. There isn’t a man I know who can honestly say that you’re his friend …”
The girl’s name was Edith, and she had had long blond hair, and she had married a man who lived in Detroit and she had had two children and been divorced twice since then.
An escaper. He had denied it bitterly when Edith had charged him with it, but he had known it was true, just the same. He had escaped the love of his mother and the pity of his father; he had escaped the war and the desires of women and the affection of men. He had escaped the profession he had almost prepared himself for and the country in which he was born. His wife was sure he was preparing to escape her, and in a way she was right. With his studio in another part of the city, and his trips and his nights away from home, he was already half-departed. He had married her soon after Edith had broken off their engagement. He had married her mostly because she had been very young, gay, innocent, and insistent, and it had looked at the time as though the marriage would not impose heavy claims upon him. But then the boy had been born and the gayety and innocence had gone and only the insistence had seemed to remain and there were long periods when only the responsibility for his son kept a kind of surface and hurtful marriage in being.