Evelyn herself found Dinah’s quiet corner of the house a refuge of sanity in trying times, and never more so than right now. The complexities of strengths given and received that made up her relationship with Bradford were echoed, perhaps even more complexly, in her relationship with her daughter. While it was true that Bradford was the center of Evelyn’s life, Evelyn was in turn the center of Dinah’s, and it was as important to her to be needed by her child as to need her grandfather.
The solitary nature of their life here in Eustace held Evelyn and Dinah together even more than in the usual mother-daughter relationship, but Evelyn kept the arrangement from becoming cloying by always remembering to maintain the age difference between them. She neither asked Dinah to mimic a grown-up companion nor did she herself counterfeit childhood. When she did — at Dinah’s request — enter into the child’s games, it was never with artificially heightened enthusiasm. The result was, they were comfortable with one another, and Evelyn had come to count on an hour or so with Dinah as a sure antidote to confusion or depression or a bad case of nerves. Or a houseful of Harrison’s branch of the family. Whenever possible now, Evelyn took herself away to Dinah’s play room, where she could be safe from the adults just as Dinah was safe from the children, or more particularly from the Simcoe girls.
Simcoe père, Maurice, was more invisible than ever, barely coming out of his room for meals. There was a particular chair in the front parlor where he usually spent his visits here, but not this time. A maid Evelyn had questioned told her that Maurice Simcoe was sitting in an equivalent chair in his room, not doing anything, not watching television or reading or talking to anyone, but merely sitting there, gazing mildly at the far wall, his cigar held loosely between the first and second fingers of his left hand.
The same maid had earlier come to Evelyn with an apologetic and embarrassed complaint; Herbert Jarvis’s seductive techniques, never particularly subtle, had escalated to something approaching rape. The girl was sorry, but she wouldn’t want to have to be around Mr. Jarvis any more.
Well, Herbert was having problems, too. Bradford wasn’t speaking to him. He had closed himself with Harrison after dinner yesterday, and he’d closed himself with Harrison after lunch again today — Patricia was still being excluded — and it had become obvious that whatever consultation Bradford would engage in concerning the mess Harrison and Herbert found themselves in would be limited exclusively to Harrison. Herbert was not a blood relation, only an in-law, and not highly thought of at that. Bradford was not going to take him into consideration at all.
Which was a harshness unusual in Bradford, but not unheard of. During the second Presidential campaign, one of the Party leaders had made what Bradford considered a grievous tactical error — though no one before or since blamed that one error for the loss of the election — and for the rest of the campaign that man ceased for Bradford to exist. He was frequently in the same room with Bradford during planning sessions — ten or twelve or fifteen men discussing a specific problem, frequently in a hotel room — and Bradford neither spoke to the man nor heard anything he might say. By the middle of October, the man had stopped coming around.
The tactic had seemed harsh but just in the context of a Presidential campaign. Under the present circumstances, it seemed unnecessarily severe. But then again, everything was being unnecessarily severe these few days.
But nothing, including Bradford’s treatment of him, justified Herbert’s treatment of the maid. Evelyn was determined that he should stop it, but she knew it would do no good to talk to him directly. Herbert had the lecher’s belief that women were objects without brains, to whom it was never necessary to listen. So she would go to Harrison, when his current session with Bradford was done, and warn him that if he didn’t get Herbert to stop she would have to report the matter to Bradford. That should solve it.
If only the whole situation were as easily solved. But at least it could be escaped, temporarily. Evelyn took Jester, one of her particular favorites from the stable, and went riding in the woods, relishing the freedom, the air, the illusion of motion.
Just as there were no surprises from the people now staying at the house, there were no surprises for Evelyn wherever she might ride on the estate. The woods, the orchards, the meadows were all known and already well-traveled by her in previous outings. There was always a faint air of confinement when she took rides like this, and that too was intensified in the present situation. She felt vaguely imprisoned, limited somehow to a defined circle in which she endlessly moved, so that Jester’s hoofs didn’t really make prints in the soft ground but rather fit neatly into old prints already there. The largest prison exercise yard in the world, she thought grimly, but then the overstatement of the thought broke her mood and she smiled at herself. Prison? Where were the locks, then? Where were the bars?
She came at last to the vanished old town in the middle of the woods, and paused to look around again at the last traces of stone walls, hints of a life now gone. This time it didn’t seem to her sad, this place, but rather restful. Their problems are over, she thought, and then laughed at herself for that thought, too. I seem to be full of self-pity today, she thought, and ironically, I wonder why? Then Robert Pratt entered her mind, he being the last person she’d been to this spot with, and she thought, why didn’t he ever call me?
Which was the most stupid thought of all. Why should he have called? They had only met once, and of course he had his own life to live. Still, she had half-expected for a week or so that he would phone, and now two months later it was still possible to be sharply disappointed that he had not.
Sunlight. She despised self-pity, and knew it could usually be combated by applications of direct sunlight, so she heeled Jester into a trot again, leading him out of the soft dim moist woods and the mulch-buried town, out onto a long rolling green meadow in dazzling sunlight, wild flowers in careless commas scattered over the green, flies humming in the hot clear air.
“Life could be goddam beautiful!” she cried aloud, angry and miserable because it was not, and heel-thudded Jester into a long open gallop around the great circle once more.
vi
Harrison was waiting at the stables, and caught her grimace on seeing him. Behind his sunglasses his expression was apologetic, but determined. He came over to where she was dismounting and said, “Evelyn, I have to talk to you.”
The groom took Jester’s reins and led him away. Evelyn said, “Uncle Harrison, you want me to say something to Bradford for you. But it won’t do any good.”
“You’re the only one who can talk to him,” Harrison said. She had never seen him this frightened before, and the realization of the depth of his urgency startled her. He went on, “I can’t talk to him. I don’t know what’s happened, he just won’t listen to me. But he’ll listen to you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Will you try? Will you let me tell you what’s going on, and then will you try? No, don’t even promise that yet. Just let me tell you my side of it. Then, if you want, you talk to Brad. All right?”
Evelyn hesitated. She didn’t want to get involved in this, she thought by now it was due to get worse before it got better, but it was hard to resist so naked and defenseless an appeal. “I’ll make a bargain with you,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you about something else. About Herbert. If you’ll talk to Herbert, I’ll do what I can with Bradford.”