Voices. One of the children demanding comfort from Catherine? But no, I told myself, walking squarely through the scented darkness that separated trees and villa, and feeling the irises growing large in eyes no longer as lackluster and heavy lidded as they had felt in the first portion of this wasted dawn — no, the voices were not high enough or querulous enough for the children’s. Thoughtfully I approached the rotten shutter locked open on the night and darkness within, avoiding stealth I approached so close to the irregular oblong of Catherine’s window that I might have peered inside, had I so desired. I stopped. I listened. I was close enough to see the morning-glories twining in the broken slats of the shutter, and yet even now the voices inside the familiar room were muffled, unclear, loud with intimacy but indistinct. I recognized the burden of the dialogue if not the words, and suddenly recognized the voices themselves because one was tired, insistent, reluctant, and belonged to Catherine, while the other was ingratiating, importuning, and obviously issued from a dry throat that could only be Hugh’s.
But Hugh? Bare-chested? Fresh from his own trampled garden and wide-awake? Was that really Hugh in there, in this late hour sprawled across a sagging bed more mine than his? Hugh propped up on his one good eager arm and filled with clumsy confidence, talking to Catherine as he had never talked to Fiona, Hugh now singing his happy but constricted version of my sweet song? No doubt of it, I told myself, our paths were crossing, and I moved closer.
I listened. I asked myself what was unusual about this pattern of sounds. I followed the rhythms of Catherine’s voice, the rhythms of Hugh’s, and then I understood. Even before I heard any actual words I understood that Catherine was employing a variety of defensive responses, whereas Hugh was saying the same words again and again as if the ease with which he had apparently shifted from Fiona’s stimulation to Catherine’s struggle justified his use of repetition. But why had Fiona let him go? Why must Catherine struggle?
I could not make out any of Catherine’s negative phrases, and decided that she was hiding her face, speaking into the pillow. But no matter, I told myself, since Catherine’s declamations came readily to mind (those words and phrases of conventional denial), and since what most concerned me now, as a matter of fact, was the precise content of what Hugh was saying, the exact nature of those particular words which had borne the freight of his sexual needs for all the years of his marriage.
For a mere instant he raised his voice. For an instant I heard him as clearly as if Hugh had popped his head out of the window and spoken not for Catherine’s benefit but mine.
“Don’t be afraid of Daddy Bear,” he was saying, “don’t be afraid of Daddy Bear …"
So this was what we had bargained for, Fiona and Catherine and I — this sad and presumptuous appeal from a man who had spent all the nights of his marriage fishing for the love of his wife with the hook of a nursery persona. The dew was a cold bath on the soles of my feet. My shoulders were heavy, my hands were more than ever resigned to the large pockets of the indifferent silk dressing gown. Instantly Hugh’s voice sank, subsided, once more rumbled along its subterranean road. The translation went hand in hand with the sounds of his voice, simple text and desperate message were one in my ear, and it took no great effort to identify the source of his words. Of course, I told myself, the honeymoon. What else if not a few words stolen in desperation from the vocabulary of the cheapest myth of childhood and spoken aloud unwittingly but successfully into Catherine’s ear in the first surge of crisis? Yes, I told myself, those words had worked, had carried Hugh with surprise and relief across that first rough spot of Catherine’s ignorance and thereafter had become the only lyrics to his monogamous song.
But why deny the humor, I asked myself, why give way to pity for Catherine and contempt for Hugh? Was there any conventional privacy that might not yield up its unique embarrassment? While the morning-glories were straining to unfurl, while Hugh lay floundering in constricted speech, while Catherine struggled to interrupt his persistency and I stood listening — why not concentrate, I asked myself, on the consolations? At least Hugh still wanted to assume his sentimental bestial shape. At least the mode of his approach was nothing new for Catherine. At least their rituals and formulas of marriage were still in force. And whatever else might happen, I told myself, my insight of the moment and Fiona’s elegance would consort together to safeguard her from all the means of self-betrayal Hugh might devise.
But Hugh was winding down at last, Catherine was beginning to give in to habit, or perhaps more than habit. I noted the first light in the sky, I moved one step closer to the window and assured myself that they would have a few minutes yet before all three children arose and came leaping into that shocked and harried bed. Yes, I thought, Hugh had slipped off one schedule but gained another. Their house was in order, so to speak, the roles had changed.
I turned away, calmly I tied the ends of my forgotten sash. And straightening shoulders and spectacles alike, I returned along the empty path that stretched endlessly from villa to villa. It amused me to discover that I was walking slowly but with a step reflecting nonetheless the rhythms of the central phrase in Hugh’s proposal, as if an old drummer were beating a brief and muffled paradiddle in my head, my inner ear, my heart. Would he find my tennis shoes? Would he begin to understand that there could be no limits on our exchange and that in the circumscribed country of Illyria a grassy wind was bound to blow away the last shreds of possessiveness? I hoped he would.
In all this darkness and silence I smelled the dead roses, saw the open door and warm rows of tiles, heard the clear but sleepy voice of Fiona calling to me from deep within our thick white walls and timeless collection of vases, earthen pots, artistic tokens of harmonious life. Her soft clear voice was coming as close at it ever did to peevishness, she might have been lying in the dew at my feet. I yawned, I approached the door, I noticed that our morning-glories were doing better than Hugh’s.
“Cyril? Is that you?”
“Expecting someone else?” I murmured, and entered the darkness, listened for another brief volley from her hard sweet sleep-ridden mind.
“Just you, baby. You.”
“WHERE’S MY MOTHER?”
“I told you, Meredith. They’re bringing the wine. You can’t have an idyl without wine.”
“I’m sick of your old idyls.”
“You’re lucky to be here. If it weren’t for me, you and your little sisters would be back at the villa where Hugh, for one, thinks you belong.”
“It’s not my father who doesn’t want us around. It’s you.”
“Look, Meredith. We need flowers, lots of flowers. You can’t have crowns without lots of flowers.”
“I don’t want any old flower crowns.”
“Your sisters do.”
“How do you know? They can’t say anything.”
“Of course they can. They speak the language of children. But take my word for it, Meredith. All little girls like flower crowns in their hair.”
“I know what you’re doing. You’re just trying to impress my parents. That’s all. You’re just trying to fool them again.”