“Mad.” He took a substantial pull on his drink.
“Did you hear about the Coronation? They’ve canceled preparations.”
Peterson said sarcastically, “My, I expect the country will be in an uproar over that.”
Marjorie smiled. A flash, then a booming crash of thunder. Marjorie leaped up in fright. They looked at each other and abruptly burst out laughing.
“As long as you can hear it, you’re safe,” he said. “By that time the lightning’s passed.”
Suddenly she felt very good. She was glad to have him there, keeping loneliness and fear at bay.
“Are you hungry? Would you like something to eat?”
“No, I’m not. Relax. Don’t play the hostess. If I want anything, I’ll get it.”
He smiled wanly at her. Was there a double entendre in his words? He must be used to getting anything he wanted. Tonight, though, he was less certain, more… “It’s good to see you,” she said. “It’s been pretty lonely here recently with the children away and John working late.”
“Yes, I imagine—” He didn’t finish the sentence. The lights went out, dramatically accompanied by a roll of thunder.
“Now I’m really glad you’re here. I’d be scared stiff on my own, thinking someone had cut the lines to the house or something.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s just a power failure. Lines blown down by the wind, probably.”
“That’s been happening a lot recently. I’ve got some candles in the kitchen.”
She crossed the room, skirting the furniture in the dark from long familiarity. In the kitchen she felt in the cupboard for candles and matches. Automatically she lit three and set them in candlesticks.
The mechanical clock on a shelf went tick, followed by a clacking as gears moved. She turned and found Ian in the doorway. He stepped inside. The clock made a sound like a rachet sticking. “Oh, I fetched that out of the garage, whilst straightening up,” she said. “With the power always oft, an old windup is better…” Tick.
“Makes that odd sound, though, doesn’t it?”
“Perhaps if you oiled it…”
“But I did, you see. There’s something needs mending. It stays pretty near right, though.”
He leaned against the counter and watched her put away the matches. She noticed that the pine shelving loomed up in the shadows cast by the candles. Things in the room waved and rippled, except for the straight shelves. Tick.
“Interesting,” Ian murmured, “how we keep on wanting to know the time, in the midst of all that’s going on.”
“Yes.”
“As if we still had appointments to keep.”
“Yes.”
A silence stretched between them, a chasm. She searched for something to say. Tick. The shelves seemed more substantial now than the walls. The clock nested in the middle of them, surrounded by preserves.
She looked at Ian. In this dim light his eyes were very dark. She leaned against the cupboard, less nervous now. She should take the candles into the living room, but for the moment it felt right to stay here, not hurry.
Ian moved across the small kitchen. Distantly she wondered if he was going to take a candle. Tick.
He reached up and touched her cheek.
Neither of them moved. She felt warm. She took a shallow breath. She breathed in and it seemed to take a long time to fill her lungs.
Very slowly he bent and kissed her. It was a light, almost casual touch.
She sagged against the cupboard. Tick. She breathed out. In the silence she wondered if he could hear the air flowing in and out of her. She watched as he picked up a candle. A hand touched her shoulder. He steered her out, away from the kitchen and shelves and clock, toward the living room.
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
PENNY’S VOICE CUT THROUGH TO HIM: “AS I WAS SAYING.”
“Huh? Oh, yes, go on.”
“Come on, you weren’t listening at all.” She swerved the rented Thunderbird around a curve. The Bay Area lay below and to the right, the twinkling of the bay hazed by fog. “Absent-minded prof.”
“Okay, okay.” But he slipped back into a fog of his own as she zoomed them around Grizzly Peak’s hairpin turns above the Berkeley campus and then onto Skyline. He glimpsed Oakland’s sprawl, green dots of islands in the blue-gray bay, and San Francisco in alabaster isolation. They flitted behind stands of pine and eucalyptus, the trees making black and green grids against the brown of the hillsides. Penny had the top down. Cool air made her hair stream and float behind her head. “Mount Tamalfuji!” she called, pointing at a short, blunted peak to the north across the bay. Then they were into the descent, brakes squealing and gears growling as she took them down Broadway Terrace. A forest musk enveloped them. They emerged from the tree-thick hillside and shot past a jumble of houses, a technicolor spattering. Traffic thinned as they neared her parents’ house. Clearly, a ritzy section with an appropriately posh name: Piedmont. Gordon thought of Long Island and Gatsby and yellow sedans.
Her parents proved unmemorable. Gordon could not be sure whether this was due to them or to him. His mind kept drifting back to the experiment and the messages, rummaging for some fresh tool to pry up the lid of the mystery. Come at it from a different angle, Penny had said once. He couldn’t get the phrase out of his mind. He found he could carry on conversation and smile and do the dance of guest and host, without ever really taking part in what was going on. Penny’s father was big and reassuringly gruff, a man who knew how to turn money into more money. He had the standard graying temples and a certain sunbaked assurance. Her mother seemed serene, a joiner of clubs and charities, a scrupulous housekeeper. Gordon felt he had met them before but couldn’t place them, like characters in a movie whose title won’t spring to the lips.
The invitation had been to stay over at the house. Gordon insisted on their staying in a motel on University Avenue—to put them smack in the middle of town, he said, but in fact because he wanted to avoid the touchy question of whether they would share a room in her parents’ castle. He wasn’t ready for that issue, not this weekend.
Her father had heard about the Saul thing, of course, and wanted to talk about it. Gordon told him just enough to be polite and then deflected talk to the department, UCLJ, and gradually to topics further and further away. Her father—“Jack,” he said with a warm, forthright handshake, “just call me plain Jack”—had bought some introductory astronomy books to learn more. This proved to be a handy time-filler, as Gordon sat back and let Jack regale him with facts about the stars, and the obligatory reverent awe at the scope of the universe. Jack had a sharp, inquiring mind. He asked penetrating questions. Gordon soon found his own rather elementary knowledge of astronomy was stretched thin. While the women cooked and chattered in the kitchen, Gordon struggled to explain the carbon cycle, supernova explosions, and the riddles of globular clusters. He summoned up smatterings of half-remembered lectures. Jack caught him in a few boners and Gordon began to feel uncomfortable. He thought of Cooper’s exam.
At last they had a beer before lunch and Jack switched to other subjects. Linus Pauling had just won the Nobel Peace Prize: what did Gordon think of that? Wasn’t this the first time anybody had won two Nobels? No, Gordon pointed out, Madame Curie had won one in physics and another in chemistry. Gordon was afraid this would launch them into politics. He was pretty sure Jack was a member of the disarmament-equals-Munich school, pushed locally by William Knowland of the Oakland Trib. But lack adroitly side-stepped the point and ushered them into a steaming lunch of soup and well-marbled minute steaks. Jacaranda trees cloaked a portion of the view from the dining room. The rest of the windows gave a sweeping vista of bay and city and hills. The steak was perfect.