The Theoretical Foot. M. F. K. Fisher

there was a bang, then the subdued scuffling of feet through the cellar and Honor laughed. “Having a quicky, I suppose,” she said aloud to no one in particular, then she walked over and sat down, then closed her eyes as if she were too bored to leave them open a moment longer.

      Why does everyone here talk to Joe as if they know him better than I do? Sue wondered. She was without resentment, simply startled by the new ways she was seeing him in their having arrived at this place. There were tones in his voice she’d never heard before. She wondered why he was so different. She wondered also that she didn’t seem to care very much.

      She opened her eyes at the sound of footsteps and was horrified to see the tiny Nan Garton almost tottering under the weighty bulk of an enormous salad bowl.

      “Oh, Miss Garton!” she exclaimed as she scrambled awkwardly out of the deck chair and dashed across the terrace to help. “You musn’t carry all that! Please let me carry it!”

      “Why, thank you, Susan,” she said.

      Susan, she thought. She called me Susan. As she took the bowl from Nan’s hands, Sue felt almost overcome by the strangeness of this. Anxiety gripped her; had she taken the bowl too roughly from this woman? Never in her life had she seen anything so lovely, so fragile, as the woman who stood quietly and was now smiling at her. Her voice seemed to vanish. Had she really called her Susan?

      “Oh, Lucy!” Nan Garton smiled affectionately at her friend who now approached. “How did it go today? Did you do good work?”

      “A wonderful morning, Nan dear. And you?”

      “I wrote hundreds of postcards,” Nan said, even gaily. “For the first time in my life I’ve had the courage to write, ‘Having a wonderful time! Wish you were here!’”

      Susan smiled at the malicious way Nan Garton had rolled out the phrases that had never before sounded as silly as they did now, though they also sounded real.

      “Ah, there’s Sara,” Lucy said, hurrying toward her as Sara walked carefully across the terrace with a tray of cheese on one arm and a great bowl of fruit held in the fingers of the other.

      “Can I do something to help, Sara dear?” Lucy asked. “Or am I too late, as usual?”

      “Never too late,” Sara said, dryly. “Yes, please take this tray, if you will. And do forgive me, everybody, for having lunch so late.”

      She looked around and smiled impersonally just as Tim, followed by the two boys, all came to the table bearing rows of beer bottles.

      “It’s our fault, I’m afraid,” Joe Kelly smiled, offering this in his softest voice.

      “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. Joe Kelly, Mrs. Pendleton. Lucy, you remember my speaking of our friend who’s at Oxford this year?”

      Lucy smiled at Joe. “I wonder,” she asked and as she was speaking she began helping herself to salad, then cutting a piece of the yellow-white cheese with great holes in it. “I wonder if you know any of the men who were at Balliol or Merton ten years ago or so? My nephew, you see . . .?”

      Susan listened as this mild chatter went on all around her and to the steady splash of water from the old fountain. She tried to eat. She was surprised that she was hungry and that she would have enjoyed the food but that her throat felt not sore but stiff. She thought she might be feeling better or maybe it was only the excitement that was getting her to forget her cold.

      She looked again at Nan Garton’s small and very vivid face in such contrast to the slow queenly Honor. Sue smiled to see them sitting side by side, the one’s feet barely reaching the ground, the other’s seemingly so long as to stretch halfway across the stone terrace.

      Then she looked at the smooth face of Sara Porter, whose expression was remote. Her heart thumped suddenly at the thought that Sara might be able to help her, that she might tell Susan what to do. Of course, so far it had been rather hard to see anything of her but perhaps sometime during the afternoon there would be a few minutes. She would simply say, “Mrs. Porter, what do you think I ought to do? Joe and I really love each other, but Joe . . .?”

      “More beer, Susan?” Tim was looking at her half-empty glass and was leaning forward with the bottle toward her, struggling slightly as he rose from his chair.

      “Here!” Dan said, pushing Tim back, and without even moving his body he stretched one long arm across Susan with the bottle poised above her glass.

      “Cuff or plain?” he asked.

      Sue, who really doubted she could swallow another sip, was simply thrilled to her very marrow at the sound of his deep voice and said, if breathlessly, “Oh, cuff, but definitely!”

      He poured. She raised her glass and smiled at Joe over its white foam.