She scowled and—with quick determination—pulled the pins out again and did her hair all over again allowing it to sit in place more softly. It was easy to pinch into place the waves always lurking in her wildly gleaming, white-blonde hair. Yes, Joe was used to her and he didn’t matter but she felt sure that Dan Tennant would like her better if she looked a little bit less like she’d been skinned.
She pulled deftly at the curls around her face to loosen them, leaving her fine brow bare, her little eyes looking wide and knowing. Then she moistened one finger and flicked her long eyelashes to point them before she looked at herself in the mirror with satisfaction.
Suddenly another violent sneeze rocked her and—for the second time that day—Sue felt as if she’d been jarred by an exploding charge of dynamite. She was sick and she was also being made dizzy by the realization that she would soon be so far away from Joe Kelly. She had never felt so overwhelmed and for a ghastly second she wondered if she was going to vomit as she stretched out one hand reaching blindly toward the washbasin. Then she stood, waiting impotently for the heartache to ebb away and leave her.
Oh, my poor Joe, she thought wildly, my poor, poor Joe. Why do you love me? What is going to happen to us?
The months and years stretched out like a cold cruel wasteland before her now. She shuddered with nausea, feeling again the loneliness of last year at school without him and the hopeless comfort of his passionate letters from Oxford, whose passion felt to her perfunctory, and knowing that this year they would be fewer and that then soon enough they would cease.
Why was it that she knew Joe could live without her? She didn’t mind really that he had slept with other girls and that he would again. But why was it that she knew she herself would nevermore feel interest in any living soul? She knew, irrevocably, that what she gave Joe, her love, she had given him all of it, all! All! All!
And now she was shivering.
How long had she been standing there, clutching the side of the wash bowl? Honor would think she’d have gone to sleep—that is, if Honor thought of anything so dull as Sue.
Oh, I wish I were a great big woman, Sue thought. Then all these things would not matter half so much or they’d be more spread out over my more massive existence.
She blew her nose thoroughly. Yes, but definitely, a damned cold was creeping up on her. Sue felt utterly miserable and quite drained of all the excitement that for a few minutes downstairs had made her forget both her aching head and her breaking heart.
With a nervous look through the door into the little bedroom she quickly opened the cupboard nearest the washstand, as embarrassing as it was to poke about in other people’s closets. As she’d thought, though, boxes of powder and a few small bottles of perfume stood there neatly on the first shelf. Beside them were two leather boxes, one of which held a manicure set. Susan felt sure that in the other, once obviously used for tiny tubes and bottles, would be odds and ends.
She opened it feverishly and grinned with triumph. There was a jumble of lipsticks, hairpins, odd mismatched earrings and—yes!—a little flat box of aspirin.
She opened it and emptied three into her trembling hand, then swallowed them with a little water. Then she went quickly through the bedroom and felt her way down the unexpected curves of the dim stairwell and into the living room.
As she went, she touched her hair here and there carefully with an abstract satisfaction in the way it looked; it felt nice to have it loose again. Would that boy notice that she’d changed her hair since his first sight of her?
But what had Joe been doing all this time? She felt ashamed, realizing that she had not thought of him—the actual bone-and-blood man, the Joe who was her inward secret love—since she’d sat on his strong round thighs in the little car. She hurried to cover her confusion and as she went past the closed door where Dan Tennant had stood in his lovely mussed pajama bottoms, she turned her head resolutely away.
“Has anyone seen Joe?” she asked, her voice cracking slightly as she stood on the top of the three steps leading down into the the big room, now entirely empty.
Well, this is the damnedest place I was ever in, Susan thought irritably. I mean, I’m a guest here, after all, and people just keep disappearing!
She grasped the heavy linen curtain that hung by the steps and peered disdainfully about her. Not a soul, not even anyone asleep.
Then her face softened as she looked with a growing pleasure at the long high room. Like the rest she’d seen, this room had been plastered in rough white but here the wood was a dark gleaming brown, like the furniture, which she knew instinctively to be as fine as it was certain to be comfortable. Almost the entire side to her left was tall wide windows that stood open now, hung in thick linen striped softly in green and buff and blue, moving gently now in the noon breeze off the lake.
At the far end was the fireplace with a faded, sloppy red Moroccan cushion before it on the large gray-green rug. To the left an open doorway was curtained in the same striped linen as the one she held and through it she could see into what looked to be a green-tiled pantry whose walls gleamed with the rounds and ovals of stacked china and the soft shock of silver and pewter vessels hung on dark shelves.
On her right an enormous mirror, curved at the top like a great window into another room and framed in dull old gold, separated two long bookcases that quite covered the wall.
There were two couches and some chairs and the blue chaise longue where Honor had lain when they’d first arrived and a big rectangular table with grapes carved along its sides.
Sue sniffed absently, then walked quietly into the middle of the silent room. It was the most pleasant room she’d ever seen. And that mirror!
Colors looked more intense in the mirror, truer than life. It was like a beautiful dream, in which everything was more vivid than it usually appeared. And the room she saw in it was much clearer, somehow, than the real one. She stared into it, not even thinking to look at her own reflection so struck was she by all the rest.
There were the windows, past the green expanse of rug; the curtains swayed softly and the sunlight falling through them made a rosy yet cool light in the room. Through them she could see a blue much clearer and much more beautiful than the blue of the real sky behind her in the real windows.
And now coming though the middle opening was a man; his large eyes were much bluer than those of a real person, his hair certainly the bluish-silver she’d only seen in dreams. He walked softly toward her, moving his small light body in its white gleaming linen clothes as if he were a dancer, not gliding but with the grace with which all real people ought to move.
She watched him come silently toward her in the too-clear glass. Just as he was about to touch her, she turned around, blinking, and willed herself back into reality. It was not a shock, not even a slight disappointment as he still stood right there, smiling at her with his large blue eyes.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m Timothy Garton. Has everyone else deserted you?”
For the second time that hour, this time more strongly than ever before in her life, Sue felt she had never, but never, before seen such an attractive man. Oh, she gasped silently. He’s wonderful! He’s sophisticated, as if he’d really lived and suffered and . . .? He lived. She looked at him seriously.
(What a sweet child, Tim thought, and what a tiny one! She almost makes me feel like a tall man. Is this the way Daniel feels as he looks down at Nan? When Nan peers up at Daniel does she feel the faint sumission that’s in this woman’s eyes? I suppose she is a woman and not a girl and I suppose things as small as this have average-size emotions. Is it harder for them, perhaps, less ground taken up, less to racket about in? She’s extraordinarily sweet and so tiny too!)
Susan