“Hello,” she said. “I’m . . .”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “You’re Susan and I cannot tell you how we’ve been looking forward to having you here . . .”
That’s a lie, she thought. He’s never given me a thought except to perhaps wish Joe wouldn’t come barging in here dragging some girl like me, but I do rather like him for lying.
“And I’m really terribly sorry things are a little screwy for a few minutes and that we can’t put you up here for the night. My sister will be right down. Sara’s in the kitchen,” he added, as if this was an important postscript. “We’ll go through there but there’s no real use bothering her. Just follow me.”
He walked silently, with his great grace and ease, toward the wide door into the pantry. “That is,” he added, turning around and smiling at her in a secret way, “you’ll follow me if you know what’s good for you.”
Sue’s heart now pounded alarmingly as she followed him across the room.
Nearing the steps that led into the pantry, she began to hear small noises and once in the light she saw a little office lined with shelves and cupboards. Beyond it the kitchen lay as part of the living room behind the fireplace wall.
Sue followed in Tim Garton’s wary steps, noticing the great hood over the electric stove and a blue map of La Gastronomie Italienne on a cupboard door and the wide window beyond with one great white daisy in the Mexican jar upon the sill.
Sara was bent over the chopping board that was piled high with lettuces and did not look up as they came into the little room. “I hear you,” she said to Tim. “You sound like rats. Lunch is in seven minutes. Have one for me, will you, and get up here in time to help carry it all out.”
“Right,” Tim said. “I will. Take it easy, darling.”
Sue’s heart thudded as if it, for that instant, believed he’d spoken to her. His voice was almost impersonal, neither fervent nor glib, not like the way an assistant director at a Hollywood party might say, Dawww-ling! He’d certainly been talking to Sara, hadn’t he? Sue followed him down the cellar steps feeling lonely suddenly.
Would no one ever talk to her in that fond way? Would it always be the quick hot voice of passion or else nothing? I’m one of those women, she thought, who is made for lust, which is just my luck, and no one will ever say darling to me the way he just said it to Sara Porter, so easily, as if loving her were as simple as breathing or eating.
The thought made her gloomy.
As she sighed, she heard the wheeze in her breathing. She looked away, directing her gaze toward the walls on the sides of the cellar steps painted in the same plaster that had been painted a frolicking canary yellow with a thin green stripe at shoulder height to separate the yellow below from that white of the plaster above. A small light glowed in its feeble way at the bottom of the stairwell.
“Watch your step here, Susan,” Tim said. “Follow closely by me. I’d hate to have you get lost under a strawberry box or something before Nan even got to meet you.”
She followed him as he moved to the right through two different cellar rooms as cool as tombs and rich with the scent of ripening fruit and cucumbers and summer cabbages. She saw shelves filled with preserves put up in jars and in the next room the round gleaming bottoms of a thousand wine bottles. There, standing in the cold dim light of a single electrical bulb, stood Joe and Honor with Daniel Tennant.
Sue’s heart stopped, it seemed, and she felt her head swim slightly to see all three men who now seemed to mean so much to her there underground together. Of course there was Honor, too, who was with them, and as Sue stood watching her, Honor shivered and put down the little glass she was holding onto a wooden table, then wrapped her long arms around what looked to Sue like such an incredibly small waist. There was gooseflesh on her arms and her eyes were melancholy.
Then there was Joe, his face—with the bang of dark curls above it—looking young and thick and tired. He, too, held a small glass so tiny it was almost hidden by the size of his right hand. With the other he leaned carefully against the damp wall.
Tim Garton stood between Sue and Honor and Sue began to feel she could hardly look at him for the love she felt for his small lithe body and his beautiful blue-white hair and dark eyes and for the half-smile on his wide mouth. His mouth made her shiver for the thought of all the secrets it might tell.
I am, she thought, going a little crazy.
And there was also Daniel Tennant, taller than anyone, his thin body hung as loosely as if his joints were tied together with old string instead of living gristle and tendon. His head was small and finely proportioned and seemed to sit on his neck lightly with a proud, arched poise. He wore a soft blue shirt; gray flannel slacks clothed his long legs. His bony arms ended in big if slender-knuckled hands.
Oh, she thought, this is terrible, then looked at the familiar bulk of her Joe almost desparately before she turned her enormous eyes on Tim, who smiled at her reassuringly. She felt her lips moving stiffly as she tried to answer with a grin, but then she was drawn back as if helplessly by the presence of this terrifying boy.
Sue stared up at him in the hard poor light of the one bulb in the dank ceiling and Dan looked down at her, politely. He had the biggest nose she’d ever seen and the rest of his face seemed to express amazement.
“Hello, again,” she told him, hoping she didn’t sound quite that weak.
“You’ve met,” Honor observed, just as Joe and Tim began a jumble of now unnecessary introductions at which everybody laughed and then Dan bowed almost formally. He looked amazed or maybe cross, with his lips pulled tightly. Someone who will never love me, Sue thought sadly.
“You’d better hurry,” Tim said. “Sara’s whizzing around and I have no idea where Nan and Lucy are but lunch will be ready in make that six minutes.”
As he spoke he was shaking bitters into two of the tiny glasses, then filled them with gin. He put one in Sue’s hand and raised his own in a toast. “To happy days,” he said, “or something. Joe reports that at Oxford you now say chahs!”
They all raised their glasses solemnly.
Sue was not sure she wouldn’t choke as she’d never swallowed so much of anything quite so hot in one imitative gulp. She prayed she wouldn’t, then blinked happily as she now felt perfectly safe. She sighed and as she did a most delightful warmth flooded through her and swirled downward into the seat of all her fervent sadness and suddenly she was glad.
“I liked that,” Sue observed, now smiling at Honor, then looking shyly from lowered eyes at the silent Dan.
“Another?” Tim asked this eagerly.
“Oh, gosh, no! Tim,” Honor said, “we’ve got to go help Sara. Come on!”
Dan swept his eyes movingly over the various expressions of resignation and disappointment that followed Honor’s nearly violent statement. He sighed. For a moment Sue thought she would finally hear him say something aside from the untranslatable buzz of his exclamation in the bedroom door and he did now open his mouth. But then he shrugged, raised one shaggy eyebrow toward his carefully combed hair, put down his glass and—bowing slightly—passed in front of Susan and went out the door.
As she followed him out, Honor told him, “You’re too young to have two drinks of gin before lunch anyway.”
The boy finally spoke, “So’re you.”
To Susan his voice sounded like the mellowest notes from Benny Goodman’s clarinet, only more manly somehow. She sighed and listened with a kind of muted awe to the two Tennants speaking to one another as she and Timothy Garton and her now silent Joe, whose arm lay almost protectively on the smaller, more frail man’s thin shoulders, followed