So they were friends; whatever friends are, David thought, and tried not think but talked and listened in the unreality that reality had become. He had heard each one speak about the other and he knew each must know what the other thought and probably what they each had told him. In that way they really were friends, understanding in their basic disagreement, trusting in their complete distrust and enjoying one another’s company. He enjoyed their company too but tonight he’d had enough of it.
Tomorrow he must go back into his own country, the one that Catherine was jealous of and that Marita loved and respected. He had been happy in the country of the story and knew that it was too good to last and now he was back from what he cared about into the overpopulated vacancy of madness that had taken, now the new turn of exaggerated practicality. He was tired of it and he was tired of Marita’s collaborating with her enemy. Catherine was not his enemy except as she was himself in the unfinding unrealizable quest that is love and so was her own enemy. She needs an enemy so badly always that she has to keep one near and she’s the nearest and the easiest to attack knowing
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the weaknesses and strengths and all the faults of our defenses. She turns my flank so skillfully then finds it is her own and the last fighting is always in a swirl and the dust that rises is our own dust.
Catherine wanted to play backgammon with Marita after dinner. They always played it seriously and for money and when Catherine went to get the board Marita said to David, “Please don’t come to my room tonight after all.”
“Good.”
“Do you understand?”
“Let’s skip that word,” David said. His coldness had come back as the time for working moved closer.
“Are you angry?”
“Yes,” David said.
“At me?”
“You can’t be angry with someone who’s ill.”
“You haven’t lived very long,” David said. “That’s exactly who everyone is always angry with. Get ill sometime yourself and see.”
“I wish you wouldn’t be angry.”
“I wish I’d never seen any of you.”
“Please don’t, David.”
“You know it isn’t true. I’m oniy getting ready to work.” He went into their bedroom and put on the reading light on his side of the bed and made himself comfortable and read one of the W. H. Hudson books. It was Nature in Downiand and he had taken it to read because it had the most unpromising title. He knew enough to know a time was coming when he’d need all the books and he was saving the best ones. But once past the title of this one nothing in it bored him. He was happy to read and he was back out of his life and with Hudson and his brother riding their horses into the tumbled whiteness of breast-high thisdedown in the moonlight and gradually the click of dice and
the iow sound of the girls’ voices became real again too so that when, after a time, he went out to make himself a whiskey and Perrier to take back to his reading they seemed, when he saw them playing, to be actual human beings doing something normal and not figures in some unbelievable play he had been brought unwillingly to attend.
He went back to the room and read and drank his whiskey and Perrier very slowly and he had undressed and turned the light off and was almost asleep when he heard Catherine come in to the bedroom. It seemed to him that she was gone a long time in the bathroom before he felt her come to bed and he lay still and breathed steadily and hoped he might really go to sleep.
“Are you awake, David?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“Don’t wake up,” she said. “Thank you for sleeping here.”
“I usually do.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Yes I do.”
“I’m glad you did. Good night.”
“Good night.”
“Would you kiss me good night?”
“Sure,” he said.
He kissed her and it was Catherine as she had been before when she had seemed to come back to him for a while.