. .
“Too bad,” said David.
“I thought he was wonderful,” Catherine said, “until I found he couldn’t write even a simple note correctly. But then you’ll be able to write in French for him.”
“Ta queule,” David said cheerfully.
“He’s good at that sort of thing,” Catherine said. “Quick tags of slang that are probably outdated before he knows it. He speaks very idiomatic French but he can’t write it at all. He’s really illiterate, Marita, and you have to face it. His handwriting is terrible too. He can’t write like a gentleman nor speak like one in any language. Especially not his own.”
“Poor David,” Marita said.
“I can’t say I’ve given him the best years of my life,” Catherine said. “Because I’ve only lived with him since March I think it was, but I’ve certainly given him the best months of my life. The ones I’ve had the most fun in anyway and he certainly made them fun too. I wish it hadn’t ended in complete disillusion too but what are you to do if you discover the man is illiterate and practices solitary vice in a wastebasket full of clippings from something called The Original Romeike’s, whoever they are. Any girl would be discouraged and frankly I’m not going to put up with it.”
“You take the clippings and burn them,” David said. “That would be the soundest thing. Wouldn’t you like to go in now and swim, Devil?”
Catherine looked at him slyly.
“How did you know I did it?” she asked.
“Did what?”
“Burned the clippings.”
“Did you, Catherine?” Marita asked.
“Of course I did,” Catherine said.
David stood looking at her. He felt completely hollow. It was like coming around a curve on a mountain road and the road not
being there and only a gulf ahead. Marita was standing now too. Catherine was looking at them her face calm and reasonable.
“Let’s go in and swim,” Marita said. “We’ll just swim out to the point and back.”
“I’m glad you’re being pleasant finally,” Catherine said. “I’ve been wanting to go in for a long time. It’s really getting quite cool. We forget it’s September.”
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Chapter Twenty-six
THEY DRESSED ON THE BEACH and climbed up the steep trail with David carrying the bag with the beach things to where the old car was waiting in the pine woods. The got in and David drove back to the hotel in the early evening light. Catherine was quiet in the car and to anyone passing them they might have been returning from any afternoon at one of the unfrequented beaches of the Est&el. The war ships were no longer in sight when they left the car on the driveway, and the sea beyond the pines was blue and calm. The evening was as beautiful and clear as the morning had been.
They walked down to the entrance of the hotel and David took the bag with the beach things into the storeroom and put it down.
“Let me take them,” Catherine said. “They ought to go to dry.”
“I’m sorry,” David said. He turned at the door of the storeroom and walked out and then down to his work room at the end of the hotel. Inside the room he opened the big Vuitton suitcase. The pile of cahiers that the stories had been written in was gone. So
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were the four bulky envelopes from the bank that had contained the press clippings. The pile of cahiers with the narrative written in them were intact. He closed and locked the suitcase and searched all of the drawers in the armoire and searched the room. He had not believed that the stories could be gone. He had not believed that she could do it. At the beach he had known that she might have done it but it had seemed impossible and he had not really believed it. They had been calm and careful and restrained about it as you were trained to be in danger or emergency or in disaster but it had not seemed possible that it could really have happened.
Now he knew that it had happened but still thought it might be some ghastly joke. So, empty and dead in his heart, he re opened the suitcase and checked it and after he locked it he checked the room again.