“Hello,” she said. “Am I very late?”
“No,” Roger told her. “We’ve been in but I’m going in again.”
Roger had moved David’s chair out to the edge of the beach and Thomas Hudson watched her as she bent over David’s feet and saw the small upturning curls at the nape of her neck as the weight of her hair fell forward. The small curls were silvery in the sun against her brown skin.
“What happened to them?” she asked. “The poor feet.”
“I wore them off pulling on a fish,” David told her.
“How big was he?”
“We don’t know. He pulled out.”
“I’m awfully sorry.”
“That’s all right,” David said. “Nobody minds about him anymore.”
“Is it all right to swim with them?”
Roger was touching the worn places with Mercurochrome. They looked good and clean but the flesh was a little puckered from the salt water.
“Eddy says it’s good for them.”
“Who is Eddy?”
“He’s our cook.”
“And is your cook your doctor, too?”
“He knows about things like that,” David explained. “Mr. Davis said it was all right, too.”
“Does Mr. Davis say anything else?” she asked Roger.
“He’s glad to see you.”
“That’s nice. Did you boys have a wild night?”
“Not very,” Roger said. “We had a poker game and afterwards I read and went to sleep.”
“Who won in the poker game?”
“Andy and Eddy,” David said. “What did you do?”
“We played backgammon.”
“Did you sleep well?” Roger asked.
“Yes. Did you?”
“Wonderfully,” he said.
“Tommy is the only one of us who plays backgammon,” David told the girl. “It was taught him by a worthless man who turned out to be a fairy.”
“Really? What a sad story.”
“The way Tommy tells it, it isn’t so sad,” David said. “There wasn’t anything bad happened.”
“I think fairies are all awfully sad,” she said. “Poor fairies.”
“This was sort of funny though,” David said. “Because this worthless man that taught Tommy backgammon was explaining to Tommy what it meant to be a fairy and all about the Greeks and Damon and Pythias and David and Jonathan. You know, sort of like when they tell you about the fish and the roe and the milt and the bees fertilizing the pollen and all that at school and Tommy asked him if he’d ever read a book by Gide. What was it called, Mr. Davis? Not Corydon. That other one? With Oscar Wilde in it.”
“Si le grain ne meurt,” Roger said.
“It’s a pretty dreadful book that Tommy took to read the boys in school. They couldn’t understand it in French, of course, but Tommy used to translate it. Lots of it is awfully dull but it gets pretty dreadful when Mr. Gide gets to Africa.”
“I’ve read it,” the girl said.
“Oh fine,” David said. “Then you know the sort of thing I mean. Well this man who’d taught Tommy backgammon and turned out to be a fairy was awfully surprised when Tommy spoke about this book but he was sort of pleased because now he didn’t have to go through all the part about the bees and flowers of that business and he said, ‘I’m so glad you know,’ or something like that and then Tommy said this to him exactly; I memorized it: ‘Mr. Edwards, I take only an academic interest in homosexuality. I thank you very much for teaching me backgammon and I must bid you good day.’ ”
“Tommy had wonderful manners then,” David told her. “He’d just come from living in France with papa and he had wonderful manners.”
“Did you live in France, too?”
“We all did at different times. But Tommy’s the only one who remembers it properly. Tommy has the best memory anyway. He remembers truly, too. Did you ever live in France?”
“For a long time.”
“Did you go to school there?”
“Yes. Outside of Paris.”
“Wait till you get with Tommy,” David said. “He knows Paris and outside of Paris the way I know the reef here or the flats. Probably I don’t know them even as well as Tommy knows Paris.”
She was sitting down now in the shade of the porch and she was sifting the white sand through her toes.