“We feel your husband’s mental health may be endangered, although I hasten to assure you that he shows no signs of losing his mental equilibrium beyond what we may call an inordinate absorption in phemomenaand even there, we cannot say, of course we can’t, that his absorption is any greater than one might expect. Except in the totally unprece-dented circumstances, I mean. We must talk about this in the next few days.”
She waited for him to go on, not unamused by the play with the cigar. Then he looked straight up at her and said, “Frankly, Mrs. Westermark, we think it would help your husband if you could have sexual relations with him.”
A little taken aback, she said, “Can you imagine” Correcting herself, she said, “That is for my husband to say. I am not unapproachable.”
She saw he had caught her slip. Playing a very straight bat, he said,“l’m sure you’re not, Mrs. Westermark.”
With the light out, living, she lay in Peter’s bed She lay in Peter’s bed with the light out. Certainly she wanted him: pretty badly, now she allowed herself to dwell on it. During the long months of the Mars expedition, while she had stayed at home and he had got farther from home, while he actually had existence on that other planet, she had been chaste. She had looked after the children and driven round the countryside and enjoyed writing those articles for women’s magazines and being interviewed on TV when the ship was reported to have left Mars on its homeward journey. She had been, in part, dormant.
“Then came the news, kept from her at first, that there was confusion in communicating with the returning ship. A sensa-tional tabloid broke the secrecy by declaring that the nine-man crew had all gone mad. And the ship had overshot its landing area, crashing into the Atlantic. Her first reaction had been a purely selfish oneno, not selfish, but from the self: He’ll never lie with me again. And infinite love and sorrow.
At his rescue, the only survivor, miraculously unmaimed, her hope had revived. Since then, it had remained embalmed, as he was embalmed in time. She tried to visualise love as it would be now, with everything happening first to him, before she had begun toWith his movement of pleasure even before sheNo, it wasn’t possible! But of course it was, if they worked it out first intellectually; then if she just lay flat…. But what she was trying to visualise, all she could visualise, was not love-making, merely a formal prostration to the exigencies of glands and time flow.
She sat up in bed, longing for movement, freedom. She jumped out and opened the lower window; there was still a tang of cigar smoke in the dark room.
// they worked it out intellectually Within a couple of days, they had fallen into routine. It was as if the calm weather, perpetuating mildness, aided them.
They had to be careful to move slowly through doors, keeping to the left, so as not to bump into each othera tray of drinks was dropped before they agreed on that. They devised simple knocking systems before using the bathroom. They conversed in bulletins that did not ask questions unless questions were necessary. They walked slightly apart. In short, they made detours round each other’s lives.
“It’s really quite easy as long as one is careful,” Mrs.
Westermark senior said to Janet. “And dear Jack is so patient!”
“I even get the feeling he likes the situation.”
“Oh, my dear, how could he like such an unfortunate predicament?”
“Mother, you realise how we all exist together, don’t you?
No, it sounds too terrible1 daren’t say it.”
“Now don’t you start getting silly ideas. You’ve been very brave, and this is not the time for us to be getting upset, just as things are going well. If you have any worries, you must tell Clem. That’s what he’s here for.”
“I know.”
“Well then.”
She saw Jack walk in the garden. As she looked, he glanced up, smiled, said something to himself, stretched out a hand, withdrew it, and went, still smiling, to sit on one end of the seat on the lawn. Touched, Janet hurried over to the french windows, to go and join him.