He wanted to say he loved the trees, the size of the sky, the white florets they stepped through as they walked, but he knew such utterances would sound leaden out of his mouth. He hadn’t got the knack of that kind of talk: not like Flynn, who could babble instant poetry as though it were a second tongue. Irish blood, he used to claim, to explain this loquacity. All Marty could say was: “I can run here.”
She murmured something he failed to catch; perhaps just assent. Whatever, his answer seemed to satisfy her, and he could feel the anger he’d started out with, the resentment at her clever talk and her secret life with Papa, dissolving.
“Do you play tennis?” she asked, again out of nowhere.
“No; I never have.”
“Like to learn?” she suggested, half-looking around at him and grinning. “I could teach you. When the weather gets warmer.”
She looked too frail for any strenuous exercise; living on the edge all the time seemed to weary her, though on the edge of what he didn’t know.
“You teach me: I’ll play,” he said, happy with the bargain.
“That’s a deal?” she asked.
“A deal.”
-and her eyes, he thought, are so dark; ambiguous eyes that dodge and skim sometimes, and sometimes, when you least expect it, look at you with such directness you’re sure she’s stripping your soul.
-and he isn’t handsome, she thought; he’s too used to be that, and he runs to keep himself fit because if he stopped he’d get flabby. He’s probably a narcissist: I bet he stands in front of the mirror every night and looks at himself and wishes he was still a pretty-boy instead of being solid and somber.
She caught a thought from him, her mind reaching up, easily up, above her head (this was the way she pictured it, at least) and snatching it out of the air. She did it all the time-to Pearl, to her father-often forgetting that other people lacked the skill to pry with such casualness.
The thought she had snatched was: I would have to learn to be gentle; that, or something like it. He was afraid she’d bruise, for Christ’s sake. That was why he was all dammed up when he was with her, so circuitous in his dealings.
“I’m not going to break,” she said, and a patch of skin at his neck blushed.
“I’m sorry,” he answered. She wasn’t sure if he was conceding his error or simply hadn’t understood her observation.
“There’s no need to handle me with kid gloves. I don’t want that from you. I get it all the time.”
He threw her a disconsolate glance. Why didn’t he believe what she told him? She waited, hoping for some clue, but none was offered, however tentative.
They’d come to the weir that fed the lake. It was high, and fast. People had drowned in it, she’d been told, as recently as a couple of decades ago, just before Papa had bought the estate. She started to explain all this, and about a coach and horses that had been driven into the lake during a storm, telling him without listening to herself, working out how to get past his courtesy and his machismo to the part of him that might be of use to her.
“And the coach is still in there?” he asked, staring into the threshing water.
“Presumably,” she said. The story had lost its charm already.
“Why don’t you trust me?” she asked him straight out.
He didn’t reply; but he was clearly struggling with something. The frown of puzzlement he displayed deepened to dismay. Damn, she thought, I’ve really spoiled things somehow. But it was done. She’d asked him outright, and she was ready to take the bad news, whatever it was.
Almost without planning the theft, she stole another thought from him, and it was shockingly clear: like living it. Through his eyes she saw the door of her bedroom, and her lying on the bed beyond it, glassy-eyed, with Papa sitting close by. When was this, she wondered? Yesterday? The day before? Had he heard them talking about it; was that what woke such distaste in him? He’d played the detective, and he hadn’t liked what he’d discovered.