leaning against a huge poster for the Winter Circus.
Henri's drooping Basque eyes were infinitely sad. He clutched the front of his jacket with one hand, the fist pressed against his stomach. He smiled foolishly and shook his head with an I-don't-believe-it expression, then the smile contorted into a grin of pain, and he slid to a sitting posture, his feet straight out before him like a child's.
When Jonathan stood up after feeling Henri's throat for pulse, he came face to face with the insane grin of the clown on the poster.
Marie Baq had not wept. She thanked Jonathan for coming to tell her, and she gathered the children together in another room for a talk. When they came back, their eyes were red and puffy, but none of them was still crying. The eldest boy—also Henri—assumed his role and asked Jonathan if he would care for an aperitif. He accepted, and later he took them across the street to a cafe for supper. The youngest, who did not really understand what had happened, ate with excellent appetite, but no one else did. And once the eldest girl made a snorting noise as the dike of her control broke, and she ran to the ladies' room.
Jonathan sat up that night over coffee with Marie. They talked of practical and fiscal matters across the kitchen table covered with oilcloth from which daydreaming children had picked flecks of plastic. Then for a long time there was nothing to talk about. Close to dawn she pushed herself out of the chair with a sigh so deep it whimpered. 'One must continue to live, Jonathan. For the little ones. Come. Come to bed with me.'
There is nothing so life-embracing as lovemaking. Potential suicides almost never do. Jonathan lived with the Baqs for two weeks, and each night Marie used him like medicine. One evening she said calmly, 'You should go now, Jonathan. I don't think I need you anymore. And if we continued after I ceased to need you, that would be a different thing.'
He nodded.
When the youngest son heard that Jonathan was going away he was disappointed. He had intended to ask Jonathan to take him to the Winter Circus.
Several weeks later, Jonathan learned that Miles Mellough had set up the assassination. Because Miles left CII at the same time, Jonathan had never been sure which side had ordered the sanction.
'Nice job of meeting the train,' Jemima said looking in the window from the off-driver side.
He started. 'I'm sorry. I didn't notice it come in.' He realized how thin that sounded, considering the desolate platform.
As they drove toward his place, she trailed her hand out the window, cupping the wind aerodynamically, as children do. He thought she looked smart and fresh in her white linen dress with its high mandarin collar. She sat deep in the seat, either completely relaxed or totally indifferent.
'Are those the only clothes you brought?' he asked, turning his head toward her, but keeping his eyes on the road.
'Yes, sure. I'll bet you were expecting some night things discreetly carried in a brown paper bag.'
'The bag could have been any color. I wouldn't have cared.' He braked and turned into a side road, then backed onto the highway again.
'You forgot something?'
'No. We're going back to the village. To buy you some clothes.'
'You don't like these?'
'They're fine. But they're not much for working in.'
'Working?'
'Certainly. You thought this was a vacation?'
'What kind of work?' she asked warily.
'I thought you might enjoy helping me paint a boat.'
'I'm being had.'
Jonathan nodded thoughtfully.
They stopped at the only shop in the village open on Sundays, a spurious Cape Cod structure decorated with fishing nets and glass balls calculated to delight weekend tourists from the city. The proprietor was no taciturn Down Easter; he was an intense man in his mid-forties, tending slightly to weight, wearing a tight-fitting Edwardian suit and a flowing pearl gray ascot. When he spoke, he thrust his lower jaw forward and relished the nasal vowels with deliberate sincerity.
While Jemima was in the back of the store picking out some shorts, a shirt, and a pair of canvas shoes, Jonathan selected other things, accepting the proprietors' estimate of size. The advice was not given graciously; there was a tone of peevish disappointment. 'Oh, about a ten, I guess,' the proprietor said, then compressed his lips and averted his eyes. 'Of course, it will change when she's had a few children. Her kind always does.' His eyebrows were in constant motion, each independent of the other.
Jonathan and Gem had driven a distance when she said, 'That's the first time I've been a victim of prejudice on those grounds.'
'I've known and admired a lot of women,' Jonathan said in an accurate imitation of the proprietor's voice. 'Some of my best friends are women...'
'But you wouldn't want your brother to marry one, right?'
'Well, you know what happens to land values if a woman moves into the neighborhood.'
The shadows of trees lining the road rippled in regular cadence over the hood, and sunlight flickered stroboscopically in the corners of their eyes.
She squeezed one of the packages. 'Hey, what's this?'
'I'm sorry, but they didn't have any brown paper bags.'
She paused a second. 'I see.'
The car turned into the drive and came around a line of plane trees screening the church from view. He opened the door and let her precede him into the house. She stopped in the midst of the nave and turned around, taking the total in. 'This isn't a house, Jonathan. It's a movie set.'
He stepped around from his side of the boat to see how she was coming along. With her nose only ten niches from the wood and her tongue between her teeth with concentration, she was daubing at an area about a foot square that constituted the extent of her progress.
'You got the spot,' he said, 'but you've missed the boat.'
'Hush up. Get around and paint your own side.'
'All done.'
She humphed. 'Slapdash careless work, I imagine.'
'Any chance of your finishing before winter sets in?'
'Don't worry about me, man. I'm the goal-oriented type. I'll keep at this until it's done. Nothing could lure me away from the dignity of honest labor.'
'I was going to suggest lunch.'
'Sold.' She dropped the brush into the can of thinner and wiped her hands with a rag.
After bathing and changing clothes, she joined him at the bar for a prelunch martini.
'That's some bathtub you've got.'
'It pleases me.'
They drove across the island to take lunch at The Better 'Ole: seafood and champagne. The place was nearly empty, and it was cool with shadow. They chatted about how it was when they were children, and about Chicago jazz versus San Francisco, and Underground films, and how they both liked chilled melon balls for dessert.
They lay side by side on the warm sand under a sky no longer brittle blue, but bleaching steadily with a high haze that preceded the wall of heavy gray cloud pressing inevitably from the north. They had changed back into work clothes, but had not returned to work.
'That's enough sun and sand for me, sir,' Jemima said eventually, and she pushed herself to a sitting
