“A bit late for that.”
“Melanie’s going to be okay, they’re pretty sure, but they’re keeping her for a few days, because she still won’t say what it was she took. Dad spent the night at the hospital.”
“At the hospital, did he? That was blameless, at any rate.”
Kit blushed. She looked stern, set. “How can you?”
“What?”
“Make these weak sarcastic little jokes?”
“I don’t know how I can. Do you happen to know your father’s schedule for the day?”
“He’s got a lot of calls to make.”
“He’ll want his office, then. To be at home.”
Kit sat down on the bed. The tray wobbled; she put out a hand to steady it. The coffee cooled in its pot. “You think we’ve let you down, don’t you?” she asked. “By not telling you?”
Anna didn’t reply. Kit said, “We would have told you. But it was too difficult. We couldn’t think of the right words.”
“Yes, I understand.” Anna sounded sad, remote, resigned. “It explains some things, though. This summer we’ve had.”
Some things, Kit thought, but not that uprush of strange fear. Who knows where a crisis comes from? The world should be more predictable. “Let me pour your coffee,” she said.
“I’d be sick,” Anna said. “How can you ask me to eat and drink?”
“Look, you must fight for him.”
“What? Like a dog with a bone?”
“No, but you must let it be known—let it be known that—” Kit pushed her hand back through her hair.
“Oh, Kit,” Anna said. “Don’t talk about what you don’t understand.”
“What will you do?”
“Go and see Ginny,” she said, unexpectedly.
Ginny’s house was a low, sprawling complex of buildings—boat-houses once, no doubt—by Blakeney Quay. It had been built for Ginny and Felix by a local firm, and its additions and extensions had been crafted with reverence for the vernacular; but its most startling feature was a huge picture window of staring, blank plate glass, which looked out over the creek to the invisible sea.
This window was one of the great acts of Ginny’s life. Some women die and leave only their children as memorial; but Ginny, like some anointed saint, would have a window. It represented a moral choice, an act of courage. Some would shudder at it, though secretly they would crave the vista. Questions of taste would cow them: questions of vulgarity, even. Ginny simply said, “Why live at Blakeney, if you don’t have the view?”
Midmorning, Ginny began to issue large drinks. When her hands were unoccupied, without a glass or a cigarette, she rubbed them nervously together, so that her rings clashed and chimed: her engagement ring with its gray solitaire, her broad yellow wedding ring, the “eternity rings,” studded with chips of sapphire and ruby, that Felix had given her at a constant rate through the years. She was never without these rings; perhaps, Anna thought, she used them from time to time to deliver a scarring blow. But Felix had never appeared scarred. She remembered his handsome, bland, betraying face.
“I’ve heard,” Anna said, “of women who came home to find a note on the table. Until then, they had no inkling.”
“Had you an inkling?”
Anna smoothed her hair back. It was very smooth already. Ginny thought, she seems to be the one in charge here.
“As I see it,” Ginny said, “you have three courses before you. When you choose which to take, you must bear in mind that this affair of his will very likely not last.” Anna raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you know my situation,” Ginny said. “It was different with me. Felix and Emma, they were old flames.”
“You don’t have to talk about it.”
“Why else are you here?” Ginny lit another cigarette. “Really, Anna, I don’t mind. I know you’re here because —well, whatever did Daniel tell you?”
“He gave me a version of your life that was different from the one I knew. I’m sorry. It is an intrusion on your privacy.”
“Bugger that,” Ginny said. “It’s a relief to talk about it. More gin?”
“Why not? Ralph’s not here to see me.”
“He stopped you drinking?”
“Not exactly. It was more the weight of tradition. Our families. And his uncle, Holy James, the total abstainer. Who’d seen otherwise competent missionaries go out to the tropics and be pickled in spirits within the decade.”
“Yes, I remember James—whatever happened to him?”
“He went abroad again. Back to Africa. After, you know … a year or two after we came home.”
“But he was old! Wasn’t he?”
“Yes.”
