Playing hard to get hasn't done her any harm, I tell you! How long will
the script job last? They'll want her for six months, Dugan guessed.
The producer who will do it is making a movie in Rome right now. He'll
probably want Debra to work with him there. Good, said David. She'll
like Rome. You coming with her, David? No, David answered carefully.
No, she'll be coming on her own. Will she be able to get by on her own?
Dugan sounded worried.
From now on she'll be able to do everything on her own Hope you are
right, Dugan was dubious.
I'm right. David told him abruptly. One other thing.
That lecture tour, is it still on? They are beating the door down.
Like I said, she's hotter than a pistol. 'Set it up for after the
script job. Hey, David boy. This is the business. Now we are really
cooking with gas. We are going to make your little girl into one very
big piece of property. Do that, said David. Make her big. Keep her
busy, you hear. Don't give her time to think. I'll keep her busy. Then
as though he had detected something in David's voice. Is something
bugging you, David? You got some little domestic problem going there,
boy? You want to talk about it?
No, I don't want to talk about it. You just look after her. Look after
her well.
I'll look after her, Dugan's tone had sobered. And David What is it?
I'm sorry. Whatever it is, I'm sorry. That's okay. 'David had to end
the conversation then, immediately. His hand was shaking so that he
knocked the telephone from the table and the plastic cracked through. He
left it lying and went out into the night.
He walked alone through the sleeping city, until just before the morning
he was weary enough to sleep.
The streams of colour settled to steady runs and calmly moving patterns,
no longer the explosive bursts of brightness that had so alarmed her.
After the grey shifting banks of blindness that had filled her head like
dirty cotton wool for those long years, the new brightness and beauty
served to buoy her spirits, and after the main discomfort of her head
surgery had passed in the first few days, she was filled with a wondrous
sense of wellbeing, a formless optimistic expectation, such as she had
not experienced since she was a child anticipating the approach of a
long-awaited holiday.
It was as though in some deep recess of her subconscious she was vaguely
aware of the imminent return of her sight. However, the knowledge
seemed not to have reached her conscious mind. She knew there was a
change, she welcomed her release from the dark and sombre dungeons of
nothingness into the new brightness, but she did not realize that there
was more to come, that after colour and fantasy would follow shape and
reality.
Each day David waited for her to say something that might show that she
had realized that her sight was on the way back, he hoped for and at the
same time dreaded this awareness, but it did not come.
He spent as much of each day with her as hospital routine would allow,
and he hoarded each minute of it, doling out time like a miser paying
coins from a diminishing hoard. Yet Debra's ebullient mood was
