Now the swimming place was a “club,” though, like the international society it represented, it would be hard to say who was not admitted.
Nicole hardened again as Dick knelt on the straw mat and looked about for Rosemary. Her eyes followed his, searching among the new paraphernalia, the trapezes over the water, the swinging rings, the portable bathhouses, the floating towers, the searchlights from last night’s fetes, the modernistic buffet, white with a hackneyed motif of endless handlebars.
The water was almost the last place he looked for Rosemary, because few people swam any more in that blue paradise, children and one exhibitionistic valet who punctuated the morning with spectacular dives from a fifty-foot rock—most of Gausse’s guests stripped the concealing pajamas from their flabbiness only for a short hangover dip at one o’clock.
“There she is,” Nicole remarked.
She watched Dick’s eyes following Rosemary’s track from raft to raft; but the sigh that rocked out of her bosom was something left over from five years ago.
“Let’s swim out and speak to Rosemary,” he suggested.
“You go.”
“We’ll both go.” She struggled a moment against his pronouncement, but eventually they swam out together, tracing Rosemary by the school of little fish who followed her, taking their dazzle from her, the shining spoon of a trout hook.
Nicole stayed in the water while Dick hoisted himself up beside Rosemary, and the two sat dripping and talking, exactly as if they had never loved or touched each other. Rosemary was beautiful—her youth was a shock to Nicole, who rejoiced, however, that the young girl was less slender by a hairline than herself. Nicole swam around in little rings, listening to Rosemary who was acting amusement, joy, and expectation—more confident than she had been five years ago.
“I miss Mother so, but she’s meeting me in Paris, Monday.”
“Five years ago you came here,” said Dick. “And what a funny little thing you were, in one of those hotel peignoirs!”
“How you remember things! You always did—and always the nice things.”
Nicole saw the old game of flattery beginning again and she dove under water, coming up again to hear:
“I’m going to pretend it’s five years ago and I’m a girl of eighteen again. You could always make me feel some you know, kind of, you know, kind of happy way—you and Nicole. I feel as if you’re still on the beach there, under one of those umbrellas—the nicest people I’d ever known, maybe ever will.”
Swimming away, Nicole saw that the cloud of Dick’s heart-sickness had lifted a little as he began to play with Rosemary, bringing out his old expertness with people, a tarnished object of art; she guessed that with a drink or so he would have done his stunts on the swinging rings for her, fumbling through stunts he had once done with ease. She noticed that this summer, for the first time, he avoided high diving.
Later, as she dodged her way from raft to raft, Dick overtook her.
“Some of Rosemary’s friends have a speed boat, the one out there. Do you want to aquaplane? I think it would be amusing.”
Remembering that once he could stand on his hands on a chair at the end of a board, she indulged him as she might have indulged Lanier. Last summer on the Zugersee they had played at that pleasant water game, and Dick had lifted a two-hundred-pound man from the board onto his shoulders and stood up. But women marry all their husbands’ talents and naturally, afterwards, are not so impressed with them as they may keep up the pretense of being. Nicole had not even pretended to be impressed, though she had said “Yes” to him, and “Yes, I thought so too.”
She knew, though, that he was somewhat tired, that it was only the closeness of Rosemary’s exciting youth that prompted the impending effort—she had seen him draw the same inspiration from the new bodies of her children and she wondered coldly if he would make a spectacle of himself. The Divers were older than the others in the boat—the young people were polite, deferential, but Nicole felt an undercurrent of “Who are these Numbers anyhow?” and she missed Dick’s easy talent of taking control of situations and making them all right—he had concentrated on what he was going to try to do.
The motor throttled down two hundred yards from shore and one of the young men dove flat over the edge. He swam at the aimless twisting board, steadied it, climbed slowly to his knees on it— then got on his feet as the boat accelerated. Leaning back he swung his light vehicle ponderously from side to side in slow, breathless arcs that rode the trailing side-swell at the end of each swing. In the direct wake of the boat he let go his rope, balanced for a moment, then back-flipped into the water, disappearing like a statue of glory, and reappearing as an insignificant head while the boat made the circle back to him.
Nicole refused her turn; then Rosemary rode the board neatly and conservatively, with facetious cheers from her admirers. Three of them scrambled egotistically for the honor of pulling her into the boat, managing, among them, to bruise her knee and hip against the side.
“Now you. Doctor,” said the Mexican at the wheel.
Dick and the last young man dove over the side and swam to the board. Dick was going to try his lifting trick and Nicole began to watch with smiling scorn. This physical showing-off for Rosemary irritated her most of all.
When the men had ridden long enough to find their balance, Dick knelt, and putting the back of his neck in the other man’s crotch, found the rope through his legs, and slowly began to rise.
The people in the boat, watching closely, saw that he was having difficulties. He was on one knee; the trick was to straighten all the way up in the same motion with which he left his kneeling position. He rested for a moment, then his face contracted as he put his heart into the strain, and lifted.
The board was narrow, the man, though weighing less than a hundred and fifty, was awkward with his weight and grabbed clumsily at Dick’s head. When, with a last wrenching effort of his back, Dick stood upright, the board slid sidewise and the pair toppled into the sea.
In the boat Rosemary exclaimed: “Wonderful! They almost had it.”
But as they came back to the swimmers Nicole watched for a sight of Dick’s face. It was full of annoyance as
