“About four months. We were on our honeymoon.”
She nodded. “I can only give you the opinion of another woman who was, in effect, on her honeymoon. Both alternatives are impossible, of course, as long as you continue to weigh them. But inevitably there’ll be a point when she has to stop thinking, and it’ll become a simple matter of instinct versus conditioning. Instinct is a lot older.”
“She may not even remember the gun. Or know how to assemble it if she does—or get the chance, for that matter.”
“But she would know better than to try to threaten him with it? You know, the magic wand of television and B pictures?”
“Yes,” he said. “She’d know better than to point it unless she was prepared to shoot it.” He closed the discussion abruptly and stood up to look down the hatch. There was perceptibly more water in the after cabin than there had been thirty minutes ago. He motioned for Bellew to relinquish the pump.
“I’ll take over for a couple of hours. We can’t all work all the time, and I want to get some idea how fast it’s rising against pumping alone. So the two of you’d better turn in on the settees in there and see if you can get some sleep. You’re going to need it.”
“Right,” Bellew agreed. He started down the steps into the doghouse. Then he turned and asked, “How did he sucker you?”
Ingram explained briefly how Warriner had rowed out and come aboard, and the story he’d told. “It kept bothering me, especially his not wanting to come back aboard here or even wanting me to. But I had no real reason to doubt him, so I couldn’t very well force him to, and I didn’t like the idea of leaving my wife on there alone with him until I knew more about him. Then he turned in, and I decided to have a look anyway. But apparently he wasn’t asleep. You didn’t even know he’d left?”
“No,” Bellew said. “When we heard you walking around, we thought it was still him. We didn’t know he’d sighted a rescue boat when he slugged me and locked us in there. A laugh a minute, that Hughie-boy. Like to run into him again some day.”
The contempt in Mrs. Warriner’s voice was like a whiplash. “Are you sure that’s why he hit you?”
“Why else, baby?” Bellew turned and went on below.
Ingram shrugged and began pumping. Mrs. Warriner remained where she was, turning slightly so she faced him. “I’m not sleepy,” she said. “Do you mind if I talk?”
“Go ahead,” he said.
She took a drag on her cigarette and stared moodily at the smoke. “I can understand your not wanting to talk about your wife under these circumstances—and least of all to me. But I’m trying to form a picture of her. Not to belabor the obvious any more than we have to, she’s the key to this, naturally; we know what’s going to happen on here, so if there is to be any other outcome it would have to hinge on what happens on there within the next few hours. You said she was thirty-five, which implies—or should imply—a certain amount of maturity. Is she pretty?”
“Yes,” Ingram said. “She’s very pretty.”
Her smile was fleeting and faintly tinged with sadness. “It was a silly question to ask a bridegroom. Is she blond or brunette?”
“Blond,” he said, still pumping. “Or in that jurisdiction. Her hair’s somewhere between golden blond and light brown-tawny, I think you’d call it—and the eyes are sea-green. High cheekbones, very smooth complexion, beautiful tan. Generally speaking, it’s the type of face and coloration that go with high spirit and a very low flashpoint in the temper department, but she grew up faster than the temper did, and somewhere along the line they gave her a sense of humor. Maybe she needed it, to marry me.”
“Don’t add too much modesty to your other virtues,” she said. “It’ll sound phony. Does she have any children?”
“No. She had a boy, but he died. Polio.”
“I’m sorry. That was the first marriage?”
“The second. The first marriage was one of those kid things, during the war. That is, the Second World War —”
“Thank you, Mr. Ingram. But I know which one you mean. Go on.”
“She wasn’t quite seventeen, and he was a navigator in the Eighth Air Force. After the war he went back to school on the GI Bill, pre-med student. She worked, and they lived in a Quonset hut—you remember the routine. They were both too young for it, I guess; anyway, he was failing all his subjects and they began to fight and it didn’t last. She went back to Texas, and they were divorced. The second marriage was another thing. No divorce; he was killed in an airplane crash.”
“How old would the boy be if he’d lived?”
“Around twelve, I think.”
“Does she attract children?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen her around any.”
“How about the lost, the insecure, the dependent, the scared?”
He saw the shadow of pain in her eyes again and knew what she meant. “She has a great deal of tenderness and sympathy,” he said. “I don’t know how apparent it’ll be after she’s just been slugged—”
“He’ll know, don’t worry. It’s like radar. And he brings it out if it’s been latent for years. With that, plus a reasonable amount of intelligence, I think she can handle him, provided she doesn’t panic.”
“Why does he think you tried to kill him?”
“He thinks Bellew and I are lovers. And that we planned to do away with him and Estelle.” She made no attempt to look away. The brown eyes were completely without expression now, however, and he could only guess at the torment behind them. “Unfortunately, there is some justification for his thinking so. And it’s my fault. I blamed the whole thing on Bellew awhile ago, but that was in anger. I’m probably as much responsible for his crackup as Bellew is, in a different way.”
Ingram was beginning to like her and found that difficult to believe. Maybe she was too accustomed to taking the rap for everything; Warriner had struck him as an alibi artist who’d load it on anybody in sight. “Well, look, your husband’s a grown man, or supposed to be—”
“The type of woman he attracts, or is attracted to, never gave him a chance to be one. And it’s too late now.”
“What happened?” Ingram asked.
For a moment he thought she hadn’t heard. Then she said, “That’s a good question, and I wish I could answer it. Specifically, what happened was a very tragic accident. The accident itself is difficult enough to explain, but to understand why it smashed him you’d have to go back a long way. When was the first time, Mr. Ingram, that you realized it was possible for this environment of ours to be unfriendly, and that it was also possible to find yourself utterly alone in it? I mean, with nobody to take your head in her lap and tell you everything was going to be all right, that the critics were wrong, that the bank must have forgotten to credit your last deposit, that the pathologist must have made a mistake, or the teacher that gave you a D was just being spiteful?”
“I don’t know,” Ingram replied. “Probably a long time ago.”
“Precisely. While you were still quite young, and under relatively harmless circumstances, and over the years you built up—well, not an immunity, nobody’s immunized—but call it a progressively higher threshold of susceptibility. It happened to Hughie for the first time at the age of twenty-eight, alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean without even a lifebelt, and he was there because he’d been betrayed by the one person he’d been conditioned all his life to trust and depend on— his mother, in one of her successive manifestations.”
“Aren’t you riding yourself pretty hard?” Ingram asked.
“No. I don’t think so.” She gazed out across the metallic glare of the sea to where the sun had already begun its descent into the west. “If you know the conditions when you accept the appointment, you also accept the responsibility. I let him down.”
8
