Owen St. Ives wasn’t in front, because a number of guests were arriving to fill the vacuum left by the after-lunch exodus. Mary caught his signalling wave and threaded her way to the other side of the cobbled court. She was in the car, and it was moving, before she realized with astonishment that for the first time in almost forty-eight hours she had completely forgotten that she was not alone here. She said, “Oh, wait a minute, I’ve got to let Jenny know that I’m going.”
He didn’t hear her; he had his head out the window, backing clear of what seemed like an endless Cadillac.
“Owen?” Mary touched his arm and he swung the wheel and brought his head back in to gaze at her inquiringly. “I’d better let Jenny know that I’m going, she’s at the pool expecting me for a swim.”
“But we won’t even be fifteen minutes,” said St. Ives. “We’ll buy anything at all that has made in Mexico on it.”
It was so at odds with him that Mary laughed a little in spite of her growing sense of guilt. “No, I must. She’ll go all the way up to the room, dripping and freezing, and find herself locked out.”
She had the door firmly open by this time. St. Ives glanced at his watch. “The place I had in mind will be closing in a few minutes—”
Perhaps because of opposition, however slight, Mary’s compunction was turning into actual worry— why, when Jenny could give lessons to a fish? Because of that startling episode at the market? She got out of the car, aware of a disappointment that mirrored his, and said before she closed the door, “I’m really sorry, but most of the shops here have quite pretty lacy shawls. I think you’re safer with that than a poncho.”
“Thanks anyway,” said St. Ives a trifle moodily, and drove away.
To run to the pool would be ridiculous, now that she hadn’t left the motel after all and was on her way to it. Mary walked rapidly along the arched passageway, emerged, found herself standing involuntarily still and staring.
The late afternoon was warm and windless, as though the weather were holding its breath for something, and there were a number of bathing-suited people on the scene but not in the water, including the two children who usually splashed so tirelessly at the shallow end. There was also a waiter, unmoving, with a tray of drinks poised at shoulder level. Daniel Brennan sat alone at a table, his chair swivelled around.
It took Mary moments to realize that in the same way in which a pair of expert dancers could clear a floor by silent and unanimous consent, Jenny had claimed the pool for herself by a virtuoso display from the diving board.
She was climbing up the ladder now, tugging briefly at her cap. Apparently oblivious of her intently watching audience, she paced along the board, positioned herself at its end with her back to the water, took a visibly deep breath, sprang high, and twisted twice before she entered the pool with almost no splash. She had evidently been doing variations of this for some time, because the tableau began to break, the erstwhile or would-be swimmers moving away, the waiter finally proceeding with his tray.
Daniel Brennan rose and came toward Mary. “That is a diver,” he remarked. There was something neutral in his tone. “My friend has Mexican stomach, to put it at its politest, and we’ve been working in his room between groans.”
Without actually taking Mary’s arm he had maneuvered her to his table and pulled out a chair so naturally that she sat down without thinking. “This is my spectator sport break. I’m not—” he was barefoot, in dark blue trunks and polo shirt “—supposed to be swimming here legitimately but I did go in. What can I get you to drink?”
Owen St. Ives had had a Bacardi on the rocks waiting for her—informed by Jenny, Mary reminded herself. She asked for a gin and tonic, and Brennan picked up his own empty glass. “Quicker,” he said, and started off in the direction of the bar.
Jenny was on the diving board again, out of breath but purposeful. She saw Mary, waved, ran three steps and soared off in a front flip. When she emerged again and executed a dive so complicated that it was possible to see individual muscles tense and relax and tense again as she stood in position, Mary felt a deep stir of uneasiness. Jenny had strong feelings about people who monopolized pools, which was exactly what she was doing, and in spite of her expertise in the water she wasn’t an exhibitionist. Moreover, this was not an exhibition in any accepted sense; it was something grim and driving and joyless. She was, thought Mary, like someone who has received a severe shock and starts scrubbing the house with furious, vacant energy.
Daniel Brennan came back with their drinks. It must have occurred to him that Mary might wonder why two men with business to transact occupied different motels, because he said as he set the glasses down, “I stayed here once shortly after they opened. I got the impression that they were paying me, and I’d better look sharp.”
He studied Mary’s expression and followed her gaze to the ladder which the claret-suited figure, lean as a whip if a whip could have bones, was climbing again. He said, still with that detached air, “She —Jenny, did you say?—has been at this for at least half an hour.”
Easily that, while Mary had found no one home at the Taylors’, learned from Mrs. Ulibarri that there had been no inquiring strangers of any variety, almost gone off with Owen St. Ives on his present-buying
