Something to do with that glimpse in the market, or even with—
Brennan’s glass went down with a crash. He said unbelievingly, “She hasn’t—”
His chair fell over backwards as he raced the few yards to the pool and shot over the edge, not in one of Jenny’s neat entries but with an echoing, cracking splash. At any other time Mary would have winced for someone hitting the water with that impact. Now she ran after him, chest hurting and thudding as if someone were beating on it from the outside, caught up in a kind of terror entirely new to her. (“Aunt Henrietta, I don’t know how to tell you this . . .”) There was an underwater tangle of arms and legs, of dark blue and claret, and then Jenny’s white-capped head broke the surface and her neck was encircled in the crook of Brennan’s arm. Her face was contorted with coughing as he back-pedalled with her to standing depth. Sealed off from any real interest of Mary’s was the fact that he looked grim and furious.
She got down on the concrete, partly because her legs felt unreliable, surprised at the effort required not to cry because with her strange mixture of blitheness and sardonicism Jenny had so nearly—“Oh, Jenny. Are you all right?”
Jenny nodded, unable to speak through her convulsive coughing. There was a red graze on her forehead just under the edge of her cap, startling against her total pallor. In spite of her shaken appearance, she gave the impression of having been jarred back to normal. Brennan looked down at her and said, “Okay now?” and, his grip not particularly gentle, helped her up the steps.
For Mary, the world still hummed and spun. “Come and sit down for a minute, Jenny. You must be—”
“I’m fine,” said Jenny, pulling off her cap and trying for an approximation of her melting smile. She couldn’t manage it. “Stupid, but fine.” For the first time, she took in the fact of Mary’s dress. “I thought you were coming for a swim.”
If she had, might this dangerous mood have been at least diluted? “I was, but I got sidetracked,” said Mary, because she could hardly explain her long and fruitless interval on the telephone. Something seemed to be badly missing from this scene, and she turned to Daniel Brennan, who had stripped off his polo shirt and seemed illogically to be trying to dry his hands on it. “I’m so glad you were here and watching. We can’t thank you enough.”
“You could have dinner with me tonight,” suggested Brennan surprisingly. He had rearranged his face into amiability. “That is if Jenny’s up to it.”
“Oh, I’ll be up to it,” said Jenny, airy, and sauntered away. The few observers were drifting off too, glancing over their shoulders. One of the two children said to the other with fascination and overtones of regret, “She almost drownded.”
Brennan heard. “She probably would have made it by herself,” he said, and seemed to feel a trace of reaction. “If I were a drinking man . . . for someone so much at home in the water, Jenny put up quite a fight. Fortunately, I am a drinking man. Seven-thirty, or should I call you, just in case?”
“Better call,” said Mary, although it was Jenny who had done the accepting, “and thank you again.” She collected Jenny’s terry robe and straw bag, and made a firm, unscrupulous resolution to see for herself the message from Astrid as soon as she was out of sight. Now that she thought about it, it would be only natural to show a thank-you note for a ride to the person who owned the car and had done the driving, and something had triggered that wildness in Jenny.
The bag was already unzipped—and here was Jenny, coming back along the passageway. “Oh, you got my things. Thanks.” She seemed to be braced for a lecture of some sort, because she said rapidly as they mounted the stairs, “I dove too deep—Acton, Girl Show-off—and I knew there was nobody else in the pool and I got sort of in a panic when I saw Mr. Brennan coming at me. I’m sorry, Mary, I won’t do it again.”
Something told Mary that Jenny did not often apologize, so she only said mildly, “I’d take it very kindly.” Now that it was all over, she felt extraordinarily trembly; such events, she thought, wobbling the key into its hole, could be harder on the spectator than the participant. In their room, she examined the scrape on her cousin’s forehead. “Are you sure you’re all right? Not dizzy or anything?”
“No, and I’m not going to throw up, either. Honestly, stop worrying about me. The Actons are famous for their thick skulls,” said Jenny with a bitterness that her light tone didn’t conceal, and went into the bathroom to change. It was clear that she wanted the incident closed, and equally clear that any question as to what had led to her singular behavior would be met by an air of baffled innocence.
She took the straw handbag with her instead of dumping it on the floor beside her chair as she usually did. The next sound you hear, Mary said to herself, will be that of notepaper being torn into tiny, flushable pieces. She was wrong; the sound she heard, and which shot her upright, was entirely different.
10
IT was like a private and fleeting roll of thunder, and it came from someone falling heavily against the other side of the locked communicating door directly behind the chair
