介绍:
She set down the vase by the uneven steps that rose to the fountain’s stone basin. The last
thing she wanted was an undergraduate debate on eighteenth-century literature. She didn’t
think Fielding was crude at all, or that Richardson was a fine psychologist, but she wasn’t
going to be drawn in, defending, defining, attacking. She was tired of that, and Robbie was
tenacious in argument.
Instead she said, “Leon’s coming today, did you know?”
“I heard a rumor. That’s marvelous.”
“He’s bringing a friend, this man Paul Marshall.”
“The chocolate millionaire. Oh no! And you’re giving him flowers!”
She smiled. Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was? She no longer
understood him. They had fallen out of touch at Cambridge. It had been too difficult to do
anything else. She changed the subject.
“The Old Man says you’re going to be a doctor.”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“You must love the student life.”
He looked away again, but this time for only a second or less, and when he turned to her she
thought she saw a touch of irritation. Had she sounded condescending? She saw his eyes
again, green and orange flecks, like a boy’s marble. When he spoke he was perfectly
pleasant.
“I know you never liked that sort of thing, Cee. But how else do you become a doctor?”
“That’s my point. Another six years. Why do it?”
He wasn’t offended. She was the one who was overinterpreting, and jittery in his presence,
and she was annoyed with herself.
He was taking her question seriously. “No one’s really going to give me work as a
landscape gardener. I don’t want to teach, or go in for the civil service. And medicine
interests me . . .” He broke off as a thought occurred to him. “Look, I’ve agreed to pay
your father back. That’s the arrangement.”
“That’s not what I meant at all.”
She was surprised that he should think she was raising the question of money. That was
ungenerous of him. Her father had subsidized Robbie’s education all his life. Had anyone
ever objected? She had thought she was imagining it, but in fact she was right—there was
something trying in Robbie’s manner lately. He had a way of wrong-footing her whenever he
could. Two days before he had rung the front doorbell—in itself odd, for he had always had
the freedom of the house. When she was called down, he was standing outside asking in a
loud, impersonal voice if he could borrow a book. As it happened, Polly was on all fours,
washing the tiles in the entrance hall. Robbie made a great show of removing his boots which
weren’t dirty at all, and then, as an afterthought, took his socks off as well, and tiptoed
with comic exaggeration across the wet floor. Everything he did was designed to distance
her. He was playacting the cleaning lady’s son come to the big house on an errand. They
went into the library together, and when he found his book, she asked him to stay for a
coffee. It was a pretense, his dithering refusal—he was one of the most confident people
she had ever met. She was being mocked, she knew. Rebuffed, she left the room and went
upstairs and lay on the bed with Clarissa, and read without taking in a word, feeling her
irritation and confusion grow. She was being mocked, or she was being punished—she did not
know which was worse. Punished for being in a different circle at Cambridge, for not having
a charlady for a mother; mocked for her poor degree—not that they actually awarded degrees
to women anyway.
Awkwardly, for she still had her cigarette, she picked up the vase and balanced it on the
rim of the basin. It would have made better sense to take the flowers out first, but she was
too irritable. Her hands were hot and dry and she had to grip the porcelain all the tighter.
Robbie was silent, but she could tell from his expression—a forced, stretched smile that
did not part his lips—that he regretted what he had said. That was no comfort either. This
was what happened when they talked these days; one or the other was always in the wrong,
trying to call back the last remark. There was no ease, no stability in the course of their
conversations, no chance to relax. Instead, it was spikes, traps, and awkward turns that
caused her to dislike herself almost as much as she disliked him, though she did not doubt
that he was mostly to blame. She hadn’t changed, but there was no question that he had. He
was putting distance between himself and the family that had been completely open to him and
given him everything. For this reason alone—expectation of his refusal, and her own
displeasure in advance—she had not invited him to dinner that night. If he wanted distance,
then let him have it.
Of the four dolphins whose tails supported the shell on which the Triton squatted, the one
nearest to Cecilia had its wide-open mouth stopped with moss and algae. Its spherical stone
eyeballs, as big as apples, were iridescent green. The whole statue had acquired around its
northerly surfaces a bluish-green patina, so that from certain approaches, and in low light,
the muscle-bound Triton really seemed a hundred leagues under the sea. Bernini’s intention
must have been for the water to trickle musically from the wide shell with its irregular
edges into the basin below. But the pressure was too weak, so that instead the water slid
soundlessly down the underside of the shell where opportunistic slime hung in dripping
points, like stalactites in a limestone cave. The basin itself was over three feet deep and
clear. The bottom was of a pale, creamy stone over which undulating white-edged rectangles
of refracted sunlight divided and overlapped.
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