Rest and Be Thankful (32 page)

“Me,” she said bitterly. “I’m all wrong. Have you ever felt all wrong?”

“Constantly. Haven’t you?”

She was surprised, both by his answer and by his question. She had never felt all wrong before—never.

“You should be happy,” she said. “You’ve written a book. And you’ve a job. Which is more than Earl Grubbock has.”

“That’s his own choice. He doesn’t want a steady job. He says he likes to be free to change,” O’Farlan reminded her.

“Well, you’ve a job that
you
like. Karl hasn’t.”

“No one is forcing him to write advertising copy. And his boss can’t be as bad as Koffing says he is, not if Koffing got a month’s vacation in order to finish his book.”

“I suppose so.” Mimi had been grateful enough to the publishing firm she worked for, when they agreed to an extra week’s vacation without pay so that she might come down here. Carla was lucky in having her funny little bookstore, down in the Village, closed for the hot weeks of August. And Bob O’Farlan, being a schoolteacher, had the summer to himself entirely. He didn’t know how lucky he was. “Well, if that doesn’t cheer you up you’ve got a wife and children. That’s what most men want, isn’t it? A steady job, a wife, and children.”

“Yes,” he said, his voice flat and non-committal.

Mimi looked at him. He liked teaching, she knew.

They climbed along the dry edge of the creek until they came to the bridge. There they scrambled up the bank to the road. They walked in the direction of Snaggletooth.

“Bob,” she said unexpectedly, “why didn’t your wife come out here?” She had never thought that important before; this morning, somehow, it was.

“Jenny?” He was startled for a moment. “Oh, she couldn’t. She’s got the children.”

But they were quite old: fifteen or something. Mimi said, “That may have been an excuse. Perhaps she thought she’d be too alone; after all, when you work you don’t think of very much else. Do you always write this way?”

“When I get the time to write.” He was half angry now.

“I know it’s difficult. I’ve a job too, you know, to eat up my days.”

“And very few free evenings, I’d imagine,” he said coldly.

“You think I’ll never write anything?” She looked at him in surprise. She had a way of asking questions, her eyes wide, her lips ready to smile, as if she hoped the answer would be a kind one. It was hard to disappoint her, he found. His anger left him.

He smiled. “No one is going to write the book for you, Mimi. Why worry about it, anyway? You may as well enjoy your life and keep happy. That may be more important than writing a book.”

“But I want to write.”

He didn’t answer.

“I know what you are thinking,” she said. “I’ve no self-discipline. Well, I can have it if I want to. How do you think I keep my figure like this, anyway? And I have experienced life, and I have imagination, and I have—why, what are you thinking? I wasn’t trying to boast. Is there anything wrong in listing your assets to cheer yourself up a bit?”

He shook his head. Experienced life, she had said. She had always got what she wanted. That wasn’t the kind of experience she needed, not if she wanted to write. But he couldn’t tell her that.

“This is one of my favourite views,” he said, as they climbed the hilly road. He stopped to look at the mountains, rising in uneven rows beyond the green valley. “I think I see the boys,” he said suddenly, and pointed. “Up there! On the shoulder of that second hill above Branch Creek.”

Mimi didn’t look. “Let’s go back,” she said. “I’m cold.”

They said nothing as they walked quickly down the road, but at the bridge she spoke again. “What do
you
mean by self-discipline? Worries and troubles? Well, I’ve had them. Or disappointments? I’ve had them too.”

“But never very real ones, never very deep ones. You’ve been luckier than most, Mimi.”

“You sound as if you envied me,” she said, in surprise. “I thought you—well, I just thought, that’s all.”

“That I was middle-aged, and thoroughly satisfied, and set in my ways? That I never wanted to turn the clock back twenty years and begin again?”

“But if you wanted that you could.”

“Only if others wanted it too—all the others who are part of my life as I am a part of theirs. But I am not a free agent. No man is.”

“You mean that to keep these others happy you’d be willing to be unhappy?”

“Not
willing,”
he admitted. “But it’s got to be done. That’s all.”

Mimi thought suddenly, we are talking about his family, about his wife. She tried to choose her next words carefully, to keep everything as impersonal as possible. “Won’t they feel your unwillingness? Won’t that make them as unhappy as you will be? So what good is your sacrifice?”

He said sharply, “I’ve been thinking that out for months.” But not exactly in that way, he reminded himself.

“I’m sorry. I wanted to get you to cheer me up. And all I’ve done is stir up your troubles.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got accustomed to them in the last ten years.” He disliked himself for that remark the moment it was made. And perhaps I helped to earn my disappointments, he thought. It was a new idea. He didn’t like it. But it stuck with him.

“I think we both need coffee,” Mimi said, leading the way into the house. They went through the hall towards the kitchen. Carla was already there, for they could hear her voice as they approached its door. “...haunted by her. A man can easily get rid of a woman.” Mrs. Gunn said, “Can he?” in that dry way of hers, and Carla said, “At least, you’d...”

But Mimi had moved away from the kitchen door. She looked down at her boots. “I suppose I’d better change them first,” she said.

“A good idea,” O’Farlan said quickly.

She looked back, when she was nearly at the top of the staircase. He was still standing in the hall, watching her.

She went into her room and sat down on the edge of her unmade bed. Everyone knew. O’Farlan and Mrs. Gunn and Carla, Chuck and Koffing and Grubbock. Once she would have been scornful. Let them talk, she would have said, and she’d have laughed. But now she covered her face with her hands and pressed her cold fingers against the cheeks that were suddenly on fire. Some men might be flattered or amused to have a pretty girl so much interested in them that others could notice. But he wouldn’t be either flattered or amused. He’d be as mad as hell. If I don’t win him, she thought suddenly, it won’t be anything or anyone else that beats me—it won’t be the mountains or any other woman. It will be just Mimi Bassinbrook, as I’ve made her.

* * *

Carla Brightjoy had tidied her room, made her bed, and found she was still half an hour early for breakfast. So she went downstairs into the kitchen, as she often did in the mornings, to get an early cup of coffee and help with the orange-juice. Now that Drene had gone Mrs. Gunn needed some extra help.

She needed it especially this morning. Norah, who looked as if she had been crying, was avoiding the kitchen. And Mrs. Gunn, as she mixed the dough for sweet rolls, looked as if she had been making someone cry.

“Come in, come in,” she said, when she turned round to see Carla hesitating at the door. “Help yourself to coffee. I won’t bite your head off.”

Carla drank the cup of coffee without saying anything.

“You’re very silent this morning,” Mrs. Gunn said, looking up suddenly from her work. She smiled. “I’m not angry with anyone. I’m just worried.”

Carla abandoned her silence gladly. “Norah?” she asked.

“Earl Grubbock,” Mrs. Gunn corrected her. “Caught him standing out in the yard this morning, with slickers over his arm, throwing pebbles up at Norah’s window to get her out of bed. She was out of it, too, standing at the window, waving to him.”

“That seems harmless enough.”

“But where’s it going to lead to? He will be leaving in little over a week. She’ll never see him again.”

“Yes, we’ll all be leaving,” Carla said gloomily. She looked round the friendly kitchen and thought of her bare little room in Greenwich Village. Once she had thought it romantic. “I suppose it was my own fault that I was lonely in New York,” she said. “I used to see plenty of people each day; but if I talked to a customer at all it was always about some book. That’s why I chose the job, of course: I thought books would be the right kind of work for me to do. And I thought if I stayed at home each night and read and wrote, then I’d be a writer. Then I wondered why I got rejection slips. Saying ‘Promising. Regrets.’ And some just said ‘Regrets.’ That as far as I got.”

“I guess you were too scared of people.”

“I see that now. Funny how you don’t see things at the time.” “Well, you aren’t scared any more,” Mrs. Gunn said.

“Not so much.” Carla put down the empty coffee-cup, and started halving the oranges. “I’ve changed a little, haven’t I? Am I beginning to do you credit?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. I keep my glasses for reading and writing. I wear my shirt tucked into my jeans. I’ve stopped braiding my hair and putting ribbons on it. I’ve cut it short, and everyone likes it.”

“Don’t see what I had to do with it,” Mrs. Gunn protested. But she was pleased. She added a little twist of decoration to each roll as she shaped it with her firm, light hand.

“Oh, it was just a feeling I got from you. You send out little waves of approval and disapproval, you know,” Carla said, with a laugh.

“I wish Earl Grubbock felt them.”

“Why don’t you like him, Mrs. Gunn?”

“I do. Only, I just don’t want him being casual with Norah, the way he treated his girls in Europe.”

“How do you know if he had any girls in Europe?”

“I can read, can’t I? All soldiers had girls, and treated them as if they were a glass of beer or a steak dinner. And if men treated girls that way abroad—and I can’t find any book that tells me different—then that’s the way they’ll treat them anywhere. And I don’t think that’s good enough for
any
girl, wherever she lives. A nice girl deserves better than that, doesn’t she?”

“But perhaps Earl isn’t that kind of man.”

“I don’t get the feeling he’s looking for a wife. He’s here for a good time, and a pretty girl is part of it.”

“But Norah’s awfully sensible, Mrs. Gunn.”

“That’s
a new word for staying out until one o’clock every morning.” Mrs. Gunn bustled around the kitchen, banged the oven door, slammed the skillet on the stove, as if energy would dissipate her anger. It helped. “As I see it,” she said more calmly, “there are several men who wouldn’t object to falling in love with Norah, and marrying her, and keeping her happy for the rest of her life. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing.” It made Carla unhappy even to think of it, though.

“So what right have other men to come and enjoy themselves for a few weeks, and make a girl fall in love with them, and then leave her?”

“They don’t think of it that way.”

“Then it’s about time they did. Let them enjoy themselves with girls that follow the same game and know their rules. That’s all I’m asking. Is that unfair?”

“But I don’t think life was ever fair to women. Or else we’d all be beautiful. Like Drene or Mimi Bassinbrook.” Carla thought for a little, and then she added with painful honesty, “You know, if I were a man I suppose I’d be stupid enough to fall for Mimi. She’s the most attractive girl.” Except Drene, of course, but she hadn’t better praise Drene to Mrs. Gunn.

Mrs. Gunn said nothing.

Carla, knowing she was making a mistake, still couldn’t resist making it. She had been too fascinated and bewildered by Mimi Bassinbrook, ever since she came here. “Do you think Jim Brent’s more in love with her than he admits? It seems strange that he lets himself be haunted by her. A man can easily get rid of a woman.”

“Can he?” Mrs. Gunn asked dryly. She was seemingly concentrating on cutting the slab of bacon into neat slices.

“At least, you’d think so,” Carla said quickly, appeasingly. “I suppose it must be difficult, too. The trouble is, some girls have so many easy conquests that they think every man could be theirs for the taking.”

“Maybe,” Mrs. Gunn said.

There was silence. Carla flushed a little. She measured the orange-juice with exaggerated care into the seven glasses before her.

“Come in, Mr. O’Farlan,” Mrs. Gunn was saying. “Coffee’s over there. Help yourself.”

It was a very peaceful evening, Mrs. Peel thought. She glanced round the living-room, and tried to imagine Earl and Karl in the mountains. By this time they would have made camp for the night: they’d be stretched near their fire, wrapped in warm blankets, looking at the stars. A most poetical experience, if you could judge by all the accounts you had read of sleeping out on mountain-sides.

But it was certainly peaceful here. Robert O’Farlan had no one to argue with tonight. He was pretending to be reading a magazine, and not managing it very well. Perhaps he was unsettled by the presence of Prender Atherton Jones, who was reading the last pages of Robert’s manuscript with a critical frown. Mimi was sitting as near the fire as possible, with an extra cardigan draped round her shoulders. She was shivering a little, and beginning to sneeze, and she said nothing at all. Carla and Esther were over by the window seat. Esther was talking enthusiastically; Carla was looking a little surprised. Sally was studying the help-wanted columns in a newspaper, trying to look cheerful, forcing herself to be amused.

Suddenly Robert O’Farlan rose. “I’ve got a letter to write,” he said, and left the room.

Mimi looked after him. She wondered if it could be a letter to his wife. Then she told herself she was becoming slightly soft in the head with sentimental imaginings. Bob’s problems were his own, weren’t they? She had enough to think about in her own life. Only... She got up slowly from her chair. “I think I’m catching a cold,” she admitted at last. “I’m going to bed.”

“I think that’s very wise,” Mrs. Peel said. “Take some aspirin.”

Sally looked up from the newspaper. “I’ll get that for you, and a hot-water bottle.”

“I can manage,” Mimi said sharply. Then she softened her voice and said, “Thanks all the same.” She left at once.