In the silence of the house was a clock like a measured respiration, and Emmy was faintly audible somewhere. These sounds reassured her and she entered a few steps. ‘You saw me go. Didn’t you tell them where I was?’

  ‘Told them you went to the bathroom.’

  She looked at him curiously, knowing in some way that he was not lying. ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘It was your business where you were going, not mine. If you wanted them to know you should have told them yourself.’

  She sat alertly. ‘You’re a funny sort of a man, aren’t you?’

  Jones moved casually, in no particular direction. ‘How funny?’

  She rose. ‘Oh, I don’t know exactly . . . you don’t like me and yet you told a lie for me.’

  ‘Hell, you don’t think I mind telling a lie, do you?’

  She said with speculation:

  ‘I wouldn’t put anything past you — if you thought you could get any fun out of it.’ Watching his eyes she moved towards the door.

  The trousers hampered him but despite them his agility was amazing. But she was alert and her studied grace lent her muscular control and swiftness, and so it was a bland rubbed panel of wood that he touched. Her dress whipped from sight, he heard a key and her muffled laugh, derisive.

  ‘Damn your soul,’ he spoke in a quiet toneless emotion, ‘open the door.’

  The wood was bland and inscrutable: baffling, holding up to him in its polished depths the fat white blur of his own face. Holding his breath he heard nothing beyond it save a clock somewhere.

  ‘Open the door,’ he repeated, but there was no sound. Has she gone away, or not? he wondered, straining his ears, bending to the bulky tweeded Narcissus of himself in the polished wood. He thought of the windows and walking quietly he crossed the room, finding immovable gauze wire. He returned to the centre of the room without trying to muffle his steps and stood in a mounting anger, cursing her slowly. Then he saw the door handle move.

  He sprang to it. ‘Open the door, you little slut, or I’ll kick your screens out.’

  The lock clicked and he jerked the door open upon Emmy, his trousers over her arm, meeting him with her frightened antagonistic eyes.

  ‘Where—’ began Jones, and Cecily stepped from the shadows, curtsying like a derisive flower.

  ‘Checkmate, Mr Jones.’ Jones paraphrased the rector in a reedy falsetto. ‘Do you know—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cecily quickly, taking Emmy’s arm. ‘But tell us on the veranda.’ She led the way and Jones followed in reluctant admiration. She and the baleful speechless Emmy preceding him sat arm in arm in a porch swing while afternoon sought interstices in soon-to-be lilac wistaria: afternoon flowed and ebbed upon them as they swung and their respective silk and cotton shins took and released sunlight in running planes.

  ‘Sit down, Mr Jones,’ she continued, gushing. ‘Do tell us about yourself. We are so interested, aren’t we, Emmy dear?’ Emmy was watchful and inarticulate, like an animal ‘Emmy, dear Mr Jones, has missed all of your conversation and admiring you as we all do — we simply cannot help it, Mr Jones — she is naturally anxious to make up for it.’

  Jones cupped a match in his palms and there were two little flames in his eyes, leaping and sinking to pin points.

  ‘You are silent, Mr Jones? Emmy and I both would like to hear some more of what you have learned about us from your extensive amatory career. Don’t we, Emmy darling?’

  ‘No, I won’t spoil it for you,’ Jones replied heavily. ‘You are on the verge of getting some first-hand information of your own. As for Miss Emmy, I’ll teach her sometime later, in private.’

  Emmy continued to watch him with fierce dumb distrust. Cecily said: ‘At first-hand?’

  ‘Aren’t you being married tomorrow? You can learn from Oswald. He should certainly be able to tell you, travelling as he seems to with a sparring partner. Got caught, at last, didn’t you?’

  She shivered. She looked so delicate, so needing to be cared for, that Jones, becoming masculine and sentimental, felt again like a cloddish brute. He lit his pipe again and Emmy, convicting herself of the power of speech, said:

  ‘Yonder they come.’

  A cab had drawn up to the gate and Cecily sprang to her feet and ran along the porch to the steps. Jones and Emmy rose and Emmy vanished somewhere as four people descended from the cab. So that’s him, thought Jones ungrammatically, following Cecily, watching her as she stood poised on the top step like a bird, her hand to her breast. Trust her!

  He looked again at the party coming through the gate, the rector looming above them all. There was something changed about the divine: age seemed to have suddenly overtaken him, unresisted, coming upon him like a highwayman. He’s sure sick, Jones told himself. The woman, that Mrs Something-or-other, left the party and hastened ahead. She mounted the steps to Cecily.

  ‘Come darling,’ she said, taking the girl’s arm, ‘come inside. He is not well and the light hurts his eyes. Come in and meet him there, hadn’t you rather?’

  ‘No, no: here. I have waited so long for him.’

  The other woman was kind but obdurate. And she led the girl into the house. Cecily reluctant, with reverted head cried: ‘Uncle Joe! his face! is he sick?’

  The divine’s face was grey and slack as dirty snow. At the steps he stumbled slightly and Jones sprang forward, taking his arm. ‘Thanks, buddy,’ said the third man, in a private’s uniform, whose hand was beneath Mahon’s elbow. They mounted the steps and crossing the porch passed under the fanlight, into the dark hall.

  ‘Take your cap, Loot,’ murmured the enlisted man. The other removed it and handed it to him. They heard swift tapping feet crossing a room and the study door opened letting a flood of light fall upon them, and Cecily cried:

  ‘Donald! Donald! She says your face is hur — oooooh!’ she ended, screaming as she saw him.

  The light passing through her fine hair gave her a halo and lent her frail dress a fainting nimbus about her crumpling body like a stricken poplar. Mrs Powers moving quickly caught her, but not before her head had struck the door jamb.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  MRS SAUNDERS SAID: ‘You come away now, let your sister alone.’

  Young Robert Saunders fretted but optimistic, joining again that old battle between parent and child, hopeful in the face of invariable past defeat:

  ‘But can’t I ask her a civil question? I just want to know what his scar l—’

  ‘Come now, come with mamma.’

  ‘But I just want to know what his sc—’

  ‘Robert.’

  ‘But mamma,’ he essayed again, despairing. His mother pushed him firmly doorward.

  ‘Run down to the garden and tell your father to come here. Run, now.’

  He left the room in exasperation. His mamma would have been shocked could she have read his thoughts. It wasn’t her especially. They’re all alike, he guessed largely, as has many a man before him and as many will after him. He wasn’t going to hurt the old ‘fraid cat.

  Cecily freed of her clothing lay crushed and pathetic between cool linen, surrounded by a mingled scent of cologne and ammonia, her fragile face coiffed in a towel. Her mother drew a chair to the side of the bed and examined her daughter’s pretty shallow face, the sweep of her lashes upon her white cheek, her arms paralleling the shape of her body beneath the covers, her delicate blue-veined wrists and her long slender hands relaxed and palm-upwards beside her. Then young Robert Saunders, without knowing it, had his revenge.

  ‘Darling, what did his face look like?’

  Cecily shuddered, turning her head on the pillow. ‘Ooooh, don’t, don’t, mamma! I c-can’t bear to think of it.’

  (But I just want to ask you a civil question.) ‘There there. We won’t talk about it until you feel better.’

  ‘Not ever, not ever. If I have to see him again I’ll — I’ll just die. I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it.’

  She was crying again frankly like a child, not even concealing her face. Her mother rose and leaned over her. ‘There, there. Don’t cry any more. You’ll be ill.’ She gently brushed the girl’s hair from her temples, rearranging the towel. She bent down and kissed her daughter’s pale cheek. ‘Mamma’s sorry, baby. Suppose you try to sleep. Shall I bring you a tray at supper time?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t eat. Just let me lie here alone and I’ll feel better.’

  The older woman lingered, still curious. (I just want to ask her a civil question.) The telephone rang, and with a last ineffectual pat at the pillow she withdrew.

  Lifting the receiver, she remarked her husband closing the garden gate behind him.

  ‘Yes? . . . Mrs Saunders. . . . Oh, George? . . . Quite well, thank you. How are you . . . no, I am afraid not. . . . What? . . . yes, but she is not feeling well . . . later, perhaps. . . . Not tonight. Call her tomorrow . . . yes, yes, quite well, thank you. Good-bye.’

  She passed through the cool darkened hall and on to the veranda letting her tightly corseted figure sink creaking into a rocking chair as her husband, carrying a sprig of mint and his hat, mounted the steps. Here was Cecily in the masculine and gone to flesh: the same slightly shallow good looks and somewhere an indicated laxness of moral fibre. He had once been precise and dapper but now he was clad slovenly in careless uncreased grey and earthy shoes. His hair still curled youthfully upon his head and he had Cecily’s eyes. He was a Catholic, which was almost as sinful as being a republican; his fellow townsmen, while envying his social and financial position in the community, yet looked askance at him because he and his family made periodical trips to Atlanta to attend church.

  ‘Tobe!’ he bellowed, taking a chair near his wife.

  ‘Well, Robert,’ she began with zest, ‘Donald Mahon came home today.’

  ‘Government sent his body back, did they?’

  ‘No, he came back himself. He got off the train this afternoon.’

  ‘Eh? Why, but he’s dead.’

  ‘But he isn’t dead. Cecily was there and saw him. A strange fat young man brought her home in a cab — completely collapsed. She said something about a scar on him. She fainted, poor child. I made her go to bed at once. I never did find who that strange young man was,’ she ended fretfully.

  Tobe in a white jacket appeared with a bowl of ice, sugar, water, and a decanter. Mr Saunders sat staring at his wife. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said at last. And again, ‘I’ll be damned.’

  His wife rocked complacent over her news. After a while Mr Saunders, breaking his trance, stirred. He crushed his mint spring between his fingers and taking a cube of ice he rubbed the mint over it, then dropped both into a tall glass. Then he spooned sugar into the glass and dribbled whisky from the decanter slowly, and slowly stirring it he stared at his wife. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said for the third time.

  Tobe filled the glass from a water-bottle and withdrew.

  ‘So he come home. Well, well, I’m glad on the parson’s account. Pretty decent feller.’

  ‘You must have forgotten what it means.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘To us.’

  ‘To us?’

  ‘Cecily was engaged to him, you know.’

  Mr Saunders sipped and, setting his glass on the floor beside him, he lit a cigar. ‘Well, we’ve given our consent, haven’t we? I ain’t going to back out now.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Does Sis still want to?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was such a shock to her, poor child, his coming home and the scar and all. But do you think it is a good thing?’

  ‘I never did think it was a good thing. I never wanted it.’

  ‘Are you putting it off on me? Do you think I insisted on it?’

  Mr Saunders from long experience said mildly: ‘She ain’t old enough to marry yet.’

  ‘Nonsense. How old was I when we married?’

  He raised his glass again. ‘Seems to me you are the one insisting on it.’ Mrs Saunders rocking, stared at him: he was made aware of his stupidity. ‘Why do you think it ain’t a good thing, then?’

  ‘I declare, Robert. Sometimes . . .’ she sighed and then as one explains to a child in fond exasperation at its stupidity: ‘Well, an engagement in wartime and an engagement in peacetime are two different things. Really, I don’t see how he can expect to hold her to it.’

  ‘Now look here, Minnie. If he went to war expecting her to wait for him and come back expecting her to take him, there’s nothing else for them to do. And if she still wants to don’t you go persuading her out of it, you hear?’

  ‘Are you going to force your daughter into marriage? You just said yourself she is too young.’

  ‘Remember, I said if she still wants to. By the way, he ain’t lame or badly hurt, is he?’ he asked quickly.

  ‘I don’t know. Cecily cried when I tried to find out.’

  ‘Sis is a fool, sometimes. But don’t you go monkeying with them, now.’ He raised his glass and took a long draught, then he puffed his cigar furiously, righteously.

  ‘I declare, Robert, I don’t understand you sometimes. The idea of you driving your own daughter into marriage with a man who has nothing and who may be half dead, and who probably won’t work anyway. You know yourself how these ex-soldiers are.’

  ‘You are the one wants her to get married. I ain’t. Who do you want her to take, then?’

  ‘Well, there’s Dr Gary. He likes her, and Harrison Maurier from Atlanta. Cecily likes him, I think.’

  Mr Saunders inelegantly snorted. ‘Who? That Maurier feller? I wouldn’t have that damn feller around here at all. Slick hair and cigarettes all over the place. You better pick out another one.’

  ‘I’m not picking out anybody. I just don’t want you to drive her into marrying that Mahon boy.’

  ‘I ain’t driving her, I tell you. You have already taught me better than to try to drive a woman to do anything. But I don’t intend to interfere if she does want to marry Mahon.’

  She sat rocking and he finished his julep. The oaks on the lawn became still with dusk, and the branches of trees were as motionless as coral fathoms deep under seas. A tree frog took up his monotonous trilling and the west was a vast green lake, still as eternity. Tobe appeared silently. ‘Supper served, Miss Minnie.’

  The cigar arced redly into a canna bed, and they rose.

  ‘Where is Bob, Tobe?’

  ‘I don’t know’m. I seed him gwine to’ds de garden a while back, but I ain’t seed him since.’

  ‘See if you can find him. And tell him to wash his face and hands.’

  ‘Yessum.’ He held the door for them and they passed into the house, leaving the twilight behind them filled with Tobe’s mellowed voice calling across the dusk.

  2

  But young Robert Saunders could not hear him. He was at that moment climbing a high board fence which severed the dusk above his head. He conquered it at last and sliding downwards his trousers evinced reluctance, then accepting the gambit accompanied him with a ripping sound. He sprawled in damp grass feeling a thin shallow fire across his young behind, and said Damn, regaining his feet and disjointing his hip trying to see down his back.

  Ain’t that hell, he remarked to the twilight. I have rotten luck. It’s all your fault, too, for not telling me, he thought, gaining a vicarious revenge on all sisters. He picked up the object he had dropped in falling and crossed the rectory lawn through dew, towards the house. There was a light in a heretofore unused upper room and his heart sank. Had he gone to bed this early? Then he saw silhouetted feet on the balustrade of the porch and the red eye of a cigarette. He sighed with relief. That must be him.

  He mounted the steps, saying: ‘Hi, Donald.’

  ‘Hi, Colonel,’ answered the one sitting there. Approaching, he discerned soldier clothes. That’s him. Now I’ll see, he thought exultantly, snapping on a flash light and throwing its beam full on the man’s face. Aw, shucks. He was becoming thoroughly discouraged. Did anyone ever have such luck? There must be a cabal against him.

  ‘You ain’t got no scar,’ he stated with dejection. ‘You ain’t even Donald, are you?’

  ‘You guessed it, bub. I ain’t even Donald. But say, how about turning that searchlight some other way?’

  He snapped off the light in weary disillusion. He burst out: ‘They won’t tell me nothing. I just want to know what his scar looks like but they won’t tell me nothing about it. Say, has he gone to bed?’

  ‘Yes, he’s gone to bed. This ain’t a good time to see his scar.’

  ‘How about tomorrow morning?’ hopefully. ‘Could I see it then?’

  ‘I dunno. Better wait till then.’

  ‘Listen,’ he suggested with inspiration, ‘I tell you what: tomorrow about eight when I am going to school you kind of get him to look out of the window and I’ll be passing and I’ll see it. I asked Sis, but she wouldn’t tell me nothing.’

  ‘Who is Sis, bub?’

  ‘She’s just my sister. Gosh, she’s mean. If I’d seen his scar I’d a told her now, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘You bet. What’s your sister’s name?’

  ‘Name’s Cecily Saunders, like mine only mine’s Robert Saunders. You’ll do that, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh . . . Cecily. . . . Sure, you leave it to me, Colonel’

  He sighed with relief, yet still lingered. ‘Say how many soldiers has he got here?’

  ‘About one and a half, bub.’

  ‘One and a half? Are they live ones?’

  ‘Well practically.’

  ‘How can you have one and a half soldiers if they are live ones?’

  ‘Ask the war department. They know how to do it.’

  He pondered briefly. ‘Gee, I wish we could get some soldiers at our house. Do you reckon we could?’

  ‘Why, I expect you could.’

  ‘Could? How?’ he asked eagerly.

  ‘Ask your sister. She can tell you.’

  ‘Aw, she won’t tell me.’

  ‘Sure she will. You ask her.’

  ‘Well, I’ll try,’ he agreed without hope, yet still optimistic ‘Well, I guess I better be going. They might be kind of anxious about me,’ he explained, descending the steps. ‘Good-bye, mister,’ he added politely.