The Theoretical Foot (5 page)

But what had Joe been doing all this time? She felt ashamed, realizing that she had not thought of him—the actual bone-and-blood man, the Joe who was her inward secret love—since she'd sat on his strong round thighs in the little car. She hurried to cover her confusion and as she went past the closed door where Dan Tennant had stood in his lovely mussed pajama bottoms, she turned her head resolutely away.

“Has anyone seen Joe?” she asked, her voice cracking slightly as she stood on the top of the three steps leading down into the the big room, now entirely empty.

v

Well, this is the damnedest place I was ever in, Susan thought irritably. I mean, I'm a guest here, after all, and people just keep disappearing!

She grasped the heavy linen curtain that hung by the steps and peered disdainfully about her. Not a soul, not even anyone asleep.

Then her face softened as she looked with a growing pleasure at the long high room. Like the rest she'd seen, this room had been plastered in rough white but here the wood was a dark gleaming brown, like the furniture, which she knew instinctively to be as fine as it was certain to be comfortable. Almost the entire side to her left was tall wide windows that stood open now, hung in thick linen striped softly in green and buff and blue, moving gently now in the noon breeze off the lake.

At the far end was the fireplace with a faded, sloppy red Moroccan cushion before it on the large gray-green rug. To the left an open doorway was curtained in the same striped linen as the one she held and through it she could see into what looked to be a green-tiled pantry whose walls gleamed with the rounds and ovals of stacked china and the soft shock of silver and pewter vessels hung on dark shelves.

On her right an enormous mirror, curved at the top like a great window into another room and framed in dull old gold, separated two long bookcases that quite covered the wall.

There were two couches and some chairs and the blue chaise longue where Honor had lain when they'd first arrived and a big rectangular table with grapes carved along its sides.

Sue sniffed absently, then walked quietly into the middle of the silent room. It was the most pleasant room she'd ever seen. And that mirror!

Colors looked more intense in the mirror, truer than life. It was like a beautiful dream, in which everything was more vivid than it usually appeared. And the room she saw in it was much clearer, somehow, than the real one. She stared into it, not even thinking to look at her own reflection so struck was she by all the rest.

There were the windows, past the green expanse of rug; the curtains swayed softly and the sunlight falling through them made a rosy yet cool light in the room. Through them she could see a blue much clearer and much more beautiful than the blue of the real sky behind her in the real windows.

And now coming though the middle opening was a man; his large eyes were much bluer than those of a real person, his hair certainly the bluish-silver she'd only seen in dreams. He walked softly toward her, moving his small light body in its white gleaming linen clothes as if he were a dancer, not gliding but with the grace with which all real people ought to move.

She watched him come silently toward her in the too-clear glass. Just as he was about to touch her, she turned around, blinking, and willed herself back into reality. It was not a shock, not even a slight disappointment as he still stood right there, smiling at her with his large blue eyes.

“Hello,” he said. “I'm Timothy Garton. Has everyone else deserted you?”

For the second time that hour, this time more strongly than ever before in her life, Sue felt she had never, but
never,
before seen such an attractive man. Oh, she gasped silently. He's wonderful! He's sophisticated, as if he'd really lived and suffered and . . .? He
lived.
She looked at him seriously.

(What a sweet child, Tim thought, and what a tiny one! She almost makes me feel like a tall man. Is this the way Daniel feels as he looks down at Nan? When Nan peers up at Daniel does she feel the faint sumission
that's in this woman's eyes? I suppose she is a woman and not a girl and I suppose things as small as this have average-size emotions. Is it harder for them, perhaps, less ground taken up, less to racket about in? She's extraordinarily sweet and so tiny too!)

Susan knew that if she didn't speak now she never would. Help! she said to herself, trying to pull herself from the compelling sureness of his gaze as if she were coming up for a breath after being underwater. His gaze swirled around her like the cold comfortable waters of a deep pool. This won't do, she thought now, with new determination.

“Hello,” she said. “I'm . . .”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “You're Susan and I cannot tell you how we've been looking forward to having you here . . .”

That's a lie, she thought. He's never given me a thought except to perhaps wish Joe wouldn't come barging in here dragging some girl like me, but I do rather like him for lying.

“And I'm really terribly sorry things are a little screwy for a few minutes and that we can't put you up here for the night. My sister will be right down. Sara's in the kitchen,” he added, as if this was an important postscript. “We'll go through there but there's no real use bothering her. Just follow me.”

He walked silently, with his great grace and ease, toward the wide door into the pantry. “That is,” he added, turning around and smiling at her in a secret way, “you'll follow me if you know what's good for you.”

Sue's heart now pounded alarmingly as she followed him across the room.

Nearing the steps that led into the pantry, she began to hear small noises and once in the light she saw a little office lined with shelves and cupboards. Beyond it the kitchen lay as part of the living room behind the fireplace wall.

Sue followed in Tim Garton's wary steps, noticing the great hood over the electric stove and a blue map of
La Gastronomie Italienne
on a cupboard door and the wide window beyond with one great white daisy in the Mexican jar upon the sill.

Sara was bent over the chopping board that was piled high with lettuces and did not look up as they came into the little room. “I hear you,” she said to Tim. “You sound like rats. Lunch is in seven minutes. Have one for me, will you, and get up here in time to help carry it all out.”

“Right,” Tim said. “I will. Take it easy, darling.”

Sue's heart thudded as if it, for that instant, believed he'd spoken to her. His voice was almost impersonal, neither fervent nor glib, not like the way an assistant director at a Hollywood party might say,
Dawww-ling!
He'd certainly been talking to Sara, hadn't he? Sue followed him down the cellar steps feeling lonely suddenly.

Would no one ever talk to her in that fond way? Would it always be the quick hot voice of passion or else nothing? I'm one of those women, she thought, who is made for lust, which is just my luck, and no one will ever say
darling
to me the way he just said it to Sara Porter, so easily, as if loving her were as simple as breathing or eating.

The thought made her gloomy.

As she sighed, she heard the wheeze in her breathing. She looked away, directing her gaze toward the walls on the sides of the cellar steps painted in the same plaster that had been painted a frolicking canary yellow with a thin green stripe at shoulder height to separate the yellow below from that white of the plaster above. A small light glowed in its feeble way at the bottom of the stairwell.

“Watch your step here, Susan,” Tim said. “Follow closely by me. I'd hate to have you get lost under a strawberry box or something before Nan even got to meet you.”

She followed him as he moved to the right through two different cellar rooms as cool as tombs and rich with the scent of ripening fruit and cucumbers and summer cabbages. She saw shelves filled with preserves put up in jars and in the next room the round gleaming bottoms of a thousand wine bottles. There, standing in the cold dim light of a single electrical bulb, stood Joe and Honor with Daniel Tennant.

Sue's heart stopped, it seemed, and she felt her head swim slightly to see all three men who now seemed to mean so much to
her there underground together. Of course there was Honor, too, who was with them, and as Sue stood watching her, Honor shivered and put down the little glass she was holding onto a wooden table, then wrapped her long arms around what looked to Sue like such an incredibly small waist. There was gooseflesh on her arms and her eyes were melancholy.

Then there was Joe, his face—with the bang of dark curls above it—looking young and thick and tired. He, too, held a small glass so tiny it was almost hidden by the size of his right hand. With the other he leaned carefully against the damp wall.

Tim Garton stood between Sue and Honor and Sue began to feel she could hardly look at him for the love she felt for his small lithe body and his beautiful blue-white hair and dark eyes and for the half-smile on his wide mouth. His mouth made her shiver for the thought of all the secrets it might tell.

I am, she thought, going a little crazy.

And there was also Daniel Tennant, taller than anyone, his thin body hung as loosely as if his joints were tied together with old string instead of living gristle and tendon. His head was small and finely proportioned and seemed to sit on his neck lightly with a proud, arched poise. He wore a soft blue shirt; gray flannel slacks clothed his long legs. His bony arms ended in big if slender-knuckled hands.

Oh, she thought, this is terrible, then looked at the familiar bulk of her Joe almost desparately before she turned her enormous eyes on Tim, who smiled at her reassuringly. She felt her lips moving stiffly as she tried to answer with a grin, but then she was drawn back as if helplessly by the presence of this terrifying boy.

Sue stared up at him in the hard poor light of the one bulb in the dank ceiling and Dan looked down at her, politely. He had the biggest nose she'd ever seen and the rest of his face seemed to express amazement.

“Hello, again,” she told him, hoping she didn't sound quite that weak.

“You've met,” Honor observed, just as Joe and Tim began a jumble of now unnecessary introductions at which everybody laughed
and then Dan bowed almost formally. He looked amazed or maybe cross, with his lips pulled tightly. Someone who will never love me, Sue thought sadly.

“You'd better hurry,” Tim said. “Sara's whizzing around and I have no idea where Nan and Lucy are but lunch will be ready in make that six minutes.”

As he spoke he was shaking bitters into two of the tiny glasses, then filled them with gin. He put one in Sue's hand and raised his own in a toast. “To happy days,” he said, “or something. Joe reports that at Oxford you now say
chahs
!”

They all raised their glasses solemnly.

Sue was not sure she wouldn't choke as she'd never swallowed so much of anything quite so hot in one imitative gulp. She prayed she wouldn't, then blinked happily as she now felt perfectly safe. She sighed and as she did a most delightful warmth flooded through her and swirled downward into the seat of all her fervent sadness and suddenly she was glad.

“I liked that,” Sue observed, now smiling at Honor, then looking shyly from lowered eyes at the silent Dan.

“Another?” Tim asked this eagerly.

“Oh, gosh, no! Tim,” Honor said, “we've got to go help Sara. Come on!”

Dan swept his eyes movingly over the various expressions of resignation and disappointment that followed Honor's nearly violent statement. He sighed. For a moment Sue thought she would finally hear him say something aside from the untranslatable buzz of his exclamation in the bedroom door and he did now open his mouth. But then he shrugged, raised one shaggy eyebrow toward his carefully combed hair, put down his glass and—bowing slightly—passed in front of Susan and went out the door.

As she followed him out, Honor told him, “You're too young to have two drinks of gin before lunch anyway.”

The boy finally spoke, “So're you.”

To Susan his voice sounded like the mellowest notes from Benny Goodman's clarinet, only more
manly
somehow. She sighed
and listened with a kind of muted awe to the two Tennants speaking to one another as she and Timothy Garton and her now silent Joe, whose arm lay almost protectively on the smaller, more frail man's thin shoulders, followed them through the cellars and up the narrow stairs.

“Who said I wasn't?” she asked.

“What?”

“Too young,” she persisted.

“Nobody.”

“Well?”

“Well, it's simply different for a man. A man can drink more. He can drink younger.”

“Oh no,” she said. “Not gin.”

“Yes,” he said. “Anything.”

“No,” she said. “Gin's for women. It's very good for the misery, for one thing.”

“Have you got the misery, then?” her brother asked.

“Not right now,” she said. “But I
might
get it and . . .”

Their voices, intertwining, went on quietly, each with its own undercurrent of mirth. It was as if they were saying something quite different but putting it into ordinary if somewhat oddly-sorted-out words, so as not to startle those around them.

I wish I had a brother who'd speak to me that way, Sue thought. A brother might be so comforting.

Sue blinked as she stepped out at the top of the stairs into the white airy brightness of the little kitchen. They were all apparently seized by the same violent briskness as soon as they came within range of Sara, who stood putting glasses on a pewter tray that was already piled with silver and plates. Without stopping her work Sara began to speak to them and her tone sounded almost cross.