The Towers of Love (36 page)

“I loved you when I was seventeen and eighteen and nineteen,” he said. “I think I loved you when I was twenty. But all those years have gone by now. It's too much to expect that we could ever pick things up again exactly as they were. The other day in the woods you said we hadn't changed much. But we have changed. All those years have changed us both. It's too late for us now, Edrita. Too much has happened to us in between.” He smiled and nodded towards the waterfall that was visible through the trees. “Too much water has gone over the dam.”

“You're saying that you don't love me any more.”

“You've given something very wonderful to me, Edrita. I'll always be grateful.”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, I suppose that's as good an answer as any.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Well,” she said, still not looking at him. “I guess that's that, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“You know,” she said, “I should probably say that I admire you for what you're doing. But I was prepared to give up a lot to go with you. I was prepared to give up my home, my marriage, my husband, and my child. Those weren't cheap things to me.”

“I know,” he said. “Now you won't have to give up those things.”

“Yes,” she said. “So do you mind if I call you a bastard?”

“No, I don't mind, Edrita.”

“Well,” she said, looking at him clear-eyed. “Can I give you a lift to the station, you bastard?”

“No thanks.”

“Well, then,” she said. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Edrita.”

He stepped away from the car and she started the engine. He watched her as she swung the car broadly around the circle in front of the house and drove back down along the steep drive without looking back.

Reba was standing at the top of the white steps. She was wearing a long black coat and she was carrying a pair of silver gardening shears in one hand. “Come back inside the house now, Hugh,” she said. She placed the gardening shears on top of the terrace wall and opened her arms for him.

He hesitated for a moment. Then he went up the steps to her and kissed her on the cheek. She held him to her with a grip that seemed implacable, so tight that he could feel the thin bands of muscle in her arms through the soft fabric of her coat. For a moment they teetered together on the top step, with her arms anchoring him. Then she released him.

“I've got to put some things in a suitcase, Reba,” he said. “Then I'll be going.”

She lifted her hands, and nodded in a nervous, abstracted way. She picked up the gardening shears. “She wants some flowers for her room,” she said. She turned away from him and started across the terrace towards the flower-beds.

He went in the house and up the stairs to his room. He closed the door and took his suitcase from the closet. Lifting things from hangers, he began to pack. There were only a few things. He had brought very little up here with him, and there was very little to take away. He took his doeskin trousers from the hanger and folded them; a small object fell from a pocket and rolled under a chair. He reached for it and picked it up. It was the catnip mouse. He looked at it for a moment or two, and then placed it carefully on the dresser-top. He placed a few more articles in the suitcase, then closed it, snapped it shut.

He walked to the window and looked out. Outside, on the terrace, Reba and Pappy were picking flowers. The early rush of spring had brought several more narcissi into blossom, and a few of the early Kaufmaniana tulips had opened in the planting bed around the fountain. Reba knelt, snipped a stem with the silver shears, and handed each flower to Pappy, who collected them, holding the flowers in front of him like a small bridal nosegay. It was a silent tableau that had a certain charm to it. And watching them, it was easy to suppose that they would always be there, in those poses, arrested in time, picking, and handing, and gathering flowers: the woman, in her black coat, bent like a Z over the flower-bed, cutting the flowers with her shears, offering them one by one to the little houseman in his white jacket, who accepted them, collected them. He turned away from the window.

In a way, he wished that he had not kissed Reba good-bye. A kiss was a sentimental, an old-fashioned gesture. Still, he had wanted to do something simple and kind. And, he thought, he really loved Reba, so perhaps the simple and kind thing was owed most to her. He would miss her. He closed his eyes, very briefly, to shut out the picture of her now for ever. All at once there was so much else to do. The precedence and sequence of things—the next thing and the next thing and the next—loomed before him. The first thing was to call a taxi to take him to the village, and the train. This would be a familiar distance. After all, he had walked this distance many times when he had been a boy, once upon a time.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1961 by Stephen Birmingham

Cover design by Amanda Shaffer

ISBN: 978-1-5040-4050-1

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