The Tunnel Page 11

  Mrs. Sherrett had painted a vivid word picture of the party. As she talked, Natalie conjured up Japanese lanterns, an awning over the doorway, lights shining from every room in the house, ladies and gentlemen in Victorian costume waltzing elegantly to violins and piano. It was a delightful picture and Natalie somehow knew Mrs. Sherrett could make it come true.

  Then there was the guest list.

  “There’s one couple I’d especially like to ask,” Natalie ran down the long list of names, most of which she didn’t know. “The Doles. She’s invited me to ride her horses. I met her in the village.”

  “Dole?” Once again Mrs. Sherrett was vague. “I don’t know them. I don’t believe so, dear. There are going to be so many others, people they won’t know.”

  “All right,” said Natalie. There was no point in arguing. It was Mrs. Sherrett’s party, Mrs. Sherrett’s house. The bills would be paid by Trev, but it was all Mrs. Sherrett’s. She and Trev would be guests, just as they were merely guests in the house.

  The dress. “I think green satin,” Mrs. Sherrett had decided. “Green is lovely on you, Natalie, and satin appropriate.” The dress had been made by Mrs. Sherrett’s dressmaker, though Natalie had protested she would like to make it herself. It turned out to be a lovely dress.

  In the end, Mrs. Sherrett had been able to make only a brief appearance at the party. The preparations had worn her out. Natalie had gone to her room before dinner to ask her about a few more details. She had long before discovered that it was unsafe to make any decisions on her own.

  Trev’s mother lay white and exhausted on her chaise longue of yellow twill, her nostrils and lips curiously pinched. It was the first time Natalie had noticed the undershadowing of blue in her skin. The blueness had become more pronounced as time went on and Mrs. Sherrett gave in to the illness which had finally killed her.

  Natalie distinctly remembered thinking that if Mrs. Sherrett should die she could give all the Sunday afternoon buffet suppers she wanted. Immediately she was furious at herself. It was bitter to realize that she resented Mrs. Sherrett more and more as the weeks went on. Resentment, unbridled, could turn to hate. But she had determined to treat the resentment as nothing more than the usual feeling for mothers-in-law. She had read enough to know that most of the bad jokes were based on fact; that though she genuinely liked and admired Mrs. Sherrett, no two women could live together in one house without friction. The way to avoid friction was to consider herself a guest, a privileged guest who politely left the management of the house to its owner.

  What was this feeling about one’s husband’s mother? Thinking it out carefully, step by step, Natalie had reached a conclusion which she found interesting and worthy of a psychiatrist’s attention.

  Trev and his mother had so many things in common. As long as he lived, Trev would never recover from the habit of ruffling his hair, which was a copy of the way Mrs. Sherrett pushed at her gray pompadour when she was worried about something. Trev’s hands, long and thin, were his mother’s hands. There were a hundred ways in which they were alike. When Trev put his hand on Natalie’s shoulder, for instance, she sometimes felt that it was the hand of Mrs. Sherrett.

  Did all wives want their husbands to be like no one else on earth?

  The letters flared up angrily at Natalie as she wrote the question down.

  Yes.

  She underlined the single affirmative with two strong strokes of her pen. She had to be honest. She was jealous of any woman living having any portion of Trevil Sherrett for her own—Mona, or his mother—it made no difference.

  Mrs. Sherrett was dead, but part of her still must be living for Natalie could distinctly feel the gentle pat of her hand.

  “There’s something I want to ask you especially, my dear.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t drink too much tonight at the party. Trevil has never really approved of women drinking. His father was the same way.”

  Nat stood stunned, too angry to voice her justified pique and umbrage. She despised people who drank too much, women or men. Before she could recover enough to answer, Mrs. Sherrett went on:

  “You must take care of yourself, Natalie.” Her eyes closed wearily, the lids paper-thin and fragile. “Trevil wants children, you know—”

  Well, there would be no children born to Trevil Sherrett and his dipsomaniac bride who drank an occasional cocktail, and even had a highball now and again.

  Not as long as Bob Helms was on this earth.

  Hadn’t he said that she’d certainly see him again?

  Chapter 19

  The hours had passed in a long cold day, and Natalie was glad when night had come. The bedroom seemed more cheerful. The flames in the fireplace leaped higher in a more natural intensity, throwing black shadows instead of gray against the wall. She had grappled with a task too big for herself, undertaken a fight against the country—not only the country—against the world and its ways of living, thinking and dying.

  Bob had perished in the same great fight; so had Jim Hartsdale, and how many million others. Or had Bob fought against it as she was fighting against it, and lived for a while, struggling against the unnatural and the unfamiliar, fighting desperately to return to normalcy and his wife again, almost winning until that crash of train and car?

  If that was true then, God help her, she had failed him, as her mother had failed her father, by vanishing from the life of one man into the life of another. “She’s dead in my sight,” her father had said, but her mother might still be walking the earth, a disembodied spirit-disembodied, at least, to her daughter and the late Mr. Strong.

  If Bob had died, it was foreordained that she could never find happiness with Trevil Sherrett. Such happiness was nothing more than unfaithfulness to a hero who had given his life for his country. If he had stayed alive, then she had failed him worse by robbing him of the decency of a widow’s grief, stealing from him the chance to bear his children. Why try to find right in a hopeless situation where everything was wrong? Maybe if she knew what heavy hand picked out these boys who had to die, it would help her.

  Trev never spoke of his service unless it was to talk of the chess games with Cam Olessa, but of late Trev spoke little of anything except factors and fabrics and Mona Desmé. Where had she heard that all men kill the things they love? What a frightening philosophy unless you considered it carefully. Then it might mean that he didn’t want to kill her, since his love had fled, transferred to Mona Desmé.

  Loneliness seized her, the loneliness of a writer overwrought, tired and discouraged from communing forever with shadows. Truly, these figures conjured up from her past were nothing more than shadows, flickering, ephemeral, no more subject to love or emotions than those dancing distortions busily disfiguring the bedroom wall.

  She began to understand why so often patients fell in love with analysts. The further she progressed, the more difficult it became to make her thoughts entirely clear even to herself, the writer.

  Freud was wrong, if he thought that love and sex were the same. Love had suddenly become a spiritual entity, a grave and immediate necessity, as real and impelling as a pregnant woman’s craving for some exotic fruit. Unselfishly and devotedly, Natalie Sherrett could have, for the moment, loved anyone to whom her thoughts were clear. She even could love herself, if just for an instant her own quick wits could dispel the clinging, foggy tendrils, but there was no satisfaction, no fulfillment in such an idea.

  Words of her father returned full force: “The lawyer who fights his own case in court has a fool for a client.” She desperately needed someone else, someone near and dear. Was her impression that Trevil could read her thoughts a natural one? Was it sound and sane, or should it serve to double her precautions by pointing out her danger? How many times, when she was overcome by that compelling wish to have his arms around her, had he opened the door and stepped in the room?

  Her brain had become an Aladdin’s lamp, frightening her with its power over her husband. He was chained
to it like the genie in the Arabian Nights. Rub it ever so gently and he entered promptly.

  “Sleepy, darling?”

  “No,” said Nat. “I was just lying in bed here thinking.”

  Trev tightened the sash of his dressing gown, and stirred up the fire. “Too tired for a cigarette?”

  “No,” said Nat. “I’d like it.”

  Apparently he was going to ignore her miraculous summons. Otherwise, he would have said with excitement, “I heard that bell ring when you rubbed your brain. See how quickly I’m here?”

  He lighted two cigarettes and gave her one, then seated himself on the foot of the bed where he could watch her face. She didn’t want him there with his gray eyes probing her, trying to understand, his sensitive lips moving in banalities, his whole expression a mask to hide his sympathy.

  “Come he down beside me, Trev.”

  He obeyed without hesitation. Nat watched his progress around the foot of the bed, watched him sit on the opposite edge, lift his feet, he down without raising the covers. She could feel the weight of sheet and spread and eider-down quilt pulled tight across her body.

  An urge to court this danger seized her, an urge to juggle with flaming embers, to see how far she could push this man and retain her life and sanity. Engendered by her daring, a warmth suffused her, reddening her face in the firelight, tingling her breasts to raise the delicate nipples, moving slowly down to warm her thighs, calves and ankles. What subtle type of poison was this injected secretly into her veins, merely by his presence?

  What did she mean by poison? If that was poison, she had felt it a hundred times before and still survived.

  She turned and stared at her husband. His head was back on the pillow, his gray eyes studying the ceiling. Nat watched as he smoked, drawing down deeply, exhaling slowly, his profile sharply etched and startlingly clear. He was older, thinner, more worn. What had happened to the sanitary bridegroom? There was no mother now to powder his little bottom, wash his ears, slick down the wave in his shiny hair. Had the death of Mrs. Sherrett caused the bridegroom to disappear?

  Nat liked this man beside her better. There was the barest chance that he might understand her thinking, help her sort the true from the false, the simplified from the garbled. He might even believe that some of her processes were clear. She could love such a man with undying devotion.

  She reached up and switched off the bedlight beside her, then snuffed her cigarette in the tray. “Come closer, Trev,” she told him in a faraway voice. “Closer, darling. Very, very near.”

  When he was close she closed her eyes to shut out even the light of the fire. There had been a hundred such nights with Trevil, two hundred, when warmed by his strong, lean nakedness and the fervor of his gentle kisses, she had drained every drop of satisfying ecstasy. How long had it been since the last one? How late was this damnable railroad train? The clocks in the house were clicking steadily: a second, a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. This was hers by the right of love and the sanction of law. What had robbed her? What creatures, living and dead, had stolen it from her, were craftily trying to filch it from her right now?

  “Get in,” she said, “and hold me close.”

  He obeyed once more without question, wordlessly shedding his bathrobe and slippers and sliding in beneath the covers. When his arms went around her, his kisses were warm but without any trace of passion. She thought how very wise he was, how exactly right his attitude. She couldn’t have explained it, but he seemed to know without her speaking that a single, ill-timed amorous move before she was ready would have changed him into Robert Helms, and blanketed her mind and body in the clutches of an uncontrollable fear.

  She unbuttoned his pajama jacket, pausing with studied wantonness at every button, attempting meanwhile to gauge his thought, to place herself in the man’s position, to anticipate the mounting desires which she hoped the touch of her fingers might kindle.

  The mind reading turned back on her, and she found that she was stripping herself, preparing herself, at her father’s orders, without responsibility, to lie in queenly nakedness for the onslaught of the Union General; denuding herself with shamelessness before Sir Gwynneth who demanded her pants and stockings for his eager maw.

  Her fingers touched, and drew a circle, on Trevil’s breast. Its familiar, quick contraction rewarded her, so she moved her hand to cup the other, and felt it rise to touch her palm. What arrant fool had made the statement that tits on a man were useless? They brought back the love and life and laughter she thought were gone forever. She remembered the raft at La Jolla and the water-shrunken boyish breasts on Paul.

  Her fingers moved on down to the flatness of his belly, then up again to caress his neck. He might look worn, but he had kept himself in fine condition, bronzed and muscled, with satiny skin—better condition than Robert Helms. Probably better than Paul.

  On his left shoulder below the neckline, she felt the scar. How long had it been, and what selfishness must have blanked her mind? She had married Trevil in uniform. She must have loved him, had sworn to love him. Was the ghost of Robert Helms so strong it could make her forget that Trevil Sherrett had nearly met his death in France?

  “Trev!” she whispered. “Were you ever afraid?”

  “Yes, my dear, I’ve been afraid.” He reached up his hand and smoothed back her hair from her forehead in the gesture he so often used on his own.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “There are more pleasant subjects than talking about fears.” Trev gave an unconvincing laugh. “Can’t you think of something else?”

  “No,” said Nat. “I’m afraid I can’t. It would reassure me to know that someone as brave as you has known fear.” She found his hand and held it tight. “I’m frightened to death, and I don’t know what it’s all about. If you told me just why you were afraid, I might be able to tell you about my own.”

  “I’ve been afraid all my life,” said Trevil. “Afraid of death, and afraid of war. And afraid, most of all, of being afraid. A triple burden, Natalie.” He lapsed into silence.

  For a moment Nat’s thoughts merged into his, supplying words which he might well be saying: “My mother seldom spoke about it, and I’ve never told you, but mother and you had a bond in common. My father, Langston Sherrett, was killed in World War One. Mother married Herbert Carter, a wealthy man much older than she. She divorced him a few years later and went back to the name of Sherrett. Carter died in thirty-four and left her the business I’m in right now. This house and everything in it was left her by Grandfather Sherrett.”

  He loosened his hand from her straining clasp and lighted two more cigarettes. Natalie lay silent, thinking she had never been close to Mrs. Sherrett, and yet Trev’s mother must really have loved her, keeping silent until her death about Trev’s father being killed as Bob was killed. No wonder Trev had clung to his mother.

  What had Natalie, full of herself and Robert Helms, meant to him? A coldly criticizing wife, if anything. Certainly not much of a helpmate, ready to lend a sympathetic ear.

  “Yes,” she heard Trevil saying. “I can tell you a lot about fear. There was always going to be another war to take me away from my mother, as my father was taken. When Hitler came into power, we never spoke of it, but I saw it in her eyes every day and I dreamed about it every night, more vivid and more terrorizing as the time drew near. I felt that I had signed my own death warrant the day I got my commission. I knew that my mother thought so, too. The Army had a one-way exit-death. The Sherrett rats run round and round and they come out here. The breakers rolled over me when the LCI was beached in France, but they weren’t waves of water, Nat, they were waves of fear.”

  Again her mind took over, supplying words he might have said, but wasn’t saying: “Blood, salt, a man I knew staring up at me with cold, dead eyes through the water, blanking my mind while my stomach retched and churned inside me. Christ, why can’t I get it soon and die a hero like my father! If my legs’ll move, I’
m going to run if this lasts a minute longer. The son of my father killed in action, a coward! For two long months that was every day, until I thanked God when I got it—thanked God when the shrapnel finally found me and crashed down through my shoulder. Then I was mad because I wasn’t dead, for it hadn’t ended and I was scared of the way I’d acted and talked, scared of the pain, scared for my mother, scared I might die, but mostly scared of being afraid. Sick, sick, sick, Nat, with the horrible fear of fear.”

  She put a finger over his lips and drew him close to her, trembling. “Once the trees outside were green, then they all turned brown,” she whispered. “Once, I thought the war had ended and I’d have you close by me forever. Then, overnight, another war is all I read and hear. Once, I thought the country could laugh. Now, nobody dares be funny. And once your mother almost took the place of my own, and then she died. Once Bob was dead, and then he got jealous of you and me, and came back here. The dead are living, and the living are dead in everyone’s thoughts. Trev, my darling, the entire world’s turned upside down. I’m sick because the world is sick—like you were, Trevil. Sick with the fear of fear. Once, I thought you loved me—”

  “I do,” he said, and kissed away her falling tears. “I do, my dear, my dear!”

  Chapter 20

  Natalie enjoyed the walk to the village, in any kind of weather. She much preferred trudging the three miles that separated the Sherrett house from Kenwood proper to taking the aged station wagon. She had never driven with assurance, and besides, she told herself the exercise was good for her. She had never lived in a small town and had no experience with the country except for her summers at the beach. In a way, she’d loved the beach. She had spent her days swimming and lying on the sand and soaking up the salt and sun; her body had grown spare and dry and brown from so much of it and when she was alone with the sea, she could imagine herself sophisticated and poised, a person who took idleness and luxury for granted. She was then too young to think much about the faint sense of dissatisfaction she felt with herself during those summers, but later she came to realize that she wanted to identify herself, not with the natives of the community, who led rigorous lives and claimed to dislike the summer people, but with the summer people themselves.