介绍:
She went to sit on the diving board and tried to give the appearance of relaxing, but her tone was strained. “He’s wondering about a medical degree. Leon, I wish you hadn’t asked him.”
“The Old Man’s said yes?”
She shrugged. “Look, I think you ought to go round to the bungalow now and ask him not to come.”
Leon had walked to the shallow end and stood facing her across the gently rocking sheet of oily blue water.
“How can I possibly do that?”
“I don’t care how you do it. Make an excuse.”
“Something’s happened between you.”
“No it hasn’t.”
“Is he bothering you?”
“For God’s sake!”
She got up irritably and walked away, toward the swimming pool pavilion, an open structure supported by three fluted pillars. She stood, leaning against the central pillar, smoking and watching her brother. Two minutes before, they had been in league and now they were at odds—childhood revisited indeed. Paul Marshall stood halfway between them, turning his head this way and that when they spoke, as though at a tennis match. He had a neutral, vaguely inquisitive air, and seemed untroubled by this sibling squabble. That at least, Cecilia thought, was in his favor.
Her brother said, “You think he can’t hold a knife and fork.”
“Leon, stop it. You had no business inviting him.”
“What rot!”
The silence that followed was partly mitigated by the drone of the filtration pump. There was nothing she could do, nothing she could make Leon do, and she suddenly felt the pointlessness of argument. She lolled against the warm stone, lazily finishing her cigarette and contemplating the scene before her—the foreshortened slab of chlorinated water, the black inner tube of a tractor tire propped against a deck chair, the two men in cream linen suits of infinitesimally different hues, bluish-gray smoke rising against the bamboo green. It looked carved, fixed, and again, she felt it: it had happened a long time ago, and all outcomes, on all scales—from the tiniest to the most colossal—were already in place. Whatever happened in the future, however superficially strange or shocking, would also have an unsurprising, familiar quality, inviting her to say, but only to herself, Oh yes, of course. That. I should have known.
She said lightly, “D’you know what I think?”
“What’s that?”
“We should go indoors, and you should mix us a fancy kind of drink.”
Paul Marshall banged his hands together and the sound ricocheted between the columns and the back wall of the pavilion. “There’s something I do rather well,” he called. “With crushed ice, rum and melted dark chocolate.”
The suggestion prompted an exchange of glances between Cecilia and her brother, and thus their discord was resolved. Leon was already moving away, and as Cecilia and Paul Marshall followed him and converged on the gap in the thicket she said, “I’d rather have something bitter. Or even sour.”
He smiled, and since he had reached the gap first, he paused to hand her through, as though it were a drawing room doorway, and as she passed she felt him touch her lightly on her forearm.
Or it may have been a leaf.
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