“I have a dark old sinful place in Geneva. I’ll go there to live. But you are younger and fresher, Charlie, so I want this place to be yours.”
“Not so young.”
“Younger than I.”
“Not so fresh. It wants me to go, too, Nora. The door tomyroom just now. It opened, too.”
“Oh, Charlie,” breathed Nora, and touched my cheek. “Oh, Charles,” and then, softly, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. We’ll go together.”
Nora opened the car door.
“Let me drive. I must drive now, very fast, all the way to Dublin. Do you mind?”
“No. But what about your luggage?”
“What’s in there, the house can have. Where are you going?”
I stopped walking. “I must shut the front door,”
“No,” said Nora. “Leave it open.”
“But … people will come in.”
Nora laughed quietly. “Yes. But only good people. So that’s all right, isn’t it?”
I finally nodded. “Yes. That’s all right.”
I came back to stand by my car, reluctant to leave. Clouds were gathering. It was beginning to snow. Great gentle white leaflets fell down out of the moonlit sky as harmlessly soft as the gossip of angels.
We got in and slammed the car doors. Nora gunned the motor.
“Ready? “she said.
“Ready.”
“Charlie?” said Nora. “When we get to Dublin, will you sleep with me, I meansleep,the next few days. I shall need someone the next days. Will you?”
“Of course.”
“I wish,” she said. And tears filled her eyes. “Oh God, how I wish I could burn myself down and start over. Burn myself down so I could go up to the house now and go in and live forever like a dairy maid full of berries and cream. Oh but hell. What’s the use of talk like that?”
“Drive, Nora,” I said, gently.
And she drummed the motor and we ran out of the valley, along the lake, with gravel buckshotting out behind, and up the hills and through the deep snow forest, and by the time we reached the last rise, Nora’s tears were shaken away, she did not look back, and we drove at seventy through the dense falling and thicker night toward a darker horizon and a cold stone city, and all the way, never once letting go, in silence I held one of her hands.
The End
