Then she quit looking at him. She came in and crossed the room fast to where his uncle (this time) stood beside the chessboard.
‘I must see you alone,’ she said.
‘You are,’ his uncle said. ‘This is Charles Mallison, my nephew.’ His uncle turned one of the chairs away from the chessboard. ‘Sit down.’
But she didn’t move.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Alone.’
‘If you cant tell me the truth with three here, you probably wont with just two,’ his uncle said. ‘Sit down.’
Still she didn’t move for a space. He, Charles, couldn’t see her face because her back was toward him. But her voice had changed completely.
‘Yes,’ she said. She turned toward the chair. Then she stopped again, already bending to sit down, half-turned and looking at the door as if she not only expected to hear the brother’s feet coming up the hall, but as if she were on the point of running back to the front door to look up and down the street for him.
But it was hardly a pause, because she sat down, collapsing on down into the chair in that rapid swirling of skirts and legs both, as girls do, as if their very joints were hinged differently and at different places from men’s.
‘Can I smoke?’ she said.
But before his uncle could reach for the box of cigarettes which his uncle himself didn’t smoke, she had produced one from somewhere — no platinum-and-jewel case as you expected, but a single cigarette bent and crumpled and already shedding tobacco as if it had lain loose in her pocket for days, holding her wrist in the other hand as though to steady it while she leaned the cigarette to the match his uncle struck. Then she expelled that one puff and laid the cigarette in the ashtray and put her hands in her lap, not clenched, just lying tight and small and still against the dark fur.
‘He’s in danger,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid.’
‘Ah,’ his uncle said. Tour brother is in danger.’
‘No no,’ she said, almost pettishly. ‘Not Max: Sehas — Captain Gualdres.’
‘I see,’ his uncle said. ‘Captain Gualdres is in danger. I’ve heard he rides hard, though I’ve never seen him on a horse myself.’
She took up the cigarette and drew on it twice rapidly and mashed it into the tray and put her hand back into her lap and looked at his uncle again.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I love him. I told you that. But it’s all right. It’s just one of those things. That you cant help. Mother saw him first, or he saw her first. Anyway, they belong to the same generation. Which I don’t, since S — Captain Gualdres is a good eight or ten years older than I am, maybe more. But no matter. Because that’s not it. He’s in danger. And even if he did give me the run-around for Mother, I still don’t want to see him hurt. At least I don’t want my brother locked up in jail for doing it.’
‘Especially as locking him up wouldn’t undo the deed,’ his uncle said. ‘I agree with you: much better to lock him up before.’
She looked at his uncle. ‘Before?’ she said. ‘Before what?’
‘Before he does what he might be locked up for having done,’ his uncle said in that bland immediate quick fantastic voice which lent not only a perspicacity but a sort of solid reasonableness to the most fantastic inconsequence.
‘Oh,’ she said. She looked at his uncle. ‘Lock him up how?’ she said. ‘I know that much about law, myself: that you cant keep anybody locked up just because of what they are planning to do. Besides, he’d just give some Memphis lawyer two or three hundred dollars and be out again the next day. Isn’t that true?’
‘Isn’t it?’ his uncle said. ‘Remarkable how hard a lawyer will work for three hundred dollars.’
‘So that wouldn’t do any good at all, would it?’ she said. ‘Deport him.’
‘Deport your brother?’ his uncle said. Where? What for?’
‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘Stop it. Don’t you know that if I had anyone else to go to, I wouldn’t be here? Deport Seb — Captain Gualdres.’
‘Ah,’ his uncle said. ‘Captain Gualdres. I’m afraid immigration authorities lack not only the will-to-succeed but the scope of movement too, of Memphis or three-hundred-dollar lawyers. It would take weeks, maybe months, to deport him, when if there is food for your fears, two days would be too much. Because what would your brother be doing all that time?’
‘Do you mean that you, a lawyer, couldn’t keep him locked up somewhere until Sebastian is out of the country?’
‘Keep who?’ his uncle said. ‘Locked up where?’
She stopped looking at his uncle, though she hadn’t moved. ‘Can I have a cigarette?’ she said.
His uncle gave her one from the box on the table and held the match and she sat back again, puffing rapidly at it and talking through the puffs, still not looking at his uncle.
‘All right,’ she said. When things finally got so bad between Max and him, when I finally realised that Max hated him so much that something bad was going to happen, I persuaded Max to agree to—’
‘ — to save your mother’s fiancé,’ his uncle said. ‘Your prospective new father.’
‘All right,’ she said through the rapid smoke, holding the cigarette between two fingers with pointed painted nails. ‘Because there was nothing really settled between him and Mother — if there ever had been anything to settle. And so at least it wasn’t Mother who wanted anything settled about it because… And he would have had the horses or at least the money to buy new ones, no matter which one of us.. She puffed rapidly at the cigarette, not looking at his uncle nor at anything. ‘So when I found out that sooner or later Max was going to kill him if something wasn’t done about it, I made a trade with Max that if he would wait twenty-four hours, I would come with him to you and persuade you to have him deported, back to the Argentine—’
‘ — where he wouldn’t have anything but his captain’s pay,’ his uncle said. ‘And then you would follow him.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Yes. So we came to you, and then I saw that you didn’t believe us and were not going to do anything about it and so the only thing I could think to do was to let Max see with you watching that I loved him too, so that Max would do something to make you believe that at least Max meant what he was saying. And he did it and he does mean it and he’s dangerous and you’ve got to help me. You’ve got to.’
‘And you’ve got to do something too,’ his uncle said. ‘You’ve got to start telling the truth.’
‘I have. I am.’
‘But not all of it. What’s wrong between your brother and Captain Gualdres. Not — as they say — chewing gum this time.’ She watched his uncle for just a second through the rapid smoke. The cigarette was almost gone now, right down to the painted finger-tips.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s not the money. He doesn’t care anything about money. There’s plenty of that for Se — all of us. It wasn’t even because of Mother. It was because Sebastian always beat him. At everything. Sebastian came without even a horse of his own, and Max rides well too but Sebastian beat him, beat him on Max’s own horses, the very horses that Max knew Sebastian was going to be the owner of as soon as Mother came to taw and said Yes. And Max had been the best pupil Paoli had had in years and one day Sebastian took a hearth-broom and parried through two ripostes until Max jerked the button off and went at him with the bare point and Sebastian used the hearth-broom like a sabre and beat down the lunge until somebody grabbed Max—’
She was breathing, not hard so much as fast, rapid, panting almost, still trying to draw on the cigarette which would have been too short to smoke even if her hand had been steady enough to hold it steady, sitting huddled in the chair in a kind of cloud of white tulle and satin and the rich dark heavy sheen of little slain animals, looking not wan so much as delicate and fragile and not even fragile so much as cold, evanescent, like one of the stalked white early spring flowers bloomed ahead of its time into the snow and the ice and doomed before your eyes without even knowing that it was dying, feeling not even any pain.
‘That was afterward,’ his uncle said.
‘What? After what?’
‘That happened,’ his uncle said. ‘But it was afterward. You don’t want a man dead just because he beat you, on a horse or with a rapier either. At least, you don’t take actual steps to make the wish a fact’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘No,’ his uncle said.
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
She leaned and put the cigarette stub into the ashtray as carefully as if it was an egg or maybe a capsule of nitroglycerin, and sat again, her hands not even shut now but lying open on her lap.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I was afraid of this. I told — knew you wouldn’t be satisfied. It’s a woman.’
‘Ah,’ his uncle said.
‘I thought you would,’ she said, and now her voice had changed again,
