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That was what she was now-a visitor.
Her plan was to wait until they got out to the middle of the river, then to tell him that she could not swim. First ask him how deep he thought the water would be there-and he would surely say, after all the rain they had been having, that it might be seven or eight, or even ten, feet. Then tell him that she could not swim. And that would not be a lie. She had grown up in Walley, on the lake, she had played on the beach every summer of her childhood, she was a strong girl and good at games, but she was frightened of the water, and no coaxing or demonstrating or shaming had ever worked with her-she had not learned to swim.
He would only have to give her a shove with one of the oars and topple her into the water and let her sink. Then leave the boat out on the water and swim to shore, change his clothes, and say that he had come in from the barn or from a walk and found the car there, and where was she? Even the camera if found would make it more plausible. She had taken the boat out to get a picture, then somehow fallen into the river.
Once he understood his advantage, she would tell him. She would ask, Is it true?
If it was not true, he would hate her for asking. If it was true- and didn’t she believe all the time that it was true?-he would hate her in another, more dangerous way. Even if she said at once- and meant it, she would mean it-that she was never going to tell.
She would speak very quietly all the time, remembering how voices carry out on the water on a summer evening.
I am not going to tell, but you are. You can’t live on with that kind of secret.
You ca
If she had got so far, and he had neither denied what she said nor pushed her into the river, Enid would know that she had won the gamble. It would take some more talking, more absolutely firm but quiet persuasion, to bring him to the point where he would start to row back to shore.
Or, lost, he would say, What will I do? and she would take him one step at a time, saying first, Row back.
The first step in a long, dreadful journey. She would tell him every step and she would stay with him for as many of them as she could. Tie up the boat now. Walk up the bank. Walk through the meadow. Open the gate. She would walk behind him or in front, whichever seemed better to him. Across the yard and up the porch and into the kitchen.
They will say goodbye and get into their separate cars and then it will be his business where he goes. And she will not phone the Police Office the next day. She will wait and they will phone her and she will go to see him in jail. Every day, or as often as they will let her, she will sit and talk to him in jail, and she will write him letters as well. If they take him to another jail she will go there; even if she is allowed to see him only once a month she will be close by. And in court-yes, every day in court, she will be sitting where he can see her.
She does not think anyone would get a death sentence for this sort of murder, which was in a way accidental, and was surely a crime of passion, but the shadow is there, to sober her when she feels that these pictures of devotion, of a bond that is like love but beyond love, are becoming indecent.
Now it has started. With her asking to be taken on the river, her excuse of the picture. Both she and Rupert are standing up, and she is facing the door of the sickroom-now again the front room-which is shut.
She says a foolish thing.
“Are the quilts taken down off the windows? “
He doesn’t seem to know for a minute what she is talking about. Then he says, “The quilts. Yes. I think it was Olive took them down. In there was where we had the funeral.”
“I was only thinking. The sun would fade them.”
He opens the door and she comes around the table and they stand looking into the room. He says, “You can go in if you like. It’s all right. Come in.”
The bed is gone, of course. The furniture is pushed back against the walls. The middle of the room, where they would have set up the chairs for the funeral, is bare. So is the space in between the north windows-that must have been where they put the coffin. The table where Enid was used to setting the basin, and laying out cloths, cotton wool, spoons, medicine, is jammed into a corner and has a bouquet of delphiniums sitting on it. The tall windows still hold plenty of daylight.
“Lies” is the word that Enid can hear now, out of all the words that Mrs. Qui
Could a person make up something so detailed and diabolical? The answer is yes. A sick person’s mind, a dying person’s mind, could fill up with all kinds of trash and organize that trash in a most convincing way. Enid’s own mind, when she was asleep in this room, had filled up with the most disgusting inventions, with filth. Lies of that nature could be waiting around in the corners of a person’s mind, hanging like bats in the corners, waiting to take advantage of any kind of darkness. You can never say, “Nobody could make that up. Look how elaborate dreams are, layer over layer in them, so that the part you can remember and put into words is just the bit you can scratch off the top.”
When Enid was four or five years old she had told her mother that she had gone into her father’s office and that she had seen him sitting behind his desk with a woman on his knee. All she could remember about this woman, then and now, was that she wore a hat with a great many flowers on it and a veil (a hat quite out of fashion even at that time), and that her blouse or dress was unbuttoned and there was one bare breast sticking out, the tip of it disappearing into Enid’s father’s mouth. She had told her mother about this in perfect certainty that she had seen it. She said, “One of her fronts was stuck in Daddy’s mouth.” She did not know the word for breasts, though she did know they came in pairs.
Her mother said, “Now, Enid. What are you talking about? What on earth is a front?”
“Like an ice-cream cone,” Enid said.
And she saw it that way, exactly. She could see it that way still. The biscuit-colored cone with its mound of vanilla ice cream squashed against the woman’s chest and the wrong end sticking into her father’s mouth.
Her mother then did a very unexpected thing. She undid her own dress and took out a dull-ski
Enid said no. “An ice-cream cone,” she said.
“Then that was a dream,” her mother said. “Dreams are sometimes downright silly. Don’t tell Daddy about it. It’s too silly.”
Enid did not believe her mother right away, but in a year or so she saw that such an explanation had to be right, because icecream cones did not ever arrange themselves in that way on ladies’ chests and they were never so big. When she was older still she realized that the hat must have come from some picture.
Lies.
She hadn’t asked him yet, she hadn’t spoken. Nothing yet committed her to asking. It was still before. Mr. Willens had still driven himself into Jutland Pond, on purpose or by accident. Everybody still believed that, and as far as Rupert was concerned Enid believed it, too. And as long as that was so, this room and this house and her life held a different possibility, an entirely different possibility from the one she had been living with (or glorying in-however you wanted to put it) for the last few days. The different possibility was coming closer to her, and all she needed to do was to keep quiet and let it come. Through her silence, her collaboration in a silence, what benefits could bloom. For others, and for herself.
This was what most people knew. A simple thing that it had taken her so long to understand. This was how to keep the world habitable.