you do care about intellectual power. It’s an unfamiliar mystery that inspires wonderment. Women always love the thing that overawes them. Isn’t that the real clue to your feeling for me?”
“Does it matter?” Her voice was husky. She leaned toward him, the green sweater molding the firm lines of her breasts, her lips parted, her eyelids drooping. Desire took sudden possession of Amos.
“No. It doesn’t matter.” His hands shook as he fumbled with her clothing.
Afterward Amos was appalled at the risk they had taken. “Tony might have walked in at any moment!” Philippa was amused. “You do feel guilty about Tony, don’t you?”
“He’s done a lot for me.”
“Just because he published your first book? He didn’t lose anything by that.”
“But he’s so unsuspecting. It would be such a shock to him if he ever found out. No knowing what he’d do. That bothers me and it ought to bother you.”
“It doesn’t, but then I’m not analytical. Most writers analyze their own emotions too much, but now and then they forget they are writers and remember they are human beings. You never do. You’re always the observer, never the participant. Always the audience, never the actor. Even in your own love scenes part of you is detached—damnably detached. It’s as if—as if you weren’t all here. As if some part of you were missing. Why don’t you ever tell me anything about your early life? Your mother and father and things you did at school and the first girl you ever kissed. Most men like to talk about themselves. You don’t. Tell me something: has Vera any hold over you? Could she blackmail you, if she wanted to? That would explain why you don’t talk about your past and why Vera seemed so sure in that newspaper interview that she could come back to you.”
“No. Vera couldn’t blackmail me.” His voice was even, but she saw a sudden uneasiness in his eyes. Somehow the shot had gone home and he was trying to conceal it. He got up and walked over to the window.
“Is there anyone else who could blackmail you?” she probed. “Come to think of it, you never talk about your early life.”
“It’s all on the jacket of my latest book.” He picked up a copy and tossed it at her. She caught it deftly and laughed.
“Tony writes all those jacket notes.”
“But I gave him the material,” retorted Amos. “Do you know it’s nearly three? Mix yourself a drink while I take a shower. Then I must be off to the airport.”
But Philippa didn’t walk over to the bar. When water gushed in the bathroom beyond, she sat on the bed reading the jacket note on the back flap of Passionate Pilgrim.
Amos Cottle was born in China in 1918 where his father was a Methodist missionary. He attended mission schools and was graduated from the University of Peking. Then began a rolling-stone existence that gathered moss—a rich treasure house of varied experience for his future writing career. Cottle has been a sailor, a bartender, a Hollywood press agent, a cattle rancher, a chemist, a construction engineer and a barker for a carnival show. During World War II he served with the Seabees in the Pacific. Out of that interlude came his memorable first novel Never Call Retreat. He is married to Vera Vane, Hollywood actress, but he spends most of his time in a modern house in Connecticut where the walls are either all window or all bookcase.
Philippa put the book down thoughtfully. Tony’s glib, hackneyed phrases really told very little about Amos as a man, and Amos had never talked about his childhood in China or his rolling-stone period. She was not a sensitive woman but now she was overwhelmed with desolation as she realized how purely physical their intimacy had always been. Amos was inaccessible. She didn’t really know him at all. Now that Vera was precipitating a crisis in their lives, Amos’s responses would be utterly unpredictable.
Suddenly she was aware of a tiny seed of distaste for Amos. His remoteness, his fatalism, his fear of Tony’s suspicions, his indifference to Vera’s onslaught—was this really the sort of man for her to love? She knew the seed would grow. Once again she was on the verge of falling out of love, as she had fallen out of love with Tony himself, long ago….
She wandered into the living room and saw the Tribune Book Review section crumpled into a ball. She smoothed it out and reread the article by Emmett Avery which she had glanced at this morning. She recalled Tony’s rage. “That little pipsqueak Avery! To think that I introduced him to his first publisher because I thought his stuff wasn’t quite good enough for us. I suppose he’s never got over our rejection.”
The water had ceased to run. In the silence, she called softly: “I must go, Amos. See you later.”
“We’ll be there around five,” he called back cheerfully.
“Good-bye.” She went across the terrace slowly to the tree where she had tied the dog. An unwelcome thought invaded her mind. Suppose—just suppose—that Maurice Lepton was wrong for the first time in his long and distinguished career as a critic. Suppose that this Emmett Avery was right in all his nasty sarcasms about Passionate Pilgrim. Suppose Amos Cottle’s mystique was pure sham, a pose to enhance the prestige of mediocre books.
Philippa did not trust her own judgment entirely in intellectual matters. She was intelligent enough to know her own limitations. She had taken the word of people like Maurice Lepton for Amos’s writing ability and Amos was right about one thing—that was the secret of her desire for him. If she couldn’t write great books herself, she could at least serve those who did as primitive priestesses served male worshippers of their goddesses.
But if the worshipper were insincere and his gifts unworthy of the goddess? Then the priestess must find a worshipper with greater gifts.
Maurice Lepton’s disturbing smile came back to her mind’s eye. No one had ever questioned his intellectual power. He himself seemed to radiate a superb confidence in his own power as Amos never had.
The boxer rose to greet her. Before she bent to untie his leash, she looked back at the house. Why did she suddenly feel that she had said good-bye to Amos Cottle forever? Could it be that she was already seriously in love with Lepton, a man she had seen only twice in her whole life?
CHAPTER FOUR
That same Sunday Meg Vesey, like Amos, woke late to full daylight. Friday’s snow had turned to muddy slush in a temperature just above freezing. The bleak December day painted the city scene in the hushed, faintly ominous palette of Utrillo. To Meg the world seemed like an empty stage where something dreadful was just about to happen.
She hadn’t told Gus yet. She had shown him the news story in the tabloid Friday evening and the letter that should have gone to Vera. “Don’t send it,” he told her. “Vera’s going to stay with the Kanes, thank God! And we’re going out there to dinner Sunday. Tony’s got it all fixed.”
It was then that Meg opened her mouth to tell Gus about the other letter that had gone to Vera by mistake, but the words wouldn’t come. They had just settled down for a cosy evening alone together with Hugh away at the Devlins and Polly soon to be asleep. Why spoil it? She’d wait and tell him Saturday. Or Sunday at the latest. She’d have to tell him then.
But when she found Polly running a slight temperature with a sore throat that Sunday morning, she forgot everything else for a while. The doctor came and prescribed the latest antibiotic. Aspirin, too, if the temperature went over 100 that afternoon.
“I’ll
