Sue listened with astonishement as the two talked quietly, all the while Sara piling packages on Joe’s enormous outstretched arms. He was blinking beatifically about him like a happy dog. She followed to look over the tiles of the sloping roof again and into the dark exciting squares of the flowered windows, on into the fruit-filled treetops.
She had never before heard him talk in such a relaxed way. With her he was almost always making love, fervent, demanding, and, with the people they had met this summer in the south of France and in the little taverns of Bavaria, he had always been passionately angry or excited or upset. His low voice—although it had never grown either loud or shrill—had always rushed and pressed upon her, whether with its own desires or with its angers against the extreme injustices others were witnessing on a daily basis. But now it was somnolent and amused.
She knew that if she were not so filled with shyness and the certainty of having to sniff or blow her nose within the next few minutes she might be jealous of Joe’s happiness being found in something besides Sue herself, jealous too of Sara Porter and all these surroundings that made Joe so beamish.
She wondered why Sara called him Giuliano, as she did occasionally. Did it mean something secret between them? Sara seemed simple but was she, beneath her quiet manners, actually a grasping woman, a bitch?
Oh, please don’t let Sara be a bitch, Sue prayed frantically. She’s got to be nice! She’s got to help me. The boat sails in seven days and I know Joe wants me to be on it, so why does he keep begging me not to go? And why do I want him to beg me not to leave him? It’s too cruel, cruel. She’s got to help me and soon.
“Here, Susan, give a hand,” Sara was telling her.
Sue flushed. How could she have stood there so stupidly while they worked? What would they think of her? She sniffed and picked up a bag of tomatoes with awkward haste. As the bag split open, she stood staring in horror at a dozen round red devils rolling merrily down in to the dim garage.
But Sara laughed and said, “Don’t you mind, Sue! They’re that much nearer the kitchen. Here, take these instead.” She piled three packages expertly in Sue’s arms and said, “Come on, we’ll let Daniel get the rest.”
Instead of taking the steep path past the watering basin, Sara now led them into the cool garage and through a door in the far wall.
Sue and Joe followed her gingerly down some twisting steps, peering as best they could over their bundles into the cool darkness of the unfamiliar stairway. The house smelled fresh and airy and was quite without signs of life.
Sara stopped at the bottom of the stairs and they stood for a minute, listening. Susan stirred, hoping that they would not notice how her heart was thumping. Who would appear in this strange place? What would happen next? She felt like a lost child waiting for goblins from the depths.
Suddenly a door crashed open in the little hall in which they stood. Susan looked at the tiled floor, soft green and light gray, and then at the green wooden door and then let her eyes ride up the interminable length of legs of the one who stood there, legs hung with mussed thin cotton pajamas. They did not move. The hips were small and properly tied about with crumpled cloth and the thin lank torso was brown and wide-shouldered and as naked as it was born, and now Susan felt herself to be staring into blinking and bloodshot green eyes.
In the half-second before he’d stut the door with a mumble that sounded rather like jzza en sczzmhm, Susan had decided that this was the darlingest, but the darlingest, boy she had ever seen.
She stood, ecstatically blank, seeing clearly against the soft green wood the rangy figure who’d been standing there, and she could easily imagine his half-shut eyes, as the sleepy garble of astonishment rang again in her ears with all the clarity of a French train whistle, all the magic sonority of an organ in a dim cathedral.
She flattened her flat little belly and reached with her one free hand, without even knowing it, for Joe’s handkerchief. She needed a good blow. Her heart thumped delightedly.
“We’ll put these things in the kitchen,” Sara muttered. “Damn that lazy boy anyway! Oh, hello, Nor.” She nodded at the tall girl who was arising slowly from the blue velvet chaise longue upon which she had been stretched. “We’ll drop these things and be back in a minute to be polite.”
She led them across a long light room toward the open wall along one side of the fireplace.
Sue picked her way down the three broad steps into the room and followed Sara, flicking one terrified look at this new person. Her mouth had turned dry and she was appalled to realized that in spite of her emotional nose-blow in the hall she would once more need to sniff, and mightily. Where else in the world were there as many enormous people as she had seen today?
She was used to Joe, so he didn’t count, but Sara Porter had always seemed as tall to Sue as the city hall, and now here Sue was, peering up at yet more people who seemed even taller! And they were all thin. Her neck ached and she slowed down in front of the strange girl with a painful feeling that very soon her head would snap off and roll back off her shoulders with a hollow thump on the floor.
Suddenly it all seemed funny. She grinned and looked up into the benign brown eyes of one of the prettiest faces she had ever seen. She had a new certainty that she was after all so small that no matter what she did nobody would notice her.
Hurray, she thought lazily, I’ll do what I like! I’ll be Mosca the Gadfly. I’ll have a little fun, maybe, and stop worrying myself thin over silly old Joe and whether he wants me and how many miles it is to Munich or Babylon or Oxford.
“Hello,” Sue heard herself saying with a kind of passive amazement at her own nonchalance. This girl was one of the handsomest things in the world, certainly, slim, brown, dressed in impeccable white with high-heeled white pumps on her small feet and her silky dark hair piled on top of her head in a way that almost belligerently accentuated her extreme height.
If I didn’t feel a little crazy, Susan thought, I’d be paralyzed by her, but paralyzed! Poor girl, though, she’s so tall I bet it’s hard for her to get dates.
“I’m Honor Tennant,” the girl said. She spoke slowly, as if she were thinking of something else.
“I think I saw your brother.”
“Dan? Yes. I heard his door while you were in the hall. That’s too bad. I’ve been meaning to get him up before Sara got home. But he won’t be long, now he’s seen you. If you’ll give me some of your bundles . . . here, let me just put these things on the table and I’ll take you upstairs.”
“But what about Mrs. Porter? Hadn’t I better . . .?”
“No. Leave them here. Sara will find them. She likes to be let alone when she’s cooking. Anyway, I think what’s-his-name went into the kitchen with her.”
“You mean Joe?” Sue felt faintly resentful at this tall beautiful girl’s complete dismissal of her love. She frowned and went on: “That’s Joe Kelly. Please excuse us for not introducing ourselves.”
“Yes, I know,” Honor said, as if bored. “Star football, Rhodes fellow, all that. He looks
