Tom careened down from the coastal range in his little car. He was still thinking about Finchley, and he realized that, even before the business with Dora, Finchley had affected him by just being around. It had been as if his very presence injected into the atmosphere a vapor that destroyed peace. And now he had turned up again, pitiful and vulnerable once more. And it was Tom, whom destiny had detailed off to look after him—destiny, who sat there watching the rushes with the screen writer at his elbow, chain smoking, holding a sheaf of notes. And even now, before Finchley the poor devil, had come round from the anesthetic and opened his eyes, his very presence had stirred up the old obsession and the misery.
Driving through the forest where the fog still hung in the tops of the firs, he knew he must think of her. All the time she had been in the half-light at the edge of his thoughts. It was to her that all these memories led in the end. He had not thought of her for years; or rather, when he had thought of her she had been only a name, an address, a phone number in an old notebook. Why must he now go back in his vivid imaginings, hankering again after the grief of it all, since he now had such, as one might say, satisfactory arrangements? Was calm not enough after all, that he must follow up Finchley’s untoward invasion from the past and drag back the sensual flavors of those days when the sight of her battling the wind in King’s Parade in Cambridge could make him catch his breath or the sound of her childish voice when they would sit opposite each other over tea or dinner would make him physically unable to eat, only devouring her with his eyes?
The fog came down and grew thicker, and Tom switched on the lights and cut down his speed. He turned on the radio and punched the button for the classical music station. There was a cadence of liquid clarinet notes, and after only a few bars he recognized a Brahms quintet. It must have been the recording with Reginald Kell—those perfect notes! He turned up the volume; and he was shut in by the fog and alone with the luxury of that music. Music did things to him: Tchaikovsky had brought out the buccaneer and made him king of the road; now the cascading notes of the Brahms, rich food for an avid imagination, brought a sensual mood into which it was inevitable that she should come.
She sat before him across the table and her eyes were wet and she gazed at him and he at her and they couldn’t eat. “Let’s just drink our wine and go,” he murmured. Or she was complaining in her little childish voice, “Tom your chair’s so scratchy,” and she wriggled her shoulders against the fabric, shaking all her upper part, bare down to the waist.
He let these images go and went back to the first meeting. It was in the foyer, after the Ibsen play Peter beckoned him over, with merely an imperious movement of his head. She was with him. There was a crowd in the lobby, but she stood apart; as he remembered, there was an actual space between her and the rest of the people, as if where she stood had been roped off with crimson velvet ropes. That was how it seemed. But perhaps it was memory that had staged her so for his first sight. He was to learn that she was no romantic figure, pretty rather than ravishingly beautiful, well groomed, every inch an American, but more gamin than princess. (“But you never really got to know her,” Aaron chided him in a dark day that lay ahead. “When did you ever talk to her about her ideas? Her academic plans? Her mind? You never really knew her.”) She had rich brown hair and she wore a cream colored wool dress with some sort of gold chain around the waist and a gold bracelet. Peter was draping a fur over her shoulders—it was the sort of thing that Peter did exactly right. The others from the audience, mostly students, were awkwardly thrusting arms into coats and sticky plastic rainwear and moving towards the door.
“My cousin Dora,” Peter said.
She gave Tom a sweet smile. Dimples, he noticed. She said, “Once or twice removed at least. Peter is a bit careless of my reputation.” She had a childish voice, and the whites of her eyes showed above the dark blue irises as if she were amazed. Addison’s disease, he thought, controlling a sudden rapture.
As he walked back to Trinity, he thought how she resembled the heroine of the play, the one on the actual stage. Both pretty women, of course; both with the childish voice. He thought of the heroine for a bit: she had behaved most of the time like a spoiled child, and she had had a number of childish mannerisms. But she turned out in the end to be a mature woman with a mind of her own, and she walked out on her pompous husband. Tom admired her: she was comfortable and she was wealthy, and she could hardly expect a much better deal in life. But she wanted something more, something else, anyway. And she had courage. He liked her for that. And at some time in the night after the play, the two women were mingled in a dream, and it was Dora he saw, not Nora from the play, walking out of the house and slamming the door.