Nightwork

As for sex ... Still affected by my reveries at the wheel that afternoon I was sure that it would be, at the very least, agreeable. But the passionate desire which I couldn't help but believe was the only true foundation of any marriage - would I ever be stirred to anything even approximating it by this placid, foreign, hidden girl? And what about the ties of family? Lily, as sister-in-law, with the memory of the night in Florence as a permanent ghost at every reunion? At that very moment I knew I wished the room would empty, leaving Lily and myself alone, untrammeled. Was I doomed always to get close to what I wanted, but never exactly what I wanted?

'This really has turned into a smashing holiday,' Eunice was saying, as she buttered her third roll of the meal. Like her sister, she had a splendid appetite. No matter what else might finally turn out wrong with the children, they would be born with at least half a chance of having marvelous digestions. 'When I think of all the poor folk back in bleakest London,' Eunice said, 'I could cheer. I have a lovely idea ...' She looked around the table with her innocent, blue, childish eyes. 'Why don't we all just stay here in the beautiful sunshine until everything melts?'

'The concierge says it's going to snow again tomorrow,' I said.

'Just a manner of speaking, Gentle Heart,' Eunice said. She had begun calling me Gentle Heart the second day in Zurich. I hadn't figured out what it meant yet. 'Even when it's snowing here, you have the feeling the sun is shining, if you know what I mean. In London in winter it's as though the sun has wandered away permanently.'

I wondered if she would have been so eager to continue the quadruple holiday with old Gentle Heart and his friends if she had been able to overhear the cold-blooded conversation about her future that had taken place in the car on the road to Bern.

'It seems like such a waste to go rushing off to crumbling, noisy Rome when we're having such a lovely time here,'

Eunice said, the roll now thoroughly buttered. 'We've all been in Rome, after all.'

'I haven't,' I said.

'It'll still be there in the spring,' she said. 'Don't you agree, Lily?'

'It's a good bet,' Lily said. She was eating spaghetti. She was perhaps the only woman I had ever met who could look graceful eating spaghetti. The sisters had come into my life in the wrong order.

'Miles,' Eunice said, 'are you absolutely frantic to get to Rome?'

'Not really,' Fabian said. There're a couple of things I want to look into here anyway.'

Like what?' I asked. 'I thought we were here on a holiday.'

'We are,' he said. 'But there're all sorts of holidays, aren't there? Don't worry, I won't interfere with your skiing.'

By the time the meal was over we had decided that we'd stay in Gstaad at least another week. I said I wanted some air and asked Eunice if she would like to take a walk with me, feeling that perhaps if we were alone for once we could make some sort of overt move toward one another, but she yawned and said that the exercise and the cold air all day had left her exhausted and she just had to fling herself into bed. I escorted her out of the dining room to the elevator and kissed her on the cheek and said good night. I didn't go back to the dining room, but got my coat and took a walk alone, with the snow whirling down around me out of the black night.

* * *

The concierge had been wrong. It wasn't snowing in the morning, but clear, blue, and cold. I rented skis and boots and had some wild runs down the mountain with Lily and Eunice, both of whom skied with a devoted British recklessness that was certain to land them in the hospital eventually. Fabian wasn't with us. He had some telephone calls to make, he said. He didn't tell me to whom or on what subject, but I knew I'd find out soon enough and did my best not to speculate just how much more of our joint fortune would be engaged in perilous enterprises before we met for lunch. He had told us he'd meet us around one-thirty at the Eagle Club, on a mountain called the Wassengrat, so that we could eat together. It was an exclusive club, with rules about membership, but Fabian naturally had arranged for us all to be accepted there as guests for our stay in Gstaad.

It was a marvelous morning, the air glittering, the snow perfect, the girls graceful and happy in the sunshine, the speed intoxicating. By itself, I thought at one moment, it made everything that had happened to me since the night in the Hotel St Augustine almost worthwhile. There was only one slightly annoying development. A young American, hung with cameras, kept taking photographs of us again and again, getting onto the lifts, adjusting our skis, laughing together, starting off down the hill.

'Do you know that fellow?' I asked the girls. I didn't recognize him as one of the men at the table in the bar with them the evening before.

'Never saw him before,' Lily said.

'It's a tribute to our beauty,' Eunice said. 'All three of us.'