Everything and More (79 page)

The tide was high. Choppy breakers charged up the narrow, shingled beach, each seventh wave flexing in a crash against the sea wall. Salt dampness added to the chill. Marylin’s gloved fingers were icy, her cheeks stung. She kept reminding herself that when in England one must accept such weather—but she couldn’t help noticing that very few people were about. BJ, clearly, was having a wonderful time as she commented on the infrequent “real English” types who passed. She fell silent, however, when one man approached them.

He was tall. The wind pressed his Burberry trenchcoat against his lean frame and tangled his dark, graying hair. He walked with the least suggestion of a limp.

He looks just like Linc, Marylin thought.

That’s too wild. I haven’t seen Linc for years—decades. . . . But from those snapshots of BJ’s, he hasn’t altered that much. Crazy, crazy, Marylin. How big are the odds of bumping into him at an out-of-season English seaside resort? A billion to one?

“Well, well,” BJ’s loud voice chortled. “Of all people, my brother!”

There are no odds, Marylin thought vehemently. “You set me up!” she cried.

And with a dramatic gesture quite outside the range of her nonprofessional life, she turned, charging up a gravel path that led in zigzags through the wind-tossed shrubbery to the middle promenade. The outrage pumping through her was the strongest emotion she’d experienced since her husband had died.

She could not face Linc.

Since Joshua’s death she had squirmed, flushing each time she remembered those poignant, what-might-have-been reveries. That terse, uncondoling condolence note! What a romantic idiot she’d been!

“Marylin!” BJ was puffing up the path. “Are you crazy? Look,
okay, I
did
plan it. But even if you’ve suddenly got a mad-on, Linc is my brother, you owe it to me to be polite to him.” Her hair, now dyed its original black, escaped to whip around her indignant face.

“Why can’t you ever mind your own business?” Marylin shouted. She took a deep breath of salty air, realizing how ludicrously out of proportion her fury was. Lifting her gaze to the elephant-colored horizon, she took a calming breath. “BJ,” she said quietly, “you’ve simply made an awkward situation for both of us.”

“Linc came of his own free will from Rome.”

“You’ve been cooking up this little scheme since before you got me to come to England!”

“Is that such a crime?”

“Does he think that I
agreed
to meet him?”

“So what?” BJ said defensively. “And while we’re on the subject, as far as I’m concerned, it took plenty of guts for him to show.”

“What does that mean?”

“That idiotic modesty!” BJ’s retaliatory indignation was diffused by a brown-eyed sparkle. “Honeybunch, I don’t believe you’ve ever once stopped to consider that you aren’t like the rest of us. It hasn’t seeped in that you’re not only unfairly gorgeous and young-looking, but you’re also famous. The goddess of screen and tube gives Linc one look and runs like he’s Frankenstein’s monster—how do you think he feels?”

Marylin knew exactly how. As abashed and miserable as she felt on reading that note. With an apologetic glance at BJ, she raced down the path to the front.

Linc’s figure was dwindling in the direction of the Downs, whose summit, Beachy Head, was hidden by a low-hanging, nearly black cloud. She ran after him. By the time she caught up, her face was glowing with exertion.

“Hi,” she said.

For a moment he studied her, then, blinking, thrust his hands into his raincoat pockets. “Hi,” he said gruffly.

Age, rather than increasing his likeness to Joshua, had lessened it, and now there was only the distinctive Fernauld nose and the darkness of the eyes. Linc’s own character had molded an air of thoughtful, quiet masculinity, which was other side of the coin to Joshua’s flamboyant I-am-leader-of-the-pack personality.

“You caught me by surprise,” she said.

“I’d never have guessed!” For a moment it flared, that touchy edginess—how well she remembered the taut nerves of a quietly brave young Navy pilot pushed beyond his endurance. Then he said, “So BJ didn’t tell you I’d be here?”

“No. But I can’t blame her. The past few months, I’ve been in the dumps. Negative about everything.”

A sudden gust of wind fountained spume up onto the cement where they stood. To escape a dousing, they both instinctively ducked toward the bench. The mutuality of their movement drew laughter from them both. Probably it was this laughter that relaxed the tight-wound spring in Marylin’s stomach.

“I’m sorry I bolted like that,” she said.

They started walking toward the Downs. Here there was less of a beach, and seawater puddled the edge of the promenade. They gave wide berth to the scallops of wetness.

Linc said, “Not making the funeral threw me for a loop.”

“I got your note,” she replied. How could the words come so easily?

“God,
that.
I must have rewritten it thirty times.”

“You really did?”

They were talking with that old intimacy.

“I knew too much about your relationship with Dad. Over heavy on the sympathy seemed phony. Everything else was condescending to your marriage. Then there were my own feelings. About us. About you and him. A very rough letter to write. After I sent it, I decided I’d been brusque.”

“A little,” she admitted, smiling. “A little. But why didn’t I figure how difficult it was for you?”

BJ caught up to them. “Well, you two, how’s it going?” she puffed. With a glance at Marylin, she raised her big, round arms and ducked comically, as if warding off blows.

Marylin laughed, a soft, husky sound that was blown on the wind. “You’re forgiven,” she said.

“Beej, you’re okay,” Linc said.

“Will you look at that sky?” BJ said. “Come on, you guys, let’s get a move on! It’s about to pour!”

*   *   *

That evening the three of them stayed up talking until nearly two; rain drummed on the windows, but they were lost in the warmer climate of their youth.

The following morning BJ insisted on returning to her half-sister’s London house by the 10:18 train. “No, I absolutely won’t stay. You guys need a chance to catch up without me and my big mouth,” she said, kissing them both.

The rain clouds had given way to blue skies with a few small, benign woolly puffs: though the temperature was only in the high forties, the sunshine made the day seem warmer. Marylin and Linc
took a hike on the Downs. The thick, low grasses were sodden, and they hewed single-file to the gouged, narrow path whose underlying chalk gleamed whitely with yesterday’s rain.

When the steep angle of ascent leveled out and the path widened so they could walk side by side, Marylin asked, “Whereabouts do you live?”

“In Parioli, near the Borghese Gardens. Do you know Rome?”

“I’ve never been to Italy,” she said. “They offered me
Roman Holiday,
but I—well I couldn’t be there and not see you.”

“So it was Audrey Hepburn who won the Oscar.”

“Oscars. . . .” Marylin looked at a blackberry bramble. “I guess we’re both thinking of the same thing,” she said.

“Dad.” Linc paused. “BJ told me he was pretty impossible at the end.”

“Getting old was very hard on him.”

“It must have been.”

“I cared a lot, Linc. Not love maybe, but real caring. Even when I didn’t want to, I couldn’t help myself. Joshua was like that. He put his mark on people.”

“Don’t I know it!” The remark burst out of Linc with amusement and perplexity.

They began talking about Joshua, his openhandedness, his vigor, the way he had of taking over every situation, his rumbling voice, his ruthless tennis serve, the incredible talent that had propelled him, a very young man, to the topmost rungs of a fiercely competitive industry and kept him there. By the time they reached Beachy Head and gazed down at the sea (“It matches your eyes,” Linc said), they had not exactly laid Joshua’s ghost to rest but had placed it in a comfortable position of repose.

Linc told her about Gudrun. “Afterward I realized how unfair it was to her, the marriage. When I saw Roy in Rome—”

“She never told me. When was it?”

“Before I got married—she’d just bought the store. Anyway, she warned me. But I cared for Gudrun, so . . .”

“BJ said she was a terrific lady. She remarried, didn’t she?”

“Yes. She has a five-year-old, a boy. I get a big kick out of buying him Christmas gifts.”

They walked slowly back to the house in time for high tea. The caretaking couple put on a spread—rashers of gammon, soft-boiled eggs, toast, sponge cake, hothouse strawberries and rich clotted cream. Marylin served herself another dollop of cream, lingeringly savoring its textured richness.

“That’s how you ate ice cream,” Linc said, smiling. “You’re the
only person I ever knew who could enjoy a small scoop for a half-hour.”

It was dark long before they finished the meal. They went into the drawing room, which was the house’s least drafty place, sitting on the well-worn Oriental rug to get full benefit of the electric logs.

“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is how you’re even more beautiful.”

“Flattery,” she said.

“Truth,” he retorted, tracing the curve between her thumb and index finger, lightly, as if he were touching an iridescent soap bubble.

They had not touched before, and the headlong violence of her reaction to this slightest of tactile pressures frightened Marylin. Her heart raced, she trembled. An electric awakening that was fraught with peril. These past difficult years, the carnal side of her had been extinguished by work, worry, and by Joshua’s repeated failures. Sex had become a defeated battleground, and even now she cringed from it. (This did not alter the fact that she was crazy in love.)

“Linc,” she asked, her soft voice shaky, “do you know the poem that ends, ‘I only know that summer sang in me/ A little while, that in me sings no more’?”

He moved his hand from hers. “Edna St. Vincent Millay,” he said. “One of her best sonnets, and the saddest, I think.”

The caretaking couple tramped through the hall, calling out, “Good night, Mrs. Fernauld, Mr. Fernauld.” They made their home in the carriage house. The side door slammed shut, loud, cheerful English voices momentarily mingled with the rustle of big old rhododendron bushes in the garden, there was the bang of a more distant door. Then Marylin heard only the final couplet of the Millay poem inside her own mind.

Linc, too, seemed preoccupied with morbid thoughts. “Let’s face it, my wife was caring, generous, bright, and so were Margaret and Jannie. I should’ve been happy with any one of them—except I never got over you.”

“Linc. . . .”

“Just because I feel exactly the same about you as I did when I was twenty-three, that doesn’t mean I’m going to jump on you the minute we’re alone.”

The redness of the electric logs shone on her face. “I wasn’t worrying about that,” she said. “It’s me, Linc. I’m not . . . I’m not the same as I was. About . . . you know, about sex.”

There was a long pause. “But you do still feel we belong together?”

“Of course I do.”

“Dad’s old age was really rough on you, wasn’t it?” Linc’s expression was twisted with sadness. “The Fernauld children left you to support his boozing and extravagances, didn’t we?”

“I was his wife,” Marylin said. “And there’s been that sad mess with Billy.”

“Billy?”

“He was involved with Althea.” Marylin sighed.

“So it
was
true. I read it in the headlines and figured it was just more of their usual junk—the case made a huge stir in Italy. Were they together long?”

“Only a few months. I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead—but Linc, she destroyed Roy’s husband and a German art teacher. Naturally I was worried sick about Billy. I went to New York, talked to her. Somehow I managed to break it up. A couple of weeks later she went to Roy’s house with that gun.”

“Do you know why?”

Marylin shook her head. “Roy says she was sort of deranged about her father. Billy blames
me.
When he got back from Vietnam, he asked Charles to get him into Coyne New York Bank. He lives in Manhattan.” Marylin’s lips quivered and she gazed up at Firelli’s portrait. “Since Joshua died, Sari’s been a doll about the telephone calls. Billy’s never once called. He’s married—a cousin of Charles’s, actually. I’ve never met his wife.”

“Ahh, Marylin.” Linc lifted his hand, as if to touch her shoulder, then splayed his fingers on the rug.

Marylin’s flesh tingled painfully where he would have touched her, and she was very close to tears. Was she doomed to be fragile bric-a-brac, a useless ornament that could not be touched? But I love him, I love him, she thought.

It took all her courage to lean forward until the darkness of Linc’s eyes filled her vision. She touched her lips to his.

His hand curved tenderly around her head, holding her mouth there. The trembling began again, and she twisted around so her breasts rested against his chest. Drawing her closer until the pressure of her double-strand pearls dug into her flesh, he covered her cheeks and eyelids with small kisses. Her nipples were as tender as they’d been when she was eighteen, her body felt as if it were melting, yet even now, caught in a riptide of physical pleasure, she could not repress her unhappy thought: This’ll be another defeat.

To drown out the misery of it, she pulled at Linc’s shoulders and waist, easing him down so that they could cling together on the rug.

“My love, my love,” he said, hoarsely, tenderly. “Let’s go upstairs.”

“No,” said Marylin. “Here.” She pulled him closer, not recognizing her own voice because of the blood drumming in her ears.

When he went into her, she gasped, thinking: It’s still summer. Then she thought no more. On a dusty rug woven in Shiraz, warmed by love and fake logs, Marylin Fernauld canceled out the years.

*   *   *

A week later Marylin and Linc were married in this same old-fashioned, memento-packed room, a ceremony witnessed by Sari, Charles, the baby, BJ, and the caretakers.

BJ, the matchmaker, was first to hug the bride. “You’re the two nicest people I’ve ever known,” she chortled happily. “How can it possibly work?”