There was a rustling as they got into raincoats. He laughed a lot and whacked her on the backside and helped her buckle it up tight. “I smell like a rubber walrus,” she said. And then they were out in the lane of green trees, slipping on the squelching grass, in the lane, sinking their rubbered feet into sludge mud furrows where cars came splashing by, whining in the thick wet dark.
“Oh, boy, this is swell!” he shouted.
“Not so fast,” she said.
The wind blew, bending the trees, and by the look of it, it would last a week. The hotel was up the hill and they walked now, with less laughing, though he tried starting it again. It was after Linda slipped and fell that nobody said a thing, though Sam, when helping her up, tried to make a joke.
“If nobody minds, I’m hitching a ride,” she said.
“Oh, be a sport,” he said.
She thumbed the next car going up the hill. When the car stopped, the man in it shouted, “You all want a ride to the hotel?” But he walked on without saying a word, so Sam had to follow.
“That wasn’t polite,” said Sam.
Lightning stood on the sky, like a naked and newborn tree.
Supper was warm, but not of much taste, the coffee was thin and unpalatable and there were not many people in the dining room. It had that end-of-the-season feel, as if everybody had taken their clothes out of storage for the last time, tomorrow the world was ending, the lights would go out, and it was no use trying too hard to please anybody. The lights seemed dim, there was too much forced talk and bad cigar smoke.
“My feet are soaked,” said Linda.
They went down to the pavilion at eight o’clock, and it was big and empty and echoing, with an empty bandstand, which filled slowly until at nine o’clock there were a lot of people seated at the tables, and the orchestra, a nine-piece band (hadn’t it been a twenty-piece band in 1929, wondered the husband), broke into a medley of old tunes.
His cigarettes tasted damp, his suit was moist, his shoes were sopping, but he said nothing. When the orchestra played its third number, he asked Linda out on the floor. There were about seven couples out there, in the rainbow changing lights, in the vast echoing emptiness. His socks squeaked water as he walked, they were very cold.
He held Linda and they danced to “I Found My Love in Avalon,” just because he had telephoned earlier to have it played. They moved quietly around the floor, not speaking.
“My feet are soaking wet,” said Linda, finally.
He held on to her and kept moving. The place was dim and dark and cool and the windows were washed with fresh rain still pouring.
“After this dance,” said Linda, “we’ll go to the cabin.”
He didn’t say yes or no.
He looked across the shining floor, to the empty tables, with a few couples spotted here and there, beyond them, to the watery windows. As he moved Linda across the floor, nearer to the window, he squinted, and there they were.
Outside the window, a few child faces, peering in. One or two. Perhaps three. The light on their faces. The light shining in their eyes. Just for a minute or so.
He said something.
“What’d you say?” asked Linda.
“I said I wish I were outside the window now, looking in,” he said. She looked at him. The music was ending. When he looked at the window again, the faces were gone.
Madame et Monsieur Shill
It was while shuttling his eye down the menu posted in a nineteenth-century silver frame outside Le Restaurant Fondue that Andre Hall felt the merest touch at his elbow.
“Sir,” said a man’s voice, “you look to be hungry.”
Andre turned irritably.
“What makes you think—?” he began, but the older man interrupted, politely.
“It was the way you leaned in to read the menu. I am Monsieur Sault, the proprietor of this restaurant. I know the symptoms.”
“My God,” said Andre. “That made you come out?”