“I feel I must know . . . it’s difficult not knowing . . . are you and Diccon . . . ?”
“Lovers?” Jane looked amused. “One would think so, wouldn’t one? But the answer, my dear, is no. If it makes you feel any better, you and I are in the same boat.” She laughed. “And we’re paddling about in circles!”
“Oh! Oh, well, then.”
“Yes, well, then. So, now we can all be jolly good friends, don’t you think? And I don’t mind telling you, it’s not as if I haven’t tried—I tried rather hard, in fact, just before you got here.”
I was aghast at Jane’s directness, but thrilled, too, to be having this sort of conversation.
“You . . . you did? But what . . . ?”
“I don’t know what goes on in the head of that man. But the other night, after dinner—we’d had plenty of wine!—we were sitting by the fire like an old married couple and, well, I guess I thought it was just about damned time, so I stood up, looked him in the eye, and said, ‘Let’s go to bed, Diccon.’ And he just stared at me—you know that look, all dark and shooting disdain at you—it seemed to go on forever. It was awful, I can tell you that. Then I simply got mad and said, ‘Oh, hell, Diccon. You really are impossible.’ And he still didn’t say anything for the longest time. I was feeling wretched, naturally, then you know what he said? He said, all slow and serious like he was lecturing me, ‘I suppose, Jane, it’s a notion I would have expected to come up with on my own.’”
She laughed, shaking her head.
“He was so incredibly serious . . . I just thought it was funny all of a sudden, and so I said to him, ‘Well, Diccon, I am the hostess, you know!’”
“Oh, Jane!”
I laughed, too, but truly I was shocked. Jane was so bold. She wanted what I wanted and had simply asked for it . . . and she’d been refused. What would I have done in her place? But of course I would never have asked. All this time I had worried that Diccon was having an affair with Jane. I believed Jane, though—it wasn’t true. But I didn’t understand.
“So, Pamela, you’re here now—perhaps you can have a go. . . .”
God. The thought made me cringe. It was quite hopeless. I knew that now. But now another idea was forming in my mind, a very confusing idea.
“I did want . . . oh, never mind. But now I can’t help wondering . . . does Diccon even . . . ?”
I couldn’t say what I meant. But Jane could.
“Does he even like women, you mean? I’ve given it a good deal of thought, and I can’t say, I really don’t know, but I think perhaps he does, that he’s all right, really. But he’s so damned English—no offense, Pamela. I think he thinks American women are animals, pouncing on men as if they’re prey. He prefers women who are . . . well, like our dear friend Nancy. He did manage to tell me that she never made a move towards him, and he said it in a very approving sort of way. It was all quite chaste, I’m sure, that whole business. . . .”
However the three of us managed to live under the same roof for even a minute I don’t know. Over the next few days we gathered together the bits of kindling: silent tensions, moodiness, bursts of sarcasm. The pile grew. And then of course the inevitable happened. The match was lit one night and the fire raged, fueled by a great deal of bourbon and wine.
The next morning, pain crackled all through my head. I worried gloomily about what awful things I might have said. Plenty of awful things had been said, I knew that. I wished I could erase the misery, but the injuries of the night before returned to me, inexorably, in all their cruelty.
I tried to remember what had set if off. Had it been when I said to Diccon, “I’ve always thought you such a good person, Diccon, but you are just a hypocrite”? Or had that come later, after Diccon had turned on Jane, scoffing at her “useless life.” He had not been gentle. But then, none of us had been. . . .
“What do you do, Jane, I mean what is it you really do? You ride horses in the north and then you ride horses in the south, you open up and shut down houses, and that’s about it as far as I can see. A woman with your intelligence . . .”
“Christ, Diccon, leave off. . . . I don’t go around telling you what you should—”
But then he quickly turned on me.
“And you, Pamela, what’s become of the artist you were? I’d really like to know that. Are you just going to go on diddling about, illustrating for magazines . . . forsaking your real self, your real talent?”
I trembled with hurt and fury. Didn’t he know?
“You don’t understand anything, not one thing . . . I . . . I have no choice . . . and anyway it’s none of your business. . . .”
“But that’s where you’re wrong!” He glared at me. “You do have a choice! For God’s sake I’d rather be starving in some rat-infested pisshole and write what I want than to do what you’re—”
I couldn’t let him finish. I didn’t want to hear it.
“You want things to always be the same! You want me to be that little girl with the flaxen braids running around Wales, drawing apple trees, and now that . . .”
“Yes, I do. I wish you were that girl still.” Diccon said it so spitefully. He stopped me cold. To my horror, he went on.
“You’re not what I would have thought. . . . You’ve become a scheming woman, Pamela. I’ve seen it. . . . Why can’t you be straight?”
“But . . . you’re the one who’s not straight, Diccon, avoiding me and my family. . . .”
“The problem is you refuse to grow up . . . it’s a sickness, actually . . . you’re attached to your mother with a bloody gold-plated umbilical cord! And your father, if he told you you ought to design nursery wallpaper, you’d go ahead and—”
He might as well have flung me across the room, cracking my head against the wall. Be done with it. I couldn’t speak. Jane spoke for me.
“How can you, Diccon! You’re cruel.”
“I’m not cruel, I’m simply telling—”
“—And you’re a pretentious lout! You care more about your precious writing than you do for any living person. You’re a cold and insensitive man. Pamela’s suffered too, too much, she really has. Why do you have to be so arrogant? You treat both of us as if we were helpless, as if we just couldn’t possibly go on in life without your great wisdom to guide us. . . .”
Diccon’s words had sapped all the life from me. I was exhausted. I wanted only to leave the room, to go to bed.
But Jane kept going.
“And you tease us all the time, Diccon. But I don’t know why you bother. I mean, you’d never . . . you don’t really even want to, do you? Was that what was so wonderful about your little Nancy— she let you preserve her just as she was, the little poet-virgin?”
Diccon stared at Jane, his blue eyes turned cold with disgust. With each beat of silence, the gulf between us—I knew his disgust was not reserved for Jane alone—stretched wider.
“Girls like Nancy,” he spoke slowly, “and I used to put you in the same category, Pamela, despite evidence to the contrary . . . most often do wait. Most women do. Whores aside, that is.”