A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [19]
She held out her hand, and he took it.
Innes could make out all of her face now, the brief smile erasing the odd chill of the profile only. She had lustrous dark eyes. Over a dress of thin black polka-dot material, she had on an almost iridescent feathery blue wrap. Innes could see the outlines of a black corset or a slip. The collar of the dress was wide and low, suggesting a sailor’s. The skirt of her dress lay in folds just below her knee.
“You must be Mr. Finch,” she said. “I’m Hazel Fraser. I’m first down. I’m having a sherry. Will you join me? I’m sorry to say my father is not back yet. I know you must be eager to meet him.”
“I am,” Innes said. He stood with his hands at his sides. He had not been invited to sit. Should he pour his own sherry? Yes, of course he should. He bent toward the bottle on the table in front of Hazel, aware that his hand was trembling, regretting that he had not waited a decent interval or declined altogether, for she would certainly see the trembling, which was even more pronounced as he picked up the small gold-and-blue goblet from the tray. He counted six goblets and wondered who the others would be.
“Please sit,” Hazel said when Innes had finally managed the business of the bottle and the glass, trembling fingers a death knell for an eye surgeon, though Innes’s hands were always rock steady in the operating theater. There, a cold certainty stole over him. As a physician, he was supremely focused and, he sometimes thought, gifted.
“How was your journey?” she asked.
“Uneventful,” Innes said, adjusting his suit as he sat. He had only the one suit and two shirts, which would be inadequate for the city. He hoped there would be time to visit a tailor, though he would have to be frugal with his purchases. Until a salary was negotiated—Innes assumed a salary, though there had been no discussion of that eventuality—he had only the money that his sister and mother had sent, a fortune to them but barely enough to cover the expense of a new suit.
“The very best sort,” Hazel said, “though one always secretly longs for adventure.”
“Do you think so?” Innes asked. “I should think an absence of adventure a good thing during wartime.”
“Here one longs for excitement,” Hazel said. “We are a backwater city.”
Innes searched for a diplomatic response.
“I’ve lived here all my life,” she added. “But you,” she said with superb manners, shifting the emphasis away from herself, “you have had an intriguing time of it—school in America, I’m told. A degree in medicine.”
So Hazel knew that Innes was from Cape Breton. Doubtless she knew his circumstances as well. “If cadavers and libraries and books be thrilling,” he said, meaning it to sound kindly and not arch, “then perhaps I have.” He could see now that the woman he had just met (he adjusted her age to twenty-three or -four: a certain gravity about the mouth) desired risk, that it was on her mind and on her tongue, though possibly she struggled not to allow others to see it. Hence, the perfect immobility.
(Innes thought that, yes, he had had a certain kind of adventure, though not one of traveling abroad and studying for his degree. Rather, his had been one he would just as soon forget—the necessary struggle of the poor, the daily quest for food, an endeavor that held risk and sometimes resulted in death, as when his father, a fisherman, had been washed overboard from his vessel. Innes now belonged to the category of people who longed not for bodily adventure, for he had had that, but rather for some quite tangible adventure of the mind. That he awaited eagerly, impatiently.)
“There you are,” Innes heard behind him. He pictured the rapidly advancing figure of Mrs. Fraser even