Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett [91]
“You were far away,” she said with a smile.
“Memories,” he said. “This talk of love…”
“I shouldn’t burden you.”
“You’re not.”
“Good memories?”
“Very good. And yours? You were thinking too.”
She smiled again. “I was in the future, not the past.”
“What do you see there?”
She seemed about to answer, then changed her mind. It happened twice. There were signs of tension about her eyes.
“I see you finding another man,” Faber said. As he spoke he was thinking, Why am I doing this? “He is a weaker man than David, and less handsome, but it’s at least partly for his weakness that you love him. He’s clever, but not rich; compassionate without being sentimental; tender, loving—”
The brandy glass in her hand shattered under the pressure of her grip. The fragments fell into her lap and onto the carpet, and she ignored them. Faber crossed to her chair and knelt in front of her. Her thumb was bleeding. He took her hand.
“You’ve hurt yourself.”
She looked at him. She was crying.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The cut was superficial. She took a handkerchief from her trousers pocket and staunched the blood. Faber released her hand and began to pick up the pieces of broken glass, wishing he had kissed her when he’d had the chance. He put the shards on the mantel.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said. (Didn’t he?)
She took away the handkerchief and looked at her thumb. It was still bleeding. (Yes, you did. And, God knows, you have.)
“A bandage,” he suggested.
“In the kitchen.”
He found a roll of bandage, a pair of scissors, and a safety pin. He filled a small bowl with hot water and returned to the living room.
In his absence she had somehow obliterated the evidence of tears on her face. She sat passively, limp, while he bathed her thumb in the hot water, dried it, and put a small strip of bandage over the cut. She looked all the time at his face, not at his hands; but her expression was unreadable.
He finished the job and stood back abruptly. This was silly: he had taken the thing too far. Time to disengage. “I think I’d better go to bed,” he said.
She nodded.
“I’m sorry—”
“Stop apologizing,” she told him. “It doesn’t suit you.”
Her tone was harsh. He guessed that she, too, felt the thing had got out of hand.
“Are you staying up?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Well…” He followed her through the hall and up the stairs, and he watched her climb, her hips moving gently.
At the top of the stairs, on the tiny landing, she turned and said in a low voice, “Good night.”
“Good night, Lucy.”
She looked at him for a moment. He reached for her hand, but she turned quickly away, entering her bedroom and closing the door without a backward look, leaving him standing there, wondering what was in her mind and—more to the point—what was really in his.
22
BLOGGS DROVE DANGEROUSLY FAST THROUGH THE night in a commandeered Sunbeam Talbot with a souped-up engine. The hilly, winding Scottish roads were slick with rain and, in a few low places, two or three inches deep in water. The rain drove across the windshield in sheets. On the more exposed hilltops the gale-force winds threatened to blow the car off the road and into the soggy turf alongside. For mile after mile, Bloggs sat forward in the seat, peering through the small area of glass that was cleared by the wiper, straining his eyes to make out the shape of the road in front as the headlights battled with the obscuring rain. Just north of Edinburgh he ran over three rabbits, feeling the sickening bump as the tires squashed their small bodies. He did not slow the car, but for a while afterward he wondered whether rabbits normally came out at night.
The strain gave him a headache, and his sitting position made his back hurt. He also felt hungry. He opened the window for a cold breeze to keep him awake, but so much water came in that he was immediately forced to close it again. He thought about Die Nadel, or Faber or whatever he was calling himself now: a smiling young man in running shorts, holding a trophy. Well, so far Faber was winning this race.