Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [76]
She rests her head on his shoulder. She knows much about him now: the tufts of hair between his knuckles, the cords at the back of his thighs, the hushed pause, as though all the world held its breath, and then the low, quick exhalation of pleasure. But sometimes doubts creep into her thoughts, and she cannot help herself from wondering: Might Catherine know things about Haskell that Olympia has not had time to learn?
“What a silly woman,” Haskell says, watching the sad comedy of the chastened husband and his overdressed wife.
He moves behind her and wraps his arms just under her breasts. He looks out the window over her shoulder. “Now, they look to be having a better time,” he says, pointing through the window at a couple with a young child sitting on a rug near the water.
The wife is dressed in a loose white shift and has her skirts pulled up to her knees. She seems relaxed, though Olympia notes that she does not take her eyes off the child playing in front of her in the water. The woman’s husband has been bathing, for his costume droops with the wet. He sits beside his wife and runs his fingers up and down the thin cloth of the back of her dress. Olympia feels a keen, not to say ferocious, pang of jealousy and regret. For Haskell and she will never have what that couple have and, perhaps because it is so easy for them, cannot value as much as they might: a child, a marriage, the ability to sit outside in public and touch each other.
She turns quickly toward Haskell. There is again the lightning within her body, that endlessly repeatable lightning. The need for the relief and release only he can offer. She puts her face against the pad of his shoulder.
“We have only one more day,” she says.
As if echoing the man and wife outside, Haskell strokes her back with his fingers.
“In our imaginations,” he says, “we have a lifetime.”
• • •
She is later than she has said she would be, and as she walks, she composes excuses: Victoria’s mother asked me to stay for tea. They were getting up a croquet match at the hotel. Julia and I were playing duets on her piano, and I lost track of the time. The sand is hard, and her dress is wrinkled. She looks up toward her house, dreading having to enter it, and when she does, she is startled to see that her mother and Catherine Haskell and Zachariah Cote are sitting on the porch.
But surely Catherine is in York, Olympia thinks.
Olympia instinctively turns and bends to the sand as if she had dropped a handkerchief or purse.
My God, she thinks. We might have been caught.
Slowly, she stands and tries to smooth her skirts. Her fingers feel for the buttons at her collar to see that they are fastened. She checks to see that the locket is inside her dress. When she turns, her mother is already waving to her, beckoning her to join them. Olympia walks toward the house and makes her way up the porch steps.
“Olympia,” Catherine says when she has reached them. “I am so glad to see you. How are you surviving this ghastly weather?”
“Olympia seems to have a secret life these days,” her mother answers for her.
“Indeed,” says Cote, flashing her a smile.
“Tell me about it,” Catherine pleads. “You have a young man.”
“No,” Olympia says in a confused manner.
“Olympia, do sit down,” her mother says.
“It is just that I have made a number of friends here this summer, and I have been much occupied with them,” Olympia says in a voice tight with strain, a strain she thinks neither Catherine nor Cote can fail