Heiress has been good to you and me both and I don't hate her.
I won't end as I'd like to because it would sound too preposterous to believe but I will say it anyway since I was always rude and presumptuous and preposterous too lately as we both know. I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.
Catherine
After he had finished it he read it through again.
He had never read any other letters from Catherine because from the time they had met at the Crillon bar in Paris until they were married at the American church at Avenue Hoche they had seen each other every day and, reading this first one now for the third time, he found that he still could be, and was, moved by her.
He put the letter back in his hip pocket and ate a second small, plump, miniature mackerel in the aromatic white wine sauce and
.
finished the cold beer. Then he went out to the kitchen for a piece of bread to sop up the liquid in the long tin and for a fresh bottle of beer. He would try to work today and would almost certainly fail. There had been too much emotion, too much damage, too much of everything and his changing of allegiance, no matter how sound it had seemed, no matter how it simplified things for him, was a grave and violent thing and this letter compounded the gravity and the violence.
All right Bourne, he thought as he began to drink the second beer, don't spend time thinking how bad things are because you know. You have three choices. Try to remember one that is gone and write it again. Second, you can try a new one. And third, write on the god damned narrative. So sharpen up and take the best one. You always gambled when you could bet on yourself. Never bet on anything that can talk, your father said and you said, Except yourself. And he said, Not me, Davey, but pile it on yourself sometime you iron-hearted little bastard. He meant to say cold-hearted but he turned it kindly with his gently lying mouth. Or maybe he meant it. Don't con yourself on Tuborg beer.
So take the best one and write one new and good as you can. And remember, Marita has been hit as badly as you. Maybe worse. So gamble. She cares as much for what we lost as you do.
Chapter Twenty-nine
WHEN HE FINALLY gave up writing that day it was afternoon. He had started a sentence as soon as he had gone into his working room and had completed it but he could write nothing after it. He crossed it out and started another sentence and again came to the complete blankness. He was unable to write the sentence that should follow although he knew it. He wrote a first simple declarative sentence again and it was impossible for him to put down the next sentence on paper. At the end of two hours it was the same. He could not write more than a single sentence and the sentences themselves were increasingly simple and completely dull. He kept at it for four hours before he knew that resolution was powerless against what had happened. He admitted it with out accepting it, closed and put away the notebook with the rows of crossed out lines and went to find the girl.
She was on the terrace in the sun reading and when she looked up and saw his face she said, "No?"
"Worse than no."
"Not at all?"
"Nope."
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. .
"Let's have a drink," Marita said.
"Good," said David.
They were inside at the bar and the day had come in with them. It was as good as the day before and perhaps better since summer should have been gone and each warm day was an extra thing. We should not waste it, David thought. We should try to make it good and save it if we can. He mixed the martinis and poured them and when they tasted them they were icy cold and dry.
"You were right to try this morning," Marita said. "But let's not think about it any more today."
"Good," he said.
He reached for the bottle of Gordon's, the Noilly Prat and the stirring pitcher, poured out the water from the ice, and using his empty glass commenced to measure out two more drinks.
"It's a lovely day," he said. "What should we do?"
"Let's go to swim now," Marita said. "So we won't waste the day."
"Good," David said. "Should I tell Madame that we'll be late for lunch?"
"She put a cold lunch up," Marita said. "I thought that prob ably you'd like to swim however work went."
"That was intelligent," David said. "How is Madame?"
"She has a slightly discolored eye," Marita said.
Marita laughed.
They drove up the road and around the promontory through the forest and left the car in the broken shade of the pine woods and carried the lunch basket and the beach gear down the trail to the cove. There was a little breeze from the east and the sea was dark and blue as they came down through the stone pines. The rocks were red and the sand of the cove was yellow and wrinkled and the water, as they came to it, clean and now amber clear over the sand. They put the basket and the rucksack in the
shade of the biggest rock and undressed and David climbed the tall rock to dive. He stood there naked and brown in the sun looking out to the sea.
"Want to dive?" he called.
She shook her head.
"I'll wait for you."
"No," she called up and waded out into the water up to her thighs.
"How is it?" David called down.
"Much cooler than it's ever been. Almost cold."
"Good," he said, and as she watched him and waded, the water came over her belly and touched her breasts and he straightened, rose on his toes, seemed to hang slowly without falling and then knifed out and down, making a boil in the water that a porpoise might have made reentering slickly into the hole that he had made in rising. She swam out toward the circle of milling water and then he rose beside her and held her up and close and then put his salty mouth against her own.
"File est bonne, la mer," he said. "Toi aussi."
They swam out of the cove and beyond into the deep water past where the mountain dropped down into the sea, and lay on their backs and floated. The water was colder than it had been but the very top was warmed a little and Marita floated with her back arched high, her head all underwater but her nose, and her brown breasts were lapped gently by the movement the light breeze gave the sea. Her eyes were shut against the sun and David was beside her in the water. His arm was under her head and then he kissed the tip of her left breast and then the other breast.
"They taste like the sea," he said.
"Let's go to sleep out here."
"Could you?"
"It's too hard to keep my back arched."
"Let's swim way out and then swim in."
. .
"All right."
They swam far out, further than they had ever swum before, far enough so they could see past the next headland and on out until they could see the broken purple line of the mountains behind the forest. They lay there in the water and watched the coast. Then they swam in slowly. They stopped to rest when they lost the mountains and again when they lost the headland and then swam slowly and strongly on in past the entrance to the cove and pulled themselves out on the beach.
"Are you tired?" David asked.
"Very," Marita said. She had never swum that far before.
"Are you still pounding?"
"Oh I'm fine."
David walked up the beach and over to the rock and found one of the bottles of Tavel and two towels.
"You look like a seal," David said sitting down beside her on the sand.
He handed her the Tavel and she drank from the bottle and handed it back. He took a long drink and then on the smooth dry sand, stretched out in the sun, the lunch basket by them and the wine cool as they drank from the bottle, Marita said, "Catherine wouldn't have gotten tired."
"The hell she wouldn't. She never swam that far."
"Truly?"
"We swam a long way, girl. I was never out where we could see those backdrop mountains before."
"All right," she said. "There isn't anything we can do about her today so let's not think about it. David?"
"Yes."
"Do you still love me?"
"Yes. Very much."
"Perhaps I made a great mistake with you and you're just being kind to me.
"You didn't make any mistakes and I'm not being kind to you.
Marita took a handful of radishes and ate them slowly and drank some wine. The radishes were young and crisp and sharp in flavor.
"You don't have to worry about working," she said. "I know. That will be all right."
"Sure," David said.
He cut one of the artichoke hearts up with the fork and ate a chunk swirled in the mustard sauce Madame had made.
"May I have the Tavel?" Marita said. She took a good swallow of the wine and set the bottle down by David putting its base firmly in the sand and leaning it against the basket. "Isn't it a good lunch Madame made, David?"
"It's an excellent lunch. Did Aurol really give her a black eye?"
"Not a real one."
"She has a bad tongue with him."
"There's the difference in age and he was within his rights to hit her if she was insulting. She said so. At the end. And she sent you messages.
'What messages?"
"Just loving messages.
"She loves you," David said.
"No. You stupid. She's only on my side."
"There aren't any sides anymore," David said.
"No," Marita said. "And we didn't try to make sides. It just happened."
"It happened all right." David handed her the jar with the cut up artichoke heart and the dressing and found the second bottle of Tavel. It was still cool. He took a long drink of the wine. "We've been burned out," he said. "Crazy woman burned out the Bournes."
"Are we the Bournes?"
"Sure. We're the Bournes. It may take a while to have the papers. But that's what we are. Do you want me to write it out? I think I could write that."
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"You don't need to write it."
"I'll write it in the sand," David said.
They slept well and naturally through the late afternoon and when the sun was low Marita woke and saw David lying in the bed by her side. His lips were closed and he was breathing very slowly and she looked at his face and his covered eyes that she had only seen lidded in sleep twice before and looked at his chest and his body with the arms straight by his sides. She went over to the door of the bathroom and looked at herself in the full length mirror. Then she smiled at the mirror. When she was dressed she went out to the kitchen and talked with Madame.
Later, David was still asleep and she sat by him on the bed. In the dusk his hair was whitish against his dark face, and she waited for him to wake.
They sat at the bar and were both drinking Haig Pinch and Perrier. Marita was being very careful with her drink. She said, "I think you should go to town every day and get the papers and have a drink and read by yourself. I wish there was a club or a real cafe where you met your friends."
"There isn't"
"Well, I think it would be good every day for you to be away from me for a while when you're not working. You've been over run with girls. I'm always going to see you have your men friends. That's one thing very bad that Catherine did."
"Not on purpose and it was my own fault."
"Maybe that's true. But do you think we'll have friends? Good friends?"
"We each have one already."
"Will we have others?"
"Maybe."
.
"Will they take you away because they know more than I do?"
"They won't know more.
"Will they come along young and new and fresh with new things and you be tired of me?"
"They won't and I won't be."
"I'll kill them if they do. I'm not going to give you away to anyone the way she did."
"That's good."
"I want you to have men friends and friends from the war and to shoot with and to play cards at the club. But we don't have to have you have women friends, do we? Fresh, new ones who will fall in love and really understand you and all that?"
"I don't run around with women. You know that."
"They are new all the time," Marita said. "There are new ones every day. No one can ever be sufficiently warned. You most of all."
"I love you," David said, "and you're my partner too. But take it easy. Just be with me.
"I'm with you."
"I know it and I love to look at you and know you're here and that we'll sleep together and be happy."
In the dark, Marita lay against him and he felt her breasts against his chest and her arm behind his head and her hand touching him and lips against his.
"I'm your girl," she said in the dark. "Your girl. No matter what I'm always your girl. Your good girl who loves you.
"Yes, my dearest love. Sleep well. Sleep well."
"You go to sleep first," Marita said, "and I'll be back in a minute."
He was asleep when she came back and she got in under the sheet and lay beside him. He was sleeping on his right side and breathing softly and steadily.
Chapter Thirty
DAVID WOKE IN THE MORNING when the first light came in the window. It was still gray outside and there were different pine trunks than the ones he usually woke to see and a longer gap beyond them toward the sea. His right arm was stiff because he had slept on it. Then, awake, he knew he was in a strange bed and he saw Marita lying sleeping by him. He remembered everything and he looked at her lovingly and covered her fresh brown body with the sheet and then kissed her very lightly again and putting on his dressing gown walked out into the dew-wet early morning carrying the image of how she looked with him to his room. He took a cold shower, shaved, put on a shirt and a pair of shorts and walked down to his working room. He stopped at the door of Marita's room and opened it very carefully. He stood and looked at her sleeping, and closed the door softly and went into the room where he worked. He got out his pencils and a new cahier, sharpened five pencils and began to write the story of his father and the raid in the year of the Maji-Maji rebellion that had started with the trek across the bitter lake. He
