All The Voices Cry Part 4

On the trolley were cups and saucers with a pattern of rosebuds, a silver teapot, and a plate of squashed pea and black pepper sandwiches with the crusts cut off, the line of filling bright as lawn clippings. The lower shelf carried the double-tiered cake stand bearing a nutmeg and apple cake barely dusted with icing sugar. Rhinoceroses no longer, Norman and Baby hurried to wash their hands in the birdbath. There might be cake for good children with clean fingers.

The combined stimuli of canasta and nutmeg brought on the fleeting visions that Mrs Viebert called her prognostications. Not for Mrs Viebert the watery ways of the teacup or the drama of tarot. Her visions came with the satisfactory click of a well-sanded drawer shutting. At any rate, some time during 1941, Mrs Viebert looked out the window at the children lurking in the undergrowth, dabbed her fingertips on a napkin embroidered with flowers and wrote something on a card that she found in her handbag, together with Norman's name.

Widowed in the early months of the war, Norman's mother was no longer the woman to hold fate back from her son. She tucked the card inside an envelope and gave it to him at bedtime.

"This is yours," she said, "from Mrs Viebert. Mind it, and keep it safe."

Norman held the envelope close to his chest and stared up at the ceiling.

"I have to fly to New Zealand," Norman announced to the a.s.sembled staff at the Montreal eye clinic where he worked. "My Uncle Stewart is on his last legs."

In truth, Uncle Stewart had not only lost both legs to diabetes, he had also died in 1979. There was not much reason to lie about it; Norman was quite ent.i.tled to take a holiday. Furthermore, Norman's New Zealand relations, both the quick and the dead, were as distant to his Canadian colleagues' thinking as fruit flies. However, Norman felt that a degree of preparation was in order for the only act of mythic proportions that he would ever perform. Telling a lie seemed a reasonable start.

Norman flew out of Vancouver on Sunday, keeping his eyes fixed on the screen that showed a digital plane inching its way out over the Pacific Ocean. Once again he pulled the envelope out of his pocket and looked at it. Time had mottled the paper until it resembled the backs of Norman's hands, but the words written on it remained unchanged: Mrs Viebert's Prognostication. For the hundredth, perhaps the two-hundredth time in his life he opened the envelope and pulled out the playing card inside it. As he always did, he looked first at the picture on the back of the card: a swooning gypsy-wild, sky-tumbled Icarus, succoured by lonely mermaids whose dark auburn hair, so tastefully arranged, had stimulated his earliest adolescent fantasies. Now Norman wondered how any artist could make falling out of the sky seem an attractive option. He turned the card over and looked at the other side. It was a two of diamonds, a wild card, the kind that froze the canasta pack, calling a temporary halt to the ordinary life of the game. The card no longer smelled of the fruitcakey darkness of Mrs Viebert's handbag but the message on it was still legible: Norman: look sharp. Monday, August 27th, 2001.

In the 1940s, August 27th, 2001 had been as unimaginable as a Monday on the moon, but the date had loomed over Norman, squashing the more ridiculous of his adolescent impulses, keeping him safe in case he was bound for glory. A career in optometry had not left much room for mortal accident. He spent his days in a brown-walled windowless room posing questions about floating specks and numbers hidden in patterns. He had been meticulous about oil changes and snow tires, and while his marriage lasted, Aspen had proved to be a wife who was careful with her hair and not p.r.o.ne to credit-card debt. Indeed, the greatest risk that Norman had taken was to leave his mother and New Zealand far behind and emigrate to Canada.

Once, there had been a before and an after this date, but as middle-age came and went, Norman began to realize that it was far more likely to be the date for a cardiac arrest or being squashed by a b.u.t.ter truck than a date marked by Olympian achievement. Indeed, Norman had come to fear that time's form was not equally divided like an hourgla.s.s, but bottomless, like a funnel with no end. Norman could see himself arriving at Monday, August 27th, 2001, but after that he could not see very much.

An air stewardess had given him the idea that the day might be avoided altogether. Not long after his divorce, Norman found himself seated on a plane beside a man in an open-necked golf shirt. The air stewardess was very pretty and the open-necked man had asked her how she kept her looks. She replied that on every long-haul flight she missed a day in crossing the dateline, and it all added up. With a practised wink and a startling mewing sound she pa.s.sed on to Norman, asking him if he would like coffee or tea. Tea, please, he had said, looking up at her smooth skin and wondering.

After Norman decided to skip the day that fate had appointed him, he organized the slow demise of Uncle Stewart through a series of postcards addressed to himself, followed by a message from a payphone, in which he regretfully informed himself, using a fake Scottish accent, that Uncle Stewart was in his final days of decline. He enjoyed these preparations and over the course of a year read each postcard aloud to the receptionist at the eye clinic, receiving her waves of sympathy with dutiful gravity.

Uncle Stewart would not have liked Norman's making use of him in this way. If he'd been alive, he might have reminded Norman of a certain wartime evening at the kitchen table, playing Smash the n.a.z.i Navy. Norman was watching Uncle Stewart pencil in the position of his fleet. By lining up the checks on his uncle's shirt cuff with the lines on the grid of the Smash the n.a.z.i Navy notepad, Norman could guess where Uncle Stewart had placed his battle ships.

"You're a clever wee chap, Norm," said Uncle Stewart, after Norman sank three submarines in Uncle Stewart's North Sea. Then he clipped Norman over the ear. "But no one likes a cheat."

In the case of Mrs Viebert's prognostication, Norman did not think he was cheating. He considered himself to be reducing the odds, just in case Mrs Viebert was right. After they took her away it turned out that she had almost predicted the Tangiwai rail disaster of 1953.

It was getting late. The remains of Norman's in-flight peppered steak and his neighbour's leafy vegetarian option had been removed, the steward had pa.s.sed by with tea and coffee, the stewardess had prepared the cabin for night-time. Norman rotated his ankles. He made his way to the bathroom where he felt a touch of regret that his life might soon be over and he had not smoked and he had not followed carnal impulses in aeroplane bathrooms. All he had done was dispose of his bodily refuse with a blue frozen sucking snort, and then wash up, wiping the hand basin for the convenience of the next traveller. He had made sure his will was in order; he had left a letter for Aspen in the fruit bowl. He thought she should know, in case his act of evasion should fail. She had always accused him of being secretive. Well, if he never returned, she could at least feel satisfied that she had been right.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Norman had failed to calculate that at 11:30 PM on Sunday August 26th, 2001, the plane would come down to refuel in Tahiti. With the rest of the pa.s.sengers he was forced to file off into the amniotic warmth of the night, shuddering at the thought of what might lie ahead. Beside a lighted doorway, three coral-clad ukulele players set up a swaying tinkling thread of sound that followed him into the linoleum limbo of the airport lounge.

Norman surveyed the available seats and chose one equidistant from a podgy woman in ripped shorts cowering behind a bank of tropical plants, and a woman knitting. The knitter was wearing sungla.s.ses perched on top of her head. Norman took a second look at her, wondering what she wanted with sungla.s.ses at midnight. He felt a strong urge to lean forward and murmur to her that wearing them on her head like that would stretch the hinges.

Around him the air was full of the rustle of people waiting, antic.i.p.ating arrival, or regretful of all that had been left behind. Tapping at their cell phones, they called out of the darkness into other time zones, chewing and twitching, crossing and re-crossing their legs. If Norman sat quite still, kept his eyes on the floor and made no contact with anyone, perhaps, just perhaps, he would be safe.

The alarm on Norman's watch began beeping. Monday, August 27th, 2001 had arrived. Heart beating against his plaid shirt, he wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and looked up at the scene around him. A couple beside the bank machine were necking like gannets, their camera straps clattering against each other, the flowers on their leis crumpling under the pressure. The hot perfume of crushed flowers reminded him of the yellow roses that once threatened to bring down the fence in his mother's garden. His mind was filled with a vision of himself as nine-year-old Norman fighting off the storm troopers hidden in the flax bush. He was wearing new shorts, Stand Fast Gentleman Drill, with silver buckles at the waist.

"Bombs away!" he had shouted, leaping off the front step, dropping and rolling past Baby Viebert towards the ngaio tree beside the gate. A wood pigeon, startled into evacuation by the attack, moved off, carving musical swoops in the air. While Norman stalked around the flax bush, Baby Viebert frowned over some rose petals that she was arranging in regiments on the path. Could that have been the day on which he had received the playing card from Mrs Viebert?

As an optometrist, Norman had spent decades studying weak vision, asking clients about relative lens strengths, measuring, correcting, and getting it right. Likewise he had often peered at his own past, trying to recall just when he had received Mrs Viebert's prognostication, for that could make all the difference to the outcome. Try as he might, Norman could not remember whether it was triumphant twelve-diamond Mrs Viebert who had foreseen his future, or her later and much longer lasting incarnation, Poor Gladys. He felt like his more dithery clients, who could not tell which lens was stronger, who talked themselves out of what they knew they once saw, and whom he secretly despised.

Cyril Viebert died of dysentery in May 1941, in a camp twelve miles south of Cairo. He had recently turned nineteen. Norman remembered standing in the backyard looking at a pot with a burned-out bottom just after the news came through. His mother was off comforting Poor Gladys and Uncle Stewart had been trying to be useful in the kitchen. Norman was still wearing drill shorts and his knees were cold. In similar weather Cyril Viebert's blond rugby thighs used to redden like sausages. After Norman sniffed the burned-out pot he trotted off to the front of the house. The yellow roses were all gone, but the purplish green feijoas were ripe upon the vine and Norman lobbed several at Rommel's Afrikakorps on behalf of Cyril Viebert.

Mrs Viebert stopped coming to canasta parties. She became Poor Gladys, answering her front door with her hair in disarray and her eyes red and puffed out. While his mother visited Poor Gladys, Norman waited in the garden. He made Baby Viebert eat leaves off the pepper bush hedge, and the heat on her tongue made Baby's eyes water, which was good, because she was Norman's prisoner, and it was right that she should know it. Above them the cabbage tree leaves cut slots in the sky with their cold dense blades.

Not long after s.p.a.ce men began to speak to Poor Gladys through the radiogram they came and took her away. Then Uncle Stewart began to say feeding flies for Tiny Freyberg. He said it with a pretend Texan accent that he had heard on the radio. Feedin' flahs fer Tahny Frahberg. Sometimes Uncle Stewart could not stop saying things.

In 1951 General Freyberg became Baron Freyberg of Wellington and of Munstead in the County of Surrey. n.o.body knew what became of Baby Viebert.

Norman found himself staring at the woman knitting. Orange and yellow, purple and flamingo, she had a hundred colours. One side of her knitting bristled with strands that looped and twisted and hung untrimmed. She dropped one strand, picked up another, twisted it in, and knitted on, frowning over her work. Her silver bird's nest of hair was held up by the sungla.s.ses and a crab-like pincer high up at the back of her head. In her orange shirt, loose green trousers, sandals and a long loop of sh.e.l.ls she looked at home in the tropical night.

A flame-coloured ball of wool dropped from her lap, rolling out over the linoleum towards Norman's foot. Without thinking he picked it up and wound it back towards her. The woman took the ball from him with a nod; her dense brown eyes studied him, without smiling. The humidity had made her hair start out in tendrils at her forehead. She finished her row and turned the knitting. Now he could see the hourgla.s.s pattern of inverted triangles forming and the diamonds in between.

They were paging Norman. This is what you get if you pay extra to fly first cla.s.s to the other side of the world. They care that you are aboard, in your seat, reducing the odds. The knitting woman looked up at him again and there was energy in her glance. She made a movement with her mouth as if she were about to speak. Norman grimaced and looked away. He had made long preparations to escape this day. It was not a time for new acquaintances. He hurried away towards the gate, away from Monday, August 27th, towards Tuesday, August 28th. His shoes squeaked, resisting the linoleum.

About the time that the plane crossed the dateline, a sudden jolt of turbulence shook Norman out of his half-sleep. Norman sat up and looked at the digital plane on the screen in front of him. He had done it. He had managed to evade all but three hours of Monday, August 27th, 2001. He was not feedin' flies. All he had seen was a couple kissing in a tropical crush, all he had done was wind up a woman's ball of wool.

The lovers. The knitter. The figures collided in his head. All these years of waiting and he had failed to see what had been clear to Mrs Viebert both in her prime and in her grief. Now Norman struggled to reach Baby Viebert across the gap of sixty years, with her eyes so dark that the pupils were almost invisible, her hair long since turned to a ma.s.s of silvery tendrils like the pollen bearing innards of the roses that she used to pull apart. Had she not looked up when his name was paged? Baby Viebert had recognized him. No one forgets the person who first makes you eat the leaves of the pepper bush.

Norman thought of the hourgla.s.s of time that had funnelled him towards Baby Viebert, and the empty years fanning out ahead of him, away from her. Ignoring the illuminated seatbelt sign, he began his search in the sky at once, stumbling over the folk slumbering under their fleecy shrouds, pushing past their sleeping knees; he would seek her forever now. Headlong he rushed in his aeroplane through the freezing dark air, pulled onwards by the bright thread of the Pacific dawn. Surely fate could not be so easily evaded? Norman had only to live long enough to reach the second date. Surely there was one? Surely.

Neither Up Nor Down.

THE WIND BLEW the palm fronds upwards and turned them into giant combs raking the mist. Penelope's hair stuck to her forehead. She clutched at her shoulder bag while the water braided and swirled around her thighs. A walk along a Tahitian beach in search of a sea cave was one thing, but wading through the streams that poured off the land into the ocean was enough to challenge even the strongest determination to be a good sport. Close by, chestnut-coloured hermit crabs crept in and out of the piles of coconut sh.e.l.ls banked up against the trees.

"Em. d.i.c.kinson appreciated Melville's novels," said Charles. "Lots of coconuts and breadfruit in Typee. Em. made a mean gingerbread. Maybe she liked coconuts too."

"Did they cook much with coconut in the nineteenth century?"

"No idea." Charles was off again. He hated a question that he could not answer. Back behind the palms, a pointed peak rose up with shrubs growing out of it at right angles. White birds fluttered in front of the greenery like handkerchiefs dropped from a great height. Penelope wanted to pull herself up the peak, clinging onto the stubby trees until, triumphant and alone, she could stand looking out at the wide grey Pacific.

"And when they were up they were up, and when they were down they were down, and when they were only halfway up they were neither up nor down," she chanted.

"What?"

"Doesn't matter," said Penelope. Nothing she thought mattered. Thirty-five years ago they had been newly-weds touring Ireland with a rug and a volume of Yeats in the back seat of the car. Now, he was an irritating know-it-all, and she, she was a pudding.

Of course what Penelope thought did matter. Her former supervisor in food science, Howard McMurray, a mild man in a homespun sweater, had believed that Penelope's research was of key importance to fried chicken manufacturers everywhere. He had complimented her on her careful approach. Penelope had met Charles at Howard McMurray's annual Snowflake Do. Penelope had been charmed by the young professor with his careful way of dressing and his whimsical habit of embroidering the view with a sparkling quotation. Can you fall in love with a purple smoking jacket and a signet ring? Penelope had.

After his fourth gin and tonic Charles had pulled down some snowflake tinsel and draped it around Penelope's neck, stroking her hair. After his fifth gin and tonic he leaned heavily against the door frame and revealed that as a little boy he liked to balance on one foot. He had been practising this very skill when his sisters came to tell him that their mother had hanged herself in the pear tree at the bottom of the garden. For many years he believed that if he could succeed in standing on one foot for a day and night, his mother might come back. As it happened, she had not died, but she had lingered, and that was worse. Charles did not like shadows in trees; he did not like to be alone. If Penelope did not already love him, she told herself that with time, she would. Upon finishing his sixth gin and tonic, Charles became rather ill, and Penelope took him home to her bed.

After their wedding, Penelope had concentrated on being a faculty wife because she imagined it was what she ought to do. In retrospect, her life had been governed by the sign of ought: I ought to be a better, thinner cook; I ought to have had more children; I ought to have found a job teaching adolescent girls how to roast chickens. Every Christmas she made plates of sugar cookies for Charles to take to the department party, she dropped off his late library books and searched for lost coffee mugs in his study. She had raised their son, a bookish child called Colin who had recently been granted tenure in the English department at Rook University. Colin claimed to be misunderstood, but in fact she knew him very well. He was a good boy, but in danger of becoming like his father. And what else did she do? When it came down to it she couldn't think what she had been doing.

In the meantime, Charles turned the way they met into a dinner-party joke. It was her supervisor in food science who introduced us. You're studying the Browning Reaction? I said. Yes, she said, you know, to heat. Oh, I said, Brownings in Italy. No, she said, browning in turkeys. She could see Charles now, snorting at his joke, tugging at his turtleneck. She should have stopped right there, at the Snowflake Do. But she had gone on with it, and the path had led here, to Tahiti, and this groping along the beach, looking for a sea cave where a long-dead writer might have had a rendezvous with a woman not his wife.

Soon they arrived at the edge of a garden where the trunk and limbs of a vast tree stretched along the ground like some great animal at leisure. Nailed to the tree was a sign in Tahitian. Tabu, the sign said, keep out, but not just in a trespa.s.sers will be prosecuted kind of a way. It was more sacred than that. Tabu was keep out or something will get you. Around about, thick banks of water fuchsia flourished unchecked in the humid air, the dark pattern of their leaves studded with scarlet flowers. Black crabs picked through the remnants of a balloon fish stuck on a fence post to dry, sidling sideways through a cloud of gnats. Penelope called ahead to Charles.

"I don't think we should go any further." She pointed at the post. "These crabs give me the creeps."

"Do you like this garden, is it yours?" asked Charles.

"What?" she said.

"Lowry, Under the Volcano."

"Oh, that. This looks like private property."

"You're a bit scared, aren't you?" Charles tipped his hat back on his head. "Mistah Kurtz, he dead," he said.

"Don't mock me Charles."

"Miss-tah Kurtz," Charles said with more sibilance. Penelope turned her back.

"I heard you the first time," she said.

"Where are you going, Penn? Look, we've pa.s.sed the peak and here's the end of the cove. This has to be the place that Stevenson refers to in the poem. The cave must be just around the corner."

"Charles, we have a plane to catch."

"Come on Penny, be a sport."

"I'll wait here for you."

Penelope sat in the green gloom swiping at mosquitoes. Once they might have walked to Stevenson's sea cave together. She would have laughed at Charles's obvious discomfort at having his trousers rolled up, he would have quoted somebody, and she would have thrown a piece of seaweed at him or threatened him with a crab. Now Penelope was glad that she would never find the sea cave, so that she would not have to hear the quotation with which Charles would adorn the view. Charles's mouth was a sea cave, with words rushing in and out of it, flecked with foam.

Charles. .h.i.t the steering wheel with the flat of his hand, gleeful and shouting over the diesel engine.

"Magnificent, it was magnificent," he cried. "There's a hole in the cave roof, fringed with ferns. It's a natural pantheon. I stood there and recited the whole poem. The words just boomed and rolled about. I'm more convinced than ever. No one in the world knows that Stevenson ever came here, except the two of us. Certainly not his precious f.a.n.n.y. Hah!"

Penelope sat silently, submitting to the roar. Poor f.a.n.n.y. She was tired and she wanted to get on the plane.

"Let's see if there's anywhere to cut across," said Charles.

They drove up into a new subdivision where the houses sat on red earth blocks gouged out of the mountainside. One big rainfall and the houses could just slip off the side. Charles drove on the newly paved road with delight in his eyes. It was the look of being first. He had been first with Penelope too. Penelope had always a.s.sumed that she should comport herself as a married woman, a phrase that she always thought of in her grandmother's voice. She looked demurely, or sideways, under her eyelids at men. Charles's total freedom in this respect baffled her. When Charles was not reading he was talking about what he read with his female graduate students. And he would tell her about them too.

"Bit of a crush on that one," he would say in a false and hearty voice, but she never knew why she had to be told that at all.

After the houses ran out the road became steeper. A barrier prevented them from going any further. Charles pulled out around it and kept driving.

"Are you sure we can take this road?" asked Penelope.

"Of course, it's a brand new subdivision," said Charles.

"I don't think this is a good idea, Charles. Look at the creepers."

They had arrived at a tight corner with a s.p.a.ce to pull over at the side. Tiny heart-shaped leaves on runners stretched out over the tarmac like lines of liquid spilling out from an unseen source. Charles sighed and pulled over.

"Alright, you win, Penny. Perhaps it would be an idea to go and see what's round the corner."

He disappeared around the edge of the cliff and Penelope was left alone with the gush of water in the bank beside her. The engine ticked as it cooled. The urge to drive away tugged at her like the currents pouring off the land into the sea. She saw the road empty, and Charles returning to find nothing but creepers fanning out over the centre line. Penelope climbed over into the driver's seat. Her shorts caught on the gear stick and ripped. She started the car.

At the airport, Penelope returned the rental car and lumbered along with both of their bags in a trolley. She found a seat between a pillar and a bank of tropical plants. After an hour had pa.s.sed she thought, he knows now, he knows that I have gone. She thought of the puffer fish on the post and its empty eye sockets. I have snapped, she thought. Like a sugar snap pea. I have no idea what I am doing. The young couple next to her moved off to resume their kissing beside the bank machine. Several leis were draped around the girl's neck and her boyfriend rested his big hands on her shoulders, leaving brown creases in the waxy flowers. Once she had been kissed like that, with intent, on a hot hillside in Ireland, while the wind flicked through the pages of Yeats, discarded along with the empty wine bottle. Penelope had left her own lei in the hotel refrigerator.

"Penelope Pilchard, it's Penelope isn't it?"

She lifted her head out of her hands. Two puffy faces floated into her field of vision. It was Bevan and May Calder from Brockville in their matching sweatsuits.

"Penelope, dear," said May, "fancy finding you here. But where's Charles?"

They looked around, as if he might be hiding behind the tropical plants. Bevan and May's cultivated innocence belied their thirst for gossip. They pecked about like hens in the dust, looking for t.i.tbits of news to relay to their travel club and their Bible-study group.

"He's dealing with the rental car. You know what it's like," said Penelope. Bevan and May did indeed know. They launched into a story about sitting in the plane near some man who later pushed his wife down a creva.s.se.

"Can you imagine that?" said May. "We saw it on the news. And I said to Bevan that's the glacier man isn't it? And on the plane he accused Bevan of taking his pillow."

"He was an impolite what-have-you, if you'll pardon my French, Penelope," said Bevan.

May nodded. "I said to Bevan he ought to tell the police what he knew, about the pillow."

"Well they got him, didn't they?" said Bevan, "and that's the main thing. Time to move on through, love. Wouldn't want to miss the flight. Are you on this one Penelope or later?"

"Three AM," Penelope replied.

"You've got a long time to wait." May pursed her lips and made a sucking noise in the air beside Penelope's cheek. "Tell Charles that we said h.e.l.lo."

Watching the matching bottoms of Bevan and May recede into the crowd, Penelope realized that she was no better than their glacier man. Her actions were not private, they belonged in the tabloids and the Calders would make sure of it. If she were going to leave Charles, she had to leave him somewhere altogether more ordinary, on the way to having her hair done or in the vegetable aisle at the supermarket. In the meantime she ought to find him and make a renewed effort to bring him back into her, into their life. He could not live forever in the literary room next door.

It was well after midnight by the time her taxi arrived at the barrier at the top of the deserted road.

"My husband, la-bas," said Penelope, pointing, trying to make the driver understand where she wanted to go to. "Mon mari," and finally, "mon amour est la." But the driver refused to go beyond the barrier, so she asked him to wait before she got out of the car.

Darkness covered the cliffs. The moon had risen and transformed the sky over the sea into a luminous upturned bowl. Penelope's stomach retracted in fear that Charles might have been murdered, that crabs could even now be picking over his eyes. Surely he would be there, sitting on a log in the half-light, crossing and re-crossing his legs, twirling his hat around on his clenched fist, reading the Times Literary Supplement that he kept in his pocket, or stroking his beard into a sharp point. Penelope recalled the things he had once said to her, that she was the good solid earth beneath his feet, the sky over his head, the sun that kept the shadows under the leaves at bay. She thought of the way his mouth curled up at the edges, so that it looked like he was smiling when he was not. She hurried and her sandals went clack-clack upon the road.

Charles was smaller than she remembered. He stood up as she approached.

"There you are," he said, as if she were a sock that he had mislaid under the bed. "May I inquire just what you thought you were doing, taking off like that?"

"I'm sorry. I needed to be by myself."

"I see," said Charles. There was a tight look about his mouth.

Penelope saw her husband's face framed by the great Pacific Ocean that glistened and stretched to the moon. They were trapped on this island, with no hope of swimming away. A truce had to be reached before they could travel on together.

"I'm glad you're still here," she said. "I thought you might have gone to find a glimmering girl."

"I am not in the mood for funny phrases," said Charles. "I have been waiting for you for three hours. Can you imagine how that makes me feel? Obviously not. Now. Shall we catch our plane before it's too late?"

They stayed far apart as they walked up the hill. In the taxi, Charles leaned back and pretended to sleep.

"Please don't do that again, Penny," he said, his eyes still shut.

Penelope was silent.