Page 265 - tender-is-the-night

XIV

Dick awoke at five after a long dream of war, walked to
the window and stared out it at the Zugersee. His dream
had begun in sombre majesty; navy blue uniforms crossed
a dark plaza behind bands playing the second movement of
Prokofieff’s ‘Love of Three Oranges.’ Presently there were
fire engines, symbols of disaster, and a ghastly uprising of
the mutilated in a dressing station. He turned on his bed-
lamp light and made a thorough note of it ending with the
half-ironic phrase: ‘Non-combatant’s shell-shock.’
As he sat on the side of his bed, he felt the room, the house
and the night as empty. In the next room Nicole muttered
something desolate and he felt sorry for whatever loneliness
she was feeling in her sleep. For him time stood still and
then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick re-
wind of a film, but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock
and calendar and birthday, with the added poignance of her
perishable beauty.
Even this past year and a half on the Zugersee seemed
wasted time for her, the seasons marked only by the work-
men on the road turning pink in May, brown in July, black
in September, white again in Spring. She had come out of
her first illness alive with new hopes, expecting so much,
yet deprived of any subsistence except Dick, bringing up
children she could only pretend gently to love, guided or-

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