Page 276 - tender-is-the-night

the affair further, but he was not interested and subsequent-
ly, probably consequently, the girl had come to dislike him,
and taken her mother away.
‘This letter is deranged,’ he said. ‘I had no relations of any
kind with that girl. I didn’t even like her.’
‘Yes, I’ve tried thinking that,’ said Nicole.
‘Surely you don’t believe it?’
‘I’ve been sitting here.’
He sank his voice to a reproachful note and sat beside
her.
‘This is absurd. This is a letter from a mental patient.’
‘I was a mental patient.’
He stood up and spoke more authoritatively.
‘Suppose we don’t have any nonsense, Nicole. Go and
round up the children and we’ll start.’
In the car, with Dick driving, they followed the little
promontories of the lake, catching the burn of light and
water in the windshield, tunnelling through cascades of ev-
ergreen. It was Dick’s car, a Renault so dwarfish that they
all stuck out of it except the children, between whom Made-
moiselle towered mastlike in the rear seat. They knew every
kilometer of the road—where they would smell the pine
needles and the black stove smoke. A high sun with a face
traced on it beat fierce on the straw hats of the children.
Nicole was silent; Dick was uneasy at her straight hard
gaze. Often he felt lonely with her, and frequently she tired
him with the short floods of personal revelations that she
reserved exclusively for him, ‘I’m like this—I’m more like
that,’ but this afternoon he would have been glad had she

276 Tender is the Night