Page 277 - tender-is-the-night

rattled on in staccato for a while and given him glimpses
of her thoughts. The situation was always most threaten-
ing when she backed up into herself and closed the doors
behind her.
At Zug Mademoiselle got out and left them. The Divers
approached the Agiri Fair through a menagerie of mam-
moth steamrollers that made way for them. Dick parked the
car, and as Nicole looked at him without moving, he said:
‘Come on, darl.’ Her lips drew apart into a sudden awful
smile, and his belly quailed, but as if he hadn’t seen it he re-
peated: ‘Come on. So the children can get out.’
‘Oh, I’ll come all right,’ she answered, tearing the words
from some story spinning itself out inside her, too fast for
him to grasp. ‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll come—‘
‘Then come.’
She turned from him as he walked beside her but the
smile still flickered across her face, derisive and remote.
Only when Lanier spoke to her several times did she man-
age to fix her attention upon an object, a Punch-and-Judy
show, and to orient herself by anchoring to it.
Dick tried to think what to do. The dualism in his views
of her— that of the husband, that of the psychiatrist—was
increasingly paralyzing his faculties. In these six years she
had several times carried him over the line with her, dis-
arming him by exciting emotional pity or by a flow of wit,
fantastic and disassociated, so that only after the episode
did he realize with the consciousness of his own relaxation
from tension, that she had succeeded in getting a point
against his better judgment.

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