Page 280 - tender-is-the-night

They sat at a table, her eyes in a profundity of suspicion,
her hand moving across her line of sight as if it were ob-
structed. ‘I want a drink—I want a brandy.’
‘You can’t have brandy—you can have a bock if you want
it.’
‘Why can’t I have a brandy?’
‘We won’t go into that. Listen to me—this business about
a girl is a delusion, do you understand that word?’
‘It’s always a delusion when I see what you don’t want
me to see.’
He had a sense of guilt as in one of those nightmares
where we are accused of a crime which we recognize as
something undeniably experienced, but which upon wak-
ing we realize we have not committed. His eyes wavered
from hers.
‘I left the children with a gypsy woman in a booth. We
ought to get them.’
‘Who do you think you are?’ she demanded. ‘Svengali?’
Fifteen minutes ago they had been a family. Now as she
was crushed into a corner by his unwilling shoulder, he saw
them all, child and man, as a perilous accident.
‘We’re going home.’
‘Home!’ she roared in a voice so abandoned that its loud-
er tones wavered and cracked. ‘And sit and think that we’re
all rotting and the children’s ashes are rotting in every box
I open? That filth!’
Almost with relief he saw that her words sterilized her,
and Nicole, sensitized down to the corium of the skin, saw
the withdrawal in his face. Her own face softened and she

280 Tender is the Night