Strawberries in the Sea (26 page)

“I'm going to show you the house, and then we'll eat somewhere where they won't allow dungarees.”

She was pleased but gave in slowly, with a sulky jerk of her shoulders. “I'll have to work at it to compete with you. Who chose that outfit for you? You must be dressing like an artist these days instead of a Yankee carpenter.”

He really laughed this time.

He had a car new to him, a late-model Mercedes. Rosa admired it with restraint; if she'd gushed, Edwin would have either suspected her or made her feel foolish. She hadn't considered his job in terms of money, but now she realized that his fee must have been considerable. No wonder the Websters had a hard time believing in this Edwin when the other one had been both wound and terror for so long.

The restored house was in the hills behind Limerock. The roadside boundary was marked by a low stone wall along which the first black-eyed susans, goldenrod, and asters of the season bloomed lavishly. The house lay about two hundred yards in from the black road, settled among young trees and judiciously pruned old ones which must have been there almost as long as the building itself, From the back of the house the Fremont Mountains seemed very close in the morning sunlight. The lake below the steep and wooded hillsides was deep blue, and in the hush they could hear the fragile yodeling of loons. From the front of the house, Penobscot Bay filled half the visible world and the rest was sky.

The barn had been turned into a garage, with an apartment upstairs for the caretaker. He came to meet them, holding a German shepherd by the collar. At sight of Edwin, the dog's tail began to beat in a wide, wild arc, and the man let him go. Rosa held out a clenched fist and was given perfunctory but polite acceptance; Edwin was obviously a great friend.

The caretaker was a stout elderly man with a ruddy face and thick white hair. He introduced himself and the dog to Rosa.

“Your cousin's a master of his craft,” he said reverently. “A real master. Somebody ought to write him up. Maybe they will when he finishes the Dudley place.”

“Where's that?” Rosa asked. Edwin and the dog were walking toward the side gate of the walled garden.

“You never heard of it?” Foster was delighted to tell her. “Magnificent old place it was once, out behind Fremont. The Dudleys owned all of Fremont once, before it
was
Fremont. Right down to the harbor and their own shipyard. . . . The new people paid a fortune for it. Friends of these folks.” He jerked his round head at the house. “Saw what Ed's done, hired him on the spot.”

“I didn't know,” said Rosa. “He's too modest.”

“All the great ones are,” he said with a wink and a nod. “Look, while you're here, I'm going to run down to the village and get my Sunday paper.” He took out a key ring and handed it to her. “I won't be long. There's lots to see, make him show it all. The Parnells are in Massachusetts for the weekend. Not that they'd mind,” he assured her eagerly. “Stay, Bruno,” he called to the dog, who showed no intention of leaving Edwin.

There was a bicycle leaning against the side of the barn, and with astonishing lightness Foster mounted it and rode off around the house, ringing his bell. The sight of the merry old man riding jauntily away to the spritely jangle unsealed an unexpected spring of happiness in Rosa.

She went to Edwin waving the keys. “Dick Foster says you should show me everything,” she said. He opened the gate and waved her into the garden.

They were just entering the house by the garden door when Bruno began to bristle and growl; he shot in ahead of them and down the shadowy hall that led past the staircase through to the front door. “Bruno,” a woman said. The dog came to a skidding stop, rumpling up a rug, then went forward wagging his tail as the woman shut the screen door behind her.

“Well, hello!” the woman called to Edwin and Rosa; she sounded about to break into laughter. She was a tall, almost attenuated figure in narrow-legged slacks.

“Hello,” Rosa responded unevenly. She felt like a trespasser or worse. As her eyes adjusted to the shade after the brilliance outside, and the woman came toward them, Rosa wondered whether she should explain or leave it to Edwin. She turned to him for help. Even allowing for the subdued light his color was bloodless, and his eyes were fixed on the woman with the cold amber gaze of the dog before he had recognized Edwin.

In spite of her passionate desire to be elsewhere, Rosa could still be intrigued by Edwin's reaction to the meeting. Yet she had a curious impulse to protect him. She walked forward, trying not to sound out of breath as she said, “I'm Rosa Fleming. Edwin brought me to see the house.”

“I'm Laura Parnell.” Still sounding amused the woman put out her hand. She had a good grip. Her eyes looked quizzically into Rosa's. They were a pale blue, with a curious dark rim to the iris. Rosa felt their question so strongly that she started to say
I'm Edwin's cousin
, but Edwin had come up noiselessly behind her, and took her arm; the pressure of his fingers inside her elbow hurt enough to startle her into silence.

“Good morning, Edwin!” Mrs. Parnell said. “Well, Miss Fleming, what do you think of it?”

“I haven't seen the house yet, but your garden is beautiful.”

“It is, rather.” She seemed pleased. “See here, this is my plan.” She led Rosa down the hall toward a framed drawing on the wall, talking vivaciously. She was not as tall as she had seemed at first, but the fine, long bones were as Edwin had drawn them. Her skin was coarser than Rosa's and expert make-up couldn't hide that or the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She was forty anyway, Rosa guessed, but she guessed also that it made no difference. Bemused by the voice, the manner, and by a delicate and probably expensive fragrance, Rosa studied without really seeing the plan of the garden of Martin Dunton, Esquire, in Ipswich in 1790. She felt caught in a tide-rip between the other two.

“We planned to be gone until tomorrow,” Mrs. Parnell was saying. “But it was simply awful at my sister's. Visiting grandchildren not quite by the dozen, but it felt that way. So Bill and I got up at five this morning and folded our tents like the Arabs and silently stole away.” She laughed. “Bill dropped me off at the gate and went on to the village to get his papers.”

“So's Dick,” Rosa said. “He went off on his bike, ringing his bell.” It sounded to her like the proud statement of an eight-year-old wanting to converse with an adult.

“Dick's younger than I ever was,” Mrs. Parnell said. “I'd love to ride a bike, but I always skin my elbows.”

Edwin's fingers signaled Rosa. She said, “It's nice of you not to call us trespassers, Mrs. Parnell. We'll go along now.”

“But you haven't seen the house yet! You haven't seen Edwin's beautiful corner cupboard, or his mouldings or mantels, or anything!” She sounded actually disappointed. “Let's have drinks, or coffee, or whatever you'd like—” She was talking to Edwin. Ignored, Rosa looked around at him, nervously, and was glad to see that now he looked perfectly composed as he shook his head.

“The immovable and inscrutable Edwin,” said Mrs. Parnell. “Bill will be sorry to miss you. But if you must, you must.” She shrugged them off, airily turning away; angry at the failure of her charm, her fragrance, her hand on his arm.

“Goodbye,” Rosa said to her.

“Goodbye,” she answered coldly. She was already on her way out the garden door. Edwin and Rosa went out the front way. At the car, Edwin made a signal to Bruno, who went back and sat on the wide brick doorstep.

On the way to the gate they met Dick cycling back, his broad face smiling at the world, the breeze lifting his white hair. Edwin stopped the car and Rosa told him that the Parnells had come back.

“I saw him at the village,” he said. “Showing some sense, I told him. Why anyone'd want to leave this place, I said to him. . . . Well, it was nice meeting you, Miss. Tell Edwin to bring you around again and I'll give you a drink. You bring her again, Edwin,” he ordered. “I'm glad to see you out with a good-looking girl.”

Edwin glanced around at Rosa with his most pawky look, as if he hadn't really noticed her before, and nodded as if to say,
Oh, she's not bad
. Dick and Rosa laughed.

They drove for a long time in silence, up through Fremont and then off the main road onto the winding, narrow ones where houses were few and far between. The countryside simmered with August, giving off a moist, aromatic bouquet of earth and leaves. Edwin pulled off the road finally at a shady turn-around above a small lake. Across it there were two tents under the spruces, and a canoe pulled up on a scrap of sandy beach. A mountain of rock rose up behind the campsite, trees clinging to every crevice in the granite.

Edwin took out his notepad and gave her the choice of three places to eat. “Wait till I've been out behind a bush first,” Rosa said. When she came back to the car he was standing beside it, hands in his pockets, watching the lake below. She took the pad and wrote, “Let's go to the least fancy place.”

He nodded. She wrote again. “Did you have anything to do with her?”

His eyes widened slightly and lifted to hers. She held her ground, waiting for an icy put-down. Instead he wrote, straight-faced, “She wondered if deaf men did it differently.”

“No!” Rosa said sharply.

“Couldn't have been any other reason.”

“The reason could be that you're an attractive man within taking distance. So she took.”

“So what does that make me?” His expression was sardonic. “A fool or a stud? No, she didn't
take
. I never went to bed with her. I wanted to.”

“Why didn't you?” she wrote. “And call it an adventure? Men do it all the time, women too.”

He seized the pad from her and wrote fast, bearing down hard. “Pride. Pure cussedness. Knowing she wanted to satisfy her curiosity. I'm a freak, so she expected me to be so damn grateful. . . . Lady Bountiful bringing a moment of beauty into my poor life. I'd never be able to forget it.”

“Maybe it would have turned out to be the other way around. She might have been grateful, and never able to forget.”

He grinned suddenly. “Well, we'll never know, will we?”

“She's still interested. I saw her look at you. And she was wondering who I was. I was flattered, but I could see it going through her head,
How can he prefer this horse to me?
”

He wrote across her words in big letters, “End of subject!” Then he opened the car door and motioned her in.

A
fter all her fears, she felt nothing at all in court. It was over quickly. Outside the judge's chambers Mr. Chatham shook hands all around and went down the corridor with some other lawyers. Jude, Leona, and Rosa walked out into the morning. There was still a wet coolness in the shade, and the robins were singing in the courthouse elms. In the parking lot Lucy sat in Jude's car, knitting.

“There!” she said when she saw Rosa. She kissed her and said, “You look better already.”

“Oh, she'll be fine now,” Jude said, patting Rosa's shoulder.

“Yes, she can put it all behind her and forget that critter ever lived,” said Leona. “What are you going to do to celebrate, Rosa?”

Everything that she had feared would happen back in the courthouse was threatening now. She saw the wave rearing up over her, about to drown her in a freezing smother of foam. She kept her slight, polite smile in place. “Well, if you don't have anything else to do up-town, Leona, I'd like to go home and shuck off my pantyhose. They're some hot.”

Everybody laughed heartily, looking at her with admiration as if she were being incredibly gallant.

Rosa took Jude's hand in both hers and squeezed it. “Thanks for helping out, Jude.”

“It was a pleasure,” he said fervently.

“It certainly
was
,” Leona said. “I'd just like to have said plenty more, that's all. And you letting him off without alimony, except that ten a week they insisted on. You won't even bother to collect that
I'd
have skun him alive.”

“I believe you would,” said Rosa. “Everett better watch out.”

“What do you suppose has kept him walking Spanish all these years?”

“Oh, come on before I melt,” said Rosa. They said goodbye to the Websters and walked to Leona's car.

“I suppose he'll be rushing Phyllis to the preacher this afternoon,” Leona said. “Roll down your window, it's hot in here. . . . No, he can't get married today, unless they do it at noon or so.”

Will you stop talking about him?
Rosa bit the inside of her lower lip to keep the words in.

“Because they're launching the boat today,” Leona finished. On the last word she gasped, and there was instantly a clanging silence in the car. At least it seemed to clang horribly in Rosa's ears. She looked at Leona who, in the act of starting the car, had apparently been turned to salt. Staring through the windshield, fingers still on the key, she muttered, “I wasn't going to mention it. I could cut my throat.”

“If you'll just drive back to Seal Point, that'll be sufficient,” said Rosa.

“Tell me you knew it already and I'll feel better.”

“No, I didn't know it, but I'm not surprised because she should be ready to launch by now. And if Phyllis is going to christen her, I sh'd think they would get married first, otherwise a very pregnant girlfriend is going to shock the pants off half the audience,” said Rosa. “Stop looking as if you've been hit by gut cramps, or do you want me to drive?”

Leona straightened up with a long sigh, and started the car. “That's right, she's showing it awful. Maybe it's twins.”

“Look, let's go back to where we left the courthouse and start in new. Talk about anything. Your kids, for instance.”