Felix had each day the sorrow born with him; for the rest, he pretended that he noticed nothing. Robin was almost never home; he did not know how to inquire for her. Sometimes coming into a café he would creep out again, because she stood before the bar—sometimes laughing, but more often silent, her head bent over her glass, her hair swinging; and about her people of every sort.
One night, coming home about three, he found her in the darkness, standing, back against the window, in the pod of the curtain, her chin so thrust forward that the muscles in her neck stood out. As he came toward her she said in a fury, ‘I didn’t want him!’ Raising her hand she struck him across the face.
He stepped away, he dropped his monocle and caught at it swinging, he took his breath backward. He waited a whole second, trying to appear casual. ‘You didn’t want him,’ he said. He bent down pretending to disentangle his ribbon, ‘It seems I could not accomplish that.’
‘Why not be secret about him?’ she said. ‘Why talk?’
Felix turned his body without moving his feet. ‘What shall we do?’
She grinned, but it was not a smile. ‘I’ll get out,’ she said. She took up her cloak, she always carried it dragging. She looked about her, about the room, as if she were seeing it for the first time.
For three or four months the people of the quarter asked for her in vain. Where she had gone no one knew. When she was seen again in the quarter, it was with Nora Flood. She did not explain where she had been, she was unable or unwilling to give an account of herself. The doctor said: ‘In America, that’s where Nora lives. I brought her into the world and I should know.’
CHAPTER THREE
Night Watch
The strangest ‘salon’ in America was Nora’s. Her house was couched in the centre of a mass of tangled grass and weeds. Before it fell into Nora’s hands the property had been in the same family two hundred years. It had its own burial ground, and a decaying chapel in which stood in tens and tens mouldering psalm books, laid down some fifty years gone in a flurry of forgiveness and absolution.