‘Oh.’ He closed his eyes briefly, frowned. ‘The window. The time I remembered the window, breaking it. I remembered that and then it… oh!’ he said abruptly. ‘You put it in my hand.’
‘That’s right. And for eight days I’d been putting it in your hand. I put it in your shoe, once. On your plate. In the soap dish. Once I stuck your toothbrush inside it. Every day, half a dozen times a day—eight days, Hip!’
‘I don’t—’
‘You don’t understand! Oh, I can’t blame you.’
‘I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say, I don’t believe you.’
At last she looked at him; when she did he realized how rare it was for him to be with her without her eyes on his face. ‘Truly,’ she said intensely. ‘Truly, Hip. That’s the way it was.’
He nodded reluctantly. ‘All right. So that’s the way it was. What has that to do with—‘
‘Wait,’ she begged. ‘You’ll see… now, every time you touched the bit of cable, you refused to admit it existed. You’d let it roll right out of your hand and you wouldn’t see it fall to the floor. You’d step on it with your bare feet and not even feel it. Once it was in your food, Hip; you picked it up with a forkful of lima beans, you put the end of it in your mouth, and then just let it slip away; you didn’t know it was there!’
‘Oc—‘ he said with an effort, then, ‘occlusion. That’s what Bromfield called it.’ Who was Bromfield? But it escaped him; Janie was talking.
‘That’s right. Now listen carefully. When the time came for the occlusion to vanish, it did; and there you stood with the cable in your hand, knowing it was real. But nothing I could do beforehand could make that happen until it was ready to happen!’