Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

Building the pool took all the money the sale of Henry’s father’s house realised. It took rather more and Henry had to borrow from the bank. The pool had a roof over it and walls round, which were what cost the money. That and the sophisticated purifying system. It was eight feet deep at the deep end, with a diving board and a chute.

Happily for Fiona, her swimming lessons were indefinitely postponed. Henry enjoyed his new pool so much that he would very much have grudged taking time off from swimming his lengths or practising his dives in order to teach his wife the basics.

Fiona guessed that Henry would be a brilliant swimmer. He was the perfect all-rounder. There was an expression in Latin which he had uttered and then translated for her which might have been, she thought, a description of himself: mens sana in corpore sano. Only for “sana,” or “healthy,” she substituted “wonderful.” She would have liked to sit by the pool and watch him and she was rather sorry that his preferred swimming time was six-thirty in the morning, long before she was up.

One evening, while doing the crossword puzzle, he consulted her about a clue, as he sometimes did. “Consulted” was not perhaps the word. It was more a matter of expressing his thoughts aloud and waiting for her comment. Fiona found these remarks, full of references to unknown classical or literary personages, nearly incomprehensible. She had heard, for instance, of Psyche, but only in connection with “psychological,” “psychiatric,” and so on. Cupid to her was a fat baby with wings, and she did not know this was another name for Eros, which to her was the statue.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand at all,” she said humbly.

Henry loved elucidating. With a rare gesture of affection, he reached out and squeezed her hand. “Psyche was married to Cupid, who was, of course, a god, the god of love. He always came to her by night and she never saw his face. Suppose her husband was a terrible monster of ugliness and deformity? Against his express wishes” — here Henry fixed a look of some severity on his wife — “she rose up one night in the dark and, taking a lighted candle, approached the bed where Cupid lay. Scarcely had she caught a glimpse of his peerless beauty, when a drop of hot wax fell from the candle onto the god’s naked skin. With a cry he sprang up and fled from the house. She never saw him again.”

“How awful for her,” said Fiona, quite taken aback.

“Yes, well, she shouldn’t have disobeyed him. Still, I don’t see how that quite fits in here — wait a minute, yes, I do. Of course, that second syllable is an anagram of Eros...”

Henry inserted the letters in his neat print. A covert glance told her he had completed nearly half the puzzle. She did her best to suppress a yawn. By this time of the evening she was always so tired she could scarcely keep awake, while Henry could stay up for hours yet. People like him needed no more than four or five hours sleep.

“I think I’ll go up,” she said.

“Good night.” He added a kindly, “Darling.”

For some reason, Henry never did the crossword puzzle on a Saturday. Fiona thought this a pity because, as she said, that was the day they gave prizes for the first correct entries received. But Henry only smiled and said he did the puzzle for the pure intellectual pleasure of it, not for gain. Of course you might not know your entry was correct because the solution to Saturday’s puzzle did not appear next day but not until a week later. Her saying this, perhaps naively, made Henry unexpectedly angry. Everyone knew that with this kind of puzzle, he said, there could only be one correct solution, even people who never did crosswords knew that.

It was still dark when Henry got up in the mornings. Sometimes she was aware of his departure and his empty half of the bed. Occasionally, half an hour later, she heard the boy come with the papers, the tap-tap of the letter box, and even the soft thump of the Times falling onto the mat. But most days she was aware of nothing until Henry reappeared with her tea and the papers.

Henry did nothing to make her feel guilty about lying in, yet she was ashamed of her inability to get up. It was somehow unlike him, it was out of character, this waiting on her. He never did anything of the kind at any other time of the day and it sometimes seemed to her that the unselfish effort he made must be almost intolerable to someone with his needle-sharp mind and — yes, it must be admitted — his undoubted lack of patience. That he never complained or even teased her about oversleeping only added to her guilt.