Mystery

Truehart held out his hand, and Tom shook it. The policeman pulled a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses from his shirt pocket and put them on as he trotted down the steps. He got into his car and backed down the track toward the club the way Spychalla had done. Tom stood on the steps and watched him drive away; he was grinning until his face was only a dark blob behind the windshield.

Roddy and Buzz unexpectedly decided to spend Buzz’s last week of vacation with friends in the south of France, and the dinner Tom ate with them on the night before their departure seemed to him like the last friendly encounter he would be likely to have at Eagle Lake. The Redwings came late to the club and left early, and acknowledged no one but Marcello, who was a pet of Katinka’s. The Spences occupied their table near the bar, and kept Sarah’s back to Tom as they talked to each other in the loudest voices in the room, demonstrating that they were having a good time, the summer had just begun, and everything would turn out for the best. Neil and Bitsy Langenheim stared at Tom as he walked in with Roddy and Buzz, and whispered to each other like conspirators.

“Everybody knows that the police paid a couple of social calls to your lodge,” Roddy said. “They’re all hoping you’ve landed yourself in desperate trouble, so they will have something to talk about the rest of the summer.”

“A hunter fired a stray shot through one of my windows,” Tom said, and caught the sharp, questioning look that passed between his two new friends.

“Is your whole life like this?” Roddy asked him, and Tom said he was beginning to wonder.

So they talked for a time about other times hunters had come too near the lodges around the lake, and from there went on to the tension that had always existed between the village and the summer people from Mill Walk, and finally got to the subject most in their minds, their impulsive trip to France; but another, unspoken subject seemed to underlie everything they said.

“Marc and Brigitte have a wonderful villa right on the Mediterranean near Antibes, and Paulo and Yves live only a few kilometers away, and some friends of ours from London are coming down because their children have suddenly decided to become followers of a guru at an ashram in Poona, so even though it’s a bit extravagant, we thought we should make a party of it for a week. Then I’ll fly back to Mill Walk with Buzz and take care of some business for another couple of weeks before I go to London to see Monserrat Caballé and Bergonzi in La Traviata at Covent Garden. I don’t think I’ll be able to get back here until August.”

Buzz would miss Caballé and Bergonzi at Covent Garden, but he would get to Paris in time for the Carmelites, and in October there was Hector and Will and Nina and Guy and Samantha in Cadaques, and in March there was a chance of Arthur and whoever it was now in Formentera, and after that …

After that there was, there would be, more. Roddy Deepdale and Buzz Laing (for that was Buzz’s name, he was Dr. Laing at St. Mary Nieves and to his patients, who knew nothing of his peripatetic, well-furnished life) had friends all over the world, they were always welcome, they were always informed, they had favorite seats at their favorite opera house, La Scala, from which they had seen every Verdi opera except Stiffelio and Aroldo, favorite meals in favorite restaurants in a dozen cities, they cherished the Vermeers and the Rembrandt self-portrait at the Frick, they knew a psychiatrist in London who was the second most intelligent person in the world and a poet in New York who was the third most intelligent person in the world, they loved and needed their friends and their friends loved and needed them. Tom felt provincial, narrow, raw, beside them: the whisper of judgment in the glance he had seen pass between Roddy and Buzz separated him from them as finally as he had been separated from the Redwings, who were pushing back their chairs and preparing to leave, encased in the bubble of their insular importance.

But Kate Redwing came over to say hello and goodbye in the same breath: she, too, was leaving tomorrow; her allotted two weeks were up and she was going back to Atlanta and her grandchildren. All three at the table hugged her, and when she heard of their plans she said they ought to take Tom with them, and Roddy and Buzz smiled politely and said they wished they could, but they would make sure to see plenty of him on Mill Walk. Tom tried to imagine what these two men would say about Victor Pasmore, and what Victor Pasmore would say about them. Kate Redwing embraced him again, and whispered, “Don’t give up! Be strong!” She turned away to follow her family down the stairs, moving away past the Spences’ empty table with hesitant, old-lady steps in her print dress and flat black shoes. A few minutes later, Roddy signed for their meal, and they left too.