"Bring your case inside. Would you like a hot cup of tea?" As she spoke she led the way into the living room, still not looking at him. "That would be nice," he said, as stilted as she. He followed her into the kitchen and watched while she plugged in an electric jug, filled the teapot from a little hot-water geyser over the sink, and busied herself getting cups and saucers down from a cupboard. When she handed him the big five-pound tin of Arnotts biscuits he took a couple of handfuls of cookies out of it and put them on a plate. The jug boiled, she emptied the hot water out of the teapot, spooned loose tea into it and filled it with bubbling water. While she carried the cookie plate and the teapot, he followed with the cups and saucers, back into the living room. The three rooms had been built alongside each other, the bedroom opening off one side of the living room and the kitchen off the other, with the bathroom beyond it. This meant the house had two verandas, onefacing the road and the other the beach. Which in turn meant they each had somewhere excusable to look without having to look at each other. Full darkness had fallen with tropical suddenness, but the air through the wide-open sliding doors was filled with the lapping of water, the distant surf on the reef, the coming and going of the warm soft wind. They drank the tea in silence, though neither could eat a biscuit, and the silence stretched on after the tea was finished, he shifting his gaze to her and she keeping hers steadfastly on the breezy antics- of a baby palm outside the road-veranda doors.
"What's the matter, Meggie?" he asked, so gently and tenderly her heart knocked frantically, and seemed to die from the pain of it, the old query of the grown man to the little girl. He hadn't come to Matlock to see the woman at all. He had come to see the child. It was the child he loved, not the woman. The woman he had hated from the moment she came into being. Round and up came her eyes to his, amazed, outraged, furious; even now, even now! Time suspended, she stared at him so, and he was forced to see, breath caught astounded, the grown woman in those glass-clear eyes. Meggie's eyes. Oh, God, Meggie's eyes!
He had meant what he said to Anne Mueller; he just wanted to see her, nothing more. Though he loved her, he hadn't come to be her lover. Only to see her, talk to her, be her friend, sleep on the living room couch while he tried once more to unearth the taproot of that eternal fascination she possessed for him, thinking that if only he could see it fully exposed, he might gain the spiritual means to eradicate it. It had been hard to adjust to a Meggie with breasts, a waist, hips; but he had done it because when he looked into her eyes, there like the pool of light in a sanctuary lamp shone his Meggie. A mind and a spirit whose pulls he had never been free from since first meeting her, still unchanged inside that distressingly changed body; but while he could see proof of their continued existence in her eyes, he could accept the altered body, discipline his attraction to it.
And, visiting his own wishes and dreams upon her, he had never doubted she wanted to do the same until she had turned on him like a goaded cat, at Justine's birth. Even then, after the anger and hurt died in him, he had attributed her behavior to the pain she had gone through, spiritual more than physical. Now, seeing her at last as she was, he could pinpoint to a second the moment when she had shed the lenses of childhood, donned the lenses of a woman: that interlude in the Drogheda cemetery after Mary Carson's birthday party. When he had explained to her why he couldn't show her any special attention, because people might deem him interested in her as a man. She had looked at him with something in her eyes he had not understood, then looked away, and when she turned back the expression was gone. From that time, he saw now, she had thought of him in a different light; she hadn't kissed him in a passing weakness when she had kissed him, then gone back to thinking of him in the old way, as he had her. He had perpetuated his illusions, nurtured them, tucked them into his unchanging way of life as best he could, worn them like a hair shirt. While all the time she had furnished her love for him with woman's objects.
Admit it, he had physically wanted her from the time of their first kiss, but the want had never plagued him the way his love for her had; seeing them as separate and distinct, not facets of the same thing. She, poor misunderstood creature, had never succumbed to this particular folly. At that moment, had there been any way he could have got off Matlock Island, he would have fled from her like Orestes from the Eumenides. But he couldn't quit the island, and he did have the courage to remain in her presence rather than senselessly walk the night. What can I do, how can I possibly make reparation? I do love her! And if I love her, it has to be because of the way she is now, not because of a juvenile waystation along her road. It's womanly things I've always loved in her; the bearing of the burden. So, Ralph de Bricassart, take off your blinkers, see her as she really is, not as she was long ago. Sixteen years ago, sixteen long incredible years . . . I am forty-four and she is twenty-six; neither of us is a child, but I am by far the more immature. You took it for granted the minute I stepped out of Rob's car, isn't that so, Meggie? You assumed I had given in at last. And before you even had time to get your breath back I had to show you how wrong you were. I ripped the fabric of your delusion apart as if it had been a dirty old rag. Oh, Meggie! What have I done to you? How could I have been so blind, so utterly self-centered? I've accomplished nothing in coming to see you, unless it is to cut you into little pieces. All these years we've been loving at cross-purposes.
