Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,72

wood smoke, reached them as they walked back toward the camp. For a minute or two there was nothing wrong in the world. Then she saw the flash of white in the woods—saw Camilla, watching from between the trees.

In her eyes, Vida saw what she must look like. Saw the horrifying impropriety that Vida had been blind to while she lay on the beach with Sal, but which was the atmosphere she had breathed all her life. When she saw Camilla’s face, Vida remembered all the social codes she was currently breaking. And she remembered Fitz, who Camilla had loved, and who was not here now to see her being so familiar with Sal.

Even so, it was hard to take all those rules seriously here. That elaborate etiquette, those codes of behavior, seemed a game now. Even Dame Edna, whose profession was to record the doings of the highly civilized and elaborately dressed, didn’t believe in those rules. Maybe, really, those rules were just a meager and unimaginative way to order one’s days. For the first time, she wondered if she wasn’t better off—if she wasn’t a better person entirely—without any of those rules at all.

Twenty-Four

For the rest of her years, Vida would remember this lesson: no garden, however Edenic, is immune to the wild weather of one’s internal life.

In that brief interlude at the water’s edge, she had been so at ease that she thought nothing could ever disturb her again. But within the hour, and only a beach’s width away, that ease was like an experience a thousand years in the past. Around the big fire a throb of anxiety overtook her. The women looked askance, they said private things in each other’s ears, and Vida’s thoughts rushed on hurly-burly.

For a brief and heady moment she hadn’t cared at all what anybody else thought. But just as fast she found out that she did, that it was not so easy to shake off a lifetime of conditioning.

She looked for Sal, but could not find him. Anyway, she knew that she should not go seeking his company just now. She should avoid suspicion.

Yet she was troubled; her skin crawled with their stares. And she wondered if it was because she had hunted, because she had killed. Or was it because she had been swimming alone with Sal (and what did that signify anyway)? There were so many ways in which she was bad, she felt a little crazed by them all. And had the others added something extra from their own imagination—had rumors begun already of something untoward between her and Fitzhugh’s man?

Nothing happened! said the petulant child who rambled on and on in her head.

But who exactly was that child arguing with?

The smell of meat cooking was so strong, Vida felt sick and crept away from the fire.

In the night she was harassed by bad dreams.

In her dreams, she passed through the fine rooms of her glorious social career, wearing clean clothes, between the beautifully embellished skirts of the ladies who decorated the manicured, topiary-laden lawns of the leisure class. But when these ladies turned their faces on her, it was with the masks of tragedy hiding their real features. All of this was quite substantial and real. Then, in the next moment, it was slipping away through the trapdoors of her mind, and she was sweating on a mat on the ground, beside Eleanor, Miss Flynn, Sonja, and Sonja’s children.

She pulled her bloomers and her shirt from where she hung them in the night to air out, and pulled them over her underthings, and went into the morning, which was still fresh and a little cool.

The memory of yesterday’s swim disinclined her from her usual routine, and as she stood there, outside the huts where the other members of the camp snored and rested after their feast, she could not shake the foreboding of the dream.

Vida walked along the palms that cut through the jungle, to the pool at the base of the waterfall. After swimming in the ocean so often she was surprised by the stillness of that pool, how cool it was, and she swam under the spray of the falls, and emerged in the room demarcated by its watery curtain. She felt a little better in the noisy quiet of falling water. But when she swam back under and emerged, the heavy knot of her hair became waterlogged. Camilla was standing at the side of the pool.

Have you come to slander me to my