behind her mother, who continues to maneuver down the aisle, walking with small smooth steps, brightly distributing smiles to the faces of the sheep. He has to admire her social co-ordination.
At the door Eccles clasps Harry’s hand with his broad grip, a warm grip that tightens at the moment it should loosen. “It’s exhilarating to see you here,” he says, hanging on. Rabbit feels the whole line behind him bunch and push.
“Nice to be here,” he says. “Very nice sermon.”
Eccles, who has been peering at him with a feverish smile and a blush that seems apologetic, laughs; the roof of his mouth glimmers a second and he lets go.
Harry hears him tell Lucy, “In about an hour.”
“The roast’s in now. Do you want it cold or overdone?”
“Overdone,” he says. He solemnly takes Joyce’s tiny hand and says, “How do you do, Mrs. Pettigrew? How splendid you look this morning!”
Startled, Rabbit turns and sees that the fat lady next in line is startled also. His wife is right, Eccles is indiscreet. Lucy, Joyce behind her, walks up beside him. Her straw hat comes up to his shoulder. “Do you have a car?”
“No. Do you?”
“No. Walk along with us.”
“O.K.” Her proposition is so bold there must be nothing in it; nevertheless the harpstring in his chest tuned to her starts trembling. Sunshine quivers through the trees; in the streets and along unshaded sections of the pavement it leans down with a broad dry weight. It has lost the grainy milkiness of morning sun. Mica fragments in the pavement glitter; the hoods and windows of hurrying cars smear the air with white reflections. She pulls off her hat and shakes her hair. The church crowd thins behind them. The waxy leaves, freshly thick, of the maples planted between the pavement and curb embower them rhythmically; in the broad gaps of sun her face, his shirt, feel white, white; the rush of motors, the squeak of a tricycle, the touch of a cup and saucer inside a house are sounds conveyed to him as if along a bright steel bar. As they walk along he trembles in light that seems her light.
“How are your wife and baby?” she asks.
“Fine. They’re just fine.”
“Good. Do you like your new job?”
“Not much.”
“Oh. That’s a bad sign, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t suppose you’re supposed to like your job. If you did, then it wouldn’t be a job.”
“Jack likes his job.”
“Then it’s not a job.”
“That’s what he says. He says it’s not a job, as I would treat it. But I’m sure you know his lines as well as I do.”
He knows she’s needling him, but he doesn’t feel it, tingling all over anyway. “He and I in some ways I guess are alike,” he says.
“I know. I know.” Her odd quickness in saying this sets his heart ticking quicker. She adds, “But naturally it’s the differences that I notice.” Her voice curls dryly into the end of this sentence; her lower lip goes sideways.
What is this? He has a sensation of touching glass. He doesn’t know if they are talking about nothing or making code for the deepest meanings. He doesn’t know if she’s a conscious or unconscious flirt. He always thinks when they meet again he will speak firmly, and tell her he loves her, or something as blunt, and lay the truth bare; but in her presence he is numb; his breath fogs the glass and he has trouble thinking of anything to say and what he does say is stupid. He knows only this: underneath everything, under their minds and their situations, he possesses, like an inherited lien on a distant piece of land, a dominance over her, and that in her grain, in the lie of her hair and nerves and fine veins, she is prepared for this dominance. But between that preparedness and him everything reasonable intervenes. He asks, “Like what?”
“Oh—like the fact that you’re not afraid of women.”
“Who is?”
“Jack.”
“You think?”
“Of course. The old ones, and the teenagers, he’s fine with; the ones who see him in his collar. But the others he’s very leery of; he doesn’t like them. He doesn’t really think they even ought to come to church. They bring a smell of babies and bed into it. That’s not just in Jack; that’s in Christianity. It’s really a very neurotic religion.”
Somehow, when she fetches out her psychology, it seems so foolish to Harry his own feeling of foolishness leaves him. Stepping down off a high curb, he