'I was sure you were a colonel,' Evelyn said. 'At least a colonel.'

Why?'

'No particular reason,' Evelyn said carelessly. She put her hand on mine on the table. 'Just a kind of air of commanding the troops.'

'It's a trick I learned, dear Evelyn,' Fabian said, 'to cover up my essential lack of self-confidence. Would you like a brandy?'

When he had paid the bill, he wouldn't hear of our driving all the way to take him to his hotel in Southampton. 'And tomorrow morning,' he said to me, 'don't bother to get up early. I have to be in New York by noon and the hotel will find a limousine for me.'

As the taxi drove up to the restaurant, now half-obscured by fog rolling in from the bay, he said, 'What a lovely evening. I hope we will have many such. If I may. Gentle Heart ...'I did not miss the echo ... 'If I may...' He leaned toward Evelyn. I would love to kiss this dear girl good night.'

'Of course,' she said, not waiting for my permission, and kissed him on the cheek.

We watched him get into the taxi and the red tail-lights faded wetly into the fog. 'Whew! ' Evelyn said, reaching for my hand.

That night and the next morning I was glad Fabian was in a hotel and not in Evelyn's house.

He did not make it to the wedding, as he was in England that week. But he sent a superb Georgian silver coffeepot as a gift from London, hand-carried by a stewardess he knew. And when our son was born, he sent five gold napoleons from Zurich, where he happened to be at the time.

24

The sound of hammering woke me up. I looked at the clock on the bedside table. It was six forty. I sighed. Johnson, the carpenter who was working on the new wing of the house, insisted upon giving you what he called an honest day's work for your money. Evelyn stirred in the bed beside me, but did not awake. She was breathing softly, the covers half-thrown back, her breasts bare. She looked delicious lying there, and I would have liked to make love to her. But she was cranky in the morning, and, besides, she bad worked late the night before on a brief she had brought home from the office with her. Later, I promised myself.

I got out of bed and parted the curtains to see what the weather was like. It was a fine summer morning and the sun was already hot. I put on a pair of bathing trunks and a terry-cloth bathrobe, got a towel, and left the room, barefooted and silent, congratulating myself for having had the good sense to marry a woman who came complete with a house on a beach.

Downstairs, I went into the guest room, which was now transformed into a nursery. I could hear Anna, the girl who looked after the baby. moving around in the kitchen. The baby was in his crib, gurgling over his morning bottle. I stared down at him. He looked rosy, serious, and vulnerable. He didn't resemble either Evelyn or myself; he just looked like a baby. I didn't try to analyze my feelings as I stood beside my son, but when I went out of the room, I was smiling.

I turned the bolt on the second lock that I had installed on the front door when I moved in with Evelyn. She had said that it was unnecessary, that in all the time she and her parents had the house there never had been any trouble. So far there had been no uninvited guests, but I still made certain the bolt was in place each night before I went to bed.

Outside, the lawn was wet with dew, cool and agreeable on my bare feet. 'Good morning, Mr Johnson,' I said to the carpenter, who was putting in a window frame.

'Good morning, Mr Grimes,' Johnson said. He was a formal man and expected to be treated formally. The rest of the building crew wouldn't arrive until eight, but Mr Johnson had told me he preferred working alone and that his early-morning labor, when nobody was around to bother him, was the best part of the day. Evelyn said the real reason he started »o early was that he enjoyed waking people up. He had a Puritanical streak and didn't approve of sluggards. She had known him since she was a little girl.

The new wing was almost finished. We were going to move the nursery into it and there would be a library where Evelyn could work and keep some books. Up to now she had to work on the dining-room table. She had an office in town, but the phone was always ringing there, she said, and she couldn't concentrate. She had a secretary and a clerk, but she always seemed to have more work than she could comfortably handle between nine in the morning and six at night. It was amazing how much litigation went on in this peaceful part of the world.

I circled the house and crossed to the edge of the bluff. The bay stretched out below me, glittering and calm in the morning sunlight. I went down the flight of weathered wooden steps to the little beach. I took off the bathrobe and took a deep breath and ran into the water. It was still early in July and the water was shockingly cold. I swam out a hundred yards and then back and came out tingling all over and feeling like singing aloud. I took off my trunks and toweled myself dry. There was nobody else on the whole stretch of beach at that hour to be offended by momentary male nudity.

Back in the house, I turned on the kitchen radio for the early news as I made myself breakfast. There was speculation in Washington that President Nixon was going to be forced to resign. I thought of David Lorimer and his farewell party in Rome. I sat at the kitchen table and drank my fresh orange juice and lingered over bacon and eggs, toast and coffee. I pondered on the special, marvelous taste of breakfasts that you made for yourself on a sunny morning. In the fourteen months since we had been married, I had become addicted to domesticity. Often, when Evelyn came home tired from the office, I prepared dinner for both of us. I had made Evelyn swear never to tell this to a soul. especially not to Miles Fabian. On his subsequent visits, after the first touchy evening on which they had met, Evelyn and he had come to terms. They would never be friends, but they were not unfriendly.

Fabian had been in East Hampton for three weeks, helping me get ready for the opening. Early in the year, he had gone to Rome and had gotten in touch with Angelo Quinn and made a contract with him for all his output. He had done the same thing with the man whose lithographs he had bought in Zurich. Then he had come out to Sag Harbor and outlined a scheme that I had thought was insane at first, but which, surprisingly, Evelyn had approved of. The plan was to open a gallery in nearby East Hampton and have me run it. 'You're not doing anything, anyway,' he said, which was true at the time, 'and I'll always be available to help you when you need it. You have a lot to learn, but you certainly picked a winner with Quinn.'

I bought two paintings for my girl,' I said. 'I didn't intend to start a career.'

'Have I steered you wrong up to now?' he demanded. 'No,' I admitted. Among the other things on which he had not steered me wrong, like gold and sugar and wine and Canadian zinc and lead and the land in Gstaad (the chalet would be built by Christmas and every apartment had been rented), there was also Nadine Bonheur's dirty movie, which had been playing to full houses for seven months, in New York, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles amid cries of shame in church publications. Our names, happily, were not on anything connected with the picture except the checks we received each month. And they went directly to Zurich. My bank balances, both open and secret, were impressive, to say the least. 'No,' I said, 'I can't say that you've steered me wrong up to now.'

'This area is rich in three things,' Fabian went on, 'money, potatoes, and painters. You could have five shows a year just with local artists and you still wouldn't begin to tap the total product. People are interested in art here and they have the dough to invest in it. And it's like Palm Beach - people are on vacation and are free with their money here. You can get double the price for a picture that you'd have to sweat to get off the wall in New York. That's not to say that we'd just stick with this one place. We'll start modestly and see how it goes, of course. After that, we could look into the possibilities of Palm Beach, say, Houston, Beverly Hills, even New York. You wouldn't be against spending a month or so in Palm Beach in the winter, would you?' he asked Evelyn.