by James Hilton
“I’m glad you mentioned it,” I said, half laughing because I found it impossible from then on to speak in a level voice.
“Well, you knew, didn’t you, Jane?”
“Yes, but—it’s—it’s made me so—so very happy to be told.”
We drove on another mile or so before he said: “There was always something between us.”
And till now there had always been somebody between us, I thought, but did not say.
He went on musingly: “The right mixture of caring and not caring—I suppose that’s what love is.”
Oh well, if he wanted to diagnose, analyze, dissect, interpret—all that was all right with me. His mind might be up there, but his arm wasn’t; and we had actually said, once and in those words, that we loved each other. But words were my field, just as analysis was his, so we were both putting happiness to the test we valued most; perhaps even in mathematical terms I could be somewhere in his mind, just as he would be somehow in my next book, whatever it was.
Oh God, I was happy as we drove on. It was like coming home after a winter walk, expecting a fire in a warm house, yet not realizing how warm and bright it could be … and how dark the night outside.
* * * * *
When we left the desert and climbed into the hills there was a mist that covered everything but the section of road ahead and the white line down the middle of it. Brad drove slowly and the miles crept by as if we should never get to Vista Grande at all. I couldn’t help recalling Mr. Chandos and his story of the road that went nowhere, and my own suggestion of the voice on the radio reading the psalm that began—“Teach me, O Lord, the way of thy statutes”; and this, I suppose, made me switch on the car radio there and then. It was very faint—a news bulletin from somewhere—I could only catch the phrase: “This morning, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima….”
THE END