The Headmaster's Wife(14)

Outside, the carillon was doing one of its minor jiggles. It was a terrible carillon, politically correct, like everything else at Windsor Academy. James checked the clock on the wall behind him and saw that it was ten thirty Then he turned back to what he was doing at the counter and looked out the window. It was not a good view from this kitchen. There was a good one, out on the quad, in the living room; but faculty apartments being what they were, one view per unit seemed to be the best that could be expected. This window looked out on the long stretch from the library to Maverick Pond. In the winter, with the snow piled high, it looked like a wasteland.

He poured black coffee into large, bone china cups and put the cups on his best serving tray. He put the silver sugar bowl there, too, but not the cream pitcher, because neither of them used cream. It fascinated him a little. They were both “effeminate” men, in a way of being “effeminate” that had gone out of style many years ago; but neither one of them had women’s tastes. The coffees were plain black brews, good Colombian, and imported, but without the bells and whistles of the kind of person who found Starbucks a personal affront to aesthetics. There was no cinnamon or French vanilla. There was no sales slip in the utility drawer indicating a buying trip into Boston to the place where a pound of ground coffee beans cost as much as a small car.

Out in the wasteland, there was movement. James stopped what he was doing, his hands full of silver teaspoons, and watched the figure in black walking away from the pond with her head bent into what must have been wind. There were no lights out there, but he knew who it was, knew it as surely as he would have if he had seen her red hair flashing under one of the security lights. He wondered what she was doing out there at this time of night, and alone. Alice Makepeace was never alone, and when she was it was because she was coming or going to an assignation. He couldn’t imagine what kind of assignation she could be having at Maverick Pond in the middle of a cold February night, when even the squirrels weren’t interested in making love in the out-of-doors.

He put the teaspoons down on the tray. He watched Alice Makepeace reach the top of the hill near the west door of the library and then begin to move along the path toward the quad. She was wearing that floor-length black wool cape she’d affected since the day he’d first met her. She looked like she was auditioning for a part in an all-female remake of Zorro. The way things were these days, somebody probably would make a female Zorro, and then all the girls in the English Department would write essays full of torturously complicated language for the Publication of the Modern Language Association saying, basically, that it was a Very Good Thing to show women in nontraditional roles, and that the movie would probably result in the death of capitalism and the coming of a Utopia built on nurturing, cooperation, and classically female values.

Alice Makepeace had disappeared out of sight in the quad. James picked up the tray and began to carry it into the kitchen, thinking that he ought to put something sensible on the CD player before the night got too quiet for either his comfort or David’s. He didn’t know when that had started—the uncomfortable feeling they both had when there was too much silence between them—but it had started, and James had been through enough of these things to know that it meant the relationship was winding to a close. It was too bad really. He didn’t love David. He didn’t have much use for all this new talk of love and relationships and permanency that characterized this phase of the “gay” movement. He refused even to call himself “gay.” Still, it was too bad. He and David were companionable. They had been together a long time.

David was sitting in the wing chair with his feet up on the ottoman going through the illustrated catalogue for the Turner show at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was an old show, years in the past. James couldn’t believe David was really interested.

James put the tray down on the coffee table and sat in front of it on the couch. You could see out the window here to the quad, but there was no sign of Alice Makepeace trudging her way to the headmaster’s house. He wondered where she had gone.

David put down the catalogue and reached for his coffee. “Where have you been? You’re not usually any more than a couple of minutes in the kitchen.”

“I was watching someone out the window, a mystery.”

“Oh?”

James shrugged. “Not really. An anomaly, really, that there’s probably some stupidly simple explanation for. I saw Alice Makepeace coming up from Maverick Pond.”

“Alice Makepeace is who—the headmaster’s wife?”