The Headmaster's Wife(21)

“Alice?” Peter said.

“I’m here. I’m getting some Perrier.”

“Where have you been?”

“Walking.”

“Outside?”

“Of course outside.”

“It’s not the weather for it. It’s below freezing.”

“Nine below,” Alice said. She looked into the little silver cannister, but the ice that had been in there had melted into water, and there were no more slices of lime to be found. She walked around to the front of the couch and took a seat on the chair at its side, the chair that was positioned exactly as it had to be so that the person sitting in it couldn’t see the television screen at all.

“I wish we could think of some place else to put the television set,” she said. “Sane people don’t have television sets in their living rooms.”

“Most people have television sets in their living rooms.”

“Most people aren’t sane. But I think you’re wrong anyway. Most people have television sets in their family rooms. They leave their living rooms free for company. We keep it in here the way Catholics keep statues of the Virgin in their gardens. It looks like something we worship.”

“Catholics don’t worship statues of the Virgin.”

“Don’t get silly. There ought to be somewhere else to put it. Maybe we could get rid of it altogether. I never watch it.”

“I do.”

“I know.”

“I’m not going to apologize for watching television, Alice. I’m not even going to apologize for watching The West Wing.”

“I didn’t ask you to apologize.”

“Oh yes, you did. You always do.”

“We’re going to have to do something about this marriage. It’s gotten to the point where we don’t have fights anymore; we simply assume we’ve had them.”

“We’re not having a fight. I asked you where you’d been. You’re avoiding answering.”

The glass of Perrier was half-empty. Alice Makepeace was definitely a half-empty, not a half-full, person. She leaned forward and put it down on the coffee table. She could not remember the first time she’d met Peter Makepeace. He was one of those boys who had just always been around, going to the same dancing classes, going to the same parties. Everybody knew him, and he knew everybody. Alice did remember when she had first decided to marry him and how carefully she had thought it all out: what the marriage would mean, just how much she would be able to put up with. In the end it had turned out far worse than she had hoped. It did matter that she had never expected it to turn out well.

“Are you going to tell me where you’ve been?” Peter asked. “You’ve been out for hours.”

“I haven’t really been anywhere. I’ve been walking. And yes, in the cold. It’s minus nine, if you want to know. Or it was a little while ago. I just wanted … to move around.”

“All right.”

“I stopped in the library for a while. I talked to Marta Coelho. She was working.”

“Marta’s always working.”

“I know.”

Peter shifted slightly on the couch. The PBS documentary, whatever it was, was going off. Alice hadn’t paid any attention to it so all she knew was that it wasn’t one of those awful evenings of swing or Liberace that all the PBS stations had become enamored of in the last decade. Peter had a bald spot on the top of his head. It was only the size of a nickel, but it would grow. She wondered if he would try to compensate with a comb-over.

“It’s not a dirty word, you know,” Peter said, “work. I don’t understand how you can spend so much time working for the causes you do and then look down on somebody like Marta, who takes her work seriously.”

“I don’t look down on her for taking her work seriously.”

“But you do look down on her.”

“She’s a cipher, Peter. She might as well be a voice program. HAL the computer had more personality. She was worrying about Mark DeAvecca by the way.”

“Ah,” Peter said. “Well, one of our mistakes.”

“She said something along the same lines. That he’s irresponsible. Of course you think he’s on drugs.”

“Don’t you?”

Alice looked away. “I’ve talked to his roommate, Michael Feyre. Michael doesn’t think he’s on drugs.”

“Would he tell you if he did?”

Alice was still looking away. “He’s got no reason to lie. I don’t think they’re friends, particularly.”

“Mark isn’t really friendly with anybody. It’s hard to know what he’s doing here. And I remember his application, too. It was one of the best I’ve ever seen.”