Amused by that, he replied, "Adult relationships can often be childish, and I don"t trust myself that way."
"You don"t trust what you feel?"
"No at least not always. I"ve spent a lot of years thinking about us
about your letters and while I always enjoyed getting them and kept them and reread them, I felt guilty about the situation before Joan"s death and after and also felt that we couldn"t possibly be in love after only two meetings. In other words, I sometimes felt that I was kidding myself; that maybe both of us were romancing. And having thought of myself as a mature man, that made me feel foolish. I know how I feel about you, Gladys. I"m just not sure why."
Gladys propped an elbow up on the table, cupped her chin in her hand, blew a smoke ring in his direction, then shook her head ruefully.
"G.o.d, I love you," she said. "I"ve never doubted it for a second. And I knew it when we first met, inside about ten minutes. I knew I was in love with that wonderful combination of maturity, common sense, and inhibition. I knew it when I sensed that you were startled by what you were thinking." She chuckled and shook her head again. "And what were you thinking, Mike? You were thinking I was attractive and attracted to you oh, yeah, you saw that! and you were excited and scared all at once, as well as hopelessly guilty. A real married man, right? And one with morals and principles. Yeah, that"s what I saw inside minutes when we first met, and I loved it and it made me love you... and I did... and I do. Now what do you say, Mike?"
He glanced around the crowded tea room, at all the women in their wide-brimmed hats, the men in drab suits and hats, the waitresses hurrying to and fro in their black skirts and white ap.r.o.ns. He studied them too intently. It was something to do. His heart was racing and he was blushing like a kid, and that rendered him speechless. Then he looked out the window, at the statue of Eros, and had to smile. He lowered his gaze to the traffic crawling around the central island. There the bobby was blowing his whistle and waving his arms as the citizens of this beleaguered, majestic, defiant city went about their daily business in a perfectly normal manner.
"The G.o.dd.a.m.ned Brits," he said, turning back to Gladys. "You"ve really got to admire them."
She raised a sceptical eyebrow. "Is that your answer, Mike?"
"Dammit, Gladys, you know d.a.m.ned well I love you. I just can"t say these things."
"You"ve just said it."
"Have I?"
"Yep. You"ve just said it. I"ve certainly heard more pa.s.sionate declarations of love, but I"ve never felt happier." She reached across for his hand, kissed the back of his wrist, squeezed his fingers, and refused to let go. There were tears in her eyes. "You"re going to leave me, aren"t you?"
"I have to go, Gladys. I have to stop that son of a b.i.t.c.h Wilson before he goes too far."
"What do you think he wants?"
"I don"t know. You tell me."
"I will," she said, drying the tears from her eyes and gazing down at the table. "I don"t believe he was after power. At least not for personal gain. I believe he"d made science his G.o.d and worshipped it blindly. He didn"t care about human beings and despised their most common feelings; he was convinced that our only purpose on earth is to serve evolution. Not mere procreation no! even the animals can do that but to form a bridge between our irrational past and a perfectly rational future. He hated irrationality and mistrusted all emotions. For him, what divides man from the beast is intelligence not emotion, not feelings. He believed only the mind, the application of logic, the quest for absolute knowledge, which he seriously confused with truth."
"I"m not sure I understand."
"That"s why you"re frightened of loving me which you do, G.o.d bless you. Because love is an emotion that flies in the face of logic, yet it endures while one scientific absolute after another is disproven and replaced with something new. Wilson didn"t understand that. Not the Wilson I knew. He was convinced that what we value, our dreams and feelings, belong to the caves. He doesn"t believe in human beings. He only believes in science. And because science is the sole road to truth, it"s all that concerns him. What he wants, then, isn"t power at least not as we know it but freedom to do what he wants without normal restrictions."
"The son of a b.i.t.c.h is working for the n.a.z.is," Bradley said.
"Yes," Gladys replied, unconcerned by his flash of anger. "But not because he"s a n.a.z.i or believes in the Third Reich. Probably because they were the only ones willing to finance his work, whatever that is. He"ll use them just as he used me and everyone else and in the end he may go down with them. But whatever it is he"s doing with the n.a.z.is, he"s not doing it for them."
"How could you be his mistress?" Bradley asked, before he could stop himself. "If he"s that bad, if he"s really as cold as ice, how could you sleep with him?"
"Does that thought hurt you?"
"Yes, dammit, it does!"
"Then you really do love me!" she exclaimed.
"That isn"t an answer."
She picked his hand up again, stroked his fingers, kissed his wrist. "Because I was wounded," she explained. "Because I"d recently lost my husband. Because I didn"t want emotional entanglements and he was perfect that way. He wanted only my body and I wanted only to lose myself, so we literally climbed into bed together and had few disappointments. To be truthful, it was perfect we both got what we needed but in the end, like most women, I confused satisfaction with love, and was mortally wounded when he left me without looking back. That"s in the nature of woman it"s in the nature of human beings but it"s nothing that Wilson would understand, which in the end made me loathe him more." She kissed his hand again, stroked his fingers, and stared steadily at him. "And now you loathe me, don"t you? For confessing my sins. You loathe me for sleeping with the man who"s taken over your life."
"No," he said without a moment"s hesitation. "I just love you more. But that Wilson...G.o.ddammit, he"s like a man without a centre. And he"s brilliant and totally mysterious and I have to look in his eyes. Do you understand that?"
"Yes, I think so... And so you"re going to Europe."
Which brought Bradley back to the real world and plunged him into gloom. "Not according to Lieutenant Colonel Wentworth-King. As far as he"s concerned, I"m here for the duration, probably until the war ends."
"Go around him," Gladys said.
"I can"t. That"s not allowed."
"What if someone with more authority approaches you?"