Free The World as I Found It by Bruce Duffy

chance to get away. In a long and dripping French bathing gown with puffed sleeves and wadded cotton flowers, she walked emphatically toward Russell. Giggling and swallowing his hiccups, acting the part of Caliban, that professional guest and sporadic author Lytton Strachey called back, Oh, O. Don’t be in a wax now.
    Then honking like gulls came the others: Now O … Ottolinoscoska! Dearest, darling O.
    Don’t O me, she said, whirling around. It went too far. Then turning to Russell, she said with a sniff, Much help you were.
    Me? he retorted. The others were near so he kept his voice low, saying, Obviously, you loved it.
    How dare you, she hissed. I did not love it. She began walking down the sand.
    No? he asked, picking up beside her. If you do not love it, then why are they here, the lot of them? We were supposed to be alone — foreign as you seem to find the concept.
    How was I to know they’d come?
    Of course. A prisoner to your guests. As usual.
    She glared at him. Spontaneous! Do you even understand that principle? Spont-aneity?
    He could feel her crumple then. Instinctively, she was retreating before he could trap her with some piddling point, using his mind first as a scalpel, then as a bludgeon, mocking and cold. Ottoline feared his mind — he was painfully aware of that — and here, as ever, he felt he had to retreat to show her the delicate clay feet of his love. This love was a new experience for him. Almost all his most logical important ideas had come unbidden, in moments of sudden insight. But these moments were then followed by months and even years of labor to find reasons for these truths, which he hoped would stand like the stars. His love, by contrast, was beyond revoking or reason, and he now had no way of knowing whether it was advancing or receding, whether it would stay, or what, at this rate, would ever become of it.
    Ottoline, meanwhile, was looking out to sea, where the dull, gray waves were stippled with light, like the barnacled humps of whales. Russell looked, too, but then instinctively his eyes dipped, deft and hungry as mosquitoes, to the cleft where the clinging wet silk made a fold over Ottoline’s noble buttocks.
    Oh, drop it, she resumed. She turned and looked at him weakly. They’ll be gone tomorrow, most of them.
    Glumly, he added, Yes, and then I’ll be gone myself. He looked at her miserably, then said, I’ve half a mind to leave tomorrow. This is doing neither of us any good.
    Her piled hair, an earthy dark red, as variegated as wool, was coming unbound. Long face, dark eyes, full lips. Lank supple shanks of legs and slender feet with long, bony toes. As he often did, he was studying her in wonderment, unable to decide whether she was impossibly beautiful or possibly somewhat ugly. She saw him looking, anatomizing her, and again she told herself that she wouldn’t be bullied or manipulated by him. In a flash of irritation, she said coldly, Then why don’t you? Go, if it’s so unpleasant. Really —
    Russell’s face creased with pain. Knowing he had pushed her too far, he wasted no time backpedaling:
    I’m not going, and you don’t want me to go. I just find it unendurable at times — to love you this much and be surrounded always by people. I am so sick of it, he said, and then stopped himself, feeling his eyes starting to fill.
    Seeing he was coming undone, she said quickly, I know — just a while longer. We’ll have our day together tomorrow.
    And even then, like figures in a comical film, jerking and gesticulating, they felt themselves having to speed up their emotional exposition because the others were lurching toward them, mock penitents now, their legs spavined with drink as they said, Now there, Mabby. Don’t be an old crabby … Is there more wine at the house? … Will supper be served soon?
    No, their little holiday had not turned out at all as he had planned. They were to have been