Free The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith Page B

enthusiastically as Walter had expected.
    â€œHow have you been getting on with Jeff?” Clara asked.
    â€œJeff” and I have been fine. Do you want to sit up a while or go straight to bed?”
    â€œBoth,” she said, laughing a little.
    He got her dressing-gown from the closet, removed her shoes from her brown stockingless feet, and hung up the dress she had pulled off. Then he propped the pillows behind her. She wanted lemonade, she said, with a lot of sugar in it. Walter went down to make it, because Claudia was busy making vichyssoise, which Clara loved, and the recipe was complicated.
    â€œWho did you tell about this?” Clara asked when he came back.
    â€œOnly Jon. Nobody else.”
    â€œWhat did you tell my office?”
    Walter barely remembered when they had called. “I said you had flu. Don’t worry, darling. Nobody has to know.”
    â€œClaudia told me Ellie Briess was here.”
    â€œShe dropped in Monday night. Oh, she brought you some tulip bulbs, too. You’ll have to look at them tomorrow. Very special ones, she said.”
    â€œEvidently you weren’t bored while I was in hospital.”
    â€œOh, Clara, please—” He handed her the glass of lemonade again. “You have to drink a lot of liquids, the doctor said.”
    â€œI was right about Ellie, wasn’t I?”
    He shouldn’t get angry, he thought. Mentally, she was still groggy, not normal yet. Then he remembered she hadn’t been normal before she took the pills, either. She had just come back to life again, and she was taking up where she had left off. “Clara, let’s talk tomorrow. You’re very tired.”
    â€œWhy don’t you admit that you’re in love with her?”
    â€œBut I’m not.” Leaning forward, he had embraced her. It was ironic that he had never loved her, never desired her so much as now, and that she had never mistrusted him so much. “I did tell her you were sick. She called up last night to ask how you were. I told her you were fine.”
    â€œThat must have pleased her.”
    â€œI’m sleeping in my study tonight, honey.” Walter pressed her arm affectionately and stood up. “I think you’ll rest better if you sleep alone,” he added, in case she misunderstood his reason.
    But from her affronted, staring eyes, he knew she had attached another meaning to it, anyway.

8
    F or about a week, Clara spent most of her time in bed, taking naps every couple of hours. Walter took her for short rides in the car in the evenings, and bought her chocolate sodas at the curb-service drugstore in Benedict. Betty Ireton came to visit her twice. Everybody seemed to believe the story that Walter had given out, that Clara had had a bad case of influenza. Finally, Clara was able to go to the movies one evening, and the next day she announced that she was going back to work on Monday. It was less than two weeks since she had come from the hospital. On the same evening, Friday, Clara’s mother called from Harrisburg.
    Walter heard Clara’s cool, unsurprised greeting to her mother, then a long pause while her mother, he supposed, pleaded with Clara to come and pay a visit.
    â€œWell, if you’re not feeling so bad, why should I?” Clara asked. “I’ve a job here, you know. I can’t just come at anybody’s whim.”
    Walter got up restlessly and turned the radio off. Her mother was not well, Walter knew. She had had two strokes. How could Clara be so merciless with somebody else’s weakness, he wondered, when she had been so near death herself twelve days ago?
    â€œMother, I’ll write to you. You’re going to run up a big bill talking all this time….Yes, Mother, tonight, I promise you.”
    Walter suddenly thought of Ellie’s tulip bulbs.
    Clara turned around, sighing. “She’s the end, the bitter end.”
    â€œI gather you’re not