Forth into Light (The Peter & Charlie Trilogy) by Gordon Merrick Page B

to mind—and wondered if he really cared. He wondered, too, with a wrench of regret and misgiving, if it were possible to recapture the old easy intimacy.
    They left the controversial child still struggling with the luggage and strolled down around the quai toward the new hotel.
    “What happened to the twentieth century?” Mike inquired. “Look at all these quaint beasts of burden. Don’t you have any cars or trucks?”
    “Dear God, no,” Sarah exclaimed.
    “But how do you go anywhere?”
    “Go anywhere? We walk—or take a boat.”
    “Farewell, mechanized world. Not that I’m not tempted to get out at times myself. If only I could afford to.”
    “Afford to!” George protested. “You must make in a month what we spend in a year.”
    “That is a secret between me and my tax man. But don’t forget my precious wives. They must be provided for in a manner to which I never intended to accustom them.”
    George laughed. “I suppose there’s something to be said for sticking it out with only one.”
    “Definitely. But not everyone is lucky enough to find Sarah.” He and Sarah bowed to each other with mock formality.
    Sarah was struggling toward a decision. The invitation was explicit at last. He had come out with it just before George had found them together on the rocks. He would be at home alone all afternoon. The risk had seemed too great for her to accept even though she felt incapable of refusing when she was close to him. Mike’s arrival changed everything. George would be safely occupied; she might not get another such opportunity for weeks or months. She couldn’t go on living with this obsession. Just once with him would free her of it. He was only a body.
    They chatted as they strolled, hugging the sides of buildings for whatever shade they could find. Mike’s voice was lighter than George remembered and made everything he said sound rather trivial and superficial. Was there something slightly effeminate about him? No, that was probably the effect of his new elegance. He worked in the theater; some of its artificiality was bound to rub off.
    They turned into an interior street on the level that formed the floor of the great amphitheater of the town. Houses rose all around them, but the sun almost obliterated them, flattening them out and destroying perspective so that the effect was of a glaring white wall from which the eye shrank.
    “Is your house near here?” Mike asked.
    George pointed up and to the left. “Up in there. You can see part of it from here, but I wouldn’t be able to pick it out for you.”
    “Good God. You have to walk up there?”
    George laughed. “I remember when we were in New York we used to walk all over the whole damn city. There was a question of carfare.”
    “I suppose we did. We must’ve been younger in those days.”
    George looked at him and smiled. Perhaps they would strike the right note yet. The few casual words had sent memories crowding through his mind of that brief period before Sarah, just after they had escaped from the army and were discovering New York together, memories of the tiny apartment they shared over a drugstore, memories of girls, some of them shared too, memories of Mike still with a New England rawness on him, gawky in badly cut clothes, but with the flippantly abrasive humor that had made him seem older and more experienced than himself. Mike had been the leader. A residue of that element in their relationship colored George’s response now, strengthening and reassuring him, as if his friend’s presence might resolve the conflicts—yes, it was not too strong a word—that were destroying him.
    They crossed the walled patio of the hotel and came to a halt at the desk. Mike looked around him. “My God. This is Greece? It looks like something out of Santa Monica.”
    George took in the familiar lobby with astonishment. They had all been rather proud of the new hotel. It had a private bath with every room, flush toilets, box springs on