The Meddlers Read Free

knew she was performing, using all the tricks she used to keep her place as the most important member of her bloody drama group. Yet, obvious a performance though it was, behind it lay a real anguish and he knew it, and knew he couldn’t help it.
    “You are important to me,” he said helplessly. “Last night, I thought you could have told from last night—”
    “You use sex the way I use makeup,” she said with a sudden abandonment of her act. “To cover up the blemishes. Don’t you think I can see through that? Making love and loving aren’t the same thing.”
    “They are for me.”
    “No, they aren’t. The only thing you love is the workings of your own mind. I’m here to be made love to when you need to, or when you think I need to, just to cover up. Like makeup. Oh, what’s the use?”
    She stood up and began to clear dishes from the table. “I take second place to your work, and I’ll have to settle for that, I suppose.”
    “Why does this present project matter so much more?”
    “More? More than what?”
    “More than it’s ever mattered before. I’ve been in research of one kind or another all our married life. Haven’t I? Yet now you mind more. The time it takes, the inevitable abstraction I show when I’m involved with something big…”
    For the first time she was really listening, not going through the motions of an argument. He felt suddenly a brief return of the closeness they had used to enjoy when the children were small and she still felt important to them and minded less his involvement with his work. He put out his hand toward her.
    She looked at it and then shrugged and turned away, and the brief light that had illuminated him spluttered and died.
    “It’s always mattered. You just never noticed, that’s all. I ought to be used to it, but I’m not. That’s all there is to it.”
    “No—” and then the door swung open, and Ian came in, ostentatiously noisy, making sure his father knew that he, Ian, was aware there was an argument going on.
    “Will I do, Rusty, my own?”
    She turned and looked at him, and her face lit up joyously, and George looked at Ian and tried to keep his own face expressionless.
    “You look splendid!” she cried. “If they don’t cast you, it’ll be because they’re blind as well as stupid. I
know
you’ll get it, darling. It’s meant! Just you remember that, and you’ll get it. Can’t you see it? Ian Briant, up in lights!”
    And then they were both looking at George, and he stretched his neck in his collar, tortoiselike, and said, a little gruffly, “Where are you going?”
    “I’m auditioning for a new show.” Ian’s voice was slightly defiant, and he dropped his head and with a careful casualness flicked away some nonexistent dust from his high-buttoned silver jacket.
    George looked with distaste at the rest of his outfit—at the indecently tight green trousers, the silver-shot green scarf in the neck of the jacket, and the way the boy’s flaming red hair curled against it.
    “I see. And these—garments—are the sort to impress?”
    Ian laughed loudly. “What would be more impressive would be nothing at all, since they’re casting another protest show. Most of the cast’ll be starkers for the second half.” He slid his eyes at his mother, and then said a little maliciously, “How much will you object if I
am
cast?”
    “As long as I don’t have to see it, not in the least,” George said dryly. “But if a willingness to display nakedness is an essential part of the… job”—he couldn’t help letting some of his scorn show—“it was hardly worth spending money on such clothes, was it?”
    “Oh, don’t worry about that!” Marjorie said, and her voice was high and brittle. “We couldn’t have afforded to buy them anyway. They’re borrowed from the costume store. My drama group people may be rather dim, but they’re generous. But take care of them, darling. I hate to think what we’d do if they had to be