She did not believe it for a moment. Becoming adukehad gone to his head. It had made him conceited and arrogant and any number of other nasty things she would never have suspected him capable of.
He sat down on a chair close to the window and stared at her.
“Forgive me,” he said. “Lord, Claudia, forgive me. I was even more of an ass than I remember. But youdidrecover. You did magnificently well, in fact.”
“Did I?” she said.
“You proved,” he said, “that you were the strong person I always knew you were. And I have paid my dues to whatever power decreed that I be snatched from my familiar life—twice, once when I was five and once when I was eighteen—and plunged into a completely alien one. There is no longer any reason, though, why either of us cannot return to where we were when I was eighteen and you were seventeen. Is there?”
What exactly did he mean? Return towhat?
“I have a life,” she said, “that involves responsibility to others. I have my school. And you have duties to others that only you can perform. You have your son.”
“There is no obstacle,” he said, “that cannot be overcome. We have been apart for eighteen years, Claudia—half my life. Are we going to remain apart for the rest of our lives too just because you have a school and I have a son—who, by the way, is almost grown up? Or will you marry me at last?”
She very much feared afterward that her jaw had dropped.
If only she had seen this coming, she thought—if only she had believed Eleanor—she might have prepared herself. Instead she stared stupidly and mutely at him.
He came across the room to her and bent over her to take both her hands in his.
“Remember how we were together, Claudia,” he said. “Remember how we loved each other with the sort of all-consuming passion the very young are not afraid of. Remember how we made love up on that hill—surely the only time in my life I have reallymade love. It has been a long, weary time, but it is not too late for us. Marry me, my love, and I will make up for that letter and for the eighteen years of emptiness in your life.”
“My life has not been empty, Charlie,” she told him.
Though it had been—in some ways at least.
He looked into her eyes. “Tell me you did not love me,” he said. “Tell me youdonot love me.”
“I did,” she said, closing her eyes. “You know I did.”
“And you do.”
She felt dreadfully upset, remembering that long-ago love, its physical consummation, and the anguish of the yearlong separation and then its cruel, abrupt ending. It was not possible to go back, to forget that even as boy he had been capable of destroying the one person he had professed to love more than life.
Besides, it was too late for him.
He was the wrong man.
“Charlie,” she said, “we have both changed in eighteen years. We are different people.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “I have less hair and you are a woman rather than a girl. But at heart, Claudia? Are we not the same as we ever were, the same as we always will be? You have never married even though you had plenty of would-be suitors even before I left home. That tells me something. And I have admitted to you that I was never happy with Mona, though I was rarely unfaithful to her.”
Rarely?Oh, Charlie!
“I cannot marry you,” she said, leaning a little toward him. “If we had married then, Charlie, we would have grown together and I daresay I would have loved you all my life. But we did not marry then.”
“And love dies?” he asked her. “Did you ever love me truly, then?”
She felt a spurt of anger. Hadhetruly lovedher?
“Some forms of love die,” she said. “If they are not fed, they die. I have gradually been coming to like you again since we met in London—as the friend you were through our childhood.”
His jaw was hard-set as she remembered its being whenever he was angry or upset.
“I have spoken too soon,” he said. “I must confess that the violence of my feelings has surprised even me. I will give you time to catch up with me. Don’t say an outright no today. You already have, but let us agree to forget that you spoke the words. Give me time to woo you—and to make you forget what I once wrote to you.”
He released her hands after squeezing them.
