“Let’s go inside,” Noelle said.
Larry looked up and saw the men. “Jesus, don’t be so jumpy. They’re just a couple of
villagers out for a walk.”
“Now,” she commanded.
“OK,” he said ungraciously, irritated by the incident and by her tone.
“Help me pack up the things.”
“Why don’t we just leave them?” he asked.
“Because it would look suspicious.”
Quickly they stuffed everything into the picnic hamper and started toward the house.
Larry was silent for the rest of the afternoon. He sat in the library, his mind preoccupied,
while Noelle worked in the kitchen.
Late in the afternoon she came into the library and sat at his feet. With her uncanny
knack of reading his mind, she said. “Stop thinking about them.”
“They were just a couple of goddamn villagers,” Larry snapped. “I hate sneaking
around like some kind of criminal.” He looked at her and his voice changed. “I don’t want
to have to hide from anybody. I love you.”
And Noelle knew that this time it was true. She thought of the years during which she
had planned to destroy Larry and of the fierce pleasure she had taken in imagining his
destruction: And yet the moment Noelle had seen Larry again she had known instantly
that there was something deeper than hate still alive in her. When she had pushed him to
the brink of death, forcing him to risk both their lives on that terrible flight to Amsterdam,
it was as though she were testing his love for her in a wild defiance of fate. She had been
with Larry in that cockpit, flying the plane with him, suffering with him, knowing that if
he died they would die together, and he had saved them both. And when he had come to
her room in Amsterdam and made love to her, her hatred and her love had become
intermingled with their two bodies, and somehow time had expanded and contracted and
they were back in their little hotel room in Paris and Larry was saying to her, “Let’s get
married; we’ll find some little maire in the country,” and the present and the past had
exploded dazzlingly into one and Noelle knew then that they were timeless, had always
been timeless, that nothing had really changed and that the depths of her hatred for Larry
had come from the heights of her love. If she destroyed him she would be destroying
herself, for she had given herself completely to him long ago and nothing could ever
change that.
It seemed to Noelle that everything she had achieved in her life had been through her
hatred. Her father’s betrayal had molded and shaped her, annealed and hardened her, filled
her with a hunger for vengeance that could be satisfied with nothing less than a kingdom
of her own in which she was all-powerful, in which she could never be betrayed again,
never be hurt. She had finally achieved that. And now she was ready to give it up for this
man. Because she knew now that what she had always wanted was for Larry to need her,
to love her. And, at last, he did. And that, finally, was her real kingdom.