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So take the best one and write one new and good as you can. And remember, Marita has been hit as badly as you. Maybe worse. So gamble. She cares as much for what we lost as you do.

Chapter Twenty-nine

WHEN HE FINALLY gave up writing that day it was afternoon. He had started a sentence as soon as he had gone into his working room and had completed it but he could write nothing after it. He crossed it out and started another sentence and again came to the complete blankness. He was unable to write the sentence that should follow although he knew it. He wrote a first simple declarative sentence again and it was impossible for him to put down the next sentence on paper. At the end of two hours it was the same. He could not write more than a single sentence and the sentences themselves were increasingly simple and completely dull. He kept at it for four hours before he knew that resolution was powerless against what had happened. He admitted it with out accepting it, closed and put away the notebook with the rows of crossed out lines and went to find the girl.

She was on the terrace in the sun reading and when she looked up and saw his face she said, "No?"

"Worse than no."

"Not at all?"

"Nope."

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. .

"Let's have a drink," Marita said.

"Good," said David.

They were inside at the bar and the day had come in with them. It was as good as the day before and perhaps better since summer should have been gone and each warm day was an extra thing. We should not waste it, David thought. We should try to make it good and save it if we can. He mixed the martinis and poured them and when they tasted them they were icy cold and dry.

"You were right to try this morning," Marita said. "But let's not think about it any more today."

"Good," he said.

He reached for the bottle of Gordon's, the Noilly Prat and the stirring pitcher, poured out the water from the ice, and using his empty glass commenced to measure out two more drinks.

"It's a lovely day," he said. "What should we do?"

"Let's go to swim now," Marita said. "So we won't waste the day."

"Good," David said. "Should I tell Madame that we'll be late for lunch?"

"She put a cold lunch up," Marita said. "I thought that prob ably you'd like to swim however work went."

"That was intelligent," David said. "How is Madame?"

"She has a slightly discolored eye," Marita said.

Marita laughed.

They drove up the road and around the promontory through the forest and left the car in the broken shade of the pine woods and carried the lunch basket and the beach gear down the trail to the cove. There was a little breeze from the east and the sea was dark and blue as they came down through the stone pines. The rocks were red and the sand of the cove was yellow and wrinkled and the water, as they came to it, clean and now amber clear over the sand. They put the basket and the rucksack in the

shade of the biggest rock and undressed and David climbed the tall rock to dive. He stood there naked and brown in the sun looking out to the sea.