Shirley Murphy - Cat to the Dogs

She was gone. The hill was empty. Dulcie reared up to look behind her and saw Lucinda Greenlaw coming up the hill, and with her, stumbling along at a hurried and uneven gait, came Pedric.

But perhaps it was not Lucinda who had startled the kit, nor even Pedric, because at the humans' approach, a half dozen cats reared up in the grass staring at Lucinda and Pedric, then leaped away like terrified birds exploding in every direction, vanishing wild and afraid. These were surely a part of the kit's clowder, surely she had run at their cue.

Dulcie thought it strange that Lucinda would bring Pedric on her solitary walk, that she would bring anyone-though she did seem to trust the old man; she seemed to have a closeness to Pedric as she had with Newlon.

Her friendship with Pedric was new and tentative. She had not met Pedric or most of the Greenlaw family until they arrived for the funeral, while she had known Newlon longer, Wilma said; and it seemed to Dulcie that Lucinda had some sort of quiet understanding with Newlon.

When Pedric and Lucinda headed in her direction, Dulcie slipped beneath a tangle of dense-growing broom bushes. How very much at home old Pedric looked as he climbed Hellhag Hill, almost as if he belonged there. Watching the two approach, she glimpsed the tortoiseshell kit again creeping down the hill toward the two humans, her yellow eyes bright with curiosity.

"Such a peaceful hill," Pedric said, sitting down with his back to a boulder, very close to where Dulcie sat unseen.

Lucinda made herself comfortable on the little folded blanket she always carried. "I've come here for years. I like its solitude."

Pedric looked at Lucinda strangely. "Solitude. That puts a kinder shape to loneliness."

She looked at him quietly.

"The loneliness of living with Shamas."

"Perhaps," she said.

Pedric's lean old body cleaved easily to the lines of the hill. "It is a fine hill, Lucinda."

"Do you sense its strangeness?"

He inclined his head, but didn't answer.

"I come here for its strangeness, too."

They were silent awhile; then he turned, looking hard at her, his thin, wrinkled profile fallen into lines of distress. "Why didn't you ever leave him? Why, Lucinda? Why did you stay with him?"

"Cowardice. Lack of nerve. When he began with the women, I wanted to leave. I tried to think where to go, what to do with my life. I have no family, no relatives."

She picked a long blade of grass, began to slit it lengthwise with her thumbnail. "I was afraid. Afraid of what Shamas might do-such a lame excuse."

She looked at him bleakly. "How many women have wasted their lives, out of fear?

"I never really believed that I could sue Shamas for divorce and get any kind of community property- there was so much about his various ventures that seemed peculiar. I did snoop enough to know he did business in a dozen different names, and I… it was all so strange to me, and frightening.

"Shamas said that much of the income was from bonds, stocks, investments that would bore me. I thought, if I left him, there would be a terrible legal muddle trying to sort it all out."

She looked down, then looked up at him almost pleadingly. "I was afraid of Shamas. Because he controlled the money, and… that he might harm me. He was so… demanding. Autocratic. He would not tolerate being crossed."

"Not an easy man to live with."

"Not at all. So instead of leaving, I went off by myself for a few hours at a time-returned to care for the house and make the meals."

Pedric shook his head.

"It helped to get away alone, take long walks and lick my wounds."

"And now that he is dead?"

"Now I'm free," she said softly.

Pedric nodded.

"With Shamas gone, slowly I am healing. The stress and anger are easing. One day, they will be gone."

Lucinda sat up straighter. "I mean to take charge now, where I never did before. It may seem mercenary, Pedric, but I'm going to think, now, about my own survival.

"There's more than enough money for my simple tastes. Money can't make me young and pretty again, but it can bring me some small pleasures. I have retained a financial advisor. There's so much I don't know, records I haven't found."

Dulcie watched Lucinda, puzzled. She sounded as if she had planned for a long time what she would do if she outlived Shamas.

"The trust was the one thing Shamas did that… has been of benefit. He did it not for me, but simply to avoid probate taxes. Shamas hated any kind of taxes."

Lucinda looked at Pedric intently. "The things I don't know about how Shamas made the money-I really didn't want to know. I could have snooped more efficiently, found out more. I… didn't want to get involved in knowing, in deciding what to do if Shamas's ventures were… illegal.

"Cowardice," she said softly, and her face colored. "I just… I just wanted out."

"You were married late in life," Pedric said gently. "Shamas grew into certain ways long before you met him. Ways that were not always respectable." A wariness crossed Pedric's face. "Family ways," he said, "that I cannot condone, that I have tried to remain free of, though I have lived all my life near the family. Tell me- what did you know about Shamas, when you married?"

"He let me know that he was well established in his Seattle enterprises, but he was vague about what they were. He said he wanted our time together to be filled with delight, not with mundane business affairs."

"And you never questioned that."

"Not in the beginning. The longer I waited to press him for answers, the more difficult that was. He took care of the banking and gave me a household allowance. He didn't offer any information. That rankled. But I didn't do anything about it.

"There was plenty of money for trips, for new cars every year-until I said I didn't want a new car, that I liked the one I had." She looked at Pedric. "I was afraid to ask him the important questions. I grew afraid of where the money came from. The longer we were married, the more secretive he was. I knew he spent a lot on his own. At first on clothes, and on business lunches, he told me. Then, later, it was obvious that he was with other women.

"Yet as miserable as I was, I was too cowardly to change my life."

"So you escaped into your long, lonely rambles."

"They never seemed lonely-only soothing. From where we're sitting you can't see the village, not a single rooftop, and in the wind, you can't hear the occasional car. I would sit up here imagining there was not another soul for hundreds of miles, that this little piece of the world was all my own."

"Yes," Pedric said, "I understand that."

She looked at him quietly. "I have continued to come here for that kind of aloneness, so very different from being lonely with someone."

She smiled. "The hills are so green, the sea so wild. It is easy to imagine that I am in the old world, somewhere on the sea cliffs of Ireland."

Pedric turned to look above them. From where Lucinda had chosen to sit that day, they could see the trailers lined up, each in its own little patio. The wind had overturned deck chairs and whipped the laundry on a clothesline. A trailer door, left on the latch, banged and slammed. Above the trailers and RVs, the eucalyptus trees that shaded the park crackled in the wind as loud as the snapping of bonfires.

Above the trailer park, Hellhag Hill rose another hundred feet, its bulk seeming to press the narrow shelf with its frail trailers, far too close to the edge.

"I seldom look up there," Lucinda said. "Usually I sit where I can't see any sign of civilization. From the first time I came here, the hill has put me in mind of the wild, empty hills in the old, old tales that Shamas told me.

She looked shyly at Pedric. "That was what first drew me to him. The stories. I loved his stories, and the caring and passion with which he told them."