Tell Me the Reason, Do

The Rounded Stones of the Beach warmed in the rising sun. At the water's edge they were dark and wet, laced with green. The spiny odor of salt water and seaweed rose in the hot air. The sea was blue and flat. Half a mile out, a catamaran scudded down the wind under a tea-brown sail, a water bug running. Behind it, pasted to the horizon like a child's paper cutout, a steamer sat under a purple thread of smoke.

Peter Hart knelt on the stony bottom of the sea. There was nothing of consequence so close inshore, no fishes, no shells, no grottoes, no seaweed jungles, only the marvel of the water, bright and clear, layered in yellows, browns, greens and sapphire blues. He rose slowly until he stood, his head out of water to his chin. He breathed, and sank until the sea lapped at his eyes. He turned slowly, like a searching periscope. On the right, a mile away, St. Martine, white and pink and yellow stucco houses, a stubby church steeple tiled in harsh red-orange. Straight ahead, the hotel, three stories high, sugar-white and shining. Left, the curving horn of the beach, half a mile of it to the jetty and the ruin of the lighthouse. Behind him, from the wavelets patting the back of his head all the way to the brass-bright shores of Africa, the blue sea. He lay against the water, rolled and began to swim. He swam for 10 minutes, or a little more, straight out. Now when he turned to look the town and the lighthouse had drawn together, the beach had narrowed. Two figures stood there, black against the sand. One waved. Peter Hart lifted an arm high from the water, dropped it back, stroked, turned. Soft, warm as milk, the sea burbled in his ears, bubbled and foamed behind him. He did not hurry. He believed that he knew what they were going to tell him, and he did not look forward to hearing it.

He waded out of the water. He was tan, and heavily muscled for one who looked, at a little distance, to be lean. He moved indifferently on the hot stones.

"Good morning, Janey," he said. "Tony. Good morning."

"Peter," Janey said. "Ollie Ramirez is dead."

"Yes," he said. "I thought that was what you'd come to tell me." He looked down. The stones were egg-shaped for the most part, white, gray, brown. Lying in a crevice between two white ones he saw a bit of bottle-glass, green, etched and rounded by the scouring sand. He picked it up.

"Was he ever conscious?" he asked. "Ollie?"

"The hospital said no," the girl told him. "Tony phoned."

Tony Markman was tall and thin. His jutting nose seemed to stretch the skin tightly over his face. He wore a black knit shirt and gray slacks that seemed to have nothing to hang to. "He might have been conscious," he said, "but they didn't think so. At least he never opened his eyes and he never spoke."

"He'd have said something, I think," Peter said.

"That it wasn't your fault, you mean?" Jeney said.

"Something like that."

Peter moved off a little way and lifted a robe and a towel from the beach. He pulled the terrycloth robe over his shoulders and looped the towel around his neck. He stood for a moment holding each end of it, feeling the welcome weight of his arms on the back of his neck. He could see three girls walking out on the jetty, single file, one of them carrying a basket. Peter wanted to sit on the beach and watch them, sit with his back to the town. But he turned around.

"We may as well go," he said.

They moved in silence to the walk that pointed, string-straight, to the hotel's main door.

"You know, I didn't kill Ollie," Peter said.

"No one says you did, Peter," Janey said.

"Oh, any number of people will say I did," Peter said. "Any number. Point is, though, I didn't. He killed himself. We know that. The question is, why?"

"It isn't quite that simple, Peter," Tony said.

"I know it isn't," Peter said. "But it's as close to the truth as we can come just now."

• • •

He used the same phrase later in the day when the fellow from the New York paper came to see him. The man's name was Donnell and Hart had read some of his pieces. Donnell had no fixed base, he seemed to move around Europe as he pleased, he was intrigued by exotic sports, pigeon-shooting, chamois-hunting, foldboating and the like.

He had phoned while Peter was dressing after his swim, and had suggested lunch.

"You had better come up here," Peter had said, "if we're to be undisturbed."

Luncheon had been laid on the little balcony table. There was a soufflé and a salad, Donnell drank wine. He was a nervous, red-headed man, committed to his life, to inquiry, to wondering, to finding out. His style was lucid but flat. He was a good reporter, but he had little originality. It saddened him to read the phrasemakers of his trade, men like Red Smith, Murray Kempton, Jimmy Cannon.

He sipped the cold white wine in small mouthfuls and looked out at the sea, brazen now in the vertical rays of the sun. A cream-and-red striped awning shaded the balcony, but Donnell's eyes were light blue, and he squinted.

"When did Ollie die, exactly, do you know?" Peter asked.

"At 10 after eight or so," Donnell said. "Dr. Limoutin told us he felt it was all over at four in the morning. You knew it was a depressed frontal fracture?"

"I thought he must be dead when I saw them taking him out of the car," Peter said. "Still, he was strong, you know. He must have had tremendous resistance ... one time in the Monte, 1956 I think it was, I saw him lift one end of a Citroën onto the road, alone, without help."

"Amazing."

"Still, I suppose that sort of strength's no use when one's badly enough hurt," Peter said. "Ascari was strong, too. So was Behra, if it comes to that."

"Sometimes, watching him drive," Donnell said, "it seemed to me that Ollie Ramirez was too big for the cars, too beefy to be able to move as fast as he had to."

"Bigness hasn't to do with it," Peter said. "Juan Manuel Fangio was big, at least he was thick and stocky, and he was strong as a bull, but he could move very fast when he wanted to."

"Still, Ramirez wasn't really quick, was he?" Donnell said. "Someone told me that if he'd been really quick he'd have got through the corner last night."

"It's sometimes hard to tell," Peter said. "I don't know what happened to Ollie except that he was trying too hard. He went into the bend there at La Pournelle much too fast."

"Yet you were going faster, obviously, since you were about to pass him."

Peter looked at him. The table was a small one and they were close. He has a hunter's face, Donnell thought, I can understand his eyes being slitted here, in this light, but I can't remember ever having seen them any wider open. And his face is all flat, immobile planes, no roundness anywhere. It is the flatness, and the sharp angles where the flatnesses join, that make him seem so cold.

"I always go very fast," Peter said. "I can go fast, so I do. I was testing brakes, as well. We'd had some bother, we'd a new kind of pad in the discs, and I was running deeply into the corners and punishing the brakes severely. That was my job, at the moment."

"Were you and Ramirez alone on the circuit?" Donnell asked.

"Not quite. It was just at sundown, and most of the chaps had gone in, but Tommy Reston was still running. He was on the other side of the circuit, over near Douet. He was stroking, just running along, you know. Ollie and I had run past him a couple of minutes before it happened. Ollie was three or four lengths ahead of me when we passed Tommy, and I had cut that to about two lengths when he shut off for La Pournelle ..."

He looked over the white wrought-iron balcony rail, down at the beach, bright with parasols, and the sea, dotted by the heads of a hundred swimmers. As he stared a red ball loomed and grew in the sea and in his mind's eye and he saw clearly the rounded tail of Olivier Ramirez' car, bordered by rivets half an inch apart. The tail was the gas tank, there was no skin over it. That was all there was to see of Ollie's car: the round, red tail, the wide tires big and black beside it, and Ollie's heavy-shouldered figure hunched in the center of the composition. In that split second it seemed that the car had been cut off at the windshield. But then the nose and a front wheel appeared as Ramirez set it up in a drift for the bend, and reality returned. Down the long straightaway Peter Hart had just touched 8500 engine revolutions a minute in fifth gear, say 180 miles an hour. At this speed he had closed slightly on Ramirez. He intended to pull up to him in the bend and pass him coming out of it. He was perfectly calm. He did not feel competitive. He was practicing. It was an ordinary thing, passing coming out of a bend, he had done it a thousand times. It would take three seconds, or three seconds and a half, and it would be divided into six phases. He didn't think anything of it. He ran a few yards past his normal cutoff point, lifted his foot and hit the brake pedal once, carefully. The pads shrieked on the discs and the car shuddered; the right front wheel brake bit a hair deeper than the others and the car came an inch out of line as the rear tried to pivot around the dragging wheel; Peter felt the movement, or sensed it, caught it with a flick of the steering wheel. He dropped the factor of a potentially grabbing right front brake into the hopper of his mind and stood off and watched, in a way, as the next five phases of the passing maneuver were instantly modified. He hit the brake again, with his toe, anticipating the wheel drag, and dropped his heel to the accelerator as his left foot twice slammed the clutch pedal to the floor and he threw the shift lever across the gate. The engine howled as it was harnessed to the lower gear, and the car slowed, savagely, reluctantly. Once more, and he had it steadied down and level at about 140 miles an hour. He was very close to Ramirez now, 10 feet or so, a little too close, perhaps, he thought, watching the man spinning the steering wheel. Ollie was doing something foolish: he had decided not to be passed just there. He had decided to be a little bit competitive. He's gone in over his head, Peter told himself, and he will lose it. They were in the bend now, drifting, all four wheels sliding together, the cars pointing into the bend, the engines screaming under full load in third gear. Intermittent, jerky, soprano screeches were lost in the din as the tires fought the rough concrete. Peter lifted his foot infinitesimally, to lessen the spinning, the slippage of the back wheels on the road by a few times a second, and thus straighten the car a bit, decrease the angle of the drift. Ramirez would go, if he went, toward the outside. Three quarters of the way through the bend he went. The rear of the fat red car broke loose, moved out, accelerated, whipped around, overcame the wheel Ramirez instantly turned against it; the car came broadside, tripped and rolled, three times sideways, twice end-for-end. At the pits they heard the noise come rushing across the field, golden in the dying sun, and the least of them knew what it was, because there is no other sound like it: the maniacal howl of rubber impossibly stretched on concrete, the scream of the engine as the wheels fly into the air, unload it, let it spin 200 times a second and destroy itself, and the crash of a half-ton toy slammed five times to the ground by an idiot giant. Smoke rose into the still air to show the way, and some were there before Peter could stop, turn and come thudding back over the grass of the infield. Three of them lifted Ramirez out, black with oil and rubber dust, red with blood, white with the snowflake foam of the fire extinguishers. His arms hung loose and straight. His head rolled on the yoke of his shoulders. They laid him carefully on the coarse bunched grass, well away from his car, smoking sullenly. The stand-by ambulance came quickly. Peter saw Ollie for the last time through its window as it moved off. He had been wrapped in two thick white blankets; a white towel had been bound around his head like a loose turban; his face was black save where his goggles had been, and there the skin was dead white. The ambulance moved carefully off the turf to the roadway, then very fast downhill along the straight past the pits toward the escape road at Perisot corner, the intersection, and the town.

Peter sighed and turned away from the sea to face Donnell again.

"There was no way in which it could have been avoided, was there?" Donnell said.

"Who can tell?" Peter said. "In these precise circumstances, and with this particular man driving, no, certainly not, or it wouldn't have happened ... if Ollie had gone into the bend three miles an hour slower ... but, of course, he didn't."

"You must know that there are people who think it was your fault," Donnell said.

"I'm certain there are," Peter said.

"They say that you were crowding him," Donnell went on.

"One can crowd another car from the side," Peter said, "but not from behind. I've run 160 miles an hour three or four feet behind another car, getting a tow, slip-streaming as you call it, and so has everyone else. The fellow in front simply drives his race and pays no attention."

"I don't think they mean it in that sense," Donnell said. "I think they mean that you were forcing the pace, running (Continued on page 128) Tell me (continued from page 54) up on Ramirez, so that he went into the corner faster than he should have."

Peter Hart shook his head in impatience. "It's not worth talking about," he said. "We weren't racing, we were practicing. No one cared. There were no prizes, no silver mugs, no money, nothing. Ollie knew I was faster, he knew I'd pass him if I wanted to."

"Wouldn't it have been the ordinary thing for him to have let you go on by?" Donnell asked.

"Yes, that would have been the ordinary thing," Peter said.

"But he didn't do it," Donnell said.

"No, he did the other thing," Peter said. "He decided to compete, he decided to try harder. Whether he was really trying to keep me from going on by, or whether he intended only to make it more interesting for us both, we can't know that."

"Will the accident affect your driving in the race itself tomorrow, do you think?" Donnell said.

There is no point in all this, Peter thought. He could see the starting grid, the cars lined up in threes on the hot white road in front of the green timing tower, the pink staring faces of the crowds, the drivers looking straight ahead, watching the rev-counters, watching the starter's flag, everyone thinking about the red car that was missing, everyone thinking about Ollie Ramirez, heartbroken for him, that dear good jolly man and do you remember that girl at Monza who claimed her twins were his, poor fellow, his new fiancée was there and someone had paid the girl to do it, and do you remember his drive at Reims in '55, the last 14 laps 10 feet from Fangio, 10 feet, eight feet, six, the whole way around, 35 miles an hour at Thillois, 185 past the pits, together as if they had been tied with a string, and Ramirez won it by a foot and a half in the last hundred yards? Oh, all that and more ...

"No, I shan't drive any differently," Peter said. "I shall go faster, that's all, since it's a race, not a practice."

"Still, I suppose you will find yourself thinking about Ramirez every time you go through the bend," Donnell said.

"I doubt it very much," Peter said. "If I think about anything but driving -- anything at all, you understand, even for two seconds -- I am quite likely to have an accident, and at these speeds, I shall be very badly hurt, in all probability, or killed. If I find myself thinking about Ollie Ramirez tomorrow, I shall pull over, and come in, and let Tommy Reston have the car."

"Do you expect to do that?"

"No, I certainly do not."

Donnell folded his yellow note paper and tucked it away.

"I came here hoping to find out why Olivier Ramirez died," he said. "But I still don't know."

"I would like to know why he died, as well," Peter Hart said. "Some think he died because he did a little thing wrong, that he incorrectly turned a wheel connected through a system of rods to two other wheels; or that he incorrectly arranged a cluster of gears connecting an engine and two wheels; or that he did not understand centrifugal force modified by the slip-angle of natural-rubber tires on rough-finished concrete, something of that sort. I don't think it was anything so simple."

"What, then?"

"I don't know," Peter said. "I don't know why Ollie Ramirez died."

Peter was watching the beach again. A little girl who might have been 10, bright in a daffodil-yellow bathing suit, crouched in water to her waist and leaped up, straight as a stick, arms over her head, then down into the water, up, down, up, down.

"I'll see you at the circuit tomorrow," Donnell said. He nodded, made ritual display of his knowledge of the mystique by not saying anything about good luck, and went away. Peter walked to the door with him.

When the waiter had taken the remains of luncheon, Peter sat on the balcony rail and watched the sea until the sun began to tire him. At the little desk in the blue-white room he wrote three short notes to people in England. The hotel note paper was gauzy and blue, a bright green palm tree engraved over the telephone number. He wrote quickly, in a long round scrawl. "... the weather is as always bright. There are vast numbers of tourists about and if possible more yachts than last year. Himself seems to think that he has the brakes set up properly at last and I can find nothing to complain about; I can hold 8000 in top just past the big birch tree before Poivre corner, which should give you a notion. You will have heard about poor Ollie Ramirez. He lost it completely in the middle of La Pournelle, I was very near him ..."

He heard a small rattling sound and looked down to see the pen roll off the desk. He did not recall putting it on the blotter pad. He had become just a little bit frightened, and the sensation was strange to him. Since he had come awake at dawn he had had almost no thought that had not to do with Ollie Ramirez. Why? He and Ollie had not been, after all, the best and closest. All right, he was a good sort, a kind man, and all that, but still ... and he wasn't the only one to die in that way, what of Ascari, Castelotti, Musso, Hawthorn, Portago, Stacey, Bristow, Behra, Sommer, Bouillin-who-called-himself-Levegh-after-his-uncle-who-was-named Veghle, Schell, Marimon, Bonetto, Lewis-Evans, Bueb, Wharton, Scott-Brown, just to name those one could think of immediately, and all contemporaries, all people one had known, all only recently dead, never mind the old boys, the people who'd been killed around Seaman's time. Some he had known better than Ollie Ramirez and liked more and at least three times he had been just as close when it had happened. So why Ollie Ramirez? He knew he hadn't killed Ollie, or perhaps he didn't actually know it, because if he hadn't started to move around him, going into La Pournelle, then Ollie would have held his own pace ... he stopped short as it came to him that he hadn't entertained so juvenile a notion for 15 years and he wholly forbade himself going on. That line was foolishness. If there was anything worth wondering, it was why Ollie had moved out. How could one know why, when Ollie himself might not have known why? The third part of a second was enough to make the decision and put it into being. Peter could recall many such times, times when he had braked without knowing he was going to brake, or bent the floor boards under the accelerator to pass someone, his foot directed by no plan. Everyone did such things, and if one were lucky one lived through and came into years of better judgment. It was unlikely that Ramirez, at 38, still had had such moments. Still, he must have done something, there must have been some reason. The man was dead.

The sun had moved away from the balcony. The tide was running out, fewer spots of bright color rode the water. Peter moved in a narrow triangle, from the balcony across the floor to the window that overlooked the courtyard, to the door of the bedroom, to the balcony, slowly over the lemon-yellow carpet. He was happy when the door buzzer sounded with Janey's three little rings. Tony was with her.

"How was Donnell?" Janey said.

"He was all right," Peter said.

"There's to be a commission of inquiry tomorrow night, after the race," Janey said. "Johnny Lurani told Tony."

"Best to them," Peter said. "By that time, even I may have thought of something -- but I doubt it." He stood with his back to the balcony. "Did you have lunch, you two?"

"With the Ferrari people," Tony said. "They've found a place on that little narrow street off the market square, four tables in it, they call it The Pub."

"Which it resembles in no way, as you can imagine," Janey said.

He walked his triangle a few times. "Would you like a vermouth or anything?" he said.

"Do run off, Tony," Janey said.

"I?" Tony said.

"Dear boy, you," she said, "I want to take Peter to bed."

Tony wagged his long head back and forth. "Quel sentiment," he said. "I'll occupy myself," he said. "If you like, I'll be at the Ferrari pub, poob, at six." He opened the door a narrow way and went out.

"We could just lie here," Janey said. "I'd be happy with that."

"You're confusing me with somebody else," Peter said.

"You don't have to do anything if you don't want to. I'm competent," she said. "I'm adept, even."

"I know," he said. "I remember. Stop being little earth-mother. Fly now, play later. And talk later."

"Did you think," he said in a little while, "that because Ollie had died, I would take vows of chastity, poverty and abstinence?"

"You said, 'talk later,'" Janey said.

"This is partly later," he said. "This is halfway later, for all you know."

"I didn't think you'd take any vows," she said. "All I know is, you can't stop thinking about it."

"That much is true," Peter said. "The big thing is not that I think about it, but that I apparently must think about it. Why, do you suppose? I was closer to Jack Mooney by far, and I never wondered why Jack died, and it was a sadder thing, in some ways: he'd retired, he had everything, his father had been killed in a car and his mother was happy to think that Jack was safe ... it never occurred to me to wonder why Jack had died. He was doing 100 in the rain, he turned to wave to someone, he lost it, and a lorry was using some of the road he needed for getting it back. Simple as that."

"I didn't believe you thought much about it," Janey said. "You or any of the others."

"I never have," Peter said. "There's the one thing you learn, and after that you don't think about it, or talk about it. I guess until you start to get old, and one day you realize your eyes are going, or your reflexes are going, and then you're frightened and think about getting killed. But while you have it, all you know is merely that driving is the essence of living, a distillate of it, a concentrate, and since it has more living in it, it must of necessity have more dying in it. I'm putting it badly, but do you know what I mean?"

"Perfectly," Janey said.

"You can see that once you know that, you can be tranquil?" Peter said. "Because then you needn't think any more about dying than a bus conductor does, which is not much. If one's going to have three times as much life, one's going to have to accept three times as much hazard of death, right?"

"Talk later," Janey said. "Peter, talk later!"

They went to the pub place at six. The Ferrari crew had three tables by right of discovery, and Tony had the fourth, and a cassis.

"These types say that Phil Hill got around in 4:5.8 just before they stopped practice," he said when they had squeezed in with him.

"A tiger," Peter said. "A charger, I think they call them in the States."

"Phil Hill is the intellectual's race driver," Janey said. "He is the egghead's pilote."

"When he found Moss at Spa," Tony said, "after Stirling's accident, he told a reporter, 'Stirling was lying in a fetal position, hemorrhaging from the mouth, and denouncing, in bad French, two people who were trying to move him.' Nobody else would have put it just that way."

"Deux Byrrh," Peter said to the waiter.

They ate scampi and said little.

Tony went away before coffee.

"He's having a big thing with a blonde Greek," Janey said. "She's as tall as he is. They have Plattdeutsch for a common language. She wakes him up every morning in the pitch dark and they go outside and wait to make love in the sunrise."

"What a romantic notion," Peter said. "Or, as he said this afternoon, quel sentiment."

"It's not romantic, it's historic," Janey said. "The ancient Greeks, the Greeks of the golden times, much preferred to make love outdoors at dawn. You didn't know that, did you."

"No," Peter said. "Is it true?"

"Yes," Janey said. "Truly. If you think for a little while you will see why it would seem logical to people like that, the most civilized people of all time."

"I'll give it some thought," he said. "Meanwhile, now that your brother's brother has left us, we could go down to the harbor and drink coffee at Mary's."

They threw goodbyes into the din the Ferrari crew was making. The sky was lavender and the air was warm and sweet. He held her wrist as they walked. She hung a quarter-step behind him. She felt leashed and happy. The white houses of the town, spilled like sugar cubes down the slopes, stood rosy in the last of the sun. There was not a trace of movement in the boats crowding the little horseshoe harbor. Their lights were coming on, here and there a yellow glow spilling from a porthole to the black water or a blue-white masthead light glittering like a Christmas-tree star. An accordionist slowly squeezed and played and in another boat farther from the bright shore a girl sang, "Um-de-bol-ay-flum-amour-tooh-le-slu-um-fum-toujour."

"Are you peaceful now?" Janey said.

"You are a dear good girl." Peter said. "You know, there is something about your being such a little thing that makes you very dear. Why is that? Do you weigh eight stone? I doubt it."

"I wish I did weigh eight stone," Janey said. "Answer me: are you peaceful now?"

"Near enough," Peter said. "I wish it were noon tomorrow and I were in the car. I'll be peaceful then." He shrugged. "I ought to go around and say hello to Himself and the people in the garage. Do you want to come?"

"If I may," Janey said. She closed her hand and offered her wrist to him.

It was a Peugeot garage in the ordinary way of things. Now it was a temporary race-car garage, identical with others in the world: bright red Grand Prix cars, or white or blue or bottle-green; tired mechanics, dark-jawed, red-eyed under the unshaded light bulbs hanging from the ceiling; a few people watching, some bored girls, ragged stacks of tires looking bigger and blacker than tires should, silvery tools scattered, electric cables snaked across the floor.

The lowest numbered of the three green cars was 9, Peter's. Two mechanics were working on it.

"What's afoot, Mike?" Peter said.

The stained white jumper-suit stirred and the man came out from under, a slant-jawed, flat-nose specimen.

"Hullo, Peter," he said. "What's afoot? Guv'nor says a hair more camber, here, that's all. Front end's as it was. Everything else done, down to the last split-pin. All it wants now is somebody to steer it and it's home with the lolly for us."

"You think so?" Peter said.

"Why not?" Mike said. "The Eyeties ain't in it, and who else is there?"

"The Eyeties did a 4:5.8 lap," Peter said.

"They ain't in it," Mike said. "They'll blow up. I give 'em an hour." He burrowed under the car again.

Two garages east, a trailer crouched at the curb, a twisted, lumped red car tied down on it.

"Was that it?" Janey whispered.

Peter nodded. He leaned on the trailer and looked in. The wheel was bent on itself, but upward not downward. When the car had flipped, the centrifugal force had tried to tear Ramirez' arms away, but the man's great strength had kept his hands locked to the wheel's rim. There was rust-brown blood on the wheel, on the glasses of the gauges on the dashboard and on the floor.

They left the lights and moved on the dark streets toward the hotel. Strange waxy-leaved trees arched over them. A scent of mimosa followed them, mimosa and jasmine and dew-wet earth. They were disembodied. They had nothing to do with their feet. They moved as if standing in a train in a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel the hotel glowed white under floodlights screwed into the crowns of the palm trees.

They stood on the balcony. Small waves ran in from Egypt. An old man leaned on a cane and stared across the water. He held his hat in his left hand. His hair was so white that it seemed to throw light of its own.

"What do you suppose that old dear is thinking about?" Janey said.

"He sees a yacht anchored out there," Peter said. "It's a steam yacht. The time is July 1909. He's standing at the rail, looking in toward the hotel. A girl is beside him, in a white dress. She has dark red hair loose to her waist. Her eyes are brown, big, gentle and forgiving. His arm is around her. She is hard and strong and beautiful. That old man is thinking about her grave. He knows where it is, a long way from here. In 45 years he has seen it many times. He is thinking of a terrible thing they taught him in Latin when he was in school, that some Roman said, that the best thing is not to be born at all, and the next best thing is to die young."

"You have made my day," Janey said. She went in.

"I'm sorry," Peter said.

"Ah, nothing, darling," she said. "Look, you're driving tomorrow, and would you rather I went to my own room?"

"No, I'd rather you stay, if you don't mind," Peter said.

"So would I," she said. "I'll just take a little Nembutal, and a shower, and bid you a soft and passionless good night."

"You can have the bed by the window," he said. "They'll bring tea at eight. I'll call down now."

• • •

At five minutes before noon next day he levered himself into the car. The mechanics had rigged a parasol over the cockpit, but he winced when the heat of the leather seat reached through his driving suit. It was wrinkled and crusty from the fireproofing and he wore nothing under it. He had a helmet upside down in his lap, a pair of cape gloves. He was wearing boxers' shoes with asbestos soles over heavy woolen socks. He was absolutely tranquil, level as the line between sea and sky. He rarely talked about the sensation now growing anew in his belly, the belief that this was life and the rest was something else. Every driver knew it, but few knew it well enough to talk about it, and fewer wished to. Peter had got around to it with Portago one lime, the year before he was killed. Portago could talk about it.

"They may get. it from the bulls," Portago had said. "I was too old to find out, by the time I wondered. And mountain climbing, maybe. And, I think, a musician a few times in his life. But that's all. Maybe a surgeon. Rarely. But that's all. I really think I know. I've tried most things. Flying? I gave up flying out of boredom. Horses? Jump races? I was amateur champion of Europe. No. Skindiving? No. Hard-hat diving? Nonsense. Skiing? Please. No. In three hours every Sunday, if you're awake and alive, you can live 10 years."

He had heard Moss put it another way: "To drive as about 10 men in the world can drive is an art, and it is related to ballet."

God bless, Ollie, Peter thought. Vaya con Dios, Ollie. Peter did not know any Dios, but never mind.

Engines were started. Peter watched his pit. At 15 seconds Mike waved. Peter pushed the clutch in, nudged the short gear lever into first, ran the engine to 4000 and watched for the flag's fall. He was in the second row, cars on all sides. The great flag dropped and they went, 15 cars howling, a noise to make your brain bubble, feeling for the spinning back tires, waiting to get into second and turn it all loose. They hit the first corner bunched like fingers in a fist, everybody in second by then, each trusting in the perfect orthodoxy of the man in front and beside and behind him. They all came through. Past the bend, the two-lane concrete road, snow-bright in the sunshine, ran straight for half a mile across the rolling farmland, two little roller-coaster rises in it. Peter had come out of the corner lying third. The engine screamed, working up to 9000 revolutions a minute, the whole shiny oil-streaming steel complex spinning 150 times a second. He sat well back from the wheel, his arms straight out, his left foot braced hard against the floor, the catapult-thrust pinning him to the seat. The engine raging at his back shook the car; the thin tubing that made its chassis sang and vibrated, and every hill and valley in the road sent a separate shock into the wheels, but none was discernible as an entity; everything, sound, shock, thrust, movement, funneled into one overpowering sensation; the noise was the shout of an organ as high as a hill. He held the wheel lightly. He could look clown and see the front road-wheels it guided, tied to the frame by finger-thin steel rods; they were leading him; his life spun with them, he knew delight.

Just ahead and a foot to the right a blood-red Ferrari sat, one might think motionless, since both cars were running at the same rate, working up to 150 miles an hour. The driver wore Hill's white helmet. They ran across the first rise together, flew into the air together, accelerating to land tail-first. The second rise followed immediately and they flew again. They moved in a blurred green world under a kindly sky. Sensations needled their bodies like rain blown by a gale, they produced the 10 decisions a second they must make to stay alive, but they knew the mystic's calm, life narrowed to a knife edge, everything extraneous set aside. At the end of the straight, a point would come to issue: Peter would consider staying off his brakes until a half-second after Hill had hit his in the hope of running around him on the outside. It was a thin hope and they both knew it; Hill was a notable specialist in refinements of braking. Running down to the corner they shifted like twins; Peter moved a little to the left, but Hill, perfectly certain that he would brake last, moved with him, and that was that, they went around as they had gone in, end to end. The cars sat down on their tails as they accelerated out and ran for the esses that led to the straight through the woods.

When they came past the pits for the first time the order was Ferrari Cooper Ferrari Lotus, red green red green, and the first four had opened 20 yards on the rest of the field. They were alone and they all knew it, Hill, Hart, Gervosa, Dedham. They were having their own race. They were almost in narcosis, sensation-drunk like fliers too high or divers too deep, so that it seemed to them not only normal but desirable and delightful to be doing what they were doing, running six miles a minute 10 feet apart, shielded from each other by sheet aluminum so thin it would give under a boy's thumb. They screamed down the straights, towing each other at 170, 175, 180 miles an hour; in orderly sequence they sorted out the gears as corners came; they lurched in the tight-fitting seats when the cars drifted in pairs through the bends, sliding like skiers in a Christy; they schemed for inches of roadway and fractional angles of direction as the cars clawed into the straights again. This went on for 50-odd minutes, until a thrown stone crystallized one side of Gervosa's goggles and put him back into the ruck, but the other three ran like triplets, like a three-car train, and no one could come near. As they burned fuel, lightened the cars, wore the tires down, and more intimately knew the circuit, they went faster, and faster. One of the pits held up a sign Rec which they all read to mean that the course record had been broken by Hill, leading; and if by Hill then by the other two as well. They knew without being told. They could run very little faster and stay on the road. All were moving in the same plane: an inch, a hair, a twig from the unmarked notch at which concrete turns to glass-smooth ice, and a car, taking its head, can slide screaming and spinning for a hundred yards.

An hour and a half into the race, the three of them had lapped half the field and were still together. The excitement of the watchers around the circuit, jammed into the tiers of the stands on the finishing straight, three deep on the shorter stretches, standing in sixes and 10s on the slow corners, was plain, and it approached hysteria; everyone in the stands was on his feet; in the one hairpin corner they were hanging to each other as if for support, shouting face against face. The drivers saw, and knew it had to do with them, and were untouched. They knew the turmoil was of their making, but they knew as well that it had nothing to do with what was going on in the red automobile and the two green ones.

They were running in their own tracks, running over the black rubber their own tires had laid into the concrete, the same place every time, to an inch or so. They were in echelon most of the time, not in line, and they came into Poivre that way, Hill still leading, Dedham still last. As the white spear of the birch tree left the corner of his eye, Peter laid his weight on the brake, a little harder now than an hour ago; the car dug in, slowed evenly, all of a piece; he dropped his heel on the throttle, hit the clutch, thrust with the gear lever, all as 200 times before, all neat and orderly; he was conscious of an unaccustomed white blank, like a movie projector misbehaving for a second, and then he knew that the rear of the car had moved out; he steered instantly against it, in precise ratio; he gave back some gas pedal but not all of it and he noted that Dedham was now on his right instead of behind him to the left; he felt the off-side of the car rise; and he knew he was moving backward; he looked over his shoulder and was mildly surprised to see a forest falling on him, straight down. He could not hear a sound. He thought of Donnell. He knew Donnell would never find out why, he would never know the reason. Clearly not: there was no reason. Naturally not. There was no reason at all. How absurd to think that there had ever been a reason! His world went green. He knew that the forest was receiving him.

• • •

That first night, and the next, Janey Sawyer was under such heavy sedation that she slept without a wisp of dream. On the third night she woke laughing from a dream, and it became recurrent, she dreamed it often during the next few months. It was a plain dream: She saw Peter floating on his back in the sea, laughing aloud, speaking, when he could for laughter, to someone out of sight under the water, saying, "Ollie, Ollie, you are a funny man, you are a very funny man, amigo, yes, you are."

At first she insisted that this was not a dream, that she could hear Peter Hart's true voice, and when she had waked laughing she would soon weep. But in time the image blurred and the voice faded. In December of that year, in Athens, she met a pleasant Canadian boy. They had passage on the same plane for London, and he arranged for them to sit together. He was attentive and amusing. He made an intangible impression of wealth. He knew nothing about motor racing. They saw much of each other in London. They had a splendid time together. In the spring they went to Montreal.