The dirt roads were indeed complicated, dodging in and out of the woods, crossing one another, and affording occasional tantalizing glimpses of the sea. Max and Kate had been fortunate in finding an informed repairman refilling his gas tank at the service station where they had stopped to inquire, and Max, in his efficient way, made rapid notes as the complicated instructions were given. “You’ll know when you’ve found the right road,” the repairman said, “because there’s a metal gate she’s had put up. Not that it protected her from death,” he philosophically added. “You have to get out, open it, get out again, close it, and after that . . . just keep going till the house is there.”
Max opened the gate when, following the directions in his neat hand, they had reached it, waited for Kate to pull the car through, closed the gates again, and climbed back in for the final bit. “The gates, as I understand it, were to keep out casual sightseers, particularly in the summer, looking for the sea. Ah, there it is.”
The house was certainly startling, perhaps, Kate asked herself, because something had led her to expect a turn-of-the-century mansion, surrounded by English roses? This house suggested that its architect might have submitted it for some contest in forward-looking design. Built of that sort of bleached wood that looks as though it had been deposited by the sea, the house had evidently been envisioned as standing upon the sea’s edge looking as though it had been washed up there. When, Kate surmised, the architect had learned that his mad client wanted it set back across a meadow, he had not altered his design. Kate had never admired modern architecture as fervently as she had felt appropriate to someone of her advanced ideas, yet this house was exactly right to stand by the sea. Why had she supposed Cecily would want something with three floors and a central staircase?
Inside, the house was even more impressive, its large central room lit by the light from the sea, having in itself an aquatic quality as though it were part of an ocean kingdom. Only part of the house contained a second story, and here Cecily had reproduced the sort of room one might have found in an English manor house. The desk, the books, the carpet, the fireplace, the clutter of the room contrasted sharply with the clean lines of the central room below. So she had liked contrasts in her life. This room did not face the sea, as though one had to turn one’s face from that vision while writing. Above the fireplace—it was the first thing to catch one’s eye as one entered the room—was the portrait of a woman: young, blond, marvelously agreeable looking, and just not beautiful. Whoever she was, her chief characteristic had clearly been vitality—she looked like some sort of Scandinavian queen or female warrior, yet with laughter about it, as though she had appreciated the incongruity between her looks and herself. She was not laughing in the picture, but laughter was not far away, and when it came it would be at herself. I wonder who painted it, Kate thought first, and only after, I wonder who she is.
She asked Max, who had followed her slowly up the stairs, gazing about apprehensively. “No sign of prowlers,” he said. “A mare’s nest, no doubt. But I had better secure all the papers, while we are here. That?” he asked, remembering Kate’s question. “The artist is more famous than the subject, which makes it a rather valuable portrait these days.” He named the painter. “He was quite unknown, of course, when he painted it. The subject? She was named Whitmore. Dorothy Whitmore. Not a particularly impressive writer, who died young. She and Cecily were at Oxford together.”
“But I’ve heard of her,” Kate said. “In fact, one of my—”
“One does forget”—Max smiled—“that British literature of the last century and a half is your specialty.”
“One of her novels was a great success; they even made a movie of it.”
“Posthumously, alas, poor dear. Her will left all the receipts from her works to her Oxford college for scholarships, and the painting to my mother, who in turn left it to Cecily.”
“Was your mother at Oxford, too?”
“Oh, yes. You see before you the son of one of the first Oxford women to get a degree. Not that my mother came all over academic, thank the Lord. One could only forgive one’s mother for being a bluestocking in her youth if she also had the intelligence to marry the younger son of the younger son of a duke. Which, I am pleased to say, she did.”
“Max, you are a snob—how enchanting of you in this day and age.”
“Not a snob, dear, just selective, and no more so than some unwashed revolutionary who will associate only with his smelly kind. She kept her papers in here.”
“In here” was a strictly utilitarian room, lined with fireproof cabinets. Max flung open one of these to, reveal ordered files which contained, he explained to Kate, the correspondence of a long life as well as original drafts and manuscripts. All of these Cecily had retained believing, accurately, that they comprised a rare picture of her time.
“Odd,” Kate said, “that she should have preserved everything so carefully, considering her love of privacy—the gate, the lonely house, all that. One would think a bonfire on the lawn, in the manner of Henry James and Dickens, would have been more in her line.”
“I agree,” Max said. “In fact, I have in the past done my best to persuade her of this. Her answer was oddly characteristic. ‘Had I known,’ she said to me, sitting downstairs in the main room, ‘that this fetish for other people’s mail would grow so widespread, I should have begun by destroying every letter after I had answered it. But to destroy them now would be to guarantee the preservation only of my side of every correspondence. I do not wish to impute any sinister motives to Dickens, or to James, whom I so much admire, but there must have been some satisfaction in removing forever from human sight that uncomfortable epistolary accusation, particularly since you know it to have been absolutely untrue.’ I can remember her staring from the window out at the sea. ‘You know. Max,’ she said, ‘I have lived in times of great change. The First World War, the early days of women’s degrees at Oxford, the years between the wars when I knew, in various degrees of intimacy, the Bloomsbury group, writers like Rose Macaulay and Elizabeth Bowen, not to mention the whole peace movement. Lowes Dickinson and the hopes for the League. I have to recognize that this is an historical record, quite apart from any importance I may have had, and I am by no means ready to claim that I am of no importance. So the architect built me a file room, and I have preserved it all. You may want to burn it when I am dead. Max, but don’t. Sell it for the best price you can get, and let the children spend the proceeds on installing an extra telephone to forestall the need to write letters and create all this evidence of a past age.’ ”
“Will the papers bring much?”
“Thirty thousand at least; more, if I am clever and persuasive. It will pay her children’s telephone bills for life, however madly the telephone company continues to raise the rates. The next step, of course, is to get an appraiser up here. They come dear enough, God knows, but if you pick a good one, their word is as impeccable as that of the holy ghost. There’ll be some wine here, I dare say. Shall we have a glass?”
This question, like most of Max’s, was rhetorical, the flourish of ancient gallantry. He led the way to the small circular staircase which led back into the large, beautiful room. “Will you wait down there while I bring the wine?”
“Is there a loo up here?”
“Her bedroom and bath are off in that direction.”
“That will be fine,” Kate said, “I enjoy catching glimpses of her life. I’ll join you in a moment.”
Cecily’s bedroom was the night retreat of a writer, reader, thinker. One recognized immediately the distinction between the bedroom of such a person and that of one whose bedroom had been “decorated.” Largish night-tables stood on either side of the large bed—Kate suspected the old dog had shared it with her, in the last years. Books were still piled there, plus paper and pencil. The window faced east, intentionally, Kate was sure, so that the morning light flooded in and awakened the occupant early to another day. Living alone, she would have retired early at night, the life forces in the house retreating to this one room her spirit could fortify. Probably, sleeping less in later years, she had read into the night, the old dog snoring beside her.
“What utter rot,” Kate snorted at herself, entering the bathroom and closing the door behind her. “For all I know, she retired at two in the morning with a bottle of gin and listened to rock music through earphones.” But the silence had a quality which was that of order and of life arranged for the deployment of personal forces. Finishing with the bathroom, Kate wandered back into the study, sitting for a moment in Cecily’s chair to stare at the portrait she herself must have seen every time she glanced up. Is it only one’s imagination that those who die young are so vital in appearance? Kate had heard it said, perhaps only with the sort of truth which adheres to ancient superstition, that those who are to die young seem to sense it and to live with double the intensity and joy of others. A romantic theory, in both senses of the word.
The files in the next room would be worth a small fortune to a budding scholar anxious to make a name, or, more literally, to a library prepared to purchase their contents. She pulled on one of the metal drawers, and was surprised, as she had been before with Max, to have it open; feeling a snooper, she closed it immediately. How odd that they weren’t locked. But then, why, since she lived alone, should they be? Passing out again beneath the portrait of Dorothy Whitmore, Kate thought to herself: Here was a complete life, and, at the end, full of work and the sort of solitude which is true aloneness. Kate found herself envying this house by the sea, actually speculating, for a moment, if it might be for sale. What is it that, in middle age, made solitude so attractive? An English poet had expressed it in a verse that Kate, once having read, never forgot:
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff—
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.
Never mind, Kate said to herself, unwinding down the circular stairs with one hand on the banister. My little cabin will have to do. Without the stimulation of the university, you would be chattering to yourself like a magpie within a week, Kate Fansler.
“The files are not locked,” she said to Max, who was emerging from the kitchen with a tray.
“I know, more’s the pity. One of the tasks I shall urge you to share with me is the discovery of a key. There must be one. We can’t leave all this unlocked—it’s partly why I wanted to come. Of course,” he added, pouring some white wine for Kate into a beautiful glass, “one can lock files easily enough by pressing a button, but one would like to anticipate opening them with something less dramatic than a blowtorch. To Cecily’s papers,” he added, raising his glass, “and to you for coming along and holding my hand. Bless you.”
It was the nearest Max had ever come to a personal compliment, and Kate was pleased to acknowledge it. They sat for a time in the glow of the wine and that particular brightness of the afternoon just before the day begins to fade. Through the window they could see the sea, not crashing against the rocks, but beyond the coastline, calm, expansive, glittering—what Kate thought of as the optimists’ view of the ocean.
Max appeared to echo her thoughts. “One ought to go to watch the waves crashing against the rocks to return oneself to the facts of earthly life,” he said, putting down his wineglass with an air of finality. “Shall we go and walk about before the sun sets?”
“One of the reasons I spend my weekends guestless,” Kate said, “is because it is always when I am feeling particularly lazy that someone suggests that exertion is unquestionably the next item on the day’s agenda.”
“Not here,” Max said, reaching for the wine bottle. “You have been angelic to come this far. Never let it be said of me that I encouraged anyone to exercise. Why, I might endanger my reputation for fastidiousness, and you’ve no idea the years it has taken me to establish it.”
Kate, laughing, rose to her feet. “Your reputation for all the virtues is still safe with me,” she said. “In fact, safer. Who else but so fastidious and urbane a creature as yourself would require moral support on a visit to a house like this? Let us saunter to the sea, by all means. Does it,” she asked as they left the house, “impose an emotional burden—this literary-executor business?”
“More than I would have anticipated, since you are so perspicacious as to ask,” Max answered, lingering on the front stoop, or whatever the modem equivalent of the front stoop is. “I admired Cecily, and for me to admire is to go some way toward loving, as you have no doubt also gathered. You call me a snob, but I find it difficult to admire those I secretly scorn. That, if you want to know, is my definition of a liberal.”
“The concept of ‘liberal,’ like the concept of goodness, must have some hidden force behind it; it inspires so many people to disdain. Never mind,” Kate said, her mind upon the mowed path to the sea, which was, indeed, a good idea, particularly if one thought of her overgrown meadow. But there—clever Cecily—the path led from her to the sea, not, obviously, from anywhere to her. Max, following her gaze, misapprehended her thoughts.
“It is unusual to have this much land near the sea,” he said. “This house and the land around it is probably Cecily’s most valuable bequest to her children. I believe that there are other houses visible on the coast, but considering the land’s value, she was wonderfully isolated. Shall we follow the path to the sea, or explore the woods behind?”
“Oh, the sea, of course,” Kate said, preceding him down the steps from the front modern-version-of-a-stoop and onto the path. It was not quite wide enough for two to walk abreast, and Kate led the way. The walk to the sea was not long, and Kate was shocked at how abruptly the land ended. Below it there was a drop to the rocks below, although a stairway of rocks had been cut to aid the descent of any intrepid soul.
“Let’s go down,” Kate said.
“Don’t be impulsive,” Max answered. “One of us—and it would no doubt be me—might break a leg and require rescue, which, from here, looks impossible. The other would have to stand by, teetering on a rock, and watch the tide come in, to our certain destruction. With what force the waves crash out there! Let’s admire it from here, like the lady and gentleman we are. Do you suppose it’s high tide or low?”
“Low, I should deduce,” Kate said, “not that I know a thing about tides. But those pools there, between the higher rocks, must have got water into them, and yet water isn’t going in now.”
“Perhaps it’s rain water.”
“Look here. Max, I’m going down. After all, there are steps, and they wouldn’t have been put there only for the purposes of suicide. I should like to watch the water crashing against the rocks close up. You watch if you are as timid as all that, and if I appear on the verge of destruction, you can go for help.”
“But I can’t drive. Really, Kate.”
“You can use the telephone. Your entire charm, Max, is your unflappableness. No bachelor should come all over mother hen. It spoils the whole style. Fortunately I am wearing pants and crepe-soled shoes, another example of the serendipity of all this. I always wear very ladylike shoes when I know I am going to meet you.”
In fact, Kate soon decided, scrambling over the rocks, the whole little scene had been nonsense. There was no real danger except, she supposed, of slipping and breaking a leg. One simply leaped relatively short distances from one rock to the next. At one of the higher points, Kate paused. The waves dashing against the rocks were impressive, not to say a bit daunting. She resisted an impulse to dash back across the rocks to dry land and nature’s more controllable forces. But she did turn around and noticed, then, in a pool between two rocks rather to her right, what looked like a bundle of clothes.
She became aware, as one does after a shock, of a plunging sensation in her stomach, which had received the message of disaster seconds before her conscious mind. With the summoning of all her determination, Kate forced herself nearer to the pool. For a moment she looked back for Max, and was astonished to discover she could not see him. She could see only rocks. Reaching a rock nearer to the pool, Kate sat upon it and waited for her pulse to stop racing. Then she looked down. It was a body, a woman’s body, face down in the pool. Each time the sea came in, a slight spray spattered it.
Responding to a sudden surge of adrenalin, which, we are told, is what rushes into our bloodstream to provide the flight or fight reaction necessary to survival, Kate leaped back with abandon over the rocks, and then found she had lost track of the stairs. “Max,” she shouted. “Max.”
Max, coming nearer to the edge, peered down at her. “All adventurous spirits properly subdued?” he asked. “You can’t get up this way, you know. The stairs are over there.” He gestured to his left. Again Kate leaped over the rocks and this time up the stairs.
“Max,” she said. “There’s a body down there. A woman’s body.”
If some witty rejoinder occurred to Max, he controlled it at the sight of her face. “Are you sure?”
“We had better go for help.”
“Would it not be more sensible to telephone?”
“Of course. I’m upset.”
“No you’re not. The telephone’s been disconnected. We had better go for help. Come on.”
“Don’t you think,” Kate said, “that you had better wait here until I return with whatever rescue I can collect?”
“What on earth for? No one’s likely to bother the body. It may have been there for days, for all you know. Or weeks.”
“Suppose the tide comes in.”
“I, my dear lady, cannot stop the tides. Perhaps I ought to see if I can find you some whisky or brandy in the house.”
“No, I have to drive. For God’s sake. Max, come on!”