Kate had been looking into London hotels in a desultory manner, when Anne called to say she had been lent a house in Highgate which she, at least, would occupy for three weeks; Kate could stay as long as she liked. Also there was a cat and a garden, both of which Anne would look to; she did hope that Kate had no horror of cats.
Kate did not, rather liked them, in fact, when casually met. But did Anne know the owner and had she seen the house?
Oh, yes, Anne had stayed there before, it was really quite nice, with two floors and two bathrooms, though a very un-modern kitchen. Still, they could eat out. The only drawback was an odd one: the insurance company insisted that each time before the occupants went out they lock the doors to each room. This was a dreadful nuisance, but Anne had agreed to comply with this condition now as in the past. Personally, she doubted that anyone else bothered, but her friend was a stickler in these matters.
What, Kate asked, did the friend do besides live in a nice house in Highgate?
She was a singer, in opera, concerts, recitals, and also played the French horn. Anne was sure Kate would like her though of course they would not meet except to say hello and good-bye.
Did the friend know anything about Gabrielle?
Nothing; Anne had never mentioned it.
All that needed to be settled, then, was the date and time of their flight; their arrival had to be synchronized with the departure of Anne’s friend, so they had to time it closely. That is, the friend needed only to hand over the keys and, if Anne knew her, repeat all the instructions about the garden, the cat, the dates of trash pickup, and locking the inner doors. She was a wonderful person, Anne’s friend, but, as Anne had said, a stickler. They would, however, be comfortable and have plenty of space in which to contemplate Gabrielle’s papers. There was a bus to the center of London, stores not too far away, and a fine pub in nearby Hampstead, useful if Kate liked English beer, ploughman’s lunch, and cheese and pickle sandwiches as much as Anne did. Kate said that she did, and was even known to relish a Scotch egg.
Arriving at Heathrow after a not-too-terrible night flight and finding that, for once, the airport workers were not on strike and the airport buses were running, Kate and Anne arrived at Victoria Station and there took a taxi to Highgate. Kate had always ardently admired London taxicabs; in these black high vehicles Kate came as close, she told Anne, to feeling like a queen as she was ever likely to under any circumstances.
Anne’s friend was waiting for them, and flung open the door with a great shout of welcome. She was in her middle sixties like Anne, and like Anne had the great energy and exuberance that, Kate thought, we tend to identify exclusively with youth; probably she had expected a younger person because of the French horn. Kate liked her immediately. Everything about her, as she led them rapidly through the house reeling off instructions and advocating the delights and conveniences of the neighborhood, including the graves of Marx and George Eliot, was delightful. Having imparted her information, and having announced that her bags were already stashed in the car, she backed it out of the tiny garage and steamed off.
“The last time I stayed here,” Anne said as they stood in the dining room admiring the garden and feeling rather bewildered, “there was a block celebration for the Queen Mum’s birthday. They took the electricity they needed from this house, and it really was quite marvelous, as rock-and-rolly as anything in America, with flashing lights and all. I think it was rock and roll, anyway it was loud, and Lavinia, my friend, stuck cotton in her ears. I’m not very good at distinguishing contemporary popular music and I don’t suppose you are either.”
“Certainly not,” Kate said. “Aging without children one tends to ignore popular music, let alone the shifts from one mode to the next. When I hum I hum the Beatles or Simon and Garfunkel from the days when I did notice popular music. Shall we go and get the papers today! I suppose instead of acting madly eager, I ought to assume a mien of quiet patience, but that’s beyond my capabilities. I’m madly eager.”
“I’ll call the bank,” Anne said. “I’ve already written. We better get some bags to collect the papers in. I kept Gabrielle’s sacks as you know and took them back to America, but it seemed rather perverse to drag them back again across the ocean. Besides, they’re decades old, if I shouldn’t speak of half-centuries, and might fall apart at the worst possible moment. Would you rather sleep upstairs or down!”
Kate chose up because it made her feel more like being in a house, which she wasn’t very often. She mentioned this to Anne.
“I often dream of having a house,” Anne said. “Not like this, with more land and off somewhere. But I know perfectly well I would die of the isolation in a month, after the fun of settling in was over. I think Gabrielle may have had some such dream when she came back to England, but she saw the errors of that way and settled for rooms in Kensington. Are you one of the rare persons who does not dream of a rural retreat?”
“I am, however rare. I’m a city person, but this house does seem to offer the best of both worlds, especially if you like gardening. I’m afraid I can’t identify anything but a rose and a pansy. Shall we have much to do in the garden?”
“No. Not this time of year. I’ll do it. You can concentrate on finding restaurants for us to dally in.”
“Did you eat in restaurants when you were last here?”
“No, but then I wasn’t here alone; besides being a vegetarian, Lavinia eats very modestly. I went to Selfridge’s incredible food floor one day and bought cheeses and other goodies, and we ate those with bread and crackers I picked up around here. Lavinia makes her own wine too, which is really quite tasty.”
“Well, let’s us do the same, except for pubs,” Kate said. “Pubs for lunch and cheese for supper; we shall do very well. Now do call the bank before they decide to close on us. I’ll unpack.” And Kate, grabbing her suitcase, marched happily upstairs where Anne, as she prepared to telephone, could hear her tramping about and exclaiming with delight.
When she spoke to the proper person at the bank, a man with a quite dignified manner on the phone, she was informed that she could come tomorrow to collect the belongings from her vault, that she would need several items of identification with photograph, and that she might ask for him in person. They would be happy if she had brought some of their past invoices with her to show by way of further identification.
“One would think it was jewels,” Anne said. “Gabrielle’s papers may be worth more to me and even the world, but they do make me feel as though I should bring along an armed guard. Well, I am bringing you.”
The next morning they set out for Archway Road where they caught the bus for London. At Kate’s request, they climbed to the upper deck (smoking allowed) and watched the streets and houses as they passed—Kentish Town, Camden Town, ending up near the Charing Cross Road. They walked to Oxford Street, where at Marks and Spencer they purchased two bags, sufficient, Anne thought, to hold all the papers.
“Perhaps we should get a third, just in case,” Kate said, suddenly worried about not being able to carry off all the papers at once, or having to crush and perhaps crumble them by packing them too tightly.
Kate could not quite subdue the sensation of being involved in some sort of secret plan, some undercover plot to fool the other side, whoever they might be. Could there be any two people on a mission arousing less interest in the populace, general, criminal, or subversive? Really, she thought, looking at Anne and herself when they had paid for the bags and were leaving the store, one could hardly find two less provocative individuals if one worked at it with both hands for a fortnight.
Kate thought the bank people looked a little startled at their entrance encumbered with large, obviously empty bags, but Anne, putting on her executive manner, asked for the man she had talked to yesterday, and sat down to wait. Kate wondered if anticipation was as clearly written on her face as on Anne’s. Probably. Excitement was to be expected if one was redeeming what had been put away in such a dramatic fashion and with such an apparent need for haste those many years ago. Anne had written that she felt then as though the Gestapo were on her trail; now they again felt somewhat the same sensation. Perhaps, Kate thought, we live in a world where it comes naturally to think of ourselves as spies. Yet spies implied betrayal, and here there was no betrayal. Or was that the whole point, that there had been? That Gabrielle had been betrayed, and her name was about to be cleared; her name, that is, as a separate person and not the wife-of-a-famous-writer.
They did not wait long. The bank manager, or whoever he was, the man in charge of vaults perhaps, invited them into his office, examined Anne’s papers and identification with great care, and then prepared to lead them downward to the vault area. Clearly, he had taken Anne at face value; a sixty-year-old woman, more or less, had to be herself, unless she was pretending to be another sixty-year-old woman, which would have required more extensive accumulation of false documents than this man found it possible to attribute to Anne. But why am I so aware of fraud? Kate wondered. It is all straightforward now. Either the papers will be wonderful or they will be a total loss. That was all there was to it.
The vault was a large one, just as Anne had said it was. It must have cost a pretty penny to maintain all these years, and Kate wondered if Gabrielle had thought of that. Perhaps she didn’t expect that the papers would remain so long sequestered in expensive quarters.
“I’m surprised you didn’t decide to remove them long before this,” Kate said to Anne as they awaited the man’s long process with keys and forms.
“But I never wanted to think of all that again. It was a new life I was starting, a life in which Dorinda and all her connections, famous or not, were to have no part. After I left the bank, and learned that Gabrielle had gone to the hospital, after I cabled Eleanor, I went into a decline, collapsed in a heap, sank into a kind of trough: honestly, I don’t know how to explain it, but somehow it became clear to me that I had to begin living as Anne Gringold, and not as a ghost still haunting the Goddards, the Foxxes, and the Jersey shore.
“I had been frightened. I don’t know why, but I had been. And I could tell no one. So I decided upon the only therapy that occurred to me: an absolutely clean break. Oh, I went to visit Gabrielle, as you know, but she was gone from this world and so, in a sense, was I. Apart from paying the bank’s charges I no longer thought at all of my childhood. It was only when I wrote my memoir that I was able to speak of the papers and to begin thinking again about the past. That, of course, was after I talked to Eleanor. I’m glad now I got the whole thing down on paper and began to remember such a vital part of my history again. But in between there had to be a time when I lived a wholly other life, wholly as myself.”
Then the man and his assistant had the vault open, and the papers lay there, piled up, starting to yellow around the edges but not yet, Kate was glad to see, brittle. She held one of the sheets up to the light, looking for the watermark, and saw that Gabrielle had used 100 percent rag paper; either that was what was sold her, or she had some sense of preserving her work. Perhaps that was the kind of paper Foxx wrote on, so she did too, particularly if she decided that her manuscript, because unpublished, had to last at least as long as his.
It took some time to move all the papers out of the vault, laying them down neatly, keeping them in the same order, not crushing or folding them in the bags. As Anne pointed out, the papers had probably not been in any particular order when she locked them away, so that it was unlikely that they were now going to be easily sorted. Indeed, it might take days, weeks, to get them into any proper order, if indeed an order could be discovered. For all that, Kate felt rather as Donald Johanson did when he found the fossilized bones of the earliest hominid, whom he would name Lucy: Perhaps once in a very few lifetimes a person is privileged to come upon a discovery that will shift some established and widely held view, that will, in its own way, transform human knowledge. Kate felt that this was such a moment, and she had time to wonder how odd it was that this should have happened to her of all people, and exactly in this way.
When the papers were all packed away (and they had had, after all, to use the third bag Kate had insisted on) the bags became remarkably heavy: paper is no lightweight. Several of the men in the bank helped Anne and Kate to carry the load to the street and commandeer a taxi—a real London taxi, as Kate remarked with relief.
The driver was a woman which seemed, as did everything on this fateful day, to be significant, as though they were all in a film someone was making, and the decision to have a woman driver had been reached, logically, after extended conferences. The driver was both pleasant and accommodating, and helped them lug the bags into the house in Highgate. When they had arrived. Kate offered her a cool drink while Anne stood over the bags as though they might walk away if she took her eye off them; the driver accepted a glass of water (fortunately, since Anne’s friend did not approve of commercial soft drinks) and seemed pleased with her large tip. So far so good.
Anne unlocked the door to the sitting room and they dragged the bags in there. The dining room may have had the advantage of a large table on which to work, but it also had French windows leading out to the garden which suddenly seemed perilous, and besides, they needed somewhere to eat. Moving all the furniture back against the walls, they made themselves comfortable on the floor and began to unpack the bags, putting the papers in abritrary piles but sneaking occasional looks to see if any pattern presented itself. Anne said she remembered feeling this way when she and Dorinda waited for Nellie’s first arrival. Kate could not remember ever having felt quite this way before. The moment resembled other moments of joy or achievement or passion, resembled but was far from the same. And when, Kate thought, did I last crawl around a floor like someone laying tiles?
“It’s a novel,” Anne said, who had been looking at the sheets of paper more closely than Kate. “It’s got dialogue, and people have names, and places are described. Look here: see what I mean?”
Kate crawled to Anne’s side of the floor and looked. She read a page, and then picked up other pages from other piles, moving, amazed, from one pile to the other, reading pages from all of them. Suddenly she found herself wishing Reed could be there now, lounging in one of the pushed-back chairs with his long legs stretched out, sharing her excitement and delight. But there was only Anne.
She sat back on her heels. “It’s a novel all right,” Kate said. “It’s another Ariadne. The characters have the same names, it takes place in the same scenes, at least as far as I can tell, but it’s altogether different. Look, it has the same first sentence: page one, chapter one. ‘He is coming tonight, she thought; one more day of waiting.’ ”
“I haven’t read Foxx’s novel since we were kids,” Anne said. “Maybe I better run out and buy a copy.”
“Let’s first see what order we can find by the page numbers.”
They scrambled for a time among the piles, soon reaching the same sad conclusion. “She’s numbered each chapter beginning again with page one,” Anne said. “You know that was the beginning because it said chapter one, page one, but if we find a page six there isn’t a clue as to which chapter it belongs to. Why couldn’t she have put the chapter number with each page number or have sensibly numbered all the pages in sequence?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Kate answered it. “I think she probably wrote one chapter at a time, in stolen, secret moments. She’d probably hidden the rest of the manuscript away somewhere. She probably didn’t remember how many pages she’d already written. Maybe we had better get a copy of Foxx’s Ariadne; since it was clearly the scaffolding on which she wrote her novel, it might give us a clue as to which chapter we’ve got a page of as we go through the papers. Anyway, it’s better than not having any guide at all.”
“Somehow I think she’d be horrified to know we based her papers on Foxx’s work.”
“Then she should have ordered them better,” Kate said with some asperity. “Besides, I rather think she must have meant this to be read as an answer to Foxx’s novel. Perhaps that was the whole point. Wasn’t she writing Foxx’s novel as she thought it ought to be written?”
“You’re probably right; but do you think she modeled every chapter on his, all in the same order? Mightn’t the scenes or the order of events be something she would want to change?”
“Yes,” Kate said, “it might. But I still think we better start with Foxx’s novel, since I can’t think of anywhere else to begin. Can you?”
“No,” Anne said. “Let’s walk over to the bookstore in Hampstead and buy Ariadne. It’s bound to be in Penguin or something. We can even stop at a pub and celebrate. Although I do feel some trepidation at leaving all her work just lying here.”
“We’ll lock the living-room door, as we promised,” Kate said, “and we won’t be gone long.” While she was speaking, the cat, who had up to now ignored them except for allowing them to let her in and out and provide meals, came into the room and, after a certain amount of reconnoitering, settled down on a stack of papers. “She’ll watch them for us,” Kate said.
“It’ll mean locking her in here with them.”
“Well,” Kate said as they stood at the living-room door, we’ll give her a chance to leave if she wants to. “Come on pussens,” Kate said, holding the door open, shutting it to declare her intentions, and then holding it open again. “Do you want to stay or leave?”
The cat rearranged herself on her stack of papers, and closed her eyes. “Stay,” Kate said. Anne locked the door, they locked the outer door and set off for Hampstead.
This was, Kate realized, one of those days when everything would work. The bookstore had a copy of Ariadne. There were days like that, there was no explaining them, they were a miracle, just as there were days when nothing went right. Life was like that, after all, Kate thought, even if we don’t choose to make too much of it and risk sounding like solitary solipsists or believers in an ordained personal destiny.
“Come on,” Kate said. “Let’s get that celebratory drink.”
“I’m worried about the papers,” Anne said, obviously recognizing a certain irrationality in the remark.
“I know; so am I. But we have to conquer that. We can’t stand guard over them day and night. Look at it this way; if a thief did break in, the papers would be the last thing he’d want.”
“He might be cold and use them to light a fire.”
“What we need,” Kate said, “is a drink.”
The task before them, even after the reassurance of cheese and pickle sandwiches washed down with the best English ale, was overwhelming. They had hundreds of pages, with no clue as to which page numbers went in which chapters.
“There is only one way to begin,” Kate said.
“Read Emmanuel Foxx’s beastly novel, I suppose,” Anne retorted.
“Even before that. We have to make stacks of all the pages of the same numbers. Then, when we’ve got all the page ones together, all the page twos together, and so on, we shall have to decide which page one goes with which page two . . .”
“And so on.”
“Exactly. Let’s begin with the page-one pile over here.”
“If you say so,” Anne muttered. “I thought I was supposed to be the one with the business sense and the orderly mind.”
“You are,” Kate said. “This requires an enthusiasm more appropriate to nursery games. Look, after we’ve decided where each pile is to go, preferably in numerical order since any order, however elementary, is welcome, you call out the pages and I’ll run around and put them each in its proper pile. Does that sound okay?”
“It sounds exhausting but inevitable.” Anne lowered herself to the floor, and pulled a stack of papers toward her. “I’m ready when you are,” she said.
“Okay. I’ve got the places for piles over here,” Kate said, meanwhile stacking all the papers as near to Anne as she could get them. “You could sit in a chair and bend over, you know.”
“No. If I’m going to be bending down all the time, I might as well start down. Less wear and tear on the lower back, though rather more on the thighs,” she added as she leaned from a sitting position to move some papers. “Ready? Let’s go.”
The following hours were hectic; Anne and Kate resembled nothing so much as two rather dotty dames engaged in some sort of witchlike maneuver. Anne would call out a number: “eighteen” for example. Kate would grab the page, rush over to the stack designated “eighteen,” and add the page to it, written side up. They got quite good at it, and really developed what to Kate seemed a remarkable performance of speed and coordination. But after hours of this, she began to feel that if she bent over one more time her back might well refuse ever to straighten up again. She suggested a walk, a return to the pub, and refreshment.
“Would you prefer tea? It’s almost time,” Kate said to Anne. “Scones and jam and a fine upper-class English repast?”
“I think I would prefer steak and kidney pie, beer, and a fine working-class English repast, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Preferable to me,” Kate said, “though I fear the Hampstead pub is no more working class than we are. Still, it beats tea.” And once again locking up the rooms, leaving the cat this time in the garden, they set out. Kate suggested that they go by way of the bookstore, as there were several other books she wanted to buy.
“You can’t be thinking of reading anything to do with anything else, can you?” Anne asked.
“Of course not,” Kate said. “Silly question.” In the bookstore, she equipped herself with Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, the volume on Occidental Mythology, and a book she found on the secondhand shelf, proving yet again the day to be one of serendipity and all other good fortune: The Find of a Lifetime: Sir Arthur Evans and the Discovery of Knossos, by Sylvia L. Horwfitz. Thus armed, and with Anne carrying Foxx’s novel, of which they planned to make an outline, they proceeded to the pub.
When they returned, considerably refreshed and reinvigorated, they devoted a few more hours to their page-sorting task, and then, over a nightcap, sketched a rough outline of Foxx’s chapters in Ariadne. At midnight they separated, Anne to sleep—she was used to early mornings and early nights—and Kate, who seldom slept before one a.m. or rose before nine a.m. if she could help it, to contemplation of the two books she had just purchased for references to Crete, Cnossus, Minoan civilization, for it seemed to be called one of those things. Although there was no way Gabrielle could have read either of the books, since both were published after her death, Kate was certain that in helping Foxx with his research, if for no other reason, Gabrielle had learned a good deal about the culture from which Ariadne came. For one thing, Evans’s discovery of Cnossus was big news for years, and his book The Palace of Minos, as well as the archaeological revelations that preceded it, must have had a great influence on Foxx in the years when he was writing Ariadne.
By the next morning Kate had culled two quotations for Anne’s perusal, one longish one from Campbell, and one very short one from Sylvia Horwitz. “Start with Campbell,” Kate said, handing the book to her with the sentences marked off. “First is a quotation from Martin Nilsson about the Minoan religion. The second and third are Campbell himself; all of these points, however, are from Evans and the substance, if not these exact words, would have been known to Foxx, who chose not to notice them, and to Gabrielle, who (and this is my point) did notice them:”
I
“In spite of the limitations imposed by the nature of the evidence, certain characteristic traits of Minoan religion do emerge in contrast to the Greek . . . And the observation must finally be added that all reference to sexual life, all phallic symbols, such as abound and are so aggressive in numerous religions—including the historic religion of Greece—are in Minoan art completely missing.
II
“The culture, as many have noted, was apparently of a matriarchal type. The grace and elegance of the ladies in their beautifully flounced skirts, generous decolleté, pretty coiffures, and gay bandeaux, mixing freely with the men, in the courts, in the bull ring—lovely, vivid, and vivacious, gesticulating, chattering, even donning masculine athletic belts to go somersaulting dangerously over the horns and backs of bulls—represent a civilized refinement that has not been often equalled since.
III
“There were no walled cities in Crete before the coming of the Greeks. There is little evidence of weapons. Battle scenes of kingly conquest play no role in the setting of the style. The tone is of general luxury and delight, a broad participation by all classes in a genial atmosphere of well-being, and the vast development of a profitable commerce by sea, to every port of the archaic world and even—boldly—to regions far beyond.”
“I begin to get your drift,” Anne said. “And what does Sylvia Horwitz have to add? I don’t mean to sound impatient with your scholarship, but hadn’t we better get to sorting the pages?”
“Certainly. This is just one sentence about Evans. I’ll read it to you: ‘However, [Evans] noted, it was more likely that the fabled labyrinth got its name from the word labrys, or double axe, the symbolic weapon of the Minoan Mother Goddess.’ ”
“Fascinating. Are you planning to provide us with a double ax for the job ahead? I don’t mean to sound impatient, Kate, but even if the double ax were a two-edged sword, we’d still have to get the damned pages into some sort of order.”
“True. Back to work, as you so wisely suggest. All I’m trying to point out in my tedious way is that the Greeks turned Crete from a matriarchal to a patriarchal culture, not only in fact but in memory. They rewrote its history, which is to say its myths. We may be able to figure out the order of Gabrielle’s pages if we have a clue, a thread if you’ll excuse the expression, through the labyrinth of her ideas.”
“Which is no longer a labyrinth but a double ax.”
“And which probably never was a labyrinth in Foxx’s sense, but rather a clue to a nature and culture unknown to patriarchal Greece. I don’t necessarily believe a word of this, you understand, but I think we must recognize what was being said after Evans’s great discovery at Cnossus.”
“And what was the Minotaur, then, a Greek interpretation of something or other, like what for instance?”
“The suggestion seems to be that the ‘bull’ gods were the consorts of the queens of Cnossus, and the whole story about Pasiphae was just another male version of making women either monsters of lust or pure queens of heaven.”
“If you say so,” Anne said. “How about sorting pages; I’m beginning to think you academics would rather sit around talking than actually do anything.”
“Of course,” Kate said. “What else is life for? All right, I’m coming. If you will just let me quote John Maynard Keynes, I promise to work silently and with great diligence until ordered to stop.”
“Oh, God,” Anne sighed. “All right.” She leaned dramatically back in her chair—they were still around the breakfast table and the garden, like Kate’s ideas, seemed to summon them to less arduous work—and smiled to lift the sting from her words.
“Keynes said,” Kate quoted, staring at the ceiling, “ ‘Both when they are right and when they are wrong, [ideas] are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’ ”
“I’ll think about it,” Anne said crisply, rising to her feet. “Pages first, ideas and double axes later. Not,” she added, patting Kate encouragingly on the shoulder, “that I don’t admit your ideas, or Evans’s or Campbell’s or even Keynes’s, may prove exactly the clue we need in the end.”
They worked through the hours, reading to each other from pages, trying to sort out the chapters, recognizing Foxx’s order and, where it seemed in any way appropriate, following it. Kate could not be constrained altogether from making comments and tossing out observations—such as that it was too bad that Gabrielle had felt the need to follow Foxx’s order, but doubtless when one was reinventing one had to build on what was there, as the Greeks had built on and reinvented the myths and stories of Crete—but Anne, torn between ignoring Kate and bawling her out, finally agreed to allow her one comment per hour when they took time out to lie down flat on the floor, stretching and relaxing their aching backs. Kate agreed to this stringency, saying she found the discipline of being allowed only one remark an hour salutary.
Their progress was slow, dogged, and discouraging. They were weary, besieged by shooting pains, and visited by the gremlins who attack those engaged in long and arduous tasks with doubts of their having any value or being in any way worth the effort. But by the end of a week’s persistent work, with lunch ignored and dinner each evening at the pub until they both announced themselves unable ever again to contemplate a Scotch egg, they declared their task, in its first stage, complete. Before them, on the sitting-room floor, once they could summon the energy to read it, was at least an approximation of Gabrielle’s cherished writings.