10

At last Bell told himself that there was only silence. He heard nothing. With a house this size, on an estate this big, even the magnate’s parting shot must have been muted. This was a living silence, an endless pause, a tireless presence as though the air were a sentient thing.

It was a surprise, then, when Hamilton Speke strode into the room.

He was a big man, broad-shouldered, with a smile Bell suspected he had practiced before a mirror for years, but which worked nonetheless. He was handsome in a shaggy way, a thinking man’s woodsman or a surgeon turned trail guide. Bell’s practiced eye took in the Levi’s, the custom-made boots, the open-collared shirt which fit too well to be anything but tailored. The clothes were scuffed and rumpled, easy to wear and attractive. There was dust on the boots, and Speke gave the impression of having just been out hunting.

This was the man himself, and he did indeed have presence. In a world of disappointments, Speke looked larger than his photographs, and seemed complete, comfortable with himself and with life.

Only afterwards, after the handshake, and after they had both settled into chairs did Bell realize how cold Speke’s hand had been to the touch. When was the last time he had touched such a cold hand, he found himself wondering.

After the first moments, the impression of health passed, and Speke looked uneasy. It was like watching an actor drift out of character. His stage presence began to ebb, like an old or distracted tragedian who has only enough energy to say his one line and then fade. A cub reporter would not have noticed. An untrained guest would have been swept along by Speke’s heartiness.

But Bell saw.

Speke fought to control it, but the nostrils were dilating, the shoulders rising and falling. Even in the air conditioning he was beginning to sweat. Bell had seen this before, in liquor distributors and cigarette wholesalers called before grand juries to deny working with the Mafia. He was watching an experienced man of considerable aplomb under a great deal of pressure.

He ran through a mental list of possibilities. Marital troubles, he guessed. He had arrived during a bad day in a new marriage. He himself had never been married, although he had frequently come close. It was just this sort of warfare that made marriage seem a good way to destroy a friendship between a man and a woman. It was also possible that Speke was in pain. Back trouble, Bell thought, or an ulcer.

He didn’t want to get the interview off to a bad start. There was no rush. If today were a bad day, he would be happy to spend it walking the deer paths. The first interview was always so important.

They had been trading pleasantries. Why was it people talked about the weather? If anything, it was the one subject most likely to remind one of terrors, earthquakes, skin cancer, the infinity beyond one’s control.

“If this is a bad day for you,” Bell said, interrupting the description of a favorite, five-hundred-year-old oak.

Speke gave a short laugh, like a bark. “Bad? What are you talking about? This is a great day.”

Bell’s curiosity blossomed into admiration. The man was in emotional or physical pain, and was undaunted. “That’s fine. But I hate to hurry. I’m very low-pressure.”

“Bell, I’m so glad you’re here. So glad. I have been looking forward to this day for months. You’ve met Sarah? Christ, what a woman. She has a mind the Pentagon would adore. A dynamo. A general. She knows all the secrets, Bell.” Speke laughed. “But she’ll never tell,” and another laugh, with twinkling eyes.

Bell laughed, too. But all the while he found himself thinking: maybe it’s me.

Maybe all this forced heartiness is because of me. I am a disappointment. Speke was stalwart, full of life. His immediate use of Bell’s last name, an affectation both Victorian and manly, made Bell feel overmatched. How could he possibly refer to Hamilton Speke as plain “Speke”? But “Mr. Speke” wouldn’t do, either.

He felt inadequate. He had not expected this, and then he realized that all of his expectations, and the months of preparation, had worked him up to the point that the real man had to be intimidating. He was not easily cowed. Hadn’t the Pope himself been, actually, simply another human being?

Speke would turn out to be the great man Bell had always expected him to be, but he would also prove to be yet another human being. True, anyone who could write an album like First Cut and a play like Stripsearch in the same lifetime had to be an astounding individual. But that was no reason to keep clearing your throat like a boy in the headmaster’s office.

“I’ve had a long morning.” Speke beamed and stretched, a man working hard to appear completely at peace. “Clearing trails.”

“You like to be active,” suggested Bell.

Speke hesitated just a beat longer than was necessary. “I clear brush.”

No, it’s not marital trouble. It must be physical pain, Bell thought. Speke hurts, and yet he is trying to make me feel at home. He murmured something about unpacking, but Speke interrupted him.

“I’m going to be completely truthful—I want you to know that.”

“That’s fine,” said Bell, attempting to beam in return.

“Completely truthful.”

Bell was smiling so delightedly he couldn’t respond.

“You’re going to know everything,” said Speke. “Everything there is to know. I’ll be as honest with you as I am with myself.”

“That’s wonderful,” said Bell, sounding, he was afraid, a little strained. No subject had ever begun the research interviews with so much stressing of how honest he intended to be.

“There’s something bothering me,” Speke continued. “No use trying to keep things from someone like you.” He gave the most winning smile, and added, “We’re having visitors.”

“Visitors?” Bell echoed.

“A film crew. I wish they weren’t coming today.”

“I see,” said Bell. Loosen up, he told himself. Act like you’ve spoken English at least once before in your life.

“They’re making a series for PBS. Right here, this afternoon. I hope this isn’t too much of a disappointment.”

“I thought from the very start that this might be a bad day—”

“This is a difficult day.” He offered the famous Speke smile again. “One of those days you wish you could skip.”

The man was doing everything to make him comfortable, and Bell felt himself shrink. He wanted to go for a long walk, and make a new entrance in a few hours, a new opening, fresh and at ease.

How was he going to interview someone who made him feel so inadequate?

And yet he wasn’t the only one under tension. Speke himself was definitely preoccupied, but carrying on masterfully. Maybe he had been right the first time—maybe it was the wife. He looked forward to meeting this woman. She must be quite a virago to have someone of Speke’s mettle so upset.

Because Speke was upset, that was clear. He was a man who had just had a fight of some sort, or who had just received horrendous news.

Speke sensed Bell’s thoughts. “I’m in the middle,” he said, leaning forward, “of something new. Just today. Right now. This very minute, up here.” He indicated his temple with a forefinger.

“That’s wonderful!” said Bell. You sound like a simpleton, he told himself.

Indeed, it was wonderful, and it also explained so much. Speke was in the middle of writing something new. He chopped madrone to work off his creative frustrations. It could be the new play, the one everyone was waiting for. It might be music. Bell looked away, chagrined that he had torn this great mind away from its work. Speke wasn’t in the midst of discord or pain at all.

“So if I don’t join you for lunch,” he was saying, “you’ll excuse me.”

“Of course. Please forgive me. You’re so kind to even come up and see me—”

“It’s a good day, Bell,” said Speke, standing. “We’re going to be a great team.”

“Of course,” Bell began, but Speke, after another firm handshake, was gone.

The entire conversation, Bell mused, had been jumpy and strained. All smiles and strange cheer. And then to be left like this, alone in Speke’s office …

I did something wrong, he told himself. I made the wrong impression. Speke’s cheer was fake, and I did nothing to reassure him.

He tiptoed out into the hall, feeling like a thief. Then he had to smile at his own joke. He felt like exactly what he was—a journalist. A professional spy.

Bell met Maria at lunch. She was even more beautiful than her photographs, but she did not speak except to agree that deer hunters should be shot. She did not eat much of her quail.

This pale woman did not seem to be the sort of tornado that would drive Speke to distraction. So Speke’s work must, indeed, be troubling him, Bell mused, although the injury theory could not be completely discounted.

Through the entire lunch, through every sip of chardonnay, and every swallow of espresso, Sarah kept glancing his way. She did not lower her gaze when he met her eye, but smiled as though they shared a conspiracy.

Speke isn’t the only intriguing person here, Bell found himself thinking. I should write about this woman. What is going on inside her mind? Does she take lovers? What could she tell me about Hamilton Speke? For that matter, what could she tell me about herself?

It was hard to have a rigid approach to such situations. Sometimes a forthright, honest approach worked, sometimes it developed into little more than a line of awkward questions. Ignoring the evident tension was often a good idea, but sometimes people became more and more diffident, until at last an interviewer reached the point where he could never get to know the very people he sought to understand.

They must be used to dining with Speke. That was the only explanation—they missed his company. Bell tried to rally, and certainly his tales of movie stars and scandal were of moderate interest. Everyone was pleasant. Hideously pleasant.

The key, he guessed, was Sarah. He would take her aside and suggest that he not even move into the guest cottage. He could leave, and come back in a few days. He was living in Berkeley, close to the campus library, and wouldn’t mind driving back across the Bay in a few days, or even a few weeks. Speke must be writing something very big. Bell was interrupting everything simply by stirring sugar into his Italian roast, a tourist among the Disciples.

The thought of Sarah kept him seated exactly where he was. He wanted the chance to speak with her again. He wanted her cool eyes on his. He had felt this way toward a woman before, but there was something uncommonly powerful about Sarah.

She knew things. She knew things about Speke, and about the world. And, he felt, she knew things about him without even asking. She was one of those people on whom nothing was lost.

While Bell had not felt so unsure of himself in years.

Speke’s hand had been cold to the touch. And Bell remembered where he had felt such a cold hand before. As a teenager, he had attended a friend’s funeral. An aneurism, a congenital defect, had killed the young tennis star, and with a teenager’s bravado, but with a young man’s curiosity and affection, Bell had touched the hand of the body in the coffin, and it had been cold, beyond cold, still and icy in its core.

Speke’s hand had been that cold.

Sarah returned to her office. It was a small cubicle with a door to the outside, where, often, she tossed bread crumbs to the sparrows and to the ever bolder squirrels.

She took a box of saltines, and opened the door, making kissing sounds to the air. Five sparrows whirred onto the grass, even though it was afternoon and most of them must have been asleep moments before. They knew her, or at least they knew what mattered to them. She was food, and a gentle voice. She crumbled the crackers in her hand, and tossed the flakes like so much seed.

The lunch had been dreadful. Maria was always difficult to read, charming to men and distant toward women. The biographer, Bell, had eyes that saw too much. What had she expected? But having such an obviously perceptive man around made her suddenly aware, as a new visitor will, of the shortcomings of her situation.

Beneath the luxury, the antiques and the art, anyone with insight could see it at once. Granted, today had been especially uneasy. Maria had been withdrawn as always, and Sarah herself aloof. This single day wasn’t the only problem. There was always something wrong. Wrong with Maria, and long before she and Speke met, wrong with this house. It wasn’t haunted. Of course not—what a silly thought. It was simply not a building full of life.

Could she allow herself to think one more, slightly unpleasant thought? There was something increasingly wrong with Speke, and today it was even worse.

She loved the man. They had never been “involved,” but he was so vital, and boyish, and got so enthusiastic about things like a first edition Tarzan of the Apes or a new video game. But she had always wondered about him, from the first day she had begun typing the stained manuscript that had become Stripsearch. During the nights of drunken arguments that passed for parties, she had lived her simple life in her cottage, enjoying the existence of a woman abandoned by events, although she was younger than Speke. She was married to Speke’s career. His success was hers. But she had always guessed that there were serpents in the garden. She had, simply, never wanted to give them a thought. An unseen serpent was, in a way, nonexistent.

She understood the limitations of Speke, and had adapted herself to Maria’s presence in recent months. She knew what she could ask Speke to do, what telephone calls or letters he could respond to without exasperation, and she knew which matters she should handle herself.

But she knew more than this. She knew there was a secret in Speke’s life, a professional secret, and while she had never formulated its exact nature in so many words, she understood that it had something to do with his old colleague, Timothy Asquith.

Yesterday on the telephone the strange, thin voice had told her that surely Ham would want to share a few memories. He had given her his name, and she had recognized it.

She had never seen Speke as nervous as he had been this morning, breaking, without knowing it, one of his brittle one-sided seventy-eights. And on his way back to the Outer Office just before lunch, Speke had given her one of his smiles and she could tell at a glance that something terrible had happened. He was gray, his eyes fixed, his breathing labored. And the way he tried to cover it all made it worse. Not that he was clumsy. She imagined that he was nearly successful in hiding his trauma, whatever its nature, from Christopher Bell.

Maria was pale, too, and yet she was able to carry off the lunch with a certain flourish, as though determined to prove herself to Sarah. She did not like to look Sarah’s way, and often spoke to her without looking her in the eye. Jealousy, Sarah had always assumed. There was no reason to be jealous, of course. Sarah had no romantic interest in Speke. Her interest was much deeper than that, and built upon greater loyalty.

But for the first time Sarah realized that Maria was a woman impossible to know. Many women—perhaps most women—would find Speke attractive. Dear Ham, he had so much life. So Maria’s affection for her husband made sense. Of course, he had money, too, but there was something further about Maria’s interest in the man she had married that troubled Sarah.

Today, though, was a day apart from all the others. What had been a household of odd silences was now a household of unease. Something had happened in the Outer Office, and Maria was determined to brave the biographer’s steady stare, just as Speke had been eager to avoid it.

Bell was going to figure it all out. He was going to overturn every secret on the estate, sooner or later. Sarah herself could deceive him. She was, she had to admit to herself, capable of anything. But Speke wasn’t, and Maria—but Maria probably knew nothing.

But what was there to know? There was something peculiar about Speke’s career. And Asquith, who had something to do with the early days of Speke’s writing, was still here, still at Live Oak. Sarah had heard the motorcycle arrive, but she had not heard it leave.

The thought of having this strange man here made her cold. She did not know why. Perhaps he would stay in one of the guest cottages. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to see him very often.

She found herself glad that Bell was here. Why was she afraid? Physically afraid. As though someone were about to hurt her.

A squirrel arrived at last, bright gold on his belly as he sat up and called to her in his speak-toy, yet authoritative way. She tossed a cracker in his direction, and he fell upon it, moving in jump-cut jerks.

She loved animals. Her mother had said that it was a waste of love to spend it on simple creatures, and not on human beings. Sarah was of another view. One loved what one could. This was another thing she and Speke had in common. He was a kind man, and donated thousands to groups that lobbied to protect wildlife. She handled the checks herself.

The smell of the air, the flavor of it, was delicious, wild thyme and that strange tang of creosote some of the trees exhaled. It was hard drought, though, and she was a person who loved the sound of rain rolling across the roof of her cottage at night. A jay joined the group, and she laughed. Perhaps all the animals on the estate knew who she was. Sarah, the lady who threw food. Maybe they knew her better than anyone, and all her thoughts and memories were, in truth, completely unimportant.

The animals could not entirely cheer her, however. She dusted the last of the cracker crumbs from her hands, and made a final kiss toward the birds. She found herself thinking that she was helping Speke hide something, and had been all along. Very soon she would have to decide whether to protect him, or to uncover the truth.

She stared, the sparrows at her feet. Yet another jay joined them, but she hardly noticed.

She put a hand to her throat. She could see no one. And yet, as she glanced away, hadn’t there been a shadow, with legs and arms, out there in the woods? She looked again, but it was one of those figures visible only when just looking away, like a sound you hear only when it ceases.

She was cold, her heart hammering.

Surely in a moment she would be able to laugh at herself. The cottages glowed in the half sun, half shade. This had always been such a sanctuary. It still was, the lichen-gray branches in the sunlight. It was dry lichen and the thready ghostlike moss, all aired to fossil-like fibers.

But the place had changed. She could not explain her sensation, and tried to dismiss the fear that kept her there, one hand on the door.

She could taste the sensation: she was being watched. She knew, at the same time, that the forest was not watching her, that no creature peered at her from that tangle of light and darkness. That shadow was the trunk of a tree she had seen many times before, not a shadow at all: a cleft red oak just beyond the buckbrush.

Sometimes, her father had told her, you can’t believe even what you see. He had said this solemnly, even sadly, with a policeman’s weariness with deception.

As a girl she had enjoyed lying on her bed, listening to the murmur of her parents’ conversation, the plaster of the ceiling illuminated by the hall light. In the wedge of electric light above her she had seen faces, frowns and grimaces in the stiff swirls of plaster. She had considered this power long gone, this ability to see things that were not there.

Now she wanted to laugh at herself. She was a steady woman, her father’s daughter. Here she was, worried about absolutely nothing. Everything on heaven and earth would be well, she told herself. There was no need to worry. A phrase from the church services she had not attended for years came back to her, and she could not begin to guess why: world without end.

As it was and ever shall be. To the Son and to the Holy Ghost. These little fragments of liturgy reassured her. But surely she did not need to be reassured. The sun was bright, and rested upon her like a great, warm hand.

When she slipped back into her office she was careful not to look back at the forest.