Sometimes the world seemed to come with subtitles, like a foreign film. So help her, sometimes people’s hidden motives, their lies, their rationalizations, were so pitifully apparent that Sophia felt she could just sit and read them. Every word they spoke, every gesture they made, revealed them as clearly as words spelled out beneath the scene.
She was at Belham Grange for the weekend. She was having coffee in the morning room with her older brother and sister. It was a small, rich, soft, well-lighted room. Windows floor to ceiling which let in the fleeting hour of winter sun. A warm sheen on satinwood dish cupboard and side tables. Paintings of Arcadian dancers amidst Roman ruins on the cream walls.
The seats were in a sort of broad, erratic circle on the rug. She, Sophia, was perched on the lyre-backed Adam chair. In white blouse, tan slacks; her legs crossed at the knee. She was facing the other two. Laura on the cushioned settee to her left. Peter draped over the French armchair to her right. Her father’s chair—his enormous Chippendale throne—was empty between them in the falling wedge of sunshine.
Little Simon, Laura’s five-year-old, Sophia’s nephew, was crawling around under the table. Running his Christmas Batmobile over the rug, battling his Batman figure against the tea table’s fierce-looking claw-and-ball leg.
Sophia stirred sugar into her second coffee and observed them. Feeling weary, jaded. Too much work, she thought, too little sleep. Tick-tick, tick-tick. Too many worries. Too many bad dreams. The auction was a fortnight away now. Whoever buys the painting, Sophia … The voice of that poor Resurrection Man was hardly ever out of her hearing. He is the Devil from Hell. And then his body in the Thames. Tick-tick. His earnest face staring with those gore-drenched sockets—an awful image for her to wake from, alone in bed.
Never exactly the cheeriest soul even at the best of times, Sophia was afraid she was entering one of her really black patches. Which probably accounted for this cynical sense that she was reading life between the lines.
“Darling, do come away from the tea table,” said Laura, for about the third time. A sweet-faced woman with still-silky, still-blond hair. But frantic eyes, and her mouth pinched. “It’s Grandpa’s antique. You’ll scratch the finish. You’ll upset the pot. Come away before you break something. Why don’t you play over by the window?”
The subtitle: It kills me that you’re enjoying the Batman car Aunt Sophie gave you, when Mummy bought you a perfectly good pirate ship and enough connector sticks to build the Taj Ma Bloody Hal.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, would you leave the poor boy alone, Laura.” This came from Peter. From behind his Guardian. Which he was reading with his leg—in jeans—swinging over the arm of his chair so that the antique walnut creaked. The subtitle being: I’m not afraid of Father. Which, of course, he was. Sophia, tasting her coffee, thought: And he must’ve driven five miles before breakfast to buy that paper too. As if having a few opinions and voting Labour made him Danton.
Laura, who could not stand disapproval of any kind, immediately left off Simon—who was ignoring her anyway—and went on the direct attack. “You’re looking absolutely beautiful this morning, Sophia. Although how anyone can look beautiful at eight-thirty in the morning, I really don’t know. I always tell Spencer that if he wanted me to be spectacular round the clock, he shouldn’t have asked for a son and heir.”
I have a husband and have produced an offspring—our father’s grandson—and you’re a frigid, sterile bitch.
Peter lowered his paper, showing a face too old for his haircut. Puffy cheeks and tired eyes under ridiculous curls. “What’s keeping the Great Man anyway? It’s a small country—how long can it take to suppress every trace of artistic originality?”
And not only are you frigid, but your life’s work is absolute crap.
Sophia tucked her silver spoon between cup and saucer. She smiled thinly, her pale eyes lidded, her smooth features serene. Because that was her role in the scenario: to look lofty, to be unassailable, to be the elegant, living proof of her father’s ascension to the gentry. Her own subtitle, she supposed, might read: No matter how many grandchildren you produce, Laura—no matter how bold and independent you pretend to be, Peter—I run the gallery; I’m the one.
Because for all of them, it was always about Daddy. Novelists make such a mystery of these things, Sophia thought, psychiatrists make a living out of them. But it was amazing to her, as she sat there, how obvious it was, how stupidly plain and inescapable. That chair of his—a Gothic cathedra, practically, carved beechwood with crocketed pinnacles flanking a traceried arch: it stood in the dying sunshine at the center of their circle, and he stood at the center of their lives, and that was that. Why not just come out and say it, she thought, print it plain beneath the picture? Here they are, they revolve around him. They cover the same old traces yearly. Laura cowers and offers the fruit of her womb and knows she’s pathetic but can’t change. Peter proclaims his leftist politics more and more bitterly, a moral sop to his self-esteem as one after another of his professional ventures fail. And Sophia guards her place at the right hand of power by the simple expedient of being ceaselessly perfect, and frequently depressed. And that’s this week’s episode of The Enderings. Come back next week, and it’ll be exactly the same.
“Watch out, Clawface!” said little Simon, under the tea table. “Here comes Batman!”
And then, all at once, he was among them. Sir Michael himself. Charging into the wedge of light, striding from the doorway to his chair. Six-foot-two, ruddy-faced, big-featured, barrel-chested, broad-shouldered in his green country gentleman’s tweed jacket and waistcoat. Silver hair in a knife-sharp widow’s peak, pointing like an arrow. Chin like a prow. Sophia smiled to see him. The size and power of him made her smile. Sixty-four years old, with the vigor of a bull, with the headway of a ship at sea.
“Morning, all”
Peter had managed to keep his leg draped over the chair all this time. Sophia wondered that it hadn’t fallen asleep. Or fallen off. He snapped his paper in half loudly, making sure the Guardian logo remained visible. “The day’s work all finished?” he asked. “Servants all bullied? Monies gouged? Tendencies to modernism eradicated?”
“And the peasants trod under my horse’s hooves, Peter,” said Sir Michael, settling into his chair. “It’s been a very satisfactory morning.”
“Is it me, or has Peter become rather a sad figure?” Sir Michael asked a short while later. He was walking with Sophia in the garden. The two of them treading slowly in step down the flagstone path between scarlet dogwood and robinia. Column fragments, and statues weathered to near-shapeless hulks, stood at intervals in the wild grass, lining the way: the garden had been the abbey cloisters some five hundred years before. “All that moral superiority and outrage,” he went on in an undertone. “I suppose it’s what one clings to in lieu of success, but still …”
“He only does it to provoke you,” said Sophia. She took his arm. Being wifely, on purpose. Because it soothed him. Because it relaxed them both.
“All that talk about the people.” he said, in his favorite harrumphing lord-of-the-manor style. “Sounds like an American. We the people. I mean, it’s incredibly sentimental, isn’t it? He should be better than that.”
Sophia lifted her face to the bracing northern wind. Watched the huge cumulus clouds crossing like a ghostly fleet in the broad blue sky. The red dogwood swayed around her, the robinia swayed. She felt her father’s thick bicep under her fingers, under the tweed, and she leaned against him. Life always seemed more tolerable to her out in the garden.
“The people have had this century pretty much all their own way, as far as I can see,” Sir Michael was going on. “And what have we got for it? More mass slaughter than all the crowned heads of history combined could ever have dreamed of. Gas chambers and cultural revolutions, that’s the work of the people. Then, when a Churchill or a Roosevelt sorts things out for them, they start wailing, ‘Oh, it was our leaders who did it, our leaders misled us.’ Well, who were their leaders? Cobblers and peasants and house painters. What did they expect? The people. Anything they can’t murder, they degrade. Television, fast-food restaurants …”
Modern art, thought Sophia dreamily.
“Modern art,” Sir Michael said. “ ‘The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right.’ You know who said that?”
She stroked his sleeve affectionately, thinking, Alexander Hamilton.
“Alexander Hamilton,” Sir Michael declared. “And he was in the we-the-people business long before Mao Tse-Peter in there.”
By the garden’s far wall, she drew him up a moment before one piece she found particularly pleasing. It was a small stone Madonna, set under the rose bushes. At least that’s what she thought it was. Time and rain had eroded nearly all its features. Only the sweet sweep of the mantle remained around the head, and the graceful gothic S-curve of the figure. Daughter and father stood looking down at it, hand in arm.
“He really must’ve got under your skin this morning,” said Sophia, “if we’re going to blame him for both the Chinese and the Americans in one sentence.”
The Great Man gravely pressed his great chin against his great chest to suppress a smile. “You probably think I’m an old fart,” he said. “Well, I am an old fart. I’m in the very prime of my old fartdom. I’ve earned it. I won’t let it be taken away from me.”
Sophia laughed once, laid her head against him. What she thought was: There was more blood and spirit in him than in half a dozen Peters. She thought he was worth revolving around.
“You know, I remember standing in London on a bomb site once,” he said, and Sophia was glad because she always liked this story. “I couldn’t have been more than twenty or so. And there was a real, old-fashioned pea-soup fog on, covering everything. Everywhere, all you could see were just jagged shapes jutting out of the fumes. Hollowed window frames staring like eyes. Skewed doorways opening up onto nothing. Rubble. A moonscape. This acid smell. And this unnatural silence all around, as if the world had simply disappeared.”
They turned and began walking slowly back up the path towards the house.
“And I had a vision standing there,” Sir Michael said. “And I realized that the world I knew was over, that the best of civilization was done. Europe was sick of itself and done. Its will to greatness was spent. And I thought to myself: There will be no more Raphaels, not ever. No paintings worthy of him, ever again. There’ll be no more great operas written or symphonies composed. No odes like Keats’s odes, no plays like Shakespeare’s. Never. People will forget how to love them, I thought. They’re already forgetting. They’re learning to love smaller things, baser things, and they’re becoming smaller, baser things themselves. One day they’ll squat in circles on the ground and hold the relics of the old treasures in their hands and they’ll grunt to one another and say, ‘What was this? Who thought that this was good?’ Like apes gawking at a broken lyre.”
The Grange was visible up ahead, beyond the garden wall. Not a stately mansion by any means, but a venerable old manor, set against the Cotswold hills. Long, two-storied. Some of the original fifteenth-century limestone still in place. Those grand, tall windows on the ground floor, two beautiful gabled oriels flanking the pitched roof above. It had been her mother’s house, built on what had once been Belham abbey’s granary. A double row of copper beeches led away from the broadly arched front door. Through the branches, Sophia could see the ruins of the abbey’s chapel. The right triangle of the shattered wall. The churchyard headstones bowing towards the grass.
“I became very depressed and started to walk,” Sir Michael continued. “Away from the site, into the City. All through the fog, lost. No idea where I was heading. And then—just like some fairy tale—I heard voices, singing. A choir, singing ‘Jerusalem,’ the sound coming to me through the fog. I followed it and, sure enough, I came on a church. St. James it was called, I’ll always remember. Anyway, I went in and, except for the choir, the place was empty. They were rehearsing—for some big occasion, as I recall, something at St. Paul’s. But the place was completely deserted otherwise, and yet there was this choir, still singing to the rafters. A sort of hopeful symbol, I thought. You know—the congregation has departed but the song goes on. By that time, they were singing something else. Something with a lot of hallelujahs. ‘Seek thee first the kingdom of God …’ And one girl stepped forward to do a solo. This lovely creature. With this raven hair, this reverent face. Completely absorbed in the music. Beautiful voice, beautiful. Mezzo-soprano. Timbre like a pearl. ‘And all these things shall be given unto you …’ ” He stopped in the path. He patted the back of his daughter’s hand. “That was the first time I ever saw your mother.”
Sophia tried to smile, but today, somehow, the story turned her heart to lead. She averted her face, looked away, looked off towards the garden shed, just visible through dripping clematis. She was vaguely aware that the caretaker was sitting there. Harry. Straddling the roof. Plucking tacks from between his lips. Tapping them into the side of the rain gutter. Tick-tick, tick-tick
This was going to be one of her black patches, she thought. One of the worst of them ever. She didn’t know if she was going to be able to endure it.
“By the way, while I’m thinking of it,” Sir Michael said. “You know The Magi is coming up at Sotheby’s in a fortnight. I think we should buy it.”
“What?” She turned back to him at once, but she did have time to realize that this was completely normal. Just what he would say, what he should. The Magi was German Romantic, right in their period, exactly their kind of thing. They’d be expected to bid on it.
“Yes,” she said carefully. “Absolutely. If the price is right. Thirty? Forty, maybe?”
“No.” Sir Michael tilted back that impressive head, hoisted that powerful countenance to the heavens. “I don’t care if it’s twice that. Three times. I don’t care. I want it. Buy The Magi,” he said. “Buy it—no matter what.”
Her mother’s portrait hung on the wall across from her bed. Her old bed, upstairs at the Grange, her childhood four-poster. As she lay beneath her duvet that night, she could see the painting below the fringe of the canopy.
It had been done shortly after her parents’ marriage. Ann must have been almost exactly Sophia’s age. In an evening dress of ivory satin. Looking gloriously over one shoulder, her throat bare above the drape neckline. A ludicrous pose nowadays. And the picture was flattering to the point of sycophancy, every individual quirk glossed away. But the likeness to her younger daughter was plain: the same black hair, the same high cheeks, the same brown eyes and pearl complexion. Only in her mother, Sophia thought, it was all warmer somehow, kinder, sweeter. The gaze more gentle, the smile more forgiving and amused. The whole posture seemed to be one of offering …
Looking at her, Sophia found the ache of loneliness almost insupportable.
Now, all of a sudden, she was drawing the duvet back. Slipping out of bed. No idea what she was doing or why she was crying. She stepped from the room into the dark of the second-floor corridor. There was a grandfather clock at the far end. Tick-tick, tick-tick. The noise was maddening. It clouded her brain. As she went towards the stairway, the worn runner gritty under her bare feet, the landing’s perspective seemed to skew. The walls seemed to angle inward overhead. The portraits on them seemed to glare down at her from a great height, as if she were a child. She was afraid. Her heart was beating fast. Her nightgown, so white it seemed to glow, seemed to heave and flow around her; she seemed to be swimming in it as she headed down the stairs.
Tick-tick, tick-tick. Yes, this was exactly how it had happened. She remembered everything now. That’s why she felt so small, so frightened. Like a child. She had been a child. Four or five years old. She had gone down the stairs. Like this. Tick-tick. Calling for her mother. Following that sound. The house was silent except for that, silent and sleeping as it was now. And she had reached the front hall and turned. Left? Yes. She turned left and kept on walking, swiping her wet cheeks with the heel of her palm, tugging at her running nose.
Another long corridor, a corridor of doors. Paintings and side tables in between; clocks, candlesticks, empty chairs. An arras at the end with a many-headed dragon rampant, its tail up among the stars. Tick-tick. She had come calling for her mother. To the last doorway. Her father’s study. On her left.
She pushed inside. Closed the door behind her. Turned on the lights. Two dim, yellowish bulbs in shaded wall lamps: they only served to make the place more shadowy, forbidding, gloomy. Shelves of hulking volumes were to her left and right. Before her was her father’s desk, stern and mammoth. Its carved mahogany ram’s heads brooded at her from the tops of their pilasters. Behind it, the tall leather chair, framed by green velvet drapery, was tilted back slightly from long use. It seemed to regard her suspiciously, as from under lowered lids.
She knew it was stupid, but she really did feel afraid. She wished the curtains had been drawn. She knew the ruined chapel was out there in the darkness. The old graveyard. She stared at her own reflection on the pane, and was half fearful something would drift out of the night, press itself through her own image to the other side of the glass. Black Annie …
Tick-tick, tick-tick. It was coming from her right, from behind one of the shelves. That’s what had happened. She had heard it. She had called for her mother. She had reached for the secret door. She felt the books beneath her fingers now. The ribbed bindings. Leather, fleshly. There was a click, and the shelves were coming to life beneath her hand. Pivoting from the wall. Swinging outward. Tick-tick.
Suddenly, the shelves flew open on a hidden room and there stood her father, covered in blood.
Sophia cried out, “Are you a murderer, Daddy?”
“Yes,” he panted hoarsely. “I’m rather afraid I am.”
It was only another of her dreams, of course. But it was terrifying, and when she awoke, there was still the sickening memory of her father in the garden. Buy The Magi. Buy it—no matter what.
She sat up under her mother’s tender gaze, trying to blot out the memory, the dream, the whole thing. Lifting her knees beneath the duvet, resting her elbows on them, screwing her palms against her brow.
Whoever buys The Magi, he is the one who killed me. The bloody holes that had been Jon Bremer’s eyes gaped at her. Four are dead already. He is the Devil from Hell. He will pay anything, more than anyone. Whoever buys The Magi, Sophia …
Sophia’s jaw hurt. She was grinding her teeth together.
Buy The Magi no matter what.
She only wished she had been more surprised.