At the house, Gilbert took himself in hand. He sent the servants downstairs. Yes, Mr. Richard was here. No, they were not to talk to reporters. Mrs. Stelling must prepare her most elaborate meal and the big bedroom at the head of the stairs must be got ready.
It was late, Gilbert realized suddenly. When Father had been alive they had eaten after the sun had set. Even when Gilbert was a little boy, they had been “genteel” enough, in his father’s eyes, to sit like gentlemen and ladies, eating in the dark. His sister had eaten the fruit out of the ornamental fruit bowl on the sideboard. That was what he remembered out of his childhood, being hungry while it got dark.
Gilbert invited Richard inside, into the library. Gilbert moved around the library, lighting lamps to push away the dusk, forgetting for the moment that the servants were supposed to do it. He wondered if Richard would think it was an imposition, lighting without asking him. Without thinking, he also turned on the electric lights by the two paintings.
“That is William Knight and that is Richard,” Richard said.
Over the north mantel stood Father, larger than life size. Richard would remember him like this, an immense frowning presence, the Almighty in formal dress, dark against darkness. Over the south mantel, a little boy smiled with a dog in the sunlight of the rose garden. Gilbert thought, How I have lied to myself, to live with myself all these years. The child should never have been painted as if he had been happy.
“Why did you say I am Richard?” Richard was standing by one of the two big leather chairs, his hand on the back, on the other side of it from Gilbert, keeping it between them.
“Richard, sit down. You are at home.”
“I’m not Richard. Do please answer.” At least Richard sat down. That was something, Gilbert thought.
How could he say it? If you were not Richard you would say that you were glad I was your uncle. I would say that I was glad you were here.
“You are like your father,” Gilbert said vaguely. “Like Tom.” It was the tiniest part of the truth.
“That’s not enough.”
“How much do you remember of Father, Richard?” he asked, hesitating between the words. “Of your grandfather?”
“I don’t remember anything,” Richard said brusquely. “Look: Unless by any chance you have some reason to think positively I am Richard Knight, you cannot say that I am. If you have a reason, give it.”
“Oh,” Gilbert said, trying to pull out of the horrible wholeness something that could be talked about by itself. “Oh, yes, I suppose, I have reasons.”
“What?”
It was as if he were still at the train station, when they had told him, so long ago, that Father had been murdered. The telegram was in one hand. The reporters asked him about Father’s death. He tried to look shocked, even be shocked. Why should he be shocked? Reasons. He could go and get Richard, Gilbert had thought then. They would not stay in Father’s house. He would take Richard back with him to the wagon. They would be peddlers together, or perhaps open up a real bookshop so that the boy could go to school in the winter. The boy would sit in the shop in the afternoons and read. On the top shelves of the bookshop, Gilbert would set apples to dry—wooden shelves are good for drying apples—and the bookshop would smell of apple-leather and of old paper, and Richard would read there in the winter afternoons, under the lamplight, and Richard would have been happy. That was the way it should have been. “Richard,” he said, “why did you come back?”
“You are the only one who believes I am Richard.”
“But here you are,” Gilbert said, puzzled.
Richard leaned his head back on the chair and looked questioningly at Gilbert. Gilbert remembered just such a gesture of Tom’s: Oh, yes, he thought, having something to answer Richard with, but just too late.
“As far as I’m concerned I am only someone who looks vaguely like you,” Richard said. He leaned forward and spoke with vehemence. "I do not remember anything about Richard. I don’t know you. You haven’t seen your nephew since he was four. What gives you the presumption to break into my life and call me him?”
Presumption, Gilbert thought; well, he deserved worse. And then he really listened to what Richard was saying.
“Do you mean,” Gilbert said, “when Mr. Pelham said you didn’t remember anything— Richard, you actually don’t remember? You don’t remember Father?”
“William Knight? I don’t remember anything because I am not Richard.”
Gilbert turned back to the painting for a moment. Father, he has forgot you. There was Father in the painting as Gilbert remembered him, with his wide wrinkled lips tightly closed, his hand around a stick, his eyes blazing. But Richard didn’t know him. Richard didn’t know anything. And there was Richard himself in the other painting. That was how he might think of himself: a little boy with a dog, smiling.
Thank the kind God, Who had given Richard back to Gilbert. And more mercifully, had given him back without his memory.
For the first time since the lawyers’ offices, Gilbert met Richard’s eyes. Richard had not come back happily or easily; he did not want to be here; he wanted to be told to go away. But he had come, and Gilbert was willing to do anything that was needed to keep him. “What would it be,” Gilbert said hesitatingly, “if we never talked about the past?”
I will lie to you, Gilbert resolved, and get Charlie to lie to you. You will be happy.
“I don’t mean that we must never talk about it, but it might be more pleasant for us—” pleasant! Gilbert thought—“to put off discussing the past. Not forever, you know. But a while. As long as you want. A few months. A few years. We could—you know—think about the future.”
To his own ears, Gilbert’s words sounded strange. How often had he said anything, to anyone, about the future?