It was evening. Perdita sat with her head in her hands, thinking, in the room from which Richard Knight had disappeared. She had closed the door, and the hot air smelled flat, like old paper from the files in the next room. It was almost dark; the square of window light by which she had oriented herself was deepening past grey, and the rest was blind no-color.
“Pet?”
Harry didn’t like her sitting in the dark but she couldn’t find the light switch; she opened the door for him. Click, and the room filled with dim orange distracting shadows. He had switched on the light. He closed the door on the corridor outside.
“Sit down,” he said. “I'm going to tell you who that man is.”
She sat down on the floor the way she had been before. “Sit down on a chair,” he said, “like a real person, can’t you?” He scraped a chair out of the shadows and pushed her down into it.
Then he told her all the story, from Charlie’s seeing Reisden on the platform.
“He’s an atheist, Pet, you know that kind of person. He was supposed to find out what happened to Richard. Instead he’s stolen Richard’s body. He was supposed to make my uncle hate
Richard. You don’t see that happening too well, do you? And,” Harry’s voice softened, “he was supposed to leave you alone. Because I love you. Instead he’s making a play for you. It’s like he thinks he could take over Richard’s money, but we know who he is, he’s not even an American, he’s signed a paper saying he’s not Richard. I don’t know what he wants to get away with, and that scares me.”
Harry’s voice went on and on like a buzzing in her ears and she sat with her hands in her lap and heard only phrases. “Maybe he thought it would be fun to ruin you for me. Maybe he thought Gilbert wouldn’t like that.” Gilbert wanted her here. “Dazzled you, but it was easy to dazzle you, wasn’t it? You heard what you wanted to hear, piano music, and—”
No. She crossed her arms over her breasts. She didn’t know whether she was being stubborn or scared.
“If you want to be my woman, act like it,” Harry said, and the door opened and closed.
🙚🙚🙚
Harry found Reisden on the shore of the lake. “I told her everything you are,” Harry said. “See how she likes you now.”
🙚🙚🙚
Perdita had turned out the lights again. She sat in the chair because Harry would dislike her if she sat on the floor. She would have cried if she had been with somebody who could give her comfort, but she was all alone and so sat in a blankness beyond tears.
She heard steps outside the door; his, not Harry’s. She did and didn’t want to see him. He did not knock or ask whether he could come in but only stood outside, as if not knowing that she could hear him and unsure of what to do. She got up and took a step closer to the door. Stillness and silence. She was afraid that he would go away without speaking to her; she put her hand on the knob and felt him do the same from the other side. He took his hand away again, and she twisted the knob, opening the door wide just as he began to knock. They were so awkward with each other, she was afraid.
“Come in.”
She closed the door to the corridor. He didn’t ask for the lights to be turned on; she stood, and he didn’t ask her to sit down.
“What you have heard is probably true,” he said finally. “I agreed to impersonate Richard Knight. I am not Richard. I know I told you I wasn’t, but you didn’t believe it and I didn’t make you believe it. Gilbert Knight was intended not to believe I was Richard; but he did. It will be part of my job to tell him he’s wrong. I didn’t take Jay’s body.” He gave a small explosive sigh. “That’s all,” he said after a while.
“It was what he said about me,” she said. “I had no brains and no wants. Everything that I thought had come from you.”
“Is that true?” he asked.
“Neither one of you has anything to do with my wanting to play the piano!”
He didn’t say anything. After a moment he asked her if he could smoke; she said yes and he opened the window and, she thought, sat on the windowsill. She came over and stood by him.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He said, “When it comes to you and Harry, I don’t know what’s driving me.”
She waited for him to go on. In the evening air, in the hot room, she could smell soap on him, as if he had just showered, but she could also smell the distinctive scent of his body and an undertone of muskiness that made her skin feel sensitive.
“I was twenty when I married,” he said, “Harry’s age; and my wife was eighteen, your age. I don’t know how to tell you this, or even if I should. At your age, Tasy wouldn’t have understood.”
Perdita moved closer to him, so that their hands were touching, only lightly. “Don’t,” he said. She moved away.
“I was, and am, lonely,” he said, “and I do things that I ought not. I wondered, sometimes, after her, if I had married her because I had been about to quarrel with my guardian, and had wanted someone to convince me I wasn’t merely selfish. So be careful of me.” He lit a cigaret, and while he was doing it he moved away from her. “She was a very good musician, a singer, she had a career and so did I. And we decided that we weren’t going to have children. No,” he said after a hesitation. “I decided. I knew she wanted children eventually. I took precautions, thinking, Perhaps someday. I really didn’t mean us ever to have children. But when she died,” he said, “when she died... It wouldn’t have been in any sense easier for me if there had been a child. But there was nothing left of her. So you see, you had better have the music and Harry too, and Harry’s children. And quickly, because there’s not always time.”
Perdita said nothing for a minute. She felt his closeness in the dark. “How did your wife die?” she asked.
“She was in an automobile,” he said, and after a long time, “I drove it. She died.”
She felt for his hand. He shook hers away, then took it and held on hard.
“When she died,” he said, “they did an autopsy and she was about a month along with child. I hope she never knew. I hope that she didn’t know, because if she did, she didn’t tell me.” He didn’t speak for a long time. “I was driving the car she died in. I thought I had killed her and the child. I thought 1 knew she was pregnant.” He took his hand away. “So now, Perdita, I think you know the very worst about me.”
She said into the darkness, “Richard?”
And the darkness did not answer her.
“No,” he said. “Not at all. I’ve told you.”
“I know what happened to Richard,” she said.
He didn’t say anything.
“He was scared,” she said, “and he hid.”
“He went away with—someone, I think.”
“No,” she said, surprised, and realized, then, exactly what she would be saying, and to whom.
“Richard,” she said, “he ran away. He’d done it before. That time he did it.”
“No,” he said after a very long while. “That cannot be.”
If she had not known him she would have thought his voice calm, but she heard something in him like violin strings stretched too tight. She touched his face. He brushed her hand away.
“He didn’t mean to do anything wrong, or run far away,” she said. “Kids do run. He just wanted the adults to fix it, then he’d come back. But he must have gone too far, or forgot how to get back—”
He interrupted her.
“You and Harry are going to make it up, you see,” he said. “You are a musician, you’re going to be married, you’ll be all right. Everything will be all right. Except you can see that I wanted you to keep your music. I made you up. It wasn’t even personal, d—n it.”
“You can’t make me up,” she said. “And I’m not her. If I play the piano in every concert hall in the universe, it won’t matter to her, your wife will still be dead and she’ll never be able to sing anymore. And Harry’s children won’t be yours, and Harry isn’t you. You made him up but he doesn’t fit. He—” Her voice wavered and she went on. “I think he really isn’t going to let me play the piano.”
“He will have to.”
“He won’t let me go to New York.”
“No,” he said finally. “He won’t. I have wronged you. I should have left you alone. ”
“You wronged Harry and me,” she said, “and yourself too. You can’t make yourself up or stop being who you are.”
He said, “I’m not Richard. Charlie is right, you’re wrong. Richard couldn’t have done this to himself. Richard died, he was in the barn, I was wrong when I thought it was Jay.”
“If you lie now,” she said, “you’ll have to lie the rest of your life.”
He laughed bleakly.
“Take my hand,” she said.
“Why?”
“I'm going to make you a promise.”
He took her hand in both of his. His hands were cold.
“I won’t tell,” she said. “I love Gilbert but I won’t tell him, because I know you’re going to ask me not to.”
She reached out with her other hand, and he held it hard, hard enough to hurt, but she didn’t say anything. After a long while something like a shudder went through his body. “Not to tell?” he asked, with a wry, tired trace of amusement in his voice. “That was what Richard said,” he seemed to think aloud, and there was another long time when he didn’t say anything.
“Then don’t tell,” he said.
🙚🙚🙚
They sat on the floor together, their backs leaning against the wall, their arms around each other. They told each other things about themselves, whispering, like children telling stories in the dark. He talked for a long time, as if he needed to share with her everything he had been and done; he told her stories about places and trifles, giving them to her, as if it had been so long since he had talked. “I saw an elephant once in Africa.” He talked about finding the first half of Hamlet in a torn book, and not knowing for a couple of years how it ended. He moved his hand up and down her arm. “This is my hand. Why does it move?” he said.
“I like your voice,” she said.
He laughed, and kept talking; and eventually his voice became lower and more tired, and he said that he had to go back to the house, but he fell asleep with his head against her arm. The birds began to sing, one by one, in the darkness, and she heard the lark’s climbing call.
It was Monday, August sixth, 1906, the nineteenth anniversary of William Knight’s murder.