I WANT TO SAY that Ellen’s visit left me completely shot, and it does seem that there was some special physical exertion required in order for me to make the zigzagging emotional tour from without-her to with-her to without-her again. But of course I was in a general state of wastedness before she ever showed up at the door. I also want to say that this last evening and night at the Willerton was like an alcoholic binge, with blackouts. But it was better organized than that: my recollections are nearly as absolute-seeming as the neat vacuums between them. I can recall with precision the sounds of Ellen’s departure—her footsteps in the hallway, the arrival of the elevator, the opening and closing of the lattice gate—and then a silence that prompted me to take a deep breath behind the barrier of my wing chair. (It was as if I’d not fully breathed for the duration of Ellen’s visit.) But I have no memory of leaving the sitting room or of any other event that might connect her departure with the next thing—Victoria, in darkness, speaking: “Daddy told us he was never quite right in the head after the navy,” she said. “Something happened to him, you see, but I’m not sure what it was.”
“Where am I?” I whispered, for I could see only the girl’s face, peering out of what appeared to be a black liquid.
“Wait,” she said, her face now vanishing behind the surface, leaving ripples on blackness.
I found myself thinking, Silence, silence … and all my symptoms arrived at once: the throbbing in my head, the heat behind my eyes, the aching in my joints. After a moment, I heard her voice again. “There,” she said, and in the emerging, more familiar dusk, I saw that we were in the sewing room. I lay on my back, on the chaise longue where earlier I’d sat with James. I’d been restored to my customary nakedness, beneath a knitted wool coverlet spread over my stomach and legs. Victoria sat at my feet, gazing down at me with her usual wounded goodwill.
“Better?” she said. “Yes. As I was saying, he was always rather … well, rather irrational. He’d come back from the navy that way. Quite incapable of really getting on in the world. If he hadn’t had Daddy, I don’t know what would have come of him. That was how Daddy was, you see. Very, very generous with Walter. Indeed, with everyone. He was the kindest, most caring father a girl—”
“But he would go away and leave you alone with Walter,” I said, propping myself up on my elbows.
This sudden remark took her aback. She wasn’t surprised by its content—I could see that right away: she accepted the truth of it at once—but she was apparently shocked by my knowing it and by my saying it aloud. She was also able to see instantly how I knew it, for after a moment she sighed and said, “You have to understand … Iris has always blamed Daddy. Iris contends that Mummy’s …”
She faltered, as if she’d taken a direction she didn’t mean to take, or as if she was unexpectedly too weary to continue.
“What?” I said. “Tell me.”
“Iris thinks Daddy was responsible for Mummy’s death,” she said at last, shaking her head as she said it. “So I suppose it’s only natural—”
“How did your mother die?”
“She drowned,” she said. “We used to live by a river, you see, far away from London. Daddy couldn’t have possibly … well, you see, he loved her very deeply. He couldn’t have possibly—”
She stopped abruptly and appeared to be listening to something I couldn’t hear, something inside her head, perhaps. Then she stopped listening and glanced about the room, her eyes pausing for a moment, fixing on an object behind me. With a burst of energy, she said, “What a lovely room this is! My very favorite in the house.”
Touching the decorative stitching on the broad collar of her dress, she said, “I made this shift, you know. Designed it too, with a little help from a picture in a magazine. Daddy brought me down the fabric from Wakefield … do you know it, Wakefield? An ancient town once part of a royal estate, owned by Edward the Confessor. Daddy often brought home short pieces from all over. And there was very little Mummy couldn’t do with a needle and thread. An excellent seamstress. I suppose I take after her in that. She taught me everything, of course. It was from her I learned to—”
And then she was gone—not gone, but asleep.
She woke almost immediately and said, “… crochet … crochet as well. Oh, she had many talents. As a girl on Edmund Island, she—”
And she was asleep again.
Poised on the edge of the chaise longue, she leaned forward a fraction more with each breath, a course that, if continued, would topple her headfirst onto the floor. The fact that I found this possibility irresistible caused me to examine the exact nature of my particular altered state at this particular moment: I thought that if I was to be lied to, deliberately confused, manipulated, beaten about the head with bricks inside pillow slips, reduced to the role of passive observer and frustrated detective, there was nothing lost in my being amused, too, from time to time. I could hear the sound of the girl’s breathing. As she continued her slow arc in regular, rhythmic increments (something like a wheel in a clockwork), the springs in the chaise longue squeaked ever so discreetly. Soon her hair had fallen forward, covering her face; soon she was doubled over, her shoulders nearly touching her knees. But alas, she stopped there, steady on the edge. I quietly slipped out from under the coverlet, putting my feet to the floor; I was extremely thirsty, and I meant to find running water. Just as I stood up, however, the girl awakened.
“Gracious,” she said, tossing me the coverlet, “have you no modesty, man?” Then she patted the cushion of the chaise longue, inviting me to sit down.
I noticed that in the brief journey to her knees and back up again, a gold chain had fallen out of her dress collar; it was the first time I’d seen it, the chain with the oval-shaped locket and the little key.
“I wouldn’t go wandering about if I were you,” she said. “Walter’s in a frightful rage. He’s likely to hurt you again.”
“Why is he in a rage?” I asked.
“There’s no why about it,” she said with a familiar impatience. “That’s who Walter is. It’s what he does. He rages. He hurts people.”
“I see,” I said.
“No,” she said, smiling. “Actually, you don’t see.”
“No,” I said. “I suppose I don’t.”
“But you want to see,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You’re caught up in something quite grander than yourself,” she said. “Your wife is angry and upset with you … not that it’s rare for her to be angry and upset. And you think you can do something to help us poor restless souls who need to … how did you put it to Victoria? ‘Move on.’ You want to help us sort things out so we can ‘move on.’”
“Yes,” I said, sitting on the chaise. “What’s that around your neck?”
A bit surprised, she touched the chain, then quickly tucked it back inside her collar. “Victoria’s,” she said.
“A picture of your mother in the locket.”
“That’s right.”
“But what’s the key?”
She gasped, widening her eyes—mocking me. “Ah,” she said. “A mysterious key. What do you suppose it opens? Perhaps it unlocks the door to our salvation. The door to our ‘moving on.’ What do you think?”
“I think maybe it opens a diary,” I said.
This made her laugh, exaggeratedly, throwing back her head.
“It winds Victoria’s table clock,” she said at last. And laughed some more.
For a reason I couldn’t begin to understand at the time, this small thing—the key, thought to be crucial, turning out unimportant—caused in me a rush of anxiety, almost as if it were in fact a “key” to understanding the larger picture in which it figured. I suddenly felt my heart racing a bit, and it occurred to me that my poor tractable heart was the machine that powered the whole shooting match here—the girl, James, Walter, the furniture, the four-poster bed, the dress dummy in the corner, the very grain in the wood of the floorboards. I saw that the girl had gone even paler than usual. “Are you okay?” she asked me. “You’re not having a heart attack, are you?”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“You’re under a strain,” she said. “You’d better get some sleep.”
“I thought I’d just waked up.”
“Well, you’d best get some more sleep,” she said. “And do try to stay out of the way. Walter’s in a rage. He’s never quite known when to quit. Such a bother he is, such a … such an obligation. Pure evil …”
She paused, tilted her head to one side. “That’s a funny turn of phrase, isn’t it,” she said. “Pure evil. Hadn’t thought of it before.”
“Iris,” I said, “you said that you and Walter fought about money the night you fell from the window. But in what sense, money?”
“A silly one-pound note, actually,” she said, shrugging her shoulders, laughing a little. “He’d been on one of his late-night pub crawls, and he’d run out of money. Daddy was away, and Walter came upstairs expecting to find Victoria, who would have given him some. She was always doing that. He had none of his own, you see. He always had to come begging.” She smiled impishly and added, “But he found me instead. Woke me up. Demanded I give him some money and began to root around in my things, making an awful mess, calling me perfectly terrible names. I happened to know that Victoria had a pound note in her little white cloth purse, which was in the bottom drawer of the dresser. So I got out of bed, I found the purse and went to the open window. It was July and quite warm. I held the purse in the air, out the window, and I said to Walter to come and get it if he wanted it so badly. I meant to snatch it away, you see. I certainly wasn’t about to let him have Victoria’s pound note. But he … well, he got hold of me somehow. He was very resentful of the money situation, always having to come begging like that, and I’m afraid I made him more angry than I’d intended. He was always a loose cannon, Walter. Never knew quite when to quit.”
Apparently, she was finished. She smiled at me, almost as if she took some pride in what she’d just narrated. I said, “Victoria told me you think your father was in some way responsible for your mother’s death.”
“In some way responsible?” she said. “He bloody drowned her. I saw him do it. I watched him …”
She pulled back, looking at me askance. “There you go again,” she said. “Trying to help us sort things out, are you? Trying to help us move on?”
“I can’t believe it’s an accident that you and I are here together this way,” I said. “That I can see you and talk to you this way. That I found my way to this flat in the first place. I can’t believe that all this is for nothing. I can’t believe—”
“Oh, it’s not for nothing,” she said quickly. “It’s for sport, don’t you see? It’s just sport.”
“Sport?”
“We’ve already been sorted out,” she said. “That’s who we are.”
She smiled at me in a naughty, would-be-seductress way, not quite successfully. “It’s sport,” she said, lifting one eyebrow. “And I suppose that makes you a sportsman.”
She bent down and straightened the buckle on her shoe. “By the way,” she said. “Thought you would want to know … it was James smashed your French lad’s dollhouse.”
Silt, a stirring of sediment: everything a study in dark gray, with only suggestions of shape and color, the windows rattling in their casements. Middle of the night; Walter Jevons, staggering, props himself against the doorjamb, entirely naked, hairy from head to ankle, and even from this distance I can smell his stench of whisky and tobacco and human rot; “You were an astonishing person,” says Ellen. “You were caring and capable and astonishing …” Abruptly afraid, a child frozen in his bed at midnight, I think I must find Pascal; Pascal, I think, is here somewhere, if only I can find him; “You may not be entirely pleased with the results,” says the girl, “but at least it’s done and you can be proud of that….” In my dream, the farmer operates a harrow in the rainy fields, the horse’s black coat wet, shining like the harrow’s blades, the ruts in the road filled with rainwater, and back in the village, something has gone terribly wrong; “Ray thinks you’ve lost perspective,” Mimi Sho-pan says very quietly, creating an aura of intimacy. “Have you, Cookson? Is that what’s happened? Have you lost perspective?” I have accepted my fate, my relinquishing of the regular world; I hurt all over, and Pascal, vulnerable, leaving the spare room, has missed a belt loop….
I turned my head on the pillow, having swum up from the depths of a coma-like oblivion, and actually saw a young man, Pascal Géricault, head porter at the Hotel Willerton, safely asleep, looking rather angelic in the other bed, his plaid flannel robe folded neatly at the foot. I didn’t recall his arrival at the flat. I didn’t recall seeing him or speaking to him, yet here he was again, loyal, patient, a willing would-be witness, wanting to help.
With a menacing grace, a single, actual white feather seesawed slowly down from the ceiling.
Soon I was fully awake, and I’d become fully awake so I might sample the pungent loneliness the night was currently serving up; I felt a sharp loneliness and something else too … a feeling that something had changed…. Of course I have carefully examined the sequence of these events again and again, and I have noted with remorse the number of warnings I was given, the number I ignored. But for now, I only had a dim sense that I’d moved willy-nilly (or been moved, for despite all my foolhardy appetites, despite all my imprudence, I couldn’t help but feel misused) past some point of no return, past some point of too-lateness, and that the boy, James, had somehow been neglected by me, underestimated by me somehow, not taken carefully enough into account.
I was famished. I quietly climbed out of bed, found my bathrobe, and made my way through the sitting room to the kitchen. There was no curtain over the kitchen window, so for the first time in a long while I saw London, the jagged roofscape obscured by a low sky of fog and drizzle. It was deep night. I turned away from the window, vaguely afraid of the vastness outside the window, the vastness behind the vastness behind the vastness … a childhood terror, the curve of space, infinity …
In the kitchen sink, cloves of garlic had been arranged in a circle around the drain, an assemblage of megaliths resembling Stonehenge with an abyss at the center, and I thought, It really is only sport, fun and games….
Whatever hunger I’d felt a minute earlier had now turned into queasiness. I was queasy and suddenly weak. (By now I’d learned to take this as a sign of the nearness of my ghosts.) I heard sounds from the sitting room (a hoarse rhythmic moaning, actually), and when I stepped to the doorway, I saw Walter, naked from the waist down, sprawled on the sofa, openly, that is to say obliviously, masturbating. The girl sat next to him, posture perfect, pointedly averting her eyes but otherwise peaceful, primed to hold forth on the imperialist attitudes of Rudyard Kipling, the anti-labor policies of Stanley Baldwin, the musical pleasures of Elizabethan verse—entirely overlooking what was going on inches away.
Walter’s head was so far back he would have been gazing at the ceiling if it weren’t for some kind of cloth covering his eyes and nose. As I began to move closer, I recognized this “cloth” as a pair of my wife’s panties, and my knees buckled beneath me—a purely physical drain having little to do with this recognition. At the same instant, both he and the girl fixed on me, he drawing down the panties from his face, she quickly shaking her head, as if to caution me away, and I was reminded of that first day we met, when she whispered to me in the sitting room downstairs, “Go.” Walter Jevons’s face was suddenly twisted with rage, and he appeared quite ready to hand over one pleasure for another: he lowered his head, glaring at me from under his brow, from under his red curls. He lunged forward, off the sofa, the girl let out a delicate little yelp, and then, outrageously, the telephone rang.
It had to be two in the morning, and the telephone rang. All three of us froze, Walter on his hands and knees, and stared at it, the alien, ivory-colored instrument on the fanciful Regency secretary in the corner.
Inside this strange moment there was another one, the smallest, densest version of the moment, the version inside which there was no other. I was acquainted with the moment already, from my history of self-abuse—it was when, having allowed the fire to grow out of control, you were tested regarding what else you would be willing to throw onto the thrilling blaze. The questions asked (from a voice whose origin remains a mystery) are no longer about you or your ambitions or any material thing. They are about what you love most deeply, about what you have the fewest real rights to or powers over, about what’s most given to you in trust. Are you willing to throw your wife on the fire? Are you willing to throw your child? And I was forced in this moment to behold my lifelong ambivalence, my thirst for drama and ruin, my great and sad spiritual poverty. The telephone continued its urgent, twentieth-century, twin-ringing signal. I could not summon the will to answer it. I was extremely nauseated by now—I thought I might collapse—and yet I seemed to watch my own caveman’s legs from a distance as they moved, carrying me toward the desk. It was necessary for me to turn my back on the room. When I lifted the receiver to my face and managed to get out some desperate variation of “Hello,” I heard the voice of my daughter, high and clear as the pole-star, saying, “Daddy, what’s wrong? Are you okay, Daddy?”
I said her name—no, I sang it quietly. The nausea passed, the pulsing of blood inside my ears abated. She reiterated her two questions. I turned back to the room and saw that Walter and the girl had gone. Then Pascal appeared from the hallway, headed for the door, wearing his pajamas and robe; I could see right away that there was something deeply wrong in his appearance, even terrible somehow; his robe hung open, its belt dangling on either side, and looking at me (but not quite looking at me), he put his finger to his lips and said, “I’ll be back,” unlatched the chain lock, and left the flat.
Something about his eyes … they were open, but he was definitely not awake. Now Jordie called my name again and again from across the ocean, but I heard myself say, “Oh, God, no,” evenly spaced words from ancient history, and the telephone fell from my hand.
By the time I got down the hall, by the time I reached the elevator, there was only silence and more silence, though I have surely wondered from time to time, unsleeping, about the sounds Pascal may have made, the sharp notes of his surprise. The elevator door stood open, the shaft empty. At the edge, I looked down, but it was too dark to see anything below. The air inside was cool, and smelled of oil and metal and dust. On the right side of the doorframe, some fabric had snagged on the protruding lip of the striker plate and moved now quietly in the gentle updraft, the belt to his flannel robe, whole, intact, a wide ribbon of cloth.