Mrs. God (10 page)

Standish trotted down the curving staircase.

This discovery meant that he would need much more than three weeks at Esswood. It would take another month to work his way through the hundreds of pages of Isobel's handwriting. At the same time, he had to conduct a thorough investigation of her poetry. He wondered if Wall would give him another month. If he presented a well-argued case that alluded to the advantages to Esswood itself in publicizing Isobel's account of her productive time here … And Jean would forgive him taking the extra time as long as he got back before she gave birth. A small, almost invisible flare of anger and humiliation went off in his chest at the thought of his wife. He imagined fat Jean squatting to give birth: blood and gore flopping out of her along with the child. Standish shook his hand at the flapping tendrils of the spiderweb, dismissing these feelings as well as whatever lay behind them—he had no time now for destructive emotions. The stairs wound around and around, going farther and farther down, far past the point where he thought they ended. At length he reached the bottom of the stairs and rushed the short distance down the corridor and let himself in.

He nearly sighed with pleasure. The desk was heaped with papers, the columns stood guard, the beautiful rows of books lined the walls. The portrait commanded him to sit and work. Then he remembered Wall's note and his response to it, and turned to the main entrance.

In a straight line on the carpet outside the doors, arranged like the corpses of mice brought in by a loving cat, were a box of number-one paper clips, three yellow Bic pens, three stenographic notebooks, and three manila folders.

seven

T
he low sun was still visible when Standish had finished separating what appeared to be drafts of poems from the far more numerous pages of prose. The next day he could sort through the second box, and if he had time, begin to divide the pages of poetry into published and unpublished; after dinner tonight he could begin paginating and reading the memoir.

There was an hour before dinner. He decided to walk down the terraces and enjoy the hazy light and long shadows.

At the end of the screened passage he let himself out onto the wide terrace at the top of the marble stairs and inhaled air so sweet and heavy with fragrance that it was like a drug. No wonder literary Londoners had so readily trekked to Beaswick: after the smoky London of the early twentieth century, Esswood would have seemed a paradise. Standish went down the steps, his knees stiff from the day behind his desk. Four steps from the bottom he looked back up at the house.
Americans always take a little time to learn our system
.

And:
Are you teasing me?

Ah, a joke within a joke.

It struck him that the house looked empty. The servants were somewhere inside, old Miss Seneschal and old Mr. Seneschal must have been pottering around inside the East Wing, but that side too looked abandoned. A reflected cloud scudded past a row of third-floor windows.

At the bottom of the steps he walked across the crunchy gravel to the right side of the house.

Large smooth flagstones ran beneath the arch of the trellis, which was densely grown with thick green vines and broad dark leaves. Halfway down the side of the house, the trellis parted around a low wooden door. At its far end he emerged again into bright sunlight and saw the land falling away before him in three broad terraces to the long dark pond. This was bordered at either end by the stands of gnarled, leaning trees from which the woman in green had emerged. A steep metal staircase, painted black, ran down the slope of the terraces.

He moved toward the staircase. Far away, on the other side of the long pond and a little forest, a wide field striped by a mower sloped upward to a row of straight feathery trees that served as the border of another, higher field. White sheep like dots of wool stood so motionless they looked painted. At the top of the far field the blades of a windmill shaped like a beehive turned slowly in a drifting breeze.

An unchanging paradise would have such fields, such ponds and trees, even the unmoving sheep and the drowsy windmill. It came to him that he was wholly happy for the first time since boyhood.

The black paint on the iron railing was flaky and pitted with rust. The entire structure clanged when Standish moved onto the first step. He grasped the gritty railing and looked back at the house.

From the rear the building had the massivity of a prison. The rough stone facing of the ground floor gave way to undistinguished brick. The windows at the back of the house were uniformly smaller than those at the front. Here and there blackened timbers, relics of some earlier Esswood, were visible within the brickwork. Only the library windows were not curtained.

Standish began to move down the iron staircase.

White iron lawn chairs and a sturdy iron table had been set out on the first terrace. The second was a smooth green swatch of lawn, oddly blank, like an empty stage.

When he reached the bottom of the stairs his palm was stained orange from the rust. Behind him the staircase chimed and vibrated against the bolts.

Over the tops of the trees Standish could see the feathery trees and the field topped by the windmill. A thick, buttery odor hung in the air—an almost sexual smell of grass, water, and sunlight. It occurred to Standish that this was a perfect moment: he had been inhabiting a perfect moment since he had come out from under the trellis. He walked across a track of crushed red gravel and bent to immerse his hand in the pond. The water met his flesh with a cold live shock that refreshed his entire body. Had they swum here, Isobel and Theodore Corn and the others? He swirled his hand gently in the water, watching the rust deposit drift away like a cloud of orange blood.

Shaking his right hand, he stood up and turned toward the house. From the pond it looked less ugly, more like the prosperous merchant-landowner's house it had been before Edith had turned it into a sort of art colony.

An enormous butterfly with deep, almost translucent purple wings like fragments of a stained-glass window bobbled in the heavy air over the pond, and Standish's breath caught in his chest as he watched it zigzag upward with aimless grace. Its angle to the light altered, and the thick wings became a dusty noncolor. Then Standish half-saw, half-sensed a movement in the house, and he looked up the terraces and saw a figure standing in the library window. A smudge of face above a blur of green hovered behind the glass. His viscera went cold. The woman was shouting at him: a black hole that must have been her mouth opened and closed like a valve. He had a sense of anger leaping like a flame. The pale blobs of her fists flattened against the glass. With a rush of panic, he remembered driving north on the motorway and seeing the child shut up in the red brick house: it was as if she had pursued him here, still demanding release.

Standish put his hand on his chest and breathed hard for a moment, then began to move around the pond toward the house. The woman stepped back from the window and disappeared. Red dust lifted from the stones each time he took a step.

eight

A
t five minutes to eight he backed awkwardly into the dining room through the door from the secret corridor. Cradled in his arms were two bulky folders, one filled with drafts of poems, the other with partially ordered pages of
The Birth of the Poet
. He planned to go through the poetry while he ate, and to make a sustained effort at reading the memoir in the Fountain Rooms after dinner.

When he turned around he saw his place laid in the now-familiar manner: the golden tableware, the domed covers, and the gold-rimmed wineglass. An opened bottle of red burgundy stood beside the glass. Two candles burned in golden candlesticks.

He put the files on the table and sat down. He placed his hand over the cover. He hesitated for a second, then lifted the cover and looked down at slices of veal loin covered with a brownish sauce and morel mushrooms. “Now wait a second,” Standish said to himself. He replaced the cover.

He saw the face of the marvelous woman who had let him into Esswood looking back up at him over her shoulder. There were two women in the house—one, old Miss Seneschal, who distrusted him and peered at him through windows; and the other, who teased. He stood up and went into the butler's pantry.

“What are you trying to do, fatten me up for the kill?” he called out.

A burst of giggles floated toward him from the kitchen.

An even diffuse light, like soft light in the library, filled the narrow stairwell. Standish trotted down to a bend in the staircase, around a half-landing, down again. He felt a bubble of elation rising to his throat from the center of his life, deep deep within.

“You have to eat this stuff with me, at least,” he called, and came down into the kitchen.

A row of old iron sinks stood against one bright white wall, an electric dishwasher and a long, dark green marble counter beside them. White cabinets hung on the wall. On the opposite side of the room was a huge gray gas range with two ovens, a griddle, and eight burners. In the middle of the room was a large work surface covered with the same green marble. A golden corkscrew with handles like wings lay on the marble.

“Hey!” Standish shouted. “Where are you? Where'd you go?”

Laughing, he threw out his arms and turned around. “Come on!”

She did not answer.

His laughter drained away. “Aw, come on,” he said. He peeked around the side of the big counter. “Come on out!”

Standish walked all the way around the divider and touched the front of the range, which was still hot.

“Please.”

He leaned against the marble counter, thinking that at any moment she would pop giggling out of a closet. On the far side of the iron sinks was an arched wooden door, painted white. A long brass bolt had been thrown across the frame. Standish pulled back the bolt and opened the door. He stepped outside into the middle of the arched trellis.

“Hello!” he shouted. Then he realized that the door had been bolted from the inside.

He went back into the kitchen. Once more he walked all around the kitchen, hearing nothing but the sound of his own footsteps on the stone floor. His emotions swung wildly free within him, vacillating between frustration, rage, disappointment, amusement, and fear without settling on any one of them. He put his hands on his hips. “Okay,” he said. “We'll play it your way.” At length he went back up the narrow staircase. On the table in the suffocatingly formal dining room were his folders, the cover over his food, the bottle of wine.

Dinner could wait another few minutes. He went back into the pantry, opened the liquor cabinet, and removed the bottle of malt whiskey and two glasses. The bottle said
COMMEMORATIVE HERITAGE
70
YEARS OLD
. He set the glasses down beside the sink and poured an inch and a half of whiskey into each glass, then replaced the bottle and carried the glasses into the dining room.

He sat down and drank while staring at the pantry door. The whiskey tasted like some smooth dark meat.

He finished the whiskey in his glass, picked up the other glass, and tilted all the liquid in it into his mouth and swallowed.

As he ate, he flipped through drafts of unfamiliar poems. They seemed to make even less sense than was usually the case in Isobel's poetry. Most of them seemed to consist entirely of randomly selected words:
Grub bed picture dog, Hump humph laze sod
. He wondered if Isobel had evolved toward or away from outright meaninglessness. He drank some red wine, which he noticed tasted as good as the Esswood whiskey, though in an entirely different way. Perhaps Isobel had written drunk. He revolved the bottle and looked at the label. It was a Pomerol, Chateau Petrus, 1972. And the veal was so good that it was almost worth eating at every meal.

In fact—

Standish stopped chewing for a moment.

In fact, it was like being with Isobel, eating this particular meal at this particular table. It was as if time did not exist in the conventional linear sense at all and she were somewhere just out of sight.

The P of the title meant
Past
, Standish realized.

He closed the folder of poems, pushed it aside, and drew the thick folder of the memoir nearer to his plate. He drank wine, he chewed at his food and drank again. He read.

An unmarried young woman from Duxbury, Massachusetts, came to a great estate in England. A beautiful woman named E. greeted her. E. led her up the staircase to a long gallery and a suite of rooms that overlooked a playing fountain. The young woman from Massachusetts bathed and rested before going downstairs to meet the other guests, knowing that she was in this place to find her truest self. She experimentally opened a door in her bedroom and discovered a staircase that seemed like a secret known only to her—

Standish tried to pour wine into his glass and found that the bottle was empty. A few mushrooms lay in congealed gray sauce on his plate. The brightness of the dining room hurt his eyes. Back in time again, he yawned and stretched. Somehow it had gotten to be nearly midnight. Standish stood up and went back to the pantry to pour himself another inch of seventy-year-old whiskey. If his body was tired, his mind was not—he would have trouble sleeping.

Carrying his folders and glass, he moved through the room to the main entrance, not feeling like struggling up his and Isobel's “secret” corridor this late at night.

He mounted the great staircase and took the right wing toward the little anteroom before the Inner Gallery. He knew that the door to the gallery was opposite the door to the staircase. Therefore he felt as if his body had betrayed his mind when he bumped into a large piece of furniture, somehow got turned around in the dark, and could not find the other door.

He told himself to stay calm. He ceased blundering from one piece of furniture to another. The room seemed even darker than it had when his beloved had led him through it. He forced himself to breathe steadily and slowly. In the darkness he could see the large clumsy shapes of high-backed leather chairs. All four walls seemed covered with a uniformly mottled gray-brown skin that refused to resolve into rows of books. He stepped forward and banged his right leg painfully against a hard surface. He swore under his breath, stepped sideways, and inched forward.