“They’re not in competition,” she said firmly. “The important thing is to understand.” According to her library book, Spinoza believed passionately in understanding.
Karel, still holding the heart, stepped forward. “You are the third person I must thank for saving me.”
For a moment all she saw was his face and, cupped in one hand, the deep red heart. She fumbled for words, something about the field, the man. Whatever she said, his gaze grew instantly opaque, as if a second, secret eyelid had closed.
“That was the best Christmas present,” his mother said, “knowing he was behind bars.”
Her comment served to bring Karel back. Or most of the way back. Zoe watched his eyes follow a man in a stovepipe hat. I don’t have to talk to him now, she told herself. He lives nearby. But there was something about the Salon, full of people in disguise, and indeed her own black robes, that licensed a certain freedom.
“Come and meet my brother, Duncan,” she suggested. “He’s a famous painter.”
Karel handed the heart back to her father and followed. They passed a stout man dressed as a Jack Russell terrier and a boy wearing round glasses and carrying a goblet. “In the field,” she tried again, “I was sure you’d gone down to the underworld, that you would bring back a message.”
She stole a quick glance at Karel. He was studying the sign above the buffet: Welcome to the Salon of Second Chances. “All the stories I know about the underworld,” he said, “are about people trying to get their wives or their daughters to come back. No one ever asks the wife or daughter if she’d like to stay. Maybe she would? But I never got there. I was lying in a field with rabbits, and flies, and bales of straw. I could see the birds flying over me. I could hear the three of you talking.”
“So you weren’t unconscious.”
“I was in between. I knew where I was, and I went places inside my head where I felt safe: my bedroom, my father’s workroom, my parents’ village. I was walking along the river that runs through the village. On the other bank a family was picnicking—grandparents, babies, children, everyone talking and laughing. If I could cross the river, I would be with them, surrounded by happiness. But the current was very strong. I could see the water rippling as if it had muscles.”
Suddenly he was holding her arm, guiding her to another part of the hall. “There is a woman here I would prefer not to meet.”
“Which one?”
“Red jacket.”
Zoe spotted her: fair hair, broad smooth cheeks, the jacket much bolder than she was. “Who is she?”
“My brother’s former fiancée.”
“Let’s go and look at Capability Brown’s garden. Is your brother upset at being former?”
“Very. He blames me.”
They skirted an astronaut, holding her helmet in one gloved hand.
“My boyfriend broke up with me.” Even as she spoke, she scanned the room, hoping Rufus would arrive to contradict her. Karel gave the smallest nod.
“Do you remember,” she went on, “when we were in the field, you said ‘Cowrie’?”
“Your brother Matthew thinks I said ‘Coward.’ Your brother Duncan, ‘Cowslip.’ ”
Coward? Cowslip? She gazed at his pale lips. The three of them had never talked about what Karel had said that day. It had been so clear; there had been no need. She remembered the detective asking if she was sure about “Cowrie.” She had been. Now she wasn’t.
Side by side, she and Karel surveyed Capability Brown’s garden. Mr. MacLeod and his son had brought in a six-by-six frame and filled it with sandy soil covered with artificial grass. At one end rose a small hill with a bench on top, surrounded by birch trees. A silvery stream ran down the hill into a silvery lake. Beyond lay a formal garden and an avenue leading to an eighteenth-century manor house. Two peacocks were strolling down the avenue, followed by an elegantly dressed man and woman, all four heading toward the house.
“How is the boy on the scooter?” Karel said.
“All right, though he’s cross about being on crutches for four months.”
“So he isn’t hurt in his mind?”
If only they could be sitting on the bench on top of the hill, gazing out across the garden. “No. He thinks he’s partly to blame. He swerved to avoid a pothole.”
“That’s good. He’ll get better more quickly if he isn’t angry. I, too, am partly to blame. When the man opened his car door, I wanted to refuse, but I could see he was a person people often said no to.”
On the other side of the garden, Capability Brown was tending his lawn with a little rake. His son placed a tiny blue bird in one of the oak trees.
“Sometimes,” Karel said, “I think my English is at fault. I say ‘no,’ people hear ‘yes.’ I say ‘sparrow,’ people hear ‘cat.’ ”
“Your English is fine,” she said. But how was it that she and her brothers had each heard him so differently?
Across the garden, Mr. MacLeod looked up from his rake. “You should dress like that for work. Do you like my garden? It’s modeled on one of my most famous gardens at Harewood in Yorkshire, with a few details stolen from Blenheim.”
“You must have a lovely view from the hill,” said Karel.
“You do, and walking down the avenue. My gardens are meant to make you feel the power of reason. You can see your destination, and you can get there by various routes. People didn’t travel much in those days, so they wanted a garden to have many vistas.”
Before either Karel or Zoe could respond, a woman wearing a white lab coat—Marie Curie? Rosalind Franklin?—had accosted him. Still eyeing the peacocks, Zoe said, “Do you have a girlfriend? Or”—she felt rude for not considering this sooner—“a boyfriend?”
“Not at present. There was a person I thought I liked. I was mistaken.” He paused as if looking down the avenue of that relationship. “Perhaps I want too much.”
“Spinoza,” she offered, “believed that our happiness is bound up with who we love. Did you have to identify the man?”
“Yes.”
She saw he had spoken his last word on the subject. Across the room Matthew, in his elegant suit, was making his way toward them. Quickly she said, “There’s something I need to ask you, but I can’t figure out what it is.”
“You can ask me any time. I only have one life. Thanks to you I’m here tonight.”
She started to tell him about Rufus, the things that were still true: how at the café she had felt as if they’d climbed onto a small, high ledge; the story they’d each read, he in America, she in England, about the town where the happiness of many depends on the misery of a few; Meresamun, the mummy at the Ashmolean, with her blue eyes, her jackals . . . .
Once again Karel put his hand on her arm. “You must not lose a person so dear to you,” he said, “if you can help it.”
Since he saw Karel arrive, Matthew had been trying to reach him. As Inspector Morse, he thought, he could ask crucial questions. What was it like seeing your assailant again? Are you glad he’s going to prison? Finally, he extricated himself from a girl dressed as an octopus and made his way to where Karel and Zoe stood beside the garden.
“Good evening,” he said, offering Karel his hand. How had he and Zoe become acquainted?
“To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” said Karel.
“Inspector Morse, at your service. Perhaps you’ve seen me on television? Or read my books? You decided not to dress up.”
Karel acknowledged the obvious. “I am grateful to have a second chance at being myself,” he said. “But if I were dressing up,” he went on thoughtfully, “I might come as a sheep, safe in my woolly fleece, surrounded by many other sheep. If anyone tried to steal me, or hurt me, I would hide in the flock and you would catch the thief.”
Matthew made a serious face. “I’d sit at home, sipping scotch and listening to The Marriage of Figaro, and suddenly I’d remember the broken straw, lying in the doorway. It was the flautist from the traveling orchestra who’d tried
to steal you. He wanted the straw as a mouthpiece for his flute, and his daughter wanted a pet sheep.”
“We were on our way to visit Duncan,” Zoe said, turning from the garden in a swirl of black.
She led the way past a middle-aged woman dressed as a schoolgirl. Nearby, sipping mulled wine, Matthew spotted an elegant Oscar Wilde in conversation with Mrs. Lacey. She wore a long gray dress with a sign: Reader, I married him.
Duncan was drawing his five bottles while Ant’s parents stood watching. Zoe kissed them. Matthew nodded in what he hoped was a laconic, Morse-like fashion. Mrs. Martin reported that Ant had wanted to come but needed to rest. “He’d love to see you,” she said.
Meanwhile Duncan had stepped away from the easel and was telling Karel that he had spoken to his first mother.
“I did not know you had a first mother,” Karel said.
Duncan started to explain that he was adopted.
I’ll talk to him later, Matthew thought. Now he should change the CD, compliment his mother’s costume, and try his father’s mulled wine. He was heading for the wine when he caught sight of another familiar figure. Hugh Price, wearing his usual jacket, smiling his triangular smile, was talking to the giant. Before Matthew could reach them, the two disappeared in the direction of the stage.
A minute later the detective reappeared, towering over the crowd. He had borrowed the giant’s stilts and was taking small steps, calling out warnings as people scattered before him. He almost collided with the astronaut and for several seconds swayed wildly.
Duncan too was watching the detective. Once again Zoe was alone with Karel. Soon he would be gone. “You should talk to your brother’s fiancée,” she said. “Maybe if she gives up on you, she’ll go back to your brother.”
He looked over at the wolf, who was gnashing her teeth. “The truth is,” he said, “I do not like my brother. It would be better for Sylvie if she met someone else. Someone kind.”
“You shouldn’t have to feel guilty about either of them.” Her robes made it easier to offer advice.
He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “You shouldn’t have to be broken up with. We will tell each other what happens.”
As he headed back to the garden, Zoe saw the woman in the red jacket make her way toward him. In another part of the hall, she glimpsed her father, in his white coat, offering something—she hoped it was the model heart—to her mother.
Awkwardly, with the giant’s help, Hugh Price got down from the stilts. “That was great,” he said. “Good evening, Inspector Morse.”
“How did you know?”
“The Ovid. Should I be insulted you didn’t choose to be me?” His lips twitched, signaling the joke.
“Why did you become a detective?” It was, Matthew realized, the question he had wanted to ask all along.
Hugh Price thrust his hands into his pockets. “Are you asking because you’re dazzled by my accomplishments? Or you think my job is impossible?”
Neither, Mathew wanted to say, but before he could speak, a voice said “Matty.”
Eileen, his fellow cashier, in her zebra suit, was standing beside them. He introduced her to the detective. “I haven’t heard of you,” she said. “Do you have a TV series?”
“Not yet. Would you excuse me while I have a word with Matthew?”
As she moved away, he turned back to Matthew. In a low, steady voice, he said, “On October twelfth, 1984, my sister Diana disappeared. We searched and searched. No one saw her after she left school, there were no clues; it was as if the earth had swallowed her. It turned out that it had. The following spring a farmer, ploughing his fields, found her. A week later the man who buried her was arrested. The person I most want to be is my younger self, skipping football practice that day to meet her at the school gates and walk her safely home.”
Before Matthew could answer, he too had stepped away, slipping between those in costume and those in ordinary clothes, moving unobtrusively toward the door.
At first Duncan had been standing at his easel, only pretending to paint—there were too many distractions; the lighting was bad—but gradually he became absorbed in the problem of how to model the largest bottle. He was applying short strokes of gray when he became aware of a man watching him. He wore an old-fashioned dark suit and a floppy mauve cravat. One gloved hand held up a mask, the face of a pale, long-faced man with long brown hair.
“Why did you decide to make the neck fade away?”
His questioner, Duncan realized, was a woman. Reaching for a stick of purple, he quoted Mr. Griffin. “I want to abolish the tyranny of subject matter.”
“We’re meant to see not just a bottle?”
“Exactly. And to see it beside the others. That’s important too.”
“I like the way the purple makes the gray look.” The woman tilted her mask. “Or do I mean the other way round?”
“Everything is relative,” Duncan said, again quoting Mr. Griffin. “Who are you?”
“I’m Oscar Wilde, not long after I wrote The Importance of Being Earnest.”
“I saw it on TV last year. You were funny. I’m Giorgio Morandi, an Italian painter.”
“Thank you. I was very famous, first in a good way, then in a bad way.”
“What would be a bad way?”
“Being charged with various crimes, being sent to prison. I probably shouldn’t use the word ‘famous.’ More like infamous, or notorious.”
“I was well known,” said Duncan, “not famous. I lived with my sisters in the town where I grew up, but I wasn’t a hermit. I traveled, and I had artist friends. I began to paint my bottles when I got older.”
“So are you old enough to paint them?”
Duncan—he had been about to lay down a streak of gray—paused. “No,” he said, “but I’m not really painting them; I’m imitating Morandi. Here’s a picture by him.”
Oscar Wilde stepped forward to look at the book lying open on the table. “I wish we could see the real painting,” she said.
“Do I know you?”
The mask turned in his direction. “We spent nine months together and spoke on the phone a couple of weeks ago.”
She lowered the mask.
Almost unthinkingly, he began to itemize similarities and differences. Eyebrows and upper lips, the same. Skin, hers was a little darker; eyelashes, hers were thicker. Eyes, he couldn’t tell. Earlobes? Yes, they curved in the same way. Hair? They could have swapped hair, and no one would guess; his was a little longer. Hands? But she still wore her black gloves.
“Duncan.”
“Esmeray.” To say her name, in her presence, made him feel as if he could see every color on the spectrum. “Can I see your hands?”
She set the mask down beside the Morandi book and took off her gloves. He set his right hand on the small table. She did the same. For a moment he could not bear to look.
“We have the same hands,” she said.
He saw his own brown-skinned, long-fingered hand, and next to it, almost the same size, the same brown skin, the same long fingers, the same curve of nails and half-moons, the same thumb not quite reaching the knuckle of the first finger.
“It seemed such a large thing for us to meet for the first time,” she said. “I thought this might be easier. Or easier for me. I wasn’t even sure I’d say hello. But when I saw you painting, I couldn’t help myself.”
“No, no,” he said, not sure what he meant, but wanting to reassure her. “I sent you the leaflet. I wanted you to come. Would you like to meet my family?”
“Not today. They shouldn’t have to meet me without warning. I’m going to leave now.” She leaned forward and kissed him on each cheek. “Oscar Wilde isn’t my alter ego,” she said. “Not like you and Morandi. I only got back from Ankara yesterday and had to find a costume in a hurry.”
“Who would you have come as, if you’d had more time?”
“Amelia Earhart,” she said, and headed for the door.
Zoe had deliberately not
worn a watch, but as she wandered the hall, she kept catching sight of other people’s. It was six thirty on the Co-op manager’s; people were beginning to leave. He wasn’t coming. Not X. It was as clear and simple as that. She would have to learn to behave as if they lived on different planets. She stationed herself by the mulled wine and filled a mug to the brim. She emptied it in a few swift swallows and refilled it. You must not lose a person so dear to you, Karel had said, but what could she do?
Her mother was standing beside her, holding out a brown feather. “These keep coming off. I should have sewn them on, rather than using glue.”
Zoe took the feather and raised her mug again.
“This was even better than last year,” her mother said, “like Halloween for grown-ups. I like being a siren for an evening.”
“Did you lure anyone onto the rocks?”
“Not that I know of, except for Hal.”
Looking at her mother’s flowing blond hair, her scarlet lips, her feathery chest, Zoe thought, He hasn’t told her yet. “Do you think,” she said, “there are things a person can do that are unforgivable?”
“You mean noncriminal things? To be honest”—her mother plucked another feather—“I’m not sure I know what forgiveness is. You hold something in your mind without anger. Is that forgiveness?” The feather drifted to the floor. “You thought your missing person might come tonight. I’m sorry.” She leaned forward to hug Zoe.
Suddenly there was a drum roll. Hal, in his white coat, was standing on the stage between the Christmas trees. “Thank you all”—he spread his arms wide—“for coming to the Salon of Second Chances, and making it such a success. The town will benefit from the funds we’ve raised tonight. We hope the New Year, the new century, brings everyone the second chance they want.”
“Or need,” someone shouted.
People started to clap. There were shouts of “Happy New Year.”
He was wrong, Zoe thought. If not X was true, then X couldn’t be true. There was no “maybe,” no “almost.”
The Boy in the Field Page 18
