Winterking (1987)

by Paul Hazel

  “What’s this square?” she asked, pointing down at the

  tower.

  He did not look. “Tell you later.” he said for he was

  eager to hear Wykeham’s answer.

  She pressed her thumb on the undecipherable blur of

  lines. “Tell me now .’

  He looked straight at her and then at the paper. Half in

  anger, he smiled.

  “Just a window,” he said quickly, solicitiously, already

  looking back at Wykeham.

  “I guessed that. But who is inside looking out?”

  “Who?”

  “Obviously there is someone. A face.” But she saw all at

  once that he did not see it, that she was being foolish. It was

  only a blot. It was astonishing how much she read into things.

  She lifted her head. In a moment she was able to laugh at

  herself. She was thankful at least she hadn’t actually mentioned

  she had thought that the face was Nora’s.

  Wykeham, who had pretended not to hear, studied the

  paper. He kept his square shoulders turned, excluding Plum.

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  But even from the back she thought he looked preoccupied

  and ill at ease.

  “This figure,” he said, addressing himself to Longford,

  “the one the river is changing to.”

  Longford pointed to the lines again, ran his hands sharply

  in the air just above them. “Of course I cannot he positive,”

  he said. “Not without the last measurement. But I believe it’s

  a ‘W ’ or will be when the banks have all straightened. And

  here.” He pulled the map edgewise so that Wykeham might

  have a clearer view of it. “I don’t suppose it means much of

  anything. Though it is curious. Having found one letter, as it

  were, staring out of the earth. Perhaps your eye just plays

  tricks.” His finger rested on a little slip of a lake, south of

  East Wood. The lake, probably no more than a large pond,

  was curved like the paring of a fingernail. “Of course the

  scale is different,” he said. “But they’re both water and from

  a certain distance, seen from the air, or on a m ap. . .”

  Wykeham shook his head, either in disapproval or annoyance. There was a silence.

  “It’s a ‘C ,’ isn’t it?” Plum asked. Longford beamed.

  “It is pronounced ‘ku,’ ” Wykeham told her softly. He

  had straightened his back. His face, now that Plum saw it,

  looked odd. She had noticed it before, a hardness in him

  which showed itself only now and then, but which somehow

  seemed more like him than his smile.

  “I didn’t quite. . .” Longford began.

  “ Gw, ” Wykeham said quietly. “Pronounced ‘ku.’ It is

  the question asked by cuckoos and owls in the old Triads; the

  first question that poets must master since there is no definite

  answer. It means ‘where?’ ” He took his outsized hands from

  his pockets. “I am surprised you did not come across it in

  your reading,” he said, “for it is Welsh.”

  Plum could tell from his voice he was leaving. “I shall

  think about the tree,” he said in a way that ended the

  conversation. He shook hands with Longford, who, because

  he did not quite know what to think said nothing. Wykeham

  left him standing awkwardly by the desk. "Thank you again,”

  Wykeham called back. Plum went beside him to the door and

  opened it.

  The lamps of Hunt’s garage had been switched off. The

  green and the surrounding houses seemed strangely malevo-

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  lent. She was still holding onto the latch. She hadn’t realized,

  until then, she was shivering.

  Wykeham tilted his head.

  "She wished me to ask,” he said in a voice serious and

  not unkind, “whether you had managed to send her letter.”

  Plum wanted to cry out. But he had taken her hand. Her

  fingers which were not dainty or small seemed lost in the

  strength of his grasp and, although she had promised herself

  she would not answer, she nodded.

  5.

  Like Luther, His Grace thought, consoling himself, remembering that even the mighty theologian had suffered from the same disorder of the bowels. Humbled, he had

  endured the ailment more or less stoically. He refused to see

  his physician. He had his port and ate normally. Work

  generally set him to rights. With the beginning of each new

  week, within an hour after he had returned to his desk he felt

  a pressure building in his lower intestine. Then, with a

  gratifying urgency, he would head for the lavatory. This

  arrangement worked perfectly well. His Grace saw nothing

  greatly amiss. He had not fully considered, however, until it

  was already too late the effect of retirement on his bowels.

  The corners of the Duke’s mouth pulled down sullenly.

  In his house across from the park he had been sitting for a

  quarter of an hour, counting the diamond-shaped tiles on the

  lavatory floor. He had been trying to determine, without

  actually looking, the exact number of tiles hidden beneath a

  Chinese vanity. He had no particular reason for wanting to

  know this yet he had brought a small collapsible desk in with

  him. Already he had covered half a page with figures. Down

  below a young man from the bank began to knock on the

  thick, paneled door. The Duke, his head filled with calculations, took no notice.

  The telegram announcing Houseman’s death arrived at

  the bank some hours before dawn on Sunday morning. It had

  been received by the watchman, who, because there was no

  one to relieve him, had waited until the next man came on

  duty before taking a cab to the apartment of the senior clerk.

  By then it was nearly seven-thirty. The old clerk, although he

  had opposed Houseman’s appointment, had been honestly

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  shocked. He had seen to many of the arrangements himself

  and met the train bearing the body. He had even, after he

  had informed the chief partners, gone to visit the young

  man’s family. Gently he had broken the news to the disbelieving

  parents. Houseman had always been neatly if somewhat

  inexpensively dressed so the senior clerk had been wholly

  unprepared for the deep poverty of the parents’ quarters. The

  mother, a large, nervous woman, wept profoundly and had

  held onto his arm as though she had feared that he too, a

  stranger, might be taken from her. Putting aside his reservations, he had told her how fond everyone had been of her son.

  It was left to the partners to inform His Grace. They

  conferred in the middle of the day. It had been scarcely two

  days since they had been lifted unto the top rung of power

  and not, they were uncomfortably aware, by any skill of their

  own but by the Duke’s climbing down. Nevertheless they

  considered for several hours the consequences of withholding

  the news from him. They were not without certain grievances. By rights, a young man from one of their own departments should have been appointed master of the Will instead of Houseman. They had had, of course, their own schemes
>
  for getting around him, by taking a subtle control of the

  Wykeham trusts until for practical purposes they would ride

  them. Accordingly, although it had dramatically cleared the

  way, they had little enthusiasm for Houseman’s death. They

  could not be certain who would be appointed next. Unsettled, they debated for some time the merits of installing, temporarily, a man of their own.

  “It isn’t a question of one being better than another,” the

  first partner said. “I daresay, the issue is who Wykeham is

  most likely to accept.”

  “Which leaves us,” the second partner said, “with His

  Grace.”

  “The Duke has taken his retirement.”

  “Nor would I have him. I was thinking of him simply as

  an intermediary.”

  “Yet surely, as soon as he had one foot in the door

  again. . . ”

  “We could see to it that the door was shut.”

  “And if Wykeham wanted him?”

  The second partner grinned. “It was Wykeham who

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  sacked him. Too old, that’s my guess. I think you will find,

  gentlemen, that we shall be fairly safe on that quarter.”

  The talk turned to other matters. On Monday, two hours

  after the bank had opened, a junior clerk, because this

  business should not be made to appear too important, rapped

  apprehensively on the door of the Duke’s house. The butler

  left him on the landing where he waited, blinking unfamiliarly

  at prints of old-fashioned gentlemen dressed for hunting. The

  Duke emerged presently, engulfed in a roseate dressing

  gown. His face appeared similarly colored as though he had

  been engaged in some strenuous and, seemingly, unsuccessful labor.

  “Your Grace,” the clerk squeaked, “I bring dreadful

  news.”

  The ponderous brass gate opened. Within, the Duke

  pressed the elevator car’s single button and heard, as though

  he had never been gone, the magical whine of its motors.

  Deus ex machina, the Duke thought mockingly but without

  embarrassment. The gentle lights fluttered, reflected on the

  walls of rubbed mahogany. It was then, reminded of opulence, that His Grace first realized that the world had been unfair to Arthur Houseman.

  It was not the sort of thing which would ordinarily have

  troubled him. The death of a man, particularly a young man

  without accomplishments, while saddening, was not an event

  likely to be much remembered. Yet he had picked this one

  man out, though few had seen the worth in him. With

  disturbing clarity the Duke remembered the look on Houseman’s face just as Wykeham sat down beside him. Houseman’s face had had a look of extraordinary anticipation, a look which

  the Duke had resented bitterly until something of its eagerness

  had reminded him of himself. The lines of his own lips

  hardened. As well I had violated the prohibition, the Duke

  thought, had gone to the station, although the Will required

  there be no second meeting. He was acutely aware that he

  had entered by chance a world whose dangers he did not

  and, despite his skills, might never understand. After two

  days’ absence the Duke stepped again into his office. Through

  the huge windows he looked out once more on the great

  tangled city of New Awanux.

  It pleased him to stand again at the center, with the

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  accumulating wealth of the Wykeham trusts passing through

  his fingers. In this place he had been a lord in fact as well as

  title, able at his word to send from the docks of Cardiff a fleet

  of colliers into the Severn fogs or by the mere scratch of his

  name to swell or shrink, as the times demanded, the crews of

  men who worked the forges and the precision shops in

  Bristol.

  The brash sunlight glinted on the steeple of the center

  church. Without quite being able to chart the progress of his

  thoughts the Duke found himself wondering how it was that

  Wykeham, who might have ruled all this and more beyond

  imagining had with no agitation, no perceptible reluctance or

  doubt, left these matters in his charge instead. With an

  amazement which over the last days had only heightened, he

  wondered what Wykeham, his one life stretching out, might

  do if he wished. Or what he might have done!

  There was a rattle of the gate behind him.

  The partners walked in briskly. As they came into the

  room they saw the tall old lord by the window. They stood

  still and waited. From their places they had an almost equal

  view of New Awanux yet they failed to notice either the color

  of the sky or the pillars of smoke rising starkly from the mills.

  They looked instead at each other.

  “Your Grace,” the chief partner said, “it is a bitter day

  for all of us.”

  “Please have a seat,” the Duke said, his tone gracious, as

  though the office were still his own.

  They sat opposite him, saying what is always said of

  sorrow and disrupted lives. Leisurely, and yet sooner than

  perhaps was fitting, the talk turned from death. They began

  to explain what they had planned for him, its temporary

  nature, its obvious usefulness to the bank. The Duke settled

  himself in his chair. His head was tilted ever so slightly so

  that he could keep watch out the window. Only half listening,

  he gazed across the rows of buildings as though face to face

  with a mystery. Even from this height, he could see no

  definite pattern. Grumbling, he put on his glasses. To the

  younger men he looked suddenly older.

  “It need only be for a day or two,” the second partner

  said. “Time enough for an exchange of letters. We have a list

  of candidates. You might, nonetheless, suggest whomever

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  you like. Wykeham trusts you. And certainly the board would

  find any suggestion you would care to make acceptable.”

  His Grace was silent. He was trying to imagine the city

  from the air, to see it whole, but he found his eye dwelling on

  one detail after another. The partners were staring at him.

  He knew an answer was expected; he was trying to think

  of one when once more the elevator gave a groan. The gate

  parted and the senior clerk came into the room.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. He nodded to the others.

  “Gentlemen.” He had an envelope between his thin fingers.

  “It was sent around from your house, Your Grace, and looked

  important. Of course I recognized the hand.” The clerk set

  the letter on the desktop. Without waiting the Duke broke

  open the seal.

  The letter was set down in the same small, precise hand

  he had expected, I must call you again into service, it began.

  For a second or two more His Grace turned in his chair. He

  seemed somehow heavier. Suddenly he gave a sly glance at

  the clerk, rose and went from the room.

  The partners looked at one another in disbelief.

  “I don’t suppose you understand any of this,” one said to

  the clerk.


  The clerk was barely a month younger than the Duke

  and had worked for him for twenty years. He did not quite

  dare a grin.

  Soon after, in a cubicle off the landing, the ancient

  plumbing roared.

  “This will be your room,” Wykeham had told her, pausing outside the door.

  “And your own?”

  “Above,” he had said, not even smiling. When he had

  told her she must come with him up to the Great House and

  ■stay there, he had already been half out the door of the old

  man’s cottage. She had gone after him, hastening through

  Black Wood, dazed but untroubled by the ease with which he

  meant to take her in.

  “I have left my husband,” she had said.

  He had plunged through the trees. “It is time you were

  somewhere,” he had answered.

  In the wood it had seemed later but it had still been

  morning when they had come out on the drive. White moths

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  had fluttered over the dazzling lawn. She had stopped at the

  edge of the gravel, quiet and at last rebuttoning her blouse.

  Finally he had looked back. “Tomorrow, if you like, we shall

  talk,” he had said. “Now there are things I must see to. And

  this evening I must go into the village.”

  He had avoided the endless turning of the drive and had

  led her straight out among the larches and rhododendrons to

  a place where the ground rose to the top of a knoll. She had

  made him stop.

  “He made a very strange sailor,” she had said, not

  certain yet, although he was standing close to her, that he was

  listening, “For one thing he always carried a bag full of books.

  Even when we walked in the streets, with the people staring,

  he read aloud to me. But I didn’t care. Sometimes he told me

  strange things about myself. Foolish things. The first time he

  saw me he said that I would marry him. He had been to

  Africa and Marseilles. He was an engineer on a ship named

  A nna. He told me how he sat down with his engines,

  drinking gin and water and reading through the gales. He

  had never, he said, looked at a girl until he looked at me.”

  She stared down at her feet. “He does not share the blame. It