Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Warrie!” I shouted.

  “I’m going,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry. I won’t come again.” He bowed to Grammaude and left the porch. I strode along behind him, following him over the stile to the yard of Braebonnie. For an instant, old sensations, old memories, dove and shrieked at me. The dark lawn, the dark porch, only moonlight on the face of the bay, only starlight, and above, against the night sky, one yellow-lit window. I had not stood in this yard for twelve years.

  He turned to face me, in the late sun again, his hands in his pockets. His full, dark face was flushed, and there was perspiration at his hairline.

  “I really am sorry, you know,” he said. “I truly thought she’d feel differently if she knew about the others. I only meant to reassure her.”

  “Well, you didn’t,” I said hotly. “You bullied her; you were bending over her shaking your finger at her. I wish you could have seen yourself. Goddamn it, Warrie, why is this house so important to you? You have all the others. Why aren’t they enough? How much of Retreat do you want?”

  “It’s just that I don’t want to see it go to the developers after she’s gone. After all, how long can she last? And I know you don’t want it.”

  “Well,” I said, glaring at him, “maybe I do, after all. Maybe I’ve changed my mind. You said yourself people do. So there’s no more reason for you to bother her again. And if you do, I’ll get…I’ll get a restraining order or whatever I have to get.”

  He laughed and held up his hands, palms out. “No need. Though the idea of anyone on Cape Rosier being able to produce a restraining order is piquant, I must say. No, if you want the house yourself, that’s the end of it, of course. I’m only interested in helping out the old ones who don’t have heirs. I apologize, Darcy, to you and your grandmother. I wish that we might have been…friends. Just that.”

  “Well, if that’s what you wanted, you picked a hell of a way to go about it,” I said, and turned and went back over the stile to Liberty. But I felt oddly ungracious. Somehow I knew that he would not approach Grammaude about the cottage again.

  “That’s the end of that,” I said, sitting down on the edge of the chaise and taking her hands. They were cold, but the color was back in her face, and her eyes sparkled.

  “That was wonderful, darling,” she said. “I couldn’t have done better myself.”

  “Was I yelling that loud?”

  “You know how sound carries down here by the water. He did sound sorry, didn’t he? I wonder about what? Probably that you want Liberty after all.”

  “Grammaude—”

  “I know. It was only to get rid of him. Still, I’d like to think…oh, well. You know, it bothers me terribly that those poor old fools along the shore have signed their cottages over to him, and as for Petie…well, I’ll deal with Petie later. I could simply threaten to disinherit him—”

  “You wouldn’t! Petie is your heart!”

  “No, I wouldn’t, of course. And you’re right, he’s much of my heart, but I really suspect you have a bit more of it. The thing about Petie is that he’s never really known it. Now you, my dear redheaded minx, must surely know.”

  A great wash of fatigue flooded me. I slumped on the chaise. The scene with Warrie was only the culmination of the small, continuous subterranean drumbeat of tension that had pounded me over the past few weeks. But it all had its genesis in him.

  “I know,” I said. “I do know that if I don’t know anything else, Grammaude. Tell you what, if you’re as tired as I am, let’s have chowder on trays in front of the fire and go to bed right after. I really don’t think either of us needs to sit up with a shotgun across our knees tonight. I think the old homestead is safe.”

  “I hope so,” Grammaude said. “I hope so.”

  The next afternoon twin bunches of roses came for Grammaude and me from the florist in Blue Hill. Mine were yellow and hers were a wonderful rose-coral. The cards read, simply, I am truly sorry. Warren Villiers.

  “I’m throwing these right out,” I said.

  “I’m not,” Grammaude said. “They’re my favorite color. I wonder if Mark Graham told him? They must have cost him a mint. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, Darcy.”

  And so for the next week, we went about the slow, symmetrical business of the colony with Warrie Villiers’s roses glowing in the background like amulets. By the time they had faded, he had made no other move toward Grammaude but to nod pleasantly to her and to me when he saw us on the sun porch or at the general store or the post office, and once, when she had a cold and stayed in bed for two or three days, he brought a small terrine of chicken and artichokes over and left it on the porch with a note that said, This is the Gallic idea of comfort food. I hope it lives up to its name. It did; it was delicious, and she and I ate all of it at a sitting.

  “Maybe he could open a restaurant,” I said, licking my spoon.

  “Maybe he will,” she said.

  I took the washed casserole back on a day that the black car was gone, thinking I would not run into him, but when I opened the screen door at Braebonnie to go up on the porch, he was there on the old glider. His foot and ankle were wrapped in an Ace bandage, and a pair of crutches lay beside him on the deck-painted boards.

  “What on earth?” I said.

  “Sprained it stepping off the curb in Castine yesterday, right on Main Street,” he said. “It’ll be okay in a week or so, they tell me.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  He grimaced.

  “I hired a kid at the gas station to bring me home and take it back. It needed tuning anyway. He’s going to work on it and bring it back in three or four days. Somebody will follow him and take him back. At least I hope he brings it back. He looks like a fledgling repo man to me.”

  I laughed. I knew that station and the young man in question. He had leered so covetously when I stopped one day for gas that I almost spoke sharply to him, until I realized that it was Mean Green’s car he coveted and not me. He did indeed look adept at spiriting cars away in the dead of night.

  “I know,” I said. “I dare not take my car back there. I could tell he lusted after it.”

  “No wonder,” Warrie said. “It’s a wondrous machine, that car. This IT that happens, it is—ah, merde, no?”

  I laughed aloud. I had forgotten how funny Warrie could be. “It is. Are you going to be able to manage?” I said.

  “Oh, sure. I’m getting good with the crutches. And I need to drop some flab, anyway. I’ve stocked up on tuna fish. I’ll be skinnier than old Mrs. Stallings by the time I’m off these things.”

  I was silent for a moment, and so was he. Then I said, “I’d be glad to—” and he said, at the same time, “Listen, Darcy, I wanted to—”

  We stopped, smiling.

  “I could bring you something for supper till you can get around better,” I said tentatively, wondering what possessed my tongue. But what sort of enemy, what sort of danger, could he possibly be, flat on the glider and unable to move around? I’d offer the same to anyone.

  “I’d be very grateful,” he said. “I’ll be able to manage after a bit, but I’m on pain medication now that makes me woozier than hell, and I’m afraid I’ll set the place on fire if I light the stove. I’ve meant all summer to get a new electric one in here. This old job must be thirty years old.”

  “Get gas,” I said. “Everybody has it. We usually lose power up here at least five times a summer, when it storms. I wonder that we haven’t before now. At least you’ll be able to cook when we do.”

  “Good idea,” he said. “Thanks for thinking of it. Listen, Darcy, I just wanted to say again that I’m sorry—”

  I shook my head and got up, preparing to leave. I did not want another apology.

  “No, I want to say this, and then I’ll drop it,” he said.

  I waited.

  “I know that I hurt you terribly that last summer,” he said slowly. “I’ve thought of it often. I wish I could undo it, but I can’t. You
were…you were a small miracle, and I just threw it away. I’ve never stopped regretting it. I don’t want anything more from you or your grandmother, though I’d have been very proud to have you as my friends. But I did want you to know that.”

  “Well, thank you for telling me, Warrie,” I said, aware that the flush was creeping up my neck again and hating it. “You needn’t have, but it was…a nice thing to do. Now. I’m making chicken pie from a recipe my great-grandmother had, and I’ll bring a plate for you. You needn’t come to the door; just leave the screen unhooked and I’ll put it on the table by the door where the keys stay.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I probably won’t come down. I’m going to try and sleep some now.”

  He wasn’t on the porch when I brought the pie, and he often wasn’t during that week when I came with food. But he was occasionally, and when he was I would sit and talk a little, and once or twice I made us iced tea in the familiar and yet unfamiliar kitchen and we sat drinking it and looking out at the sweep of sea and islands and sky that Braebonnie commanded. It was a spectacular view; I wished afresh on those evenings that Liberty had that direct water frontage. But I was glad, too, in a way, that it did not. You would have to live up to that magnificence. Liberty simply let you sag when you needed to.

  We talked, on those evenings, of nothing in particular, nothing in the past. We were careful about that. He told me a little about France and Italy in these opening days of the new decade, and I talked a little of Atlanta and the blaring, sun-punished new South. It was light talk, and I did not stay long. Mostly, we laughed. I had not laughed much that summer, and before that, not at all for a very long time. The laughter felt good.

  Grammaude said nothing when I left with the plates of food each evening. I know she was uneasy at my going, but I knew too that she would have done it if I had not. It was unthinkable, in Retreat, to let a neighbor lack food because of illness or injury. Mostly, I knew, she disapproved of and somehow feared the laughter. She could not help but have heard it. Her window gave directly onto the piled stone wall and the lawn of Braebonnie. I noticed, each evening as I came back across the stile to dinner, that the shades in her bedroom were drawn once more.

  At the end of that week I took her to Donald and Marie Elliot’s enormous lawn party at Fir Cottage. It was the loveliest of a string of preternatural nights. My grandmother’s old friend Erica Conant was gone now, but her legendary rock garden rioted and tumbled down the cliff face, and her Japanese lanterns, like the ones in Grammaude’s shed, glowed magically in the dark branches of the great firs for which the cottage was named. Fireflies winked, and the darkening bay breathed and sighed like a great dolphin, and the thin pure curve of a young moon hung in the green sky over the Camden Hills. I looked at the handsome people in flower prints and linen and madras on the lawn and veranda. How little this place had changed since I was small; how much had happened! It struck me that there should be, in every life, a place like this, a kind of Brigadoon, where you could come and visit your past, and the past of your people, and know that whatever happened outside, here timelessness lived. But few lives can claim one. I knew myself blessed, in that moment, by Retreat, and wondered for the first time if perhaps there might be more for me here than the enforced healing of this one summer. But at the thought the fear, dormant now for weeks, coiled and struck sharply as a snake, and I pushed it away. No. Not for me. Not any more.

  I got up and went up to the bar to get Grammaude a refill, and listened closely for the first time in many days to the talk in the group milling around it. Then I began to laugh. I was still laughing when I brought Grammaude her drink and sat back down. She smiled up at me inquiringly.

  “Sewage,” I said, motioning with my head toward the bar. “Everybody’s talking about septic tanks and sewage disposal. Come to think of it, they’ve been doing it all summer. I’ll bet Retreat is the only place on earth where people routinely talk about shit over drinks.”

  Grammaude smiled and looked down into her gin and tonic. Then she looked at me. “Shit, as you put it, is a real dilemma up here. Most of the cottages on our side of the main lane sit on a rock ledge; dig down about nine inches and you’ll hit it. They can’t have septic tanks in their yards. For more than a hundred years—maybe for as long as the colony has been here—the only septic field available to them has been that big old meadow that runs alongside Liberty and behind Braebonnie down to the water. We own part of it, and the Potters own the rest—Warrie, now. Both families have always been glad to let the other cottages channel their septic lines there. I don’t know how many do; probably about half the cottages in Retreat. Otherwise, they simply couldn’t be used. You can see that people are concerned about…shit.”

  She smiled again and looked away.

  “You mean,” I said slowly, “you mean that if…somebody…owned Liberty and Braebonnie he’d—they’d—have the only septic field in this half of Retreat?”

  She nodded, her eyes on the bay.

  “And if they chose, they could deny all those people the right to use it? But then they couldn’t come here.”

  Grammaude said nothing.

  “Grammaude, he would not do that,” I said.

  She looked at me then, but she did not speak.

  “I know he would not,” I said.

  “Oh, Darcy,” my grandmother said, and her voice was tired and old. Soon after that we went home.

  “He would not,” I said aloud into the salt-cool air that night, after I had turned off my light. And there was such a simple, solid truth to it that I slid immediately into sleep on the hardness of it and did not dream.

  Chapter

  Eighteen

  When Warrie graduated from his crutches, I borrowed my cousins’ Beetle Cat and took him sailing. It was the first clear day we had had after nearly a week of cold, thick-felted white fog, for the perfect weather had finally broken the day after Donald and Marie’s party, and I was restless and dull-minded and needed the fresh, sharp-edged blue of the sea and sky.

  I asked Warrie along because, after being house-bound in the gloom with Grammaude for so long, I needed also to laugh. She had been distant and preoccupied ever since our conversation about the septic field in the great meadow shared by Liberty and Braebonnie, and I had finally given up trying to get back to our old easy footing. In another woman I would have put the silence down to simple sulking because I had defended someone she thought indefensible, but Grammaude did not sulk. I knew she was deeply troubled and strongly suspected that she was trying to decide what to do about my seeing Warrie the little that I did.

  I could have put her mind to rest about that, I thought; I wanted only simple lightness and the thoughtless companionship of someone near my own age, after a summer spent with the old. But I did not. For one thing, her unhappiness at the situation made me perversely annoyed; I simply did not want the weight of it on my head, not now, when the years-long cloud of misery and fear was finally giving way to a frail normalcy. For another, I knew on some level that my seeing him had more to it than a way to pass the time. Every woman who has been in love with a man long before and lost him wants to retest those waters when she meets him many years later. She may be supremely happy with her current state of affairs, and usually she has no wish at all to resume the relationship. She simply wants to see if she has the power to make him the slightest bit sorry. I think it is so universal a trait with women as to be genetic. I recognized a small streak of it in myself and did not admire it. So I did nothing to ease her pain. I did not admire myself for that, either.

  She hadn’t spoken of Warrie during the week after the party, when I left in the evenings with his supper plate. But when I told her where I was going and with whom that morning, she put down her coffee cup and said, “Oh, darling. I do so wish you wouldn’t. I know you’re twenty-nine years old and all that, but I didn’t really speak up that last summer, and look what happened. Taking his dinner over to him is one thing, but a day on the water alone is quite anot
her. You’re still very fragile, and I don’t think you see him plain even now.”

  “I see him as plain as day for the rat he was twelve years ago and the ass who’s been annoying you all this summer, and I can handle that as well as you can,” I said a bit sharply, for she seemed very old and diminished that morning, almost as faded and used as she had when I found her asleep on the sun porch at the beginning of the summer, and that frightened me. I did not want to feel guilty about Grammaude.

  “Then why not cancel today? Spend it with me instead of a rat and an ass. We could go somewhere: Bar Harbor, maybe.”

  “For God’s sake, Grammaude, we’re only going sailing, not…to a motel or something,” I snapped. “I’m not going to get involved with Warrie Villiers again; I don’t even particularly like him. I just want to spend a few hours with somebody who makes me laugh.”

  She turned back to the coffeepot, but not before I saw the hurt in her face. She had made me laugh quite often that summer, so my words were thoughtless and hard. I should have done what she asked; the sail was nothing to me. But I didn’t. I just kissed her wrinkle-etched silk-velvet cheek and said, “Back before drinks time. Want to have Mrs. Thorne and Mrs. Stallings over? I’ll get some crab at the store if you do.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Maybe I’ll take P. D. James and go back to bed for a little. This is an elephant day.”

  A small dart of worry pierced the impatience I felt; occasionally Grammaude had days when it was hard to draw deep breaths and there was a sensation around her heart that felt, she said, as if an elephant were sitting on her chest. These attacks had frightened me at first, but she said she had been checked over just before she left Northpoint, and her doctor had said there was nothing critical there, just the expected weariness of old muscles and long-used lungs. She was simply to rest when she felt the elephant, and it would be gone in a few hours. And it always had been, at least by the next day. But usually, also, she would follow her announcement that the elephant was back with a wry smile and the statement, “A very small elephant.” This time she did not. Even that annoyed me. Could it be possible that she was feigning illness to keep me from seeing Warrie?