The House

by Hilda Lawrence

  “Somebody’s got to sneak up there and drag all that stuff in,” Joe said. “I don’t mind doing it for you.”

  “Keep moving,” Mike said. “The party isn’t over. Isn’t this the place where the halls cross?”

  I said yes. The small room that was once my bedroom, the bath adjoining, the room with the flowered paper, the first eastern turret.

  “You’re thinking out loud,” Mike said. “That’s crazy. And you don’t have to tell me what’s what, I’ve been there.” His voice was sharp.

  “It’s getting you,” Joe said. “Where’s the old poise now, pal? Where’s the ice water in the old veins? Hey!”

  Ahead of us a stream of light shot out across the path. The kitchen door had opened. We didn’t stop, we walked on; Mike’s hand, gripping my arm, told me to walk on. He whistled, Joe whistled, I walked between them. Anna came out into the light, wrapped in an old coat, pulling the old sweater over her head.

  “Anna?” Mike called.

  “Who’s that?”

  “The younger generation. Don’t tell me you’ve washed up already!”

  “I’ve got a headache, I’m going down to bed. Ada—Mrs. Tench says I can. I’m sick.”

  “Sorry to hear it Want us to walk down with you? It’s pretty dark.”

  I thought: If she looks up, she will see the windows. If she looks up, she will see the windows and scream.

  “The dark don’t bother me,” Anna said. “But thank you.” She covered her head with the sweater and ran. Once she had passed the dim kitchen windows, she was invisible. We heard the flying gravel under her feet, the crackle of dry leaves. The sounds grew fainter and died away.

  “Got a baby bat in her pocket right now,” Joe said. “Going home to play with it.”

  We skirted the kitchen windows and came to the part of the wall that was in line with the old cedar tree. In line with Joe’s attic window. Mike looked from the wall to the garden and bade again. He was trying to get his bearings.

  “Give us the light, Joe.”

  Trunks. Veranda Furniture. Nursery Furniture. Storage. Words typed on small cards and tacked to doors. The light picked out the windows and the limp white strips. Trunks, Veranda Furniture. Nursery Furniture. Storage.

  “You’re thinking out loud again. I told you I knew—“ Joe said, “Wait.”

  The light wavered in his hand, slid down the wall, climbed and stopped at a narrow window. Empty.

  The light slid down the wall again, moved up, traveled to the right and to the left and came back. An empty window, a slit in the wall, a window, blank, empty. Where the base of the southeast turret curved to meet the house wall, a narrow window, empty.

  “How did we miss that one?” Mike asked softly.

  “We didn’t,” Joe said. “The marker fell out.”

  “See it anywhere?”

  “No. Listen. We opened every door, we had a key for every door, and there weren’t any keys left over. We saw everything there was to see. Two windows in each of those rooms, one in each closet, one in each turret. We opened every door. So what? So that’s no window, that’s a ventilator or something, they fixed it up to match the window in the turret.”

  “Ventilator?”

  They forgot me. They tried to break each other down, and they forgot me.

  “Sure, a ventilator. Or something.”

  “A ventilator with a windowpane?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Now that you mention it, I don’t know. Maybe it belongs to the heating system or the plumbing. Could be important pipes and stuff behind it.”

  “How would you reach the important pipes? Where’s the door?”

  “Now that you mention it—Well, maybe the guy who built the house—”

  “What?”

  “Maybe he wanted a window seat or something and changed his mind and walled it off.”

  “Cheaper to wall up the window. You admit there’s got to be a wall or a partition of some kind?”

  “Mike, there’s got to be. Or else it’s an odd window in a corner of the trunk room with stuff piled against it.” Mike said, “Look at the trunk room in your mind, Joe.” They forgot me. I stood between them and did my own thinking. I saw the trunk room in my own mind.

  Hie trunks were stacked in the middle of the room, the walls were bare and dear. The trunk room was a lie. The outside wall gave it away. I asked myself what was behind that small, empty room. A closet without a door? A little room without a door? A closet, a little room, without a door, a key? Empty?

  How could a light shine in an empty room, a walled-up room without a door? How could a light move back and forth, be seen, turn itself on and off, without a hand? How could a hand, a body—

  I heard Joe, answering nothing. “Do we have to get permission to go up there this time? Do we have to tell those old girls what we’re doing? That music-box stuff is going to sound crazy if we pull it again.”

  Mike said, “We don’t tell anybody anything. Issy? I haven’t forgotten you, baby. Easy does it We’ve found the place where Anna raises glowworms.”

  The same wind that fought us back before urged us to return. It lashed and whipped and drove us home. The same wind is outside my window now, not hindering or helping but hiding in the trees. Sometimes, now, a door slams far away, and I know it has slipped from someone’s hand.

  “We may be through in ten minutes,” Mike went on. “If we aren’t, they can think anything they like. Well argue that one when we come to it.”

  Behind the library portieres, the cousins were playing their games. They were shrill, absorbed, and happy. Mrs. Barnaby played with them; her voice was low and patient. I could not hear Mother. She has begged off, I thought; she has gone to her own little table with the port, the cards, and the Turkish cigarettes.

  When we climbed the stairs for the second time, and walked the halls, we kept to the rugs. Mike took the keys from his pocket. We climbed the last, bare flight We did everything a second time, but we did not talk. There was no tinkling music behind us; we climbed and walked in silence. Mike separated the keys, chose the two he wanted and held them apart from the others. Trunk Room. Southeast Turret The trunk room. He closed the door behind us.

  Two windows, square and honest anchoring the ends of the long white strips. We walked around the room, circling the center stack of luggage; we walked slowly, like people pacing off a piece of land. Joe’s flashlight moved from floor to wall to ceiling and came to rest on the wall against the turret.

  “Somewhere about here,” Joe said, “something ought to show.” The light played on the smooth, unbroken paint “Not a crack. Something ought to show. That window is about four feet from the right of this wall, but that puts it nowhere. I mean, it isn’t in the turret There’s about four feet of space floating around in here somewhere, unless it’s been filled in with stone and covered over, and that’s dumb. Unless some screwball did the same thing with every corner of the house and we missed it before. We could go around and check, Mike.”

  “Turret,” Mike said.

  “Don’t you think we ought to check the other rooms, on the other side, and see if—”

  “Turret, Joe.”

  “Okay, but we know that’s only stairs and a kind of platform. The walls are plenty thick, but if there’s anything behind them, it’s got to be a very—”

  Suddenly Joe remembered me and everything the search implied. He remembered and saw me, not as the girl next door who had told a story about a hidden room, tied it up with her own house, and let you run around tapping walls; he saw and remembered Isobel Ford. Isobel Ford, the girl his brother and grandmother talked about, the girl who hid behind hedges and watched other people’s parties, the girl whose father had killed himself while of unsound mind. The girl whose empty house showed lights at night, lights that moved behind a window in a non-existent room. The girl who told a story.

  Poor Joe, with his plastered hair and new dinner coat. “Issy?” His voice rose and fell. “Issy, I—”

 
; I told him it was all right, that I wasn’t afraid. I said there was nothing to be afraid of, nothing.

  Mike said, “Issy, it’s cold up here. Go downstairs to the others. Tell them Joe and I went home for cigarettes.”

  I answered carefully. “How do I know I’ll find them all there?”

  -”What?”

  “How do I know who’s in the library? We heard voices, that’s all. One voice against another, overlapping, confused. We didn’t see anyone. How do I know who’s in the kitchen? How do I know Tench and Mrs. Tench are in the kitchen, where they ought to be? How do I know Anna went to the cottage?”

  “We saw Anna go.”

  “I’ve seen too many things come and go. There’s something hidden in this house, and we’ll find it now, all three of us, or I’ll—”

  “We’ll find it, Issy. All three of us, as you say. Now.”

  I heard myself saying now, now, now.

  That time, I looked for the clean steps in the turret. I moved my hands over each step, from side to side, from front to back, each step. I looked at my hands. When they were covered with dust, I rubbed the dust on my dress. There were four dean steps at the top, dean all over. The others were clean close to the trunk-room wall, as if something had walked down and up, close to the wall, hugging the wall. The wall between the turret and the trunk room.

  “There’ll be a door here,” I said, “hidden in the wall. It will look like stones and mortar, but it will be a door, an opening, a hole to crawl through. Here, in this place, up here, near the top. Didn’t you see me find the clean steps?”

  “Yes, Issy; yes, baby”

  “Something felt safe about using the top steps. Something used the top steps every day or night, looking for air on the turret platform. Even looking for sun or people in the garden. It was afraid to raise the little window. And it went down to the bottom of the stairs, too, down to the hall door, maybe even through the door, out into the hall, out into the house. But when it did that, it hugged the wall and made a single, narrow track. That was for safety, that was playing safe. Suppose someone had wanted to come up here, suppose some honest person with an honest reason had unlocked the hall door and looked up the stairs? The narrow trade would be invisible, the clean steps would be above eye level. Suppose I’d unlocked the door, alone, and come up here, alone.” I called, “Who’s listening to me? Who’s listening?”

  “Be quiet,” Mike said. “Be quiet, now.”

  His fingers dug into the mortar, he began at the bottom of the steps and moved up. Joe worked beside him. I stood against the opposite wall and held the light and watched their fingers.

  Mike said, “Got a knife or a nail file?”

  Joe’s knife went into the mortar up to its hilt. Four steps from the top they lifted a small stone from the wall. Joe put the stone aside, and his hand went into the cavity. A door swung inward, into darkness.

  “Get the light.”

  Mike took it from my hand. A short flight of steps led down to a stone floor level with the trunk room. A narrow space, a passage to nowhere.

  Another light came to meet ours, wavering across the floor. Out of the black behind it, we heard a voice. “Isobel?”

  Then the figure and the face. It was my father, and Tray was with him.

  “What there is left of me,” he said, “is quite harmless.” One hand cupped the burning candles, and the light stripped the flesh from his fingers and turned them red. “Come down, Isobel. Mike and Joe, come down.”

  I think we stood with linked arms. I think we did. We stood with linked arms, on the bottom step. We were in a tunnel between the trunk room and the turret; it widened at the window end, and there was space for a cot and table under the turret stairs. We could see them from the bottom step. My father was buried in a tunnel in his own house. The tunnel was cold.

  He backed away from us until he reached the cot. The dog backed away, too, in step with my father, grinning.

  “I need time,” my father said. “Give me a little time.” He was thin and white, and the fire had burned out of his eyes. “I’m not prepared for you, although I knew you’d come eventually. Tonight or tomorrow. I heard you outside, but there was nothing I could do.”

  “You can have all the time you want,” Mike said. He kept his hands in his pockets.

  “I’m harmless, Mike.” He sat on the cot as if he had come a long way and was tired. The candles were on the table, the dog was at his feet He had tins of food, tobacco, books. He wore clothing I had never seen before, shoddy but dean. Not the Harris tweed he died in. A scrap of Harris tweed, singed.

  I heard myself say, “And the candles are yellow!”

  Mike’s arm tightened against mine. “A medieval kind of guy,” he said softly to my father. “Everything but the iron mask. Only yesterday I told Isobel you were a medieval kind of guy. I was trying to comfort her. She said you hated her. I said you didn’t We were down at the shacks.”

  My father’s eyes met his steadily.

  “I said you were a doer,” Mike went on. “I said if you didn’t like a thing, you fixed it in your own way. I didn’t know how good I was going to turn out to be. How long have you been here?”

  “I came after the car burned.”

  ‘Well, I know this much. I know a man can leave his family and he can’t be touched as long as they’re provided for. If he’s a good provider, like yourself, he can disappear forever if he wants to. But I don’t know how the law feels about a phony funeral. We’ll have to check on that. What was it, an insurance racket?”

  “I had no insurance. Who is in the house beside yourselves?”

  “Ourselves. My grandmother, your wife, and her cousins.”

  ‘What mistake did I make? How did you find this room?”

  “We saw your light.”

  Joe, looking from me to my father, to Mike, was a tall child thrown into battle unarmed. Joe and I were alike. The other two were a different breed; they spoke another language, not with words but with their eyes.

  My father’s hand went to Tray’s head and rested there. Watching that hand go out in the old gesture was like finding a long-lost letter and reading lines that should have been destroyed.

  “Are you going to believe me?” my father asked. “Are you willing to believe me?”

  Mike answered. “We’ll wait a bit before we decide that. Tell your story in your own way, Mr. Ford. You must have one ready, you’ve had time enough.”

  My father spoke to me. “Not quite time enough, Isobel, because I haven’t reached the end. I’m still waiting and looking for the end.” It was the same voice, grown old, that once had said, “Always open doors when you hear music.”

  Mike said, “Talk to me, Mr. Ford. To me. Who was the man in your car?”

  He told us; and in spite of Mike, he talked to me. He began with his illness, watching me receive his words, pausing between sentences. He was an anxious beggar, holding out an empty heart “I was ill; everyone knew I was ill. And everyone knows a sick man is not a responsible man, he magnifies and distorts. Can you understand that?”

  He was a beggar, but not abject He was asking for something, and I thought it was courage. I thought he wanted courage, from me, so that he could give it back. To me. I wondered why I would need it.

  One day in the spring, he said, he went to the squatters’ settlement. He was looking for someone more miserable than himself. In the lane his car passed a man who staggered under a load of firewood. They talked, they measured each other, and each one liked the thing he saw. That was how he first went to the shack at the end of the row.

  “Two men lived there, brothers, as old as I am. Not derelicts, but old, tired men who had forgotten how to hope. The older brother was incurably ill, dying. Death was as close and real to him as I thought it was to me. We were both trapped, the dying man and I; we were both waiting. But he was ready and I was not; he had only one life to lose and I had two. I was afraid that I had two.”

  “Afraid you had two lives to los
e?” Mike was urbane.

  My father said, “Yes. My own and Isobel’s.”

  I think it was Joe who made the strangled sound. It must have been Joe. I remember that Mike laughed and I did nothing. Yes, it was Joe.

  Mike said, “Tell me about the man who had only one life, Mr. Ford. He died in your car, didn’t he? How did that happen?”

  My father talked to me again—not to Mike, to me.

  He said they had been drinking in the shack, and the side man was restless and irritable. He crouched beside the stove and complained of the cold.

  “Although the fire was roaring, the poor wretch trembled with the cold. I lent him my jacket. I sent him out to gather wood. He went willingly, he thanked me, I know now that he was too willing. When he failed to return, we went to look for him. We called his name, we heard no answer. You know the rest We found the blazing car. The surviving brother was terrified, perhaps of me, of my reaction. I don’t know. I only know he left me standing at the quarry’s edge and I never saw him again.”

  Mike asked, “How did you know who was in the car?”

  “We followed the tracks from the field. We went as close as we dared. It was all plain enough. When I returned to the shack and found it empty, I told myself I was free. I was dead, if I wanted to be. I was dead in the bottom of the quarry. I was dead and free to live and think.”

  “No qualms about letting a stranger’s body be found and identified as yours? No conscience about your wife and daughter and what they would have to face?” There was no venom in Mike’s voice. I felt his arm grow slack: in mine and saw his eyes meet Joe’s.

  He and Joe talked to each other with their eyes, and my father watched them. He looked as if he understood what they were thinking and wanted to answer, but was afraid. I felt the strength of pyramiding thoughts that were too frail to bear the weight of speech but strong enough to fill a room. I felt Mike’s silent disbelief and, over it, my father’s fear. My father’s story was unbelievable, but his fear was real. Mike’s eyes talked to Joe, and my father watched.

  “I was ill,” my father insisted quietly. “Very ill. There was a dead man In my car, burned beyond recognition. His only relative, the only witness, bad disappeared. I took what bite had given me, a living release.”