“Me too,” she said. “Do I look sadder but wiser? That’s how I feel.”
“You look like you’ll be fine.”
She nodded, not doubting it herself.
•••
No one answered the phone at the Cornwall number Jenny had given him. He kept calling until two in the morning. Cornwall was a long way off. Even by American distances. Theo drove there early the next day in a rented “budget car,” having declined Mole Fontwell’s offer to lend him the Bentley.
“Now, find out,” Jonas nagged, “exactly what Ford told this Mr. W.F.D., and make sure he understands that Foolscap—”
“I know what to say,” Theo reassured him. “We don’t have to worry about Ford.” This remark was met by a maniacal laugh from the fretful Marsh.
“Or drive you myself?” asked Mole, his small dark face full of solicitude. “It’d be an honor to be of assistance to Ford Rexford; I admire his work awf’lly. Jonas and I saw Her Pride of Place just last month. Overwhelming. And you say he helped you with Foolscap, which you know I think absolutely splendid. Very generous of him.”
“Yes, he’s very generous.” Theo smiled. “Immoderate in every sense. In a way, Foolscap is as much his as mine.”
“Elizabethan,” Mole said, buttering his toast at the elegant little table wheeled in each morning by a Brown’s waiter. “Much prefer the old Elizabethan attitude of crib and share the lot, as Dame Winifred used to say, to all that Romantic pride of authorship, all that genius. Bit much, the sole solitary original Artist proclaiming Self in every line.” The private scholar deftly cracked open his boiled egg. “When a writer’s life becomes the sole subject matter of the work, the life begins swamping the work, and then substituting for it, and then—”
“And then, sooner or later, we get Thomas Wolfe!” Jonas Marsh suddenly exclaimed, furiously spraying a decongestant up his nose. “We get one well-done if minor novel by, and seven hundred huge biographies about, F. Scott Fitzgerald—all of them telling us he was infatuated with his wife and couldn’t hold his liquor. And I’m certain your biography will perpetuate Ford ‘Great Original’ Rexford as yet another irresistibly soused Romantic.”
“Well, now,” Fontwell said, “the original Romantics cannot really be described as soused—”
“Bugger the Romantics!” Marsh blew his nose furiously. “Infantile narcissists mooning and moaning to their daffodils and clouds and their filthy sheep. bah bah Wordsworth-less!” The slender man leapt onto the blue chintz couch in front of the mantel, clutched his hands spasmodically, and shouted in a palsied warble:
God, said I, be my help and stay secure. I’ll think of the leechgatherer on the lonely moor!
“‘Thoughts too deep for tears’!” Marsh spluttered on. “Thoughts too deep for thought!”
Despite the kind offer of Fontwell and Marsh to accompany him, Theo had felt he should go to Cornwall alone, and certainly (nervous as he was about British roads) not in a borrowed yellow Bentley. So he left them there in their suite, with Marsh (to whom all the world was clearly a classroom) charging the Romantics with glamorizing the neuroses of the artist into a signature of the seriousness of the art. This “everyone’s thrilled by Van Gogh’s sliced-off ear” theory had led, he insisted, straight to Hemingway’s writing sophomoric world-weary claptrap when he was young and sentimental macho rubbish when he was old. “Stay on the motorways,” Jonas suddenly paused in his diatribe long enough to advise. “You can go ninety miles an hour, easily. The M–4 to Bristol, the M–5 to Exeter. Then head west. Maxwell Perkins has a lot to answer for, making all those me, me, me chauvinist adolescents synonymous with the modern American novel. And that, ‘Aw shucks, I’m jest a natural born genius’ promo of Rexford’s! Really! See you soon, Ryan.”
Theo had obediently gone on the motorways and had gone ninety miles an hour too, though not easily. It was the heading west that had taken all the time. Hour after hour into the sun, into Devon again, rattled by winds on the Dartmoor hills, across the Cornish moors, the landscape wilder and less settled than any other he’d yet traveled through in England. He’d driven about four hundred kilometers when he finally saw, far off on the horizon, late afternoon light glistening on the choppy waves of Port Isaac Bay.
He’d come too late. Ford wasn’t there.
It was a small gray town, and with the directions Jenny had given him, it wasn’t hard to find the cottage. It sat in a grove of low gnarled apple trees atop a hill overlooking the bay. A farmhouse really, it looked as dark and primitive as the land. The moss-stained stone sides sloped unevenly, the bedraggled thatched roof sagged. In the hilly yard was an odd assortment of furniture, like the unbought remains of a tag sale—a thin mattress, a broken rocker, an ugly set of andirons. When Theo parked on the dirt road that led to a dangerously tilted barn behind the house, a dog raced barking toward his car. Then a short, gray-bearded man in rubber boots and dirty ribbed sweater came out of the open door, calling to the dog. He carried a large pail and a mop. This man, the owner of the property, was, he finally explained after prodding, in the process of cleaning the house, having evicted the tenant, Ford Rexford, two days earlier.
“But I’ve just driven all the way from London,” Theo told him, walking stiffly across the stone-strewn grass, kicking to stretch the cramps from his legs.
“Missed him,” the old man said with no evident regret.
“Ford Rexford is…I’m his…close friend. I was told he was ill.”
“Ay.” The man nodded with a sour look, tossing the dirty water from the pail into the yard. “’Tis ill he should be, from the lot of whiskey bottles I’ve carted off. And a madman besides. ‘Out ye go,’ says I. ‘I’ll not have the carryings on,’ says I, ‘what I’ve heard tell of up and down this town.’” Disgusted, the man slapped the mop against the stone steps. “And if you’re here looking for his young wife, she left him a week Friday. A taxi come from Trebarwith and carried her off with her traps. Andrew Simpson the postman saw ’em go.”
“Ah, well, yes, I realize that.” Theo held out his hand, which the farmer begrudgingly took. “I’m Theo Ryan.”
“Thomas,” said the old man, leaving Theo to guess that he meant not his Christian but his family name.
“Mr. Thomas, I spoke with, ah, Mrs. Rexford in London. She asked me to come see what I could do. Mr. Rexford hasn’t been well.”
“Well enough to eat a great huge pig and send its fat up my chimney,” the man mysteriously protested.
“I beg your pardon?”
Slowly, Theo lured out of the landlord, an odd combination of garrulity and parsimonious silences, that the immediate cause of the eviction had been the report (confirmed by eyewitness testimony) that Ford, in league with one “Daniel Llangbi, a bad ’un from Wales,” had “kidnapped” the local vicar, brought him to the farmhouse at gunpoint (who’d lent them the hunting rifle was still unknown), where the American had not only made this priest listen to obscenities about the Bible, but had torn pages out of the holy book and used them to light a fire in the front room. It was in this fireplace that Ford had roasted an entire spitted pig (origins suspiciously undetermined, and perhaps tied to the hunting rifle). It wasn’t clear to Theo whether the old landlord was more incensed by the kidnapping, the blasphemy, the presence on his premises of a Welshman, or the greasy mess splattered all over his whitewashed walls. But incensed he was, and had given the playwright notice the next morning.
“Did the vicar press charges? Is Mr. Rexford in jail?”
“No more he’s not,” complained the farmer. “Father Mabyn denied it all to the magistrate’s face, and may God forgive him for the lie. Told how he’d gone off with ’em of his free will, when his own housekeeper saw him marched out the vestry door with his hands high over his head! Shut yer mouth, Liz, damn ye!” (This to the spotted dog, with a nonchalant kick in her direction which she ignored.) “But the story come out in
the Black Prince that same night, what with Daniel Llangbi bragging on how they’d done it to any would listen. So my wife says, ‘Out he goes, rent or no!’ I give him his notice next morn.”
“But where did Mr. Rexford go?”
“Drove off.” Thomas gestured with the mop in the general direction of the rest of England.
“Drove off? Where? Where are all his things?”
“Don’t know. Father Mabyn come in his housekeeper’s husband’s lorry and fetched this big black trunk he had.” The old man struggled with himself, then added, “I’ll not deny Mr. Rexford paid up handsome for damages.” More facial contortions accompanied an angry wringing of the mop. “I’ll not deny he had an open hand.”
This admitted, Mr. Thomas seemed to think he had fulfilled all obligations, for he turned back through the doorway. But Theo hurried after him, entering the low, rough-plastered room where there were indeed fresh grease stains on the walls and on the wide stone hearth. In fact, neatly displayed on a wood-planked table lay the damaging exhibits of a few sizable charred bones and several burnt pages of the Old Testament. What furniture there was, was dark and large and roughly made. The whole place, stripped and scrubbed, smelled of ammonia. It was, at least potentially, a very pleasant space, but there was nothing personal in it now. Theo, receiving reluctant permission to look around, followed the narrow stone-dabbed hall past a bedroom and into the little room that must have been Ford’s “study”—and the reason he’d rented the house. There was a table pushed up against the casement windows. The windows opened westward, out over the hills to the sea.
“I’ve cleaned,” growled Thomas unnecessarily; the room now was scoured and spare as a monk’s. There was nothing in it but the few pieces of furniture.
Unlatching the windows, Theo leaned out, watching the low twisted apple trees bending to the wind. At the edge of the sky, the sun rose a last moment on the waves, then slipped down into the water, turning the low clouds red.
“Were there no papers, Mr. Thomas?” Theo asked the landlord, who’d followed him suspiciously from room to room. “Typed papers or notebooks, anything like that? He was a writer.”
“Took off. Or burnt.”
“You burned his papers?” Theo turned sharply.
The old man thrust his beard out with a defensive truculence. “Not I, lest he’d throwed them in the rubbish. He now, he burnt whatever he took a mind to. The police come one time on account of the smoke where he’d lit up half my woodpile with the flue shut. ‘Give him notice while our barn still stands,’ says my wife to me.” After another internal quarrel, Mr. Thomas opened the top drawer of a wobbly dresser and took from it a dog-eared book with a broken spine. “Left this book here under the bed.”
It was a cheap, small-print collection of the plays of Shakespeare, published in 1917 and inscribed in a faint, laboriously uniform hand as having been “Presented to Lavinia Birch, Winner of the Eighth Grade Essay Prize, Bowie, Texas.” Some of the brittle pages had been patched with tape, now dry and yellow; others had come loose from the binding. On the frontispiece, someone had drawn glasses around Shakespeare’s eyes.
“I’ll take this to him,” Theo said. “It belonged to his mother.”
•••
Father James Mabyn, Anglo-Catholic vicar of Saint Agnes Church, was a bald, middle-aged, overweight man with a wonderful smile and green fervent eyes that grew even greener when Theo introduced himself as a friend of Ford Rexford’s. In the little graveyard of the church to which Mr. Thomas had directed him, Theo found the vicar down on his hands and knees doing a charcoal stone rubbing of a half-buried tombstone. Brushing at his black cassock, Mabyn scrambled to his feet, offered his hand, then retracted it when he saw how sooty it was. He explained that he was taking impressions of the older grave markings before salt and wind wore them away, erasing from memory those who had lain for centuries beneath them. “Unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time,” he quoted cheerfully, kneeling to wipe his hands on the grass. “So you’re Theo Ryan. A pleasure. My word! Just as Ford described you. What a pity you missed him. It might have helped. I’m afraid he’s gone. I never met the young woman staying with him, but I gather she’d left earlier.”
“Yes, I spoke with Jenny. Do you know where he went?”
“I think, now this is sheer hypothesis, I think he went to Stratford.”
“On Avon?”
“I think so. He said, ‘I want to go shoot the’—is it ‘wind’?”
“Shoot the breeze?”
“That’s right. ‘I want to go shoot the breeze with Will.’ I’m assuming from the context he meant Shakespeare.” With a grunt, the fat priest gathered up the paraphernalia from his rubbings. “Cup of tea? What am I saying? Stay to supper. I dare say you’re famished after your drive. All the way from London? Stay the night.” And talking in this hospitable way, Father Mabyn led Theo through the scattered tumble of graves to the vicarage where he had little trouble persuading the exhausted American to accept both food and lodging, postponing the long trip back to London until morning.
Throughout a very large, opulent meal in a very small, shabby dining room (served by an elderly housekeeper who was the evident cause of the vicar’s plumpness—for she forced heaping platters upon him as if he were something she was fattening for Christmas), Father Mabyn talked of Ford, whose plays he obviously both knew and loved and whose soul he’d resorted to praying over—all else having failed. For they’d had many “all-nighters” during Ford’s six weeks in town; usually initiated when the playwright reeled drunk into the church or came banging on the vicarage door, demanding (“in a thoroughly obnoxious manner, I grant you”) to debate with the priest issues of faith already settled to Mabyn’s entire satisfaction before the Middle Ages began. “Oh my word, he’d positively shake the roof with it. Existence of God, omnipotent good, presence of evil, original sin, all that sort of thing. In a rage against imperfection. Poor Mrs. Roberts here was certain he’d murder me one night; expected to stumble over me stabbed like Beckett at the altar. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Roberts?” Mrs. Roberts, squeezing an extra stuffed cabbage onto the vicar’s plate, gave a defiant nod to testify that indeed she had suspected exactly that.
The kidnapping then had been only the last of numerous such encounters, and yes it had been a real kidnapping. “In the sense, you see, that Ford was terrifically tight when he burst in with the rifle,” said Mabyn, delicately lifting a sole fillet from its bones, “and in that frame of mind where contradiction was like a match to petrol. He’s such a believer,” Mabyn paused with a broccoli flower speared on his fork. “Naturally, drove him mad to hear me say so. His father must have been a very mean-hearted man. One of those ministers who think God so hates the world He hires on sadists to help Him condemn it.
“Yes, Ford wanted intensely to shock me by tossing Leviticus into the fire. Like a nasty little schoolboy. But, uhhh, being obliged to dine on raw whiskey and black burnt pork! That, now, Theo, was a bad shock.” The vicar shuddered, patted the napkin tucked into his clerical collar, and returned to his stuffed cabbage.
“And this Daniel somebody?” Theo asked.
“Llangbi. Oh, a would-be poet, our banker’s son. Worshipped Ford and egged him on. The village atheist. You know the type. I’m sure you have them in the States.”
Theo wasn’t sure that they did anymore. “But Mr. Thomas evicted Ford because of this ‘kidnapping’?” he asked.
“A sanctimonious churl, I’m afraid. His wife put him up to it. Mrs. Roberts, roast beef looks lovely. Still, I’ll wager it cost Thomas a horrific struggle, greedy as he is. Charging Ford four hundred pounds a month for that wretched farm! And booted out his own son-in-law to do it, too. On the other hand, I grant you, Ford did rather make a mess of the place. My impression is, he was ready to go in any case. I sensed the…young woman and he had…had parted company.”
“Yes, they have. It sounds as i
f his drinking really got out of hand again.” Theo attempted in vain to stop Mrs. Roberts from adding the fifth slab of roast beef to his plate. “Thank you. Do you know if he was working on a play here?”
Mabyn poured Theo a glass of wine. “Well, again just my impression. I don’t think it was going well. No, not well. But he talked about writing in general with great passion. He can talk, can’t he! He’d talk all night. I confess, I lost rather a lot of sleep. He told me, by the way, that you were a marvelous writer yourself.”
“He’s very generous,” Theo said.
“Fond of you…Thank you, Mrs. Roberts. We’re fine now.”
“Custard coming,” she threatened as she left.
The vicar pulled the napkin out of his collar and scrubbed pleasurably at his mouth. “Very fond of you. And, let’s see, ah, an American Indian name. ‘Pawnee,’ yes, Pawnee.”
“His son, younger son.”
“I see. And someone called Rhodora. Spoke of her with great admiration. A singer. With Indians, I believe. Cherokee Indians?”
Theo held his hand near the warmth of the candle. “Not exactly. Did he say anything about Rhodora personally?”
Mabyn searched the ceiling for the memory. “That she’d left him? Is that right?”
“Ford said she’d left him?”
“I believe so. Declined to marry him? Perhaps I misunderstood.”
Folding his napkin, Theo sighed, “Oh, Lord.”
The custard was followed by coffee, the coffee by port wine and cheese. Theo asked about Ford’s army trunk. “His manuscripts are in it—or used to be. I’d hate for—”
“Safe and sound. He asked me to have it shipped for him to London, care of Midden-something, I believe.”
The two agreed that, instead, Theo would take the trunk to London in the hatchback of his rented car. “Such sad and intriguing stories,” the vicar said, picking up crumbs of Stilton with a moistened forefinger.
Foolscap Page 29
