The car ground to a halt in front of the door. Thomas must have been listening on the other side of it. He came out at once. A flood of thin yellow light spilled across the narrow porch, blotched waveringly by his shadow as he came down the two alighting steps. The way he walked, with the stiff carefulness of an old man, startled me; I did not remember him like this. His butler’s coat, made for him by Dr. Lister’s own tailor, did not fit him any more, and the stoop in his carriage was new too. Seeing him come out to meet me made the whole thing more real and less tolerable. My throat thickened, and I did not trust myself to speak for some seconds while I paid off the driver and hauled my bag out of the car. My muscles, I saw, were almost too weary to obey orders, and I heard myself grunt as I tugged at my suitcase.
“Hello, Thomas,” I said, and my voice sounded harsh and rusty.
“Mr. Berkeley, sir,” he replied, giving my name the English pronunciation. Even in the shadows of the porch I could see how still and gray his face was, how carefully he had composed the lines at his mouth and eyes to betray no emotion. His appearance shocked me; the picture of Thomas in my mind was of another man entirely. A younger, straighter man with the laughter in his eyes only partly concealed by a professional decorum. Thomas—the Thomas that I had grown up with—was only incidentally a butler. He was a tall, brown man who could handle a jib sheet like a sailor and shoot tin cans in the air with a revolver. He was the companion of Jerry’s boyhood and mine, the man from whom we had learned how to ride and fish and swim. The Thomas in my mind seemed to have no connection with this tired old man who was carrying my bag with a perceptible effort. I wondered if my own face was as changed as his. Did I look twenty years older?
As we crossed the porch I could not keep from staggering. There was no sensation at all in my legs, and walking was a laborious, conscious process.
“Steady,” I heard Thomas’s low voice behind me.
“I’m all right.”
“Yes, sir. Of course.”
The hall was cool and empty. Most of the rugs had been taken up for summer and the dark oak floor glowed somberly under the wall lights. To the left a broad, heavily banistered stair curved up and away into the dark, but on the right the hall continued clear across the house to a pair of big double doors. Beyond them I had a glimpse of the reach of the Sound and the color of the sunset. As I always did when I entered it, I thought again what a good house this was, full of comfortably large furniture and a sense of space. Women sometimes said that it was like a club, but we never minded that. We liked its dignity and its impersonality, and the absence of any feminine influence—no woman lived in it and there was no reason why it should look as if one did.
Thomas switched on the stair lights. “We have given you your old room, sir,” he said, and began slowly to carry up my bag.
“But,” I began to object, “doesn’t he want to see me right away?”
“The Doctor is on the terrace, Mr. Berkeley. He thought you would prefer to wash and change before—” He left the sentence uncompleted, but I understood what he meant. He had been about to say, “before you go out to tell him about his son’s death.”
I followed Thomas up the stairs, heavily and without any further protest. Under my hand the banister was smooth and solid. Jerry and I slid down it, I remembered, the first night I had ever come here. Nothing was changed except Thomas. The house maintained its air of stability and peace, and even in the stupor of grief and weariness in which I was I felt again the old sense of belonging to it. We went down the upstairs corridor to the familiar door.
Thomas opened it and switched on the lights in the room beyond. “Home again, sir,” he said, and swallowed.
He was right. This low, wide room with its windows looking over the water, its dark-blue leather easy chair, its broad walnut bed, the huge old desk in one corner, and its shelves and shelves of books was my real home, much more so than any of the guest rooms in which I always had to stay when I visited Grace and her husband. Grace is my mother, and she and her second husband, Fred Mallard, have lived for the past fifteen years in a succession of smart, theatrically furnished apartments which never contained a real place for me. So, when I used to come home from school, and later college, I simply occupied the guest room and was treated almost as a guest too, except for Grace’s infrequent attacks of maternal tenderness.
After Jerry and I became such fast friends, Dr. Lister practically adopted me as a second son. I spent more time in the house on Long Island than I did with my mother, and she was visibly relieved to have me off her hands. Grace was grateful to Jerry’s father for taking an interest in me, and not in a wholly selfish way. She admitted that she and Fred were not the sort of people who ought to have children dependent on them and she knew that I needed a certain feeling of security and stability that her way of life could never provide.
The room to which I now came had been mine ever since the summer after Jerry’s and my third-form year at prep school. We had arrived at the house full of excitement and plans for the summer to find that Dr. Lister had done over two upstairs rooms, put a bath between them, and furnished them specially for us. When he showed me mine he said: “This is your room. You can do anything you like in it provided you keep it neat. When you aren’t here, nobody else will be allowed to use it.”
I had stammered out some sort of thanks, interrupted by a whoop as Jerry came bursting through the connecting door.
“Hey, Bark! Isn’t this somepin?”
But it was more than “somepin” to me—it was what I had always wanted: a place that was securely my own and that would remain so no matter how many times Grace moved from apartment to apartment. I had grown up in this room.
Thomas began to unpack my bag. That was familiar too; he had done the same thing a hundred times before. Even in the stupor which dulled me I saw him give the customary glance of inspection to each shirt and pair of socks before putting it away. A habit he’d got into when he first learned what school laundries do to buttons and fabric. The silence between us contained no unspoken question. I knew that he did not expect me to say anything to him, to tell him the things that had happened. Like myself, he was trying not to think. Slowly and heavily I began to undress.
When I glanced at him next he had stopped taking out my clothes and was holding to the footboard of the bed, looking down into the suitcase and shaking a little. I knew at once what he had come upon and went over and lifted it out myself. It was the silver vase which Jerry and I had found one summer in a Paris antique shop and brought home because we wanted it more than anything else we’d seen abroad. The metal felt cold and heavy in my hand, and the silver curves of the thing reflected the lights and the room in a sliding jumble of distorted images. For a second I hated it. And yet it was a beautiful thing, with a flawless six-inch replica of the Winged Victory on its lid and the long Greek lines of the vase body flowing into the base.
I carried it across the room and set it on the wide window ledge. The goddess strained exultantly forward toward the darkening Sound and the wide spaces of the evening sky. Under her feet, in the hollow breast of the vase, was a double-handful of white crystalline ashes. Thomas must have guessed that I would choose our silver urn to hold Jerry’s ashes.
“I’ll leave it there until we decide,” I said.
“Yes, sir.” He went on with his unpacking. “Have you had dinner, Mr. Berkeley?”
“I had something in the station. I’m not hungry.”
He nodded, snapped the bag shut, and stowed it in the closet. “I’ll start the shower, sir. Will you have it hot?”
“No,” I said. “Lukewarm.” “Yes, that’s best in hot weather.” He disappeared into the bathroom.
I finished my undressing, hardly able to focus my attention on what I was doing. When you haven’t slept except in snatches for several days things begin to seem unreal. My memory was flashing disconnected pictures in front of my eyes and some of them were more real than the four walls of the room. They were pic
tures that I did not want to look at, but they came to me in steady succession in spite of myself. What would it be like, I wondered, if I tried to go to sleep tonight? How many of these images would I have to look at again and again before they faded into blackness? Even on the edge of exhaustion, as I was, I dreaded the thought of shutting my eyes.
The shower felt good. The feel of water running down over my skin was enough physical pleasure to stop me from thinking very much, and it was comfortable to be clean again after three days on the train. The rush and patter of the water began to put tag ends of songs into my mind:
I’ll have a rendezvous
With you . . .
No, that was not a good song. There would be no rendezvous again for Jerry and me. Try something else:
Soft o’er the fountain
Lingering falls the southern moon.
Far o’er the mountain—
“Far o’er the mountain!” Far over the looming cliff of Cloud Mesa with the white adobe house in the shadow by the spring! That was something else I did not want to think about. Songs were no good. I turned off the water and dried myself slowly. The more I hurried the sooner I’d be talking to Dr. Lister.
Thomas had laid out flannels. A soft white shirt, and one of the club blazers Jerry and I wore when we sat on the terrace and drank and looked at the water and the summer night. We used to do that often when there wasn’t a dance at the club and we didn’t feel like going for a drive. I slipped into the clothes, grateful for their cool cleanness, combed my hair, put pipe, tobacco pouch, and matches into my pocket, and started down the hall.
The routine of doing pleasant, familiar things had made the past half hour endurable, but it deserted me part way down the stairs. The worst moment of all was coming now, and I knew it. Jerry’s father was waiting for me on the terrace; waiting to hear the story I had to tell him. I had no fear of that; he was equal to anything that could happen to him. I never knew a man who had such mastery over himself as Dr. Lister. Even when I told him that his son had shot himself there would be no crevice in his armor. And because I was almost as much his own son as Jerry had been it would be easier for both of us.
What I was afraid of was something quite different. It was not the telling of the facts about Jerry’s death that would be difficult. Somehow I had to give them to him without making him begin to think. I must present my story in such a way as to make it seem natural, and it wasn’t natural. It was, on the surface, tragically unreasonable and inexplicable. The idea of suicide did not belong to Jerry’s character, and Dr. Lister would know that as well as I did. The first question he would ask would be, why? As I went down the stairs I wondered how I was going to answer that question without telling him at least a part of the things that I had come to know and believe.
There was danger in that. The things he would want to know could not be stated in terms of tangible facts, of events and people shaped into a recognizable pattern. For the first time I admitted to myself that there was a possibility of connection between small, disturbing things in the past and the present fact of Jerry’s death. What that common denominator was I did not know, but I was certain that I did not want to find it out. Merely admitting its existence gave me a feeling of tightness inside that was familiar. It was, I realized, fear. And fear of a shapeless, misty thought that was as insubstantial as a ghost.
But Dr. Lister would not believe in ghosts. I did not myself, for that matter. I must tell my story matter-of-factly, as if that shadow in the corner of my mind did not exist. That was all. I must not make him feel, as I did, that something horrible lay behind what I said. It could be dangerous to let him begin to sort and arrange the elements of the past so that he, too, thought he saw a ghost and began to think back, selecting here a fact and there an overtone, weighing one trifle of evidence against another until he had a complete story.
The pieces of the puzzle were all lying in my mind, of so much I was sure. I felt that if I looked at them, thought about them, they would slip together into a picture of the truth, and the feeling frightened me. My conscious mind rejected the idea of knowing or thinking anything more about the events of the past two years. But Dr. Lister would not consent to that, once started. He would want to get down to the bedrock of the truth. Donne’s tremendous lines went through my mind:
Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm
Nor question much
That subtle wreath of hair about mine arm;
The mystery, the sign you must not touch—
When we shrouded Jerry in our talk tonight we must not question much. He had been unhappy, his marriage had not turned out to be what he had hoped from it, and he had shot himself. Those were the bald facts. If there was anything behind them, it had best stay in the shadows. I would tell my story carefully, as nearly within the bounds of truth as I could, but suppressing some things. It would not be wise, for example, to say that she had been in the room when Jerry picked the gun out of the drawer and . . . I was tired too, my own mind not entirely clear. I should have to be very careful.
The double doors at the end of the hall were still open. I stepped out on the terrace. Below the balustrade the land sloped down in a long sweep of grass to the beach and the waves on the sand. Framing the lawn on either side, the trees were heavy clusters of black shadow against the sky. By now the lower air was full of the silent sparks of fireflies. There was no wind at all. Almost in the zenith, the great constellation of Orion sprawled across the sky, and as I saw it I remembered another time when I had stood under it, and another smell quite different from that of the flowers blooming under the balustrade.
Jerry’s father was sitting at the white iron garden table to my right. In the middle of it was a candle in a hurricane lamp socket. A tall bottle of sherry, and two glasses. The gleam of the candle picked out the crisp whiteness of his hair and shadowed the sockets of his eyes. I could see no sign of sorrow in his posture; he sat as erect as always with one arm stretched before him across the table top and the brown fingers of his surgeon’s hand holding one of the glasses. It was his habit in summer, at the end of evening, to sit out here drinking sherry, and he was doing it tonight. There was something admirable in the fact that he had made no exception of this one evening, and the usualness of it steadied me. I went across the stone flagging and sat down opposite him at the table.
“Hello, Bark,” he said, and smiled.
“Hello, Dad.” He liked me to call him that.
“Your trip must have been hot and uncomfortable, this time of year,” he said, pouring me a glass of sherry. His hand, like his voice, was entirely steady.
I lifted the glass and looked through the wine at the flame of the candle. “Yes.” The sherry was noble, neither dry nor sweet and with a fine, full body. “This is good stuff.”
“The best. How are you feeling?”
“Tired.”
He looked at me. “We can talk about this thing in the morning. Don’t feel you have to speak of it now.”
“Thanks.” He said nothing more but continued to look at my face as if trying to read it. I avoided his eyes and told him. “The ashes are here, in the silver vase. I thought he’d like to have them in it.”
“That was good of you.”
In the silence that lay between us I heard the bumbling of an insect against the glass of the lamp and the faint slither of water moving on the beach below us. He was expecting me to speak, and I knew that I ought to say something to help him and to lessen the torment of his waiting. But there was nothing to say except “Jerry’s dead, and I’ve brought his ashes back to you in the silver vase.” My mind was empty—the least word of thought echoed hollowly in it.
“Don’t try to talk, Bark. Sit here with me a few minutes and then we’ll go up to bed.”
I made an immense effort of will. “It happened the day after I got out there. In the evening. A little earlier than this. I didn’t tell you the whole story in my telegram. He . . . he shot himself.”
What he sai
d next contained the whole quality of his character. “So. I wondered what sort of accident it was.”
“That was it,” I said.
He was quiet for a while. When he spoke next his voice was remote, detached. “Tell me how it happened.”
This was the danger point, I told myself. What I said now would either satisfy him or set him on the track of the mystery I was resolved he should not think about at all. “He went into the little study. After a few minutes we heard the shot. He was lying across the desk. The gun was on the floor beside him. We couldn’t do anything for him.”
“We?”
“She and I.”
“I see.” He took a careful sip of wine. “And there was no letter, no note? He didn’t write anything to explain?”
“No.” I didn’t want him to think about that, so I went on quickly. “I got his body into the car and drove to Los Palos. As soon as I was through with the undertaker and the coroner I caught the train home.”
“What about her?”
That was another question I didn’t want him to raise. “I don’t know.”
“Did she drive in to Los Palos with you?”
“No.”
“You didn’t just leave her in the house?”
I looked squarely into his eyes and said, “When I was ready to leave, she wasn’t in the house.”
He was puzzled, I could see, and I was aware in some subtle way that he was beginning to doubt something in my story. “You didn’t see her again, then?”
“No.”
“That is strange. Very strange, and not quite like you, either, Bark.” He paused. “Do you know where she is now?”
“No.”
“Look here, my boy,” he said finally, “I have somehow got the impression . . .”
“There’s no impression to get, Dad. I don’t know where she was when I left the house, but I think she had gone up to the top of the mesa. I didn’t know when she would come back, and I couldn’t wait. She’ll be all right. The sheriff’s men drove the car back to the house. She can come away any time she wants to.”
The Rim of Morning Page 2
