by Tod Davies
Then Colin turned and petted Rex one last time. Death said something softly in his ear, and he nodded, turning toward Lily to mouth a last good-bye. Then he put a confiding hand in Death’s and followed her to an open door. It was from this door, Lily now saw, from which the strange illumination streamed.
The door shut behind them. The light was gone. And in the morning, the door was no longer there.
Ten
This is where my father truly enters the story.
I met him much later in his life, when he was a different kind of person—the person that his life had made of him.
But at this time, he was a Handsome Prince. How much he was conscious of polishing up his performance in this role I am not sure. My guess would be—not very. My father, even in his last, more introspective, days was not what you would call a deep thinker.
He was an affectionate person, at bottom. I think he must have been born that way. In another world, in another kind of culture, he might have grown up to be a veterinarian, or a grade school teacher, and I think at both of these types of jobs he would have done very well. And been happy.
But he was born in this world, into a pampered class as the rich heir of one of the most highly placed families of a great and powerful empire, one that had effectively (or ineffectively, which was more and more the truth) ruled Megalopolis for unquestioning generations. His choices, therefore, were rather more limited. Great things were expected of him. Megalopolis expected great things of its younger generation just then. The older generation had done its job, and had its day. It had spun straw into gold.
It had spun all the straw of Megalopolis into gold. In fact, it had spun so much straw into gold that there was no more straw left.
As to what should happen when the straw inevitably ran out, that problem it left to its children and their children’s children.
Hence the hopes held out for Conor.
At this time, though, few would have considered his position anything but enviable. He was (and I have the testimony of many eyewitnesses for this) the handsomest scion of an almost embarrassingly handsome race. In Megalopolis—and this is still true—if your children aren’t handsome, or beautiful, and you have the money and the ambition, they can be made so by science. As a result, the children of the rich were truly gorgeous—my father’s wife Rowena was a case of this. I have seen her earlier portraits, and the perfection of her features, combined with an exquisite rose and platinum coloring, was staggering. A bit chilly for my tastes. But beautiful just the same.
He was handsome. His hair was gold wire, amusingly parted with severity on one side, a precious forelock threatening to fall over his forehead. His nose was long and inquiring—even in old age it quivered with a special, attractive sensitivity. His eyes were the cracked blue marble of his mother’s, lacking just enough of her intensity to give his face a more approachable look. His lips were thin, and appeared destined to command. His ears and throat were those of a perfected sculpture. And he was very tall, with the rangy, elegant look of some well-made rich child’s doll.
He was all of these things. He was young, he was beautiful, he was strong, he was the darling of his people. But he was also very weak. It was that weakness that kept him, young and untrained as he was, from having his own life. His own love. My mother was so much the stronger of the two. But even she couldn’t save their love and their life together, not when the tide that pulled at my father was so much stronger than him. And she was in a different current, one that she knew she had to follow, even when it threatened to sweep her out of her depth, out to sea.
It must have felt like being swept away, my father’s coming to the Children’s Mine.
“He’s coming! I heard ’em! He’s coming here!” That was the chatter on the day of his arrival, as my dear nurse Kim told me. “It was all in the papers, Soph. Oh, yer dad was coming to see us! Fact-finding mission, they called it. Ooohh. Yer can imagine. Royalty! To us, the poor little peeps in the Kid’s Mine!”
Lily hardly heard the gossip going on around her. Her senses had dulled in the aftermath of Colin’s death; grief slowed her down. She couldn’t see, or hear, or taste, or feel the way she had. “I was different,” she told me later. “I had been sharper. Clearer. But it all went away then, as if I were in a fog.” Rex watched her and never left her side. The monotonous grind of the Mine, the constant walking always in the same spot, never getting anywhere at all, didn’t affect him the same way it affected Lily. A dog can live in the moment. It doesn’t much matter to a dog if each moment is absolutely the same. One after another, moments stretch out to Eternity, so what do they matter to a dog?
But for a human, of course, it’s different. The only way we know is the forward march of Time. And if every inch of that line is the same, gray and dull and bland, life, before it reaches its goal, stumbles, sickens, and eventually dies.
Rex watched as Lily walked on that gray dull path. But there was nothing he could do except watch her change.
She was thinner now, and more silent. Her black hair hung in stringy coils down her fragile back. Her red-brown eyes got larger and larger in her pinched face. Only her wide mouth kept its generous size, until Rex worried that soon that would be all that was left. That and her eyes.
It’s hard to be far away from home. I know this well myself. It’s hard to remember what home means, what home is for, what home can help you become. There are lots of ways of being far away from home, and the one Lily experienced was among the hardest. Because Lily was halfway between two homes: the one in her past, which she missed, and the one in her future, which, unknown as it was, she yearned toward without knowing why.
For now, though, there was no going forward. There was no going back. Everything was as tough and inert and immovable as the sludge and dirt of the one outdoor courtyard of the Children’s Mine after a hard rain.
What made it even worse, I imagine, though my guess is that out of courtesy she forced herself to endure it, was the meaningless chatter of the Megalopolitan children around her. Lily was unused to the stupidity and banality of much Megalopolitan conversation. (And in fact, I could hardly comprehend it when Devindra used to shudder and describe it to me later, not until I had experienced it for myself.)
In those days, when Arcadians conversed (and to a certain extent this is still a noticeable trait in our land, thankfully), they bantered, or they informed, or they flirted, or they exchanged views. Sometimes they tried to top each other, for amusement’s sake, in a certain kind of lighthearted irony which has rather gone out of fashion now, but which you can still hear, especially in the salons of the better-to-do families of Paloma. But even now, Arcadians speak differently than the mass of Megalopolitans in Lily’s day.
The conversations would have been, so Devindra told me firmly, “endless babble about topics of no interest at all.” Devindra taught me that this was the direct result of most citizens of the Empire having no share in what became of them, no hope of ever being able to influence events. “So why would their talk be anything but meaningless, Sophy?”
Why, indeed.
It was this kind of meaningless chatter that occupied Megalopolitan children all day long, as a matter of course. They told each other the plots, endlessly, of popular entertainment, all of which seemed to Lily to include scenes of almost incredible degradation and violence. Yet these children, who she liked, and sometimes was even fond of, seemed not to mind these descriptions, or feel pain at them. “Well, why not, Soph?” Kim said to me much later, in her philosophical way. “Ye live where ye live, unless yer lucky enough to get out, don’t ye?”
Lily tried to be friendly, and succeeded, too. But intimacy with such minds was not only impossible, but, in the absence of any other source of solace (other than Rex, of course), actively painful as well.
There was the ceaselessly traded gossip about Megalopolitan celebrities, and about members of the Megalopolitan ruling class. These stories held an endless fascination for the children as they plo
dded away on their treadmills in the Mine.
Especially the girls.
“Oooooh, she’s put on weight, hasn’t she, she looks like a fat pig!” they would say, and Lily, to her astonishment, would find that they spoke about some girl somewhere, on some popular show, that none of them had ever met. Or one of them would say, “I don’t think much of him, she should dump him right away, he’s only after her money, I bet,” and the others would offer their opinions. “No, I think he really loves her, you’ll see.” And Lily would find again that they were talking about some couple high up in the Megalopolitan hierarchy, some couple that they could never hope to meet outside the pages of glossy newspapers.
The people in these magazines, far away from the children in the Children’s Mine: they were unseeable, unreachable, unknowable, except by what was printed on the shiny page. And that was mostly lies. But how could the reader tell?
Now, it appeared, one of the stars of those newspapers was coming to the Children’s Mine. The whole of the place was buzzing with it. Conor Barr! “Conor Barr is coming here!”
“It’s true, I tell you! He is! His mum’s sending him on a fact-finding tour! I read it here…and here…and here!” The brassy little girl with the blonde hair and the tight jeans pointed at three of the magazines spread out on the linoleum floor.
The other children crowded around her. All, that is, except Lily, who lay, silent, with her face turned toward the wall. Rex curled watchfully at her back.
Then something happened. Lily’s back twitched as if a current passed through it. The others murmured excitedly, “Conor Barr! Conor Barr!” And her forehead furrowed. It was as if the name was a familiar thing, a thing not of home, but somehow an extension of home. Lily, in her dulled, gray state understood nothing, except that the name “Conor Barr” had, for her, some meaning that was yet to be understood. So she sat up slowly and rubbed her eyes. She turned back toward the others. “Who,” she asked politely, in a voice that had become fainter and fainter as the weeks dragged on in the Children’s Mine, “is Conor Barr?”
The others looked at her. There was no dislike in their looks, but there was no understanding either. The brassy blonde, whose name was Kim, and who was my very own nurse, my Kim, later to be surnamed ‘the Kind,’ exclaimed, “Conor Barr! Yer don’t know who he is? He’s just the ooohhhiest of them all, Conor Barr!” She looked at Lily with a hopeful, if slightly confused, expression, and she said, holding out one of the papers, “Here, see for yerself.”
“Thank you,” Lily said politely and took the paper, as the others looked on with interest. There she saw a picture of a boy—a man, really, still one not much older than herself—who looked like every other Megalopolitan of his class. She had seen them, coming through on field trips for their universities, or acting as assistants to government functionaries on their round. They were all tall and had glossy hair and teeth and eyes, and they uniformly smiled, as if for some camera set right at an angle there, high up in the corner.
If this was Conor Barr, she couldn’t tell the difference between him and any other of the boys or men she’d seen down here in the mines. At least, not the rich ones. The poor ones looked different all right—all stunted and hunched and raw-skinned, with their ears sticking out at right angles from their heads. Lily had trouble telling them apart, too. It seemed to her that in Arcadia, each person looked like herself or himself. In Megalopolis, each person looked like his or her class.
“He looks just the same as all the other ones,” she said gently, so as not to give offense, and the other girls, even though they laughed out loud at this, seemed not to take any. According to Kim, they saw Lily as a kind of curiosity, and to Lily’s relief, they showed no malice toward her.
She was puzzled, though, my mother. What she said was true. And yet…and yet…there was something about this particular boy….
“No, look,” Kim said eagerly, and sat cross-legged in front of Lily. The others did the same, looking at Kim as if she were about to tell them a story that was of tremendous interest, even though they had probably heard it a thousand times—maybe because they had heard it a thousand times.
“Conor Barr,” Kim said, “is the great-grandson on his father’s side of the man who invented the Whaddoyoucallit.”
She turned to the girl next to her. “What DO you call it?” she said, but that girl, helpless, just shrugged.
Kim went on. “And on his mother’s side, well, I don’t know, HER father invented the Whatchamajigger.” She looked around at this, and a couple of girls nodded agreement. “Anyway, they’re completely loaded, and his father’s on the Council, and his mother has all these charities, and they have this humongous villa right smack in the middle of Central New York where the property values are, you know…”
“Humongous,” added another girl helpfully.
“Exactly,” Kim said. “And he’s just about the handsomest thing you’ve ever seen…” At this there was a collective sigh of agreement. “And every girl in Megalopolis wants to marry him, that’s all.”
“Or…” another girl said meaningfully, and at this they all went off into gales of laughter. Even Lily smiled, and Rex’s tail thumped once or twice in encouragement. The other girls were pleased at this. They vaguely understood that Lily was unhappy, but as for them, they had entertainment enough between the Games Room and the Magazines and the Rumpus Room, all provided by the charitable foundations of Megalopolis. Almost all of them had come from places far grimmer than anything that could be found underground. So by and large, most of them were content. But they understood that Lily wasn’t, even if they didn’t understand why.
Still, it was better to have harmony than not, so when she smiled, they were all obscurely pleased. Everyone was in a good mood as they settled down to sleep. The boys in the next room huddled over some game of their own. An unusual harmony reigned.
The girls, I guess, all dreamed of Conor Barr. To Lily’s surprise, she did, too. But not in the same way as the others.
Lily hadn’t connected the pictures in the tabloids to the young man she had been drawn to the night of the invasion of Arcadia. A picture, to Lily, was a dead thing, and the boy she had seen had been alive, a very different thing from a photograph or a film. In Lily’s dream, a picture from one of the magazines tore itself up from the bottom to the top, and scattered into a thousand pieces on the floor. Then a voice said, “Here I am.” But when she fell to the floor, scrambling to gather up the bits of paper and piece them back together, the voice insisted, “Not there. Here.” And then she felt a deep, strong feeling, but whether it was of terror or pleasure, she didn’t know, and no matter how hard she tried to pierce the darkness of her dream to see the source of the voice, she couldn’t tell who it was, or where. All she knew was that at its sound, a current passed through her, from the top of her head, straight through her middle. And in her sleep, she stirred, deeply moved.
Eleven
On the morning of his twenty-first birthday, in the breakfast room of the Villa in Central New York, Conor, although nervous, announced his plan.
“Mother, I am bringing a woman home,” he said (and no one in attendance—servants, courtiers, journalists and assorted hangers-on—knew how nerve-wracking a moment this was for him). “Have the rooms made ready.”
I can imagine him saying this. He told me ruefully about it much later, his earlier, lordly, anxious self far behind him. “I was a right prat, Soph,” he said. “I was always given to making pronouncements, Goddess help me.”
This wasn’t entirely his fault. His speeches were doubtless always greeted with awe, manufactured and otherwise.
“Oh, bravo, bravo!” There was applause from the audience. It was probably muted from the servants, since there was obviously going to be more work—even if the woman to be brought there wasn’t an official wife, she still would have her demands, they were sure of that. Much more enthusiastic would have been the reaction from the journalists and the hangers-on. Because of recent d
isasters in Megalopolis, the newspapers had been crying out for more distracting stories. Since Conor was already engaged to be married to one of the Great Tabloid Beauties of Megalopolis, Rowena Pomfret, an heiress herself, there was going to be the triangle story to work. “Any kind of story like that was meat to them,” my father remembered. “I don’t know what I was thinking, if I thought at all, about how Rowena would feel about this, or what it was going to mean to my future career. I think that must have meant I was already in love with your mother, Soph. Before then, I don’t think I ever forgot about my career, not for a second.” He sighed and smiled (and in his old age, he had a particularly sweet and engaging smile). “Of course, after… well, it came, and it went. Until it was too late.”
As for the hangers-on, they immediately plotted to lure the concubine-to-be to their side. There was constant political war for the scraps from the tables of the rich in Megalopolis, and the war in the Villa in Central New York was no exception.
Everyone approved, it seemed, of this unusual step Conor was taking. Including, to his considerable surprise, his mother. Livia. My grandmother.
“Bring her back, Conor,” Livia advised, her voice thoughtful. “And we’ll see what we shall see.”
Conor froze. He had been packing—it was a habit of his to pack for himself, as he was fastidious in his dress and never trusted a servant to get the creases just so. He had just smoothed down his two favorite shirts when Livia entered the room unannounced. She looked at him. He shuddered, but went on packing. “In a way,” my father told me to my own surprise much later, “in a way, we understood each other very well, Livia and I.” I know that he had always hated her. She told me so herself, much later, and she appeared to relish, rather than regret, the terror she inspired in her son.
