Mercury

by Margot Livesey

  Later I would learn that the next day Viv drove to New Hampshire and spent six hundred dollars on a handgun, ammunition, and a bribe to the man who made the purchase.

  16

  BY EARLY FEBRUARY NABOKOV was uncrowned king of the office. Merrie rationed his treats, her daughters provided him with fresh tree branches, and Jo had taught him to say, “Better? Or worse?” His feathers were growing in, smooth and thick, and in the morning he often urged me to hurry. One day, when I was collecting the children from the stables, he started calling from the front seat: “Hurry up. Hurry up.”

  “He sounds like us now,” Trina said.

  At once I realized she was right. Only when he quoted poetry or recited the railway timetable did Nabokov still sound like my father. In my dismay I failed to ask the children if they had everything. After supper Marcus discovered he’d left a crucial schoolbook on the office table.

  “You’ll just have to explain to your teacher,” I said.

  “But there’s a test tomorrow. Ms. Fisher hates to give makeup tests. Please can we get it?”

  Viv and Trina were watching a show about a game reserve. Lions were roaring. “I want to see this,” Viv said. “Can you go, Don? I’ll explain the alarm.”

  “I’m paying the bills. Marcus needs to take responsibility when he forgets things.”

  “He does, but all the shuttling around is hard on the kids.” She smiled up at me. “Everyone gets to make a few mistakes.”

  All the shuttling around is because of you, I thought, but I wrote down the instructions for the alarm and told Marcus to start studying while I fetched his book.

  The night was cold and starless. Outside town I passed only a few other cars, and when I turned up the road to Windy Hill, my headlights shone on the empty paddocks. As I walked towards the barn, I was grateful for the brightness of the new security lights I had unwittingly paid for. I pressed the buttons of the alarm once, then again. Nothing seemed to happen, but the door opened silently. Inside I heard a faint rustling. Only a mouse, I hoped. I hurried along the dimly lit corridor and retrieved Marcus’s book from the office. Back at the door, I reset the alarm. I was turning towards my car when I noticed the windows of the arena glowing. Someone had forgotten to turn out the lights.

  The arena, I know from the Windy Hill website, is seventy-five feet by two hundred. As I stepped through the side door, I saw an almost white horse cantering at the far end, a dark figure on his back. Charlie was riding Mercury. In the middle of the arena stood a young man who seemed to be alternately checking his phone and taking pictures. Even at this distance I could smell his cigarette. Now I understood why the alarm had behaved oddly; it was already off. Neither of them noticed me. For several minutes I remained standing in the doorway, spellbound by the drama of the solitary horse and rider. As Mercury approached, cantering up the nearest wall, I could see his breath streaming in the cold air. Charlie, beneath her helmet, was radiant.

  By the time they approached for the second time, I had come to my senses. I stepped forward, arms raised. “Charlie,” I called. “Stop. Stop.”

  Both horse and rider startled. Then Charlie was lying on the ground, and Mercury was again heading to the far end of the arena. I bent over Charlie, asking if she was all right.

  She was already scrambling to her feet. “Dr. Stevenson—Donald—you scared the shit out of me. Don’t you know not to shout at a horse?”

  “What are you doing here, riding Mercury? How did you get in?”

  The young man was running towards us, shouting, “Are you okay? Who the fuck is this?”

  “Viv loaned me the keys last month when she had to leave early. Ben and I were driving by—and I so wanted to see Mercury.”

  “Who the fuck is this?” Ben repeated. Despite his swearing, he was not a threatening figure. He was wearing far too few clothes for the cold night—a hoodie, tight jeans, and sneakers—and his face, even scowling, had a good-natured look.

  “This is Viv’s husband.” As she spoke, Mercury cantered by, showing no signs of slowing. If anything, he was going faster, stretching into a full gallop, stirrups flying. We all three turned to watch him.

  “Mercury,” called Ben. “How are we going to catch him?”

  “Food.” Charlie stepped out of the side door and returned with an armful of hay, which she dropped in Mercury’s path. He slowed to a trot. A moment later he was greedily nudging the hay. Charlie captured his bridle, and order was restored.

  Only then did she turn to me. “Please, please, please,” she said, “don’t tell Viv. I promise we won’t ever do it again.”

  Until she asked, it had not occurred to me that I had a choice. I imagined Viv seizing the phone, firing Charlie. But of course I must tell her. Not to do so would be a terrible betrayal. I became aware that my face and hands were freezing.

  She sensed my hesitation. “Riding is my favorite thing in the whole world,” she said. “I know it was wrong to come here like this, but I was desperate to see Mercury.” Her eyes were brimming.

  I remembered Bonnie’s story about losing her beloved Pekingese—“I never got to play with him again.” What would my silence cost me? Nothing, other than the pain of lying to Viv. She had often said Charlie was their best worker.

  “Put him back in his stall,” I said. “Bring the keys to my office tomorrow.”

  “And you won’t tell Viv?”

  Her eyes were very wide and her lips very red, but that was not what made me decide, between one moment and the next, to keep her secret. At the time I thought it was because of Bonnie. Now I suspect that I also wanted to punish Viv, for her almost abortion, her obsession with Mercury, her betrayal of Claudia, her falling asleep, night after night, without turning to me.

  “I won’t,” I said, “but you must never do this again. If Mercury got hurt, there’d be hell to pay.”

  She promised fervently—cross my heart and hope to die—and led him towards the door. Ben followed. I heard the ring of hooves on the icy snow. I was turning to leave when something lying in the middle of the arena caught my eye: a black scarf. I hung it on a railing, like any other piece of lost property, and turned out the lights.

  At home the safari show had ended. Trina reported that the baby hippopotamus had learned to swim.

  “Here,” I said to Viv, handing her the keys. “Did its mother teach it?”

  “Not really. She just led it into the water. The father was off somewhere.”

  “Fetching missing schoolbooks,” I said.

  And so in a couple of sentences, in less than a minute, I did to Viv what she had done to Claudia; I let the opportunity to tell the truth pass. I lied. I was helping Trina choose her pajamas when it came to me that the glove of the first break-in was not some sinister message, but the result of Ben’s inability to hang on to even his few items of clothing.

  The next day when I returned from my lunchtime walk, an envelope lay on my desk with the words “Thank you!” written in black marker. I put it at the back of my desk drawer and noted the code for the alarm in my appointment book. Like those householders who hung a picture of Mercury on their doors, I was committing a small crime, I told myself, to prevent a large one.

  17

  AS THE ANNIVERSARY OF my father’s death approached, each day was both itself and the day it had been a year ago. I woke with the same feeling of terror that he might have died in the night, carried the same burden of dread through my appointments and duties. If only I was stronger, or cleverer, or richer, or more eloquent, if only I was a better person, I could save him. The actual anniversary was an abyss. I could not imagine how I would get from the day before to the day after. Then my mother phoned and suggested we go to Gloucester to mark the occasion.

  “I thought about Walden,” she said, “but Edward loved the beach, and we’ll be closer to Scotland.”

  “It’s a Tuesday,” I said, as if this were an insuperable objection.

  “I already told my assistant I won’t be in. Can’t
Leah take over your appointments?” She had it all planned. The five of us would drive to Gloucester, remember my father on the beach, and have lunch in a local restaurant. I put down the phone, my dread deeper than ever. Later that day in the bathroom mirror, I noticed how the lines on my forehead had begun to mimic my father’s.

  My mother must have phoned Viv separately. That evening at supper she announced she’d arranged for the children to have the day off from school. “What shall we do?” she said. “We could bring some of Edward’s favorite poems to read? Or put a message in a bottle and throw it out to sea? Or tell stories about him?”

  Trina said she would draw a picture of Edward to go in the bottle. Marcus said he’d write something and attach it to a kite. He had heard about some country—Japan? Korea?—where people used kites to send messages to the dead.

  I spent several evenings going through family albums, searching for a photograph to put in the bottle. My father’s illness, which in life I had often managed to ignore, was in pictures clearly visible. He was always holding on to something—a tree, a wall—or someone—my mother, me. There were even several photos of him at Windy Hill, holding on to a horse. I chose one of him walking in the Adirondacks and slipped it into a bottle along with one of Nabokov’s tail feathers.

  Tuesday was overcast, miraculously still and a little above freezing. My mother arrived at our house soon after ten. Viv had offered to drive, but as we approached her car, she suddenly exclaimed: she’d forgotten to get gas. Could we take mine? Later I realized she had already begun to keep the gun in the trunk of her car.

  We were nearing Gloucester when Trina asked if Edward would be able to hear us.

  “I don’t think so,” said my mother, “but no one knows for sure. We’re honoring his memory.”

  “Like Greyfriars Bobby?” Marcus said.

  My father had told the children the story of the little dog who, for years, went every day to sit by his master’s grave. Viv and I had visited the churchyard when we were in Edinburgh.

  Even on the beach there was almost no wind. The sea was a dark green and the sky was like a painting, the gray streaked with yellows and pinks and oranges. It was a perfect day except for Marcus and his kite. We’ll take a walk, Viv promised, on the next windy day. We lined up, my mother and I, the children, and then Viv, looking across the ocean to Scotland.

  “We’re here,” my mother said, “to remember Edward John Stevenson, our beloved Edward, who died a year ago today.” She described how they’d met at university in Edinburgh. How they’d walked around the city, talking about politics. At one point he’d thought of trying to run for Parliament. Then he got a job working for British Rail and fell in love with trains. Life wasn’t fair, he used to say, but everyone deserved a good train service. She read a poem he had known by heart: “The Night Train.”

  Next Trina read a list of the things she liked about Edward: that he did double knots in his shoelaces, that he called jimmies hundreds and thousands, that he gave her a guinea pig for her fourth birthday, that he talked to Nabokov and tried to answer her knock-knock jokes. Marcus explained about his kite and how it had a private message for Edward. He liked that Edward could imitate all kinds of machines and always came to watch him swim.

  Viv described her first meeting with Edward—he had shown her his asparagus beds—and how much he’d enjoyed visiting the stables. While the waves came and went, she read several haiku, some by Basho, some by my father.

  “Dad,” said Trina. She tugged my sleeve, and I understood it was my turn to speak.

  “Edward—”

  I cleared my throat and tried again. “Dad, I don’t know what to say. I remember coming home from school. It was June and you’d been cutting the lawn and everything smelled of grass. Mum was away, and we had supper in the garden. You said we could stay up as long as the swallows were flying. You taught me to be kind and truthful and not to judge other people. You’re the person I feel standing behind me—”

  I stared at the waves and blinked and stared. Then I raised the book I had brought and read Shakespeare’s sonnet: “From you I have been absent in the spring.” Line by line, I thought, I can’t continue. Line by line, I did. Line by line, my father drew closer until, by the final couplet, I sensed him standing beside us on the wet sand.

  Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,

  As with your shadow I with these did play.

  My mother had brought a bunch of white roses. She gave each of us some flowers to throw into the waves. I waded out as far as I could in my rubber boots and threw the bottle containing the photograph, the feather, and the message towards Scotland.

  18

  I KNOW NOW THAT DURING those snowy weeks, when Viv claimed to be so busy at the stables, she was also visiting a shooting range. She used her weekly trips to the riding school in New Hampshire to cover her tracks and to justify the sudden increase in take-out meals, which delighted the children. At the range she found herself in the company of people who regarded a gun as no different from a screwdriver. Live free or die. Scotland was united with England in 1603 and, despite the efforts of Bonnie Prince Charlie (and others), has remained part of that more populous, more prosperous country for four centuries. Perhaps that is why honesty and integrity have always mattered more to me than freedom. Of course there are degrees, but who, after all, is ever free? As a son, a brother, a doctor, a father, a husband, an employee, and an employer, my life has been governed by rules, and mostly for the better. I am glad that someone paves the roads, makes me send my children to school, regulates my business, checks the ingredients in my food, stops my neighbor from burning down my house, sends the fire brigade when they do.

  But I am getting ahead of myself. A few days after our visit to Gloucester, Jack phoned to ask if Marcus had swimming practice that afternoon. “I’ve got cabin fever,” he said. “Can I come and watch?” I was about to refuse—my day was already complicated—but something in his voice stopped me. Leah took over my last appointment. I whisked Nabokov home, collected the children, and was at Jack’s apartment a few minutes early. While he got ready, Marcus and Trina played with his computer, talking nonsense into the microphone and giggling when it appeared on the screen.

  “There’s a picture of Mercury,” Trina said.

  She was pointing to a photograph, one I hadn’t seen before, on the wall over Jack’s desk. A white horse stood in a field; a man was holding its bridle. “Actually,” Jack said, “that’s his mother, Moonshine, with Michael.” Hilary had hung it there, not wanting to see it every day.

  So this, I thought, stepping closer, was the architect of all my troubles: a slight man of medium height, wearing a white shirt and jeans. Save for the intensity with which he gazed at the horse, he looked entirely unremarkable.

  We dropped Trina off for her violin lesson and drove to the pool. While Marcus headed to the changing rooms, I led the way to the bank of seats, where half a dozen parents were already checking their phones. When we were seated in the front row, Jack said, “Swimming pools are so intense. Shut your eyes.”

  I did. Breathing in the warm, muggy chlorinated air, listening to the splashing and the echoing voices, I felt calmer than in days. “Tell me what they’re doing,” Jack said. I opened my eyes and described Marcus, his teammates, and their coach, a woman with hair even shorter than Viv’s and the endearing habit of clapping her hands and exclaiming, “Good work.” Then I asked if he and Hilary were still going swimming. He had told me they’d started going to the Y together.

  “We’re not doing anything,” he said. “Hil phoned saying she wasn’t feeling well and then left a message saying she had the flu. Since then I’ve heard nothing for three days and seven hours.”

  “So call her.”

  “I have.” He slammed his hand down on the bench. “I called asking how she was feeling. I called asking if there was anything I could do. I called asking if I should get tickets for a concert. In the old days I’d have gone over to her hous
e. When my girlfriend Marie-Claire dumped me, I tore a sink out of the wall.”

  I said that flu was very debilitating. “Viv was completely flattened at New Year. I could take you to her house.”

  “So could a taxi. If she doesn’t want to see me, there’s no point. My charging around never did really work. Now I’d just be some blind guy, tripping over chairs.”

  His words were so bitter, his expression so bleak, that I turned back to the pool and said they were practicing flip turns. Marcus’s was a bit splashy. Jack said he used to do great turns.

  “You still could,” I said, “if someone counted down the distance. Did the two of you have a row?”

  “The good old British row. Not that I’m aware of. The last time I saw her, we went to the movies and ate Mexican food. I don’t think I got salsa on my face. But a dozen things could have happened to make her realize having a blind lover is crazy. That’s the trouble with silence. It can mean so many things. An atom bomb might be about to fall. A dog might be taking a crap.”

  Beside him I shifted uneasily. “Sorry,” he said. “Rampant self-pity is a drag. People have ditched me before, but I always had anger to fall back on.”

  “So why not get angry now?” From the pool came the sound of clapping, followed by “Good work.”

  Jack spread his hands. “It was only ever a way to hide from the pain. Now I can’t do that shit anymore. I just have to sit with the pain, and let me tell you, it’s torture to feel so fucking helpless.”

  I remembered Bonnie in my office, swearing. As if I’d spoken aloud, Jack said, “How’s the school dinner lady?” He might have given up on anger, but he had not lost his edge. I said her surgeon had reported that, as I’d suspected, she had had several operations as a child. There was significant scarring, which might compromise the success of her recent operation.