The Players Come Again

by Amanda Cross

  “No. Not this time of year. I’ll do it. You can concentrate on finding restaurants for us to dally in.”

  “Did you eat in restaurants when you were last here?”

  “No, but then I wasn’t here alone; besides being a vegetarian, Lavinia eats very modestly. I went to Selfridge’s incredible food floor one day and bought cheeses and other goodies, and we ate those with bread and crackers I picked up around here. Lavinia makes her own wine too, which is really quite tasty.”

  “Well, let’s us do the same, except for pubs,” Kate said. “Pubs for lunch and cheese for supper; we shall do very well. Now do call the bank before they decide to close on us. I’ll unpack.” And Kate, grabbing her suitcase, marched happily upstairs where Anne, as she prepared to telephone, could hear her tramping about and exclaiming with delight.

  When she spoke to the proper person at the bank, a man with a quite dignified manner on the phone, she was informed that she could come tomorrow to collect the belongings from her vault, that she would need several items of identification with photograph, and that she might ask for him in person. They would be happy if she had brought some of their past invoices with her to show by way of further identification.

  “One would think it was jewels,” Anne said. “Gabrielle’s papers may be worth more to me and even the world, but they do make me feel as though I should bring along an armed guard. Well, I am bringing you.”

  The next morning they set out for Archway Road where they caught the bus for London. At Kate’s request, they climbed to the upper deck (smoking allowed) and watched the streets and houses as they passed—Kentish Town, Camden Town, ending up near the Charing Cross Road. They walked to Oxford Street, where at Marks and Spencer they purchased two bags, sufficient, Anne thought, to hold all the papers.

  “Perhaps we should get a third, just in case,” Kate said, suddenly worried about not being able to carry off all the papers at once, or having to crush and perhaps crumble them by packing them too tightly.

  Kate could not quite subdue the sensation of being involved in some sort of secret plan, some undercover plot to fool the other side, whoever they might be. Could there be any two people on a mission arousing less interest in the populace, general, criminal, or subversive? Really, she thought, looking at Anne and herself when they had paid for the bags and were leaving the store, one could hardly find two less provocative individuals if one worked at it with both hands for a fortnight.

  Kate thought the bank people looked a little startled at their entrance encumbered with large, obviously empty bags, but Anne, putting on her executive manner, asked for the man she had talked to yesterday, and sat down to wait. Kate wondered if anticipation was as clearly written on her face as on Anne’s. Probably. Excitement was to be expected if one was redeeming what had been put away in such a dramatic fashion and with such an apparent need for haste those many years ago. Anne had written that she felt then as though the Gestapo were on her trail; now they again felt somewhat the same sensation. Perhaps, Kate thought, we live in a world where it comes naturally to think of ourselves as spies. Yet spies implied betrayal, and here there was no betrayal. Or was that the whole point, that there had been? That Gabrielle had been betrayed, and her name was about to be cleared; her name, that is, as a separate person and not the wife-of-a-famous-writer.

  They did not wait long. The bank manager, or whoever he was, the man in charge of vaults perhaps, invited them into his office, examined Anne’s papers and identification with great care, and then prepared to lead them downward to the vault area. Clearly, he had taken Anne at face value; a sixty-year-old woman, more or less, had to be herself, unless she was pretending to be another sixty-year-old woman, which would have required more extensive accumulation of false documents than this man found it possible to attribute to Anne. But why am I so aware of fraud? Kate wondered. It is all straightforward now. Either the papers will be wonderful or they will be a total loss. That was all there was to it.

  The vault was a large one, just as Anne had said it was. It must have cost a pretty penny to maintain all these years, and Kate wondered if Gabrielle had thought of that. Perhaps she didn’t expect that the papers would remain so long sequestered in expensive quarters.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t decide to remove them long before this,” Kate said to Anne as they awaited the man’s long process with keys and forms.

  “But I never wanted to think of all that again. It was a new life I was starting, a life in which Dorinda and all her connections, famous or not, were to have no part. After I left the bank, and learned that Gabrielle had gone to the hospital, after I cabled Eleanor, I went into a decline, collapsed in a heap, sank into a kind of trough: honestly, I don’t know how to explain it, but somehow it became clear to me that I had to begin living as Anne Gringold, and not as a ghost still haunting the Goddards, the Foxxes, and the Jersey shore.

  “I had been frightened. I don’t know why, but I had been. And I could tell no one. So I decided upon the only therapy that occurred to me: an absolutely clean break. Oh, I went to visit Gabrielle, as you know, but she was gone from this world and so, in a sense, was I. Apart from paying the bank’s charges I no longer thought at all of my childhood. It was only when I wrote my memoir that I was able to speak of the papers and to begin thinking again about the past. That, of course, was after I talked to Eleanor. I’m glad now I got the whole thing down on paper and began to remember such a vital part of my history again. But in between there had to be a time when I lived a wholly other life, wholly as myself.”

  Then the man and his assistant had the vault open, and the papers lay there, piled up, starting to yellow around the edges but not yet, Kate was glad to see, brittle. She held one of the sheets up to the light, looking for the watermark, and saw that Gabrielle had used 100 percent rag paper; either that was what was sold her, or she had some sense of preserving her work. Perhaps that was the kind of paper Foxx wrote on, so she did too, particularly if she decided that her manuscript, because unpublished, had to last at least as long as his.

  It took some time to move all the papers out of the vault, laying them down neatly, keeping them in the same order, not crushing or folding them in the bags. As Anne pointed out, the papers had probably not been in any particular order when she locked them away, so that it was unlikely that they were now going to be easily sorted. Indeed, it might take days, weeks, to get them into any proper order, if indeed an order could be discovered. For all that, Kate felt rather as Donald Johanson did when he found the fossilized bones of the earliest hominid, whom he would name Lucy: Perhaps once in a very few lifetimes a person is privileged to come upon a discovery that will shift some established and widely held view, that will, in its own way, transform human knowledge. Kate felt that this was such a moment, and she had time to wonder how odd it was that this should have happened to her of all people, and exactly in this way.

  When the papers were all packed away (and they had had, after all, to use the third bag Kate had insisted on) the bags became remarkably heavy: paper is no lightweight. Several of the men in the bank helped Anne and Kate to carry the load to the street and commandeer a taxi—a real London taxi, as Kate remarked with relief.

  The driver was a woman which seemed, as did everything on this fateful day, to be significant, as though they were all in a film someone was making, and the decision to have a woman driver had been reached, logically, after extended conferences. The driver was both pleasant and accommodating, and helped them lug the bags into the house in Highgate. When they had arrived. Kate offered her a cool drink while Anne stood over the bags as though they might walk away if she took her eye off them; the driver accepted a glass of water (fortunately, since Anne’s friend did not approve of commercial soft drinks) and seemed pleased with her large tip. So far so good.

  Anne unlocked the door to the sitting room and they dragged the bags in there. The dining room may have had the advantag
e of a large table on which to work, but it also had French windows leading out to the garden which suddenly seemed perilous, and besides, they needed somewhere to eat. Moving all the furniture back against the walls, they made themselves comfortable on the floor and began to unpack the bags, putting the papers in abritrary piles but sneaking occasional looks to see if any pattern presented itself. Anne said she remembered feeling this way when she and Dorinda waited for Nellie’s first arrival. Kate could not remember ever having felt quite this way before. The moment resembled other moments of joy or achievement or passion, resembled but was far from the same. And when, Kate thought, did I last crawl around a floor like someone laying tiles?

  “It’s a novel,” Anne said, who had been looking at the sheets of paper more closely than Kate. “It’s got dialogue, and people have names, and places are described. Look here: see what I mean?”

  Kate crawled to Anne’s side of the floor and looked. She read a page, and then picked up other pages from other piles, moving, amazed, from one pile to the other, reading pages from all of them. Suddenly she found herself wishing Reed could be there now, lounging in one of the pushed-back chairs with his long legs stretched out, sharing her excitement and delight. But there was only Anne.

  She sat back on her heels. “It’s a novel all right,” Kate said. “It’s another Ariadne. The characters have the same names, it takes place in the same scenes, at least as far as I can tell, but it’s altogether different. Look, it has the same first sentence: page one, chapter one. ‘He is coming tonight, she thought; one more day of waiting.’ ”

  “I haven’t read Foxx’s novel since we were kids,” Anne said. “Maybe I better run out and buy a copy.”

  “Let’s first see what order we can find by the page numbers.”

  They scrambled for a time among the piles, soon reaching the same sad conclusion. “She’s numbered each chapter beginning again with page one,” Anne said. “You know that was the beginning because it said chapter one, page one, but if we find a page six there isn’t a clue as to which chapter it belongs to. Why couldn’t she have put the chapter number with each page number or have sensibly numbered all the pages in sequence?”

  It was a rhetorical question, but Kate answered it. “I think she probably wrote one chapter at a time, in stolen, secret moments. She’d probably hidden the rest of the manuscript away somewhere. She probably didn’t remember how many pages she’d already written. Maybe we had better get a copy of Foxx’s Ariadne; since it was clearly the scaffolding on which she wrote her novel, it might give us a clue as to which chapter we’ve got a page of as we go through the papers. Anyway, it’s better than not having any guide at all.”

  “Somehow I think she’d be horrified to know we based her papers on Foxx’s work.”

  “Then she should have ordered them better,” Kate said with some asperity. “Besides, I rather think she must have meant this to be read as an answer to Foxx’s novel. Perhaps that was the whole point. Wasn’t she writing Foxx’s novel as she thought it ought to be written?”

  “You’re probably right; but do you think she modeled every chapter on his, all in the same order? Mightn’t the scenes or the order of events be something she would want to change?”

  “Yes,” Kate said, “it might. But I still think we better start with Foxx’s novel, since I can’t think of anywhere else to begin. Can you?”

  “No,” Anne said. “Let’s walk over to the bookstore in Hampstead and buy Ariadne. It’s bound to be in Penguin or something. We can even stop at a pub and celebrate. Although I do feel some trepidation at leaving all her work just lying here.”

  “We’ll lock the living-room door, as we promised,” Kate said, “and we won’t be gone long.” While she was speaking, the cat, who had up to now ignored them except for allowing them to let her in and out and provide meals, came into the room and, after a certain amount of reconnoitering, settled down on a stack of papers. “She’ll watch them for us,” Kate said.

  “It’ll mean locking her in here with them.”

  “Well,” Kate said as they stood at the living-room door, we’ll give her a chance to leave if she wants to. “Come on pussens,” Kate said, holding the door open, shutting it to declare her intentions, and then holding it open again. “Do you want to stay or leave?”

  The cat rearranged herself on her stack of papers, and closed her eyes. “Stay,” Kate said. Anne locked the door, they locked the outer door and set off for Hampstead.

  This was, Kate realized, one of those days when everything would work. The bookstore had a copy of Ariadne. There were days like that, there was no explaining them, they were a miracle, just as there were days when nothing went right. Life was like that, after all, Kate thought, even if we don’t choose to make too much of it and risk sounding like solitary solipsists or believers in an ordained personal destiny.

  “Come on,” Kate said. “Let’s get that celebratory drink.”

  “I’m worried about the papers,” Anne said, obviously recognizing a certain irrationality in the remark.

  “I know; so am I. But we have to conquer that. We can’t stand guard over them day and night. Look at it this way; if a thief did break in, the papers would be the last thing he’d want.”

  “He might be cold and use them to light a fire.”

  “What we need,” Kate said, “is a drink.”

  The task before them, even after the reassurance of cheese and pickle sandwiches washed down with the best English ale, was overwhelming. They had hundreds of pages, with no clue as to which page numbers went in which chapters.

  “There is only one way to begin,” Kate said.

  “Read Emmanuel Foxx’s beastly novel, I suppose,” Anne retorted.

  “Even before that. We have to make stacks of all the pages of the same numbers. Then, when we’ve got all the page ones together, all the page twos together, and so on, we shall have to decide which page one goes with which page two . . .”

  “And so on.”

  “Exactly. Let’s begin with the page-one pile over here.”

  “If you say so,” Anne muttered. “I thought I was supposed to be the one with the business sense and the orderly mind.”

  “You are,” Kate said. “This requires an enthusiasm more appropriate to nursery games. Look, after we’ve decided where each pile is to go, preferably in numerical order since any order, however elementary, is welcome, you call out the pages and I’ll run around and put them each in its proper pile. Does that sound okay?”

  “It sounds exhausting but inevitable.” Anne lowered herself to the floor, and pulled a stack of papers toward her. “I’m ready when you are,” she said.

  “Okay. I’ve got the places for piles over here,” Kate said, meanwhile stacking all the papers as near to Anne as she could get them. “You could sit in a chair and bend over, you know.”

  “No. If I’m going to be bending down all the time, I might as well start down. Less wear and tear on the lower back, though rather more on the thighs,” she added as she leaned from a sitting position to move some papers. “Ready? Let’s go.”

  The following hours were hectic; Anne and Kate resembled nothing so much as two rather dotty dames engaged in some sort of witchlike maneuver. Anne would call out a number: “eighteen” for example. Kate would grab the page, rush over to the stack designated “eighteen,” and add the page to it, written side up. They got quite good at it, and really developed what to Kate seemed a remarkable performance of speed and coordination. But after hours of this, she began to feel that if she bent over one more time her back might well refuse ever to straighten up again. She suggested a walk, a return to the pub, and refreshment.

  “Would you prefer tea? It’s almost time,” Kate said to Anne. “Scones and jam and a fine upper-class English repast?”

  “I think I would prefer steak and kidney pie, beer, and a fine working-class English r
epast, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Preferable to me,” Kate said, “though I fear the Hampstead pub is no more working class than we are. Still, it beats tea.” And once again locking up the rooms, leaving the cat this time in the garden, they set out. Kate suggested that they go by way of the bookstore, as there were several other books she wanted to buy.

  “You can’t be thinking of reading anything to do with anything else, can you?” Anne asked.

  “Of course not,” Kate said. “Silly question.” In the bookstore, she equipped herself with Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, the volume on Occidental Mythology, and a book she found on the secondhand shelf, proving yet again the day to be one of serendipity and all other good fortune: The Find of a Lifetime: Sir Arthur Evans and the Discovery of Knossos, by Sylvia L. Horwfitz. Thus armed, and with Anne carrying Foxx’s novel, of which they planned to make an outline, they proceeded to the pub.

  When they returned, considerably refreshed and reinvigorated, they devoted a few more hours to their page-sorting task, and then, over a nightcap, sketched a rough outline of Foxx’s chapters in Ariadne. At midnight they separated, Anne to sleep—she was used to early mornings and early nights—and Kate, who seldom slept before one a.m. or rose before nine a.m. if she could help it, to contemplation of the two books she had just purchased for references to Crete, Cnossus, Minoan civilization, for it seemed to be called one of those things. Although there was no way Gabrielle could have read either of the books, since both were published after her death, Kate was certain that in helping Foxx with his research, if for no other reason, Gabrielle had learned a good deal about the culture from which Ariadne came. For one thing, Evans’s discovery of Cnossus was big news for years, and his book The Palace of Minos, as well as the archaeological revelations that preceded it, must have had a great influence on Foxx in the years when he was writing Ariadne.

  By the next morning Kate had culled two quotations for Anne’s perusal, one longish one from Campbell, and one very short one from Sylvia Horwitz. “Start with Campbell,” Kate said, handing the book to her with the sentences marked off. “First is a quotation from Martin Nilsson about the Minoan religion. The second and third are Campbell himself; all of these points, however, are from Evans and the substance, if not these exact words, would have been known to Foxx, who chose not to notice them, and to Gabrielle, who (and this is my point) did notice them:”