Blue Fire

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  When they had circled the market, with the flower sellers greeting him and sometimes thrusting a bouquet beneath his nose, Niklaas began to make his selections. He seemed to remember exactly where the flowers were that he wanted, and he chose lavishly and with evident pleasure, often calling the market women by name.

  Susan stepped back toward the street and took out her light meter. Only color film would truly do justice to this display, and she had none in her camera at the moment. Nevertheless, she was interested in the central figure of her father, the smiling flower sellers nearby, the expression on the face of the fat old woman who was returning his cane. She snapped the last two shots on the roll and began to turn the film on its spool. When she looked up again, she saw Thomas Scott waiting near the entrance to the market.

  Niklaas raised a finger, as if he knew he would be there, and Thomas came to gather up the flowers the girls had wrapped into cornucopias with paper and string.

  Susan bought a few roses and a bunch of green chinkerichees for herself. She had loved these South African “chinks” as a child, with their green buds that climbed a long stalk and would open later into long-lasting white flowers.

  When she walked back to the car with her father, he offered her a lift home, but she thanked him and refused. The car drove away and she returned to the scented garden for the blind and sat on the bench which she and Niklaas had shared. There was much that she wanted to think about here in this quiet place.

  One thing she had learned this morning and it was something she had never believed in before. Niklaas van Pelt had loved his wife deeply. He still retained for her a tenderness that he succeeded in hiding most of the time. Apparently he had reached a state of acceptance and understanding, so that he did not blame her for running away. Yet, in spite of this, Claire had raised her daughter with the belief that Niklaas had cared for neither of them, had not wanted them, had somehow betrayed them. For the first time a faint doubt about her mother began to rise in Susan’s mind.

  More than ever now she felt a reluctance about delving deliberately into the past. Whatever she found was sure to injure one or the other—her father or her mother. Yet she knew she must take the action she had promised Dirk. One way or another, she must have the answer.

  14

  When she reached home Susan was eager to see how her new pictures had turned out. She went directly to her little darkroom to develop the roll of film. Since her enlarger had not yet arrived, she could not complete her work as perfectly as she wished, but she could at least develop the film and make the first contact prints.

  Just before lunch she finished her work and took the roll out to hold it up to the light. The shots of her father looked as if they had come out well. She hung the strip up to dry and was ready when Willi came to call her to lunch.

  The thoughtful, shutaway time in the darkroom had increased her feeling that she must wait no longer to take the first step back into the past. She would not wait for Dirk to make the arrangement for her to visit her father’s house. She would go there this afternoon on the very heels of Niklaas’s kindness to her this morning and would hope that he might hear her request receptively.

  After lunch she set off for Protea Hill. The colored maid admitted her and showed her into the living room, where French doors stood open. Afternoon sun shone into the room and she walked to the doors and looked out. On the terrace John Cornish sat before a table on which rested a portable typewriter. He looked up at once and saw her.

  “Do come and talk to me,” he said, as though he expected nothing but friendliness from her. “I’m getting nowhere today. Cape Town distracts me and so does the feeling of spring.”

  She crossed the flagstones to the low wall of the terrace. From here Devil’s Peak was behind her, and she could see the full sweep of the Lion, from its tawny stone head to the flanks that reached toward the sky.

  “I’ve had no chance to thank you for arranging a meeting with your father the other day,” Cornish said. “Considering the rather brutal way I’d blurted out the story to you, it was kind of you to help me.”

  “I didn’t do it for your sake,” Susan told him frankly. “I wanted to see my father stop you from writing whatever you had planned. I had no idea that it would wind up with you here in his house.”

  John Cornish continued to study her with his oddly intent gaze until she began to feel uncomfortable beneath the scrutiny. There was never any knowing what he thought, or what plots this man might be hatching. There was still something in his purpose with her father that she did not understand and that made Dirk feel that he was dangerous. Was it, she wondered, because there was even more to what Niklaas van Pelt had done in the past than John Cornish had originally brought to light? Since her encounter with her father this morning, she disliked such a suspicion. But what else could Dirk mean?

  Idly Cornish tapped the space bar on his typewriter. “How is your photography coming?” he asked.

  This was a safe enough topic and she told him about the picture story she was planning and her efforts to get beneath the placid surface of Cape Town life. Before she was through, her father came to the door of his study and stepped out upon the terrace.

  “Susan?” he said and waited for her response.

  The softer mood of the morning was gone and he was distant again, even a little forbidding. She rose to greet him, but before she could state the reason for her visit, he drew a ring of keys from his pocket and began to detach one of them.

  “Dirk tells me you want to explore the house,” he said. “You’re welcome to do so now if you like. You may go into any room you please—even Mara’s and John’s, with their permission. And of course my own. There’s only one door you’ll find locked. This is the key for it.”

  Her problem was solved more easily than she had expected. Relieved, she thanked him and returned to the house with the key in her hand. In the downstairs hallway she stood looking about for a moment. The great Chinese vase, filled now with African poppies her father had bought this morning, stood on the hall chest, a glowing splash of color in gloom that sunlight did not penetrate. But now she had no desire to look through the downstairs rooms.

  Quickly she mounted the stairs, following the right-angle turn to the floor above. Near the top was the open door to a room she remembered as her father’s. She merely glanced in and went on. It was not her father whom she sought up here. Across the hall a second door stood open and she saw that this was the guest room John Cornish must be occupying. She glimpsed a desk with manuscript pages spread out upon it, and on a tall dresser the framed picture of a pretty, smiling woman.

  Hastily she moved away, not wanting to pry. Somehow the picture surprised her. In her mind John Cornish had come to be more a symbol than a man. He was the well-known author, and more recently a rather sinister figure who had stepped threateningly into her own life. She had no idea who the woman in the picture could be—wife, fiancée, sister? No one had ever mentioned a woman in connection with him.

  She crossed back to the room next to her father’s. This had been her mother’s room, as she knew very well. Was it here that she would need the key? But the knob turned under her hand and the door opened at her touch. It was strange to have her returning memory of the room erased in a flash. Everything had been changed. There remained not a stick of furniture that her mother had used, though this was clearly a feminine room. A pale-blue negligee lay across the bed and there were jars of cream and bottles of perfume upon the dressing table.

  For an instant a queer vertigo possessed her. It was as if the world about her whirled and fell into angry sound and she felt with compelling conviction that something dreadful was about to happen. She steadied herself and closed the door upon the wave of fragrance that she recognized as Mara’s French perfume. She had been half afraid that she might see a picture of Dirk upon the dressing table, but there was nothing save those bottles and jars and boxes. Yet it was not her sense of Mara’s occupancy that had caused this sudden dizzines
s. For a moment it had been as though something had reached out of the past to smother her in nightmare fear. But as she stepped back from the threshold her head cleared and the oddly threatening impression was gone.

  Shaken, she moved on toward the rear of this upstairs hall. It was her own room that she was now approaching. There was no fear in her now, no sadness. She had loved this room as a child, and had always looked forward to returning to it for the summer months that the family spent in Cape Town. There was no need to try the door. She knew it would be locked, knew the key she held would open it. The key slipped easily into place, but before she turned it she closed her eyes and rested her forehead for a moment against the darkly varnished wood. This time she did not want memory to be suddenly dispelled, and she called back a clear vision of the room in detail, impressed it upon her consciousness so that it might be recalled even if everything in the room was different. Then she pushed the door open and stepped across the sill.

  Her first impression was of a place that was dark and dusty and long unused. There was a stuffy odor and the very opening of the door roused a stirring of dust. As her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, she saw that all was the same as it had been when she was a child. There was a small bed and a low bookcase still filled with rows of books. A worn leather hassock stood before the bookshelves as if it had been used only yesterday by a little girl who loved to read. There was a small desk, and a chair too, and a full-sized chest along one wall.

  Softly Susan crossed the room, hesitant to disturb whatever was left here of her childhood. She opened the casement window and unhooked green shutters to push them outward. In the frame of the open window the full sight of the mountain, gray and rocky and massive, caught away her breath. This was the view she best remembered, and it was the one she had both loved and feared. Sometimes the mountain had seemed her friend and guardian. Its strength and eternal presence had seen her through many a childhood problem. Yet at other times that mass of rock could seem relentless in its judgment of her. There had never been any way to hide from the mountain. It knew everything.

  The block of the lower cable-car house made a spot of white at the place where the slope began to steepen. As she watched, a tiny car started upward, rising like a bead upon an invisible thread. Up, up, slowly—and there was its counterpart coming down. The cars passed like the figures in a formal dance and each disappeared into its own white cubicle at the foot and at the top. The mountain remained unmoved, untouched by this display of human engineering. In spite of the continuous assault made upon it, no human figures could be seen along that vast expanse of the table. The mountain would have dwarfed them, made them invisible. Only when one came close could an occasional climber be seen, finding his precarious way up that great face. The easier paths were hidden in ravines, or lay out of sight on the other side. Every year the mountain took its toll in human sacrifice. Its strength and immobility affected all Cape Town, set a stamp upon it, but sometimes its influence and import were less than benign. Yet every child who grew up in the Cape, both colored and white, loved to go climbing. Last Sunday, on her day off, Willi had gone up the mountain on a date with Thomas, and Susan knew that if she had stayed here as a child she would sooner or later have gone up the mountain herself.

  She turned her back now on its stern face and looked at the room. She found it both touching and disturbing to realize that her father had kept her room exactly as it had been in the days of her childhood. Had he expected that she would someday return? Had he kept it waiting for her, even though he had wiped the memory of his wife’s room from existence?

  There was a tightness in Susan’s throat as she went to the chest that stretched along one wall. It was a fine old kist made of beautifully grained stinkwood and it had been given to her by her father to keep her treasures in. She did not question now what she would find inside. If all else had not been changed, this, surely, would remain the same.

  She pulled over the leather hassock and sat down before the chest, pushing the heavy lid back against the wall. Sure enough, an all-too-familiar jumble of toys lay within. Not all her toys, it was true, but only those she had brought to the Cape Town house the last time she had journeyed here from Johannesburg. She pulled out a stuffed toy rabbit with one pink glass eye and grayish fur. There was a small box camera with a broken lens, a china doll with a missing arm—how she had loved that vacant-eyed doll. And then—at the bottom of the chest among other odds and ends she discovered a treasure. It was the album of old snapshots she had taken before she had broken the camera.

  This was a find. Perhaps these pictures would be something to jog her memory. She took the big book with its woven grass cover out of the chest and was about to close the lid when she heard a sound from the doorway. Looking up quickly she found Mara Bellman watching her.

  “Your father sent me to see if you were all right,” Mara said. “You’ve been quiet for quite a while and he began to worry.”

  “I’m fine,” Susan said curtly and waited for her to leave.

  Mara, however, came into the room with unconcealed interest.

  “Bluebeard’s closet!” she said. “I always expect to find a body hidden in here, or at least evidence of some crime.”

  Susan said nothing, merely waiting. This was an intrusion she heartily resented and she was not deceived by the other girl’s suddenly affable manner. Mara remained insensitive to her wish to be alone. She strolled idly to the window and looked out at the mountain.

  “We’re allowed in here only once a year, for spring cleaning, you know. The rest of the time your father keeps it locked. I understand he had the room closed when he came down here to live after he was released from prison. Not that he ever saw it again himself. I suppose you know that his blindness came on while he was in prison.”

  “I didn’t know,” Susan said in a low tone. There was pain for her in the sudden revelation. It seemed doubly tragic that he should have gone into prison, never to see the bright free world again. It was as if the prison sentence still lay upon him and always would.

  “How dusty everything is,” Mara said. “I’ll have to get the key away from him soon so the servants can clean up.” Looking about, she noticed the chest beside which Susan knelt. “That, of course, is a treasure,” she added. “A beautiful old piece. It’s odd that it should have been given to a child to use for toys.”

  Restraining her irritation, Susan answered evenly, “When he gave it to me, Father said I was to take care of it. He always believed that children should learn very young to take good care of their possessions. He said this was to be my wedding chest when I grew up. I didn’t dare let it get scratched or dented because he would have been angry.”

  Perhaps Mara did not care for the reference to a wedding chest. She moved on about the room, revealing her impatience now, opening a drawer here, touching a chair there. Ignoring her, Susan reached into the chest again. This time she drew out a faded pink candy box with a heavy content that rattled in her hands.

  At once she remembered what it was and opened it delightedly, to reveal what had been her prized rock collection. She dumped the entire contents out upon the floor and began to identify bits of rock and shell that she had not thought of in years. This bit of shell with the mother-of-pearl colors had come from Camp’s Bay, where her parents had friends and where she had often gone swimming. This piece of black porous rock had come from the top of Table Mountain. Dirk had brought it down after a climb, especially for her collection. Something with a bright gleam to it caught her eye and she held up a piece of quartz.

  Mara had come to stand beside her, watching. “What’s that?” she asked.

  Susan’s resentment at this continued intrusion brimmed over. “The one thing it is not,” she told Mara, “is the Kimberley Royal,” and she looked up at the other girl angrily.

  For once Mara’s poise failed her. A flash of dislike so intense flared in her eyes that Susan was startled. Without another word Mara went out of the room. Thoughtfully Susan
began to put the bits of rock back into the box. She wondered if Dirk had any conception of how much Mara Bellman detested her.

  When everything except the photograph album had been returned to the chest, Susan closed the lid and came out of the room, locking the door behind her. Then she took the key back to the terrace where Niklaas sat talking to John Cornish.

  15

  “Keep the key if you like,” her father told Susan when she would have put it into his hand. “I have a duplicate. You’re welcome to visit the room whenever you like. Everything in it is yours.”

  His manner had not softened and the offer was made almost indifferently. Yet so close was she at that moment to her childhood that the impulse to touch him in a remembered caress was hard to resist. She made no move toward him, however, and only thanked him softly.

  He did not let her go at once. “I’ve been thinking about inviting a few people in for tea to meet you before long,” he said surprisingly. “It’s been a good many years since I’ve entertained in this house, but I believe there are some who would come. There are a few people I would like you to know. Would you have any objection? I’ve already mentioned it to Dirk.”

  “Why, no, of course not,” she told him. “It would be very kind of you.”

  He nodded. “I’ll set the wheels to turning then.”

  She said good-by and nodded to John Cornish, who had risen when she had come out on the terrace and stood watching them both with that look of his that was somehow different, Susan thought, from the way other people looked at you. Always there was an intensity in his gaze, a lively awareness of all that went on around him. Yet there was no knowing what his conclusions were or how he was summing you up.

  “I believe I’ll take a bit of a walk,” John said. “I’ve sat at an unresponsive typewriter long enough for one day. Do you mind if I come a way with you?”