“Meaning?” asked Luke.
“Not meaning a damn thing. Except sometimes it’s better to keep your nose out of things. But if you have to stick it in, concentrate on Lily and keep the girl aside. Lily’s had her run. It’s about time someone caught up with her. It’s a thing I’d like to see. Oh, Lily’s the answer. She’s the answer to a lot of tilings. And all you have to do to beat her is outgrow her.”
“You’d like to see her beaten, wouldn’t you?”
“Wouldn’t you?” Ford glanced away from him. “Jerome was a friend of mine. I loved the guy. Pull her down. She pulled everyone else down, and now it’s her turn. Pull her down and let her rot.” He reached under the sofa for the Asthmador tin and couldn’t find it. “Oh, hell,” he said. “When you get to be my age it’s time to quit. I used to know the people who ran everything, and that was living. It’s all gone now. She kicked me out of here, you know. She was a trustee.”
“And Charles?”
“Charles?” Ford seemed to hesitate. “Oh, him. He was just an ambition that blew the wrong way.”
Somehow Luke didn’t think that it was quite that easy. Nothing ever was. But there was no point in telling Ford that. Ford was a shabby old man with a grudge. He always had been. The grudge was wrung out and there was nothing left of him at all. Ford was somebody he had outgrown. He was beginning to wonder now if he hadn’t outgrown the whole lousy crew. Life was better in the south. He didn’t have any part in the hatreds up here. He had wanted a part in the loves, but that was another matter: the hatreds shut him out.
Even now, when he rose to go, though Ford didn’t have anything to say to him, he didn’t want him to go. Nobody wanted him to go. They all hung on, not out of affection, but because they needed something. He left the house in disgust.
Somehow, because it had, he admitted, seemed glamorous and important once, it seemed shabbier than ever now. The trouble with him was that he suffered from a spaniel loyalty that was not even properly fed.
Just to work it off he called a cab and took a drive through the hills. They at least were primitive and green. He didn’t want to succeed in the world really. It was just that he had to do it, because everybody else did.
XII
BY THE TIME HE SWUNG DOWN towards Atherton he felt better. For one thing the orchards were in bloom. He remembered once that one spring afternoon, as the rain was blowing south, he and Maggie had sat in the mustard and the grass under one of these trees, on an abandoned farm above the campus, and had been happy. The petals, wet and clinging, as they fell down sometimes fell on her face, like beauty spots, and on his own, like kisses. He put the remembrance away.
He did not enjoy the taxi. It was ridiculous through that country-side. He would have preferred his own car. He had the driver drop him outside the gates and stood there until the taxi had driven away. Atherton did not seem so fearsome now. Only the silence was disturbing, for it was a brooding silence. For the rest it seemed smaller than it had ten years ago, dustier and more forgotten, despite the new and smaller houses with their bright curtains and raw wood.
He walked up the drive between the walls of ivy. They were less well taken care of than formerly. Some of them were yellow with some kind of rot, and there were spider webs among the vines. The gravel was hard on his shoes. He turned the curve and came in sight of the house, stripped down to an uncomfortably fake Georgian elegance that did not fit its shape. He stood there for a moment, at the distance of the lawn, looking at the house, but except that one of the french windows was open, it looked deserted and non-committal. The sunlight was not kind to it. He did not want to go inside, so stepping across the lawn, which was sopping wet, he made his way round the living-room wing, through heavy hydrangea shrubs with bruised exhibition blooms. He did not know why he did this. Perhaps he was subconsciously reconnoitring.
Buried in the shrubs was a small formal garden with a moss floor and a pool with a plaster statue of a plaster boy holding a discoloured plaster trout. The fountain was not running. Maggie was sitting on a bench, staring down at the turf below her. He stood where he was, watching her for a moment, his head lost in the hydrangeas. He was very close to her and could see what she was watching so intently. It was a double thread of ants moving efficiently towards the other side of the bench. She was completely absorbed, and he thought that in that mood of frighteningly inconsequential absorption, which came over her from time to time for no discernible reason whatsoever, she would be capable of anything. The ability was random, catatonic and amoral. What bothered him was that she seemed so utterly content and pleased by those ants. And it was certainly true: she had never learned to tell the value of one thing from another.
Ford had said save her and it was what he wanted to do, but he couldn’t tell why. It was not quite love. Perhaps it was only the idea of love, which is more durable than the emotion itself. He felt that if he watched her any more he might change his mind, for there was nothing positive in her for him to grasp.
He parted the hydrangeas, dodging his face, where they splattered him with water and stepped out on to the lawn.
“Where are they going?” he asked quietly.
She wasn’t startled. She seemed to take his appearance for granted. She had been very thoughtful and the sun sparkled in her hair and cast unexpected shadows on her face. She looked up and smiled at him happily. “Hello,” she said. “Isn’t it lovely?”
She seemed so unaffectedly pleased, that he was shocked. But after all, what the hell do you say the morning after an unregretted death? She made room for him on the bench and he sat down. Unexpectedly she turned round and kissed him. She broke whatever there was between them just like that. At first surprised, he drew away, and then did not draw away, and slowly felt his arms going round her and his fingers splaying out below her shoulder-blades, slightly astonished to find that there was a real self inside her that he had forgotten, somewhat older than the self he had remembered, and nicer. He remembered, too, that she was not exciting ever until you touched her, and then she became excited herself. It was like knowing two people you liked equally well, but in different ways.
“Things will be better now,” she said, with a simple, childish faith that they would be.
“Yes, I guess they will.” He was sobered by the dangers of that disparate outside and inside of her. He did not know which one he was attempting to defend. “There’s still Charles.”
“I don’t want to talk about Charles.”
“You may have to.”
“I have had to. The police were here. But that isn’t what you mean, is it?”
“What do you mean, they were here?”
“Oh, why talk about it?” she said. “I was only his wife. What would I know?”
“At least you know he’s dead.”
“Oh, yes, I know that.” She looked at him earnestly, drawing her index finger along his thigh. “It’s funny,” she said, “you’ve changed, too. And yet you haven’t. I hoped you’d come out here. That’s why I was waiting, watching the ants.”
He looked down at the ants involuntarily, and as he looked up he saw the windows of the house and Lily standing at one of them. He flushed, seeing that she had been there for some time. She didn’t do anything. She leaned with one arm against the door, watching them. Maggie looked up and saw her, too.
Lily bit her lips. “When you’re through you’d better come in, Luke,” she said. She sounded angry. He glanced at Maggie and went into the house, following the trail of ants which still moved from the house towards the bench. He wondered vaguely why, and then saw that Maggie had laid down a trail of chopped-up apple. It was the sort of useless, concentrated thing she would do. As he turned to shut the french window behind him he saw her bent over the ants again, thoughtfully.
Lily was standing in front of the fireplace. As far as he could tell standing in front of fireplaces was what she did best. In the bright light he looked at her and wondered how she managed to keep a firm hold on her looks. She h
ad slimmed down a lot in the past years.
“Sorry about that,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter. Did she tell you the police were down here?”
“Yes.” He hesitated. “Did she get through it all right?”
“Yes. After all grief wasn’t exactly called for. Not from her, anyhow.”
He didn’t ask her what she meant by that. He thought now that he knew what she meant by that. It surprised him how conscious she made him feel of himself, not anxiously as at San Francisco, but here, on her own ground, absurdly sturdy and irrefragable. Perhaps she felt it, too. If there is ever an involuntary attraction between two people that is not satisfied, perhaps it then persists until it is satisfied. And this one never would be. He sometimes wished he had not been so naïve years ago. Now that he knew so much more about Lily he felt a curiosity to know more. For maybe, like her daughter, she also had two selves. He was happy that by her standards his suit, which was a rich blue with a wide white stripe, was too assertive for this room.
Such things were the wrong things to think about. He thought about them all the same. And as though feeling that some tension had eased between them, he sat down. She joined him and opening a green leather box, offered him a cigarette with fingers that still wore too many dirty diamond rings. He glanced away. Her fingers showed her age.
She lit his cigarette. “I never liked you,” she said.
“I know that.”
“But now it doesn’t matter.” She eyed him through the sudden smoke from the cigarettes. “Well, I’m not afraid of the police. We have friends and we have power. I guess they can be managed.”
“Then what are you afraid of?”
“I?” she asked, as though the idea were new to her. But he saw that it was not new to her. He realized she was trying to establish some kind of tentative contact with somebody, anybody, now that Charles was dead. He wondered what he should say about that. It might be worth a try to say something. On the other hand he didn’t want to antagonize her either.
“Why did she do that?” she asked. “The ants and the apple, I mean. She always does something like that, and you can’t hold on to her. Perhaps you could, but I can’t. Maybe she is mad. She might be. If the worst came to the worst, we can get her off that way. Maybe it should have been arranged before, just like …”
“Just like what?” he asked quickly. But she wouldn’t look at him or answer. He saw she was abruptly scared, but of something he could not put his finger on. “No,” he said. “Maggie’s not mad. She’s lonely and she’s scared, but she’s not mad. She hides whenever she can, but that doesn’t make a person insane.”
“Doesn’t it?” she asked. “I’ve seen her afraid of madness.” Her voice was both worried and at the same time self-satisfied.
“So that’s the way you’ve always worked it.”
“It’s the way her father went. I thought you knew that.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
She flushed. “She wasn’t an easy child,” she said. “She never has been easy.”
“Why should she be?”
“I worried about her.”
“Yes,” he said, “but what way?”
She did not like that. He saw not only that she had over-extended herself and wanted to draw back, but also a good deal else that he had not seen before. With something like pity and disgust he saw it now. You clever bitch, he thought, you goddam clever bitch. So that’s how you got a hold on her.
He looked round the room and saw suddenly how the house could have madness in it, if you worked it right. And he was sure Lily had worked it right, with that horrible, sweet, understanding, social kindness that was the real weapon women always use on each other. There was the portrait in the library, and the room upstairs, and suddenly he felt sorry for Lily. He thought that for once he saw her, not the way we usually see people, as something observed from the outside, complementary to ourselves, but from the inside of herself, restless and bitter and locked up in a body too old for her; afraid that some day somebody might find out just how little there was inside, and how easily it could be hurt; and sticking pins in Maggie to see how much she could stand herself. He decided to try sticking in a few pins of his own, the other way round, to take them out of Maggie.
Unexpectedly Lily reached out and took his hand and patted it. Her skin was shockingly, prematurely old, and the frigid temperature of a dead turkey. In a few years the brown spots would begin to appear on it. It made him sit up with a jerk.
“I went to see Senator Ford,” he said.
“You were one of his boys, weren’t you,” she said innocently. “They say he’s got doddery. And spiteful. He always was spiteful.”
“Honest, though,” he said.
“Do you think so?” She sounded contemptuous. “I could tell you things about him that would make your hair curl.” She looked at his hair. He needed a haircut and the long ends were curling slightly out of place. It didn’t disconcert him one bit. He was enjoying himself now and wondered if Maggie was still watching the ants.
“Don’t you know who that woman is?” he said.
She stopped inspecting his hair. “What woman?”
“At the beach house.”
“Was it a woman?” she asked blandly.
“Yes, it was a woman.” He was sure of it now, but how did he know? Perhaps because with Charles it always was a woman. He tried to suggest that anyhow, and was rewarded with an angry shrug. He looked at Lily curiously, wondering if she was keyed up enough to crack. He rather thought she might be.
“We don’t want trouble,” he said. “We’d better find out. And if you don’t know, who does?”
“I told you I didn’t know.”
“But you do know what I mean, don’t you?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t.” If she hadn’t said that he would have let the matter drop, but she was so patently lying that now he wanted to hurt her. Somebody had to hurt her some day.
“Why not? Charles was your lover, wasn’t he? He certainly wasn’t his wife’s.”
It didn’t have the effect he thought it would have. “Yes,” she said drily. “He was my lover.” She sat back on the sofa and lit another cigarette. “For five years. “Why not? Her father went insane and there wasn’t much in Maggie. A woman can get lonely. And then he married Maggie.”
“Yes, he married Maggie. Why?”
“I suppose he wanted to,” she said coolly. She relaxed a little. “It kept it in the family.”
“That was the idea, wasn’t it?”
“It was his idea,” she corrected.
“Was it?”
“It certainly wasn’t mine.”
“Why not?” he asked, and wondered why they were having what only seemed a matter-of-fact conversation about something he had hoped would make her flare up and give herself away.
She looked down at her dress, retreating inside with the same intensity Maggie had, but more contemptuously. He didn’t mind. If retreating contemptuously was the sole defence she had, she was welcome to it.
“Does Maggie know about you and Charles?” he asked.
“Of course she knows.”
“Did she know when he married her?”
“I presume so. Why on earth shouldn’t she? Maggie does as she’s told.”
“She didn’t this time,” he reminded her. It was the only thing he had said that made her angry.
“You’re cocky,” she said. “But you’re a fool. If you want to play adolescent games in the shrubs, you can, but you won’t do it in my garden. Or in my house. Nor in Charles’s house.”
“You don’t want her to have anything, do you?”
“She doesn’t deserve anything. That isn’t the point. But I won’t allow it, and the papers won’t like it. And the papers might find out.”
“That would be foolish of you,” he said, but he was frightened.
“Do you think I care?” she demanded. “Do you think I care about anything?”
&n
bsp; “Yes, I think you do,” he said, and he did not say it angrily. She glanced at him, surprised at his tone, and he looked back at her, trying to see what there was behind those eyes. But she would not let him see.
“Leave her alone,” she said. “If you’ve got any decency, leave her alone. At least for a while.” She glanced round the room irritably. “This house is so empty,” she said. “It always was.” She stood up and walked towards the door in her high heels that made such a hopefully young sound. She left him where he sat. He did not move. He could hear her moving through the house, making rapidly for the hall, and it seemed to him that from the sound she was going up the front stairs more quickly than she might have done.
He heard a door bang and he thought he heard it lock. And it occurred to him that that was what was wrong: that the house was empty and that it always had been. It did not make him like her any the more, or like Maggie any the less. It solved nothing. He remembered, unpleasantly, how close and warm and different Maggie had felt when she had kissed him, and he thought of Charles, with his cold, hard flesh. He became so aware of Lily that he got up and left the house.
“You’re not old,” he told himself. “Nobody is ever old. But you aren’t young any more either.”
Outside the ants were still trooping towards the apple, but Maggie was not there. If she was still waiting for him she was waiting somewhere else, and he took a walk to investigate. The garden was no longer kept up. It had gone to seed. And perhaps for that reason the farther he got from the house the happier he felt. He stopped and frowned, and found himself staring at a scarlet pepper bush, its long leafy antennae withered by the heat, even here, in the shade. He would have to tell Maggie he loved her some time. It might as well be now, if that would help to keep her calm. He would compel himself to love her, for that was the only way to save her. Therefore love her he would.
XIII
LILY STAYED LOCKED IN HER room. There was no one in the house, but that didn’t prevent her from locking her door, chiefly against that corridor with its bedrooms that were no longer used. There were five bedrooms apart from her own. She went in them sometimes, when the house was empty, just to be sure that there was no one there.
A Fox Inside Page 12
