A Fox Inside

by David Stacton

  He considered the breakfast-room. It was supported by four old posts twenty feet high. Cut them through and the whole damn back of the house would tumble down into the slums.

  Yet the view, if anybody ever looked at the view from this room, was beautiful. Despite the view he had no desire to live in this house or any like it. Once he had had, when he was shut out of it, but now he did not want to live in any of their houses. He did not think that they did either.

  He was waiting for Maggie to come downstairs and the breakfast-room was at least cheerful. They had all driven up for the inquest and they were all on edge. Even Senator Ford had come.

  Luke had stayed at Atherton for several days. He had been there this morning. He had got downstairs first, rising early, when the house was deep in shadows mixed with that singularly cheerless steel grey morning light. Wandering through the house was like wandering through a furniture warehouse. He had gone into the library, as the one bearable room that looked lived in, but had then gone through the french windows for a stroll round the lawn. There were no flowers in the garden, only flowering shrubs. They were easy to take care of and Lily obviously had no domestic skills. The dew was heavy on the grass. Looking back he could see his own footsteps walking rapidly away from the house. The air was full of waiting, but he heard no birds. Morning in the suburbs came differently, heralded by a garage door sliding up into the roof, the chirruping of the milkman’s bottles, or the bellow of a generator pumping heat through a distant room.

  When it was eight he went back to the breakfast-room and heard Ethel in the kitchen. He went to the chair at the head of the table that was clearly Lily’s and reaching under it with his foot pressed the buzzer. He did not want to see any of them without something on his stomach. Ethel brought in coffee, tomato juice, grapefruit juice, fried bacon, and scrambled eggs. The first morning he had stayed she had served a woman’s bird breakfast, but had changed soon enough. He looked at the hot bacon, the half-drained fat still bubbling on its lean, in a silver platter, and decided that this was what Ethel must have cooked for Charles. It was clearly a country breakfast, suburban style.

  It was also well cooked.

  What he was trying to get round was the necessity of seeing Lily. Lily had fallen apart and stuck herself together again, but not very well, and it was uncomfortable for all of them. She seemed to have grown heavier. He heard her coming. He looked up and smiled reassuringly.

  “Well, this is it,” he said.

  She had made a special effort this morning, but he could see the grains of powder on her face. She did not look as though she had slept. She had brought down her bag and her coat and her car keys, as though she didn’t want to go upstairs again, and these she laid on the buffet. The coat caught on the edge for a moment and then, the fur allowing no purchase, slid slowly and then more rapidly off the polished wood and landed on the floor with a soft, animal plop. She left it where it was. He started to retrieve it.

  “Oh, let it stay,” she said. She reached under the table and pressed the buzzer more firmly than he had done. “We may as well have some more coffee,” she said.

  “It’s still hot.”

  She shrugged. “It won’t do Ethel any harm to make some more. She’s nothing else to do.”

  Ethel stuck her head through the door, saw Lily, disappeared and came back with a fresh pot already made, a tight smile of triumph on her face. They had gone through that routine for four mornings now. The tight smile had no effect. Lily drank four cups of coffee in a row. She pretended he was not there. It was just as well. It was what he wanted to pretend himself.

  Maggie came in last. “Hello, dear,” said Lily amiably, not meaning a word of it. She had developed a dry knack of looking at them as though they had no clothes on and were lying in the same bed. She didn’t really mean anything by it: it was done involuntarily.

  Maggie said good morning a little too cheerfully and slid sideways into her chair, scooping up her skirt. She was wearing black, as was Lily, and she, too, had brought her bag and hat downstairs. She placed the former on the table at her right, away from Lily. Her dress was too smart. It obviously had not been bought specially for the occasion. It did not give the right post-mortem touch of grief, but instead merely looked well tailored. She glanced at Luke and then reached for the jug of tomato juice. He watched her pour it neatly into her glass.

  Maggie had changed. She had taken on the life that Lily had lost. But it would not do for her to appear too self-confident. Maybe she was awake for the first time in her life, for her aliveness had that special, self-enchanted quality that kittens and young puppies possess, even on the concrete floor of a pound. She reached out and touched his knee under the table. Lily stared at them both and then poured herself another cup of coffee, watching it soak through the heavy mound of sugar at the bottom of her cup. She seemed both subdued and anxious.

  “All I ask”, she said wearily, “is that you behave yourselves.” It was a fragment of disapproval that had somehow lost its edge, but he could hear her honing it. Neither of them answered. Lily looked as though she was expecting something worse. He thought it was a pity about her. She must have been a nice woman once. She had the remains of a nice face.

  The wisps of an old quarrel hovered in the air, like ashes, and somebody had to damp them down for a while. He did not think they would ever dry out and blow away. He realized they were all watching the clock, and having dawdled behind their food, were now rushing towards the half-hour. He dabbled at his mouth with the napkin, folded it in his lap, unfolded it hastily, and put it crumpled on the table. Lily had watched all this attentively. He looked up and caught her eye. She looked relieved. It meant he was leaving. She shifted to watch Maggie, but Maggie’s napkin had dropped to the floor and had not been recovered.

  “Well, we’d better go,” said Luke, after this comedy. He got up and they all followed suit. He picked Lily’s coat off the floor and held it, while she went into the pantry to say good-bye to Ethel. She had to have somebody to say good-bye to. Then, in a clump, they moved through the empty living-room. There was a screech of brakes on the gravel and the doorbell rang. They stopped where they were. Lily out in front, by the sofa, and Luke and Maggie behind, but apart. The slip covers had a pattern of blue and black artichokes in flower. For some reason he found blue and black artichokes annoying. They all listened to Ethel grumble. They even heard her say, “Oh, it’s you.”

  Senator Ford came into the room. He looked testy and sardonic, which was his customary party manner. The three of them shifted position slightly.

  “Morning, Lily,” he said, as though it made no difference that he had not been in the house for several years. He had a trick he liked of unexpectedly picking up where other people left off. “Thought I’d drive Luke to the inquest.”

  Lily merely stared.

  “You’re looking fine,” he said drily. He glanced behind her at Maggie and Luke, and summed that up. He had a battered shapeless felt hat on his head that only gave him an unsightlier Hapsburg jaw than he possessed. Luke wondered if he still had his own teeth—he must have had, for they were crooked and nicotine stained. He talked, though, as though he had a loose denture.

  “Luke was coming with us,” said Lily. “I thought he might drive. I’m so tired.” So she didn’t want to be alone with Maggie, Luke concluded, for it was her habit to do the driving whether she was tired or not.

  Senator Ford grimaced. “Maggie has a licence,” he said. He gave the room a cursory glance and marched back towards the hall. Ethel had left the front door open, and he noticed that. “Thoughtful of her,” he commented without any particular malice that you could put your finger on.

  Lily shrugged and followed him without a word. They all clumped under the porte-cochère, for the morning was cold and misty, before they separated to their cars. Ford had a battered old grey Plymouth with one front fender missing and bashed-in headlights. The chrome had been stripped away for metalwork was not among his interests. He got
into his car and waited for Luke. Luke squeezed Maggie’s hand reassuringly and walked round to the far door of the Plymouth. Ford started first, but Lily’s Cadillac soon passed them, horn honking impatiently. Ford grinned at her. The upholstery of his front seat was ripped and the seat was too far forward so that Ford’s long legs stuck up into the steering wheel. He was a fussy but careless driver. He drove as though he momently expected the dashboard to explode.

  “What gave you this idea?” asked Luke.

  Ford was humming discordantly to himself. He stopped. “Oh, I don’t know. Loving kindness, I guess.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Ford watched Lily’s car receding ahead of them. “They’ve impanelled a grand jury for this thing,” he said. “It might just be misguided family pride, on the other hand it might be sticky. I thought I’d take a look.”

  “Oh.”

  “Grand juries”, said Ford, “are always irritable, autodidactic, and smug. The women love it: it gives them a sense of importance and it gives them a chance to be seen. What more does any woman want? It does not give them brains.” He chuckled. “What did you do to Lily? She looks as though she’d lost her last pup.”

  “She has.”

  “That won’t do her any harm,” said Ford. He started humming again. He wouldn’t drive on the Bayshore Freeway to town, because every time he picked up a paper he saw that someone had been killed on it; so they puttered up through the suburbs, among the heavy traffic, the neon signs, and the eucalyptus trees which, considering the way he drove, were even more dangerous than the Bayshore. This route was maddeningly slow. Luke was anxious, for he did not want Lily and Maggie to be together for too long. Ford cursed all the stop signs. He also gazed moodily through the windshield.

  “Used to be open country twenty years ago and now look at it. You could make the city in forty minutes in those days and now it takes over an hour,” he said. “That’s what Lily always forgot, you know: that anybody could build up around her, people she didn’t even know, people none of us ever knew. She might guess wrong about them sometimes. Like she did about Charles. Even that house, she can’t hang on to it forever, and I never knew why she hung on to it at all. It’s too big for her. Things get smaller. Have you pumped Lily yet?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I can imagine,” said Ford. “Well, you don’t know her. I do. I’ve got something at the back of my mind I might use. If I have to. They’re both lying.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean that they are,” said Ford. “And you’re no fool. You know it, too. It might be a good idea if one of them told the truth a little bit, just for our peace of mind. That is, if Maggie and you are serious, and you look serious.”

  “Maggie’s all right.”

  “But you don’t believe she’s told you quite everything, do you?”

  Luke was silent.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Ford. He hit a traffic-free space and put his foot down on the gas. The car gave a vertical leap and gathered speed, though not very much speed. “It’s like bringing in a well,” he said. “Sometimes you have to go down a long way to get water. Or a long way back. And sometimes you have to soup it up and wait for the explosion.”

  “There isn’t going to be any explosion.”

  “Somebody knows something,” said Ford. “I’ve got a hunch we’ll find out who one of these days. That might be inconvenient. In a way I wish Maggie had done the bastard in. It would make it a pleasure to get her out of it.”

  “Maybe she did.”

  “She didn’t,” said Ford. “Not that I care. And not that you should care either. Do you?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Now you’re lying.” Ford seemed pleased. “The trouble with you is, you’re all too young.” Having said which he concentrated on getting into town.

  They got there about half an hour after Lily, but though the Cadillac stood outside the house, Lily was not there. Nor would Ford come in. “I’ll meet you at the courthouse,” he said. “Don’t feel like seeing what Charles did to the old place.” He drove off, looking determined but very old, probably to sit alone in the Pacific Union Club over his lunch. Luke went into the house.

  Lily had certainly been there. He could not think of anyone else who could have filled the living-room with that many flowers. The effect was the opposite of cheerful. It looked like a funeral, or rather like a living-room after the coffin has been carried out and the flowers have wilted a little. He knew what she had done. She never did anything herself. She had simply phoned up the florists and told them to send over a roomful, and here they were, jammed into every available vase, about ten of them, untouched by human hand. They were mostly blue delphiniums of an expensive length, and larkspur in appendix shades, so that the whole room was in a morbid purple and blue condition. The smell was overpowering. It was the stench of pollen.

  It worried him that neither Lily nor Maggie seemed to be about, but he did not want to go searching for either of them. There was a mess of newspapers on the coffee table. He picked up the phone to call his hotel but it was dead. Probably Lily had had it disconnected, because of the reporters.

  The case had drifted back to the inside pages, which was some consolation. Another few days and Charles would be way back, in the funeral announcements, and then the matter would not interest anyone any longer. If everything went smoothly, that was. He prayed that everything did go smoothly. Maybe Lily’s influence was good for something after all.

  The inquest was not until two-thirty. He wandered restlessly through the house and went into the library. The shades were down and at first he did not notice Maggie sitting at the chair behind the desk. She wasn’t doing anything. She was just sitting there. He pulled up the blinds and saw that a handkerchief was tightly squeezed into a sodden mass in her hand. He looked at her closely. But she had not slipped. For better or for worse, she was alive now.

  “Oh, Luke,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t be in here.”

  “Can we ever get out from under?” she asked. “Can we?” She looked at her handkerchief, uncurling her hand, and then dropped it into the waste-paper basket.

  “Things should go okay,” he said. “They can’t prove a thing.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” He knew it wasn’t.

  “We can try,” he said. He was worried about her, so he spoke too sharply. He went over and leaned against her, burying his face in her hair, and she took his hand.

  “We’ve got to, I guess.”

  “He planned everything so well,” she said. “If you only knew how well. I think he even planned this, sometimes.”

  He looked at his watch. “It’s a quarter to two,” he told her. “You’d better go upstairs and pull yourself together. I’ll wait down here.”

  XVII

  FOR REASONS HE DID NOT ALTOgether understand the inquest was to be held in the City Hall. Senator Ford and Lily were going to meet them there, so he drove over with Maggie, in her old convertible. He had never driven it himself before, and that also marked a change. She seemed to take it for granted that he would drive. She had longer legs than he, so he had to push the seat forward. At the stop signs he reached over and held her hand, on the seat, trying to pump courage into her, though he didn’t feel too confident himself. It seemed to work. He didn’t care who saw them.

  “Thanks,” she said, the first time he did it, but then her hand became smaller, warmer, and more confiding. He hoped she trusted him: she had too; but it was like bringing up a child in five days all the same. And until he knew whatever it was she hadn’t told him yet, he would never be sure of anything.

  The Civic Centre was far out, built on once cheap, flat land, in a section of town that had refused to boom, and that was mostly shanties and cheap lodgings and a derelict skyscraper or two. Maybe city halls everywhere are surrounded like state capitols, by the cheaper, shoddier, more furtive kinds of vice: they seem to attract it.

  It was
not a cheerful part of town and he had trouble parking the car. He thought he found a place close, but a traffic cop waved him on. A tall gangly one very new and efficient in striped breeches and black leather. So they had to walk the whole length of the square, a distance of about a thousand yards. The buildings were in different styles and had the inhuman, malignant atmosphere of all buildings that are not lived in at night. The complex, never finished, had been constructed with an idea of solemn grandeur, but it was only a beaux-arts copy of reality and all the details were wrong. The Federal Building was the newest, the civic auditorium the oldest, and the two forms of ostentation did not jibe. It was a sad, spittle-stained place, whose flowerbeds and low pressure fountains did nothing to help, and whose brickwork was hard to walk on. The usual flea-bitten bums were collected on the library steps, the dirty pigeons clamoured in the air around some bread an old woman was throwing out for them, and the city hall was dingy. It had fallen down in the earthquake and the original armatures had been suited to the replacement, with the result that it looked not like a new building, but like a reconstructed ruin, ready at any moment to topple in on itself. Seagulls roared over its golden dome, screeching pelagic on the air.

  Even in sunlight the square never looked right, and to-day was overcast. He took Maggie’s arm and walked up the stairs, carrying his brief-case on his outer side. He was walking a trifle too rapidly for her.

  The downstairs into which they entered was gloomy and the day had only made it the gloomier. They went to the rotunda. He had forgotten that, an Irish politician having recently died, they had allowed him to lie in state there. He felt Maggie’s fingers tighten on his arm.