A Fox Inside

by David Stacton

  “Isn’t that a little soon?” But her voice conveyed no emotion. It was only something for her to say.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.” He glanced down at her with momentary compunction. “What about you?”

  “About me?” She smiled to herself, but not at him. “I’m going back to Atherton,” she said. “I’ll shut this place up.”

  “Why not sell it?”

  “No, I won’t sell it.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I’ll leave that to you. You’ll probably enjoy selling it.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.” He meant it.

  “I don’t think I feel any way.” She glanced up the staircase. She clearly wanted to avoid seeing Maggie. She had been sneaking out of the house, almost as though it were no longer hers. “Oh, go away,” she snapped, “and have done with it.” She blinked rapidly and went out the door. He waited on the stairs until he heard her car start up. In some way he felt sorry. She was alone now. She had lost both husband and lover. Nobody should be alone. It was not compassion he felt, but sympathy.

  Maggie came out of her room. She was only half dressed and she was in her stockinged feet.

  “Hurry up,” he said. “We’re going.”

  “Was that Lily?”

  “Yes.” He crooked back his neck to look up at her. “I ordered breakfast unless you’d rather go right now.”

  She hesitated. “I’d rather go.” She looked at him as though not quite believing that he was there.

  “O.K.,” he said. “I’ll tell the maid not to bother. I’ll wait in the car.”

  He went outside. It was sunny for once, though some fog was still caught among the buildings on the hills. As usual there was nobody out in the street. Pretty soon she came out carrying a handcase. She smiled at him, looking up and down the street, and got into the car. It was amazing how many times they had both looked up and down that street, and he wondered what for, for it was always deserted. There had just been the fear that maybe one morning it wouldn’t be.

  She did not say much, but she watched which way he was going. At the top of Nob Hill he eased the car down past a clanking trolley, diving into the financial district. When he took the road that led to the Bay Bridge rather than the road that led over the sluices of the factory district towards Los Angeles, she let out her breath with a long sigh. Neither of them looked back at the city, but she didn’t look towards the Berkeley hills either. The day was too clear. It made the hills appear too close.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” he said, “but I have to go back to see her.”

  “She won’t really do anything, will she?”

  He noticed she seemed to take it for granted that she could if she wanted to, the way children always believe their elders can punish them, until they are themselves past a certain age.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard to tell.” He thought she might as well know the chances. “She might be able to make it unpleasant for us.”

  “Do you care?” she asked slowly, not looking at him.

  “We both care, and you know it. But I don’t care that much.”

  “But, Luke, are you sure you can afford to take the chance?”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.” Her hand fiddled with the knob on her window. “Yes, I am.”

  He laughed. “I’m not going to send you away,” he said. “Not ever. But it’s different down there. Have you thought of that?”

  “I hope it is,” she said fervently.

  They were on the approach to the bridge, and since there wasn’t any traffic coming their way he speeded up and got to the other side as fast as he could. “It’s early,” he said. “I thought we’d go to Planters’ Dock for breakfast. We may as well have a drink on it.” He wound through the traffic. They had bored a tunnel through the mountains, to connect the valleys beyond with the bay. On the other side of the bore was Planters’ Dock. It was a night place, but he thought they could get some scrambled eggs there and a highball or something.

  It was a big fake South Sea Island set on top of a hill. The hill had been dotted with plaster copies of Easter Island statues whose flat faces leered down towards the highway at an artistic tilt. At night they were lit up with green and orange floods. He turned up the private roadway. He thought she might as well get the true Los Angeles feeling, for it was a very Los Angeles kind of a place; and he could use a little of it himself. They even got their ham and eggs and coffee and two rum highballs apiece, with a lot of garbage in them, very artistically done. It was quite a change from the sort of places they had gone to in the old days, and if the windows had not been tinted or the area built up recently the view would have been magnificent. It was all very restful.

  “Are we running away?” she asked.

  “You bet we are,” he said. “Straight home.”

  They went back to the car and he climbed up to the ridge road by the back way, past an artificial lake and a carefully preserved wilderness area that contained a perfectly preserved golf course. It gave him a pleasant feeling that everything was under control to drive that way, through trees.

  They reached the house soon enough and there was no question this time whether or not she would stay in the car. She stayed. He was running things now.

  The house, if anything, looked shabbier than it had the day before. He rang the bell.

  She was waiting for him, as before. When she opened the door she was holding the cat. He looked at it blankly. It was not a nice cat. It looked thoroughly ill-natured and uncomfortable, for she was holding it by its middle, so that both ends sagged down, and it twisted its face up to him and yowled. She dropped the cat and it ran from the room. She watched it run rather thoughtfully. Wordlessly she made way for him to come in and shut the door behind him. He went ahead of her into the living room, as before. Neither of them sat down.

  “Well?” he asked. He jangled the keys in his pockets and then stopped when he realized it annoyed her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She looked at him with some complex emotion that did not have a name. It had a great many things in it, but defeat was the main one, mixed with a certain aged bewilderment. “Somebody should pay for this.”

  “It seems to me quite a lot of people already have,” he said. “They had it coming, too.” He shoved his hands into his pockets, slightly ashamed of himself for feeling self-satisfied and proud about having taken a decision against what might be his own advantage. Maybe in his case the melodrama was built in. If it was, he was not sorry.

  “I should tell you,” he said. “I’m going to marry her anyway. Maybe you can make it difficult, the way you say, but I’ve made up my mind.”

  “I haven’t made up mine,” she said, and he saw that it was not a threat, but only that she felt alone and did not know what to do.

  “He had it coming,” he said. “You know that.”

  “I know that. I didn’t until … well, Jerome was someone I knew. Once, a long time ago. He shouldn’t have touched Jerome.”

  “He didn’t care one way or the other.”

  “I know,” she said. “I suppose I knew it all along.”

  He hesitated. “That puts you one up on Lily,” he said. Suddenly he put out his hand. “Good-bye,” he said. She looked at him from a great distance, and then took his hand, but without smiling. She watched his face instead.

  “Some day make up your mind,” he said. He didn’t want to defeat her. He wanted to leave her the comfort of a threat. “There’s a statute of limitations, even on libel.”

  She played up to him gratefully. “Not on gossip,” she said. “And in ten years perhaps love does not mean very much.”

  “It matters now.” He wished he could stop and sit down and talk to her, but he had met her at the wrong time in the wrong way. Yet there was something beguiling about her. She was someone he should have known, rather than Ford, and at the same age as Charles had. But she had wanted Charles.

  He turned round at the door. “What was in the pic
ture frame?” he asked.

  She did not answer at first and he thought she had forgotten him. “Nothing,” she said at last. “Just a picture. Nothing that meant anything at all.”

  He thought he understood. He said good-bye again and left. She did not show him out and he had not expected her to do so. At the end of the hall he turned around and she was still standing in her living-room, looking not at him, but through the window, at the strange modern city across the water, that was not the city she remembered or that any of them any longer knew. As quietly as he could he let himself out of the house.

  So he did not see her go over to the desk. By the time she went over to the desk he was half-way down the hill. She slid open one of the drawers, the sort of cluttered drawer that accumulates discarded odds and ends, and took out the photograph. It was an old photograph, faded and brown, of a woman of perhaps fifty, leaning on a cane, wearing a big straw hat, gazing confidently into the camera with beside her a young boy. He was long and gangly and about fourteen, and he looked into the camera, too, but with an eager, almost anxious face. They were both smiling, but in different ways. In the background was the beach and some surf. She looked at it and then she put it back in the drawer and turned the key.

  There were other pictures in the drawer as well, even more faded, but she never looked at those. One of them was of a young girl of oh, say fifty years ago, with her hair tied in a bow, a pensive finger to her cheek, and with a sweet, confiding face. It had faded badly, but the smile remained.

  It was merciful, she thought, that he did not know that each to their generation, they were all the same people, at different ages, in a different milieu; that they became each other; that in two generations his seed would be spilt for a Charles, a Lily and a Jerome, endlessly; he could save only himself. But who was merciful to her? She was the older one, whose wisdom died. She had inherited only herself, and that was not enough. For her the wheel stopped spinning like a prayer wheel on a mountain, cracked with cold.

  XXIV

  THE QUICKEST WAY TO TAKE THE road for the south was to cross the bay once more and drive down the Bayshore Highway that paralleled it. It was a big six lane highway with overpasses, underpasses, clover-leafs, safety lights, and a high accident rate. The region was proud of it. But using it involved passing through Atherton, fortunately not the secluded part where Lily lived—it by-passed that—but the new, recently developed area of smaller, jerry-built homes. Maggie looked the other way.

  The sun was bright. “Look in the glove compartment,” he said. The glove compartment was really a drawer, and he had put his sun-glasses in it that morning. Sun-glasses, when you put them on, help you to pretend that you’re really living in a private world. Sunglasses help to cut the glare.

  “Thanks, honey,” he said, when she slid them over his nose. He squinted at the drawer. “There’s an extra pair if you want them. They help.”

  She reached in the drawer and took them out and put them on. It made them look like any couple, driving anywhere. And maybe, just for once, that was what they were. All the same he knew he would feel better after they had got far enough south to hit the first indigenous palm trees. People are better off where they belong.

  *

  Ischia—Roma—Atherton

  15th July 1953

  9th May 1954

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © David Stacton, 1955

  The right of David Stacton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–29467–1