The woman from the photograph, their companion on the journey, stood behind a half-opened door. She lifted owl-rimmed spectacles, which hung from a chain around her fragile neck, to peer at him through cloudy blue eyes. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Well, really no. It’s how I can help you.’
The door closed somewhat further.
‘I’m not selling anything.’
The door was about to close.
‘I’m a friend of Warren’s.’
The door opened again a little.
‘Warren’s not here.’
For a moment Edgar saw himself as she saw him and he shared her distrust and fear. He should be above designing an appearance to frighten old ladies with.
‘Can I come in?’ Edgar composed his face into a smile and she backed further away. ‘I’m a friend of Warren’s. I’ve got something very important to talk to you about. My name’s Edgar.’
Again, the alluvial magic of his resurrected name. ‘I know that name,’ she said, as if she didn’t know many. ‘Are you the boy from Vail? The grandson?’
‘Fay’s grandson. Edgar,’ he said, and she let him in.
Her name was Hester and she lived in a very pretty house that showed Warrenish touches. They sat in the kitchen and drank weak bitter tea from a cracked service that Edgar suspected was Onyataka plate.
‘Warren’s on his way back,’ Hester said. ‘I’m sorry the tea’s so wretched. I’m hopeless without him.’
‘How long has he been with you?’
‘I couldn’t say.’ Hester’s smile was without apology or guile.
‘When do you think he’ll be back?’
Hester didn’t answer that one, but poured Edgar more tea with a confidently shaking hand. ‘Your appearance is very original,’ she said.
‘Thank you. How long have you lived here?’
She gave him the same pleasant smile that registered total lack of comprehension.
‘Do you like John Mills?’
‘I’m not sure I know him. Is he another of Warren’s friends?’
‘Not really, no.
‘Your clock’s stopped,’ he said, desperate to produce a conversational fact that they can agree on.
She looked at the grandfather clock by the wall. ‘Has it? I think I knew that,’ she said agreeably.
Edgar had the disagreeable sensation that they could sit here for ever, taking it in turns to make pleasantries that the other doesn’t quite understand. Perhaps they already have. Perhaps this was his fate, for perpetuity, his punishment.
He started again. He asked her questions from which he tried to eliminate the content of time, but it kept flooding in through his words.
‘You have family but you don’t see them very often,’ Edgar said.
‘They’re very busy,’ Hester agreed.
‘You don’t know where you’d be if Warren hadn’t come along.’
‘Oh I do. I know that perfectly well. I’d have been in a nursing-home.’
‘And you’d have had to sell the house to pay for it.’
‘I like my house,’ Hester said.
‘It’s a very nice house,’ Edgar said.
‘Warren says it’s the prettiest house he’s ever known.’
‘I can understand that. You have an arrangement.’
‘Yes we do. That’s right,’ she said, proudly.
He’s got it now, he understood, he swallowed with a horrified gulp, what Warren did. Edgar was here, alone with Warren’s latest ‘friend’, whom he tried, passionately and incoherently, to warn. She interrupted. ‘Warren’s very good at what he does,’ she said. ‘He’s very tidy and he cleans up after himself.’
‘Of course he is! He’s done it before. I don’t know how many times!’
‘Well then he knows what he’s doing and he won’t bungle anything. Would you like some more tea? Or a bath maybe?’
Edgar always forgot that he smelled kind of grungy. Warren hadn’t been entirely able to hide his shock at his appearance, and scent. Edgar had thought it an operation of guilt when it was just concern, and disappointment. Here he has been sucked into a world where time does not exist. Like Mary Pagan, or Fay towards the end, this woman lives in a perpetual now. The past is finished. The future is comfortably taken care of.
‘I think I better go.’
‘Aren’t you going to wait for Warren?’
‘Thank you for the tea. I should get back.’
Edgar stood forlorn by the station-wagon, realizing he’d left his keys in the house, dreading to go back in. But he was an adult now and adults do not shirk any challenges, even the greatest. He knocked again on Warren’s new house. The door opened a fraction.
‘Can I help you?’
‘I left my keys behind.’
She stared at him, prettily and blankly.
‘It’s Edgar,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘Edgar. Warren’s friend.’
‘Oh, you must be the boy from Vail. The grandson.’
‘That’s right. Fay’s grandson. Edgar.’
‘Warren’s not here at the moment. Why don’t you come in and wait for him? I’ll make some tea.’
Edgar wondered if there was any way out of this except through violence. He sat again at Hester’s kitchen table and told her her clock had stopped and she told him that she thought she knew that. They drank tea and took turns to say things that did not meet or match, and when he picked up the keys and told her he had to go she showed no sign of disappointment or even interest. The tea had performed terrible things to his bladder but he couldn’t bear to stay in the house any longer without the consolation of time. He went to the station-wagon and urinated behind it, his piss sizzling in the uncomprehending heat. He zipped himself up and gazed at Electa until he could bear it no longer, and kissed her.
Sleepily she opened her eyes.
‘Those piercings of yours, they kind of tickle.’
He took that as an invitation to kiss her again.
That night Edgar dreamed of Mary Pagan, and when he awoke he wondered if that was a sign of wonder. Mary was naked below the waist and she carried her skirt and pantalets neatly folded across her outstretched arm. She sang the old song that had been one of his mother’s favourites, played most often in her intervals between boyfriends, We are famileee! I got all my sisters and me, and her features blurred first into Mon’s and then quickly, as if Edgar the dreamer had become abashed by his dream, into Marilou Weathers’s, the protuberant eyes, the dizzy caffeine smile, and Mary’s white blouse turned into Marilou’s knitted sweater with the goofy face of a dog embroidered on it, tongue lapping down, which then became a waitress’s outfit, and the face finally settled into Electa’s, which was, as he opened his eyes, beside him, miraculous.
8
On the day of the Blackberry Festival Mary Pagan drowned. On the day of the Blackberry Festival Edgar brushed his grandmother’s hair. On the day of the Blackberry Festival Edgar dressed himself in Association clothes from the display in the Music Room. He doubted they were original, probably all left over from Warren’s opera ten years before, when Guthrie had helped to dress the cast for Utopia, taking the pins out of her mouth whenever she had to cough. Edgar wore the boots he had travelled in; paint-spattered and worn, they fitted in with the baggy trousers and heavy frock coat and cravat and hat. He went back into the sun-porch to pull the covers over Electa’s shoulders. Electa sleeping smelled of cloves.
Edgar, bred for holiness, sweating, funereal, hands clasped, walked through Creek and Vail. It had rained in the night. The morning sun burned off moisture on the lawns, raindrops from parasols and bicycles, and from the trestle tables that had been laid out on the south lawn of the Mansion House.
Could he live in this town? He doubted it. He had come to make an end of what had happened here, not a beginning. Edgar, hat atilt, sat by the creek and threw stones into the water.
The Campanile was catering the Blackberry Festival. Electa and her brother and a
few straggly volunteers piled food on the trestle tables. Pizzas cooled, untouched, in the sun. The Mansion House bought most of its blackberries from the supermarket but it still produced its own small harvest, which were in bowls on the top table, which was where most of the Festival attendants were sitting, with places for the patrons’ committee, the museum director and his partner, and Edgar himself, who represents the unbroken line of descent from John Prindle Stone and Mary Pagan.
‘One day your kids will be sitting here,’ Guthrie said.
Edgar thought he recognized Marilou Weathers, giddy and become beautiful, sitting with a couple of other women at the faculty table. Company Bob sat by himself, his face flushed by liquor and sun.
‘I doubt it,’ Edgar said. He could not imagine ever siring children, and he had as little faith in the continuity of this tradition as the reassuringly surly museum director—who was serving out his time in this backwater, and already the better jobs were becoming elusive: he’d applied to Washington and New York, and been turned down, and there comes a time when you’ve been in a place too long, when no one even considers you for preferment any more.
‘There was a time,’ Guthrie said, ‘when this would all have been full. I think people should realize that. And be …’
‘Grateful?’ said the museum director’s partner.
‘Well not grateful exactly, but you know what I mean. This whole place is because of the Association, and the Company.’
‘Was, you mean,’ corrected the museum director.
‘No. I don’t think I do,’ Guthrie said, coughing gracefully, which attracted the attention of Warren, bringing through jugs of lemonade.
Edgar went to join Company Bob.
‘Call me just plain Bob, ‘s what everyone else calls me.’
Just Plain Bob was drinking beer. He had a cooler bag at his feet, and a tower of empty cans on the table in front of him.
‘You’re not at the Company any more.’
‘No one’s at the Company any more. Company’s not the Company any more. Crying shame. Built this town and look what happened.’
‘What happened?’
‘Company went belly-up. But I was let go before that. That’s what they called it, letting go. We got to let you go. We’re letting a few people go, Bob. We have to let you go, Bob. We’ve let Bob go. Bob? Oh, we let him go. Well Bob ain’t going nowhere. Bob stays right here.’
‘Good for you,’ Edgar said.
‘And how large do you think my pension is?’
‘I couldn’t say.’
‘Company town, Company man, Company Bob, gave the best years of my life and what’s my reward?’
‘I don’t know, Company Bob.’
‘Just plain Bob.’
‘I don’t know, Just Plain Bob.’
‘Well I’ll tell you. Zilch. Nada. That’s how much. Company folded and the pension fund was empty. Directors’d been dipping into it for years trying to keep things afloat. What do you think of that?’
‘I’m sorry to hear it.’
‘Don’t be. I’ll tell you something really choice. There’s a few of us just plain types who are fighting that. We’re taking the Company through the courts.’
‘But the Company doesn’t exist any more.’
‘You’d think so. But for legal purposes it does, just because of us. Company dead, town dying, and it’s our efforts that are keeping the past alive. So long as we fight our case the Company still exists. I’m very proud of that. Hey. Who you come as? I didn’t realize it was fancy dress.’
‘Maybe we should sit with the others? There’s room.’
‘Don’t mind me. I got drinking to do.’
There were few other tables with any Festival guests. Marilou Weathers sat with faculty wives (The Blackberry Festival Welcomes the Educators of Creek and Vail!). The Blackberry Festival also welcomed its restaurateurs, which meant the staff of the Campanile and the Silver City Diner. The other tables were empty, including the one that Welcomes Its Onyataka Friends! Edgar went back to the dignitaries.
‘I thought my father might be here,’ he said to Guthrie.
‘He’s probably at the casino. Most everybody is.’
‘The Onyatakas don’t seem to be coming,’ the museum director said.
‘The casino’s having its own festival. Reclaiming the past, so they say.’
‘It’s a fair deal,’ the museum director’s partner said. ‘We stole their land and gave them smallpox and alcohol. They’re selling retribution back to us with gambling and cheap cigarettes and gasoline.’
‘You know, it’s really horrible to say this, but I liked them better when they were poor,’ Guthrie said.
Warren unnecessarily smoothed down his hair and sat beside Edgar. ‘So? Do you want the house?’ And then, as if to forestall Edgar’s objection, Warren said, ‘It’s not a gift. It’s not me who’s giving it to you. It’s Fay. It’s what she wanted.’
‘I thought you loved this house.’
‘I do love this house. Which is why I want it to go to somebody who appreciates it as much as I do.’
‘But …’
‘It’s what she wanted.’
‘I’m sorry. I still don’t understand why you want to leave.’
‘It’s not a question of want to. I’m needed elsewhere. And there are all kinds of little wars being fought around here. Land claims and legal battles with the Onyatakas over who owns what. I haven’t got the energy for all that.’
‘Who is it that needs you?’
‘A couple of friends.’
Edgar was expecting this. He had met Hester, but he had suspected there were others. Another graceful, elegant lady, whose family had lost interest in her decline, and who lived in a desirable house. How, he wondered, did Warren find these friends? Does he advertise? Do they? Or was it all word-of-mouth, I have to tell you, Marjorie/Fay/Hester, I’ve found the best man at this kind of thing, the most wonderful man, he’s very tidy and he cleans up after himself. I simply have to pass him on to you. After I’m gone, of course …
‘If I could find a reliable lodger then I would. But this town is changing. It’s not like it used to be. You remember when I did that opera?’
This isn’t what he has come for, to reminisce about old times with Warren.
‘There was a lot of opposition to the opera, you may have noticed. But Fay supported me throughout. It was an awful endeavour I suppose, but at least it stirred things up. Fay liked that. She had that Stonian thing about her.’
‘And what do I have of the Stonian thing?’ Edgar couldn’t stop himself asking.
‘Does it matter? I hope that whole breeding-for-holiness business that got Jerome so exercised hasn’t gone to your head. You know what breeding for holiness meant? It meant that only the ones John Prindle decreed were the most holy were permitted to breed, and by definition holiness meant following John Prindle most assiduously. The guy was a despot. It was a decent sort of despotism and people’s lives were enriched and all, but despotism was what it was. Anyone looking for a despot can always find one. Decency might be rarer but that’s not the point.’
‘You still haven’t answered my question.’
‘Which one?’
Edgar tried another. ‘You never told me how you met Fay.’
‘Didn’t I? We had a mutual friend. A doctor.’
‘Doctor X?’
‘That’s right. How do you know about that? It’s a silly name, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a sinister one.’
‘I guess so. That’s sort of the joke of it. We used to go out with each other. He was my ex, so that’s what we used to call him.’
‘And did he …’
‘Did he what?’
‘I don’t know. Did he know, what, your arrangement would be?’
‘Roughly I suppose he did. He knew that Fay required daily care and that there was no one else who could or would provide it. If I hadn’t come along, she’d have had to sell the house back then, use
the money to pay for a nursing-home. It’s what old people do these days.’
‘But—’
‘Look. Fay didn’t want to move. I’m good at looking after old people. I like looking after old people. Fay wanted to stay in the house for as long as she lived, and you know the arrangement we had. I didn’t get any pay, it was all deferred, to the value of the house. After I’d worked here for two and a half years, I would get the house when she died. There was nothing sinister about it.’
‘But it was assisted! That’s the point! The arrangement I can understand, but you got greedy didn’t you Warren? You had to help her on her way.’
‘I’m not a murderer, Eddie. Is that what you think I am? I don’t just kill people. That’s not what I do. Hired killer. I’m offended, Eddie. Edgar. Really offended.’
Despite his indignation, Warren was still the generous host, except everything is suspicious now: the pizza slices he tried to pass to the museum director, the dollops of cream he offered for Guthrie’s blackberries, the beer he brought out from the Mansion House kitchen—his back turned when he was pouring it, so any number of sinister ingredients might have been added between can and glass—the knife that could have been smeared with odourless poison, even the water jug that sat on the trestle table, refracting the same sunshine that the Perfectionists must have loved, a light film of dust on the surface, or maybe what passes for dust …
Coach Spiro and a pair of Down’s syndrome twins in shorts and T-shirts stumbled past between the lawn and the golf course. Warren initiated a conversation between Guthrie and the museum director and his boyfriend so he could continue with Edgar unattended.
Warren said, ‘There are a couple of points here. Number one, there’s a lot of old people who don’t want to carry on living when their quality of life gets poor. You’ll find some doctors are sympathetic to this, some not. One will intervene if the client catches pneumonia, another will not, just stand back from it. It was a disease that used to be called the old person’s friend.’
The Pagan House Page 31
