“They all are.”
“What, you mean the others on the stage were all men, as well?”
“Not the chorus line, but the three other singers, yes.”
I’d never even suspected it. Alcohol, of course, was partly to blame for my lack of perception, and the room’s thick, smokey air, but on reflection, I decided that the reason I had failed to notice was that, in England, such acts as I had seen were generally in small and seedy cabarets, not in a glittering palace the size of a warehouse with a big, slick jazz band to accompany its internationally known singer.
“Well, fancy that,” I said in the end, vowing to myself never to tell Holmes of my failure. We sat beneath the stars and the sliver of new moon, speaking of other things, and after a while Donny brought out a ukulele and sang in a surprisingly sweet tenor a bouncy melody assuring us that “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’,” some of the words of which escaped him, and another tune (this one sung in a startling imitation of a Negro woman) about Mamma going where Papa goes. He played songs I did not know and others of my childhood, and although the ukulele has never been one of my favourite instruments, under the stars and beside the lake that night, it seemed the only appropriate music in the world.
Eventually, when the moon had slid beneath the hills and the Milky Way was a bright smear across the firmament, we took ourselves to bed.
Chapter Nineteen
Tuesday was a day of leisure, an unlooked-for holiday from care, during which we at last eased into the attitudes appropriate to a summer house. The weather cooperated in the venture, with a slight high fog to keep the sun from waking us too early, then burning off to present us a day worthy of the Riviera. Flo and Donny appeared, yawning and tousled, to exclaim in appreciation of the sparkle off the lake. Flo turned on her heel and went back to don her bathing costume, and while Donny was studying the potential contained in the cupboards, she trotted down the lawn and to the end of the dock where she stood, pulling on her red bathing cap, before launching herself off the end into the water.
Donny produced griddle-cakes (apologising all the while for the lack of some spice or other that his mother used and which, he claimed, defined the dish) until we were groaning, and we then merrily abandoned the mess in favour of reading in the lawn-chairs.
They had both brought novels, although at the moment both were buried in other things. Flo was reading one of the Saturday Evening Posts that Mrs Gordimer had left in the sitting room, chuckling over an F. Scott Fitzgerald story called “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.” I glanced automatically at the book beneath her as I settled onto my chair. “Heavens, Flo,” I said, “what is that door-stop of a book you’ve got?”
“It’s Ulysses,” she said with a giggle. “A friend bought it in Paris and smuggled it in disguised as a five-pound box of Swiss chocolates. Have you read it?”
“Not yet.”
“They say it’s hot stuff.”
“It had better be, considering the size of it. And what’s that you have, Donny?”
“Cross-word puzzles,” he replied, holding up a peculiar book that had come with a pencil attached to it. “Just hit the shops, and a friend said it was going to be all the thing. Can’t see them catching on, myself. They’re tough.”
The more ordinary-looking book on the grass underneath his chair said The Plastic Age, by someone named Marks. “I presume that’s a novel?” I asked.
“You bet,” he said. “Everyone’s talking about it—nearly got itself banned for the hot bits. The story of a fellow’s undergraduate years. What about you?”
“A book on feng shui. It’s a kind of Chinese philosophy.” I saw their faces go blank, and thought I should perhaps redeem myself a little. “I did read a book on the boat out that had been banned for years. Have you read Jurgen?”
They’d heard of it, wanted to know how “hot” it was, but I had to admit that the moral outrage of the censors probably had less to do with the petting scenes than with the fact that it was gods who were doing the petting. Donny trumped my bid of Jurgen by saying casually that he’d met Scott Fitzgerald at a week-end in France the previous summer, but as I’d found Fitzgerald’s stories a somewhat tedious glorification of childishness—and American East Coast aristocratic childishness at that—I had little to say. Eventually I returned to my Orientalia, they to their stories, and the sun continued its complacent way across the sky.
We ate lunch, and then Donny wanted to try the canoes. Flo protested that the sun was too hot, but he offered her one of his long shirts, and that (along with a wide straw hat from the house) mollified her. They paddled, they swam, I joined them and sat out, and then it was somehow evening, and the happy melancholy of physical repletion coupled with too much sun settled over us. We had a drink, and dinner, and played billiards in the front room until the worst of the mosquitoes had been driven off by the citronella.
Around ten o’clock Donny proposed another swim. Flo and I begged off, but he was set on it, and strode down the lawn into the darkness. After a minute, we heard a splash, then the rhythmic sounds of arm strokes.
“Do you suppose he went in fully dressed?” I asked Flo. He was by no means drunk, so I wasn’t worried about his safety, but I was curious.
“No, there’ll be a line of clothing down the lawn come morning,” she told me.
The sound of his strokes faded and grew dim, then nonexistent. “He seems a strong swimmer,” I said dubiously.
“Gosh, you don’t need to worry about Donny—for two bits he’d swim across the Golden Gate. You’d never know he had scarlet fever when he was a kid, would you?”
“It doesn’t seem to have affected him.”
“It did, though. He tried to join up in ’17, but they wouldn’t have him. A dicky heart. That’s when he came out here—he was too wild about it to stay at home where all his friends had joined up, had to get away. Bit sensitive about it, you know?”
“I won’t say anything.”
“Crazy, really, he’s strong as an ox. Hell, they even took my father, who was old.”
“Yes, your mother told me he’d been killed in the war.”
“Bet she said he was her husband, too.” I heard her chair creak and protest as she sat up suddenly, then heard the sound of her cigarette case opening. In a minute, the flare of a match lit her face.
“Do you mean to say they weren’t married?” I asked tentatively.
“Oh, they were married, just not by then. They divorced when I was tiny, maybe five, but she never tells anyone that, like it’s something shameful. He used to come around and ask Mummy for money, after she inherited Granddad’s packet, but we never saw much of him in between. You know, once upon a time he was great friends with your father.”
“He was?”
“I think they went to school together, or maybe university, I don’t know. In fact, I was thinking today that my daddy probably helped yours build this place. I remember him telling me stories about living in the woods, building a log cabin and fighting off the bears.”
“More likely raccoons,” I murmured, considerably distracted by the revelation.
“I always thought it was just talk, but looking back, I have to say that most of his stories had some kind of truth behind them. More illustrations than inventions, you know? And I know the two of them were pals, ’way back when, long before our mothers were.”
“But what happened? Or have I just forgotten him?” Yet another gaping hole in my memories?
“You probably never knew him. Your father didn’t see much of him after they both got married. Things change, I guess. And I know your mother didn’t like Dad—I haven’t a clue why, but Mummy let it slip one time, when she was mad at him. ‘Judith was right,’ she said. ‘He’s not to be trusted.’”
“My mother didn’t trust him?”
“Maybe because he was part of your old man’s wild youth. That’s what happens, isn’t it, when people tie the knot? They put nooses around each other’s neck and pull them tight? Tell them
they can’t see their old friends, can’t go out and be wild, have to have babies and a white picket fence?”
“Not always,” I said distractedly. “But what—”
But Flo had worked the conversation around to the question that bothered her, and would not be set aside. “Tell me, Mary. What’s it like, being married?”
“In what way? The restrictions, you mean? I haven’t found—”
“Not just that. The whole thing. I haven’t . . . Donny and I haven’t . . . you know—done it. We’ve come pretty close, but even when I’ve been pie-eyed I think about how he’d look at me, after. It wouldn’t be the same, would it?”
That rather answered the question of whether or not they were sharing a room. I cleared my throat. “Er.”
“Oh, I don’t want the birds-and-bees stuff; I know all that. It’s just, I can’t decide if I should wait.”
“What stands in the way of your getting married?”
“Just . . . everything!” she cried, her glowing cigarette-end making a great sweep through the air.
“Picket fences and nappies?”
“Exactly!”
“Have you talked it over with Donny?”
“He says he’s glad to wait, that he wants what I want. If I knew what I wanted.”
“But you’re afraid he’ll change his mind and become a tyrant once you’re married?”
“Men do, don’t they? Once you’re pinned down they go off and there you are, raising the babies and getting fat and bored to tears.”
“Flo, look—sure, some men do that. But from what I’ve seen of Donny, he honestly loves you, and if something bothered you, and he knew it, he wouldn’t force it down your throat.” I hesitated, then said, “Just because your father was irresponsible, doesn’t mean Donny will be.”
“Dad wasn’t irresponsible,” she retorted instantly. “Just a little . . . childish. He was great fun—I always loved it when he visited; it was like having another play-mate. But Mummy got so absolutely grim whenever he came around, it made me wild to see, and I would look at her face and think, I never want to feel that way, never want to be forced to, I don’t know, grow up I guess, if that’s how it makes me look.”
I began to see why my own mother wanted nothing to do with Flo’s father, although I couldn’t see why she would have banned him outright.
“So you think he wouldn’t, look at me differently, I mean?” she asked hopefully.
But I was not about to take that degree of responsibility. “He probably would, Flo. How could he not? And you would look at him differently. The question is more, would it lessen how he looks at you, and I can’t answer that one.”
She gave a little sigh, and the glowing ember sagged to the ground. “No, I suppose not.”
“Flo?” I said, hesitant about offering advice. “You know, one thing I have found, that it helps a lot to have some kind of interests outside of the marriage itself.”
“Easy for you to say. I had to have help getting through high school.”
“You did a magnificent job converting your house.”
“I did, didn’t I?” she said proudly.
“What about that?”
“What, decorating? You mean as a job?”
“As a profession you love. You have the skills, and you have the social contacts necessary. Think about it.”
“Hm,” she said. “I will.”
The sound of splashing reached us, but before he got close enough to hear our voices, I hurried to ask, “But tell me, Flo, what happened to your father? If he didn’t die in France, where is he?”
“Oh, I think he did die in France, just not the way Mummy says. You see, he wrote to tell her that he was going to join the French army, which by that time was taking pretty much anyone, even broken-down men in their late forties. He’d been living in Paris—he had a half-sister there, about fifteen years younger than him. His father had left his first wife and remarried—divorces seem to run in Daddy’s family. Anyway, that was the last we heard from him. Rosa, his half-sister, wrote at Christmas, 1918, to say that he had gone missing in action in September, three months before. So I suppose in the end, he became a little more responsible after all.”
“It sounds like it.”
“Anyway, I’m sorry he’s gone. He wasn’t around a whole lot, but he was fun.”
We sat in silence for a moment of eulogy, then Flo jumped to her feet and picked her way down to the water. In a minute, the swimmer got close enough that she could speak with him, and the two joked and carried on like . . . well, like an old married couple.
Two hours before dawn on Wednesday morning, I sat bolt upright in my bed while the dream of the hidden apartment faded before my eyes, to be slowly replaced by the dim outlines of my childhood room in the Lodge. I’d only had the dream once or twice since arriving in California, and this time it took place in a house similar to that of the Greenfields’, except that the vining Art Deco motifs were actual vines growing up the high stone walls, and the thin greyhound statues were living creatures, mincing about on their impossibly thin legs. It was as if some long-lost jungle temple, overgrown with creepers and saplings, had been chosen to host a party of the fashionable crème of Society.
I had, as usual, been walking through the rooms showing my unlikely house to half a dozen acquaintances, passing through the orangerie (where three quizzical black-and-white monkeys peered through the overhanging branches at us) before inviting them to admire the proportions of the great hall (whose corbels and beams, on closer examination, proved to be the mighty trunks and branches of some enormous clinging trees). We went past a fireplace, across whose twelve-foot-high mantel stretched a panther, and a billiards room where the game was being played with clear crystal balls, before turning towards the noble staircase leading to a long gallery. Then someone in the party said, “What’s that?”
“That” was a half-opened door revealing a library of extraordinary richness. Walls twenty feet tall laden with leather-and-gilt spines; high, angled work-tables displaying precious Mediaeval manuscripts; racks of ancient scrolls and papyri; long gleaming tables calling out for scholars and behind them a glimpse of soft leather chairs inviting a more leisurely read before the fire.
In other words, Paradise.
But in the dream I merely shrugged, pulled the door shut, and said, “It’s nothing important.” I then went on to show my companions the intricacies of the decorated stairwell.
Nothing important? How the hell could Paradise be unimportant? And why was this third dream still with me, lingering at my shoulder like some telegraph boy awaiting a reply? The other two dreams had politely faded away as soon as their messages had been delivered. If I had accepted the message of this one, that the hidden rooms represented the portions of my past that I had closed away from myself, then why hadn’t it drifted away as its brothers had? Instead it had returned, with greater urgency and detail than ever—my dreaming mind could not have been more insistent had it grabbed my shoulder and shouted in my ear, but for the life of me, I could not decipher its meaning.
One thing was clear: I would have no more sleep that night. Putting on my glasses and dressing-gown, I padded downstairs to make myself a cup of tea.
I took it out onto the terrace and sat in the darkness, but the night air was uncomfortably cold and damp, and before the cup was halfway empty I retreated inside, at something of a loss.
I missed Holmes. The realisation surprised me somewhat, since it had only been three days, and we were often apart for far longer than that. Perhaps it was Flo’s talk of marriage, perhaps my need to converse with someone who spoke my language, but at that moment, I’d have given a great deal to have him sitting across the kitchen table from me.
Leaving the tea on the table, I went upstairs to retrieve one of the books I had brought with me; halfway down the corridor I paused, and turned towards the stairway.
My parents’ bedroom was at the rear of the addition’s upper floor. I had not gone in the room o
n Sunday, merely glanced through the door-way, seen that Mrs Gordimer had not made up that bed, and shut the door. Now, before I could reconsider, I opened it and stepped inside.
The light from the hall-way showed me a slice of the room: floor-boards, carpet, bed, lamp-shade, wall. I made my way around the bed to the lamp on the night-table, and switched it on.
A simple room, considerably smaller than its counterpart in Pacific Heights. A single, built-in wardrobe for clothing, a small dressing-table for my mother, a private bath-room, and, on the opposite side of the room, French doors leading out onto a balcony wide enough for two chairs and a low table. And between the doors and furniture, bookshelves.
Those shelves, laden and much used, made this room more a boudoir than a chamber for sleeping. Books in the bedroom—serious books, and in great number—were considered an oddity; that I had known even as a child. However, I did not know, then or now, if my mother’s intentions had been to bring the best of the outer world into her private chambers, or to keep her private life insulated from the world.
In either case, this room was where she spent what free hours we gave her. My father would take us swimming or out in the boat, and when we looked back at the house, Mother would be here reading, either on the balcony or just inside the glass doors. And it was not that she was shutting us out, for we were welcome to join her, with our own books or choosing one from her shelves. Other activities, board games or cards, were taken elsewhere; books from the shelves generally remained in the room, with cautious permission granted rarely for their removal. It was a room where my mother’s worlds overlapped. A holy place, as it were.
Odd, I reflected: In Pacific Heights, I thought of books in association with my father and his library; here, it was my mother’s books that dominated, while my father pursued more active forms of entertainment.
I went forward to the shelves, finding them as neat as they had always been: spines pulled evenly half an inch from the edge, a book-end at the right end of each row to allow for additions, every book, large or small, novel or theological treatise, English, Hebrew, or other, arranged by the author’s last name. I had asked her once, when I was first reading—was I six? No, it must have been the previous year, if we had gone to England shortly after the 1906 fire—how she could order names when they were in different alphabets, and she had showed me how to transcribe Hebrew letters into their Roman equivalents. Thus, I saw stood easily between Hightower and Hindermann. I used the same system on my own shelves. When, that is, I could be bothered to shelve them properly.
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