False Entry (64 page)

“
She’s—
you know—” Now it was Molly who hesitated and I who nodded, collecting the password as smoothly. “In a—nursing home, in Worthing. Has been, these twenty years.” She clapped her hands together. “But what am I thinking, to keep you standing here. And without your tea.” She turned, and I thought she meant to lead me to her own quarters, where the prodigal had after all been remembered, and perhaps she did. Midway, she swiveled round again to have a look at me, at first with unease, but when she spoke, her tone had a certain old-fashioned distance, satisfied, even triumphant. From it, I might read if I wished, if after all these years I was still able, how far I had risen. “Maureen! Take the gentleman’s things.”

He was already seated on one side of the fire when I entered, and motioned me into the chair opposite. While we drank our tea, Molly hovered; I had the feeling that on his deathbed, if he came to it with none of his family about as there seemed to be none now, she would grip his hand with the most natural fealty, but in any situation short of it she would never sit down. When he was not using his cup, he himself sat with his long hands alternately hanging or upturned on the arms of his chair. “And your mother,” he said, “is she—?”

“Dead for many years. More than twenty.”

He nodded. After an interval he spoke again. “My wife would have been so happy to see you, no doubt. But she has been ill, you know. For many years.” I could not tell whether or not he had echoed by accident the phrase that seemed to equate her illness with death, or whether he had remembered me by now; here his gentility did have the advantage, for if he would not pretend on first sight, he would not clumsily repair on second, taking for granted that my own good manners would not press it, and so awarding me them in his way exactly as Molly had awarded me my rise. Meanwhile I sat on with them in that suspended room.

Of all the rooms in the house other than his fourth-floor study, this one, often containing an overflow of materia belonging to the Museum, and therefore kept locked against that race of children which had reigned everywhere else, was the only one unfamiliar to me. It was a faded enough room that had perhaps achieved its character only very late in life. Fire had persisted here, and rain, and a few furnishings of the sort kicked about on the foam-edges—it was a room where only people mattered now. If this was limbo, it was one that was new to me, for I found that if I thought of the two older ones sitting here with me in the portion of their real existence which for the moment I was sharing, they had nothing to do with the legend I had made of them, although the legend was still there. Here in this fogbound room the three of us were together in some middle distance, middle darkness, where, with the same ichor in our veins, we were all three of us shades.

“Cook died three years ago,” said Molly, energetically refilling both our cups. “You remember her, don’t you—Mrs. Holland?”

I nodded without comment, risking the charge of coldness rather than embark on all I remembered here. They would never understand what I had made of them. Here in
the
place—if such there was—was the last place in the world to unburden it. In a few minutes, with only that knowledge to brood on later, as was my way, having done nothing, nothing—as was my way—I could take my leave.

At Molly’s remark, Sir Joseph’s long hands had again made their slow reversal, as if to say “Enough of that side of the medal. Enough.” He leaned forward now, shoulders tensing away from some deep, and again I saw the ramrod, heard the sudden, alternative youth. “So you’re an American now, eh? Then I may ask you that very American question, ‘What do you do?’”

I told him about Lasch’s, keeping back only that I was its head. He knew of it, of course, and leaped eagerly to the subject, rapping out pertinent inquiries on our publications in fields allied to his own, going on from there to recent work, not his own but important, at the Museum where he kept a token office, even ranging on, with that proprietary passion Englishmen have for the social order—he was Labour, he told me—to sharply dubious queries on ours. I listened to him as I would listen to any in this house, from the sheer marvel of being in it as I was, my own
Doppelgänger
, whirled through thirty years at a stroke, to be addressed as I was being now. But what I saw, with the half of me which for the moment had regained the gift of that purer, still-life vision before words complicate, was his terrible struggle for liveliness. Once it faltered, when the telephone rang, and until Molly returned from answering, he dropped the thread of what he had been saying. “Ah,” he said when she gave him the message that Mr. Harley would arrive tomorrow in time to go with him—only “Ah.” There was a pause. I could better have understood dread—at that other expected phone call, or satisfaction at Harley’s—indeed any other emotion. But this was the blankness of a man utterly lost—“Ah,” he repeated, and on the same note again, “Ah”—of a man who had lost the thread not only of me, of Molly who had gone out leaving us together, but of Harley and even of “her.”

Sort of weather the old ones die in, I thought, but his color had not changed and he was sitting very straight in his chair. His lips moved, bit themselves, said to themselves what I thought was “I must do better. I must do,” and as I caught their drift I could have groaned with him, for I began to understand what I was seeing. What I had written off as the mild alternations of senility was the exceptional struggle of a man to keep himself complete, summon himself back from the ordinary deeps of decay. The one clear eye looked at me, utterly lost—yet it had not been blessed with complete loss—it still knew. None are so brave as the old, I thought, and could not help him. What I had mistaken for an effort toward liveliness was the mortal struggle of a man to keep that vital intelligence which to him was life. “Ah-h-h,” he said, this time in a growl from depths that were scarcely human, but above, the lone eye maintained itself, and as I watched it, grew not merely human again, for it was already bitterly that, but more so, as if I could all but see behind it the resumption of that ticktock flame. “Stukely,” he suddenly said in the most natural way, picking up the thread where we had left it. “So you’ve met him, eh? Hmm. Stukely. One of our better lightweights, of course, but still—Hmmm. Stukely.”

I scarcely had time to accept this irony—that of all the names, recognitions, I had hoped to exchange in this house, this one should be the one to appear—when the door opened to Maureen, shyly bearing a tray which she set down between us. Just then, Sir Joseph spoke again, stretching a hand to me across the tray.

“Armistice Day!” he said, with a great widening of the voice. “The first one. Martin was three. You know—about our Martin? He would have been just a bit older than you are. It was the wine that reminded me. We drank to it. Armistice Day. You were born on it. Here.”

Never as one dreams it. I barely heard him, never answered him, hearing instead Maureen’s “I’m to ask if you’ll have some, sir, before I take it up to her,” seeing instead, centered in the light of the fire, a phoenix glowing from its ashes, the slim Spanish bottle of Madeira, and beside it, an old image broken now into three, the thin, upstanding glass.

Three. I knew on the instant who the third must be, and not Molly. Could it be?—that old Cybele of the upstairs, still fending off death then with her
sabacthani
, still proffering as hostage to the absolute her point lace and her goblets,
für die Familie
,
für die Familie
, with that grim Hebraic faith in the object which I had got here, from her. Not to Molly yet, the third glass. It was all too possible. Romance of a lesser sort would have had her die, but this was the world, where the sadder of the unities can sometimes be not death but change. Frau Goodman had been preserved then (that old historian whom even thirty years ago only one person had called “Franziska”) for the fate she had wanted—to see the rubric, the formal design of life, of theirs. And in so occurring, it had happened that she was still here to revise whatever fake history her young apprentice had given them in his—kept on for her confidant, her by-blow—me. “It can’t be,” I murmured, in the stupid way we protect ourselves from giving away how well we know it can.

“What?” said Sir Joseph, with a trace of pride. “That I remember?”

“That—that
she
is still alive.”

“Who?” He said it with a sternness which melted into doubt. I saw with pity how unsure he would be of his own alternations—I had forgotten whom
she
meant first of all in this house.

I looked at him, this old child whom I seemed never to have seen before, before I answered. “Tour mother.”

He bent his head at that. “Oh, I’m a very old party, getting on for seventy-eight. But not my mother. She’s only ninety-five. You remember her, then?”

Such inquiries usually faze me. What can someone like me reply? But here it seemed as natural as the honesty with which I answered; looking back, I see that I told no lies in that house. “We—used to have conversations,” I said. “I used to—” I gestured toward Maureen, who was still waiting, hung on our words, for the tray.

“Did you indeed. She always has someone. Never one of us, I might add—none of my brood. Not that she fabricates. Just that we’d be too close to—see the glory of it all, I suppose.” He smiled at this last.

“The general glory?” An odd question from one shade to another, or perhaps possible only between those who meet as such. I did not expect him to answer unguardedly, and it was as I thought. Struggle as we may, we do not like to admit to more than interest.

“Oh,” he said carefully, “I’m afraid she manages to make it pretty much ours.” He arose, and I with him—time to leave. But what he said was, “Let me take you to her.”

“She won’t remember.” I discovered that I did not want her to. All were dead now who could have had any real inkling of me early on—Dobbin, my uncle, my mother; even all those who had been supernumeraries in that life were either dead too or far strayed down their own lost paths. I did not want her to be alive, this old woman who had started me down mine. It was the last stand of my childhood. We do not like our monitors to survive.

“On the contrary. Sometimes she’s a bit shaky on the present—she has so little of it. But very rarely on the past.” He had already pressed me forward, motioned to Maureen to follow behind with the tray.

The two flights up are long ones and not directly above one another, but accessible through a small passage, with several landings on the way. We took them with a slowness which his stiff bearing made majestic—like the old dog, Chummie, he preferred to walk when he could. On the way, he told me that his mother, though she could still walk, no longer got about much; an old hip injury, from which she must have been recovering when I knew her, had been renewed during the blitz. He said nothing of his eye. I thought briefly of Mannix back there, of whatever it was that the Judge in his own way might be struggling to keep, but I put it aside, as only the traveler can. They were in abeyance back there, I thought, passing a fog-bleared window; that is what distance is. They are in abeyance, pending this. “Yes,” Sir Joseph answered as we climbed, his mother had gone with them to Japan, even taking up painting while she was there; later, after the second war, when his work had taken him to Paris, she had spent almost every day as a copyist in the Louvre. She had lost interest since, since coming back home really, but one could not say that she was failing, though she of course was frail. “But she shows no signs of failing,” he said, squaring his shoulders as we reached the last landing.

From where we stood, briefly resting, I could see, down the hall, those other steep, narrower stairs, the back ones, down which I had cast the tray and myself after it, that last day. “One of the Eyetalian glasses!” Cook had been the first to cry when she and Molly got to me where I lay, in a welter of shards aromatic with wine and a small amount of blood, the cruelly jagged neck of the bottle pursed like a smashed mouth too close to mine. None of the others had reproached me, from Sir Joseph himself, straggling from the floor above this one to join the circle of children looking down at me as if I were down a well; not even my mother, joining us last of all from the muffled room where she had been closeted with Lady Goodman, had said anything. I had been picked up, washed, bound and tended, even coddled, without another word. In the general leavetaking, no one had appeared to notice whether I had suffered any other wound beyond a few scratches about forehead and shins, or that my mouth, though not smashed, was closed. But as I looked at those empty stairs now and repeopled them, it struck me for the first time that my mother, that strict connoisseur of relationships, might have gone to America not only for need of money or in retreat from my father’s humiliating history, but also, having watched her young bird in his paradise, for me—but we cannot really add to the secrets of the dead, only discover them. The old woman, still there on the other side of the door facing us, had been the most realistic of all. No. You cannot stay. I no longer looked back at that boy, her apprentice, with the same single-minded pity.

We had stopped just short of the door. “Go in ahead of us, my dear, will you?” he said to the young girl who had trailed us with her load. “Tell my mother I’m bringing in a guest. Just in case Molly’s not with her.” As she awkwardly shifted the tray in order to knock, I reached out to take it from her, but casting me a cool look from those deep child’s eyes, as if to say “This is mine!” she managed it, and almost immediately the door opened; Molly was there. So I entered that room with my hands at my sides.

“You’ve told her we have a guest?” he said softly.

“Only that you were bringing someone to see her,” Molly said, stepping aside for us. The sliding doors which divided the suite had been pushed back, revealing the whole ugly, comfortable, grandiose room, still heavily curtained to appear windowless, boxed to the ceiling with the monstrous and the elegant, from Sèvres urns to Bohemian beer steins, spotted down its length by curio cabinets in which the
bijouterie
of a lifetime lurked and gleamed. Two grates burned the air to stuffiness; stewing on the hob of one of them the old benzoin inhaler sent up a thin, camphorous column of snuff-steam; everything which could keep the elements at bay here had been done. Frau Goodman was at the far end of the room. We approached her through its unmistakable attar, the smell of age. Chin on her breast, she regarded us.