Mrs. God (16 page)

seventeen

A
t the top of the iron staircase he walked across the burning grass toward the trellis. A crowd of languid ghosts raised their teacups and from the corners of their eyes watched him pass. Standish slipped into the trellis. Fat green leaves, dark as spinach, cupped the trembling liquid of the sunlight. He entered the house through the unbolted kitchen door and moved toward the stairs to the pantry and dining room. Beside these enclosed stairs was a door he had not tried earlier. It opened onto the basement stairs.

Downstairs, he turned toward the furnace room, retracing backward his earlier route through the basement. Doors stood open in the stone passageway, and he passed the room filled with stuffed tigers and dusty plush dogs. All the doors he had opened remained open. Standish hurried along.

He turned through the open door of the concrete cell with its small worn chair. In the picture on the wall the playful dog scampered at the carriage wheel. Standish went through the second open door and proceeded past the black furnace to the far wall to the family of axes.

He took the largest axe from its bracket, hefted it, replaced it in the bracket, and took the next largest. This one felt less likely to tip him over. He carried the axe back into the corridor.

From the furnace room he trotted up the short flight of steps toward the two locked doors he had tried on his earlier trip to Esswood's basement.

At the top of the steps he came out into another dark corridor. Here were four closed doors. Standish walked toward the first, swinging the axe beside him as he went. This was the second locked door he had tried, beside the room stacked with old newspapers. He twisted the knob. The door was still locked. Standish stepped backward, lifted the axe over his head, and swung it at the middle of the door.

The head of the axe sank into the wood. Standish yanked it out and swung again. Sweat blinded him. He rubbed his eyes with a dirty hand and smashed the axe into the door again. Finally the door began to splinter, and after several more swings Standish was able to put his arm through a hole in the wood and turn the knob from the inside. A knife of raw wood cut into his arm, and blood bubbled happily from the wound and ran down his arm.

Standish opened the door.

He had expected big dollhouses, cut away on one side to allow a child access to every room, but these were actually miniature Esswoods, larger than he had expected and identical to their model down to the water stains dripping from the corners of the windows. They were actual houses, doll bungalows, lined up like houses on a suburban street. High on the wall above, like the sun in a suburban sky, hung another reproduction of the painting in his sitting room—the capering dog, the rolling carriage. A low light burned in each third window from the right. Standish's breath caught in his chest. It was as if three little people were due home from work any minute now. The floor was a mess of small white bones—chicken bones—so dry they snapped when Standish stepped on them.

The stairs before the miniature houses were of marble, cut by craftsmen who had been extravagantly paid for their silence. He looked into one of the windows and saw tapestries two feet long and carpets three feet square, and ornate red and gold chairs a foot high. There would be golden plates three inches across, and golden forks half the size of his little finger, and little wineglasses that would snap in his hands. And did they sleep on beds, or had Edith ordered them pallets woven from soft wool? And had they screamed at night in pain and terror, and had Edith come down to comfort them?

That was not very likely, Standish thought. Their mother had been like God in the heaven of the picture above their houses, loved or hated but invisible—vanished into the sky.

Before Edith's generation, had there been other Seneschals who occupied the little houses, afflicted Seneschals who lived concealed from everyone who came to the great house around them? That was likely, for in the twentieth century the only man Edith had found to marry had been her unsatisfactory second cousin, who likewise had found no one but Edith to marry
him
.

And had any of Edith's illustrious guests ever known or suspected her secret? That was even more likely, Standish thought, for after a time all who came were scribblers like Y., D., and T., and eventually no one at all came: no cars, no carriages for little dogs to follow. And think of what they had written! Henry James and his mad governess who arrived at a remote house to care for two afflicted children, E. M. Forster and his tale of people living in a great hive, Eliot's wasteland and hollow men … Many of Esswood's guests had walked part of the way into knowledge. Isobel had gone farther than any of them, and Isobel had never left.

It's better never to leave Esswood
, Standish remembered.

He stepped back, raised the axe, and brought it down on the first little house. The thin plaster wall crumbled like stale bread, and little paintings in little frames and little chairs and a little bed fell from a guest bedroom into the West Hall. Another blow smashed the main staircase into splinters and toothpicks. Another shot miniature books from miniature shelves, and cleaved the portrait above the mantel. The floors broke apart like kindling, and the foot-high furnace fell into clanking sections of pipe. The library's vaulted ceiling shattered into a rain of candy. Standish swung his axe again, and the contents of a kitchen cabinet exploded upward into the ruins of the dining room. A table three feet long slid down a tilting floor and crashed into a miniature sink. Matchstick bones and tissue butterflies flew up like tinder. The East Hall disintegrated, and the bedrooms of the East Wing splattered against the wall. It took Standish nearly an hour to smash the first little house into a heap of broken shreds and shards from which protruded a length of bookcase, a porcelain sink, a little book bound in Moroccan calf, and the curved wooden corner of a window frame. Then he moved on to the second house, and a little more than forty-five minutes later, to the third.

When that one was destroyed too he threw his shirt behind him. His arms felt as if he had been rowing through heavy seas, and his back was one vast ache. Standish dropped the axe, and it smashed a patterned china teacup to powder. He picked up the axe again and discovered from a sharp stab of toothache in his right palm that he had developed a blister the size of an orange. He settled the axe handle into the blister and felt the sharp awakening presence of pain.

The other locked door stood across the cement corridor. Standish spared both the axe and his hand and kicked at the stile beside the lock. The door rattled in its jamb. He kicked again with the flat of his foot, then drove the whole strength of his leg against the lock. It broke with a loud snap like the breaking of a bone, and the door flew open on its hinges. Standish dragged the axe into Isobel's ultimate room.

There was no window: the light came in with him. He wiped sweat from his forehead and waited for his eyes to adjust. A dry
tock tock tock
that sounded faintly like frightened laughter came to him from the corridor.

At last Standish could see that he had broken into an empty room. He was not sure what he had expected—nothing as overt as skeletons or a chopping block, but something that would
shake
him. The floor sloped toward a central drain. Before the back wall the cement floor was scuffed, as if a heavy piece of equipment had stood there a long time. There were long faint scratches in the floor. Finally Standish saw what appeared to be a series of oblong frames on the wall to his left. They reminded him of the framed butterflies in the bone room, and as he stepped nearer he saw that the frames contained photographs.

There were six of them, ordinary snapshots of unremarkable couples. From what Standish could see of the clothing worn by the two people in the first photograph, it had been taken in the late twenties or early thirties. In the third photograph, the man wore the uniform of an American army officer. Thereafter the men reverted to suits. The women next to the first two men wore veils; all the other women wore large-brimmed hats, or had turned their faces from the camera, or were in shadow. Two of the photographs had been taken on the first terrace of Esswood House, and two had been taken on the path that circled the long pond—shadows of the twisted oaks turned the woman's face to darkness. Then Standish recognized the face of one of the men beside the pond.

The face was sunken and unhealthy, with prominent knobs of bone above the eye sockets, and the man's shoulders had a decided stoop. He was smiling—smiling in ecstasy. It was Chester Ridgeley, some ten or eleven years older than when Mr. and Mrs. Standish, William and Jean, had left the serpent-infested Eden of Popham College in the town of Popham.

But there was no Mrs. Chester Ridgeley.

The woman beside the old scholar had turned away from the camera into the shade of a deformed oak. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, strong of body, square-shouldered, with the sort of inherent self-sustaining physical confidence with which even otherwise ordinary women are sometimes blessed, and which makes them anything but ordinary. Ridgeley held her hand trapped between his two old hands.

It was her because it had to be her. It was her because it could be no one else.

Standish went down the row of photographs and peered at each couple. The men, he guessed, were all academics—Esswood Fellows. The woman was always the same woman, always with the same air of physical confidence in the set of her shoulders, the carriage of her arms, the balance of her hips. In the fifty or sixty years represented by the photographs, she had not aged ten. When she had opened the door of Esswood House to him, she had appeared a strikingly youthful forty.

Standish stepped away from the photographs, aware for a moment that he was half-naked, dirty, out of breath, bleeding from many small cuts and abrasions, that he stank.…

He turned from the photographs and stared down at the drain in the center of the floor. He wondered if Ridgeley had ever returned to Popham. Had they received a telegram announcing his retirement? A letter declaring his intention to devote the remainder of his life to research on the life of that absolutely inessential literary figure, Theodore Corn?

I feel certain that you will understand my excitement at having made many discoveries here, also my unwillingness to sacrifice my remaining years to classroom lecturing when so much (and so much, also, in the personal sense) remains to be done.…

Standish left Isobel's ultimate room. Little bodies scurried here and there in the room stacked with old newspapers. He leaned in, and all motion ceased. Standish looked down at the copy of the
Yorkshire Post
and its blaring headline, then lowered himself onto his sore knees and flipped the newspaper over and stared at the photographs he knew would be there.

But these photographs, of a burly publican with a face like a thrown rock, a hard-faced woman with high bleached hair, and a weak-chinned lover, were of strangers.
Tock tock tock
went the mechanical mirthless laughter. He forced himself up on his feet and looked down again at the meaningless faces.

A puzzling gap in experience, a piece of experience missing from the universe—a loss for which the universe yearned, ached, grieved without awareness of its suffering—went with Standish as he wandered with his axe beneath Esswood. He came to a modest set of stairs going upward to an open arch, and carried his axe up into the known world.

He passed through the arch and found himself at the back of “his” staircase, in “his” secret corridor that had been Isobel's. He walked down the hall to the dining room and opened the door. The smell of his cooling lunch was faintly nauseating. He went to the table and pulled the open bottle of white wine from the bucket. Then he carried the dripping bottle down the corridor.

The library seemed larger, lighter, even more beautiful than on the night “Robert Wall” had first shown it to him. The long peach carpet glowed, and the alabaster pillars stood like sentinels before the ranks of books.

Standish swigged from the bottle, then looked at the label. Another 1935 Haut-Brion, ho hum. He swigged again, and winked at Great-great-great-great-grandfather. He set the bottle on the desk and carried the axe across the shimmering room into the first recess. Here were the broad file boxes stamped
STANDISH
and
WOOLF
and
LAWRENCE
, all the names which had been the lures for the men whose photographs hung in the ultimate room. He had been right, his first day in the library, when he had imagined “Robert Wall” drinking blood from these fat containers.

Standish raised his axe and smashed open the second of Isobel's file boxes. A tide of yellowing paper spilled from the ruptured box and splashed on the floor. Standish swung his axe again, and the blister on his hand screamed like a child. Papers fluttered around him like birds. He drove the axe into the third
STANDISH
box, and instead of disintegrating into a shower of handwritten pages, the box slid along the shelf until it slammed into a wooden upright. Standish wriggled the axe out of the cardboard, and the box spilled off the shelf, dumping small square photographs to the ground like confetti.

Grunting with surprise, Standish bent down and picked up a handful of the photographs. And here, in the first photograph, was the image of a tall, intense-looking woman in a pale dress and close-fitting hat standing on the path beside the long pond. Standish knew that the dress was green, though the seventy-year-old photograph was black and white; and he knew the woman's face, in the photograph no more than a blur, had the long chin and narrow nose he had already seen. Here was Isobel at the chair in the library, here she was reading a fat book in the West Hall, here Isobel stood beside a rotund openmouthed man whom Standish eventually recognized as Ford Madox Ford. Standish tossed the photographs aside and grabbed another handful from the smashed file box. Isobel posed uncomfortably beside an equally uncomfortable T. S. Eliot. Isobel with a sleek dark-haired man who might have been Eddie Marsh; Isobel in the far field, trying to look pastoral; Isobel holding a drinks tray—serving cocktails—and smiling ruefully. The poor mutt.