Mrs. God (7 page)

“I'd forgotten—the chap, the boyfriend fellow, wasn't the local poet. All part of the scandal. He
had
been important—not anymore. Fellow had been the librarian, something like that, headmaster perhaps, but had gone seriously downhill years before. Became a drunk. No job. Lived rough. Pub fellow couldn't take the humiliation of being cuckolded by a virtual tramp.”

Standish ate steadily while Wall spoke, in reality now only half-tasting the wonderful food.

“This
is
a terrible tale for dinnertime, isn't it?”

“Not really,” Standish said. “When I was in The Duelists—”

“I must tell you the rest. The next day, as I say, the body of the publican was found on the road. Man had been crushed by the car that struck him. Car was still there, you see—driver's door open, engine still running. No driver in sight. He had panicked and scarpered across the moor. Never knew he was innocent—never knew the whole tale.”

“Didn't they track him through his car?”

“Rented. Fellow may have used a false name, as far as I know. He's still running, I suppose.”

“The man in The Duelists told me that someone had been murdered here.”

“At Esswood?”

“Yeah! An American, he said.”

“That's very odd.” Wall seemed entirely unperturbed. “I'm sure I should have heard of it. After all, I'm generally somewhere about the place.” He was frowning-smiling, the frown being a disguise for a smile. It was perhaps the most ironic expression Standish had ever seen.

“I thought it sounded funny,” Standish said.

“Can't really think when we last had a murder.” Wall was nearly smiling outright. “And I've been around here most of my life. Your fellow had the name confused with Exmoor or something of the sort. You weren't worried about it, I hope?”

“Of course not. Not at all. Nope.”

“You were clearly a good selection for an Esswood Fellowship, Mr. Standish.”

“Thanks.” Unsettled by the flattery, Standish wondered if he should ask Wall to call him William. Would Wall ask to be called Robert?

“Did you happen to peek into the library on your way through the back hallway? If I were in your shoes, don't think I could have resisted.”

“Well, not really,” Standish said, and Wall raised his eyebrows. “That is, to tell you the truth, I did try the door, but it was locked.”

“I'm afraid that isn't possible. The library doors are never locked. Could it have been another door?”

“Near the bottom of the stairs?”

“Hmm. No matter. Sounds as if it didn't want to let you in. We may have to reconsider your application, Mr. Standish.”

Now he knew he was being teased. He sipped his wine, and then met Wall's continuing silence with a question. “You said you've been at Esswood most of your life. Were you born here?”

“I was, in fact. My father was the gamekeeper before the first war, and we lived in a cottage beyond the far field.” Wall poured for himself and Standish. “In those days, what drew guests here to Esswood was Edith Seneschal's hospitality and the fame of her kitchen, which as you see continues to be pretty good, but the pleasure they had in one another's company and whatever they found to enjoy in Esswood itself kept them coming back. Their gratitude for that pleasure led them to contribute to our library—which is of course why it is unique. Every literary guest we had donated manuscripts, papers, diaries, notebooks, drafts, material they knew to be significant as well as things they must have considered nearly worthless. Of course, some of the latter have turned out to be among our most important possessions.”

“Manuscripts and diaries? T. S. Eliot and Lawrence and everybody else? Even Theodore Corn—even Isobel?”

“Oh, even Isobel, I assure you,” Wall said, smiling. “Especially Isobel, I might say. I don't quite know how it began, but before long it had become a custom to give something of that sort to the house, as a token repayment for Edith's hospitality, as an indication of one's gratitude for Esswood's beauty and seclusion.… It was part of coming here at all, to leave something like that behind when you left.”

“That's extraordinary,” Standish said. “You mean that all these famous people donated original manuscripts and diaries every time they came?”

“Every year. Year after year. Isobel Standish came to Esswood twice, and I believe she left some very significant items for the library.”

“And were these, um, donations, copies of more widely known works? It doesn't sound—”

“Nor should it. I
think
I'm right in saying that everything of that sort we have is unique to us. None of it can be published or reproduced elsewhere, except by arrangement. Those were the conditions that evolved, you see.”

Standish felt as though he had licked his finger and pushed it into a socket. The place was a treasure house. Manuscripts of unknown works by some of the century's greatest writers, early handwritten drafts of famous poems and novels! It was like coming on a warehouse full of unknown paintings by Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso.

Robert Wall must have seen some of his excitement in his face, for he said, “I know. Rather takes the breath away, doesn't it? If you're the sort of person who can appreciate it properly. Of course, you can see why we are very careful each year in selecting the Esswood Fellows—they have a great deal to live up to.”

“Wow,” Standish said. “Absolutely.”

“And that was its attraction for me too, I imagine. Apart from its being the only home I've ever really known. I went to school and then university, the Seneschals were always very generous when they felt generosity was called for, but I'm afraid I always felt a deep connection to Esswood. So after university I did my best to make myself indispensable, and I've been here ever since. Called up in the second war, of course, but I couldn't wait to get back here. Still the gamekeeper's boy at heart, I fear. And I do like to think I've helped Esswood move into the modern world without losing anything of its past.”

Wall smiled at Standish. “That's the thing, you see. The past of Esswood is really still quite alive. I can remember walking out past the long pond with my father one morning, and seeing Edith Seneschal, who seemed to me the loveliest woman in the world, wander toward me with a tall woman, also beautiful, and a stout, distinguished elderly gentleman, and introducing me to Virginia Woolf and Henry James. James was very old then, of course, and it was his last visit to Esswood. He bent down to shake my hand, and he admired my coat. ‘What a lot of buttons you have, young man,' he said to me. ‘Is your name Buttons?' I was tongue-tied, hadn't a clue what to say to him, just gawped up like a gormless fool, which he took awfully well. Later on in life, I read everything I could about them, James and Woolf, as well as all their work—I tried to learn everything possible about all our guests. Scholars included, of course. I see that as one of the essential tasks of running Esswood properly. We screen everybody pretty thoroughly beforehand, and try to get to know them even better while they're with us. We want to be well matched with our guests. It won't
work
as well as it should if it isn't a proper mating. The people who come here must love Esswood.”

Standish nodded.

“But you see, I'm an advanced case. I love it so much I've never left.”

“You're a lucky man.”

“I agree. It's better never to leave Esswood.”

Never to leave Esswood
. Standish heard some unspoken message, a kind of silent resonance, in Wall's last words. Even Wall's posture, his head tipped back and his fingers wrapped around his glass, seemed to communicate the aura of an unspoken meaning. Then Standish realized at least one of the things Wall must have meant: he had been something like ten in 1914, and therefore must now be over eighty years old. The man looked to be somewhere in his fifties.

“Esswood has been good to you,” he said.

Wall smiled slowly, and nodded in agreement. “Esswood and I try to be good to each other. I think it will be good to you too, Mr. Standish. We were all very happy when we received your application. Until then it looked as though there might not be an Esswood Fellow this year.”

“I couldn't have been the only applicant!”

“No, we had about the usual number of applicants.”

Standish raised his eyebrows in curiosity, and Wall indulged him. “Something over six hundred. Six hundred and thirty-nine, to be exact.”

“And mine was the only one you considered?”

“Oh, you had some competition,” Wall said. “There is always a period of several months while things sort themselves out. We do take what we consider to be more than usual care.” He smiled with the same slow ease, and looked nothing like the son of a gamekeeper. “If you're finished, we could peek in at the library. Then I'll let you get the rest I'm sure you need. Unless you have some questions?”

Standish looked down at his plate. Most of the wonderful meal seemed to have consumed itself. “I guess I can't help wondering when I'll have the chance to meet the Seneschals.”

Wall stood up. “They're not in the best of health.”

“The woman who greeted me said that Mrs. Seneschal—”

Again Wall stopped him with a look that told him not to trespass.

“Let us try that troublesome door, shall we?”

Standish stood up. For a moment his head swam and he had to steady himself on the back of his chair. Some words that Robert Wall said to him vanished like everything else into gray fuzz, and then his head cleared and his vision returned. “Sorry.”

“Do you feel all right?”

“Just a little spell. I missed what you said, I'm sorry.”

Wall opened the door through which Standish had entered the dining room. “All I said was, you must have heard this mysterious person incorrectly. There is no Mrs. Seneschal.”

Standish passed by Wall, and the deep grooves like scars in his face came into focus.

“It's Miss Seneschal. She and Mr. Seneschal are brother and sister. Edith's two surviving children.”

“Oh, I was sure—”

“Simple mistake for a weary man.”

Wall gestured down the length of the flagged corridor. “Unlike most of our guests on the first night, you already know this way quite well, don't you?” He set off in the direction by which Standish had come. “Yet another sign of our good judgment in selecting you.”

They walked on a few paces, Wall striding like a youthful and well-exercised man.

“You're married, aren't you, Mr. Standish?”

They turned right at the statue of the woman shrinking back.

“Yes, I am.”

“Children?”

“Not yet,” Standish said, the skin at the back of his neck prickling. He thrust away from him the vision of a lighted window in a Popham apartment house, a drawn shade behind which two people, one of them a faithless wife and the other a faithless friend, clawed at one another in bed. Wall was looking at him inquisitively, and he added, “Jean is pregnant—expecting in two months.”

“So we'd better get you home safe and sound before that, hadn't we?”

Standish nodded vaguely.

They turned right again, past the reaching boy.

“In any case, this is what you've come all this way to see. Let us try this puzzling door.”

They stood before the tall narrow wooden door. Wall's face was a shadow beneath his handsome gray hair—entirely unwillingly, Standish saw Jean folding herself into Wall's arms, rubbing her face fiercely against his chest. Jean often made a fool of herself with handsome men.

“Seems to work normally.” Wall turned his shadowy face toward Standish. “Perhaps you turned the knob the wrong way.”

He had not turned the knob the wrong way. For an instant it was as if Jean, or her shade, had witnessed his humiliation, and Standish felt a ferocious blush leap across his face like a rash.

Wall stepped inside and flicked a switch. Warm bright light filled the doorway. “Come in, Mr. Standish.”

Standish followed him into an enormous room which seemed at first to contain a disappointingly small number of books. Most of the room consisted of vast empty space. Bright white Corinthian columns shining with gold leaf at top and bottom stood before curved recesses ranked with books. Books spanned the library beneath classical murals. Almost immediately he realized that there were thousands and thousands of books, books on shelves all around the massive room, books reaching nearly to the barrel-vaulted ceiling as ornate as a Wedgwood china pattern, books and manuscript boxes everywhere, in every molded, flowing section of the huge room. Chairs and chaises of red plush with gilded arms stood at intervals alone the walls, and a massive chair sat before a wooden writing desk in the middle of the room, on the center rosette of a vast peach-colored Oriental carpet. Over the mantel of the marble fireplace on the left side of the library hung a large portrait of a gentleman in eighteenth-century clothes and white wig looking up from a folio propped on the library's writing desk. The library's walls, and the section of the high-vaulted ceiling not covered with ornate plaster palmettes, husks, arabesques, and scrolls, were painted a cool, almost edible color hovering between green and gray that seemed lit from within. The entire space of the library was filled with radiant light that came from no visible source. Standish had spent much of his life in libraries without seeing one like this. He wondered if he really could walk through it—it seemed too good to use, like some delicate clockwork toy or Fabergé egg.

“Rather good, isn't it?” Robert Wall was leaning back against one of the pillars, his arms crossed over his chest. “It's a Robert Adam room, of course. One of his most successful, we think.”

“What are those columns made of? I thought they were painted, but—”