Sleeping Beauty (16 page)
“How can you presume to control such things?”
She made a shrug, the barest forward movement of one shoulder.
“And if I don’t agree to such careful categories?”
She pressed her lips together, against her teeth, till they hurt. Then risked that what she did offer was as valuable solace to him as it was to her. She said, “Then I wouldn’t see you anymore. Not at all.”
He pushed back immediately, an abrupt movement away, openly irritated. No, upset. He said, “You’re the only person in all of England I’ve been able to talk to since I’ve been back. Really talk to, I mean. You can’t take that back.” He paced out into the dim light once, his white shirt and pale vest a startling contrast as he walked out of the darkness.
Coco was mesmerized to hear the urgency in his voice, to understand it in his movement, his posture. “No,” she murmured. “I don’t want to. Please—”
He paced back, returning to the darkness, the cover of the shadowed wall. “I—” He hesitated. He took a breath. His head moved, as if he looked around, as if hunting for safety. “In Africa,” he murmured, “I developed a taste for acting on my sexual impulses. Here, I look at a woman and feel like an animal. Grown men talk about their ‘baser needs.’ Base. As if it were perverted for a man to want to lie naked with a female. The worst part is, even I used to think this. But I was wrong; it’s not.” He ran his hand back over his head, through his hair, and held it there. “Or is it?” He paused, a man roaming an inner continent, lost. “I honestly don’t know anymore.”
Coco laughed. “Of course it isn’t. Africa changed you,” she said. “But that is not so strange.
I suspect it changes most men who go there. You will survive it. You will adapt.”
He took two or three deep, troubled breaths, then he held out one hand. “Coco, honestly—” But he couldn’t put his plea into words. He let out a huge sigh, then said simply, “I need a friend.” He laughed. “I could use a lover. But a friend, well…I absolutely, positively need a friend who understands.” He gave another short, humorless laugh, then held out his hand again toward her, a man indicating a preference. “You,” he said.
Relief flooded her there in the dark. “Yes,” she said. Oh, yes.
They walked from the dark into the gray light of the forward part of their little sanctuary. There Coco sat down with James, the two of them safely within the dry portal, and watched the rain. Slowly she did what was necessary to proceed: she helped cultivate the notion between them, the pretense, that nothing had happened, that they were not lovers. James seemed willing to become party to her lie, since she insisted.
The time went by quickly. They talked of the university mostly, joked about a dean they both knew and the Vice-Chancellor, who had taken a friendly bent toward the Bishop of Swansbridge, an alliance James thought ludicrous. So did she. They made jokes about strange bedfellows. Though basically they talked with pride about the university. James loved it. And Coco was grateful to the institution for admitting her son. David had not come from the most traditional English educational background; up to this point, he’d been schooled mostly in Italy.
As the rain began to let up, James asked, “And David’s father? What became of him? Why have you raised David alone?”
She wasn’t going to answer at all at first. She was unused to talking to anyone about her life this intimately. Then she thought to lie, to insist that Horace Wild, as the official documents said, was David’s father. In the end though, she settled for a vague brand of the truth. “David’s father was—” She looked for the right generality. “An important man on his way to becoming more important. He was afraid to acknowledge either our affair or its living outcome.” She paused. “In all fairness, though, he tried. His life was…complicated; I don’t know what else to call it. He couldn’t be David’s father, not in any productive sense. So I let him off the hook. If I had forced the issue, I would have injured him terribly—not just personally, but socially, professionally. I didn’t want the ruin of the father of my child on my conscience.”
“He abandoned you?”
“More or less. He struggled against it for a while.”
When the rain finally stopped, she was surprised to learn that the better part of the afternoon was gone.
“I’ve talked too much,” James said, as he threw a loose stone into a glassy puddle at the base of the steps. The stone plopped, ringed the surface; when the surface cleared, it showed the reflection of the sun. “It’s your fault though: you are marvelous to talk to.”
She rocked back an inch, tightening her arms where she had them wrapped around her shins and
damp skirts. “Not always. I’m interested.”
He looked at her across her knees, that radiant look his handsome face could take on. St. James. With a beatific smile, he insisted, “No, you are a marvel.” He meant it. In his fortunate, highly privileged world, she was a miracle to him. He asked, “And how long are you staying in Cambridge?”
She lifted her shoulders slightly. “Till the bee mess is cleaned up.”
“Well then. Till the bee mess is cleaned up.”
“Speaking of which”—she leaned forward to push herself up—“I’d better be off.”
He quickly leaped to his feet and offered his hand. “You’re absolutely right. I should go reschedule my lecture, figure out what kind of difficulties I’ve caused.” With hardly a break in thought, he asked, “Dinner tonight?”
She blinked, glancing up as she handed him his coat. “What?”
“Dinner. Will you have dinner with me?” He took his coat, reached his arm back, sliding into it. “The bees have given us only so much time, you know. We should make the most of it.”
“No.” Don’t be silly, she wanted to say. She looked around for her parasol.
“Over there.”
“What?”
“Your parasol. It’s over there by the door.”
“Ah.” She went for it.
Behind her, he said, “Breakfast tomorrow, then,” as if it were a decided fact. “Tolly’s? Seven o’clock?”
Coco stood, blinked, taken aback. Like an idiot,
she repeated, “Tolly’s? At seven tomorrow? Again?”
“Marvelous,” he said. He stepped down into the wet grass, walking backward. “See you there.”
James Stoker trotted off before she could explain that she hadn’t agreed. She hadn’t agreed to anything, she told herself.
A
week later, James stood in the center of his vast and chaotic laboratory, the largest lab of six in the Cunningham Science Building on Fairfield Street. Scanning the room, he pulled his hair and asked, “Sam”—his assistant—“is there any way to make the room look less disastrous?” Because, in an hour and ten minutes, Coco would walk through the door.
Sam shook his head pathetically. If they cleared off the top of a stool, they could make a place for her to sit. Other than this, it was surely hopeless.
The floor at the far end was stacked with notes and journals and books, many under maps spread out and rolling with pens and nibs. These piles stood about like high and low islands in the flow of looser debris, mostly field equipment under repair and cleaning—coils of rope, pitons, shoulder slings, swami belts, spikes, adzes, pick axes, hammers, an old compass in a frayed leather case, a tarnished sextant minus a lens, an altazimuth missing its circles and microscopes.
The center of the lab was taken up with tables
covered in instruments of analysis: several shiny new microscopes (at one of which sat Sam, looking through the eyepiece). Files, tiny picks, gouges, three of the new Bunsen burners, a rack of chemicals—hydrochloric acid to test for lime, sodium hydroxide to test for iron pyrite, others. Calibrated rocks on a hardness scale, from gypsum, the softest, to diamond. The tables were littered with the best, the most modern instruments.
Yet the value of all the rest of the room did not compare in James’s mind to what he considered his best spoils from all his climbings and travels of the earth: an oak cabinet of tiny drawers that ran the length of the longest wall of the laboratory—the most organized part of the room—housed tens of thousands of what many would call rocks.
To James, however, these chunks of petrified wood or fossils or flint or quartz were much too individual to be termed merely rocks. To him, they were as particular as individual human faces. There was the sedimentary slice of the cliff side at Atulla, an amazing compression of millennia. Or the granite with the surprising white mica. Or the deep red-brown garnet-rich skarn, hard enough to jolt his arm up his hammer but that sliced as neatly as liverwurst in the lab, making it a charmer for microscopic inspection. Here were pieces of the earth, the planet on which he set his feet, each distinct in its origin. He wanted to know them the way he wanted to know certain people. He was held by them, without questioning the attraction, the way his body was bound to Earth by gravity.
James had collected rocks since he was so small, he couldn’t remember when he hadn’t. Family sto
ries had his mother having to take rocks from his mouth in order to nurse him, and a variation on the story was that he was eventually lured away from his mother completely, before he could walk, the lure beautiful rocks, usually offered by Phillip Dunne. Dunne, a geologist himself and very successful at luring, had eventually taken young James into his household, all but stealing him from his parents (the family coachman and local milkmaid). James was the closest thing Dunne had to a son, though he had offspring—four daughters, any one of whom, Phillip laughingly suggested, James might marry. (Not so laughingly, James imagined the second oldest, Vivian, would one day be his wife. She was the prettiest, the brightest, the most light-hearted, the least like her mother.)
James bent over a paper-thin slice of rock under Sam’s microscope, then, seduced by it, took Sam’s pen and added his own notes to the notebook. He scooted a stool over and sat. This particular task was compelling at some moments, off-putting the next. He couldn’t explain it other than to say it was part of what stood behind him, at the near end of the lab, from floor to ceiling, from wall to wall, stacked ten feet out: the trunks and straw baskets he’d brought back from Africa, the sum total of the surface samples, borehole plugs, notes, diaries, the geological specimens and data of the whole of his trip. The work of one hundred forty-eight men, all save one dead now, their labors having survived the hands that took them from the earth, labeled them, lovingly wrapped them and packed them, and noted them in a log.
When James opened a trunk sometimes, he had
to stop, go out for a while, come back. It was the dead, he thought. His friends, his associates. He saw them in the rocks, knew them sometimes by their handwriting on tags. It was like having to pick through their bones some days. This was the trouble, he thought, the reason he was behind on the project.
The project, as it were, was massive: to begin with, James was to create maps. From microscopic inspection and chemical analysis, the samples would slowly reveal pictures of Africa, the likes of which no man had yet seen before. If he ever got his data together, he would make geochemical maps of the distribution of each chemical element, geophysical maps—radiometric and magnetic. He and his team would do a groundwater series. A metallogenic map series. Hazard maps, seismological maps. In short, the data and samples, once organized, would make the expedition more valuable, to James at least, than all the gold in the world.
Yet he had barely begun. A month had gone by and he had done next to nothing—only what Sam here had put together. Sam, who would entice him with bright optical images, images under the microscope divorced from the stones in the crates.
“May I come in?”
James looked up, then felt a rush of disorienting embarrassment. Coco. He glanced at his watch. She was actually a few minutes late. Where had the time gone? He smiled and slid off his stool. The sight of her brought a now familiar rush of happiness, a welcome distraction.
Since that rainy day more than a week ago, he and Coco had met everyday for breakfast. Twice
they had met for lunch, once for afternoon tea. Each time was a pleasure, a bright point in his day. Never mind that after teatime, he was banished from her life—on the grounds that beyond three
P.M.
their meeting could be construed as romantic, an impression she very strictly wished to discourage. She refused dinner, refused go with him anywhere after dark or even on an outing that might last into twilight. They were daytime friends.
His triumph today was that she was coming for a tour of his laboratory. He was more or less sneaking her in, walking her through the geological lab an hour or two before the building was regularly open to visitors during term.
“Well,” he said. He laughed. “It looks as though you sneaked yourself in. Did you have no trouble getting inside the building?”
“I told them you’d sent for me, that I was part of an experiment.”
He blinked. “W-what?”
She laughed. “Teasing. No one stopped me.” She smiled as she ambled forward, wearing that warm, gentle smile of hers. “I just pretended I belonged here, and in I came.”
She was at once so out of place here, yet such a perfect example of all that was missing in his life. A beautiful, civilized woman walking among his tables and rocks and gadgetry, her collapsed parasol tucked under her arm as she ran a gloved hand along the table’s edge, then up a microscope. She had something tucked up under her other arm as well, he realized, unexpectedly a long folder as pretty as any parasol, gros-grained and tied with ribbon.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.” She smiled. “I’ll show you later.” Her smile lingered on him, and he lost track.
He never tired of looking at her, all over, at the shape of her, her way of tilting, strolling, wobble-hipped, her silk-bustled, Paris-chic mien—mauve silk today piped with silver velvet that twisted in places somehow into tiny rosettes, more roses on her small, stylish hat set at an angle atop her thick black chignon, the hat’s net just long enough to extend over her eyes, her dark, kohl-lashed eyes peeping from beneath. He could not take his gaze from her.