Small World (36 page)

The Doll’s White House and its mates stood forlornly behind the locked door of the dollhouse room. The big dollhouse began to stink of mildew as well as fire and Dolly could hardly bear to enter the place. She had only to think of the ruin of her pride and joy to spin into a restless depression. It was then she needed Roger. The question she asked of him was always answered the same way, in her bed.

The city summer kept her imprisoned in the apartment or in air-conditioned automobiles or chic shops. Searching for some relief, she hit upon the idea of going away, as if somewhere else in the world would be sweet and green. Her home closed in on her, an artificially cooled capsule floating above the city. So far above the ordinary world did she live that the city was shrunk to the scale of toys. Coming down from her tower to re-enter it, she felt the process reversed, as she shrank and it grew too large to deal with.

She determined to leave for a little while, at least. Perhaps when she awoke from some pleasanter dream, her dollhouse would be restored by magic. In the meantime, she instructed Ruta .:o have the contract cleaners do the apartment, except for the iollhouse room, and to have the decorator to do over the bedroom.

In purple,’ she told her dreamily.

It was only on the way to the airport, with the minimizer in its :arrycase in his lap, that Roger asked where they were off to.

'England,’ she said absently, inventorying her handbag to see if she had her cigarettes. ‘I asked you to bring your passport, didn’t

I?'

She missed the shadow of delight that slipped across Roger’s race and away.

It was a conventional flight because the supersonic planes were looked solid. Roger couldn’t sleep, so he patiently ate what the flight attendants offered, and watched the movie. It was a .omedy, but he couldn’t summon up more than a half-hearted .huckle or two. The familiar melancholy settled on him, thick and heavy as the cloud cover visible through the small windows of the plane.

He peeked at Dolly, in the seat next to him. Sleep was unkind to her. The fine lines were suddenly coarser, the poignant little smudges under her eyes no longer a romantic suggestion of experience. No, she looked like a forty-five-year-old spoiled brat, fucked up and out. The promise of ten, fifteen years, down the line, was in her face. The old woman she was becoming, Roger thought, very like a very old, bad-tempered monkey. She was beginning, in fact, to look like her old man.

He stared unseeing at the movie screen. If they crashed right now, if the plane fell apart in midair, he’d have spent the last precious seconds of his life thinking about Mike Hardesty, summoning up the old bastard’s face. It was an appalling consideration. The more he tried to shake the image, the more persistently it presented itself.

He closed his eyes and pushed his chair back to the reclining position. He had to make it to England, where he’d never been before. Never been out of the country at all, except for a couple of teenaged forays into Mexico. Hated it, got the shits both times. His mother had nodded wisely, and told him to take the lesson, for once. He had.

But England was different. His mother would approve of his sucking up a little culture in the mother country. Thoughts of his mother banished those of Mike Hardesty. Roger made a silent promise to call her from London. She’d be thrilled. He would make an effort to be thoughtful. In time, she would grow accustomed to his new life.

The jet lag hit them both very hard. The first three days were an agony of sleeplessness, cross words, and fumbling sex that came to no good end. London was prototypically gray and chilly, a drastic enough change from New York’s humid torpidity to bring on a late summer cold in Roger. Dolly smoked incessantly, and Roger’s eyes watered along with his nose, until he moved to the second bedroom of the suite, on the pretense of sparing her his germs. He had developed an irritating cough as well. Dolly was not unhappy to have her bed to herself.

She felt better after a while and went out, bored with sexless Roger and his cold. If the day was long, cold, and lonely for Roger, it was not for her. When she returned, she was followed by a bellman burdened with her purchases. Like all the others Roger had seen, he was Indian; the entire staff of the hotel appeared to be one brand of Asian or another. In four days in England, Roger had seen next to no Anglo-Saxons. It was a shock.

The shopping expedition cheered Dolly right up. She ordered a room-service meal for them. She sat on Roger’s bed and they ate Dover sole and rice pilaf together, washed down with pots of tea and honey and lemon. Roger admired the clothes she’d bought, and privately thought the stuff looked like something his mother would wear, though she’d need a drastically larger size.

‘Let’s get out of London,’ Dolly proposed. ‘You ought to see more of the real England.’

‘Ummm,’ replied Roger noncommittally, though he had not seen any more of London than the view from the inside of a cab from the airport to their hotel on the Victoria Embankment, and from the suite, of the Thames. It looked real enough and if she said it was England, he was prepared to take her word'for it.

The next day, they took a train from Waterloo Station to Salisbury. It wasn’t the treat Dolly implied it would be, but it was comfortable enough. Naturally, the comfort part couldn’t last. It was just Roger’s luck. She tucked them onto a bus to Stonehenge, announcing she wanted to see the prehistoric ruins. The bus kept out the rain but was overcrowded with tourists filling out a rainy day with an educational stare, and the atmosphere inside quickly became an unbreathable mix of damp cigarette smoke and bad air. Roger felt like he was in a leaking submarine after the crew had dined on beans for weeks.

After standing in the rain at Stonehenge, shivering and dripping . at the nose, and trying to see whatever it was he was supposed to see in a Japanese Giants’ stone garden, Roger revised his opinion on the whole jaunt downward. He was ready to quit and go back to un-English, boring London, or any place that offered shelter from the rain, and something to warm his interior. Dolly was thriving like so much fungi in the wet, and hustled him back onto the bus, which was to go on to someplace called Longleat. At least the air in the bus had been renewed while the tourists tramped in the mud and took the pictures that weren’t going to come out for lack of adequate light.

Longleat turned out to be a great big drafty old palace that the guide called ‘a stately home.’ Roger had to snigger when he heard that; it sounded like stately Wayne Manor to him. That made Dolly give him one of those I-can’t-take-you-anywhere looks and he glummed up. He allowed himself to be flogged through the place with the clots of tourists from the bus, again taking pictures that would come out appropriately blotchy, fogged, and unfocussed. Roger did what he thought was the sensible thing: He bought some post cards and a book about the joint to mail to his mother. She would probably be as impressed with the stamps as she with about the stuff about Longleat, which anyone, even his mother, could see was hopelessly unliveable, but at least she would know he had been thinking of her while he was having such a giddy, gay old time, blowing gallons of snot into carloads of Kleenex in merry olde England.

When it was time to board the bus again to return to the Salisbury train station, Dolly pulled him aside. Roger just wanted to park his duff in a well-cushioned seat and maybe doze a little. Standing in the drizzle, whispering to Dolly, was almost painful. It seemed to begin in his teeth, aching in the cold, but that stopped hurting when she wrapped her nails in his wrist deeply enough to draw blood.

‘Let’s zap it,’ she hissed, gesturing to the massive stone pile of Longleat. Roger’s hands moved instinctively to clutch the minimizer suspended on his chest, inside his clumsily buttoned trenchcoat. He giggled feebly.

She dug her nails in a little deeper. He wondered if she were searching for a vein. The joke had gone far enough, he decided.

‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ he hissed back at her. He freed his wrist by prying up her fingers like staples from a cardboard box, pushed by her, and boarded the bus. He flopped into a window seat, the hell with this ladies-first-gentlemen-last bullshit. In short order, she sat down stiffly next to him, after letting a pair of old ladies in identical green pantsuits board before her. Miserably, Roger realized that the window next to him was cold and wet with condensation. He was going to be dripped on all the way to the Salisbury station. And she wasn’t going to speak to him. Maybe that was a blessing.

‘You need to see some people,’ Dolly diagnosed. Roger grunted, remembering her last prescription for his health, and rolled the blankets tightly around himself. For two days he hadn’t been out of bed except to pee. The sudden prospect of a social life didn’t excite him at all.

During his relapse, Dolly decided to nurse him back to health. Smoking and chattering, she stayed in and Ping-Ponged from one end of the suite to the other. No sooner had Roger settled into a comfortable doze than she would descend to plump the pillow, refresh his water glass, ply him with hot tea or chilly orange juice, slap magazines cheerfully onto the nightstand, or inquire did he want the telly on? If he did watch television, she wanted to change the channel for him, or to draw the blinds and have him take a nap. He found himself wondering if she intended to irritate him back to health.

At last, he fled to the bathroom for a moment’s peace. There was no reading matter there. It had all migrated to his bedside. He had no cigarettes and no desire for one, not with his sense of taste and smell deadened with the headcold. With all the liquids sloshing around in him, he was still unable to coax forth more than a trickle of pee. There was nothing, finally, to do but look at himself in the mirror. His beard was at the do-or-die point. He either shaved today or let it grow. He stroked the stubble thoughtfully, thinking he looked like a cut-throat pirate. Grinning at the mirror, he strived for a debonair, deadly look. ToO bad his teeth were so good. A gap, or a flash of gold would be a nice touch.

Once up, he was unable to really relax again. The bed had a plowed-over look to it and didn’t exactly smell sweet anymore. He decided to shower and dress. Dolly fussed and then brightened. Probably she was bored too. She headed for the phone.

She was still on the phone, having an animated conversation with someone in an outrageously affected accent when he whispered he was going out to the barber’s.

When he returned to the suite with his infant beard shaped and trimmed, she was waiting for him, a fur coat thrown over the chair she was perched in, making it seem thronelike.

‘We’re going out for tea,’ she announced, and tickled his chin under his beard. ‘Cute.’And picking up her handbag. ‘You’ll like her. She’s an old, old friend, and a darling, when she isn’t a perfect bitch.’

The old friend turned out to be really old. Roger felt as if he had slipped into a time warp. Tea was served in a high-ceilinged parlor where a fire burned merry hell in the fireplace even though the temperature outside was a pleasant, if gray, seventy-two. The stone walls of the crumbling old pile they were visiting were probably feet thick, Roger speculated. That would account for the clammy cold of the room.

Then maybe the cold kept the old bird from rotting. She was eighty-five if she was a day, and a horse-faced nurse in a whitewinged cap waited on her hand and foot. Nursie poured the tea, as the old lady was apparently too weak to lift the enormous silver teapot by herself, and Dolly was too busy running her mouth.

‘Lady Maggie,’ Dolly introduced her. ‘Weiler.’ Significant pause. ‘Nick’s mother.’

That made Roger jump. She must have had baby Nickie at the last possible biological moment. She was all shrunk up, like really old ladies often are, and wasn’t even any bigger than Dolly, just a wee thing. But her eyes were bright and fiery, and she didn’t wear glasses. She was dressed in a long rusty black gown of the same era as the decoration of the room. Roger was unsure about such things, but he guessed the room had last been redone in the midtwenties. She wore her hair like a flapper, short and tight to her ancient skull, with spit curls underlining her rouged cheeks. The rouge was too bright. His mother’s often was; Roger thought perhaps ladies’ skintones changed as they aged, and they didn’t notice. Or perhaps they just didn’t see well enough to do their make-up properly.

Her dress was cut very low, not that the old lady had anything to look at or ever had, to judge from her birdy build, but it wasn’t grotesque. Her skin formed a parchment background for the necklace she wore, a massive arrangement of pearls, stones that were surely a small fortune in diamonds, glass beads of a curious silver blue color, and enamel on gold. An abbreviated version of the swirling design hung from her ears. Roger thought they must be uncomfortably heavy, yet Lady Maggie sat perfectly upright. Her head was steady. Only her hands trembled a little and when they did. the chunky gem-encrusted rings that circled every finger twinkled and flashed. Her wrists were surprisingly slim and young-looking, and were completely unadorned.

Lady Maggie and Dolly talked of people, places, and things that Roger didn’t know. The old woman tried to draw him into the conversation and Dolly occasionally threw him an arch bone of a witticism, but inevitably his attention wandered to the sweets on the tea table. There was nothing he could add to the conversation but polite noises and he could do that quite adequately with his mouth full.

Nursie came and went with increasing frequency. She was fairly hopping from one foot to another. Roger couldn’t figure it out. Then he hauled out his hankie to blow his nose, which was very well behaved, really, when she glared at him and he caught the worried glance she cast at her employer. The ladies were too absorbed to have noticed Roger’s snotrag. It answered Roger’s mental question; evidently the old woman was as fragile as she appeared. A cold might be disastrous. Dolly had informed him that Lady Maggie rarely received guests anymore. Just the excitement of having tea with them might be a serious strain.