Small World (41 page)

. . knew I was just a quitter, a nasty old hermit with a heart like

i raisin.’

Nick too moved closer to his father but could find nothing to say :hat was of any comfort. So he listened.

‘She was all alone in that rotten old house, all alone for years, ^erhaps it’s because some thug or other has carried her off and -rurdered her . . . ’ He toyed painfully with his teacup ‘ . . . I’m ?are she’s dead, I can feel it, but I hope I should have felt the same : she’d died in her bed all alone.

She was beautiful when she was thirty.’ He laughed. ‘We played some awful pranks, the two of us. And when she came to me and told me she was going to marry a rich man who would be v:nd and generous and faithful, I thought that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. I came here and stayed, months, and months, and Men found myself drawn back to her again
_r
as if by some invisible :.iread that connected us heart to heart.
She
ended it, you know,’ ind he seemed to be speaking only to Nick, ‘after you were born.

So much for noisy bones. Still, we were friends. We never quarreled, or hated each other. We just got old and everything, even love, became more of an effort than it was worth. We’ve been merely rumors in each other’s diaries for years. I must be getting senile, to go all damp-eyed and drippy-nosed over a woman I haven’t seen since, God, your stepfather’s funeral.’ He blew his nose loudly into his dinner napkin and muttered. ‘Ethelyn won’t like that.’

‘There’s nothing senile about finding out you can still feel for an old love,’ Lucy said softly, looking at Nick.

He played assiduously with his coffee spoon, his mouth slipping back and forth between a shaky smile and a tightdrawn line.

‘One hopes so,’ Sartoris said, a little too loudly and clearly. ‘Enough of this maudlin sogginess.’ He raised his untouched brandy glass. ‘To Maggie.’

Solemnly, Nick and Lucy joined him.

‘And you know,’ the old man continued, putting down the glass with a thump, ‘damned if that miserable girl Dolly Hardesty wasn’t there. I never knew that bitch to bring anything but trouble with her, like a big black cloak.’

‘These days,’ Nick commented, ‘she has a little elf with her.’ Lucy smiled; Sartoris, not understanding frowned.

‘Poor girl, she’s your mother-in-law, isn’t she? Must have earned a halo by now on that alone. And you worked for her. That silly toy house of hers. Not that it’s really silly, I suppose. I daresay your work is as valuable as mine.’

‘Ho, ho,’ Lucy laughed it off.

‘I’m not getting into this,’ Nick said, reaching for the brandy. ‘Can’t, can you? That’s the trouble with being . . . ’ the old man wrinkled his nose in distaste ‘ . . . a curator. You can’t afford to offend anyone. Brown-nose the potential donor, lick-spittle for the silly public and the bloody damned critics with their foppish fads. No job for an honest man. Or woman.’

Nick shrugged. It was apparently an old argument between the two men.

‘Miniatures used to be little bitty portraits and whatnot, when the earth and I were green,’ Sartoris observed. ‘Now it’s another world. Anything and everything, on a scale of one to one-tenth, or less. Next thing it’ll be real people.’ i’m afraid the state of the art’s not quite up to it yet,’ Lucy laughed, thinking the brandy must be getting to Sartoris. ‘But it’s a living, and as you say, an honest one.’

‘Oh, yes,’ the old man agreed, i’ll tell you, my dear, I’d almost rather that my own little pictures and pots were classified as toys, playthings, instead of textbook illustrations or interior decoration. Learned dissections of brushstrokes and impasto and optic nerves, for God’s sake. Gives me headaches.’ He sighed. His large hands came to rest on the tabletop. In their complete stillness, Lucy discerned the old man’s weariness.

Nick seemed to pick it up, too. ‘I don’t know about you,
mon pere,
but my lady and I have had a long day and face our Indefatigable companions tomorrow, probably at first light.’

‘The best time.’ Sartoris gestured his dismissal. ‘I must see Ethelyn before I retire. Have a pleasant night’s rest.’

He sat like a statue in a garden, a shadowed bulk in a ladder-backed chair looking down the white plain of the dining table. It was some hours later, when Lucy approached consciousness at the conclusion of some dream cycle that she thought she heard the measured footsteps of the old man in the corridor, like a mourner at a funeral procession.

14

She thought,
when she woke again, that he was still there, only now he was a giant and he was running. Opening her eyes, she found the room was full of daylight, and the pounding of giant steps resolved into the beat of helicopter blades. Turning to Nick, s he found his side of the bed empty. He came out of the bathroom, pants on, but still shirtless and sockless.

‘Oh, shit,’ she said, sitting up and grabbing the travel alarm from the nightstand.

is that any way to greet true love?’ he complained.

Throwing back the covers, she slid from the bed, barefoot and clad only in a thin summer nightdress, and made for the next-door bedroom she was officially sharing with her children. Their cots were empty and unmade, their flimsy pajamas crumpled on the pillows. '

Nick, buttoning his shirt with sleep-slowed fingers, had followed her. Driven by the panicky conviction that the children were in danger from giants, she pushed past him and ran toward the kitchen, ignoring his puzzled exclamation.

Zach and Laurie looked up at her when she pushed open the

swinging door to the kitchen. They were sitting at an old-fashioned wooden kitchen table, with their mouths full of freshly baked beignets. Ethelyn Blood looked up from the croissant dough she was shaping into half-moons on a baking sheet and smiled. Lucy, realizing that Laurie and Zach, fully dressed and with their hair still shining from the application of a wet comb, were not only perfectly safe but apparently unfazed by her absence from her bed, and she was still in her nightdress, felt more than a little foolish. Summoning an uncertain smile, she shouted ‘Good morning!’ over the steady thunder of the helicopter blades.

Ethelyn grinned, and holding her cupped palms an inch from her ears, rolled her eyes in exasperation with the din. From just behind Lucy. Nick shouted, ‘Who is it?’

The housekeeper shrugged and raised her eyebrows.

‘Where’s Sartoris?’ Nick roared.

Lucy flinched away from him as his shout hurt her ears, and Laurie and Zach grinned at the adults’ capering, half-mimed conversation.

‘He’s up,’ Ethelyn Blood shouted back cheerfully.

Nick glanced quickly at Lucy. The same thought formed fullblown in their minds at nearly the same instant. If Lady Maggie had been the victim of a botched kidnapping, then Sartoris was an even more likely target, living as he did in total isolation with only a middle-aged, if tough, woman as his companion and protection.

Nick plunged through the kitchen, hurtling out the garden door. Lucy followed him. The sound of the helicopter covered Ethelyn’s cry of surprise.

She dropped the curl of pastry in her hand. Putting her hands on her hips, she asked in puzzlement, ‘What are they up to? Himselfs on the beach, painting like always.’ She turned to the children. ‘Well, you eat up the whole plate of them benyays, somebody’d better. And I was just feeling good to have somebody in for breakfast. Himself, he don’t ever eat any. Only time anybody ever comes is when your mama’s museum man visits. He takes after his daddy in more than one way, but he does like to eat. Most times. This time,’ she looked sadly down at her buttery pastries, ‘he got his mind on something besides Ma Blood’s good cooking.'

Zach and Laurie shared a hasty glance and giggled. Not only was the food in this place heavenly, there were more goings-on than a circus.

The chopper landed closer to the house than it had for them. Nick and Lucy had only to race through the garden and over the ridge to the orchard where the apple trees bent and struggled as if against a hurricane. At a safe distance from the orchard, the helicopter was even then beginning to struggle upward. Standing just outside the whirlwind of its blades, two people bent over their overnight bags.

The chopper lifted off and drifted away, like a powerful swimmer in calm waters. As the turbulence of its departure diminished, its former passengers were able to show their faces. Lucy, suddenly cold and angry to see her former mother-in-law even in this isolated paradise, turned to Nick, who put his arms around her protectively, perhaps possessively.

Dolly shouted at them, waving her hands, ‘Darlings, isn’t this wonderful?’

Beside her, Roger Tinker, with his chest armored in an assortment of cameras in cases, in the approved Japanese tourist manner, stared slack-mouthed at Lucy in her diaphanous nightgown.

Lucy shot back a defiant glare, and then said, ‘Excuse me,’ to Nick, turned her back on the unexpected visitors, and walked calmly back through the orchard. Nick grinned after her, thinking
rah, rah, kid.
Dolly touched his arm, talking into his ear.

‘Nick, you’ll be chasing Lucy through the fountain in the altogether next. You
are
your father’s son.’

Nick ignored her sniggering. ‘What are you doing here?’

She waved a hand airily at the house. ‘Visiting my dear friend, your darling
pere.'
Patting his arm, she whispered, i’m devastated about your mother. London just went sour and ugly. I had to leave. I’m sorry I missed you.’

Nick stuck his hands in his pockets and shuffled bare feet in the grass.

This isn’t a particularly opportune moment for you to be here. Sartoris has been hit hard by Mother’s disappearance.’

‘But you brought Lucy and my bon-bons here,’ Dolly pouted.

‘They’re family,’ he said bluntly.

Dolly paused, then, ‘Oh, I see.’ She withdrew her arm from his delicately, as if she had just noticed a wet paint notice dangling from his elbow. ‘Well, darling, it’s your bed. And I wouldn’t dream of intruding on your . . . grief. But I must see Lucy. It’s a business matter.’

‘She won’t do it,’ Nick said shortly. He nodded cryptically and stalked off toward the house without another word.

Dolly raised her eyebrows at Roger.

‘He might have offered to help with the bags. Well, you can manage, just the two of them . . . if you can walk with the lump in your pocket.’

Roger grinned. With the weather holding hot and fine, he was looking forward to multiple opportunities to leer at Lucy Douglas. At least there would be some profit to this jaunt. His private opinion was that Dolly was pushing Lucy and that Lucy was not the woman to push. Perhaps he could manage to head off a direct confrontation, act as a buffer. Buffering Juicy Lucy would be okay.

Nick went first to the terrace and then to the beach, looking for his father. He found the old man a little way from doors of Sartoris’s own bedroom, that opened onto his own patch of beach. He was sitting on a camp stool, one hand holding the brush, the other supporting it. Nick did not look at the canvas on the easel; from past experience, he knew Sartoris loathed people peeking at his work in progress. The son watched the father dab at the canvas in silence. After a quarter of an hour, the old man stopped, raised his head under the Panama, and stared at Nick, it’s Dorothy Hardesty and her buddy.’

The old man growled, ‘What the hell does that bitch want here?’

Nick shrugged. ‘She says to talk to Lucy. Lucy told me Dolly wants her to fix up the dollhouse again. Evidently there was a fire in it when Dolly, while soused, dropped a cigarette in it. Do you want me to hold her off while you work?’

Sartoris was silent. Abruptly, he pulled a paint rag from the waistband of his baggy trousers and wiped his brush. ‘Bah! I can’t concentrate now, with that hurdy-gurdy pounding in my ears, and the thought of Dolly and this villain you say she’s kipping with hissing around my house and island.’

Nick nodded. He was afraid of this reaction. The old man seemed dangerously tired.

‘Let me help you pack your gear,’ he offered. It was disquieting that Sartoris, normally so fussy about people handling his equipment, assented with a weary shrug.

When they crossed the sand to the terrace, Dolly was ensconced on the terrace, with a pot of coffee and a plate of freshly baked beignets. Mrs. Blood stood guard over her, watching anxiously as Sartoris shuffled his way toward them. Roger sat in another corner, with the bags at his feet.

The housekeeper nodded to Nick, a
we have this invasion in hand
look, as he mounted the steps to the terrace.

‘Where’s Lucy?’ Nick asked.

‘Dressing. The little ones want to go on the beach,’ Ethelyn Blood told him. With her arms crossed over her chest, she looked as she were ready and eager for an eviction.

Dolly came to her feet to greet Sartoris, holding out her hands and crying, ‘Sartoris, what can I say?’ Her voice was mournful, her eyelashes fluttering as if to hold back tears.

Roger suddenly found the beach very interesting. There was no one on it to see the shade of disgust that passed, against his will, across his features.

‘Dorothy.’ Sartoris shook his hands free of hers immediately and flinched back from her drawing near as if to embrace him. 'What brings you here?’ he asked, and passed slowly by her to stare down at the table laid for an outdoor breakfast.