The Unfinished World (32 page)

Back when the War had begun, Inge's German aunt wrote to her of rallies in the street, of crowds spontaneously breaking out into “Die Wacht am Rhein.” Inge was disturbed; she loved the works of German playwrights, novelists, and composers. Her aunt sent her Wedekind's
Spring Awakening
, and she read it in a breathless few hours, enthralled. The Germans, far more than her father's people, represented culture for her—they were urbane, artistic,
modern
. And they were her mother's—they were something of her mother's she could hold. Her aunt wrote her that some women in Berlin—including her!—worked in shops, as secretaries, as nurses—in all sorts of professions. The bust of an ancient Egyptian queen named Nefertiti was in display at the Berlin Museum, and Asta Nielsen's films made waves; a woman with a temperament and hair, her aunt said, as wild as Inge's. Even Albert was passionate over German motorcars. Even her father, British to the core, adored Wagner and Strauss.

But then Albert died, and her father tore up the letters as they arrived, pronounced her aunt, and all Germans, spies and murderers. And then the letters eventually stopped coming. And then her aunt disappeared, fled, perhaps, to Switzerland, perhaps to France. Inge missed her voice-on-paper dreadfully.

When her father died, she was not surprised. She and her sisters felt sure, after the War, that he could not last long. He was a man of another era, an Edwardian, looking for fixity, certainty, reliant on tradition. He did not understand the turbulence of this new world—he could not feel safe in such unsteady times. He was too old to find his footing again, especially in a country he didn't belong to, in an Ireland busy uprooting itself, hurling itself forward by violent and unstoppable force.

The men came to their house in the middle of the night. Inge
thought it odd they were smashing windows; they could have crawled in through the missing ones in the south wing, or simply walked right in through the door in the kitchen that wouldn't lock. But once her father came to the front door, they were quieter, almost polite. Inge recognized some of them—village boys, one of whom delivered groceries to the house every Wednesday. He kept his hat pulled down, but Inge knew him just the same. And one of them was the cook's boy, who refused to meet her eyes.

The brashest boy shoved Inge aside and demanded the keys from her father. Her father stared, blankly. She wanted to tell the men it was no use, he was already gone. But he finally moved. He went to his office and took up the big ring of keys. He held it out, heavy and jangling, like some foreign body he'd longed to be rid of. They were allowed to pack a small bag, some clothing and a toothbrush and some favorite books, and then they were turned out of doors to watch the fire creeping along, licking the floors, consuming the drapes and the rugs, cracking and tipping the beams until the whole structure collapsed on itself and exploded in a great yellow whoosh.

Inge had never seen anything burn before. She could feel the high heat of the fire from where she stood on the lawn. More villagers had come and were carting away the furniture that hadn't burned up. A small man walked past them with her father's favorite chair slung over his back and called them dirty papists, which she didn't understand at all, because she saw him at the village church each Sunday. She hated the house and had often wished it burnt, or bombed, or otherwise destroyed. And now that it was she didn't feel sorry, exactly, although she was sad, and that was complicated, too. She wished she could have saved the library. That was the hardest hurt of all.

Hannah and Clara were crying—loudly enough that Inge could hear them over the fire. She was almost embarrassed to see them so frightened. It seemed obscene to watch someone's naked fear, and so instead she turned her eyes toward the fire, waited for the last flames to fall, and flicker, and go out.

And in the end, all her father could do was try to save his daughters, to throw them to the mercy of the waters and bow quietly out of the chaos, duty done. He left a note on the blackened floor, next to his last glass of whisky. A quote, from Yeats: “There is no longer a virtuous nation, and the best of us live by candle light.” It fluttered away during the shotgun blast, and a gust of wind through the burned parts of roof blew it up and out to sea.

Curiosity #1039: Illuminated manuscript, 180 x 125 mm, circa 1390, titled The Book of the Saints. Illuminated by The Master of Death—possibly Pierre Remiet
.

Pru has welcomed them as warmly as she knows how. She has made the tea herself and served it in the green and garnet parlor, and Inge has had to stifle a laugh—drinking tea with this old-fashioned matron in a button-neck frock dating back probably to the gay nineties, while strains of fractured jazz spill out of the radio, the orchestra tuning up. Fragments of the past lined up in great cabinets along the wall. Set seems oblivious to the incongruity—though, Inge is quickly discovering, Set seems oblivious to almost anything his strange family does. He seems to think the strangeness is in himself instead. Inge
is not sure how they have managed this, his family, but she thinks it is a mean trick.

And here the real strangeness stands now, in Cedric. He stands beside Pru, holds half of a beautiful ivory mask. He wears a necklace of bone. He carries a knife of flint. One of the cabinets is open, its contents spilled onto the parlor rug. Arrowheads and beads and bowstrings. On meeting Inge, he shakes his head sadly and quotes Dante, “These have no hope of death . . . mercy and justice disdain them.” So, she thinks, Set's living brother is mad.

Set looks to Pru, shocked, and she shrugs. He's been here for months, she says, but I didn't want to tell you. How could I?

But what about the expedition? Point Hope? Set stares at Cedric, a dark sort of fear frothing up in his hollow place.

Look around you, boy, says Cedric. The city is everywhere—we are uncovering it now, always, forever digging it up. We are always digging up the dead.

Oh, there
is
no city, sighs Pru. There never was. You should have known that. She fingers the buttons on her collar with an unsteady hand. And you should never have brought her into it, she says, and nods at Inge.

Cedric grins at Set, an empty chasm-yawn more grimace than pleasure. Oliver, he says, now he wanted to collect you, that's why he didn't mind what we'd made you. It was only I who suffered, only I who knew what you'd become. He sinks into a chair, seems to shrink into his own skin. You were Oliver's curiosity, he says, but you were always my ghost.

Inge stares at Cedric. Stop telling him insane things, she says. If he's empty inside it's your fault, not his.

Don't you think I don't know that? asks Cedric. He takes off
the mask, dashes it to the floor. I've lived every day with that guilt. You can't come back, not truly. There's always a price to be paid by someone. I'm paying for it now.

Set gently pushes Inge aside. Cedric watches them both, Set with a look on his face that he's never seen before, something so open, so willing, that he finds it almost obscene. And the girl—wearing a worshipful gaze like a commedia mask, as frankly and sadly smitten as Pierrot. Something in Cedric springs up in rage, as if he were looking at an abomination he'd created—something so wrong with the fabric of the world that it has to be ripped out. His fault, after all. He couldn't find a dead city; he couldn't find a way back from death. Only one way to fix it now.

Cedric raises the flint knife. Set sees it coming, has always seen it coming, ever since the swimming pool he's seen it, even when he tries not to. And now his brother stabs, rather theatrically, toward him. A gesture, perhaps, but still dangerous. Set twists away but not quite fast enough to avoid a slashed hand. There is a lot of blood, on the carpets, on the wallpaper, on his tan suit. There is blood on Inge's pale cheek. No one speaks. Pru grabs for the knife, but Cedric drops it, already drained of whatever momentary frenzy has possessed him.
Yes sir, that's my baby,
the radio warbles.
No sir, I don't mean maybe
. The clock clicks loudly over the hearth. Even now, time refuses to stand still. Pru kneels next to Cedric, and Inge wonders what on earth Set ever thought she could do for him here. What this place could ever do besides draw life out of a person? This dark house, dead for years? It reminds her so much of her own childhood home, of memories and mourning and halls where the dead stalk the living. It, too, is full of rot.

Set is crying, and she looks for something to bandage his
hand. He shakes his head, and there is nothing ghostly about him now, a mess of earthly blood and tears.

He tried before, he tells Inge. He doesn't know quite what to say, really. What do you say about someone who's saved and destroyed you, over and over again? How do you appease them? How do you live with yourself?

Cedric is quite mad, says Inge. We need to go, Set. We need to leave this place.

This place, says Set. It was Oliver's, too. He stops then, just for a moment. Stops breathing, stops moving, stops his heart. Oliver's. Still there is Oliver here, in the cabinets, the carpets, the stuffed owls and lyres and the lonely fireplace, unlit since he went down to Hades. Set's eyes close. He can almost see it, Oliver's shade in the darkness below, waiting for him. Waiting for his understanding.

Then Set thaws, grabs her hand. Come on, he says, drags her up the little round staircase to his childhood bedroom. There is something he needs to find.

As a small boy, Set wanted to be like Oliver, gentlest of all his siblings. So he started creating his own cabinet, making his own collections. Rocks, sticks, bird feathers, newspaper ads, kazoos and other plastic toys and trinkets, old coins, jacks, ribbons, smooth stones for skipping: he wrapped them each in rags and carefully stuffed them inside of labeled shoeboxes. He had shoeboxes, too, full of intangibles—these, he would have told you, came directly from his head and needed only the reminder of a physical space for storage. Empty boxes lined his bedroom floor, labeled “Clouds” and “Deserts” and “Dreams” inked in neat rounded letters. His siblings gently mocked the empty boxes, all but Oliver. When Oliver saw them, he smiled and said, Where is the one for spirits?

Now Set digs through the wardrobe, pulling out box after box and scattering leaves and rocks and animal bits across the floor.

Set, says Inge. You're bleeding all over. What are you
doing
?

Something I have to find, he says, and dumps out a box labeled “Stamps,” another labeled “Butterflies.” Bright paper-thin wing parts flutter to the floor. Where is it? Finally he fishes out a box with a different script, smooth and elegant and spelling “Spirits” on the side. Here, he says. He lifts the lid and then his face falls, his shoulders fall, he sits, childhood trinkets sprinkled over the floor like some kind of failed spell. Inge seizes the opportunity to steal a shirt from the wardrobe. She winds it round his bloody hand while he stares into the empty shoebox. She asks what he was expecting to find.

I don't know, he says. Something of Oliver. A message. Something left behind.

Inge wipes the blood from his arm, rolls up his soaking sleeve gently. She has never seen him look so human, so present. She thinks of the burning manor in Larne, of the flames reflected in the face of her father. We all leave something behind, she says.

Downstairs, Cedric is slumped on the rug, staring, surrounded by ruins. Pru has both skinny arms around him. Set loves and hates them both so much in this moment. Inge wonders wildly if Set will disappear when he crosses the threshold, turn to air or salt or sand. Are they all mad here, or is there magic after all?

What was it Constance said? No flying back to the past? Not for Cedric, not for him, not for Inge, not for Pru, not for poor dead Oliver. No second chances.

I won't send him away, says Pru, and Set nods. Of course not, he says.

Inge looks at the two of them, Pru and Cedric, in the dark
surrounded by these dead things in cases. They look like a wax tableau. They look like something in a museum, something fallen from and frozen into the past.