‘No you’re not.’ Hamish made a kiss-shape with his mouth on her neck. ‘But you should have learned your lesson. I told you about them, and you should have learned your lesson.’
‘I’ve learned it,’ the small voice lied. But Dody hadn’t learned her lesson, unless it was the lesson of this limbo where no one got hurt because no one took a name to tie the hurt to like a battered can. Nameless I rise. Nameless and undefiled.
One more lap of her journey loomed ahead: the safe getting in the door at Arden, and then up to her room with no stairs creaking. With no simmering Miss Minchell bursting out of her room on the landing between the first and second stair, raging in her red flannel bathrobe, her hair undone for the night from the bun and hanging in a straight black braid down her back, with the grey strands braided into it, down to her buttocks, and no one to see. No one to know that Miss Minchell’s hair, when undone, reached her buttocks. Some day, some year hence, it would be a braid of battleship grey, probably, by that time, reaching down to her knees. And by the time it grew to touch the floor, it would be turned pure white. White, and wasting its whiteness on the blank air.
‘I am going now.’
Hamish heaved himself up, and Dody lay indifferent, feeling the warm place where he had been, and the warm sweat drying and cooling on the cool air through her sweater. ‘You do just what I tell you,’ Hamish said. ‘Or we’ll never get out.’
Dody put on her ribboned shoes, grown so hot from the fire that they seared her footsoles.
‘Do you want to climb over the spikes again? Or try the brook?’
‘The brook?’ Dody looked up at Hamish, standing over her, solid and warm, like a horse, breathing hay in its stable. ‘Is it deep?’ It might have been Larson, or Oswald, or even Athert on, standing there, standing in with the pleasant warmth common to horses. Immortal horse, for one replaced another. And so all was well in an eternity of horses.
‘Deep? It’s frozen over. I’d test it first, anyway.’
‘The brook, then.’
Hamish stationed Dody by the doorway. First he opened the inside door, and then, after peering out the crack, the outside door. ‘You wait here.’ He wedged her against the doorjamb.
‘When I signal, come.’
Stairs chirked faintly under his weight, and then, after a pause, a match flared, lighting the entrance, showing the grains of wood, worn to a satin patina by the hands of ghosts. Dody began to descend. How we pass and repass ourselves, never fusing, never solidifying into the perfect stances of our dreams. Tiptoing down, her right hand sliding along the rail, Dody felt all Queens’ crescent list and recover, and list again, a ship rolling on heavy seas. Then a splinter entered her index finger, but she kept her hand sliding down along the rail, right on into it. Unwincing. Here. Strike home. The splinter broke off, imbedded in her finger with a small nagging twinge. Hamish stationed her in the dark niche of the entry, a dressmaker’s dummy.
‘Wait,’ he whispered, and the whisper ran up the stairs, twining around the banisters, and there might be someone on the next landing, wary, listening, with flashlights and an official badge. ‘I’ll beckon if it’s all clear, and you run like hell. Even if anyone starts coming after, you run, and we’ll get over the brook and across the road before they can catch us up.’
‘What if they arrest you?’
‘They won’t do any more than send me down.’ Hamish dropped the match to the ground. He crushed it under his foot. The small yellow world went out and the courtyard flowered, large, luminous, blue in the light of the moon. Hamish stepped out into the courtyard, his dark shape cut itself clear against the snow, a pasteboard silhouette, moving, diminishing, blending into the darkness of the bushes bordering the brook.
Dody watched, hearing her own breathing, a cardboard stranger’s, until a dark figure detached itself from the shrubbery. It made a motion. She ran out. Her shoes crunched loud, breaking through the crust of the snow, each step crackling, as if someone were crumpling up newspapers, one after the other. Her heart beat, and the blood beat up in her face, and still the snow crusts broke and broke under her feet. She could feel the soft snow dropping like powder into her shoes, in the space between the arch of her foot and the instep of the shoe, dry, and then melting cold. No sudden searchlight, no shouts.
Hamish reached for her as she stumbled up and they stood for a moment by the hedge. Then Hamish began shouldering through the rough-thicketed bush, making a path for her, and she followed him, setting her feet down, tramping the lower branches, scratching and scraping her legs on the brittle twigs. They were through, at the bank of the brook, and the hedge closed behind them its gate of briars, dark, unbroken.
Hamish slid down the bank, ankle-deep in snow, and held out his hand, so Dody would not fall coming down. Snow-covered ice bore them up, but before they had reached the other shore, the ice began to boom and crack in its depths. They jumped clear onto the opposite bank and started to crawl up the steep, slippery side, losing their footing, reaching for the top of the bank with their hands, their hands full of snow, their fingers stinging.
Crossing the snow field toward the bare expanse of Queen’s Road, stilled now, muted and relieved of the daily thunder of lorries and market vans, they walked hand in hand, not saying a word. A clock struck clear out of the dead quiet. Bong. Bong. And bong. Newnham Village slumbered behind glazed windows, a toy town constructed of pale orange taffy. They met no one.
Porch light and all the house lights out, Arden stood dark in the weak blue wash of the setting moon. Wordless, Dody put her key in the lock, turned it, and pressed the door handle down. The door clicked open on the black hall, thick with the ticking of the coffin-shaped clock and hushed with the unheard breathing of sleeping girls. Hamish leaned and put his mouth to her mouth. A kiss that savored of stale hay through the imperfect clothwork of their faces.
The door shut him away. A mule that didn’t kick. She went to the pantry closet just outside Mrs Guinea’s quarters and opened the door. The smell of bread and cold bacon rose to meet her nostrils, but she was not hungry. She reached down until her hand met the cool glass shape of a milk bottle. Taking off her shoes again, and her black gown and her coat, she started up the back stairs with the milk bottle, weary, yet preparing, from a great distance, the lies what would say, if necessary, how she had been in Adele’s room, talking with Adele until late, and had just come up. But she remembered with lucid calm that she had not looked in the signing-out book to see if Adele had checked herself back yet. Probably Adele had not signed out either, so there was no knowing, unless she tried Adele’s door, whether Adele really was back. But Adele’s room was on the first floor, and it was too late now. And then she remembered why she did not want to see Adele at all anyway.
When Dody flicked on the light switch, her room leapt to greet her, bright, welcoming, with its grass-green carpet and the two great book-cases full of books she had bought on her book-allowance and might never read, not until she had a year of nothing to do but sit, with a locked door, and food hoisted up by pulleys, and then she might read through them. Nothing, the room affirmed, has happened at all. I, Dody Ventura, am the same coming in as I was going out. Dody dropped her coat on the floor, and her torn gown. The gown lay in a black patch, like a hole, a black doorway into nowhere.
Carefully Dody put her shoes on the armchair so she would not wake Miss Minchell who slept directly below, coiled up for the night in her braid of hair. The gas ring on the hearth, black and greasy, was stuck with combings of hair, speckled with face powder fallen from past makeup jobs in front of the mirror on the mantel over the fireplace. Taking a kleenex, she wiped the gas ring clean and threw the stained tissue into the wicker waste-paper basket. The room always got musty over the weekend and only really cleared on Tuesdays when Mrs Guinea came in with the vacuum cleaner and her bouquet of brushes and feather dusters.
Dody took one match from the box with the swan on it which she kept on the floor by the grey gas-meter with all its myr
iad round dial-faces and numbers stenciled black on white. She lit the gas fire and then the gas ring, its circle of flames flaring up blue to her retreating hand, leaping to scorch. For a minute she squatted there, absorbed, to remove the splinter from her right hand where it had dug itself into a little pocket of flesh, showing dark under the transparent covering of skin. With thumb and forefinger of her left hand she pinched the skin together and the head of the splinter came out, black, and she took the thin sliver between her fingernails, slowly drawing it out until it came clear. Then she put the small battered aluminum pot on the gas ring, poured the pint of milk into it, and sat on the floor, cross-legged. But her stockings cut tight into her thighs, so she got up and ripped down her girdle like the peel of a fruit, and pulled the stockings off, still gartered to it, because they were shredded past saving from the twigs of the bushes outside Queens’. And she sat down again in her slip, rocking back and forth gently, her mind blank and still, her arms around her knees and her knees hugged against her breasts, until the milk began to show bubbles around the brim of the pan. She sat then in the green-covered chair, sipping the milk from the Dutch pottery cup she had picked up in New Compton Street that first week in London.
The milk seared her tongue, but she drank it down. And knew that tomorrow the milk would not pass, all of it, out of her system, extricable as a splinter, but that it would stay to become part of herself, inextricable, Dody. Dody Ventura. And then, slowly, upon this thought, all the linked causes and consequences of her words and acts began to gather in her mind, slowly, like slow-running sores. The circle of teethmarks hung out its ring of bloodied roses for Dody Ventura to claim. And the invariable minutes with Hamish would not be spat out like thistles, but clung, clung fast. No limbo’s nameless lamb, she. But stained, deep-grained with all the words and acts of all the Dodys from birth-cry on. Dody Ventura. She saw. Who to tell it to? Dody Ventura I am.
The top floor of Arden did not respond, but remained dead still in the black dawn. Nothing outside hurt enough to equal the inside mark, a Siamese-twin circle of teethmarks, fit emblem of loss. I lived: that once. And must shoulder the bundle, the burden of my dead selves until I, again, live.
Barefoot, Dody stripped off her white nylon slip, and her bra and pants. Electricity crackled as the warmed silk tore clear of her skin. She flicked out the light and moved from the wall of flame, and from the ring of flame, toward the black oblong of the window. Rubbing a clear porthole in the misted pane, she peered out at the morning, caught now in a queer no-man’s-land light between moonset and sunrise. Noplace. Noplace yet. But someplace, someplace in Falcon Yard, the panes of the diamond-paned windows were falling in jagged shards to the street below, catching the light from the single lamp as they fell. Crash. Bang. Jing-jangle. Booted feet kicked the venerable panes through before dawning.
Dody undid the catch on the window and flung it open. The frame screaked on its hinges, banging back to thud against the gable. Kneeling naked on the two-seated couch in the window-niche, she leaned out far over the dead dried garden. Over the marrowless stems marking iris roots, bulb of narcissus and daffodil. Over the bud-nubbed branches of the cherry tree and the intricate arbor of laburnum boughs. Over the great waste of earth roof under the greater waste of sky. Orion stood above the peaked and of Arden, his gold imperishable joints polished in the cold air, speaking, the way he always spoke, his bright-minted words out of the vast wastage of space: space where, he testified, space where the Miss Minchells, the Hamishes, all the extra Athertons and the unwanted Oswalds of the world went round and round, like rockets, squandering the smoky fuse of their lives in the limbo of unlove. Patching the great gap in the cosmos with four o’clock teas and crumpets and a sticky-sweet paste of lemon curd and marzipan.
The cold took her body like a death. No fist through glass, no torn hair, strewn ash and bloody fingers. Only the lone, lame gesture for the unbreakable stone boy in the garden, ironic, with Leonard’s look, poised on that scuplted foot, holding fast to his dolphin, stone-lidded eyes fixed on a world beyond the clipped privet hedge, beyond the box borders and the raked gravel of the cramped and formal garden paths. A world of no waste, but of savings and cherishings: a world love-kindled, love-championed. As Orion went treading riveted on his track toward the rim of that unseen country, his glitter paling in the blue undersea light, the first cock crew.
Stars doused their burning wicks against the coming of the sun.
Dody slept the sleep of the drowned.
Nor saw yet, or fathomed how now, downstairs in the back kitchen, Mrs Guinea began another day. Saver, cherisher. No waster, she. Splitting the bony kippers into the black iron frying pan, crisping the fat-soaked toast in the oven, she creakily hummed. Grease jumped and spat. Sun bloomed virginal in the steel-rimmed rounds of her eyeglasses and clear light fountained from her widowed bosom, giving back the day its purity.
To her potted hyacinths, budding on the window-sill in their rare ethereal soil of mother-of-pearl shells, Mrs Guinea affirmed, and would forever affirm, winter aside, what a fine, lovely day it was after all.
Above the Oxbow
On all the mountain that hot, August day Luke Jenness hadn’t seen a thing moving. Traffic was slack on Mondays. The rickety remains of the old mountain-top hotel, half of it blown away in the ’38 hurricane, seemed oddly quiet after the lines of tourist cars grinding up the steep hairpin curves in first gear all that weekend, with the children piling out in the parking lot and running around and around the four-way veranda, buying root beer and popsickles and fiddling with the telescope on the north side. The telescope opened its magnifying eye on the Oxbow, the green flats of Hadley farms across the river, and the range of hills to the north, toward Sugarloaf. You could see up to New Hampshire and Vermont, even, on clear days. But today heat hazed the view, sweat didn’t dry.
Luke leaned, arms folded, on the white-painted railing, looking down at the river. The raised scar running diagonally from his right eyebrow across his nose and deep into his left cheek showed white against his tan. Pale, almost dirty, the scar tissue had a different texture from the rest of his skin; it was smoother, newer, like plastic caulking a crack. At his feet, extending down to the halfway house below him, the grey, splintered timbers of the funicular railway lay bleaching in the sun in a fenced-off danger area, the warped flight of steps still intact, but ready to collapse any day now. Abraham Lincoln had stood where Luke was standing, and Jenny Lind, the famous singer. She’d called the view of the valley a view of Paradise. Visitors wanted to know things like that. What date did the hotel go up? What date did it blow down? How high was the mountain compared to Mount Tom, say, or Monadnock? Luke knew the facts: it was part of his job. Some people wanted to talk. Others paid him the fifty cent parking fee, or the dollar on Sundays; like a tip, so he’d disappear and they could watch the view by themselves. Other people didn’t seem to see him at all after they paid him; you’d think he was some kind of tree, just standing there.
Down in the clearing at the halfway house now, Luke saw two figures moving. A dark-haired boy in khaki pants and a girl in a blue jersey and white shorts were walking up the blacktop road, very slowly. From where he stood they seemed smaller than his thumb. Probably they’d parked their car somewhere a little below, in the brush at the side of the road, and walked up from there. He hadn’t had a hiker for three weeks or more. People drove up, got out and looked at the view a few minutes, maybe bought a cold soda—the tap water was warm and full of air bubbles, hardly spouting high enough out of the chipped chrome fountain bowl for you get a good gulp of it. Then they drove down. Sometimes they brought picnics for their noon meal and ate at the brown wooden tables in among the trees. Nobody walked up much anymore. It would be a good half hour before the kids got to the top. They’d just strolled out of sight to the right and would be coming up the road around the south side of the mountain. Luke sat down in a frayed wicker rocking chair and propped his feet on the veranda railing.
When he
heard voices coming up the ramp onto the rocky ledge below the hotel veranda he got up and leaned on the railing again. Far down there, the speedboats were making small V-shaped wakes of white foam on the dull grey surface of the river. A queer river, for all its broad, smooth back—full of rock reefs, just under the water, and sand bars. The kids weren’t coming up on the veranda. Not yet, anyway. They had spread out a khaki raincoat on the orange shale ledge just beneath Luke, and they were resting.
‘I feel better,’ he heard the girl say. ‘Much better now. We’ll do this every day. We’ll bring up books, and a picnic.’
‘Maybe it’ll help,’ the boy said. ‘Help you forget that place.’
‘It might,’ the girl said. ‘It just might.’
They were quiet for a moment.
‘Not a wind moving.’ The boy pointed down at some black birds flying over the treetops. ‘Look at the swifts.’
Luke felt the girl glance up at him then. He shifted, and stared straight ahead, not wanting to seem an eavesdropper. If they didn’t come up to the veranda the way everybody did, if they started back down, he’d have to call after them and collect the parking fee. Maybe they’d come up to the veranda and want a drink.
The voices stopped. The boy was getting up. He helped the girl to her feet, bent, picked up the raincoat, and folded it over his arm. They started to climb the veranda steps. At the top, they paused by the railing, not far from Luke.
‘You sure you’re all right?’
‘Yes.’ The girl tossed her lank, shoulder-length brown hair almost impatiently. ‘Yes, I’m all right. Of course I’m all right.’ There was a little pause. ‘How high is it here?’ she asked, then raising her voice as if she meant Luke to answer, not the boy.
Luke glanced in her direction and saw she was, in fact, looking at him and waiting. ‘About eight thousand feet,’ he said.