No music played. No cars arrived.
Hello, I thought. A new statue seated by the shore. Hello again. Not a statue…
But Nora herself seated alone, legs drawn under her dress, face pale, staring at Grynwood as if I had not arrived, was nowhere in sight.
‘Nora…?’ But her gaze was so steadily fixed to the house wings, its mossy roofs and windows full of empty sky, I turned to stare at it myself.
Something was wrong. Had the house sunk two feet into the earth? Or had the earth sunk all about, leaving it stranded forlorn in the high chill air?
Had earthquakes shaken the windows atilt so they mirrored intruders with distorted gleams and glares?
The front door of Grynwood stood wide open. From this door, the house breathed out upon me.
Subtle. Like waking by night to feel the push of warm air from your wife’s nostrils, but suddenly terrified, for the scent of her breath has changed, she smells of someone else! You want to seize her awake, cry her name. Who is she, how, what? But heart thudding, you lie sleepless by some stranger in bed.
I walked. I sensed my image caught in a thousand windows moving across the grass to stand over a silent Nora.
A thousand of me sat quietly down.
Nora, I thought. Oh dear God, here we are again.
That first visit to Grynwood…
And then here and there through the years we had met like people brushing in a crowd, like lovers across the aisle and strangers on a train, and with the whistle crying the quick next stop, touched hands or allowed our bodies to be bruised together by the crowd cramming out as the doors flung wide, then, impelled, no more touch, no word, nothing for years.
Or, it was as if at high noon midsummer every year or so we ran off up the vital strand a way, never dreaming we might come back and collide in mutual need. And then somehow another summer ended, a sun went down, and there came Nora dragging her empty sandpail and here came I with scabs on my knees, and the beach empty and a strange season gone, and just us left to say hello Nora, hello Charles as the wind rose and the sea darkened as if a great herd of octopi suddenly swam by with their inks.
I often wondered if a day might come when we circled the long way round and stayed. Somewhere back perhaps twelve years ago there had been one moment, balanced like a feather upon fingertip, when our breaths from either side had held our love warmly and perfectly in poise.
But that was because I had bumped into Nora in Venice, with her roots packed, far from home, away from Grynwood, where she might truly belong to someone else, perhaps even to me.
But somehow our mouths had been too busy with each other to ask permanence. Next day, healing our lips, puffed from mutual assaults, we had not the strength to say forever-as-of-now, more tomorrows this way, an apartment, a house anywhere, not Grynwood, not Grynwood ever again, stay! Perhaps the light of noon was cruel, perhaps it showed too many pores in people. Or perhaps, more accurately, the nasty children were bored again. Or terrified of a prison of two! Whatever the reason, the feather, once briefly lofted on champagne breath, toppled. Neither knew which ceased breathing upon it first. Nora pretended an urgent telegram and fled off to Grynwood.
Contact was broken. The spoiled children never wrote. I did not know what sand-castles she had smashed. She did not know what Indian Madras had bled color from passion’s sweat on my back. I married. I divorced. I traveled.
And now here we were again come from opposite directions late on a strange day by a familiar lake, calling to each other without calling, running to each other without moving, as if we had not been years apart.
‘Nora.’ I took her hand. It was cold. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Happened!?’ She laughed, grew silent, staring away. Suddenly she laughed again, that difficult laughter that might instantly flush with tears. ‘Oh, my dear Charlie, think wild, think all, jump hoops and come round to maniac dreams. Happened, Charlie, happened?!’
She grew frightfully still.
‘Where are the servants, the guests—?’
‘The party,’ she said, ‘was last night.’
‘Impossible! You’ve never had just a Friday-night bash. Sundays have always seen your lawn littered with demon wretches strewn and bandaged with bedclothes. Why—?’
‘Why did I invite you out today, you want to ask, Charles?’ Nora still looked only at the house. ‘To give you Grynwood. A gift, Charlie, if you can force it to let you stay, if it will put up with you—’
‘I don’t want the house!’ I burst in.
‘Oh, it’s not if you want it, but if it wants you. It threw us all out, Charlie.’
‘Last night…?’
‘Last night the last great party at Grynwood didn’t come off. Mag flew from Paris. The Aga sent a fabulous girl from Nice. Roger, Percy, Evelyn, Vivian, Jon were here. That bullfighter who almost killed the playwright over the ballerina was here. The Irish dramatist who falls off stages drunk was here. Ninety-seven guests teemed in that door between five and seven last night. By midnight they were gone.’
I walked across the lawn.
Yes, still fresh in the grass: the tire marks of three dozen cars.
‘It wouldn’t let us have the party, Charles,’ Nora called, faintly.
I turned blankly. ‘It? The house?’
‘Oh, the music was splendid but went hollow upstairs. We heard our laughter ghost back from the topmost halls. The party clogged. The petits fours were clods in our throats. The wine ran over our chins. No one got to bed for even three minutes. Doesn’t it sound a lie? But, Limp Meringue Awards were given to all and they went away and I slept bereft on the lawn all night. Guess why? Go look, Charlie.’
We walked up to the open front door of Grynwood.
‘What shall I look for?’
‘Everything. All the rooms. The house itself. The mystery. Guess. And when you’ve guessed a thousand times I’ll tell you why I can never live here again, must leave, why Grynwood is yours if you wish. Go in, alone.’
And in I went, slowly, one step at a time.
I moved quietly on the lovely lion-yellow hardwood parquetry of the great hall. I gazed at the Aubusson wall tapestry. I examined the ancient white marble Greek medallions displayed on green velvet in a crystal case.
‘Nothing,’ I called back to Nora out there in the late cooling day.
‘No. Everything,’ she called. ‘Go on.’
The library was a deep warm sea of leather smell where five thousand books gleamed their colors of hand-rubbed cherry, lime, and lemon bindings. Their gold eyes, bright titles, glittered. Above the fireplace which could have kenneled two firedogs and ten great hounds hung the exquisite Gainsborough Maidens and Flowers that had warmed the family for generations. It was a portal overlooking summer weather. One wanted to lean through and sniff wild seas of flowers, touch harvest of peach maiden girls, hear the machinery of bees bright-stitching up the glamorous airs.
‘Well?’ called a far voice.
‘Nora!’ I cried. ‘Come here. There’s nothing to fear! It’s still daylight!’
‘No,’ said the far voice sadly. ‘The sun is going down. What do you see, Charlie?’
‘Out in the hall again, the spiral stairs. The parlor. Not a dust speck on the air. I’m opening the cellar door. A million barrels and bottles. Now the kitchen, Nora, this is lunatic!’
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ wailed the far voice. ‘Go back to the library. Stand in the middle of the room. See the Gainsborough Maidens and Flowers you always loved?’
‘It’s there.’
‘It’s not. See the silver Florentine humidor?’
‘I see it.’
‘You don’t. See the great maroon leather chair where you drank sherry with Father?’
‘Yes.’
‘No,’ sighed the voice.
‘Yes, no? Do, don’t? Nora, enough!’
‘More than enough, Charlie. Can’t you guess? Don’t you feel what happened to Grynwood?’
I ached, turning. I snif
fed the strange air.
‘Charlie,’ said Nora, far out by the open front door, ‘…four years ago,’ she said faintly. ‘Four years ago…Grynwood burned completely to the ground.’
I ran.
I found Nora pale at the door.
‘It what!?’ I shouted.
‘Burned to the ground,’ she said. ‘Utterly. Four years ago.’
I took three long steps outside and looked up at the walls and windows.
‘Nora, it’s standing, it’s all here!’
‘No, it isn’t, Charlie. That’s not Grynwood.’
I touched the gray stone, the red brick, the green ivy. I ran my hand over the carved Spanish front door. I exhaled in awe. ‘It can’t be.’
‘It is,’ said Nora. ‘All new. Everything from the cellar stones up. New, Charles. New, Charlie. New.’
‘This door?’
‘Sent up from Madrid, last year.’
‘This pavement?’
‘Quarried near Dublin two years ago. The windows from Waterford this spring.’
I stepped through the front door.
‘The parqueting?’
‘Finished in France and shipped over autumn last.’
‘But, but, that tapestry!?’
‘Woven near Paris, hung in April.’
‘But it’s all the same, Nora!’
‘Yes, isn’t it? I traveled to Greece to duplicate the marble relics. The crystal case I had made, too, in Rheims.’
‘The library!’
‘Every book, all bound the same way, stamped in similar gold, put back on similar shelves. The library alone cost one hundred thousand pounds to reproduce.’
‘The same, the same, Nora,’ I cried, in wonder, ‘oh God, the same,’ and we were in the library and I pointed at the silver Florentine humidor. ‘That, of course, was saved out of the fire?’
‘No, no, I’m an artist. I remembered, I sketched, I took the drawings to Florence. They finished the fraudulent fake in July.’
‘The Gainsborough Maidens and Flowers!?’
‘Look close! That’s Fritzi’s work. Fritzi, that horrible drip-dry beatnik painter in Montmartre? Who threw paint on canvas and flew them as kites over Paris so the wind and rain patterned beauty for him, which he sold for exorbitant prices? Well, Fritzi, it turns out, is a secret Gainsborough fanatic. He’d kill me if he knew I told. He painted this Maidens from memory, isn’t it fine?’
‘Fine, fine, oh God, Nora, are you telling the truth?’
‘I wish I weren’t. Do you think I’ve been mentally ill. Charles? Naturally you might think. Do you believe in good and evil, Charlie? I didn’t used. But now, quite suddenly. I have turned old and rain-dowdy. I have hit forty, forty has hit me, like a locomotive. Do you know what I think?…the house destroyed itself.’
‘It what?’
She went to peer into the halls where shadows gathered now, coming in from the late day.
‘When I first came into my money, at eighteen, when people said Guilt I said Bosh. They cried Conscience. I cried Crapulous Nonsense! But in those days the rain barrel was empty. A lot of strange rain has fallen since and gathered in me, and to my cold surprise I find me to the brim with old sin and know there is conscience and guilt.
‘There are a thousand young men in me, Charles.
‘They thrust and buried themselves there. When they withdrew, Charles, I thought they withdrew. But no, no, now I’m sure there is not a single one whose barb, whose lovely poisoned thorn, is not caught in my flesh, one place or another. God, God, how I loved their barbs, their thorns. God, how I loved to be pinned and bruised. I thought the medicines of time and travel might heal the grip marks. But now I know I am all fingerprints. There lives no inch of my flesh, Chuck, that is not FBI file systems of palm print and Egyptian whorl of finger stigmata. I have been stabbed by a thousand lovely boys and thought I did not bleed but God I do bleed now. I have bled all over this house. And my friends who denied guilt and conscience, in a great subway heave of flesh have trammeled through here and jounced and mouthed each other and sweat upon floors and buckshot the walls with their agonies and descents, each from the other’s crosses. The house has been stormed by assassins. Charlie, each seeking to kill the other’s loneliness with their short swords, no one finding surcease, only a momentary groaning out of relaxation.
‘I don’t think there has ever been a happy person in this house, Charles, I see that now.
‘Oh, it all looked happy. When you hear so much laughter and see so much drink and find human sandwiches in every bed, pink and white morsels to munch upon, you think: What joy! how happy-fine!
‘But it is a lie, Charlie, you and I know that, and the house drank the lie in my generation and Father’s before me and Grandfather beyond. It was always a happy house, which means a dreadful estate. The assassins have wounded each other here for long over two hundred years. The walls dripped. The doorknobs were gummy. Summer turned old in the Gainsborough frame. So the assassins came and went, Charlie, and left sins and memories of sins which the house kept.
‘And when you have caught up just so much darkness, Charles, you must vomit, mustn’t you?
‘My life is my emetic. I choke on my own past.
‘So did this house.
‘And finally, guilt-ridden, terribly sad, one night I heard the friction of old sins rubbing together in attic beds. And with this spontaneous combustion the house smouldered ablaze. I heard the fire first as it sat in the library, devouring books. Then I heard it in the cellar drinking wine. By that time I was out the window and down the ivy and on the lawn with the servants. We picnicked on the lake shore at four in the morning with champagne and biscuits from the gatekeeper’s lodge. The fire brigade arrived from town at five to see the roofs collapse and vast fire founts of spark fly over the clouds and the sinking moon. We gave them champagne also and watched Grynwood die finally, at last, so at dawn there was nothing.
‘It had to destroy itself, didn’t it. Charlie, it was so evil from all my people and from me?’
We stood in the cold hall. At last I stirred myself and said. ‘I guess so, Nora.’
We walked into the library where Nora drew forth blueprints and a score of notebooks.
‘It was then, Charlie. I got my inspiration. Build Grynwood again. A gray jigsaw puzzle put back together! Phoenix reborn from the sootbin. So no one would know of its death through sickness. Not you, Charlie, or any friends off in the world: let all remain ignorant. My guilt over its destruction was immense. How fortunate to be rich. You can buy a fire brigade with champagne and the village newspapers with four cases of gin. The news never got a mile out that Grynwood was strewn sackcloth and ashes. Time later to tell the world. Now! to work! And off I raced to my Dublin solicitor’s where my father had filed architectural plans and interior details. I sat for months with a secretary, word-associating to summon up Grecian lamps, Roman tiles. I shut my eyes to recall every hairy inch of carpeting, every fringe, every rococo ceiling oddment, all, all brasswork decor, firedog, switchplates, log-bucket, and doorknob. And when the list of thirty thousand items was compounded, I flew in carpenters from Edinburgh, tile setters from Siena, stone-cutters from Perugia, and they hammered, nailed, thrived, carved, and set for four years, Charlie, and I loitered at the factory outside Paris to watch spiders weave my tapestry and floor the rugs. I rode to hounds at Waterford while watching them blow my glass.
‘Oh, Charles, I don’t think it has ever happened, has it in history, that anyone ever put a destroyed thing back the way it was? Forget the past, let the bones cease! Well, not for me, I thought, no: Grynwood shall rise and be as ever it was. But, while looking like the old Grynwood, it would have the advantage of being really new. A fresh start. I thought, and while building it I led such a quiet life, Charles. The work was adventure enough.
‘As I did the house over, I thought I did myself over. While I favored it with rebirth, I favored myself with joy. At long last, I thought, a happy person comes and goes at
Grynwood.
‘And it was finished and done, the last stone cut, the last tile placed, two weeks ago.
‘And I sent invitations across the world, Charlie, and last night they all arrived, a pride of lion-men from New York, smelling of Saint John’s breadfruit, the staff of life. A team of lightfoot Athens boys. A Negro corps de ballet from Johannesburg. Three Sicilian bandits, or were they actors? Seventeen lady violinists who might be ravished as they laid down their violins and picked up their skirts. Four champion polo players. One tennis pro to restring my guts. A darling French poet. Oh God, Charles, it was to be a swell grand fine re-opening of the Phoenix Estates, Nora Gryndon, proprietress. How did I know, or guess, the house would not want us here?’
‘Can a house want or not want?’
‘Yes, when it is very new and everyone else, no matter what age, is very old. It was freshly born. We were stale and dying. It was good. We were evil. It wished to stay innocent. So it turned us out.’
‘How?’
‘Why, just by being itself. It made the air so quiet, Charlie, you wouldn’t believe. We all felt someone had died.
‘After a while, with no one saying but everyone feeling it, people just got in their cars and drove away. The orchestra shut up its music and sped off in ten limousines. There went the entire party, around the lake drive, as if heading for a midnight outdoor picnic, but no, just going to the airport or the boats, or Galway, everyone cold, no one speaking, and the house empty, and the servants themselves pumping away on their bikes, and me alone in the house, the last party over, the party that never happened, that never could begin. As I said. I slept on the lawn all night, alone with my old thoughts and I knew this was the end of all the years, for I was ashes, and ashes cannot build. It was the new grand lovely fine bird lying in the dark, to itself. It hated my breath in the dooryard. I was over. It had begun. There.’
Nora was finished with her story.
We sat silently for a long while in the very late afternoon as dusk gathered to fill the rooms, and put out the eyes of the windows. A wind rippled the lake.
I said, ‘It can’t all be true. Surely you can stay here.’
‘A final test, so you’ll not argue me again. We shall try to spend the night here.’