Stars and Bars

  ‘A half-owned car?’

  ‘A telephone call.’

  ‘A left front hall?’

  He picked up an invisible receiver and dialled the air.

  ‘Oh. You want to phone. C’mon in.’

  Henderson climbed the steps. The trailer was surprisingly capacious, or rather would have been if the vast amount of junk inside had been removed. The room was dark, the curtains being drawn, and only one table lamp was lit. There were many anonymous-looking white parcels and packages stacked against the walls which he took to be supplies of medical wadding.

  TmShandaGage.’

  ‘Henderson Dores.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  She showed him to a glass and wrought-iron chair beside a small table, upon which stood a telephone. He sat down and smiled, not trusting the simplest words. Shanda moved listlessly about the room shifting packages with a knee, going through the motions of tidying up.

  Henderson called Beeby, collect.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Beeby asked. ‘Gage called briefly this morning, said you’d arrived. Everything seems OK, looking good. What’s the place like?’

  ‘It’s a mad house,’ he said softly, glancing at Shanda.

  ‘What? Speak up.’

  ‘Fine. Lovely old place.’ If Beeby thought things were going well there was no point in relaying Freeborn’s threat.

  ‘What about the paintings?’

  ‘Seeing them this afternoon.’

  ‘Wonderful, wonderful. Keep in touch.’

  ‘Bye, Thomas.’

  Henderson hung up. Shanda came out of a doorway with a tray holding two coffee cups. Henderson braced himself.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, smiling and nodding.

  Shanda sat down opposite him. She pressed the top of a black lacquered toy roundabout-thing beside her and it began to rotate slowly, a music box somewhere in its innards playing ‘The Blue Danube’. After a second or two various little doors in its side sprang open to reveal niches filled with cigarettes. Shanda helped herself to one.

  ‘Smoke?’

  Henderson shook his head and held up a hand. He took a sip of his coffee and concentrated on what Shanda was saying. She had paused in the act of putting the cigarette in her mouth. She held it inches away from her lips, the lighter flaring in her other hand. She looked at the ceiling. Henderson noticed it was spattered with stains.

  ‘Freeborn’s in Montgomery,’ she said, with all the deliberation of an aphorist.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘He’s a good husband.’ She stuck the cigarette between her pink lips and lit it, dragging avidly on the smoke. Henderson’s eyes smarted in sympathy for the infant in her womb. She sat back in her chair and scratched an ankle. She had thickened with pregnancy, her shoulders and upper arms were creamy and soft with excess fat. He suddenly thought of the loathsome Freeborn paying his vampiric attentions to her neck, which was also soft and creamy, he noticed, with three well-defined creases in it. Shanda blew smoke at the ceiling.

  ‘Freeborn’s a salesman.’

  ‘Mm-hmm?’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t care for that Cora, do you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Cora Gage. Freeborn’s sister.’

  ‘I’ve yet to meet her.’

  ‘No, Cora. Freeborn’s sister.’

  ‘I. Don’t. Know. Her.’

  ‘You will.’ She rolled her eyes and scratched the underside of one heavy breast. She stubbed out her cigarette. Henderson and Freeborn Gage junior breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘Where you from?’

  ‘England.’

  She gave a little shy chuckle. ‘You know, I’m trying but I just can’t make out what you say. You know, it just sorta sounds like ‘Mn, aw, tks, ee, cd, ah, euh’ to me. Sorry,’ she shrugged.

  ‘Can I?’ He did his telephone mime.

  ‘Oh sure. Go ahead.’

  He called Irene, collect.

  ‘Will you accept a collect call from Henderson Dbres, Luxora Beach—’

  ‘No I will not.’ The phone went down.

  ‘Not at home?’Shanda asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did Freeborn ever tell you that I was fourth alternate in the Miss Teenage South Carolina pageant?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I was. It was last year. We were married then but he told me to enter for it all the same; you know, under my own name? I’ll be twenty next month so I guess it was my last shot. And, well…’ she patted her belly.

  She pointed to a large silver column on top of the television set. It looked like a scale model of an elaborate cenotaph. Politely, he inspected it. ‘Shanda McNab’ it said, ‘Fourth alternate’. Once on his feet he considered he could decently leave. Shanda brushed past him to open the door. She already smelt sweet and farinaceous—of milk and talcum powder—he thought.

  ‘Use the phone any time,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to talk. I don’t get many visitors coming by. And that Cora, well, you can’t talk with her.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Henderson said. ‘Bye for now.’

  He noticed the increasing heat of the day and the undisturbed blueness of the sky as he crossed the drive to get a better view of the house. But then as he walked by his car he saw to his astonishment that one of its front wheels was missing, the axle resting on a pile of bricks. He felt a sudden shock and outrage, followed by disquiet—like a householder opening his front door to discover his home burgled and vandalized. Who? How? Why? Questions yammered again in his brain. Of the three cars and a pickup that had been parked outside the house the night before only one—a particularly large dusty green monster, the colour and patina of a battle-scarred tin helmet—remained. He told himself to calm down. There was doubtless some perfectly innocent explanation. He probably had a puncture and one of the household had thoughtfully removed the tyre to get it repaired. It couldn’t be any plot to immobilize him…He laughed scornfully—out loud—at the suggestion. The noise of his laugh sounded pretentious and hollow. There was, he realized, one sure way to find out. He opened the boot. His spare tyre was there. He could change it any time he wanted. He felt relief slither down his spine to weaken his knees.

  However, he couldn’t be bothered changing his tyre now. Too hot. He walked out into the middle of the grass circle ringed by the drive and looked back at the Gage mansion.

  It was an old solid-looking wood and brick plantation house, with none of the pseudo-Grecian elegance of those usually featured in tourist brochures or films about the Civil War. The ground floor was set on a semi-raised basement and was reached by wide steps which gave on to the two tiered encircling porch supported, on the ground floor, by double stuccoed-brick columns. The split-shingled pavilion roof, with a steep hip, formed a cover for the upper gallery, the roof slope supported here by unembellished wooden colonettes. Four small brick chimneys were grouped at the centre. It was a fine, nicely proportioned house, derived in the main from the French Colonial style, he saw. At some stage its woodwork had been painted green but wind, rain and time had rendered this down to a flaky lichenous mixture of sludge-greys and browns. It was in need of some care and attention, but had it been in the most gleaming pristine condition it could have done nothing to counteract the awful proximity of Freeborn’s mobile home, parked a mere six or seven yards from the front steps. The large number of dirty motor vehicles usually nosing at its sides didn’t help either. It was like some old broken-down sow giving suck to an assorted metallic farrow. Neglect and indifference were all it seemed to evoke; few traces of its romantic past lingered in the air.

  The small park it was set in was better tended. The coarse tough grass had been cut back to ankle height. The scattered trees were tall and in fine leaf. From his bedroom window that morning he had looked out onto a garden at the back of the house, wild and overgrown and in riotous flower, the gravelled paths and their low box hedges almost obscured by the profusion and fecundity.

  He walked round the side of the house. From here he co
uld see the clapboard extension built onto the back which, he imagined, composed Alma-May’s annexe. He pushed open an askew wicker gate in the tangled hedge that marked the garden boundary and made his way with difficulty along a path to emerge at a small square of lawn. Here the grass was knee high and alive with butterflies. He picked a flower from a nearby shrub and smelt it. Sweet and musky: redolent of Shanda.

  He looked up at the rear elevation of the house. A smaller set of steps led down from the porch to the garden. Because of the wide porch and gallery and the overhang of the roof it was hard to gain an accurate idea of the house’s size: just how many rooms it had and how they were laid out within the basic rectangle of the design. He started counting windows on the upper storey. Eight. He thought he saw someone move behind one of them but then he couldn’t be sure. A minute later he heard the sound of a car starting and then driving away. Shanda? Alma-May? Cora?

  He went up the back steps and tried the back door. Locked. He followed the porch round to the front door. Some of the windows he passed were firmly shuttered and he wondered if the rooms behind them held the Gage collection.

  He walked into the hall. The house was quiet and felt empty. He wandered around the ground floor, peering into rooms he hadn’t visited. There was a large dining room, a ‘den’ with a dust-mantled ping-pong table, another reception room with all the furniture shrouded in sheets, with the exception of a large grand piano. Such paintings as were on the walls were framed prints, family portraits or water-colours by patent amateurs.

  He went quietly upstairs. He paused at the top checking for noise. Nothing. He put his hands in his pockets and hummed tunelessly to himself, wondering if he really should be prowling around in this way. To his right ran a corridor off which were Duane’s, Bryant’s and his rooms. He turned left. He opened a door and looked in. An utterly characterless bedroom with scattered clothes and an unmade bed. On a chest of drawers stood a sizeable component from an internal combustion engine. Beck-man’s room? Other doors revealed a large walk-in closet heaped with folded sheets and towels, a bathroom and another room, entirely empty. The corridor led him round a corner. Two doors were set on either side of the passage which came to an end at a casement window overlooking the back garden.

  He tried one door. It was locked. So too was the one adjacent. He tried a door on the other side. It swung open. The room was dark, the curtains were drawn, and no lights were on. He stood poised in the doorway for a moment, listening. Not a sound. He saw a small sitting room with some old leather armchairs. There was a strong smell of stale cigarette smoke. Were these Gage’s rooms? Or Beckman’s? Through aj ar double doors in one wall he could make out a single bed. There was a gleaming aluminium stereo set placed on some shelves amidst a rubble of LPs, magazines, newspapers and stacks of books. Some pictures hung on the wall beyond them but the gloom was too intense to make them out. He walked carefully over to them, stepping round the piles of reading matter and scattered records.

  He stopped suddenly. A small light glowed on the stereo’s console. The turntable was revolving. A record was playing soundlessly. He could feel the echo of his heart beat rebound from the roof of his mouth. His startled eyes followed a wire which led from the stereo set across the littered carpet and onto a divan tucked into a far corner of the room. Someone was lying on it.

  ‘Who’s that?’ a woman’s voice said. ‘Duane? Keep your fuckin’ hands off of my records.’

  Thick-throated and trembling, Henderson stood to attention.

  ‘Ah, no,’ he said. The person lay on her back, as far as he could see, and had made no move to turn round. .

  Henderson began to talk. ‘Terribly sorry to wander in name’s Dores actually looking for Mr Gage’s paintings, um…’ He took a pace or two forward. He started explaining again. Now he could see that the person lying on the divan was a very small young woman—Cora Gage, doubtless. Henderson stopped talking because he realized she couldn’t hear him. She wore headphones and very dark round sunglasses. She sat up, removed her headphones and turned her sightless eyes in his direction.

  ‘If you’re not Duane who the hell are you?’ Her voice had the faintest of Southern accents. She expressed no surprise at a stranger walking, uninvited, into her room, her tone was weary and dry.

  ‘The name’s Dores.’ Henderson explained again who he was and why he’d made the mistake of coming in. He held out his hand then snatched it back, realizing she couldn’t see the proffered gesture. He could hardly say ‘shake’ like some cowboy in a saloon.

  ‘He hangs his paintings in his own rooms,’ she explained. ‘Across the corridor. But he keeps them locked up. So Freeborn and Beckman can’t get at them.’

  ‘Ah.’ This made no sense, but, then again, that was hardly surprising.

  ‘Awe.’ She imitated him. Henderson charitably ignored this. Blind people were preternaturally sensitive to noise, he knew; she was probably savouring the timbre of his voice, as if making some sort of a sonic filing card for her memory, as sighted people might make a note of a face or a view. She was wearing jeans and a man’s shirt. She swung her legs off the divan and sat on the edge. She was very small and thin, not much more than five feet, he guessed. She had a pale, sallow face and wispy untidy brown hair scraped into crude bangs on either side of her head. In the blurry light, with her round opaque lenses, she looked like some mutant night-creature, some lemur or potto.

  ‘I assume you’re English,’ she said, looking straight in front of her. Her hand groped along the coverlet and came in contact with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She lit one with only the briefest of hesitations.

  ‘That’s right, yes,’ he said, in the eager respectful tones he used to all cripples, deformed or socially disadvan-taged people he met. His voice said: ‘You have been born with a handicap but I am not shocked or repelled. On the contrary, I respect and admire you for your efforts in overcoming it and will treat you exactly as if you were normal and entire.’

  ‘I have an illogical but profound dislike of the English,’ she said.

  Henderson laughed. A come-on-you’re-joking chuckle.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Nothing. I—’

  ‘Why did you laugh, then?’

  Henderson looked about him as if calling on an invisible audience for support.

  ‘Well, because I assumed you were joking, I suppose.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well…’ Good God! ‘I suppose because one just doesn’t say that sort of thing in all seriousness to someone one’s just met moments before.’

  ‘Oh, doesn’t one? But I do. I hate the English.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’ He sensed a hot pelt of embarrassment cover his entire body. He backed off a couple of steps and waved his hands about.

  ‘Perhaps if I, if we, were to get to know each other I might, um, be able to—ha ha—persuade you to, to, reconsider. Or at least exclude me from the general slur.’ Somehow he had reached the door. He wished he hadn’t given that little laugh.

  She puffed on her cigarette and made no reply.

  ‘Well, I won’t disturb you further. Sorry to have—’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Dores.’

  ‘Bye.’

  He shut the door and walked slowly down the corridor. He understood what Shanda meant. What an astonishing woman, he thought. What a…bitch, there was no other word for it, blind or no. He shook his head in sagacious sorrow. He wondered what had brought it on. Had her blindness been caused by a crash in an English make of car, a Jaguar or Aston Martin, say? Or had she been a forceps delivery handled by a clumsy and strong-fingered English gynaecologist? He turned the corner realizing with some distaste that his armpits were moist and squelching. No, there was something deeper there: that sort of aberrant hate—if he was any judge of human nature—was to do with affairs of the heart turned sour. Unrequited love. Probably ditched by an Englishman for a girl who could see. Some right-thinking, sensible, sane, pragmatic Englishman. Turned her into a bi
tter, chainsmoking, reclusive anglophobe. He trotted down the stairs, feeling marginally reassured by his armchair psychology, and saw Freeborn come in the front door. He resisted the temptation to check his watch.

  ‘You still fuckin’ here?’ Freeborn said pointing at him. ‘You got about a hour and a half.’

  Henderson slowly arrived at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Look, I might as well tell you,’ he said nervously, ‘that I’m not leaving here until I have completed my business with your father.’

  Freeborn, who had been heading across the hall in the direction of the kitchen, abruptly changed course and strode powerfully over. Henderson raised his hands to chest level, then tugged at the loose skin on his neck.

  Freeborn put his huge face with its dense, neatly clipped beard very close to Henderson’s.

  ‘Listen, you English fuck. You ain’t gonna do no business with my father. It’s been done, see? Those pictures are sold already. He’s a old man. He don’t know what he’s been talking about, so get yo’ shit out of here.’

  ‘Your father has asked my company to do a valuation on his paintings and I don’t intend to leave until he tells me to.’

  Freeborn looked at him. ‘You been warned, man.’ He spread his hands reasonably, ‘I can’t say fairer than that. Just don’t fuck with me.’

  ‘The last thing on earth I want to do is ‘fuck’ with you,’ Henderson replied bravely. ‘I suggest you take the matter up with your father if you’re unhappy about my being here. I’m simply doing my job.’

  ‘Yeah, and look, keep away from Shanda, heah? I catch you messin’ with her, boy and you—’

  ‘I was only making a telephone call, for God’s sake.’

  ‘That’s my fuckin’ phone, man. You keep yo’ chicken-shit hands off of it, no good English mofo.’ With that he turned and marched off into the kitchen.

  Henderson went slowly back upstairs to his room. This sudden hostility from all quarters left him feeling weak and thoughtful. He wondered, once again, if Beeby knew what he was talking about…And what, moreover, had Freeborn meant by the statement that the pictures had been sold already? Or was that all his clenched fist of a brain could come up with as a ruse? Like a lot of people, Freeborn could at’times give the impression of being astonishingly stupid, but it was too risky an assumption to elevate into a truth. He resolved, for what seemed like the hundredth time, to quit the Gage mansion the minute his evaluation was done.