by Paul Hazel
with the unconscious morality of children, knowing herself
naked, began to put on her dress.
3.
In the books they had read together, books which for the
most part Wykeham had given him, the women were
pushed off until the end, a reward presumably. But here,
Harwood thought, they were, his wife and his daughter,
inconveniently in the middle. The Duke, of course, could
come and go as he pleased. Holmes was married. All the
same, Harwood did not think it greatly impeded him. Doctors’ wives, he was certain, were accustomed to having their husbands called away unaccountably.
Harwood thumbed through his wallet, counting the few
notes, and threw them all down on the table. “Twenty
pounds,’’ he said unhappily, realizing that His Grace would
have to pick up his share of expenses.
“We can look after ourselves,” his wife said with dignity.
The girl, playing on the floor before the woman’s feet, had
not lifted her eyes to look at him.
“Just a few days,” he said in despair.
The woman let herself be kissed. Behind her the little
kitchen was hung with laundry. She had washed his one good
shirt, straight from his back, when he had come home that
morning. It lay starched and expertly folded in the bottom of
his suitcase. She had packed it herself with his underwear
and his second pair of trousers.
“I would like to wear it again,” he explained and she
nodded, distracted. Through the open window, hours before,
when he had only just arrived, she had caught a glimpse of
the old gentleman climbing into the limousine. If he were
anyone important, her husband had not mentioned it.
“I cannot say what will come of this,” he had told her.
He lifted out the shirt she had folded carefully, put his thick
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arms into' it. “But the details have to be the same, I think. Or
nearly so.”
He was taking the overcoat.
“What do you want with that?” she asked.
She had the uneasy feeling that he was already gone.
“It’s summer,” she put in scornfully.
Harwood looked past her.
“That first night I had it,” he said.
It had also been April— or March. He had forgotten
which and wondered now if it mattered.
“I must be going,” he said, gently, and stepped out the
door.
She watched him go down the walk. She did not know
how long she stood by the curtain. It was not until she had
turned back that she saw the suitcase open on the table.
Harwood went along the High Street and through the
park, as he had come before, without luggage. As he crossed
the intersection, cars with stone-faced chauffeurs hooted
imperiously. Let out from shops and offices, men and women
pressed into buses or, retracing familiar routes, melted
anonymously into pubs and houses. Harwood trudged on
doggedly. His Grace had been prepared to drive them all,
Holmes included, out by the river road to Greenchurch, but
Harwood had protested.
“You and I must start at the station,” he had told him.
“Please understand.”
But he had not. “And Holmes?” he had asked.
“I must get on at Bristol, Your Grace.”
The Duke had sat with his back to them, overlooking the
city. During the night it had seemed clearer; but now, the
whisky deserting him, he had not been able to think.
“How will you get there?” he had asked.
In fact, Holmes had taken a taxi.
“It seems a foolish expense,” the Duke said, meeting
Harwood by the information booth. Under the great dome of
the waiting room his voice did not sound angry but humiliated. But he was not thinking of the money or, indeed, of Holmes. A daughter, he thought. It seemed impossible that
Wykeham had not told him.
Except for the one secret, he had been told everything.
He had earned that trust. He had worked indefatigably. It
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was he who had always been summoned to deal with lawyers,
with loose ends, with death. But the one thing that counted,
a child, the passing on of the inheritance, had, until the very
end, been kept from him. It wrung him to think of it.
He walked stiffly beside Harwood. Because the evening
was mild, the doors to the platform had been left open. They
could both see the train.
As they neared the gate, Harwood stopped, shocked by
the clarity of his recollection. His eye crept along the line of
car windows.
“There ought to be a woman,” he said.
The crowd of passengers, already boarding, were finding
their seats. No face peered down at him.
He had not wanted to look this far ahead, to visualize
anything too completely, as if all their lives had been plotted.
But at bottom he had kept a list; he was checking against it.
“She was staring out of the train,” he said, almost
desperately.
For the first time the Duke noticed that Harwood was
carrying the overcoat.
“There were two women,” he reminded him. But Harwood
had forgotten the other.
It depended, the Duke realized, on who had been
watching.
And three men, he thought. Four, if he counted himself.
But he did not think he should be added; there had been
nobody watching him. Harwood, he remembered, had walked
ahead but he had stayed where he was. There had been no
part for him. The Trust, even his office in the bank, had been
given to Houseman.
The Duke was looking up at the train.
The sky, because it was summer, was tranquil; its lingering
brightness glowed a soft reddish gold. In the cars the lights
had been turned on. The faces of the passengers, illuminated
in equal measures by the sky and the lamps, shied first one
way, then another, nervously.
The engine expelled a cloud of white steam. From
behind it came the bark of horns, the sound, almost lost
under them, of ships’ bells in the harbor. In the first car, by
the window, a man took his seat.
Harwood looked and saw nothing. He glanced sharply
around.
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“Perhaps I was wrong after all,” he admitted. “We could
just as well have driven.” He paused, looking back at the
station. “I thought that if we could just repeat everything,
one thing after another, as it happened, something would
change. But it hasn’t.” Dejected, he walked away. “Are you
coming, Your Grace?” he asked.
The Duke’s eyes were fixed beyond him.
The face staring from the car window was printed indelibly on his mind: the thatch of dark hair and the high forehead, the deep hard eyes watching.
The man was looking out at the evening.
“At the light that was fading,” the Duke told Harwood
afterward. “Regarding it contemplatively,” he said later, “as if
it were something important, to be gravely considered.”
>
It had only been for a moment; the head turned.
“We must hurry,” the Duke said. Taking hold of Harwood’s
arm by the elbow, he pressed forward.
The train crawled past shipyards, past the tight-packed
roofs of the slums, following the river. The Duke sat up in his
seat. It was his second night without sleep but he was no
longer tired. “He did not see us,” he said in a rapid, low
voice, his eyes shining. “He was not looking for anyone. He
would not have expected anyone.” His own face beamed.
"But he was seen.”
The sun’s rays had disappeared. The plain of the river
had become a cavernous darkness. Harwood did not care to
look at it.
“Why should you be the one?” he grumbled.
The conductor had come through, collecting the tickets.
The Duke paid both fares.
“Compensation,” he said cheerfully. “You must admit I
was owed something. It was my decision which sent him to
his death. I felt the pain of it. It comes down to that, I think.
Payment for sorrow.”
Harwood frowned. The dead man, sitting no more than a
dozen rows ahead, did not look very dead. Yet from the back
it was difficult to make judgments.
“I could walk up front,” Harwood suggested, “to the
lavatory.”
“What would you see?” the Duke objected. “He was no
one you knew.”
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“I could see if he looks like a man.”
“He does,” the Duke said flatly.
“I could see for myself.”
“Isn't it enough that I told you?"
“You!” Harwood nearly shouted. “Why you?”
Beyond everything it was this which had troubled him.
If the world had changed, if this was an instance of its
changing, why had he been excluded?
He looked around miserably. “Why should it be you who
noticed?” he asked.
But His Grace had already given his answer. “Perhaps it
only happens in pieces,” he added sympathetically.
“W hat?”
“Just a bit at a time,” the duke said. “Only changing
things that he thought should be different.”
“That who thought?”
The Duke looked at him doubtfully. "Wykeham,” he said.
Harwood shook his head. It was the same argument they
had had in the bank; he was still adamant.
“Not Wykeham. Not pieces either,” he said.
He was remembering the woodcut that hung over his
desk. The pattern, he recalled, once altered, changed
incrementally from one tessellation to the next. Yet, looking
back, he had never been able to tell just where the change in
the pattern had started. A hundred times he had tried to find
the place but always there were shadows, glimmerings, a
place farther off for every place he looked.
“No,” he said fiercely. For an instant he looked straight
at the Duke.
“There are differences," he said. “But they had always to
have been there. Or to seem so, afterward.” In his excitement, he leaned forward.
A lock of his ginger hair had fallen into his eyes. He
pushed it back with his fingers. He said, “What changes one
thing, I’m afraid, Your Grace, changes everything.”
“But it was William,” the Duke persisted. “Or at least it
was Joseph.”
“What makes you think,” Harwood asked, “that only he
could be the cause of it?”
“Cupheag,” the conductor called sharply, announcing
the station.
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“Metichanwon,” he said later.
But when he should have shouted out Bristol, he did
not.
The train slowed. The conductor came into the car and
then left it. Three or four times the Duke noticed him in the
passage between the car and the engine, speaking to someone up front. Each time he came back into the car he was frowning. The Duke wished the man would stay in one place.
The movement along the aisle was annoying and he was
trying to think.
“Your pardon,” he said the next time the man passed
him.
“There’s been a delay,” the conductor replied curtly.
“How long?”
The man shrugged.
It grew late. The Duke let his forehead rest on the
window. The sound of the wheels came softly through the
floor, a faint, even throbbing that made the sound almost
tender. He glanced up. Houseman, to his relief, was still
there.
For a moment he felt safe again.
He had listened to Harwood, had tried to think honestly
what the younger man had meant. He knew that something
had gone terribly wrong and equally that it had been put
right again. A man was dead. Over and over he had tried to
grapple with the shifting tides of that responsibility but he
had felt himself being pulled under. Now Wykeham had
changed it. “There is a place to stand again,” he might have
said. He had been beginning to drown.
“Christ Almighty!” exclaimed Harwood.
The Duke dragged himself up.
The passengers rumbled awake, their sleep-slackened
faces jostled into alarm.
The river was burning. Across the water-meadows and
the marshes on the outskirts of Bristol they saw the bright
sheet of flame: a thousand tongues of light, not upon the
water but within it, gleaming balefully. It grew bigger and
brighter. But it was itself without height. Without heat.
Without sound.
“Like a reflection,” Harwood whispered.
He looked up. Even in the glare of the burning, his face
grew pale.
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“It’s the city,” he gasped.
“But how— ?”
His Grace was staring.
The train crossed a small bridge. After a few hundred
yards there was another. The sound of the wheels, rocking,
echoed softly. Then the track, following the long curve of the
bank, straightened. Suddenly the station was ahead of them.
In the bright distance behind it the roofs of Bristol were
engulfed in flame.
At the front of the car the door opened. The conductor
walked through. He closed the door, locked it. The stricken
faces of the passengers watched, unmoving..
“You must stay in your seats,” he said evenly. “We will
take only as many as we can. There is no need for panic.
There are police on the platform. Everything has been
arranged.”
“What has happened?” someone cried.
“Fires,” he said stiffly and went down the aisle and
through the next door into the car behind.
The Duke did not watch him.
All around him was the confusion of the yard. Acres of
track were sliding by him; odd little sheds and old carbarns
flickered past. Usually untidy and blackened, they were now
curiously enlivened. Touched with fire-gold and copper, they
bloomed. The engine gave a small moan. The car bumped.
Along the narrow platform, marshaled behind gates and high
railings, crowds of people gathered by tens and by hundreds.
The Duke did not feel their stares. His body did not seem to
belong to him but to be floating above them, as the car
passed, slowly, out of darkness, into light, again into darkness. ..
In the car the lamps were switched on once more.
He did not feel the blast of heated air as the outer doors
opened. All but unnoticed, Dr. Holmes, pushing his way
through the men scrambling down the aisle, threw himself,
exhausted, into the seat beside His Grace.
“I had fallen asleep,” the Duke said afterward, as if that
justified it.
But now he was strangely awake. His eyes ran down the
rows of new passengers. More than a score had to stand,
awkwardly, holding on to whatever they could find. He could
not see Houseman. But he was there. The Duke was certain
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of that. The car was noisy with questions; he pushed his face
next to Holmes’s.
“Your wife?’’ he asked, almost shouting.
“I got her away this morning,” Holmes answered. “With
the children. Off to Cambridge." He was very nearly shouting
himself. Yet some dread that had been in him relaxed a little.
Still, his eyes did not soften. He said, “As far as anyone can
tell, it is only this valley.”
“It’s only here, isn’t it?” Harwood said. “Surely not in New
Awanux.” He had just remembered his wife and his daughter.
Holmes shook his head. “There were rumors this morning,” he said. “When I came into the house, everyone was talking. We had time.”
“We heard nothing.”
“Then perhaps in the south there was nothing.”
Harwood had to hunch forward to hear. “We were in
New Awanux until evening,” he cried. “No one sa id .. .”
Holmes's voice, raised above the voices nearest him, had
at least the sound of honesty. “No one knew. There were only
rumors at first. It was hours before anyone saw them and
then they were so few. We just looked at them. Everyone
went out into the streets. We all stood around on the steps of
the houses, looking up.”
His color was high, but it seemed less anger or resentment than a kind of sad embarrassment, as if he had seen what should have been hidden. He turned, not meeting their