Sextet

by Sally Beauman

  ‘A Yale key?’ She gave a low sigh. ‘Oh, Colin.’

  ‘I know, but it was all I could find.’ He paused. ‘It’s the key to my apartment in England. I have this sort of apartment in my father’s house. The house is terribly large. It’s called Shute Court, but everyone just calls it Shute…’

  There was a silence. ‘Shute?’ Lindsay said. ‘Colin, I don’t understand…’

  ‘That farmhouse belongs to it as well. It’s—well, it’s part of the estate, and the estate’s enormous. My family has had it for four hundred years. It will all be mine one day. Lindsay, I’m rich.’

  There was another silence. Colin had spoken in the tones of one confessing some mortal disease. His blue eyes were fixed steadily on hers and his face had become very pale. Lindsay wanted to weep and to laugh. She took his hand in hers.

  ‘I think now might be the moment to faint again,’ she said.

  This reply appeared to delight Colin; his face lit. He drew in a deep breath, as if about to dive into icy water from some great height, and clasped both her hands in his.

  ‘I want you to marry me,’ he said. ‘I want you to overlook everything I’ve just told you and marry me.’ He paused. ‘I know I proposed before, and I think I meant it then, but there’s always the possibility you didn’t believe me, considering a few minor factors…I’d never met you; I was blind drunk.’

  ‘I’m not narrow-minded,’ Lindsay said, in a reproachful way, her vision beginning to blur. ‘Colin—’

  ‘I’m not very good at proposing.’ Colin gave an agitated gesture. ‘On the telephone. On the stairs. I was going to do it in two days’ time, by moonlight. I thought if I did it by moonlight, you might accept.’

  ‘I’m glad you did it here, on the stairs. I’m so—’

  ‘Lindsay, why are you crying?’

  ‘I’m not really crying. Well, I am a bit. I’m—taken aback. Colin, I’m touched, more than touched, and I’m honoured…’

  Colin, who could hear the ‘but’ coming, lifted his hand and quickly laid his fingers against her lips. He looked into her eyes intently. ‘Don’t give me your answer now. I was incapacitated the first time I asked you, and you’re incapacitated now. It’s not really fair to propose to someone who’s just fainted. No, don’t say anything.’ His expression became tender; he frowned. ‘Now keep still. I’m going to fish that key out.’

  The process of retrieving the key was complicated and took some time. Having finally extricated it, Colin held it up and looked at it somewhat sadly.

  ‘This is yours,’ he said, in a quiet voice. ‘It’s all yours. I’m yours. I tried to tell you that in my fax from Montana. Did you notice?’

  ‘Ah, Colin—yes, I did.’ A tear fell onto her knee. ‘I wasn’t sure that was what you meant.’

  ‘If I didn’t mean it, I would never say it.’ He paused and gave her a sad, steady look. ‘I believe I could make you happy, Lindsay. I don’t have any illusions about my failings—but I know I could do that. I could make you happy tomorrow and next year and thirty years from now. And thirty years from now, if you were my wife, I’d know I’d achieved something worthwhile in my life, and I’d be completely content. That doesn’t sound very romantic, perhaps, but it’s my best qualification. I would never alter, Lindsay, I promise you that.’

  ‘Ah, Colin,’ she said, turning her face away to hide her tears. ‘People do alter. They alter very swiftly, despite all their best intentions…’

  ‘No,’ Colin said with great firmness. ‘I give you my word. Semper fidelis, in my case. And I know I won’t have to translate that, my darling.’ He paused. ‘Look at me, Lindsay. And when you’re considering your answer, just remember: I am not going to miss this particular bus, not if I have to go on chasing it for the next ten years. And I give you fair warning of that.’

  Taking her hands in his, he drew her gently to her feet and turned her to look at him. ‘You look so beautiful. The colour’s come back to your cheeks. Your eyes—well, I won’t ask you why you have tears in them; I know you’ll tell me in due course. Meanwhile, I’m going to kiss you.’ His manner became sterner. ‘So don’t argue, don’t faint again, and don’t move an inch.’

  He did so. Rowland, returning with the water, and with ice Frobisher had taken an age to provide, saw that these aids were not needed. He looked at the embracing couple, at the sweep of the stairs with its sentinel slaves, and quietly turned back.

  He returned to Emily’s apartment. There, he was introduced to a small, melancholy man called Henry Foxe, and to three ancient women whose identities he at once confused, and remained unsure of ever afterwards. Hearing the trickle of dropping names from Nic Hicks threaten to become a flood, knowing he would insult him if he stayed a second longer, he withdrew to the kitchen with some muttered and inadequate excuse.

  Frobisher, as fond of him as Emily, took one look at his face and gruffly put him to work. Things not being what they had once been in this household, she informed him, he could make himself useful. He could open that wine; he could hold that tureen steady while she decanted her Alice B. Toklas Algonquin soup. Finally, he could light the candles through there in the dining-room, but she gave him warning—the room was draughty and the candles temperamental, so they kept going out.

  Rowland went through to the dining-room, a shadowy place. It was chilly; he draped the curtains more tightly closed, then began to light the array of candles one by one. They made the corners of the room more suggestive. In the glimmering polished surface of the table, Rowland found he could see some pale and insubstantial reflection, which he assumed was his own. In the still of the room, he found he felt haunted and uneasy; if he turned, he felt, he might encounter some other self.

  The last of the candles refused to light. Patiently, Rowland struck another match; as it again guttered out, with the candle still unlit, he became aware of the noises for the first time. He tensed, then swung around, sensing someone behind him as close as a shadow; he found he was looking at empty space.

  The voices emanated from the floor, he was almost certain of that, but the acoustics here had an odd quality, so the voices shifted their position—now they came from his right, now from his left. He was no sooner certain that they issued up from beneath the parquet, when they seemed to come from the walls, or the corridor beyond instead.

  He burned his fingers, dropped the match, and again tensed. The shadows bent upon the walls; the voices, a man’s and a woman’s, he was almost sure, whispered of past losses and future loneliness. He could hear a sound like water; then, as he lent against the table, head bent, the tenor of the voices changed. A new sound began, mounting above these miserable whisperings and drowning them out.

  Rowland, less quick to identify the sound of a child crying than Lindsay, finally recognized it. Something brushed against his hand, and he drew back sharply, his heart full of inexplicable grief. He found he was now listening to silence, to a thick, hushed expectant silence. He found he was no longer certain whether he had identified that last cry correctly. It unnerved him, for he had been sure, so sure, that he had heard the impossible: the calling to him of a son he did not possess.

  ‘Jonathan, try to eat your dinner,’ Natasha Lawrence said. ‘Please try, darling. Angelica went to a lot of trouble…’

  Her son speared a tiny fragment of turkey on his fork, put it in his mouth and chewed. Eventually, he swallowed; he bent his head over his plate.

  ‘Natasha, there’s no point in forcing him,’ Tomas Court said, in a quiet voice. ‘Angelica’s out. She’s not going to see whether he eats it or not.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’ His wife gave a small nervous gesture. ‘This is our first Thanksgiving here. I planned it all so carefully. I wanted…’

  ‘The sweet potatoes are certainly very good,’ Court interrupted, in a pacifying voice. ‘Are there any more?’

  ‘There’s heaps.’ His wife rose in an eager way. ‘They’re in the kitchen, keeping warm. I’ll get them…’

&nbs
p; As soon as she left the room, the eyes of Court and his son intersected. Court laid his finger against his lips, picked up Jonathan’s plate and scooped most of its contents onto his own. By the time Natasha returned, both were eating, at a steady pace.

  Court, who had no appetite whatsoever, forced himself to eat everything put in front of him. He tried to fix his mind on the scene with Natasha that had to take place after dinner, when his son was safely in bed. All the while, Natasha kept up a steady flow of conversation, to which he responded with a polite murmur whenever appropriate. Both of them, he thought, could sense Jonathan’s mute distress; both of them, helpless in the face of it, tried to conceal their knowledge. Court began to wish they were not alone, and that Natasha, accepting that his presence was unavoidable, had not cancelled the invitations to her other guests.

  He looked around the dining-room from time to time with a sense of dazed incomprehension. No invitation to see the apartment had been extended by his wife on either of his visits since his return from Montana; he had, as yet, seen only a few of its many rooms. He had seen a whitish hall and a white on white drawing-room where he and Natasha had quarrelled, the previous night. Now he saw this appalling dining-room, where, as Natasha had informed him, the decorator recommended by Jules McKechnie had been given his head.

  The dining-room walls, at this man’s behest, had been lacquered a deep and not unsubtle red. The furniture, old, heavy, and acquired from God knew where, was black. Court faced his wife across a blackened expanse of oak; his view of his son was half obscured by the ranks of ecclesiastic candlesticks. At intervals around the room were modish arrangements of plants: a white orchid reared up at him from a side-table; one of Natasha’s mother’s orchid paintings cried out at him, open-throated, from above the chimney-piece; in the grate burned a recalcitrant, smokey, obstinate fire, which gave, and needed to give, no heat.

  The temperature in the apartment was in the high seventies, he would have guessed. The air, dry and scented by candles, smelled of pine needles; it had an acrid quality that caught at his throat. He was breathing with caution and with irritation, and trying to disguise this.

  He found the apartment uneasy, a little schizoid and desperate. He pitied Natasha for the desperation he could read here, and he pitied his son, who had to make a home in this vast mausoleum of a place. He thought of the small, ugly frame-house where he himself had grown up, a place he had not loved at the time, and from which a drive-in movie theatre two miles away had provided, in his youth, the only means of escape. Poor and cramped his childhood home might have been, but it seemed to him a thousand times preferable to this. He half listened to Natasha, as she coaxed replies from their son, and the air began to whisper to him, and he allowed his mind to start travelling, to drift back.

  That drive-in, that drive-in, with its lousy sound system, old scratched prints, and an audience who rarely bothered to watch the movie because they were too busy making out. That drive-in, with its output of old B-features and violent cartoons; with its terse private eyes and taciturn cowboys; with its vampires, zombies and supermen. That drive-in, where all the slurry of the movie industry was dredged up night after night. A sudden longing rose up in his heart for those gangsters and their molls, for those Apaches gathering on the horizon, for the trenchcoats, tough dialogue and slouch hats. He saw himself as a boy, not much older than his son was now, sitting there entranced, eyes fixed on the screen, lips moving to dialogue he knew by heart, watching the camera angles, watching the lighting, learning the grammar of this rough magic, the grammar of kisses, weapons, buddies and baddies; of cross-fades, close-ups, reverse shots, two shots and cuts.

  Ah, the terrible beauty of film, he thought—and he had been so confident of mastering it once. It was only now, when he was practised in his art, when his health was poor and his life disrupted, that he was beginning to learn just how ravenous the appetite of this art was. It ate him alive—and what was the result? Approximations merely, he thought, as the ghosts of his past and future work moved in his mind; into this maw he poured all his energy, all his acquired skill—and it was never enough.

  One of his sins—and he now thought of it as a sin, as well as a gift—was that these ghosts of his work were more real to him than anything else; they drained the blood from all his other concerns, including his concern for his son and his wife. Much of the time, as his wife had often accused him, he lived in that other parallel world; even now, the air teemed with its spirits; their hands plucked at his sleeve, begging him to give them expression and thus release. He could hear two men’s voices now, arguing some issue back and forth; he could hear a woman’s footsteps, pattering between them. It was in this spectral way that his movies always first came to him: the next movie but one, he thought. He looked up and returned to the red room. His wife had just risen to her feet.

  ‘It’s time for Jonathan to go to bed,’ she said. ‘I’ll just see him up. You go through to the living-room, Tomas. I won’t be long. Darling, kiss your father goodnight.’

  Court hesitated, wondering whether he should suggest accompanying them. Sensing the suggestion would be refused, he rose and held out his arms to his son. Jonathan held back, his face tense and pale. He glanced towards his mother, then cannoned into his father’s arms, clinging to him as he was hoisted aloft.

  ‘Will you be here in the morning, Daddy? Will you be here when I wake up?’

  ‘Darling, no.’ Court concealed his reaction. ‘I start work again tomorrow. I’ll be leaving for work long before you wake up. We’ll all be off to England soon, remember. Now—off to bed.’ He embraced his son tightly, then passed him across to his mother, and listened to their footsteps retreat. He returned to the white living-room, where another stubborn fire smouldered; he kicked at its greying embers and it flared briefly into life.

  He picked up the briefcase he had brought with him, with its faxes and photographs, with the documentation that had been pouring in now for a day and a half, and which had to be shown, and explained, to Natasha that night. Where should they sit when he embarked on this explanation? This question, a trivial one, refused to be dislodged. He looked at the room as if it were a set; he adjusted the lighting; he moved an irritating feminine cushion; he rehearsed evasive sentences, and calming ones—after all, the important thing was that the mystery attached to Joseph King was now solved; it was out of his hands and in those of the proper authorities. An arrest must now be imminent. What he must stress, he told himself, was that the stalking was now over; he must emphasize that he and Natasha and Jonathan were now safe.

  He did not feel safe, however, but he blamed that reaction on the long years of unease and the atmosphere in this apartment. He blamed too the devices of the movies with which his mind was saturated: at that drive-in in his mind, evil was always reluctant to die; up from the floor rose the dead body of the enemy; from out of the grave came the snatching hand; just as hero embraced heroine, the lights flickered and a door creaked.

  A door had creaked. He turned and crossed to the hall, frowning. He looked along the pale corridor which led, as those plans of the Conrad had informed him, to that inner and elusive staircase, and those rooms on the upper level where he supposed his wife, and perhaps his son, now slept.

  Those plans had disappeared with the rest of the detritus that had been littering the floor of his TriBeCa loft on the night he had entered it and someone unseen had attacked. His memory of that night was fragmentary; he supposed that Thalia had destroyed the architectural plans with the rest of the papers and tapes. It was of little moment, since he could remember their details with precision—and he could also see that these spaces here, and those plans, did not fit.

  The apartment might appear unaltered and in its original state—indeed Natasha had claimed, with pride, that that was the case. Yet that could not be so, he realized, looking along the corridor, looking from the doorway on his right to that on his left. They did not match, and this perhaps accounted for his feeling, intense since he
first entered this place the previous day, that his perceptions were skewed. It was not his perceptions that were to blame, he told himself, what was wrong here was the space.

  On Hillyard White’s drawings, this corridor had run through the centre of the apartment like an artery; now he could see that the corridor, although arterial, was neither centred, nor straight. It angled around a corner that should not have been there; to his immediate right was a wall where there should have been a room—could that room have been bricked up?

  He looked at the wall in question, and at the odd sweaty sheen achieved by some specialist paint effect; hung upon it was a picture by Natasha’s mother he had always greatly disliked, in which a man’s hand grasped the stem of some white and repugnant flower. The picture was askew; irritably, he moved to straighten it, then drew back, with a low exclamation and a sense of dread. A sound was coming from behind the wall, a dry, persistent scratching sound, as if something were clawing at the plaster, desperate to get through, desperate to get out. Court, who had grown up in a farming community, recognized the sound instantly as that of rats.

  As a boy, he had shot rats for his uncle in one of his barns; he was paid a nickel a dozen, and the task was one he disliked. It was not easy to shoot the rats, for they were fast and agile; their death throes, prolonged, acrobatic and squirming, were vile yet fascinating to watch. It was difficult too, to collect up the bodies: he had a superstitious fear that one rat might be shamming, that it would rise up and bite him as he stooped. Also, he discovered, the live rats retrieved the dead bodies of their fellows, and did so in a bold, knowing way, even as he approached. He had never been able to decide, nor could his uncle inform him, why they did this: did they give their rat brothers honourable burials—or did they eat them? He stared at the wall, sweat breaking out on his brow, and all the fears of his childhood rising up; the scratching continued for some while; then, abruptly, it stopped.