The brown station wagon turned up at precisely two minutes before nine—so apparently they kept shorter hours these days—containing mother and child. Rather than get out on her side and walk around, Kathleen slid across the front seat and opened the passenger’s door. She kept Rocky between herself and the school building, taking no chances. You could tell it was something she had thought about; she had probably planned every movement of the approximately three and a half mile trip from home, worked it all out in the hours just before dawn, when sleep was impossible. No doubt she was feeling the strain of having to live like that. Hell, Guinness didn’t get out of his car to walk to the filling station men’s room without having first decided where he’d dive for cover if some clown rose up out of the pile of truck tires near the Coke machine and tried to cut him in half with a shotgun.
But he was used to it; it was something he did on automatic pilot. With ordinary people, who had lived all their lives with the comforting fiction that the world was a place of safety, it was sometimes more than they could handle, even for a few days. They would grow jumpy, so that the sound of a dry leaf being pushed along the driveway by the wind would make them grow pale and sweaty. They didn’t have the nerves for it.
She had glanced for a moment at the car, frowning suspiciously from behind her glasses (she couldn’t see to the end of her arm without them), but she hadn’t acted as if anything registered—not even the car, which she should have recognized from the two other times he had practically parked it under her nose; but Kathleen was one of those people for whom a car was simply a car, indistinguishable from every other.
Then suddenly it struck him that he might have been a gorilla sitting behind the wheel for all she’d be able to see inside. She had had the sun at her back, and the glare off the windshield must have rendered him perfectly invisible. She might not even have been able to see whether there was, in fact, anyone inside the car. He rolled down the window on his side and put an elbow out over the door, where she would have something to look at.
She came back out again, alone, and it wasn’t until she had reached the middle of the walkway that suddenly she slowed down and then, after a step or two, paused dead still. She stared at him, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, and then he watched her face harden as she seemed to make up her mind about something.
Another fifteen or twenty brisk paces brought her to the door of her station wagon. She climbed in and drove off—in the opposite direction, Guinness noted, from the way she had come. Her right turn signal was flashing before she had covered a hundred feet. Guinness turned the key in the ignition, nursed his Granada around 180 degrees in the narrow little street, and followed after her. In a few minutes they would both know what the other had in mind.
It was quite a distance before Kathleen made her promised right turn, and then crossed the highway bridge over 123. But instead of hooking into the first little side road, as Guinness had done two days before when, still the impersonal, machinelike dispenser of vengeance for the government of these United States, he had first set a watch on the school building, Kathleen ploughed straight ahead, kicking up dust on the tar and gravel road at a clip that suggested she knew where she was headed.
Guinness followed sulkily behind, keeping enough distance between them to avoid giving the impression they were in convoy. He didn’t like being led along by the nose, even if that had been the original idea; he kept remembering what he had been taught, when he had been the impersonal, machinelike dispenser of vengeance for Her Majesty’s foreign office. Never trust a woman you’ve been to bed with, even if it was eight years ago—maybe especially if it was eight years ago. It always made him nervous to be wound in like a trout with a hook in its mouth, and a woman whose brood has been threatened was always dangerous and unpredictable. Even if she was Kathleen.
The road went past tidy little suburban front yards, past a cotton field, past a house right out of an Erskine Caldwell novel, front stoop and everything, and then more cotton fields before running into a slightly wider, slightly better kept road advertized as S.C. 93.
They followed 93 for a while, and then Kathleen branched off to the left, after passing through what looked like a tiny, blighted little village of the one gas station and a laundromat variety. This new road was barely a footpath, and after three or four hundred feet the pavement stopped and they were on packed clay, red and soft and filled with little chips of stone that caught the sunlight. If somebody had set up an ambush for him, he wouldn’t even be able to turn his car around.
Eventually the road led down to the edge of a marshy lagoon, presumably a finger of Lake Hartwell. Kathleen stopped her car and got out, turning to face him as she closed the door behind her. Guinness allowed about fifty feet between them. He left the keys in the ignition and didn’t set the hand brake—you never knew—and checked to make sure he had plenty of cover to his left.
And then, almost immediately, it became obvious that nothing more sinister than a conversation was going to take place. Kathleen came around to the back of her station wagon and leaned back against the tailgate, crossing her arms over her breast and staring down at her shoes, as if checking to see if they had picked up any mud. The decoy for an ambush doesn’t present herself like that, like the bull’s eye in a shooting gallery. She would know she would be the first person to die.
But Kathleen didn’t think about things like that. The rough stuff would be out of character—that was why she had left him in the first place, after all—and the idea of having her ex-husband zapped out at the end of a country road would never have occurred to her. Guinness almost felt as if he should apologize as he climbed out of his car. But he still didn’t set the hand brake or take the keys out of the ignition.
It was a very quiet place. The only sound was from the water lapping against the clay rim of the lake bed, that and once in a while the buzz of some gigantic insect flying past. There wasn’t a breath of air to make the reeds rustle—it was too hot for that. One could almost watch the steam rising from the lake.
When they were about fifteen feet apart, Guinness stopped. And for a long moment they just stood there, looking at each other. Like ancient enemies.
“I’m sorry about last night,” she said at last. Her arms were still crossed in front of her, and nothing about the way she looked or sounded conveyed any very lively impression of remorse. The words were merely a troublesome formula she had to get through. Guinness stuck his hands deep into his trouser pockets and shook his head, as if dismissing the apology, as if he didn’t give a damn whether she was sorry or not.
She looked very nice this morning. Prettier, more like the girl he had married all those years ago in London. The tan pants suit she had on was well cut enough to show that she hadn’t lost her figure. Guinness found it difficult to keep from softening.
“Speaking of which, how did you find me? Last night you seemed to know right where to look.”
She smiled maliciously.
“Did you think you were invisible, Ray? Everybody who comes to town almost has to stay at the Holiday Inn. It’s about all we have.” Her hands dropped down and slid behind the small of her back, as if to warm her kidneys. It was one of her characteristic attitudes, slightly bent at the waist, seeming to shoulder some unperceived burden, as her arms braced backwards to help support it. She was just tired, and probably hadn’t eaten much over the last few days; she never did when she was unhappy.
“My husband told me what name to ask for, so I just phoned the motel and asked. They gave me your room number quick enough; people in a small town aren’t very suspicious.”
“Duelle told you?”
Her laugh was short and brutally contemptuous, as she straightened up and recrossed her arms over her breast. She seemed to sneer at the weakness and stupidity of all men.
“Oh, yes. That was the first thing he wanted to know last night, when he came home from school. Had anyone been around the house asking questions? Had anyone phoned? He didn
’t even wait for his first pre-dinner Manhattan, and usually it takes at least two before he can even stand to be in the same room with me.”
In the moment she paused, it was impossible to know for certain whether her mouth was shaping itself into a sob or another laugh. Perhaps the two impulses cancelled each other out, because ultimately her face smoothed out to an expressionless mask.
“Then I got to hear all about your little visit. I guessed it was you, and it didn’t take much prying to be sure. He didn’t say so, but he seems to think you’re going to arrest him any minute.”
“Does he know who I am? I mean, about us.”
She shook her head. “If it’s all the same, that’ll just stay our little secret. My domestic life is complicated enough as it is, thanks.”
A plane flew by overhead, an antique twin propeller thing with a silver body. It was going so slowly it seemed barely to move at all. Guinness watched it for a minute and then decided he was tired of standing in the middle of the road like an idiot and went down to the water’s edge, where he squatted down and began turning over pebbles with the tip of his finger. The lake was an unpleasant greenish color, like the water in a swimming pool. Probably people used this road to bring their boats down for launching, but Guinness didn’t think he would have cared to be out on that flat, lifeless surface—too much like a painted sail on a painted ocean. Too much like the water in Willie Trowbridge’s bathtub.
Guinness could feel Kathleen back there behind him; he didn’t have to turn around to look. He didn’t want to have to look. He didn’t want to hear any more of the sordid details about her and Duelle. It wasn’t really any of his business anymore, except as it involved this problem with his daughter. Kathleen could use somebody else as a confidant.
He picked up one of the smaller pebbles and threw it fifteen or twenty feet out into the lake, where it made a peculiar plopping sound as it went under the surface and disappeared without leaving so much as a ripple.
“Ray, what’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know, Katey,” he said quietly, still watching the play of the light on the water. “I just don’t have much of an idea.”
When he did get up, he found her crouched beside the front wheel of her station wagon, with her back to him. Her head was buried in her fingers and her shoulders shook in noiseless spasms of weeping. He knelt down beside her and put his arm across her back and drew her into him, and she clung to the front of his jacket as if she thought she would drown if she let go. With his free hand he reached up and touched her hair.
“Don’t cry, Katey,” he whispered. “Please don’t cry. It doesn’t ever do any good.”
But she did cry, helpless against her accumulated misery, helpless to do anything except suffer and weep. What else could she do? She was afraid, for her child, and for herself, and for still more besides. It was as if the whole edifice of her life, the sum total of everything she believed and loved, everything that kept life from being merely sinister and ugly, all of that seemed as if it were being broken into pieces as she shuddered under the resistless force of her own sobbing. Perhaps that was what it meant to say your heart was breaking.
And she wasn’t the only one who felt helpless; Guinness, too, suddenly perceived himself trapped, not so much by circumstances, or by the collapse of his aspirations—after all, what kind of aspirations did he have left to collapse?—but by his own feelings.
“He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune,” said Francis Bacon. Hath given hostages to the likes of Flycatcher, as Guinness very well knew, even without having taught the essay Of Marriage and the Single Life to uncountable legions of sophomores. It wasn’t in anybody’s interest that suddenly he should remember how much he had once loved this woman, not even hers. Like crying, it didn’t do any good.
It wasn’t very long until she was quiet again, and she pushed herself away from him. She wasn’t angry now, only embarrassed.
“Oh, look, I’ve got mascara all over the front of your shirt,” she said, probably only to keep from having to say anything else. Guinness smiled as he took a handkerchief out of the pocket of his trousers and rubbed it a couple of times over the spot on his chest where he could still feel the wetness of her tears. Sure enough, the handkerchief showed up a faint charcoal smear.
“I can remember when they couldn’t have bribed you to wear this junk,” he said. And then they both smiled, at the memory of happier times.
8
All that summer it had rained in Seattle. Kathleen had rented herself a small house, thinking that way Rocky, who from her tenderest years had always been very big on sand boxes, would have a backyard to play in; but the weather was usually so lousy that they hadn’t been able to make much use of it. To top things off, the house had been constructed with a flat roof, and the rain would collect in enormous puddles which never seemed to dry up—preferring to work their way down through the cracks in the composition board and reappear as dark, crumbling stains on the living room ceiling.
Rocky and her sandbox. After they all moved to the Solid South, Kathleen hadn’t allowed her to have another for fear of parasites, making another chapter in the book of blasted ambitions.
The roof was just one of the things Kathleen had found herself somehow unable to cope with. The winter before her father had died, leaving her a rich woman by any reasonable standard, but with an empty space in her life that a daughter just out of infancy couldn’t possibly fill. She was lonely and, what was worse, bored.
Her father, whom Guinness had never met but whose good qualities he was perfectly prepared to take on faith, had rebelled against his father by becoming a Professor of Romance Languages instead of following in the well marked family groove and acquiring greater and greater riches. Nevertheless, there apparently had been enough to keep everyone in perfect comfort.
They had gotten along pretty well, the philologist-father and his incense burning, positivist child, apparently even better after she had returned from Europe with the child who seemed mysteriously to be hers alone.
She swore, as they sat together on the tailgate of her station wagon, sharing a Mounds bar which Guinness had happened to find in his jacket pocket, that she had never revealed to anyone, not to her much loved sire and certainly not to Duelle, the reasons for the collapse of her first marriage. But Guinness wasn’t sure that he believed her, at least not about her father. It would have been too much the sort of story women love to tell their fathers after the dust of the divorce has settled; Kathleen, however, to give her credit due, might well have entertained a delicacy on such a point; so it would have to remain an unresolved issue.
At any rate, she had moved back into the family house when she returned from England. In that house, with its parquet floors and its built in bookcases in almost every room, she was her father’s hostess when the occasion arose and his helper with the book that had occupied most of his time since retirement. He couldn’t get around as well as he would have liked—something to do with the heart—so Kathleen would cart his books back and forth to the library and put in hours bent over dusty little drawers in the card catalogue. It gave her a way to fill her time—and her life. She loved her father, and he was convinced that now he would live to finish his hopefully definitive study of the Italian satirists of the Eighteenth Century.
And then he died, quite abruptly while on his way to his bedroom to retrieve a pair of eyeglasses. The great work would remain forever an incoherent jumble of papers, filling two packing cases and lodged, apparently forever, in the Seattle warehouse of Bekins Van and Storage. Kathleen had suddenly to deal, not only with this bereavement, but with that other crisis, the whole sordid business of her ruined life, which her return to her father had only allowed her to postpone. Now, at last, she had to learn the arts of desolation.
She couldn’t stay alone in that vast house—she thought she might go mad in what had so suddenly become merely an enormous cavity—so she put the place on the block and moved into
the rental with the flat roof.
Sitting there beside her in the South Carolina sun, Guinness had some trouble believing there could be such a thing as rain. It didn’t work that way; the wet weather was something that rose up out of the red, clinging earth like steam from a tureen of piping hot, opaque chowder. It was hard to think of the cold rain, although he had seen enough of it while he was growing up in Ohio—rain that would freeze to the window the instant it touched, disfiguring the surface of the glass until the landscape outside became something too vague even to possess an outline.
And it had poured in London, all the time. But there neither of them had been alone. Sometimes, if the afternoon was too wet for them to go anywhere, they would lie together on the floor in the living room, pretending to listen to the rain on the roof. All they could do was pretend, since their apartment was only on the second floor of a five story building, but there was the charm of being inside and dry and together, and rain is one of those things that can make its rhythm felt, even through the dead spaces of a suburban apartment building.
Kathleen had liked the rain in those times; on such a day it was like an emblem of their privacy and peace.
Anyway, it had rained all that first summer of mourning and she was driven nearly frantic with misery.
Finally, it got so bad that she begged several of her father’s old friends to find her a job, any kind of a job, and one of them managed to put her to work behind the reference desk at the university library. Rocky went to a day care center and Kathleen to a stool in front of a computer terminal, where, if she was careful, and didn’t go outside to get her lunch or a breath of unheated air, she could go all the day without hearing a drop fall.
Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2) Page 10