Mike nodded. “A perfect setup for a man with death on his mind. But suppose the other brother returns? And talks? He knows who you are?”
My father looked at me and turned away. “I think of that constantly.”
“Then why did you come here?”
“I had to think. I had to see Isobel. I had played in this house when I was a child. I remembered this tunnel. I thought I might stay hare for a few days until I had finished my thinking.”
“A few days. You’ve had a month, more than a month.”
“I’m ready to leave now.”
“Do you think we’ll let you?”
“Yes. You’re going to marry Isobel; you wouldn’t hurt her. This would hurt her. You’d never be rid of it—you, Isobel, your children.”
Mike’s nod agreed and approved. My father might have been the lone survivor of a shipwreck and Mike, familiar with the craft and the waters, a sympathetic and understanding listener. It was insane. Insane.
It was insane; there was no sense in any of it. My father was truly the monster of my story. He lived in a tunnel in his own house; he sat on a cot and warmed his hands over candlelight; he talked about two lives, his own and mine. He talked about not hurting me. Downstairs, within reach of my voice if I screamed, were five elderly women, four of them mourning him. My mother—
I thought of my mother wandering through the house she loved, wondering where the spiced and sweetened years had gone, hiding her pride and pain in silence. Breaking her heart in memory of a man who let a stranger fill his grave while he lived between walls like a rat.
“I’m afraid he’s mad,” I said. “Mother must be warned and protected. Suppose she comes here, unprepared?” My father spoke eagerly. “Isobel is right. I’m afraid you’ll be missed. If you will leave me now, give me a few hours—”
“Why?” Mike’s voice was mild and soft. “Why, suddenly, do you want a few hours? So you can run away again? And what’s happened to the end you said you were waiting for? The end of your story? Don’t tell me you’ve found it. Don’t tell me that one of us has given you the answer to your thinking. What are you afraid of, Mr. Ford?”
My father said he was not afraid. He said, “I am only ill, I am not afraid. Let me go, Mike, now, tonight Believe me, it’s the best thing.”
Mike released my arm. He went to the cot. I waited for Tray’s snarl, but he was quiet and absorbed. He was listening, as he always did. “Soon, soon,” Mike said. “But first I want to hear more about your illness and the little incidentals of your life in here. Then we can talk about your going. Tell me about your food, for instance, and the books and so on. Where did they come from?”
“They came from the shack; they were originally bought for the use of myself and my friends. I moved them here, later.”
“Later,” Mike agreed. “After the accident, or suicide, or whatever you want to call it. By the way, what do you call it?”
“I have always called it a release, for both of us. But I had no hand in it. I didn’t kill him.”
“No, you didn’t kill him. You’re no murderer, not you.”
I was not the only one who heard Mike’s underscoring. Joe and my father heard it, too. Mike said, “Not you.” The almost whispered words relit the fire in my father’s eyes and filled Joe’s with wonder. I heard myself echoing Mike. Murderer. Murderer. Not you. Not you. I heard Mike talking on, not giving me time to think, to probe, to dig deep in my mind and bring up names and faces.
“Do you still go out at night, Mr. Ford?”
“Occasionally.”
I made myself ask, “With Tray?”
He looked over my head to the stairs. Joe blocked the way. “Yes,” he said.
“I want to hear about Tray, too,” Mike said. “He tracked you here, didn’t he?”
“Yes. That first night I tied him in the stable. I wanted him discovered and cared for, not roaming the countryside. But he found me, and I had to take him in.”
“Did you tell him to take care of Isobel?”
“I may have.”
“Where do you get the meat you’ve been giving him?” My father looked at the blocked door again.
“Don’t worry about the door,” Mike said. “Nobody goes out and nobody comes in, not until we’re ready.” Joe’s hand gripped mine, and his mouth brushed my cheek. He whispered, “He’s stalling; Mike’s stalling. I don’t know what for, I don’t know why. He’s stalling and waiting, and I don’t know what for. Do you?”
I knew nothing.
“And forget about the meat,” Mike went on. “I’m a good guesser. If you have an ally in the house, that’s okay with me.”
My father said, “Let me go, Mike!”
“Soon,” Mike promised again. “Don’t you know that I’m on your side, whatever that is? If you still want oblivion, I’ll help you get it. I’ll help you get away for good, and I’ll make Isobel understand. But you’ve got to help me, too. You’ve got to stop lying.”
“I’m not lying.”
“You’re not talking, and that’s the same thing. In this situation, it’s the same. If you want to lose yourself again, we’ll make a good job of it; but you’ll have to sell me on it first. You’ll have to prove that you’re alone in this cockeyed game of hide-and-seek, that you aren’t being hunted and you aren’t hunting. If you can do that, you’re free. You can start another life anywhere you want to; you can make a comeback if you want one. A little amnesia, tactfully handled, is something to keep in mind. You can turn up, all bewildered, in a hospital halfway across the country.”
My father’s hand covered his eyes.
“So,” Mike said. “Let’s go back to the beginning and tie it up. You were ill, too ill to think straight, unwilling to confide in your family or your doctor. Want to tell us what you thought was wrong?”
No answer.
“Sick in body or mind or both, and yet you preferred to treat yourself. That’s the first snag in your story, and it’s a pretty one. Well follow it with your decision to play dead. You played dead in the first place because you were ill. Bight? Well, you’re not ill now, you’re thin but you’re sound enough, and yet you still want to play dead. Why?”
No answer, no movement, no sound but Joe’s small, frightened cough.
“Come on, Mr. Ford,” Mike said. “You’ve been here a month, you’ve straightened yourself out physically. What have you been hanging around for? As far as the world knows, you’re suitably buried in the family plot, your wife and daughter are well provided for, everything is on the up and up, on the surface. On the surface you’re free, free, free. What have you been hanging around for?”
My father filled Mike’s pause with two words. He said, “Please don’t.”
“I must,” Mike said. “For the everlasting peace of everyone in this house. You made a quick and desperate decision on the edge of that quarry, and you got what you wanted: a grave with your name on it. You got oblivion, and how did you use it? You went straight back to the life you ran away from. What for? To think, you say; and to see Isobel. “What’s wrong with Isobel?”
My father said, “You don’t know what you’re asking!”
I begged Mike to let me leave. I begged him to let me leave and take Joe. I reminded him that Joe was only seventeen; I told him we were hurting Joe. “He’s only a baby,” I said. “Look at him, he’s frightened. Let us both go.”
“Nobody goes,” Mike said, “until we all go together. And I have a hunch it won’t be long now.” He turned to my father. “Now, I can understand a man’s wanting to run away; it’s not my cup of tea, but I can understand it. ‘Most men live lives of quiet desperation.’ One of the bright old boys wrote that, I don’t know which one, but I can get the point, I can understand it It’s you I can’t understand. You got what you wanted and came home again. To see Isobel. That’s the part I plug, to see Isobel. You’d been seeing her every day for months, but apparently that wasn’t enough. You wanted a better view, and you had to play dead to get it.
No sense to that unless we cut one word and substitute another. I say you came back to watch Isobel, to watch her unseen.”
“Give me until daylight,” my father whispered. “I want to think. I’m still not sure. Give me a few hours, and I’ll talk to you.”
“No,” Mike said. “Mr. Ford, when we found that door and came in here, I was all set to call the cops. But not now, not any more. I changed my mind when I began to smell fear and panic. Your fear and panic, and not for yourself, either. For someone else. I want you to tell me what to do. I want to line up on your side, but I don’t know how to get there “
Fear and panic. When Mike called them by name, they went away, as such things do. They fell away before a strange, new warmth. It came slowly, it was tangible, it was in my father’s voice when he said, “Thank you.”
They looked at each other for a long time, in silence; I could have warmed my hands by holding them out to the two quiet men.
Mike spoke first. “What did you mean, Mr. Ford, when you said you were still not sure? Not sure of what?”
My father didn’t answer.
Mike went on. “Who or what has been hurting you, Mr. Ford?” His arm lay across my fathers shoulders.
Still no answer.
“That mans death gave you a peculiar freedom. Does your death free someone else?”
There was silence again while they read each others faces.
The silence might have lasted until, in desperation and defeat, we left him. It might have lasted until we closed the tunnel door behind us and left him, until we went down to the others in the library and moved among them, lighting my mother’s cigarettes and playing the cousins’ games.
But Mike broke it. “I’m remembering how you refused food,” Mike said softly. “Isobel told me about that. I’m remembering how you preferred to eat and drink with the men in the shack. What put you off the food in your own house? Were you afraid of poison?”
Joe took my hand, and we crept forward. We walked into the current of my father’s voice as if it were the sea.
“I was ill,” he begged. “I am still ill. Can’t you see that? I couldn’t think, I’m unable to think now. Look at me. I’m not responsible, for myself or anyone else. Don’t talk to me. I’m not responsible for what I say.”
“Bull’s-eye,” Mike said. “And I almost wish I hadn’t hit it.” He whispered his questions, and my father fought against their strength.
“Have you proof, Mr. Ford?”
“No, no, no!”
“Can you ever prove it?”
“No.”
“But you think you were given poison in your own house?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“Now I get the point about the quarry business. It makes sense now, even the tunnel makes sense. You came back here to look for proof, proof of poison or of your own madness. But why did you try to handle it alone? Why didn’t you come to me? Between us we’d have licked it, one way or another. You trust me, don’t you? You’ve always trusted me, haven’t you?”
“I didn’t trust myself.”
“Small wonder. Mr. Ford, how does Isobel come into this? You talked about two lives, yours and hers. I don’t like that. It can mean anything, and all of it bad. What’s Isobel’s place in the picture?”
The tunnel room was filled with the sound of breathing, but I heard another sound that wasn’t there. It was familiar. I had been hearing it in other places for more than a month, in the house, in the garden, at night. It was the sound of my father’s mind churning.
I listened to the sound and heard the pattern change. I heard the end before it came. It crept between us, moved among us like a specter; nameless, faceless, invisible, but strong enough to stir the air and draw my father to his feet. We were no longer four minds, but five. The new warmth ebbed on a dying tide, and the old cold returned. My father raised one arm in a warding gesture. One arm, outflung, to make a barrier.
Then I heard the footsteps. They were outside the tunnel where the halls form a cross.
I said, “Tench.”
The steps came on. No, not Tench. Light, clicking, little spool heels.
I said, “Don’t let her see. She’ll be terrified. Let me tell her, let me!”
Her voice was faint at first, then it grew stronger. “Isobel? Isobel?”
My father said, “Close the door!”
But we stood there, Mike and Joe and I rooted to the floor. The steps came on, and we heard them falter at the open turret door. I was turned to stone; I tried to warn her; my mouth was turned to stone.
“Isobel, are you here? Why are you here?” She was frightened.
My father stood alone and waited. She came on, slowly; we heard the measured rustle of her trailing skirt She stood in the doorway at the top of the steps, a candle in her hand. She looked down. One scream, only one. She turned and ran.
She fell twice on the turret stairs; we heard her fall. We were behind her, running, when she reached the main stairs. She turned once and looked back. The others stopped, only I ran ahead. She sent me one look from eyes I did not recognize and flung her body to the stones below. Her candle was an arc of light that fell a second later.
She killed herself because she was a killer.
Mike met the stream of terrified people that poured into the hall; the cousins, Mrs. Barnaby, Tench, Mrs. Tench. He held them with lies.
He knew she had killed herself; he didn’t know why. But he lied with authority, and now his story is our story. We have tightened and strengthened it, and we will tell it the rest of our lives. He concentrated on the cousins, instinctively choosing the weakest links and holding them together with words.
“He has been ill, out of his mind. The dead man was a stranger, wearing his coat. He was ill, shocked. He doesn’t know where he’s been. But he was on his way home when we found him at the gates.”
They looked from my father to my mother; my father leaning on the balustrade, my mother on the floor at his feet. They clung to Mike, and he told his thin, loud lies over and over, while Tench led my father to a chair and stood beside him. Anna came from the cottage, summoned by Mrs. Tench. I don’t know who covered my mother; I think it was Joe. They all stood in a circle around Mike, Tench, and my father, and listened to the story we all will tell from now on. Even Tench, who knew it was a lie, nodded and listened. They believed it, all but Tench and one other. Tray watched from the head of the stairs, his head resting on his paws. Joe tried to drive him back, but he crouched like the brooding gargoyle that looks down on Paris and thinks. He looked as if he were waiting for my mother to move.
Mike told them my mother had fallen. He said she was running down the stairs to tell them the great news. Her little spool heels.
The cousins drank the words, and their eyes never left his face. Those little spool heels, hadn’t they always warned her? And running to tell them her great, good news, running to share her miracle. They wept softly, and their old, tired weeping was her only elegy.
We had walked to the road, Mike said, and found my father standing at the gates. We had brought him into the house, secretly, and hidden him upstairs, because we wanted to prepare them. He was not fit to be questioned, not yet.
Mike did not look at me or my father when he talked. He avoided detail and forestalled interruptions. “We don’t know much about this ourselves. Mr. Ford will talk to you later, but he must be quiet now. We know he lent his car and jacket to a man who needed them, and you know what happened to that man. The shock was too much for Mr. Ford—he was on the edge of a breakdown and the man’s death sent him over the edge. He doesn’t remember where he’s been or what he’s done, except that tonight he found himself outside his own gates and knew he was home. Tench?”
“Yes, sir?”
“You and I will handle this. What’s the first thing we do?”
It was Tench who called the doctor and the police and sent Anna and Mrs. Tench to the kitchen to make coffee. It was Mrs. Barnaby who took my fa
ther and me to his room, left us alone, and returned to the cousins. Later she drove them home. It was Joe who closed the tunnel door and removed the strips from the windows. It was also Joe who stopped halfway up the stairs and slit the carpet with his pocket knife. He made a ragged tear at the edge, the kind of tear a heel might make. He thought no one saw him, but Tench did. Tench showed the tear to the doctor and the coroner, and they shook their heads. The foolish heels, the trailing skirt, the sudden happiness. Poor lady.
Tench. Tench talking to the doctor and the coroner, giving them coffee, serving them as they had never been served, repeating Mikes story as he had heard it, adding a few things of his own. “Mr. Ford was in bad shape before the accident Mrs. Ford and I often spoke of it and worried about it He was what you might call a sensitive man, failing in health and sensitive. So it stands to reason, gentlemen, that when he saw the fatal result of his charity—Well, we read of such things in the papers, but we never think they will come to us, do we? Shock, do you say, doctor? Similar to battle shock? Yes, we read of such things.”
The coroner and the doctor were pleased to agree.
Tench had known for three days that my father was in the house. Later, when we were together, and my father said, “Sit down, Tench,” he sank into a chair like the tired old man he was. My father covered Tench’s hand with his.
Mike and Joe, my father and I, and Tench. My father lying on his bed, covered with an eiderdown. Downstairs the strangers came and went and the lawyer talked to the reporters. The cousins and Mrs. Barnaby were gone, and Mrs. Tench and Anna had returned to the cottage.
“I knew it all along,” Anna said. “Didn’t I say as much, or something like it? I felt his living presence, that’s what I did. He had me dropping dishes. I felt his living presence drawing near. The dog felt it, too, don’t tell me he didn’t. Dogs always know. It wouldn’t surprise me if that dog wasn’t trying to tell me all along. The poor man, wandering the face of the earth, not knowing who he was or where he was bound, and all the time his footsteps guiding him home. A death and a life, that’s the way it goes.”
The House Page 10