“I’m not five, Toby, and I would hope that you would have imagined me taking care of myself, because that’s exactly what I do.” It struck her that despite his protestations the night before, he believed there was something in all this, and that he believed she was in danger. And suddenly she felt awful and she wanted to tell him she was sorry.
Embarrassed, Patch said, “Why don’t we all go into the living room and leave you two.”
“No, that’s all right,” Sweeney said, and turned to Toby. “Can we go for a drive or something? I want to talk to you.”
He nodded and they put on their coats in silence and went out to the Rabbit. Driving gave her something to do as she decided what she wanted to say and they were almost to the Kimballs’ house before she started, “I’m sorry. I should have called and told you guys I was downtown.”
“Yeah, especially after all the stuff last night about someone being willing to kill Ruth Kimball to keep her quiet.” That was sarcastic.
She waited a moment until he had calmed down and then, because she was embarrassed, she blurted out, all at once, the words tumbling over and over each other, “What I’m really sorry about is last night. You were right. I put you in a really bizarre position and the thing is, I like Rosemary and I like how you are with her and I want it to work out. But I can’t help it if I’m jealous or whatever it is that I am. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
They drove over the bridge and Sweeney pulled the car over into a little turnout overlooking the brook.
“Yeah, that seems to be the way you and I do things,” Toby said. They were quiet for a moment and then he went on, “When I . . . last summer, I don’t think you knew how hard it was for me to see you. You made it out that you were the victim in all of it, that I was wrong to have told you. I don’t know why I let you do that. I didn’t say anything, but maybe I should have. And then, I just . . . it kind of gradually went away. I replaced it with something else and I was okay. I met Rosemary and it was the first time I’d even felt anything for anybody other than you. In a long time.”
She listened to the brook rushing beneath them. The night was still. “I know that. And that’s good.” There was nothing else to say. She felt like laughing. Toby just looked at her.
“Do you think that maybe this whole thing means something? That it means you’re ready for, I don’t know, a normal relationship? With a man who doesn’t already know that you eat condensed milk out of the can with a spoon?” The car’s headlights bounced off an evergreen tree in front of them, shining on Toby’s face. He was grinning.
“Is that what Dr. Berg would say?” Toby, whose mother had put him in psychoanalysis when he was eleven, always had a Dr. Berg.
“No, you don’t want to know what Dr. Berg has to say.”
She started up the car. “What? Does Dr. Berg think I’m screwed up?”
“Very.” They laughed. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.” She wasn’t yet, but she would be.
As they pulled into the driveway, he said, “Hey, what did you find out today? Anything interesting?”
She told him about the relief at Sabina’s house and asked if he’d ever heard of anyone associated with the colony with the initials J.L.B.
“I don’t think so, but you should ask Patch. He’d know.”
Sweeney knew she wouldn’t do that. She said, “I don’t know. I’m ready for a break from Mary’s gravestone.”
“You should come skiing with us tomorrow then. We’re taking the kids, I think. It’ll be fun.”
“Okay. Sounds good. I’m terrible, though. I might break my neck.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll look after you.” He smiled. “I always do.”
TWENTY
DECEMBER 17
IT WAS BRIGHT and clear the next morning, a perfect skiing day. Outside Sweeney’s bedroom window, the disembodied sky, a brilliant slippery, shiny blue, seemed to hang in suspension. She stared at it, half-conscious, until a passing cloud, as vague as a puff of breath in frozen air, broke her gaze.
Outside, after breakfast, they organized skis and cars. There wasn’t room for everybody in the Rabbit, so it was decided that Toby would take Britta’s Land Rover with Gwinny and the twins and all of the equipment.
“I’ll go with Sweeney,” Rosemary said.
Toby looked concerned for a moment, until Sweeney said, “Yes, good. It will give us time to talk about Toby,” and he flashed her a grateful smile.
“Can I ask you something?” Rosemary said, as they passed a development of condominiums hugging the sides of the mountain. Sweeney slowed down behind an old station wagon, crawling improbably up the hill.
“Sure.”
“What do you think about Toby and me?” Sweeney turned her head and saw that she was blushing, and Sweeney felt herself blush back.
But she could say honestly, “I think it’s great. I’m really happy for you guys.”
“He’s lovely. I just keep wondering if it’s just that we’re on holiday, you know. And if I should be careful not to get too involved.”
“Well, I can tell you that Toby takes things seriously. He always has. I don’t think he would be involved at all if he wasn’t serious about it. I don’t know if that helps.”
“Thank you,” Rosemary said, smiling. “I’m a bit out of practice. I haven’t dated in ages and I’ve kind of forgotten what you’re supposed to do and not do. I asked him if he wanted to have lunch with Granny and me and then I panicked that he might think I was trying to rope him.” She laughed. “See how muddled up about it all I am?”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Sweeney said, laughing, too. “Toby’s usually the one who’s inviting people to meet his mom after the first date.”
They drove in silence for a while before Rosemary said, “And what about you? Is it my imagination or is there something going on between you and Ian?”
“Ian?”
“I thought I detected something. On his side anyway.”
“I don’t think so. Actually, he’s been driving me a little crazy. Does he seem odd to you?”
“Other than the fact that he’s English?”
Sweeney laughed. “You don’t think there’s something kind of sinister about him?”
“Sinister? I think he has a crush on you.”
Sweeney blushed. “It feels more like he wants to kill me.”
“What?” Rosemary looked shocked.
“No, I’m kidding. I don’t know . . . it’s just that you know when someone’s always watching you and, I don’t know, keeping track of you. That’s how it feels. He’s keeping track of me.”
“I still think he has a crush on you.”
Sweeney didn’t say anything. She hadn’t considered that possibility.
THEY SKIED ALL MORNING, Toby and the kids off on the expert slopes and Sweeney and Rosemary trying to stay upright on the easier runs. Sweeney hadn’t skied for five or six years, but she remembered the basics and after a couple of runs felt that she was starting to improve. By the time they met Toby, Gwinny, Trip and Gally for lunch in the lodge, she felt pleasantly exhausted.
They all skied together in the afternoon and after a couple of runs, she found herself riding the lift up the mountain with Gally. He was a good skier—the best of the three kids, really, though Trip was more daring—and she told him so as they cleared the lodge and moved slowly up the mountain, the wind blowing tiny crystals of snow around his head, leaving it in his hair like glitter.
“Thanks,” he said, and then lapsed into silence.
She had no idea what his eyes were doing behind his sunglasses, and she sensed that he didn’t want to talk. But she went on anyway.
“Do you like being home for Christmas, or do you miss school?”
“It’s all right, I guess. I don’t really have a choice.”
That was true. “This is a pretty cool place to spend Christmas. It must have been a fun place to grow up.”
He said, “It was when I was little. We used to go swimming
and hiking all the time and stuff. My dad used to come with us all the time. My mom even used to ski. She was really good.”
“She doesn’t do that stuff anymore?”
“No, because then she’d have to spend time with my dad.”
“Oh.”
She said impulsively, “ ” I remember how weird it was to be seventeen. It does feel like things kind of fall apart, doesn’t it? Everything gets so much more complicated.”
“No,” he said cryptically. “I think things are the same. I think you just begin to see them the way they really are, to see things you couldn’t see before. People can’t fool you anymore.”
They had reached the top of the mountain and in a quick, graceful motion he lifted the bar and dropped down on to the snow, leaving Sweeney fumbling for her poles. She jumped off, too, but promptly fell onto the snow, cursing the sport of skiing and wondering about Gally.
THEY GOT BACK to the house in the late afternoon and showered and changed to go out to dinner at Les Deux Canards, Patch and Britta’s favorite restaurant in Byzantium.
As they were getting ready to go, Sweeney said, “It’s really weird. I’ve lost my emerald earrings. You guys haven’t found them, have you?”
“Those ones you were wearing at dinner?” Gwinny asked. “I liked those.”
“I’ll look around for them,” Britta said. “Maybe you just misplaced them. They were lovely.” Her voice was cheerful, but Sweeney thought she saw worry in her eyes.
LES DEUX CANARDS, housed in a perfectly restored Georgian mansion on Byzantium’s Main Street, reminded Sweeney of a combination of a Savoy Raclette restaurant she’d eaten in once and The Cock and Lamb, her favorite pub in Oxford. As a student, she’d often settled into a snug at the back to read and drink pints of Guinness, something her English friends had ribbed her for. The library was for coursework, pubs were for socializing, they’d said. On her last trip to Oxford, Sweeney had been dismayed to find that The Cock and Lamb was now a nightclub called—bizarrely but nodding to tradition—The Rooster.
The walls of this cozy little bar and restaurant were papered in a cream and blue fleur-de-lis pattern and covered with landscape paintings and old photographs of the Byzantium artists. The long bar up at the front was ornate, a rich, dark mahogany, and at eight o’clock it was cluttered with skiers and end-of-the-workday revelers. The men seemed all to have beards and work boots and expensive jackets, and there were a lot of beautiful, earthy women with long hair.
In the car on the way to the restaurant Britta had told Sweeney that it was all over town now that Ruth Kimball hadn’t committed suicide. “Gwinny was supposed to babysit for a family we know tonight. But they called this afternoon to say they wouldn’t be needing her after all. I felt just sick. We haven’t done anything!” She’d sounded as though she was about to cry.
As they’d come into the restaurant, there had been a strange, halting moment in which conversation had slowed and a few people had turned to watch them enter. Sweeney felt the attention of everyone in the room focus on them as they made their way to a table in the back. “Everyone’s staring at us,” Gwinny had whispered to them.
Once they were seated, Patch said quietly, “Let’s have a good time. We haven’t done anything wrong. We don’t care what people think.”
“Hey, look Gwinny,” Trip said, looking at the menu. “Sweetbreads. That’s brains. You should get some. Maybe it would make you smarter.” He was sitting on Sweeney’s other side and had been telling her about boarding school life and playing Nathan Detroit in the school’s production of Guys and Dolls.
“Fuck you,” Gwinny said nonchalantly. The twins laughed.
“Gwinny!” Britta gave her a stern look.
“I bet Ian will get sweetbreads,” Sweeney told Gwinny in a loud stage whisper. “English people like all kinds of disgusting innards and brains and things. Tripe. Trotters.”
Gwinny giggled.
“Only those brains belonging to American professors,” Ian, who was sitting directly across from them, countered loudly, winking at Sweeney. He was making an effort to cheer them all up, she realized, and it made her warm to him.
“Because we have the best brains, is that it?” She nudged Gwinny, who laughed again.
“Yes, the brains of art historians are known to be particularly delicious. A bit tough sometimes from so much thinking, but nonetheless . . .” The waitress appeared over his shoulder and everyone looked down at their menus again.
After they had ordered, Toby asked Ian about his job.
“Basically, I look for pieces that are very valuable whose owners don’t know they’re very valuable. I’m a bit of a confidence man, really. I don’t ever want to be dishonest with anybody, but my profit margin depends on my being able to acquire something for less than it’s worth.”
“Ian makes himself sound like some kind of crook,” Patch said. “The truth is that he’s probably the most respected decorative arts guy in Britain. He headed up a commission last year that did a survey of decorative arts in country estates. It was a really important piece of work.”
Gwinny took a sip of her father’s wine and said, “No offense, Ian, but how did you get so interested in lamps and stuff? It isn’t even art really, is it?”
Ian leaned back in his chair. “Think of it the way you think of Sweeney’s gravestones. You have to have furniture, right? But what the really fine craftsmen and their workshops did was to turn it into an art. Creating a leg wasn’t just about making something for the table to stand on, it was about making it the most functional and beautiful leg they could make it.”
He looked over at Sweeney and smiled.
“I’m interested in that,” Patch said, warming to the topic. “When you study a gravestone, are you studying it as a piece of art or a piece of anthropology? I mean, there are other media for artistic expression that are easier to work with than gravestones.”
“It’s art and anthropology. Many stonecarvers didn’t have those media available to them,” Sweeney said. “In America they were frequently European immigrants who had trained as sculptors back home. They carved some beautiful stones. For families who could afford special commissions, but also for families who couldn’t. I like to think of them like Amish quilts. The women who made them weren’t allowed to be artists. But when they created functional things like quilts, they really let loose and made things of beauty.”
“What do you mean when you say art history?” Gwinny asked.
Gally said meanly, “It’s the history of art, stupid.”
Gwinny made an extremely unattractive face in his direction, but Ian turned to her and said kindly, “It’s the study of how art has developed over the years. From cave paintings in France to Andy Warhol. Art historians trace the different movements, how one led to another and how artists reacted against, say, paintings they thought were too fancy and formal by making paintings that were more natural, that recreated nature without embellishment.”
“Oh,” Gwinny said. “But cave paintings aren’t considered real art, are they? It’s just drawings of buffalo and stuff.”
“But they are absolutely art,” Ian said, with feeling. “The people who painted animals on the insides of caves were painting what was familiar to them. Animals were their means of survival, they were sacred, and those cave painters drew them with loving detail, the same way the Renaissance painters would labor over every detail of the background in a painting of a madonna and child.”
“But what is it for?” Gwinny asked. “I like looking at art and everything, but what is it for, other than being pretty?”
It struck Sweeney that Gwinny was acting out by questioning the usefulness of art. In this family, it was the equivalent of questioning capitalism in a family where the business was banking.
“It’s for a lot of things,” Sweeney said now. “For one thing, it tells us a lot about what was going on at a particular time. How people lived, what kind of houses they lived in, what kind of bowls they ate out of
. Art as anthropology. When I study gravestones and things like Victorian mourning rings or Egyptian funeral practices, I learn a lot about how people felt about death.
“But that’s only part of it, I think. Art is also about representing the sublime, or at least it should be. When you look at a beautiful painting, you feel that you know what feeling or atmosphere the artist was trying to capture. You experience something that’s true.”
The food came quickly and she ate silently for a few minutes before she looked up to find Ian staring at her.
“Have you heard anything about the little girl?” he asked after an awkward moment. “I wonder how she’s doing?”
“The little girl? Oh, you mean Mrs. Kimball’s granddaughter. You’d have to ask Patch. She can’t be doing very well.”
“Children that age react to things in funny ways. They’re very good at deflection. At least my daughter is.”
“You have a daughter? I didn’t know.” She felt herself blush.
“Her mother and I are divorced and they live in Paris,” Ian said quickly. “I don’t see her as much as I’d like, but . . .”
“What’s her name?”
“Eloise.”
“That’s pretty. I had a French friend named Eloise when I was at Oxford.”
“Oxford,” he said. “Well, I shall have to watch my back. I was at Cambridge. You Oxonians are notoriously treacherous, you know.”
“I was only there for a few years,” Sweeney said, grinning at him. “Doing graduate work. Maybe it doesn’t count.”
The waitress came over with another scotch for Ian and he took a long sip as Patch said something at the other end of the table that made everyone laugh.
“What part of England are you from? I’m good at accents and I guessed London,” Sweeney asked.
“Ha! Sussex. But I did have a strange and unsettled upbringing that included British schools in some of the most peculiar outposts of the world. When one has been taught by unhappy, exiled Londoners, one’s accent tends to come to the middle after a bit.”
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