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Copyright
I
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, 15TH March 1953. The clouds had begun to part, as the louvres of an observatory slowly part, to reveal a cold and sparkling sky. There was a crisp snap in the air, so that if you were at a great height you would have seen the world in its separate compartments. Far to the south, beyond the last barrier hills that protected the city, lay the more opulent suburbs, quiet under their trees. The city itself was a drenched grid of red and yellow lights, inimical and strange. North of the city, across the black waters of the bay, and at the other end of the high-swinging red lacquer bridge, rose the sullen bulk of Mount Tamalpais, a little legendary in that air. Its foothills fell sheer to the dangerous water.
The city seemed to sleep. Only the angry electric eye of the prison island of Alcatraz patrolled the darkness. But to the north, on the other and ocean side of the mountains, the long coastal sandbars were cluttered with week-end shacks. There it was less quiet. Even so, there was merely the restless sobbing of the sea and a few noisy drunks loitering outside the shanty dance pavilions at Stinson Beach. Stinson Beach was lower middle class and sometimes wild.
Farther north, and much more respectable, was the brackish lagoon of Bolinas, the ocean swirling through a breach in its spit to snap at a dissolving cliff which rose from the surrounding marshes. It was a place that seemed somnolent and forgotten. It had the quiet of old age.
As a township Bolinas was small, being a cluster of weathered wooden villas sprawled along two vacant streets. On the top of the bluff that protected the town from the sea mangy pines contended with the spray. On the land side grey eucalyptus trees rustled, swayed, and dripped with a steady precipitation of ocean fog that fell always on the same disintegrating, knife-shaped leaves, rotten in the heavy suffocation of damp eucalyptus oil. The red and yellow blossoms, like ragged sea anemones, lay wilted on the ground.
An outsider named Shannon had built a summer house along the edge of the cliff, to the right of where the arroyo sloped down to the beach proper. He never bothered to speak to the townspeople, and since he had thrown a high brick wall round the town front of his property, there wasn’t much they could find out about him. He never gave parties and his house was always idle. Only the cold glow of the floodlights in his garden shone over the top of the wall. And those were out now, for it was late at night.
That is what you would have seen if you were at a great height, but Maggie was not at a great height.
*
She was at Bolinas. She turned and went swiftly out into the yard. The gravel path cracked and exploded underfoot, and over that sound she could hear now the steady drip of water from the trees and the snarl of the surf as it lashed at the lagoon on the other side of the cliff. She did not know anything about Bolinas, and that made these noises ominous to her. She heard them all too well. She went down the drive, whose gravel hurt her bare feet, and stepped over the low chain that held the entrance driveway private.
She did not look round, for she knew that the house lay low and quiet behind her. It seemed to sleep, like the rest of the town. Only on the beach the faint patterns cast by the dimly lighted windows trickled out across the sand. But she did not think that there would be anybody on the beach. Of course she should not have left the lights on, but she had no intention of forcing herself to go back to turn them off, either. She did not dare to push herself that far.
Because the arroyo was narrow and she would have made too much noise backing the car, she had left it up the road a piece, parked in a clump of bushes under the trees. The street she had to walk up was banked by closed-up Victorian cottages, their wood blistered ash-grey by the corrosion of the ocean air. She went by them rapidly, having no way of knowing whether or not, from behind their windows, someone might be watching her. She hunched slightly forward, ducking her head, concentrating on getting to the car. By the time she reached the clump of bushes she was fighting down the panic to run. As it was she overshot the mark and had some difficulty in finding the car. It was an open convertible and even while she had been away a few of the scythe-shaped eucalyptus leaves had dwindled down into the front seat. Cautiously she threw them over the side, and then, closing the door softly, she leaned back in the driver’s seat and tried to pull herself together.
At last she turned on the engine and eased the car out of the shrubs towards the highway. In the silence of the night the sound of the engine was frighteningly loud, but to her surprise nobody stopped her and the car was built for quiet speed. Speed was something that luxury could understand.
She raced down the deserted road beside the lagoon, in a hurry to get safely past Stinson Beach. She need not have worried. The town was quiet now. Only one or two lights in a kitchen window shone out across the sand. Stinson Beach was a temporary town: anyone might come and go there, and yet not be observed.
As she climbed the mountain she rattled over a cattle guard. At the top, before the last pull, the road reversed so that she could look down through the darkness far into the distance. Even in bright sunshine there was something eerie and inhuman about that strip of shore. It was too savage and too dry. At night it was all the worse. It had been like Charles to go hide himself there. She could only hope that he would remain hidden a while longer.
It did not occur to her to wonder where she was going. She was too eager to get away for that. She wanted to become lost in the back roads and suburban alleys of the mountain, under the steady drip of the pines and the redwood trees. It seemed to her that every moment she lingered was a bit of her future in jeopardy. She put her head into the wind, to let the fog-laden air clear it, but nothing seemed to clear it.
When she came out of the yellow adobe tunnel, lined with concrete, and faced the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, she was doing fifty. It was a windy night and high above the water, under the criminal glare of the vapour lamps, the bridge swayed alarmingly. She had to stop while her toll money was taken. It was another danger of being identified. Resentfully, afraid to turn her face away, but also afraid to show it, she drew the car up and fumbled in her purse for a dollar bill. Beside her, on the floor, she could see a paper bag.
The attendant wore a black leather jacket with a fur collar, breeches and boots and a visored cap. He creaked as he moved, and the fog made the stench of leather all the stronger. He took the bill and said good night, but the car had stalled. She got it started again soon enough, but by that time she was shaking. She began to realize she could not get through with this alone. Even if the attendants, huddled up against the fog and impersonal and bored, noticed nothing, she would have to get help before someone did notice something. And she did not know where or how to get it. Charles had always shut her off from any help.
Before going down the wide, barricaded ramp and through the military Presidio, under more of those glaring yellow lights, she stared helpless at the shadowy and silent city, closed against her on its hills. She had had friends once. She did not have them now. She had lived here most of her life, but there was no one left for her to turn to. She did not know, she never had known, she now thought bitterly, anyone that she could trust.
From force of habit she turned the car up the Vallejo street hill, angrily shifting gears when the car stalled half-way, and stopped in front of the Barnes-Shannon house. She even started bleakly to get out of the car. But there was no point in going in. She looked at the shaded windows. She could not use the telephone there, for telephone calls could be traced. And worse than that, the serva
nts had all been chosen by Charles. If they were loyal to anybody, it was not to her. She had not so clearly realized before how even this house was not really hers.
She swung the car down through the wet spaces of the Italian district and into the deserted financial section of the city. In front of the building in which Charles had his office she passed a water truck, slowly spraying the street and sidewalk with a constant hissing of dirty water. There was an all-night Western Union office down there. It was not until she drew up near it that she remembered that if telephones could be traced, a telegram was that much worse. Nor could she linger where she was, for cars were rare in that district at night and a patrolman might stop to ask her questions. She shivered in the fog that smelled of dust and iodine. It was then she thought of Lily. There was no affection between them, but at least Lily was her mother. She always did have to go back to Lily in the end, and Lily, she knew, preferred that it should be that way and liked it so. This time, she thought grimly, she might not like it so much.
With a crooked smile she swung out of the canyon of high buildings and over the slough bridges of the factory districts to get on to the express highway going south, which was the quickest, if also the most dangerous, means of reaching her mother, who lived forty miles away, in the suburbs of Atherton.
It was only then, because of the smell of heated rubber and of hot dust near the tubes behind the instrument panel, rather than because she heard anything, that she realized that all this time the radio had been going full blast. She could not remember having turned it on. It was playing the national anthem as the station closed down for the night. She did not turn it off, not even after the three long dots that were followed by a crackling, troubled silence on the disused air. Playing the radio full blast in the car had been Charles’s trick. He liked to turn the radio on full and then go about sixty or seventy, on those rare occasions when they had driven together in her car. And it was her car. After two years of marriage it was the only thing she owned outright, and it was five years old. She had lied to her mother to buy it. She had had to have some means of escaping and had known that even in those days.
Escaping in cars ran in the family. Their cars were their life line. Lily had the station wagon and the Cadillac, and Charles had a grey Jaguar, because it was smart; and she had the Ford with the Mercury engine. She had it because when she was at college that was the car to buy. She had bought it second-hand out of her trousseau money and now it had to save her neck.
II
LILY BARNES LIVED IN ATHERTON. She always had, or at any rate so she pretended. She felt there was magic in that name and for that reason she lived there. Of all the suburbs of any city that ebb and flow through fashion, there is always one that manages to hold its own through pride of place. For San Francisco, Atherton was that suburb. Through the years its grandeur may have been whittled down to ostentation, but it was grandeur all the same, if you so considered it. And Lily Barnes did so consider it, deliberately.
Once it had been nothing but a sandy waste of tidal land, yellow with straw and brown with dusty oaks. But in the 1850s, when the city had grown rich on fraudulent merchandise, those people who elsewhere were to be called robber barons had built for themselves to the south of San Francisco great wooden houses furnished from France and set in gardens which were without a fountain, despite the dry heat. That was Atherton and it was not without its glamour.
Lily Barnes was born and raised a snob, but she had few illusions about her own status. Magic to her had always been glamour in the next room. Perhaps this was because she had been born in the Palace Hotel, had spent her childhood in hotels, and when she married, had married out of an hotel, in that luxurious and squalid way of the American transient rich. Even as a child, far below her, six stories down in the palm-clogged carriage court, she must have heard the dancing and the laughter. And that was how she always heard it.
To marry Jerome Barnes and move to his house was the closest she could get to reality. But the suburb changed. The houses built in her time became discreetly smaller, if no less expensive, just as the site of her own house had been carved out of the old Flood estate. She did not remove. She never thought of removing. Atherton was her ambition, and to live there was her accomplishment. It was what she had married to achieve. To leave it would have been to leave herself. She enjoyed it. There was nothing about it that she did not know. She felt safe there.
Maggie did not.
Now, as she drove rapidly through the unobservant streets, she felt that old heavy dread of appearances that had always been her emotion there. She also felt a sense of safety, however, in the defensive discretion of the rich, who know just how much they should not see and so have a mutual agreement to go through the world unwatched. She was grateful for that.
But if what was behind her bothered her, it did not bother her half so much as the thought of the next half hour. She circled the block once, and then went slowly up the drive, afraid of the gravel popping under the tyres in that still air. The moon had gone down but the stars were bright. They were too bright. She stopped the car and sat for a moment in the cool air, gazing across the lawn towards the to her somehow dangerous bulk of the house. She had always dreaded coming back to it, and she did not dread it any the less now. Somewhere up there Lily was asleep, and she had reason to know that the night thoughts of her mother were sometimes treacherous. She knew this house and this garden with the clarity of childhood. She knew it too well. And of course she had been married from this house; she was self-possessed enough to know the irony in that.
She got out of the car and stood waiting. She was afraid that the sound of the shutting car door would make a light spring up in the servants’ attic. Then, slim and furtive, she slipped out of the night and into the shadows of the porte-cochère. She got the door unlatched, but was baffled by the night chain being on. It took her a moment to remember the trick of that chain; sliding one hand painfully through the opening, she found, as she recalled, that it was just possible to loosen the fastening by lengthening her fingers. The chain fell with a rusty clank. She closed the door behind her and stood in the cluttered darkness of the hall.
It was difficult to see. The downstairs doors, open on each side of her, gave into shadowy wastes haunted by furniture, with dim light from windows in the distance. The floor was wood, it smelled of too much polish, and it cracked underfoot. More from knowing where it was than from being able to see it she made her way to the foot of the stairs and began to mount them, keeping, as she had done in childhood, to the outer edge of each tread, where the noise would be least. It took her a long time to go up that way, but she did not want to rouse anybody. Lily’s maid on the floor above was deaf, but she was not that deaf. She pretended to herself that once she reached her mother she would be safe. She had pretended it before when anything went wrong. She knew it wasn’t true, but it helped.
She gained the landing. The transverse corridor was open to the hall for the length of the far wall, protected from space by a thin ornamental balustrade. In front of her was the room, almost never used unless someone important was staying in the house, in which her father had once slept. To her it had always been a mysterious, sad place that seemed to be waiting for someone. Behind the other doors were rooms almost as empty, for Lily no longer had any love of guests. She did not like to be seen too constantly or too close.
Lily’s rooms were to the left. Hesitantly Maggie turned the knob and let herself into the small sitting-room. She stood there, just inside the door, blinking and somehow wishing she had not come. Feeling her way across the rug she passed under the open archway into Lily’s bedroom and faced what she imagined to be the place where the bed was.
“Mother,” she called. The act of speech somehow destroyed that false calm that had held her together. “Mother.”
There was no answer and she could not bring herself to speak again. She did not like to call Lily “Mother”. But as she stood there Lily, sensing someone in the room, moved unea
sily in the darkness and with a heavy rustle of bedclothes came up to consciousness. The room smelled heavily of powder and perfume. The air was thick with it and had an uneasy odour. At first she did not speak. When she did speak her voice was calm and level, the fear in it kept under, as the fear in it always was. She did not seem surprised and she did not ask who it was. She asked, “What is it?” as though her daughter’s voice was unfamiliar to her. Probably she knew perfectly well who it was, but she always treated her daughter like that, as a matter of policy.
Maggie cleared her throat. “It’s me,” she said. “Don’t turn on the light.”
“Why on earth shouldn’t I?” demanded Lily. She was using her sensible voice, the one she always used to make objections, as though making an objection tied the situation down. She sat up in bed. Maggie could hear her doing it, but couldn’t yet see her. She did not, however, turn on the light. She was silent and then asked again, “What is it?” in a voice that was curiously low, as though she knew what it was.
Maggie could not speak.
“Well,” said Lily. Her voice was drowsy and slightly unpleasant. It was also vigilant. She reached out, a barely definable bulk, and Maggie caught sight of her pale face in the glow of the lighter, as she lit a cigarette. She saw her mother’s eyes, staring inquisitively into the darkness, and knew that Lily would not understand.
Out of some other self than her own self, impersonally, she said, “Charles is dead.”
The room became very quiet. Nothing happened, and she repeated the sentence, like a child at school, by rote, her hands clasped in front of her. Now she had said it, it was not her problem any more. Her mother could take care of it. “Charles is dead,” she said.
Lily did not immediately answer. Instead, leaning over, she rapidly flicked on and off the night light. This frightened Maggie, who had been facing the wrong way and in that instant saw that her mother’s bed had been moved, so that Lily saw her sideways. The light went on and off so fast it was like being struck. And the darkness was then deeper than ever.
A Fox Inside Page 2