Maggie sank down into a deep wing chair, as though it would help to hide her. She did not look at her mother but she sometimes glanced at Luke, when she thought that neither of them was noticing her. Luke was uncomfortable. He did not really feel at ease in this room, or in any room like it.
“Very well,” said Lily. She squared off at them, so that the hardness showed under the powder, but some of the pathos, too. It sounded as though she were mouthing a prepared speech, and she had had hours of night to prepare it in. “I don’t know how he died, and Maggie is in no condition to explain anything. He was at Bolinas, and she went up there. She knows he is never to be disturbed there, but that’s beside the point. Apparently she left him in the living-room, lying on the floor. It was an accident, but it probably looks like something else. It doesn’t matter now what it was. It does matter what it looks like. The house up there is isolated and Charles was not precisely friendly with the neighbours. It’s quite likely nobody’s found him yet. Maggie said to send for you. Apparently she trusts you. So there it is.”
They looked at each other bleakly. “I didn’t kill him,” said Maggie.
“You don’t know what you did.” Lily was snappish. She glanced at the portrait behind her, as though it explained everything, and Maggie drew back into the shadows of her chair. “Whatever you’ve done, you’ve been foolish, and that doesn’t alter the fact that Charles is dead. After all, we aren’t unknown round here and neither was Charles. It isn’t going to be easy.” She stopped to consider. “Either way, he wouldn’t be dead if you hadn’t gone there, so we have to be very sure that you didn’t go there.”
“I don’t matter, do I?” asked Maggie.
That seemed to hurt Lily. She looked exasperated.
Maggie got up. She was trembling. The sedative was wearing off.
“You don’t believe me,” she said.
“What does that matter? It’s what the papers tell people to believe that matters, and this will be in the papers. Have you thought of that?”
“You don’t care about anything else, do you?”
Luke tried to interrupt them. “It matters a good deal,” he said.
“If I killed him, I’m glad I did. I wish I had.”
“I know you do,” said Lily, and clasped her hands at her sides with an angry gesture Luke had never seen before.
“I can’t stay here,” said Maggie. “I’ll go back to town.”
“You can’t face it alone,” said Lily. “You’ll crack. You always do.”
“I won’t have to face it.” Maggie made for the door.
“You’re here now,” said Luke, as gently as he could. He was frightened of her, as well as for her. Lily watched them sardonically and that made him mad. “It might be better to stay. It would look better.”
“I’m tired of looking better,” cried Maggie. She did not even seem to see him. “I don’t want to look better. I want to look myself. I want to rest. There must be somewhere I can rest, even in Charles’s house. It was mine once.”
Lily frowned but did not move. Maggie opened the door, wrenched away from Luke, and with a white-faced look at her mother stumbled outside. Luke and Lily stared at each other. They were both alarmed at that hysteria. For the moment it was the real thing that almost made them understand each other. Lily stared across the room at a cluster of silver picture frames on a low table in front of the windows.
“You’d better go after her,” she said. “Let her go to town if she wants, but get the truth out of her. Maybe you can. I can’t. I’m too tired.”
He went out, leaving her standing in front of the portrait of her husband, staring into the garden. It was only in the garden that anything seemed alive. Hearing a car door slam he quickened his step.
Lily stayed where she was for a long time, feeling filled up with a sadness she had got used to and which for the moment showed in her face. Then she went up to her sitting-room and went through some old letters and decided, as usual, that she could not burn them. They were old letters of her own, and perhaps they had always been meaningless. But reading them helped to clear her mind. She was determined to hush the thing up. Hushing it up would be like paying back an old debt so long overdue that it, too, was meaningless. No one, she was determined, should ever know anything about her but herself. It did not occur to her that perhaps no one any longer wanted to.
IV
LUKE HAD SMALL FEET THAT made it difficult for him to sprint across the steel grass. But he got to the car and opened the door. Luckily Maggie had not been able to get it started.
“Move over,” he ordered. She gave him a frightened look, as though she would have liked to speak, but couldn’t. She moved over. He got in and fumbled for the keys. Driving the car gave him the quick feeling that the situation was under control. As he swung the wheel, narrowly avoiding Lily’s Cadillac, and as the shrubbery leapt up dangerously near him, he felt something of Maggie’s dread to get away from this house. In the old days he had cringed in the same way, but he wasn’t going to cringe any more. It gave him some satisfaction to realize that now they could not do without him. But Lily was still frightening. Perhaps that was because her house was too big for all of them. Perhaps it was something else in her that he refused to recognize.
As they left the drive, Maggie seemed to settle more easily into her seat, as though she no longer felt compelled to hold herself erect. As usual, there was something neat, cool, and far away about her that had always moved him. He realized suddenly that this was her old car, and that he had driven in it before. Maybe she realized it, too.
They left the treed suburbs and turned north along the express highway which skirted the bay and led back to the city. Even at this early hour there was already too much traffic, most of it coming towards them. It came too fast. He could see that it made her nervous to see it coming. They faced that long green barrier mountain which separates San Francisco from the south, and up whose shores climb mean houses and dingy marble cemeteries. He remembered that in the folded valleys of that mountain there grew pale blue irises close to the ground. He had gone there with her once, to pick them. It annoyed him that it was only in such abandoned places that there had ever been any ease between them.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” she said, watching the mountain nervously.
“I’m glad you thought of me.”
“Are you?” She did not look at him. “We used to take this drive sometimes.”
“Twice,” he said.
“Oh.”
It was a bleak oh. He felt contrite. He did not want to hurt her. He could not blame her for his own presence, for he had come of his own free will. Therefore he had no right to hurt her, and only himself to blame.
She also did not want to show that she was hurt. “Charles loved the city,” she said. “I think it was because he came from Santa Barbara. At least he said he came from there. It’s hard to imagine him coming from anywhere.”
“Why think about it?”
“I don’t know. I think about a lot of things.”
Luke slowed down as they approached the village of South San Francisco and the factory zone. They came in full view of the bay, with the land around it treacherously low, and the Berkeley Hills still in shadow in the distance. He wondered why it was that you always had to approach American cities through their slums. Slums made him nervous.
“I don’t want to cause any trouble,” she said.
He wished she would not talk. It made it all the clearer when she did that she didn’t know what to say to him. They had an uncomfortable ride until they reached the factory district, passed over a canal, and headed for the centre of the city. The streets were still empty. Here and there a pile of newspapers lay bundled outside a shuttered tobacco shop. A little fog lingered in the low places, making the buildings seem sad and obscure. He took another turning.
“This isn’t the way,” she said. She clutched at the window of the car, rolled it down, and put her head out into the air.
“We’re going to Bolinas.”
“I can’t go there.”
“You’ll go wherever I think we should go,” he said irritably. He caught sight of his eyes in the rear view mirror and cooled down. “You may have forgotten something. We’ve got to be able to prove that you didn’t go there. We can’t let anybody else prove that you did.”
“I didn’t forget anything.”
“No?” He reached down to the floor, where he had seen it, and picked up a eucalyptus nut and held it out to her, dropping it into her palm. She stared at it and he threw it over the side.
“Oh,” she said. “But Charles is there….”
“That can’t be helped.”
She did not answer. She retreated into herself. It was the effort of not crying that kept her like that, and he knew that she would be better if she could cry. Besides, it would make it easier for him. They had to touch each other sometime. If he was to do anything for her at all, they had to get over that barrier.
But they didn’t get over it. They never really had. He went over the bridge and plunged through the tunnel at the other end, coming out over the fishing village of Sausalito, with its rotten hulks of brigantines half buried in the mud flats. The morning was only slightly dusty. He forced the car on. In half an hour he had reached the divide of Mt. Tamalpais and saw below him, as she had seen it in the night, the long desolate sweep of sand spits and sharp cliffs jammed against the ocean. There was something evil about this country: it was too empty. It was haunted, and that made it just the sort of place Charles would choose to hide himself in.
He had never been to Bolinas before, and yet it seemed oddly familiar to him, like a town in the south. Only the fog-clogged atmosphere was different. He went slowly down the main road, towards the bluff at the end of it, facing the sea.
“Where did you park the car?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Over there, under the trees, I think. You see, I didn’t want to wake anybody up.”
“You didn’t?”
“You don’t understand.”
He didn’t suppose that he did. He found the place where she had parked and eased the car back over the faint tyre marks.
“You’ll have to come with me,” he said. “Then, if anybody interrupts us, well, I drove you up to see Charles about something, it doesn’t matter what, and we found him together.” He took her arm and helped her out of the car. They went silently down the empty street of the town, in the smell of the sea. She turned instinctively towards the beach, so he knew where to go. He thought it was a funny abandoned kind of place, but he had heard it was a Legionnaire town. That would have suited Charles. Charles was Irish. As far as Luke was concerned Legionnaires were a good group to avoid.
The house surprised him. He had not realized that Charles had really climbed far enough to get exactly what he wanted. The house had a blind discretion that must have been expensive. It must have cost somebody plenty, for Charles was a shrewd lawyer, if nothing else.
The oddness of the place impressed him, for he was sensitive about other people’s houses. It was clearly not the sexual hideaway of a businessman. Neither was it a house to be lived in. But it was very much the building of a man who did not like to be watched. Who perhaps did not dare to be watched. He pushed open the front door with his glove and went inside. Then he, too, stood, as Maggie had done earlier, in that non-committal hall, perplexed by the superfluity of doors. Maggie came in after him, not quite closing the door behind her, as though she were afraid of being shut in here.
“It’s easier to go in,” he said, seeing her stare at the double doors. He slid them apart, but even he was not prepared for that living-room. It was cold now. It had the disreputable smell of a room that has been used all night before anyone has come in to clean it. The fire had long since burned out. There were a few charred stubs, but the logs had burned through. Where they had been was only a heap of slightly smoking grey ash. And there was Charles.
Except for his smudged picture in the financial pages of local newspapers, Luke had not seen him for years. Charles, besides, had had that ability to hide his face even when talking to someone directly. So Luke looked down at Charles. There had always been something wrong with the man’s body. It was too long, too thin, too painfully articulated, so that it seemed hollow, as though controlled by some trick from the head.
The head was even worse. The head was that of Michelangelo’s most unctuous white Piétà, with the same straggly beard to hide a weak chin. Or so Luke supposed, for Charles had been too sensible a man to wear a beard for any other reason. The marble whiteness and thinness of the flesh over the bones was as it had always been. Only those large brown eyes, in life so usefully dishonest, were a little closed. The hair was awry and the skin looked damp. But what was surprising was that in death his face had a look of boyish eagerness, an almost trusting, hopeful air, that certainly nobody else had ever seen before in Charles. Luke stood there looking down for quite some time. Perhaps it had taken death to make Charles a human being.
He took Maggie’s arm and she smiled at him wanly. “It’s all right,” she said. She sounded puzzled. “But he looks different.”
“Are you sure he was dead when you left?”
“Yes, he was dead.”
“But he looks different?”
“Yes.”
Luke went rapidly through the house, but there was no one there. He had the feeling that someone had been there. When he came back she was as he had left her, still staring at Charles. He made her sit down. “We’d better go over it,” he said.
She was not prepared for that, but she began. He thought she had never understood, and never would, that anyone could ever accuse her of guilt in anything, Lily was like that, too.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He liked to needle people. It gave him pleasure. He didn’t like people to be here. Last night I decided I couldn’t stand it any more. I decided I’d have it out with him, so I got the car. It wasn’t midnight, but the street was quiet. I had to do something or go crazy. I just didn’t want to be seen. I didn’t have any reason. I parked under the trees and walked in here. I was scared. Charles isn’t easy to face up to.
“He was sitting near the fire. He didn’t say anything. He only looked scornful. Not even surprised. That was the way he always looked when anybody did anything he didn’t like. I think he was stewed.
“I told him I was going to get a divorce. He said I couldn’t. He was Catholic, you know, when he felt like it, and he said he wouldn’t let me. He said Lily wouldn’t either.
“I said I was of age and neither he nor Lily could stop me.
“He said I knew what would happen if I tried anything. I asked him why he wouldn’t divorce me. He didn’t care about me. He said it didn’t suit him to and went on drinking. He was pretty cold-blooded. All he did up here was sit and drink. It was the only thing he enjoyed doing and he liked to do it alone. It didn’t make him drunk. I don’t think it even amused him. He got up and spread his hands in one of those funny gestures he liked to use.
“I was pretty mad. I said I’d kill him if he didn’t give me a divorce, and he laughed. Then he fell down against the coal scuttle. It has a sharp rim.”
“Why did you want a divorce?”
She looked at him cautiously. “I couldn’t stand it any more, that’s all.”
It was probably true, but he did not think that it was all the truth. There never had been much truth about the Barnes. It was something they did not like to have too much of.
“Who knew about all that?” he asked.
“Nobody. Who would know? He didn’t like me to have friends. And you know Lily.”
Yes, he knew Lily. It seemed to him that Charles could hear them. He hoped not. It was a distasteful idea.
“You didn’t murder him,” he said. It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t anything.
“I told you I didn’t.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I have to know, if we’re going to
get you out of it. But I don’t care.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “I don’t think so,” she said. “But Lily thinks I did. Sometimes I can’t remember things.”
“What are you talking about?”
She drew reproachfully into herself. “I hope Lily burnt the bag,” she said.
“What bag?”
She told him about the bag and he watched her while she spoke. “I don’t want her to have anything else over me,” she explained quietly. “And there may have been blood on those shoes and stockings. I couldn’t look to see.
She was afraid of something much more than she was afraid of Charles’s death and he did not think that something was Lily. “What does she have over you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Charles watched me all the time. So did Lily.”
He believed in her, but he didn’t believe in what she said, and that made him angry with himself. He was in no position to believe in her, and he didn’t expect to get any thanks for it. He was bewildered and a little resentful.
“Charles does look different,” she said.
“I know,” he said. He led her to the door. “Go out and wait in the car. If anybody comes near you, you don’t say anything except that you’re waiting for me. Do you understand?”
She nodded solemnly. He watched her go down the drive. When she was safely out of sight he went back to the living-room and went through Charles’s pockets. There was nothing in them, but he did not think they had been searched before. When he had done, and not much caring for the look of Charles, he faced the rest of the house.
A Fox Inside Page 4