A Fox Inside

by David Stacton

  “You don’t care,” he said. “You know that. And you certainly don’t care about the girl.”

  That was not quite true but it was true enough.

  “I thought it might appeal to your sense of humour,” he explained. “If you’ve still got one.”

  “I’m not that old,” she said bitterly.

  “No one’s ever that old. That’s not the point.” He was very comfortable on her sofa, in her library, looking at the portrait of her husband.

  “Maggie’s got a will of her own,” she said. But the matter was decided already. He never said anything until matters were settled. He had that trick, she knew it, and there was no way round it.

  He looked straight over her head at Jerome’s portrait. “We both know how you control her,” he said. “Do it again. You might see me more often.”

  “Perhaps I don’t want to.”

  “Oh, you want to, all right. God knows why, but you do. I often have wondered why.”

  “I used to be fond of you, Charles.”

  “It’s not so long ago.” He waggled his foot up and down, looking at his loafer, and removed a speck of dirt with his forefinger from the heel of it.

  “I can see the two of you on your honeymoon,” she said.

  “I thought maybe you could. I thought we’d go to Del Monte. Same room. Same place. But a little different in other ways, this time.” He got up and left the house quietly. After he had gone she crouched down by the fire, taking jabs at it with the prong of the poker and staring into the hot burnt coals along the log. For some reason she thought of Luke.

  Charles did not seem to be in any hurry. It was three or four days before he put the pressure on. One night, because he knew she didn’t want him to do so, he stayed at the house. He had been out with Maggie, it was too late for him to drive back to town and he wanted to annoy her.

  The marriage went through. She was ruthless about it. And Maggie agreed to marry him, she said, just in order to get away from Lily.

  There was no point in telling her that she could not get away; that probably now neither of them could. And Maggie made such a show out of it: she thought she was tricking her mother. It made Lily impatient and hard.

  Just for a moment, on the day of the reception, she felt sorry. One generation sucked into Charles was enough. Then, when she saw the car drive away towards Monterey, and when she drove home herself, all the way down to Atherton, she went through the house, flicking on all the lights, and wasn’t sorry at all. All she wanted now was revenge.

  *

  But now he was dead she did not want it any more. She wanted him back. He was the only thing she had ever had and now she was an old woman, and it was too late, and Luke was downstairs, somewhere, with the girl. The past and the present were not the same. It didn’t do any good to sift ashes. You could sift ashes all day and there was nothing to find but ashes, for whatever had got burnt up by mistake had burnt totally away. The knowledge of that did not prevent her from sifting them.

  “Oh, my God,” she said in the darkness. “There isn’t anyone. There isn’t anyone anywhere. I’m alone.”

  She got up and paced round the room hopelessly, bumping against the furniture in the dark. “Oh, my God,” she said, “I’ll be one of those well-dressed women who are sitting in the theatre when the lights go up with empty seats on every side of them, and who cry when Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck gets it in the neck. Oh, Charles; Oh, Charles.”

  *

  A slim, woman-hating, bloodless, sexless bastard, with his head bashed in. He might just as well have been lying sprawled out in the dark here, in her sitting-room.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, “I’m fifty-three. Why?” And quite deliberately, because she had never done so in her life, she began to scream, knowing perfectly well it would not help.

  XIV

  LUKE FOUND MAGGIE STANDING in the middle of the hall, with the lights out, looking up the stairs. There was no need to ask her what she was doing there: they could both hear Lily.

  “Come on,” he said gently, taking her arm. “You can’t help her.”

  “I don’t want to help her,” she whispered. He could sense for the first time since he had seen her again that she was agonizingly awake. “I never will.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know. Come away.”

  “No. I want to listen.”

  “Maggie, come away.” He led her to the front door, pushed her through it and closed it after them. When he turned around she was already purposively striding across the lawn. He hurried to catch up with her.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I know where I want to go.” She shoved her hands in her pockets and turned to look back at the house. There was no light in Lily’s room or anywhere upstairs. “We always were a mixed up bunch,” she said. “I thought you knew that. Everybody else does.”

  She stopped looking at the house, or the dark windows of the house, he could not tell which, and walked more rapidly. He did not take her arm again. He figured she did not want to be touched. They reached the end of the lawn and went into the shrubs, the eucalyptus leaves crisp and brittle underfoot. “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “You’ll see. It’s some place I always wanted to take you and never did. It’s time now.”

  He had not realized that this part of Atherton was built over what was left of the old Flood estate, a grandiose wilderness scattered with pavilions and follies, where even now you could find a big cast-iron urn standing on a pedestal among the weeds or in the backyard of some raw new wooden house. They walked through the eucalyptus wood, fragrant in the cool evening, and it was like walking into an older place. They came to a fence. She hesitated for a moment and then followed it to the left towards a gate. He opened the gate and they plunged across an uneven field of wet grasses and lupin and circling round, went through another copse of trees. It was a small one and she slowed down as though puzzled.

  “Yes,” she said, “it’s still there. They were going to tear it down, but they didn’t.” She came out of the trees and stopped.

  This time he came up and took her arm, blinking with surprise. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  Across an open space littered with builders’ rubble and torn-up foundation trenches rose a pavilion. It was mostly the Villa Rotunda, but with improvements, and a little larger, made of wood. It was about twenty-five feet high, but the eucalyptus trees were higher. It was a building from which the plaster had fallen away. Originally it must have been painted white, but the starlight turned it blue and, he thought, from the way it reflected light, that the dome had once been either gilded or coppered, it was difficult to determine which. Once he supposed there had been an avenue approaching it, but now the weeds not only went right up to the door but grew between the two small templed wings that framed the main flight of stairs. The foundation was of rose brick.

  She looked at him and saw that his eyes sparkled with pleasure, so she herself was pleased. “When I was small and Daddy was around we used to come here,” she said. ‘It’s where I always come when I want to.” She seemed suddenly young and charming. She took his hand and squeezed it. “Come on,” she said. “It’s growing late.”

  Late for what, he wondered. For midnight? For the Big Game Dance? For the secret of secrets? He was delighted. For the first time in many years romance settled tightly down over his head, like a helmet filled with pressurized air. It made it much easier for him to breathe.

  “Let’s run,” she said. “Let’s run.”

  “Okay,” he agreed. “Let’s.” And he broke into an awkward run that became less awkward, until she stumbled. Stumbling amused her and she laughed. The field swallowed up the laughter in a friendly silence. He looked at her and saw that for her this was a good place. Dodging the trenches, which in the stubbled moonlight were difficult to see, so that they had to jump over one or two of them, they reached the entrance, where the carriageway was white with scraps of fallen plaster, like moulted feathers. There she stopped.


  “Oh, Luke,” she said, and timidly reached out and put her hand in his coat pocket. That she should know about putting hands in pockets surprised him, but it didn’t in the least annoy him.

  She stood between the two temple wings, looking at the stairs, and he thought he understood. She was a high priestess taking the neophyte up the steps of the shrine and wondering if the conversion was sincere or not, and just what he would make of the mysteries. At the top of the steps was a gaping black hole that did not seem to lead anywhere.

  “Have you ever been here at night?” he asked, thinking about tramps and not altogether liking the darkness. More solemnly now she again took his hand and began to walk towards the stairs. At the foot of the steps were other yawning black holes in the two side buildings. He supposed they had been cloakrooms or some such thing. The stairs sagged and were splintered, and weeds grew through them. At the top they looked back at the field of rubble and then plunged into the gloom. He put his arm around her in the darkness, protectively and awkwardly, because she was a little taller than he was, and felt her hair brush against his neck.

  She knew the way and the darkness was only a sort of baffle or devil door. They came out around it into a big circular hall with, in the centre of it, a broken fountain on a dais. There was a hole in the ceiling, as in the Pantheon, through which he could see the stars. The stars bathed the room in a uniform, shifting blue light.

  “It’s all right now,” she said, drawing away. “This is one place Charles never even knew about.”

  He did not listen. Once, no doubt, the room had been banked with palms and ferns and azaleas from the mountains. It seemed to him they were still there, and at the far end of the room was a raised platform for an orchestra, and beyond that, another gaping hole, this one bigger. He left her and went exploring, crossing the arena and jumping up on the dais. The hole was a big passage of double height. There were rooms off it and at the end of it double doors. Someone had chopped a passage through the doors and he peeked outside. Outside was a big landing platform, like a wharf, and he was puzzled by it, it so resembled the loading stage of a meat packers. He decided it must have been built to accommodate caterers. No doubt the side rooms were for the same purpose. The effect was uncomfortably eerie and he hurried back to the rotunda, stepping over fallen plaster and a timber or two. In the side rooms, as he could dimly make out, the damage was even more severe.

  The light had changed. There was more of it and it was more the colour of silver. It showed up the desuetude of the place and yet made it friendlier. He looked up and saw part of the moon shining down through the circular aperture at the apex of the roof. No doubt at the right times it fell straight on the fountain, and he supposed they had played a trick with that in the old days. He sang wordlessly, to test the resonance, but because of the hole in the roof the effect was not good. Maggie was sitting on the steps of the dais under the moon. Beside her one tall thistle, dead for ages, reared up from the top step and cast a long shadow. She was watching him. Behind her the statue of the fountain was complete to the waist, above which rose a rusted armature, with nothing clinging to it but a plaster hand. Whistling, he jumped down from the orchestra platform and went over to her. Standing at the bottom of the fountain steps, looking up at her, he felt curiously excited. Her eyes were shining and misty.

  “You like it,” she said.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  She struck the thistle with her curled index finger, shooting it out from her thumb; and the dead flower sent out a shower of pale white seeds that bobbed for a minute in the air before they fell. She was fascinated by them. She repeated the motion. He watched not her, but the seeds leap up from the dead flower while she struck it with her small, slim fingers. Then, instead of going up the steps, he sprawled out along them, hoisting himself forward with his hands, until his head was about level with her waist, and turned over on his back. He felt for her hand and played with it. “Tell me all about it,” he said.

  “It used to be a ballroom.” She let him warm her hand and made a surreptitious gesture back, as though they were in public. “When I was small I had some of my grandmother’s dolls. They weren’t like modern dolls. They were little wax-headed women with wooden bodies and wax hands and feet, and pantaloons, and big sweeping dresses. There was a man, too. He had a frock-coat and a little hat that always got lost. I suppose they looked like that here and played waltzes and, well, did things.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” he said, looking up at her, but she did not catch his eye. She was looking inside herself. “Tell me about the other part of it.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know. Father was much older than Lily, really much older, and he was immensely tall. He was over six feet, but I don’t think he was very strong. He brought me here once, that’s all. It was when I read fairy-tales and I had on a white dress and pigtails with blue ribbons, and I’d just learned about tucking your handkerchief into your sleeve. And then afterwards I came by myself.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Nothing happened to him,” she said, and started to draw her hand away. He did not let her. “He went insane,” she added, and bit her lip.

  “When?”

  “A long time ago. I was just a child.”

  He stared at her for a moment and pulled himself upright. He started to take off his coat.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You know what I’m doing,” he said. “You know very well.”

  “No,” she said. She closed her eyes and clenched her fists. He looked at her thoughtfully.

  “Take off your coat, Maggie,” he said gently. “Please.” He stared at her. After a while she opened her eyes and looked at him. She really looked at him as he didn’t think she ever had before. She began to take off her coat. He helped her with it and spread it beside his own. Then suddenly she leaned down and cuddled up to him, half turning her face away, looking up at the moon, and he felt her blind hands playing with his shirt.

  “That’s better, isn’t it?” he asked softly.

  “Yes. Oh, Luke, yes.” He held her tighter, trying to cover her with his hands which were too small; and they lay together there, slightly uncomfortably, looking up at the moon which was full now and yellow, because of the heat haze. It almost completely fitted the opening in the roof.

  Its geography was very clear. They could see the rabbit pounding the paste of immortality in his pestle, under the cassia tree; and he was a nice, serious, clean-minded rabbit, concentrating on what he was doing and quite serene. After all, he did it almost every night: by this time he should know how.

  You could see a lot of things in the moon if you wanted to and knew how. You could even see Coatlicue, the Mexican goddess, but he did not want to; or the big nice friendly man there, grinning; or even, if things weren’t going too well, the Cheshire Cat. But on the whole things were going very well indeed. As far as he was concerned it was a fine big moon made out of blue cheese. He wondered if Maggie knew about the rabbit in the moon and the cassia tree and the paste of immortality. He didn’t really want to ask her. Instead he thought of the mooncakes they had once bought together in Chinatown, years ago, and what fun that had been, and how they had tasted.

  And how, really, she tasted, so he bent his head to find out.

  *

  She was not at all as he had expected. She was a different person than the person he remembered. He suspected she was a different person, for she had never seemed fully awake in the old days, and he had only been half conscious with adolescent embarrassment himself. The reasons he had thought he loved Maggie then were social reasons. He had always been uneasily aware of that. Even when he had come up to San Francisco this time, it had not occurred to him that she was a woman now and not a girl. He wondered vaguely but not very much where she had got experience. Certainly not with Charles, if he knew Charles. It was like being pleasantly surprised by a new person and he wondered why she hid behind the girl.
He went right on kissing her, only more avidly. Then she stopped him.

  ‘I’ve never been to Los Angeles,” she said.

  “What has that got to do with it?”

  “Nothing,” she said, and played with his hair that was too greasy, pulling it out from the sides until it stood out like two wings, which embarrassed him.

  “Don’t do that,” he said. She looked at her hands that glittered with his brilliantine.

  “It’s just that you’ve changed,” she said. “I think maybe it must be nice down there. You know, you never belonged here, and I don’t think that I do, either.”

  He shrugged and tried to weasel his way in to her again, but she was thinking and serious now. “We’re so dead up here,” she said. “It’s nice to be alive, but if you are you have to pretend to be dead, otherwise they kill you.”

  He hadn’t thought about it that way, but it was probably true. He did not want to think about it right then. “You’re so small,” she said.

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say.”

  “No, it’s not. Small and compact. How did you get to be so compact?”

  “Swimming mostly.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You can swim down there.” She stopped talking and put her arms around him, locking them, and drawing him closer down to her, slowly, as though she were moving the tube into place over a horizontal X-ray table; as though to say, here, this is where the infection is, you’d better start here.

  It was a warm night and he thought he knew why she had wanted to do this here. It was because she wanted him in the continuity that life had broken up for her, the old continuity of life as it should have been. Then he got so excited, because she was excited, that he stopped thinking. It was like shooting white water in an open boat and not caring what you hit, just so as you got out alive. And just as he thought he would go under and the water bubbled up all around him, he shot suddenly out into the pool at the bottom, even though the boat still spun round crazily from the dwindling currents that had forced it there. He half raised his head and saw that their clothes were scattered all over the dais. Tugging at her dress he pulled it over both of them and glanced up. The moon was beginning to pass, so that the hole in the roof was divided, half blue sky, the colour of fashionable ink, and half yellow moon.