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A Stargazy Night Sky

Page 15

by Laura Briggs


  "Thanks for the compliment," I answered, snarkily, as I collected the plate.

  "I'm only trying to fill the gap Norman's left us," he said. "Place won't be the same without some gruff old badger telling us all to sod off at least once a day, will it?"

  "I'll miss him, too," I said.

  ____________________

  Mrs. Graves had sent Dean a tin of her atrocious comet creams that I knew he wouldn't appreciate, but had agreed to deliver. They lay forgotten on my dresser until the morning of the big event, where I imagined they were no worse for wear. But I had promised, so I brought them along for my visit.

  Dean's cottage door was open, as were the drapes across his windows. I knocked, heard a voice answer somewhere on the other side, and went through to Dean's parlor.

  I put the tin on the little table cluttered with Dean's art supplies, and cast an admiring eye on the rough canvas of trees and murky pond ringed by rushes. Copies of Mahler and Beethoven on CD were stacked atop the usual records by the hi-fi, and I shifted them in search of the jazz one Sidney was playing last time I was here.

  When I looked up, what caught my eye was Dean's desk, the untidy space usually occupied by a vintage wooden box, junk correspondence, and an old inkwell and pen set. But these things had been cleared with the main spot occupied by an old typewriter, surrounded by bits and bobs from an old hardware case. A vintage Royal 'Magic Margins' in black.

  I blinked, but it was no mirage. A little bottle of crusty glue and another of oil, an antiquated ribbon more snarl than snap were piled by the rusty little tool kit, as if the whole thing had been emptied out of some old storage box. The machine's key labels were nearly worn off. When I was close enough, my finger reached to touch the 'K' key, to click one letter to assure myself of its reality.

  "Don't touch it, please." Dean's tone was sharp. I turned, startled. He was in the passageway door, wheeling into the parlor.

  "I'm sorry." Guiltily, I withdrew my hand.

  "It's only that I couldn't forgive myself if something befell it," he said. "It's rather delicate and temperamental these days. I don't even touch it myself." A humorless grin came, but with it, a softer tone than before.

  "I didn't realize it was so valuable, or I wouldn't have presumed." It wasn't, I knew — not commercially, because a pristine Royal 'MM' of its model and era was worth a few hundred at best. It had sentimental value, apparently.

  "It's something of a Frankenstein's monster of a machine these days," he said. "Sidney put it together ages ago, when we were in Oxford, and harvested its parts from broken bits along the way. I used it to type notices for the artist's club, then, among its many uses. These days, I occasionally let him type my correspondence for me, among his myriad favors."

  "He types letters for you?"

  "Among other things, yes." Dean's smile became inscrutable.

  "This machine must be from Sidney's 'tinkering' period of creativity," I said. "If you were using it at university."

  "Correct," answered Dean.

  We were both quiet. His gaze was intent, as if trying to read me, and as if he'd guessed, impossibly, what must be on my mind. I looked at the typewriter again, as if trying to place its story and its seeming importance in line with other facts, and was unsuccessful.

  Six years ago, Dean suffered the accident that changed everything about his life and dampened all his passion for it. That was just before publication of Davies' last book, Let to Lie. All of Dean's copies of the novels were first editions, I remembered.

  Dean's lips moved, and I thought he was going to say something else, but another voice chimed in from the passageway behind him. "The state of your linens is something terrible. We'll have to see about some bluing in the next wash, shan't we?" It was the brisk, no-nonsense voice of Nancy, Dean's other nurse. The sound of it brought an eye roll of disgust to his face.

  She appeared directly, with an armload of linen towels and shirts, a bony, sharp-angled woman in scrubs who was amazingly strong enough to lift Dean with the ease of moving a sack of potatoes.

  "You're entertaining her without finishing your lunch," she scolded him mildly, as she began folding them on the back of the sofa. "I've said it a thousand times if once, you have to eat if you want any energy. You'll be napping away at midday with nothing to boost your blood sugar."

  It was an excellent voice for a mother firmly coaxing a child to eat its peas, but a terrible choice for dealing with a grown man as clever and caustic as Dean.

  "I assumed we established multiple times in the past that I am not suffering from memory damage, only from spinal damage," he answered, sarcastically. Softening manners had not expanded his patience.

  "Cheering him up, are we?" Nancy asked me. "The poor lad needs something. He's been in such a mood today. The weather affects his body's pain perception." She lowered her voice in the sympathy of a pig's whisper.

  "My hearing is also impeccable," Dean snarled.

  "The poor lad," she repeated to me, in the same voice. "Now, don't be such a fussy patient, and put on a proper face for visitors, since the young lass has come all this way to cheer you," she said to Dean. "Back to the kitchen and we'll finish lunch directly after I sort these towels. Go on now, get your wiggle on."

  "I have no appetite presently," said Dean, as if the words had been dragged between his teeth. "Please stow it in the refrigerator and leave me in peace."

  "If that's what you want, but it'll only come out again for your afternoon tea," she reminded him. "We'll be having a proper cleanse inside and out as soon as I've finished doing the cupboards. Callum or somebody's been having a sort and done a terrible job putting things tidy." She carried the folded stack of laundry away with her.

  Dean closed his eyes, wearily. "Is she gone?" he asked.

  "As good as," I answered. "Does she help you paint on the days she's here?"

  "No, she fusses about the stains on my clothes and hazards to the carpet until it drives me to distraction," he answered. "I reserve artwork for days when more sympathetic souls are present." He wheeled closer to the windows, where I suspected he needed a moment to recover from the various indignities that Nancy's speech unintentionally foisted on him.

  I sat down in the parlor chair nearest to the canvas. Slow progress and wobbling brush had created only the trunks of trees and the outline of the pond reeds. Talent made what would have been colored blobs and lines into a picture recognizable nearly at first glance, to someone who had visited the little pond on the wood's edge.

  I wondered why Dean had so few finished canvases, so few unfinished ones, for a man who loved to paint. It wasn't perfectionism, Sidney had claimed, but a passion for life's many opportunities that had prevented him from painting more. Which ones, specifically, had remained vague in his explanation.

  "Would you still be a painter, if not for the accident?" I asked.

  "You mean, professionally?" Dean replied.

  "I suppose so. Were you a professional before — years ago?" I amended, skirting direct reference to the diving accident.

  He smiled. "No," he answered. "I didn't have what you would call a 'career' before it happened. I considered various paths for the future, even teaching — the notion of a staid, long-term academic life was my first dream, even before I first lifted a brush."

  This surprised me. "Then why did Sidney choose art as your means of expression?" I asked. "Or did you choose it yourself, and he only helped?" I watched the breeze flutter one of the tall weeds in Dean's back garden.

  "Ease of practice, I suppose," said Dean. "It suited his purpose. He might've chosen skydiving if it had been handy."

  I detected the sarcasm underneath. "I don't believe it in the least," I answered.

  "You don't, Alice? Then let the Mad Hatter butter his pocket watch in peace, if you don't like his answers." His grin was not as mocking as I expected, however, which left me unsure what to make of this.

  "If you're not going to tell me, I suppose I'll have to," I retorted, with a
faint smile. Keeping silent seemed easier with my mind so full and my thoughts uncertain and unbelieving. I could let Dean keep his answers, because it might be easier that way. It might be less complicated and less awkward than the truth.

  Dean stayed silent for a time, watching the weeds in the garden also. "It may not have been my first love, but it was perhaps my deepest one," he said. "Painting. The connection between myself and the brush was natural, almost human in its own way. It was more so than a great many other talents or attachments I pursued at that time."

  "Sidney said you were gifted at a lot of things." Those specific things were suddenly of greater importance to me than before.

  "He would. 'Bright' is the better word," Dean corrected. "I didn't need the money painting would bring, so I didn't paint for money, not at Oxford or afterwards. I did it because ... it was my way, ultimately, of best seeing the world's beauty. And it was the one love that my accident didn't completely destroy."

  He paused. "Others, I couldn't bring myself to face again," he said. "Even a choice that might seem easier, more lucrative, more logical. The desire that burned for all else is simply gone."

  "Do you wish it would come back?" I did not look at the typewriter, though my head was dying to turn that way, as if it were the crown jewels on display, not merely a battered, antiquated machine that Sidney had scrapped together from secondhand pieces. It was not the same one, I told myself. It was not in any way connected with the novel I loved so. This story simply wasn't true.

  "Do wishes bring them back?" Dean queried. "I do not wish any more, as a general rule. I'm a confirmed realist, as you've been told."

  "You only paint reality these days, so it's obvious," I said. "Fantasy requires stretching the imagination backwards and forwards, which yours struggles with these days."

  Dean's expression was faraway and sad. I was instantly sorry for these words, and for this whole conversation, which had become double-sided and strange, and in no way cheering. What did the past matter? As Sidney said, it couldn't be changed — and no one was ever exclusively the sum of their regrets and their achievements. He had said that last part to divorce Dean from past accomplishments, so he could embrace new ones.

  "Sherlock Holmes was an outstanding violinist, probably," I said.

  "What?"

  "In the books, Sherlock is talented at a lot of things, but he's obviously chosen to become a detective," I said. "It doesn't matter that he's brilliant at the rest, because he picked which passion to devote himself to, even if some people would say he was wasting a lot of other deserving talent."

  "I have a feeling you're trying to say something rather profound about life through some literary parable," Dean answered, dryly. "About my life, specifically, although I haven't asked for validation."

  "I'm only saying I think Sidney was right," I said. "Whatever allows the artist inside to express itself becomes the right talent. It has to, I think. All the ideas can't stay pent up — the brain can't keep away from creating things. It makes painting your best gift, even if you could express yourself as profoundly and beautifully in a hundred other ways."

  "Every human has their own language of expression that they must cling to," Dean said. "As a writer, you would know it as well." He looked at me, his clear gaze strangely kind. For the first time, I felt a kinship between us. Maybe it was the fire of a mutual artistry, even if our current mediums were not the same. Or maybe it was because I had touched the corner of another secret, one that gave me a deeper sense of who Dean really was, even if I did not understand it.

  "The sheets need changing, so I'll have to pop another load in the wash," Nancy announced. "I'll run the hoover before your bath, but it would help with the dust if you'd get rid of these books cluttering the place."

  "It would help also if I died and therefore ceased shedding dry skin cells." Dean's biting answer was as bad as any I'd heard in his darkest moods.

  "No need to be so shocking about it. I'm not telling you to toss them into the rubbish, only giving you some sensible advice. It's not as if you read them, now that you use an electronic reader." She gave the crushed pillows on Dean's sofa a vigorous fluffing, then folded up the tarp that covered his in-progress canvas.

  "Toss that onto the desk," he instructed her. "Cover the mess of Sidney mucking about, since he never finishes what he starts, even for me. He should have tidied things." He cut his glance away from mine as he spoke.

  The cover flopped over the Royal 'MM,' obscuring all but part of the keyboard. "If you won't finish your soup, I'll try you on some of that cucumber salad," she said, shaking out the sofa shawl. "It'll be good for your stomach."

  "That woman will bring the permanent collapse of my patience with humanity," he muttered.

  "What's that you said, love?" Nancy lifted the tin of Mrs. Graves's biscuits.

  "Nothing you need concern yourself with — I was talking to Maisie."

  "I was dropping those off," I informed Nancy, as she popped open the lid. "It's a gift. Some 'comet creams.'" I gave Dean an apologetic smile.

  "You didn't," he said. I could tell his groan was already building for the sight of one of the vicar's housekeeper's recycled tins, and the realization of where said 'comet creams' had come from.

  "Biscuits," Nancy said, inspecting its contents. "Lovely of you to be so thoughtful. Do you want one with tea after your bath?" she asked Dean.

  "I would rather have my skull split open than eat one of those mallow-filled poison puffs," he answered. "Throw them into the rubbish."

  "Must you be so rude?" Nancy scolded, looking scandalized. "You're lucky poor Maisie puts up with your nasty comments without insulting her cooking to boot."

  ____________________

  I didn't know what to think. Putting it out of my thoughts seemed like the only right choice to make, as difficult as it was to do. I had told Sidney that the reality of the author didn't matter to me at this point, and I meant it. Being presented with the truth, brushing close to it in the way this afternoon's encounter felt, shouldn't change it. Curiosity was there, however. I was too human not to suffer from it, although there were any number of reasons why Dean might be sentimental about a vintage typewriter, and any number of talents he might be too bitter to ever again pursue.

  It wasn't a distant stretch of the imagination to see it as a symbol of Dean's past. He might have had it dug out of its hiding place as a symbol of beginning another part of his past anew — or to have Sidney patch it for the next charity sale, to say goodbye to it forever.

  I sat on the edge of my bed, staring at my tablet computer across the way, a symbol of equal kind to me. With a sigh, I shook my head, letting the ghost of a smile cross my lips one last time for the idea.

  The imaginary knowing stare of stuffed Mr. Bubbles the giraffe, propped beside my pile of books, was like a conviction from my own thoughts. Dead dreams, I told myself. Better left to eternal slumber. With a deep breath, I rose and opened my curtains, then unfastened the window, letting in the fresh air cooled by yesterday's rain. The wind was blowing in from the sea, wet and bracing. I remembered Katy's ominous prediction about the weather and hoped for better.

  My hotel shift remained the ordinary dinner hours at the hotel, so I wouldn't be part of the staff waiting on the glittering banquet crowd for tonight. I would miss seeing Brigette's white-lily tribute to the stars, serving regular spinach risotto in the dining room, but that's just how chance rolled this time. At least when I cleared away, I would have plenty of time to make it out to the field and witness the comet's wave to the earth below, if Sidney could adjust the lens on his tatty secondhand telescope.

  Sonia's decorations were twirling in the breeze coming through the parlor windows, making the tin foil comet dance above her doily-covered table. She had offered to let me raid the kitchen for my turn at a picnic with Sidney if we went stargazing, including her new jars of 'pear honey' just begging to meet some old-fashioned American peanut butter on bread. Fresh-baked bread — Sonia, like
some Parisian housewife, nearly always turned out a fresh one if she was here, so I was growing spoiled on it.

  I unhooked my jacket from the hall tree and slipped it on, wrestling one arm into a sleeve as my phone rang. It was buried in my bag, underneath some old shopping lists and a daisy hair ribbon.

  "Hello?"

  "Hello, this is Arnold — Arnold Spofford. You remember me, I trust?" He sounded as if he didn't quite trust his memorability, but maybe that was just Arnold's way of being polite.

  "Of course, Arnold, it's only been a week," I said. I hoped he wasn't calling for a long chat since I was on my way to the hotel.

  "Maisie, listen. I got it," he said. "I got the opening for your manuscript."

  "What?" I stopped wrestling with my jacket. "What do you mean?" I took my phone in my grip instead of holding it jammed between my cheek and shoulder like before.

  "It just so happens there's a brilliant startup publisher looking for authors. They had a bit of flashy success in the mystery world last year, and rumor had it they wanted to expand into other genres," he explained. "There was a small chance that I could persuade them to look at your manuscript if I could find a sympathetic editor on staff. So I 'felt them out,' so to speak, and they agreed to see if your story was what they need to launch their satellite. So I sent the manuscript, and they picked it, Maisie. They want you to sign with them."

  "Are you saying they want to publish my book?" I wasn't sure my brain had completely received the message, because it was unbelievable.

  "I am. Well, I am if that's what you'd like. I'll have to negotiate a bit on royalties and there are media rights to consider — audio books, film and television, and so on. If you're interested, of course, the next move being entirely up to you, and you may not even want me as an agent —"

  "Arnold, how can you say that when you just convinced them to publish me?" I said.

 

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