A Mind of Winter (37 page)

Standing there, I realized I would never really put that summer—or Barnaby—behind me; that when something changes you, it becomes part of you, and you can’t leave your self, even a little bit of it, behind.

At the sound of footsteps in the hallway, we both turned to see the attorney, sturdy in an expensive blue suit, stride into the room.

“Mr. Harrington, Mrs. Wright.” He offered his hand, which we each shook in turn. “Thank you for coming. Let me again say how sorry I am about Mr. Harcourt. It must have been very difficult, these past few years, not knowing for certain what happened to him. Perhaps now, it will be easier to put the matter to rest.”

It was clear to me from the way the lawyer was speaking that he didn’t believe in Oscar’s death any more than Barnaby or I did. For a moment, none of us spoke, as if we each needed a chance to decide how to proceed with this awkward yet necessary charade. I wondered, had Oscar communicated with Barnaby too, the way he had cryptically, through that single postcard, communicated with me? But this was not something I could ask Barnaby. To do so would risk betraying Oscar’s unspoken confidence in me. Perhaps Barnaby was wondering the very same thing.

It was the lawyer, finally, who broke the silence. “Perhaps we ought to get started. Let me first say, I’m sorry Mr. Wright could not make the meeting today. I trust you will relay all the details. In the will, your two names appear together: always Mr. and Mrs. Simon Wright—though I know, Ms. Whittacker, that professionally, you go by your maiden name.”

We sat down: Barnaby and I in the two armless chairs with tapestry seats. The attorney sat facing us in the leather wingback. He shuffled quickly through the pages of a lengthy document, and arrived at the place he was seeking. He read aloud several legally technical sentences, which stated that Oscar had bequeathed the three of us the house. I looked over to Barnaby; he wore a clouded, perplexed expression. Joint ownership, the lawyer was saying, Simon and me one party, Barnaby the other. With right of survivorship.

When Oscar had disappeared, one week after I returned from my disastrous weekend with Barnaby at the lake, everyone but me went into a state of shock. Numerous theories were put forth, one more fanciful than the next. I paid little heed to any of them. One point, though, was clear: the Ellis Park world we had known was over. In took only two days for the place to clear out.

I knew that Oscar’s leave-taking had something to do with the German-speaking visitor, with the mysterious, and surely dire, accusation, and with the finding of witnesses I’d heard mentioned while eavesdropping late that night by Oscar’s study door. The phone call with the investigator—how odd, his name slips my mind—only convinced me that Oscar was the victim of some terrible mistake; the idea of his being the perpetrator of a war crime came to seem more unlikely as the years passed.

For a time, I tried to put content to the contours of what I knew. But none of what I came up with made any sense, so finally, after months of anguish, I tried to put the matter to rest. I took comfort in knowing that Wallace was gone too, which suggested not only that Oscar was in his responsible care, but that they were operating with some kind of plan. In any case, the investigation, whatever its details, must have failed, else we’d have heard about the matter in the press.

Even had I not received that postcard almost a year ago, postmarked
London
, I’d have known Oscar was alive and well, simply from the filaments that bound us, delicate and steelstrong as spider silk. The card bore the typed name and address of a solicitor in London, along with an ink drawing of an Indian man in a loincloth, his head cleaved in two. Clearly, to my mind, a reference to a conversation we’d had that summer while out, if I recall correctly, for a ride. This was how I understood the message of Oscar’s drawing:
All is as it was, nothing is changed.

Now, the attorney scanned silently down, flipped to the next page, and scanned that one too.

“There are some details concerning the contents of the house. A few pieces of furniture and the odd painting are left in bequest to some other party. The majority of the contents, however, are to remain.”

He handed us copies of the relevant pages.

“As you will see, it was the wish of my client that the bequest be made in the winter of the present year, and that it be announced here. Our dealings from here on may be conducted at my offices.”

He handed us each a business card.

“Call me when you’ve had a chance to read everything through.” He gathered his papers and stood. “And feel free to linger—it’s yours, now, after all.”

He extended his hand and offered a quick professional smile.

“I’ve instructed the groundskeeper to give you keys. You know where to find him, I trust.”

We did not linger, however, but rose soon after the attorney had taken his leave. We walked together into the hallway, past the familiar rooms with their unfamiliar shroudings and dustcovers, empty vases, and unlit lamps. I was struck by how clean everything looked—not a dust ball or felled insect in sight. I pictured the staff going about their business with lonely, closed faces.

I still sometimes think about the mysterious events that led up to Oscar’s disappearance, and about the late-night visitor, with his peculiarly sinister mildness, though I no longer try to solve the puzzle. I see Oscar as I last saw him, sitting at his desk, in the greenish light of his lamp, and recall how small he had seemed beside the outsized tapestry of the fox hunt, and yet also somehow grand. Much like any individual human reality, I suppose: potent and inconsequential both. As I left the room that night, I’d taken one last glance at Oscar sitting there; I still wonder if I saw him mouth the words,
Thank you
, or whether this was something I imagined.

Though it was the last time I saw him, Oscar is with me still, as are the collection of days from that heated summer, which I imagine will always emit for me a disconcerting light: both too shadowy and too bright, disarming the capacity for focus, disabling the mechanism of the shutter.

I still get requests to go out on assignment. Now, when I politely decline, I no longer feel frantic with grief. It is true, I suppose, that a piece of me has—I was going to say
died
, but I think
been put to rest
is a better choice of words. I find I am surprisingly content in my role as mentor to my students. I value the privilege of helping them uncover the shape that their own struggle will take, and then nudging them into the work of it.

It was in Oscar’s study, I think, that Barnaby had said, of my work as a photographer: “Isn’t that the business you’re in? Teasing the truth out of things?” My camera, my eye, to his way of thinking, was trained on the world with the purpose of showing up Truth.

Thinking about Oscar sitting there in his study, remembering the look of intolerable pain on his face, which he seemed unable to mask, I take consolation in a new thought. That sometimes the closest one can get to the truth is to look away.

Barnaby and I stepped onto the wide front steps and looked out over the circular driveway to the brown, wintry lawn. I turned, force of habit, to catch sight of the sea, from here no more than a dull metal band joined to a heavy expanse of white-blue sky. A faint echo sounded from the woods: a few birds deep in the trees, taking shelter from the cold.

“Can I give you a ride somewhere?” Barnaby asked. There was that dip in the eyes: both of us aware of other questions, other offerings, and everything else besides. The cold air smacked up against me.

“Barnaby, obviously I haven’t discussed this with Simon, but on matters like these, I know how he’d think. I’m sure he’d agree to us signing our share over to you.”

“I was going to say the same thing,” Barnaby responded in a husky-soft voice. He reached for my hand, then, lifted it to his lips, his eyes holding steadily on mine, head lowered in that way he had so that in looking at you, he was looking up and over, as though peering out from some enclosure—not confined, but pleasantly ensconced and inviting you in. And me, my resolve dissolving, wanting to go wherever it was he intended to take me. But knowing that I wouldn’t, that I’d found my place, at last, with Simon; that the two of us had, in our odd and unencumbered way, divested of claims to ownership, made for ourselves a home.

I nodded to my car, parked at the other end of the driveway, where the loose gravel met the first tufts of lawn.

“I brought my own car,” I said. Barnaby’s lips lingered on my hand. I could feel the smile on them as I looked deep into the lithe gleaming smile in his eyes.

We must have stood that way for some time, as I became aware that through the leather of my boots my toes were feeling quite frozen. I was thinking how strange it was, and yet how right—and, of course, this had been true all along—that at this moment, I felt Simon’s presence so strongly. A peculiar triumvirate, to be sure.

Barnaby leaned toward me, I leaned toward him, we leaned toward each other.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Oscar

London. November, 1956.

I
was surprised to learn that Christine had returned to England; it appears she has been back for some years. How could one not have been struck by the intense loathing she’d felt for this place when I knew her, so many years back? That great ache to be elsewhere; it followed her around like a fog.

There’s symmetry here, as there has been so often in my life (in everybody’s life?)—the postcard I sent Christine years back, when she was still in China, giving a clue to my whereabouts in the United States, and the postcard Christine recently sent to the address I’d given her then—my lawyer in Long Island, forwarded now by him (bless his loyalty, and the inviolability of his discretion)—imparting the same kind of clue.

I do not know the circumstances of her return, but something in the tone of her quick note—five sentences, that’s all it was—informed me that her sojourn in the East had not proved to be the escape for which she’d hoped. I suspect Christine’s mission was doomed from the start: that what she was fleeing is not something one can, in fact, leave behind.

There was hostility in that note—lightly disguised, but clearly there. She blames me for what happened between us; I feel this, though I could not identify what she sees as my crime. Needless to say, I have spent a good deal of time mulling the matter over. After considering and reconsidering a number of the most likely permutations, I remain loyal to this view: that, upon intuiting the imminent confession of my crimes, Christine fled. Which is to say, she was not up to the truth: Christine chose to stake her claim to life in artifice and illusion.

I say this with compassion; I am in no position to judge. In any case, I do not believe Christine’s choice had anything to do with being shallow. I am certain it was simply a question of survival.

Perhaps it would surprise her to hear me talking this way. The fact is, I knew Christine better than she thought I did.

I have set up a home—nothing with the grandness and sociability of Ellis Park; it’s just the two of us now, Wallace and me, in a handful of pleasant, furnished rooms overlooking the heath. I rigorously avoid all districts to which I formerly had ties. I have, through this necessity, found that London is indeed the sprawling metropolis it is famed to be: a haven of anonymity for whoever chooses it to be so.

I do my utmost not to think of the past and often enough I succeed. I can go from day to day in a kind of self-imposed temporal confinement, willing my mind to occupy itself only with the next twenty-four hours. It is a strange limbo, this living without a past; when I see amputees—and they abound, of course, because of the war—they feel to me like
landsmen
: others, like me, who go on with a damaged part of themselves cut away.

It didn’t take me long to track Christine down. It was a further surprise to find she is trying to establish a girl’s school: in a sense, right back where she started. I understand that she has a partner in the endeavor—a young Chinese woman she brought back with her from Shanghai.

But how was it for her? Did she feel, in coming back to England, that she was coming home?

Only once—it was last week, as it happens—did I risk venturing into dangerous territory in passing by the library. I stopped, for a time, and looked up at its imposing façade. The home of my long-ago researches—where I sat researching the paintings that would pass through my hands.

I knew, incidentally, that Christine had followed me on several occasions, including one time when I came here. What I still do not know is what she was seeking in tracking my movements.

I do not believe, though, that Christine ever trailed me on an appointment with a customer (I speak of the paintings); I was especially careful about this.

Standing outside the library, a fragment of the past erupted, as if coughed up by the great building itself: that strange night I spent here, locked within the institution’s daunting emptiness.

I’d been sitting in the stacks, examining the large volumes with their beautiful reproductions. When I heard the
tap-phh, tap-pph
of the guard’s step, I found myself scooping up my belongings and ducking behind a wall of books. I don’t know what made me do it—the odd whim simply reached out and grabbed me.

I hid in a cleaning supply closet that appeared just when I needed it, managing to tolerate the burning admixture of ammonium and lye for as long as I could. When I pushed open the door and, faint from the chemical fumes, almost fell from the closet, I could feel from the heavy emptiness that the guard had gone and that I was alone.

The library lights flashed off. The blackout cloth on the windows had been scrupulously fitted, and in that corner of the massive room all signs of the waning day were banished. I stood alone in the blackness. The air was heavy with dust.

I’d been careful about my study sessions here: kept them to a minimum to avoid drawing attention to myself or to the subject of my researches. The few hours I spent here, though, I’d enjoyed a sense of calm and peace long denied me. Blocking all else from my mind, I’d given myself over to the blinding majesty of the Art.