False Entry (63 page)

The side window held me. The house, made of a brick almost the color of the brown dark, bulked just visible in it, of no shape except comfort’s, never a house with a silhouette, only one with a core. It was the window that held, drawing me across a yard of fog that was ocean and years both—a projection-room screen which would be nothing but shadow and canvas if I grasped it—but it held.

The high casement was sealed against the drip, but inside the draperies had been drawn back and a lamp, set on the window seat as if for wayfarers, shone out with a strong yellow gleam. From any distance, the fog baffled the lamp, but if one stood to one side, close against the shutter, one could see in. This was the morning room, side room for the dispensing of benefits, downstairs nursery on rainy days for the older ones, at whose window Martin had mooned over his marbles, to whose games I had sometimes been summoned from the sewing room, at whose doorway, tranced from my backstairs errands, I had sometimes watched. What colors I could see were not the same and long faded; the same fire burned in the grate. Fire and rain had continued, and over there was the old wooden hutch in which they had kept the games. Near it, on a small desk, once gilt, almost child-size, that I had forgotten, a man’s dark coat sleeve rested. To see whose it was I would have to step down into the well for a cellar window centered just below the casement. I stepped down. Through the drops sliding along my hat brim, the man’s arm was directly in my line of vision on a level just above the sill, its hand rested on the desk while he spoke into the telephone. His back was turned to me, head bent toward the instrument, his words inaudible, but the hand lay under the light in close-up, firming itself with the restless constant of the aged, now clenching, now splayed. Its veins were ropes now, under mushroom skin heavily spotted, and the curled, black mat of hair which would once have been on the level of a boy’s eyes was now either whitened or shed, but those long sinews, the fingers still sallowed with tobacco, could only be, in this house, the same. I remembered the scholar’s pencil glinting in them, writing in its precise script:
The pig said
“
Oui.
” I remembered how the strong, black hairs seemed to curl and tremble of themselves the day I came upon the two of them, the day I stood behind him, quiet with the bastings, and heard him ask her where she had got what was in the Battersea box he was holding, the day I heard him speak to her about the cachets.

The man inside there finished talking, put down the phone, rose, the hand aiding him, and turned; he was coming toward me, but I had the advantage and was up and away before his shadow intercepted the lamp. While I watched, flattened against the side of the house, the shadow stayed there, waiting for someone perhaps, or just looking out. It could not have seen me. But from that moment, all that I was to do in that house came to me as natural and unpremeditated as if that hand had pressed a fount long dry or never freshened, and that shadow, waiting there, long expectant, had seen. When I made a circuit of the house my feet moved surely over the lawn that sucked them, wet flagstone and lawn again, as if they had played at hare-and-hounds here yesterday. I had the advantage over him of youth and memory, my dram’s worth of the power only a little less temporary than his, which would be taken from us both in the way that I had seen it wrested from my mother, but I no longer wanted it—any more than I wanted my mother to sit up in her grave to show me, huddled still between her poor bones, my paring, or needed the old monologuist his mother, long since gone to hers with all their rich rubric around her, to read me, from the chance bit of mine she may have harbored, what I had gone down on my knees to beg her that last day. Let her harbor it still, if she had ever had it; let them both. It was the simplest, most impossible question in the world I had asked her, one to which at the end everyone had his answer. I walked up the front path as the real walks toward the dream.

The light was on over the door. Here was the place that I had chosen as the receptacle of my innocence, as Johnny, no less deluded, had chosen the town. Was it in there, that strangling, angel-black presence I came back here to murder? Here you are, and good luck to you. I stared up at the light. Why should I want to break bread with them here as the prodigal breaks bread in the house of his father; this was not my father’s house. Nor was it the house of righteousness, only the not impossible house—with a light on over its door. I rang.

I was about to ring again when I heard feet running and the door was opened by a fluttered young maid still tying her apron. “Yes, sir,” she said in thick Irish. “Excuse me, sir. Please to come in.” As the door closed behind me, a woman’s voice rang strongly from above. “Mr. Harley’s to be taken in to Sir Joseph at once, Maureen.” Before I could explain myself to the little maid, who was nodding over her shoulder and at the same time offering to take my things as shyly as if she had never done this before, the door of the morning room opened.

Stooped as he was, he was still almost as tall as I remembered him, with the same high-shouldered Egyptian narrowness, the head thrust from it like a buttonhook, the talon-nose carried forward to do the honors for the rest of his person which, scholarly reluctant, lagged behind—for these alone I might have known him, nothing else. The head was an old man’s enlarged pate now, with the yellowed baldness that comes to men of saturnine complexion; from beneath it the thin, oval face lengthened as if from a hat, an El Greco in oddly dashing eyeglasses, one of whose lenses was dark. He came toward me quavering, arms outstretched.

“Harley, how good of you—I scarcely dared hope.” One trembling hand grasped my waterproof. “Harley. She’s been calling all day—they have instructions not to prevent her from calling, you know—I couldn’t stick that. But I shall value your company down there tomorrow, more than I can say.” The rushing speech slowed. “I do beg your pardon. You’re not even out of the wet.” The hand dropped from my sleeve. “Do excuse me.” His head retracted in its wing collar, the lowered chin brushing it. “It’s the same thing, of course; she wants to come home. Raising his eyes, he stared at me. “You’d think I’d’ve got used to it in twenty years, wouldn’t you. And to those Mondays. But the truth is—” He passed a knuckle over the clearer lens. “The truth is, I’m getting on.” Shaking his head, stepping back, he collided with the maid waiting behind him. “Dear me.” Again the hand went out, encountering the girl’s hair—she was very small, perhaps fifteen. “Ah, m’dear, you’ll have to get used to me, too. Harley—” he went on, half turning, his hand still on her hair, “this is our little Maureen, Molly’s niece, come just last week to help us, all the way from County Wexford.” A flash of his former courtliness straightened him; inside this wavering apparition one saw for a second the ramrod of its youth. “She’s going to stay awhile,” he said, with a smile that knew itself liked. But tenderness to children had always been able to woo him from his distance, and this blunt-featured girl, not pretty but with babyhood still on her like a deer’s velvet, was only a child. I could remember how he had always stooped to them, not sparkled from a safe vantage like that other charmer whose name now was mine. “Lucky it wasn’t the Nailsea, eh?” he had said once, stooping down. “And Maureen,” he said now, “this gentleman is Mr. Harley, almost one of the family here.”

At this last, I remained speechless. I had not yet had a chance to take stock of my surroundings; it had been bemusement enough to be inside here, meet him even under the ordinary rules of exchange. Now, for one dread flash, I even wondered whether I could have constructed a “Harley” to enter here, which personality—in an ironically final stroke of amnesia—I had then forgot. Then from behind him a saving voice came, the one I had heard from above. She must have come quietly down during our interchange, and now she came forward without surprise, sending me one of those faint, telegraphic gestures we make behind the backs of the failing. This woman with the black still in her gray, the kindly face both sharp and blunt, was not Lady Goodman, could never have been, even though there had never been a death notice for Rachel, Lady Goodman, even if the old man, confirming a prescience I must have had ready for him, had not all but told me where his wife was. But this could very well be Molly, servant girl, grown to housekeeper’s estate, who had once looked not unlike Maureen here, Molly in dark blue neatness and a breastpin like the one my mother had received here one Christmas. She touched his sleeve. “The gentleman is not Mr. Harley, Sir Joseph.” She pressed a switch beside her and the central chandelier came on. “This weather, the lamps do nothing.” She turned to me, hands folded. “Yes, sir?”

“Not—not—?” He peered at me. “Of course not. I do beg your pardon. I was expecting someone, my godson. I’m afraid my eyes are not what they were.”

“I’m the one who should apologize. Your secretary wrote saying you’d be here, but I should have telephoned.” The matter-of-fact, adult phrases came to my own ears as if they were
lèse-majesté
, a masquerading; this must be a common experience for those who speak as equals, after long absence, to elders who knew them last as a child. But I had never had that experience and now I shrank from it. I could not face his humility and my own advantage. I had left him so proud. It was Molly I turned to. “You’re Molly, aren’t you? Mary Mulvey. You must be.”

“You’re not—why you’ll be another one of them chaps from the papers, come about the Sweeps, are you, even on such a day. Well, you may leave off. I’ve said my say.” She leaned toward the old man. “Do go on then, sir. Go on in the library, do; the side room’s too cold. There’s a nice fire in the library. And if she rings again, I’ll answer.” Whispering this last, she turned back to me. “Yes, I’ve had the money. And yes, I’m still here. Now that’s all now, do you hear?”

“No, I’m not from the newspapers, although I read about your win—and your answer.” I must have answered her as slowly as if I were dreaming, for now I was beginning to take stock of my surroundings, and the mention, too, of her windfall had filled me with a dreamer’s sudden, lavish benevolence toward all those belowstairs who had been so kind to me in that haven of second breakfasts; I could have wished to have arrived in a whirligig of presents from America for them, and for those abovestairs too, like my namesake long gone. But my presents, couched with the deadly faith of those who remember too well, would have been awkward ones—a sack of immies and those baked-stone marbles from Tuscana, the like of which Martin would never have seen, an air gun for James’s excursions on the inflatable Taft, and—perhaps the only dateless one—for Cook a bottle of her ruby port. “I shouldn’t have burst in on you like this.” I was not sorry. “And I’m afraid you’ll have forgotten me.” But this too was the language of the masque; I did not really believe it. “I’m—” My glance, wandering, greeting this, that, was intercepted at the top of the stairs. “The Knights of Malta—he’s gone.” In the light of the chandelier, the landing window shone as ever, and clear.

“The—oh yes. Good Lord, the old Templar—he’s been gone a long time now. One of the boys broke it, wasn’t it, Molly. He wasn’t much really, you know, Flemish, but nowhere near first-rate. The house itself isn’t at all early, you know; I’d no idea we’d become antique enough for that sort of thing. Trust my secretary didn’t raise your hopes.” His voice was suddenly as suavely distant, competent as I remembered it, freed of its quaver if a bit breathy, as if he had outrun that—the same voice which had bent, museum professional, over the harlequin-feathered cape. “Maureen will take your things. Do excuse us. I can’t think—oh, of course—the dining room. It
is
Morris, and more intact than most, I suppose. We did once have a fellow come photograph that.”

“Sir—” Molly’s voice had the tremble now, and she had arrested Maureen with a swift hand. “Sir Joseph—James broke that window almost thirty years ago, sir. He couldn’t have been ten. With his ball.” Turning to me, she held the girl close. “Who
are
you!”

I turned again to Sir Joseph, giant preserved for my coming. Pitilessly straight as a compass needle, innocence turned me toward him. “Until I was about ten, too, I used to come here with my mother. I’m Dora Cross’s son, Sir Joseph.”

“Dora … Cross. Do—Forgive me if I don’t quite—” He passed a hand over the darkened lens, as if this must stand for all his lapses. And indeed it might, I thought, tender for all seventy-seven years of him still preserved, thinking of the thousands of names he must have gone through in those years and have had to put behind him, else how get through such a roster, else how get through? Allowance must be made for that, and for my present appearance, which would have set him searching in the wrong category, among names that belonged abovestairs.

“My mother used to sew for her ladyship.” Softened with revelation, I could afford to be modest, even servile, to wait for his “Sew?—why, she was with Rachel when we married. Remember you—tumbling about underfoot with our own children? Why, my dear boy, you may not know it, but you were
born
here!” I trembled on the verge of his smile.

And now, if he delayed, surely it was because he was sifting through another category as numerous, that other long roster of benevolences cast so freely, so casually by such a house, upon the waters—so few of which, persevering as I, would have floated themselves back. I waited, in trust for them all. “For her ladyship?” he said, not infirm, not wavering, but he had slipped off his glasses to stare past me, baring the one empty eye socket already closed, quietly sealed. In it I saw my answer, not only to the favor—of remembrance—that I had just asked of him, but to that other more impossible request to which it was bound. No. To none of us—neither on our deathbeds nor on our childish knees. No, we may not. Not in any house for long, not anywhere. We may not stay. “For her ladyship?” he repeated. “Ah, that must have been a long time ago.”

“Dora Cross! Dora Cross—as went to America!” The cry was Molly’s, the face thrust up to mine, smiling and tearful, was Molly’s, the arms half extended to encircle the boy I had been, drawn up short before the man I had become, were hers; for a moment the hall was filled with all the sounds of welcome that could be made by a chorus of one. Tea was just on the way—if Sir Joseph would be good enough to go in by the fire ahead of us. He submitted as the old do, with a humble pleasure at still being part of the bustle of the world; meanwhile, I might just glimpse, peeped out like a fine pocket handkerchief to the son of a woman whose place here had been well above a kitchen-maid’s, how Molly reigned here now. “Lost an eye in the blitz,” she whispered after him, “and now Doctor thinks the other is going.” She stood off and regarded me. “Crossie’s son. And how is—?” My hesitation told her; before I said more she had collected its meaning without a hitch, like the commonest of passwords, as indeed it must be by now in this house. “Cook and I wondered, many’s the time. Your mother always wrote to
her
, so likely we never knew when it stopped.” So my mother had remembered. To all I had not known about her, to the great pile of secrets of the dead which must form somewhere in space-time their Everest, I added this leaf.