In For a Penny (19 page)

He went into the living room now and sat down heavily on the couch to rest. Dust motes swirled in the sun rays that slanted between the window curtains, and the clock ticked away heavily, filling the house with its solemn reminder. He looked around, recalling those times when he had lived in this room every day and evening, when he had come down the stairs before dawn and turned on the lamp, when he had gone to bed at night and turned the lamp off again. His eyes were drawn to the narrow hallway that led back to Myrt’s sewing room. She had long ago hung a framed mirror on the hallway wall to give it the illusion of size, and from where he sat, looking at the mirror nearly edge-on, the glass was a confusion of shadows, which, like the ghostly reflections in the glass of the fishbowl, seemed to him to be moving. He watched curiously—seeing in it the same suggestive shape, the bowing and reaching and turning insistently repeated—and after a moment he stood up and walked toward the hallway, regarding the shadows until they faded from view and it was his own face he was looking at in the mirror.

He opened the door to the sewing room and walked in, seeing the cut-out pattern parts still lying on the long table—pieces of a shirt she had been sewing for him. The old ironing board with its ivy-decorated cloth stood against the wall in the corner. Nearby sat the silent sewing machine, and next to that the sewing cabinet that he had built with wood left over from the casket. He wondered suddenly if his building the sewing cabinet had been inspired by guilt: probably it had—but good things sometimes resulted from dubious motives, and in the end it was all one. On the opposite wall the closet door stood partway open, and he shut it now, admiring the doorknob, which was made of old leaded glass that had turned purple in the sun, another of Myrt’s antique store purchases. It had always been the loveliest doorknob in the house, and Johnson had never been the type to despise a doorknob or any other simple and unadorned thing. Taking out a handkerchief now, he wiped the glass clean of dust and peered into its transparent depths, where he saw once again the familiar shadowy movement. Knowing that the room behind him was still, the curtains drawn across the windows, he abandoned the idea that what he saw was a reflection. It was rather the presence of something, or of someone.

He turned slowly, expecting he knew not what, and for a brief moment there appeared on the wall behind the sewing cabinet the same moving shadow, which dimmed and disappeared in the moment that his mind acknowledged what it was—the shadow, or perhaps the shade, of a woman opening the lid of the sewing cabinet and removing something from inside—or else putting something there. He stepped to the box, put his own hand on the dusty wooden pull, and opened it. There, lying among bobbins and spools of thread, lay a small package wrapped in white paper and a ribbon and bow. There was a card attached, the corner of its envelope slid through the ribbon.

It was an anniversary card from Myrt, undelivered. Clearly she had hid the package in the sewing chest, waiting for the day of their anniversary. He read the card twice and put it into his pocket, and then slipped the ribbon off the box and pulled the paper loose, balling it up and tossing it into the trash. Inside the box was a tissue-wrapped gift the size of his hand. He hesitated, stopping to catch his breath, to listen once more to the now-muted ticking of the clock. Slowly he removed the tissue, finding inside a sherry glass identical to the first: the same etching, the gold rim, the octagonal base. …

Carrying the glass he walked back out into the hallway, across the living room, and into the kitchen again. He opened the cabinet that held the few bottles that he and Myrt had kept for company, and took out the square bottle of sherry, put away at the rear of the shelf since that first toast when he had brought it home from the Vietnamese market.

At the back door he hesitated for a moment, leaning his weight against the wall and looking back one last time, before tossing the house key onto the kitchen floor and closing the locked door forever behind him.

When he stepped into the sheltered darkness of the garden shed, the casket was a long shadow on the low saw-horses that supported it. He had always noticed that there was a time right at dusk when, even with the lights on, things were darker than they would be a half hour hence, when it was night, and this was surely such a time. He set the bottle and glass down and leaned against the casket itself, catching his breath for a moment before going on, letting his eyes adjust, wanting to get through this in what was left of the light of day.

Earlier he had emptied the tools out of the box, and now he slowly and carefully disassembled the various notched-together panels that had defined its useful existence, laying the wooden dividers behind him until the casket contained only the built-in compartments, most of which already held his afterlife accoutrements. He slipped the bottle down into its own narrow space and the sherry glass into its niche, and just like that the thing was finished. He stood for another moment regarding it. The cribbage board and the deck of cards were one of the travel sets they had used early in their marriage, and he found that they were only barely familiar to him now. He took the plastic wrap off the first of the books, Priestly’s
The Good Companions
, and riffled the pages, finding an old postcard bookmark with a picture of Yosemite Valley on it. The sight of the card made him think of the label on the first sherry bottle, still pressed in the dictionary inside the house, and for a moment he regretted the loss of the house key. But the label wasn’t useful, really. It was mere nostalgia, and there wasn’t a lot of room for nostalgia in a casket. The idea almost made him laugh, but his heart began to skip and flutter, and abruptly he found himself sitting on the floor, looking up at the tarnished brass screws in the wooden cleats that crisscrossed the bottom of the box.

He realized that he had passed out, and he sat there recovering for a minute before he hauled himself heavily to his feet and made his unsteady way back outside, looking up into the sky. There was still enough sunlight in the west to call it dusk, and a scattering of fleecy white clouds made the sky above the sunset look interminably deep. He rested three times ascending the treehouse stairs, and used both hands to turn the doorknob. He was tempted to lie down on the bed for a breather, but he knew it was unlikely he would rise again.

Septimus bumped around as usual, looking for food, and Johnson fed him again, a healthy pinch, deciding to leave the light on over the bowl. He looked around him one last time, then bent over to straighten the covers on the bed. “Well …” he said out loud, but he couldn’t find any useful way to finish the thought.
Sentimental old fool
, he thought. Myrt had called him that more than once, and apparently she’d been just as right as rain. Closing the door behind him, he went back down the stairs, haltingly, holding on tight to the rail and planting his feet carefully.

In the shed he realized that his mind was made up, and had been since Myrt had shown him where to find her anniversary gift. It had been a day of indecision, but the second sherry glass had finished the forty year job of putting together the casket and had made the way clear to him at last. He removed the bottle and the two glasses now and set them on the closed bottom half of the lid. A clutching pain shot down his left arm, and he held his chest, stopping dead still and closing his eyes until it receded to a dull ache. He had to use his teeth to pull the cork from the bottle, and his right hand shook when he poured the two glasses full.

“Over the river,” he said, carrying the first of the glasses to his lips and draining it. He winked at Queen Isabella, and then threw the glass against the wall of the shed, where it shattered and fell. He picked up the second glass, raised it in a silent toast, and drank it too, and then, using up what was left of his strength, he hurled the glass after the first, the shards scattering among the others on the floor. A weight as vast and as heavy as the sky and earth together seemed to be crushing his chest as he fumbled the cork back into the bottle and put it back into the casket.

But now he was free to go, out at last into the waning sunlight. His breath came in shallow gasps as he tottered across the yard and sat down hard in the open air among the fallen fig leaves, resting his back against the tree trunk, the evening clouds and the first stars turning far far above him in the sky, and the wind rustling the foliage around his small house, hidden now within that leafy darkness. The glow of the fish bowl shone as ever through the shifting foliage, casting its dim light out into the night.

t
he Vicar’s Bookshop lay in Avebury, not far from the churchyard, and was built of the same stone and oak as the church itself, with heavily mullioned windows and a roof of weathered slates that would soon need work. A leaky roof isn’t a good companion for books, and there was a ring the color of weak tea in the plaster ceiling over the counter, ever so slightly expanded by this year’s rains. Whether the time-dilapidated roof would outlast Ian Henley, the owner of the shop, was a good question. He was feeling dilapidated himself these days. He didn’t care much about the money that the repairs would cost, but he cared very much about the upset—nearly as much as he cared about his books, although not quite. And anyway, in his will he had left the shop lock stock and barrel to his nephew Jack, who could fix the Vicar’s roof himself if it mattered to him. If it didn’t, the boy would probably sell the shop and pass the leaky roof on to someone else, and, being dead, Ian Henley would be none the wiser.

The bookshop—Henley’s home in recent years—had in fact been a vicarage in the distant past, and it was ideally situated, looking out across a gap in the hills toward where the standing stones shone now in the moonlight, the road a dark ribbon winding around past the West Kennett Long Barrow, past wheat fields and lonesome farm houses. Three wings had been added to the building over the years, so that the shop comprised more than a dozen wainscoted rooms, with wall-hung shelves and with easy chairs for the leisure of the customers. Books occupied most of the rooms, and aside from the kitchen and bathroom, Henley kept only a couple for himself. He found that he didn’t need much space for living these days, now that his life had narrowed. He kept a guest room with a made-up bed and a small bathroom of its own, but he’d had no guests in several years and wasn’t likely to anytime soon.

Henley sat now in Ghosts and Houses, the largest of his several rooms of specialized books, almost all of these having to do with supernatural subjects—ghost stories and allegedly true accounts of hauntings and paranormal phenomena—nearly two thousand volumes that spilled over into a doorless closet and into an antechamber that had once been a large dressing room. The antechamber also contained Henley’s collection of unframed etchings and photographs of English houses, many of which photographs his wife Iris had taken in their travels.

Henley looked at his watch, set his book down, filled one last pipe full of tobacco, tamped it, and lit it, drawing the smoke in contentedly. At his age he was damned if his doctor was going to make him feel guilty about indulging in simple pleasures. But this was his last pipe; it was late in the evening, and tomorrow would be a long and busy day. He had contracted to pick up a small library from an old gentleman in Little Comberton—or rather from the old gentleman’s daughter, the old gentleman himself having passed on—enough of a library for him to have to borrow a small lorry from the museum rather than make six trips back and forth in the Morris. The man hadn’t been dead more than a week, but the daughter was evidently in a tearing hurry to sell off the estate, and she had agreed to let Henley have the library at a fire-sale price. In fact he hadn’t done quite this well all at one stroke since he and Iris had set up the bookshop twenty-odd years ago. Why he was still buying books in quantity he couldn’t quite say, because at seventy-two, and with his precarious heart, he ought to be at the downhill stage of things, his estate-buying days over. Earlier in the day he had twice taken a nitroglycerin tablet to head off episodes of a particularly suffocating angina, and even now he felt the phantom tightness in his chest and jaw, lurking there like an assassin.

The book business was all Henley knew or had ever known. Certainly he knew it far better than he had known the business of being a husband, which he had come to fairly late in life when he had married Iris and moved to England. It was merely a happy chance that she had walked into his first shop in Vancouver, one thing leading to another in the changeable days that followed. He had been a younger man then, with the fire and stamina necessary to pull up stakes and move, and to do it for love. But as the poet said, way leads on to way, and Iris’s death only ten years later had left him alone and far from Canada and the life he had left behind. The truth was, however, that he hadn’t left much behind at all, except a lonely bachelorhood, which is exactly what had been returned to him upon Iris’s death. In the years that followed his marriage, Wiltshire had become his home, and in the past ten years he had lost all desire to return to Canada or to do any sort of traveling, especially without Iris to travel with him. New places were empty of interest to him. Old places were golden with nostalgia, but were lost to him now that Iris was gone and his life with her was a memory.

Another writer had said that with a good book in his hand, a man is never alone, or something of that nature, and the sentiment was no doubt at least partly true. The part of it that
wasn’t
true, however, loomed a little larger and darker as the years passed, and he more and more often thought of Iris and their life together, and although he could still lose himself in a book, he lost less of himself, and his mind was more often content to wander alone through old memories instead. And it was ironic, too, that largely out of sentiment he had managed to buy the libraries of dead friends, so that he was surrounded not merely by books, but by books that called up further memories, as if the shop itself were a churchyard and the books were paper and ink headstones.