Little, Big (74 page)

"You must," Lilac said simply.

"I don't," Sophie said, shaking her head. "I don't, and even if I did I'd be afraid." Afraid! That was the worst: afraid to take steps away from this dark old house, as afraid as any ghost. "Too long," she said, wiping her wet nose on the sleeve of her cardigan, "too long."

"But the house is the door!" Lilac said. "Everybody knows that. It's marked on all their maps."

"It is?"

"Yes. So."

"And from here?"

Lilac looked at her blankly. "Well," she said.

"I'm sorry, Lilac," Sophie said. "I've had a sad life, you see. . . ."

"Oh? Oh,
I
know," Lilac said, brightening. "Those cards! Where are they?"

"There," Sophie said, pointing to where the box of different woods from the Crystal Palace lay on the night table. Lilac reached for them, and pulled open the box. "Why did you have a sad life?" she asked, extracting the cards.

"Why?" Sophie said. "Because you were stolen, partly, mostly . . ."

"Oh,
that
. Well, that doesn't matter."

"Doesn't matter?" Sophie laughed, weeping.

"No, that was just the beginning." She was shuffling the big cards awkwardly in her small hands. "Didn't you know that?"

"No. No, I thought . . . I think I thought it was the end."

"Oh, that's silly. If I hadn't been stolen, I couldn't have had my Education, and if I hadn't had my Education I couldn't have brought this news now, that it's
really
beginning; so that was all right, don't you see?"

Sophie watched her shuffle the cards, dropping some and sticking them back in the deck, in a sort of parody of careful arrangement. She tried to imagine the life Lilac had led, and couldn't. "Did you," she asked, "ever miss me, Lilac?" Lilac shrugged one shoulder, busy.

"There," she said, and gave the deck to Sophie. "Follow that." Sophie slowly took the cards from her, and just for a moment Lilac seemed to see her—to see her truly, for the first time since she had entered. "Sophie," she said. "Don't be sad. It's all so much larger than you think." She put her hand over Sophie's. "Oh, there's a fountain there—or a waterfall, I forget—and you can wash there— oh it's so clear and icy cold and—oh, it's all, it's all so much bigger than you think!"

She climbed down from the bed. "You sleep now," she said. "I have to go."

"Go where? I won't sleep, Lilac."

"You will," Lilac said. "You can, now; because I'm awake."

"Oh?" She lay back slowly on the pillows Lilac plumped up behind her.

"Because," Lilac said, with the secret in her smile again, "because I stole your sleep; but now I'm awake, and you can sleep."

Sophie, exhausted, clasped the cards. "Where," she said, "will you go? It's dark and cold."

Lilac shuddered, but she only said, "You sleep." She raised herself on tiptoe beside the tall bed and, brushing the pale curls from Sophie's cheek, kissed her lightly. "Sleep."

She stepped noiselessly across the floor, opened the door, and with a glance back at her mother, went out into the still, cold hall. She closed the door behind her.

Sophie lay staring at the blankness of the door. The third candle guttered out with a hiss and a pop. Still holding the cards, Sophie wiggled slowly down within the quilts and coverlets, thinking—or perhaps not thinking, not thinking at all but feeling certain—that Lilac had, in some regard, been lying to her; in some regard misleading her at least; but in what regard?

Sleep.

In what regard? She was thinking, like a mental breathing: in what regard? She was breathing this when she knew, with a gasp of delight in her soul that almost woke her, that she was asleep.

Auberon, yawning, glanced first through the mail that Fred Savage had brought the night before from uptown.

"Dear World Elsewhere," a lady with peacockgreen ink wrote, "I am writing now to ask you a question I have long pondered. I would like to know, if at all possible,
where is that house where the MacReynolds and the others live?
I must say that it is very important to me personally to know this. Its exact location. I wouldn't bother you by writing except that I find it impossible to imagine. When they used to live at Shady Acres (way back when!) well, I could imagine that easily enough, but I cannot imagine this other place they've ended up. Please give me some kind of hint. I can hardly think of anything else." She signed herself his hopefully, and added a postscript: "I sincerely promise not to
bother
anybody." Auberon glanced at the postmark—way out West—and tossed it in the woodbox.

Now what the hell, he wondered, was he doing awake so early? Not to read mail. He glanced at Doc's old square-faced wristwatch on the mantelpiece. Oh, yes: milking. All this week. He roughly pulled the covers of the bed in place, put a hand under the footboard, said "
Up
we go," and magicked it into a mirror-fronted old wardrobe. The click of its locking into upright place he always found satisfying.

He pulled on tall boots and a heavy sweater, looking out the window at a light snow falling. Yawning again (would George have coffee? Yours hopefully) he pushed his hat on his head and went out clumping, locking the Folding Bedroom's doors behind him and making his way down the stairs, out the window, down the fire escape, into the hall, through the wall and out onto the stairs that led down to the Mouse kitchen.

At the bottom he came on George.

"You're not going to believe this," George said.

Auberon stopped. George said nothing more. He looked like he'd seen a ghost: Auberon at once recognized the look, though he'd never before seen anyone who'd seen a ghost. Or like a ghost himself, if ghosts can look stricken, overcome by conflicting emotions, and amazed out of their wits. "What?" he said.

"You are
not
. Gonna believe this." He was in socks of great antiquity and a quilted boxer's dressing gown. He took Auberon's hand and began to lead him down the hall toward the door of the kitchen. "What," Auberon said again. The back of George's dressing gown said it belonged to the Yonkers A.C.

At the door—which stood ajar—George turned again to Auberon. "Now just for God's sake," he whispered urgently, "don't say a word about, you know, that story. That story I told you, about—you know—" he glanced at the open door—"about Lilac," he said, or rather did not say, he only moved his lips around the name silently, exaggeratedly, and winked a frightened warning wink. Then he pushed open the door.

"Look," he said. "Look, look," as though Auberon were capable of not looking. "My kid."

The child sat on the edge of the table, swinging her crossed bare legs back and forth.

"Hello, Auheron," she said. "You got big."

Auberon, feeling a feeling like crossed eyes in his soul but looking steadily at the child, touched the place in his heart where his imaginary Lilac was kept. She was there.

Then this was—

"Lilac," he said.

"My kid. Lilac," George said.

"But how?"

"Don't ask me how," George said.

"It's a long story," Lilac said. "The longest story
I
know."

"There's this meeting on," George said.

"A Parliament," Lilac said. "I came to tell you."

"She came to tell us."

"A Parliament," Auberon said. "What on earth."

"Listen, man," George said. "Don't ask me. I came down to brew a little coffee, and there's a knocking at the door. . . ."

"But why," Auberon asked, "is she so young?"

"You're asking me? So I peeked out, and here's this kid in the snow. . . ."

"She should be a lot older."

"She was asleep. Or some damn thing. What do I know. So I open the door . . ."

"This is all kind of hard to believe," Auberon said.

Lilac had been looking from one to the other of them, hands clasped in her lap, smiling a smile of cheerful love for her father, and of sly complicity at Auberon. The two stopped talking then, and only looked at her. George came closer. The look he wore was an anxious, joyful wonderment, as though he'd just hatched Lilac himself. "Milk," he said, snapping his fingers. "How about a glass of milk? Kids like milk, right?"

"I can't," Lilac said, laughing at his solicitude. "I can't, here."

But George was already bustling with a jelly jar and a canister of goats milk from the refrigerator. "Sure," he said. "Milk."

"Lilac," Auheron said. "Where is it you want us to go?"

"To where the meeting is," Lilac said. "The Parliament."

"But where? Why? What . . ."

"Oh, Auberon," Lilac said, impatient, "they'll explain all that when you get there. You just have to come."

"They?"

Lilac turned up her eyes in mock-stupefaction. "Oh, come
on
," she said. "You just have to hurry, that's all, so as not to be late. . . ."

"Nobody's going anywhere now," George said, putting the milk in Lilac's hands. She looked at it curiously, and put it down. "Now you're hack, and that's great, I don't know from where or how, but you're here and safe, and we're staying here."

'Oh, but you
must
come," Lilac said, taking the sleeve of his dressing gown. "You have to. Otherwise . . ."

"Otherwise?" George asked.

"It won't come out right," Lilac said softly. "The Tale," she said, even more softly.

"Oho," George said. "Oho, the Tale. Well." He stood before her arms akimbo, nodding a skeptical nod but lost for an answer.

Auberon watched them, father and daughter, thinking:
It's not all over, then
. That had been the thought he had begun to think as soon as he entered the old kitchen, or rather not to think but to know, to know by the rising of the hair on his nape and the weird swarm of feeling, the feeling that his eyes were crossing and yet seeing more clearly than before. Not all over: he had lived long in a small room, a folding bedroom, and had explored its every corner, had come to know it as he knew his own bowels, and had decided: this is all right, this will do, a sort of life can be lived here, here's a chair by the fire and a bed to sleep in and a window to look out of; if it was constricted, that was made up for by how much simple sense it made. And now it was as though he had lowered the front of the mirrored wardrobe and found not a bed clothed in patched sheets and an old quilt but a portal, a ship in full sail raising anchor, a windy dawn and an avenue beneath tall trees disappearing far out of sight.

He shut it up, fearful. He'd had his adventure. He'd followed outlandish paths, and hadn't for no good reason given them up. He got up, and clumped to the window in his rubber boots. Unmilked, the goats bewailed in their apartments.

"No," he said. "I'm not going, Lilac."

"But you haven't even heard the
reasons
," Lilac said.

"I don't care."

"The War! The Peace!" Lilac said.

"Don't care." He'd stick. He wouldn't miss the whole world if it passed him by on the way there, and it probably would; or perhaps he would miss it, but he'd rather that than take his life in his teeth and pass into that sea again, that sea Desire, now that he'd escaped it, and found a shore. Never.

"Auberon," Lilac said softly. "Sylvie will be there."

Never. Never never never.

"Sylvie?" George said.

"Sylvie," Lilac said.

When there had been no further word from either of them for some time, Lilac said, "She told me to tell you . . ."

"She didn't!" Auberon said, turning on her. "She didn't, it's a lie! No! I don't know why you want to fool us, I don't know why or for what you came, but you'll say anything, won't you, won't you? Anything but the truth! Just like all of them, because it doesn't matter to you. No, no, you're just as bad as they are, I know it, just as bad as that Lilac that George blew up, that fake one. No different."

"Oh,
great
," George said, casting his eyes upward. "That's just great."

"Blew up?" Lilac said, looking at George.

"It was
not
my
fault
," George said, rifling a furious look at Auberon.

"So
that's
what happened to it," Lilac said thoughtfully. Then she laughed. "Oh, they were mad! When the ashes drifted down. It was hundreds of years old, and the last one they had." She climbed down from the table, her blue skirt riding up. "I have to go now," she said, and started toward the door.

"No," Auberon said. "Wait."

"Go! No," George said, and took her arm.

"There's so much to do," Lilac said. "And this is all settled here, so . . . Oh," she said. "I forgot.
Your
way is mostly in the forest, so it would be best if you had a guide. Somebody who knows the woods, and can help you along. Bring a coin, for the ferryman; dress warm. There are lots of doors, but some are quicker than others. Don't be too long, or you'll miss the banquet!" She was at the door, but rushed back to leap into George's arms. She circled his neck in her thin golden arms, kissed his lean cheeks, and scrambled down again. "It's going to be so much fun," she said; she glanced once at them, smiling a smile of simple sweet wickedness and pleasure, and was gone. They heard the pat of her bare feet on the old linoleum outside, but didn't hear the street door open, or shut.

George took from a leaning hatrack his overalls and coat, pulled them on, and then his boots; he went to the door, but when he reached it he seemed to forget what he was about, or why he hurried. He looked around himself, found no clue, and went to sit at the table.

Auberon slowly took the chair opposite him, and for a long time they sat silent, sometimes starting, but seeing nothing, while a certain light or meaning was subtracted from the room, returning it to ordinariness, turning it to a kitchen where porridge was made and goat's milk drunk and two bachelors sat rubber-boot to rubber-boot at the table, with chores still to be done.

And a journey to go: that was left.

"Okay," George said. "What?" He looked up, but Auberon hadn't spoken.

"No," Auberon said.

"She said," George said, but then couldn't exactly say what; couldn't forget what she had said but (what with the goats bawling, what with the snow outside, what with his own heart emptying and filling) couldn't remember it either.