Pitch Dark (8 page)

Time passes. I don’t know where he has gone. By agent, for some reason, I think he meant a news agent, and from his allusion to advice, I assume the news agent is some sort of worldly friend. More time. He does not return. I park my car in a better spot, further from the curve. The town, it occurs to me, is absolutely still. I look for the news dealer, find him, ask where the truck driver might have gone. The man is oddly evasive at first, seems to know nothing about the truck, the driver, or the events, for that matter, which have just taken place, in that stillness, on a curve just a few yards from his door. He waits. Suddenly, he says, Perhaps he’s gone to the police station. I ask where that is. And though the street is the only one in town, and though it has on each side at most ten small buildings, either he, and the other people in his shop, and two people I subsequently ask are incapable of giving directions, or I am too rattled and obtuse to follow them, but I cannot find the police station. More time. I walk more slowly. I notice a doorway over which there is a small blue porcelain medallion, lettered, perhaps in Gaelic. The windows are dark. The door is locked; it has no handle; and when I knock there’s no reply. Twenty more minutes. I’ve walked the length of the town, several times, returning always to the truck. I wonder how I’m going to manage without my rental agreement, but I give up. I start to walk, again, toward my car, when the truck driver comes out of I don’t know which door. Where have you been? I ask, in an almost apologetic voice. He says, I’ve been to the agent, for his advice, it’s all taken care of, there’s no harm done. Although, for some reason, I still don’t altogether distrust him, I say, You know, I’ll need that rental agreement back. He’s been walking toward his truck. He says, It’s all right, I believe the agent has it. And his eyes shift briefly, involuntarily, toward the doorway under the medallion. The door is now slightly open. I walk toward it. The driver turns to follow me, runs. We enter almost at the same moment.

At the right of the room, which is small and almost completely dark, sits a policeman, writing, by the light of a small lamp, in a huge, lined ledger, at a wooden desk. The back of the room is dark, with, darker still, in outline, what appear to be three chairs. At no moment so far, not at the airport, not when I thought I was lost, not even when I heard the slap of bumper and fender, or in the long wait since, have I felt the slightest rush of adrenaline. Now, for some reason, I’m a little out of breath. The policeman says, It’s all right, ma’am, it’s taken care of. I say, almost accustomed now to not understanding and feeling somehow remiss, Well, officer, how do you mean? He is wearing his helmet, and writing in his ledger. He says, We’ve already rung the rental agency, and they have said they’ll pay. I say, No, don’t you see, I didn’t sign for their insurance. Under the agreement, I’m the one who has to pay. The policeman continues writing, says, It’s all right, ma’am, I’ve spoken to them, and I’m nearly finished. I say, Well, in that case, don’t you see, officer, I’ll need your name, and the driver’s, and a copy of your report. It’s all right, ma’am, the policeman says, I’ve nearly finished it. I say, But you haven’t seen my car or even the truck. He does not reply. I say, Surely you’re going to come and see the truck. As though this were a new thought to him, he gets up reluctantly from behind the desk. His helmet has been on the whole time. And I am still, or again, deluded, perhaps because they both seem so slow and unintelligent, with a kind of idiot trust. At the door, the driver, perhaps by now embarrassed, says, The damage of course is nothing. I just didn’t want them coming after me about your car. In this matter of the commas. In this matter of the paragraphs. In this matter of the scandal at the tennis courts. Not right here, I think, not now.

We walk to the truck. When the policeman finally sees, after I’ve pointed it out to him, that the bumper is bent, he starts to press his own foot against it, pauses, steps back, says to the driver, I guess you’ll want to bend that back. The driver, sensing perhaps a loss of allegiance, looks at us both and says, very slowly, I’ll want to get an estimate. The policeman, as though recollecting himself, says, He’ll want to get an estimate. I say, Look, since I’m responsible, why don’t we go together for an estimate, and I’ll just pay. Silence. The driver says, Oh, I can’t go now. I ask when he might be able to go. He looks away and says he can’t say at the moment. Beginning at last to get an intimation, I say, Why don’t you simply tell me your own estimate of the damages, and perhaps I could pay it to you now. He hesitates, seems to calculate, says, No, I’m afraid I couldn’t do that. The policeman has been standing there, looking off into the distance. I ask, either of them really, what I ought to do. I ask whether I oughtn’t to see the truck driver’s license. No reply. I look toward the policeman. He asks me when I’ll be going back to the United States. I say, Friday, or Saturday. He says to the driver, Why don’t you give the lady your phone number, and she can call you Friday afternoon. I say, That’s fine, but you know, I really ought to have his license number. The policeman says, I’ll just write his phone number down for you; asks the driver; writes it down at his dictation. They walk away, as though the matter were at an end. I say, Officer, I think I’ll need that rental agreement, if you’ve finished with it. He says, I returned it to you, I believe. I say, Maybe we left it at the station; and start walking toward the door. I have been standing, as it happens, further from the truck and nearer the station, than either of them. The rental agreement is lying beside the ledger, on the desk. I take it. There is a moment of tension. Then the policeman says, He will have that estimate for you Friday afternoon. The driver smiles. We walk back to the road. As we part, the driver climbs into his cab, smiles again, and says, oddly, You have my word.

Quanta, Amy said, on the train, in that blizzard, in answer to my question. Hello, this is Medea. Wasn’t always. Well, he asked for me, you inquired after me, at the conference in the Motel on the Mountain. The motel has since become, what does it matter what it has since become. I don’t think they hold conferences there. It is where we began.

Driving onward, I simply do not understand it. What word. Why no exchange of license numbers. There was an undertone, certainly of complicity, but what could possibly have been the underlying calculation? It did not seem, after all, so very cagey to have given me his phone number; better, in some ways, I would have thought, to ask for mine. It was fobbed off, I suppose, in lieu of the driver’s license, and of the policeman’s actual report. But to what end? I still tend to mistake their apparent lack of intelligence or competence for guilelessness. The policeman never even looked at my car; and if they were planning, for instance, to say that I’d hit and run, why write out the phone number in the officer’s own hand? But I do know this: that I ought not to be in the hands of the driver, and the rental agency, and the estimator, for what I’ll have to pay. At one point, the driver had said, You know, the damage could be as much as twenty or forty or eighty pounds. I said, surely not as much as that. The policeman said, with a little laugh, You don’t know our Irish repairmen. They may have to replace the entire bumper with a new one. And even then, the driver had rejected my offer to pay, whatever it cost, right then and there. I don’t know what to do. I would normally call the rental agency, but if the officer has really already called them, that seems redundant; and why was I not called in, why did he not call them in my presence, or look at my car? I have an odd feeling that somehow they do plan to say I’ve hit and run. But that can’t be right. Not when I have that phone number in his handwriting. I know I now need to find an honorable repairman, who will not look at the rental sticker, and proceed to think, as the driver thought, of the agency’s insurance. The car, after all, is not due back at the agency for a week. Maybe somebody at the castle will know a repairman. Or maybe Captain Walton, whom the ambassador had mentioned as a special friend and neighbor. I have a small intimation now of danger, and of being, within seconds, entirely at the mercy of unfamiliar people. And I think, Thank goodness it was nothing serious; from one minute to the next everything is changed.

In the pool of the Hospital for Special Surgery, which, perhaps because it specializes in diseases, not of life or death, but of locomotion, must be one of the most cheerful hospitals in the world, we aligned ourselves, at first, naturally, conversationally, according to the gravity of our ailments. The pool room is on the ground floor. Along one wall, its windows look out on the drive and the river, the dazzling grey light and the barges. Nobody swims here, no splashing, no barking or echoing tiles. At the deep end, where the water, which is of course heated, reaches only to the chins of the adults, a young therapist walked slowly back and forth, holding in his extended hands a small wooden bar. Clasping that bar, a small child of about six was being drawn gently, laughing, through the water. Mrs. Martinez, mother of eight, who walked back and forth beside me, looked on with approval; then, in order to free the therapist for other patients, she took over the small bar and the child herself. The three of us were soon joined by Mr. Lanier. It is not quite accurate to say, of Mrs. Martinez, Mr. Lanier, or myself, that we walked. We had been lowered into the pool by means of a crane and stretcher, and now we solemnly proceeded, technically upright and on our feet but with most of our weight borne by the water, from one side to the other of the pool. Anna Mills, who was slightly shorter than we were, walked a little nearer the shallow end, but took part in our general conversation. So, from time to time, did the three young athletes just beyond her. Recovering from knee surgery, they stood, arms outstretched along the pool’s edge, bending and straightening their injured legs before them. Buoyantly, gravely, wincing or expressionless, we chatted: about what was wrong with us, how it happened, whether we had been injured, or born this way, or simply, gradually disintegrated; about past surgery, impending surgery, no surgery. But the subject of most profound interest, the one that divided us along lines not of age, or class, or job, or personal affinity, was drugs. The Tylenol set, the group on Empirin with codeine, the poor souls on Bufferin or Darvon, or any non-prescription remedy, were separated from the lucky few on morphine derivatives, on Percodan. The difference, we soon discovered, or rather, the Percodan group discovered it, had less to do with kind of illness or intensity of pain than with the philosophy and disposition of the prescribing doctor. Al Hines, the truck driver, we knew, had been scolded by his doctor for taking too much aspirin, when he had the same problem as Mrs. Martinez, Mr. Lanier, and I. Ten days of traction, Al’s doctor had said, and if that didn’t do it, surgery. But my own doctor had said that traction—and, in our rooms, all of us were in traction—was of no use whatever, just a device to satisfy insurance companies. So there we were; when Al walked with us, like children discreetly withholding from less enlightened children the truth about the stork or Santa Claus, we would not discuss our medication. And the day old Mrs. James, completely warped and crabbed by her arthritis into a kind of clawed, bowlegged arc, mentioned that her doctor, bless him, did allow her Percodan, specifically one half a pill four times a day, we, we lucky few who took Percodan (and sometimes, having surreptitiously stored them, three Percodan eight times a day), we said nothing, only continued our stately procession, like swans, or philosophers, generals or Athenians, back and forth across the pool.

But then, stopping everywhere, as I was, to ask directions, it was by no means clear, at many intersections, which was the straight continuation of the road and which was another road entirely. I asked various bicyclists, farmers, passersby. And once, when I pulled far off the road, for the last of several farmers with their herds of lowing cattle, I met, no, not met, encountered, one of the truly gentle and poetic souls, a man who said, You’ve bent part of your fender against this tall grass; and who bent the metal back in place, along its tidy line, getting mud on his trousers and his hands. A kind man, with the profound sense of natural honor from which, I supposed, the lorry driver’s You have my word, in some way, derived. My sense of the ominous and hostile receded. I began to think these were omens, perhaps, after all, auspicious. As the weather let up, I became aware for the first time of serenity, of the fields, the walls of stone, slate sky, the incredibly long eyelashes of the cows. I passed through the countryside, the towns. Just before dark, I found the unpaved road to Cihrbradàn, then the iron gates, and the long drive to the castle. In the circle of gravel, at the front door, I parked my car in such a way that the driver’s side, the damaged fender side, was visible to all comers on the road. Later, I thought this even then, later I could say, What kind of fool do you take me for; if concealment was what I had in mind, do you take me for such a fool as to park my car in such a way that the damaged side is there for all the world to see? As I opened the car door and got out, I felt watched. I saw a round middle-aged face peering at me through the shades. Celia, I thought, the hearty cook, looking out eagerly for the first glimpse of the stranger. But, as I crossed the few remaining yards of gravel driveway, she made no move toward the door.

After I had knocked for quite a while, the door was opened by a younger woman. Kathleen, I thought, but when I introduced myself, she did not give her name. She said, There’s a note for you from Captain and Mrs. Walton, and led me to a small room, full of guns, boots, hunting jackets, and a large desk. On the wall above the desk, there was an ancient telephone, on a wooden panel, with many wires and switches. An envelope addressed to me lay on the desk. Kathleen handed it to me; and walked back across the little entryway, down a short, narrow corridor, to an immense kitchen, where she introduced me to Celia, who stood beside the kitchen table, watching protectively over a round pink child. You’ll be wanting to see your room then, Kathleen said. We climbed a beautiful, old, slowly rounding staircase, to a room which looked out in two directions, on an old grey tower, and on the sea. The waves were placid against the black rocks of the bay; to the absolute verge of those rocks, and the sea itself, the fields extended, in calm, perfect, implausibly familiar, muted green. Three sources of heat in the room, Kathleen pointed out to me briskly: central heating, an electric blanket, the peat fireplace. She also showed me the closet and the bed. Not the bathroom, which I found later, at some distance, down the hall. You’ll be wanting tea, she said, as she was going down the staircase. I said, Thank you, yes. And what time would you like your dinner? I looked at my watch. It was five-fifteen. I said, At seven, please. And then, On second thought, with dinner as soon as that, instead of tea, I’d like a drink. I like to go to bed early, I added, and get up early. We walked through the first kitchen, past Celia and the baby, through a second, still larger kitchen, to a pantry, with an enormous wall safe. We always keep it locked, Kathleen said, when the ambassador’s away. The door swung open, revealing shelves and quantities of every kind of whiskey, gin, rum, brandy, vodka. As you’re his guest, she said, I’ll leave the key in while you’re here. I chose one of the Irish whiskeys, Bushmills. Have you known the ambassador long? she asked, as she led me through several dark rooms, one of which seemed to be the study, to the drawing room, where the lamps nearest the sofa were on, and there was a peat fire burning in the grate. He had said, Talk to them, they are friendly; so I said, Not long, and told her how I met him, and that he sent his best. Will you be wanting ice? she said. She brought cubes, in a glass, and some water in a small pewter pitcher. I stayed a long time, alone, with my drink, beside the grate in the drawing room. I opened the envelope from Captain and Mrs. Walton. An invitation to dinner, the following evening, at eight. Paddy, the groundskeeper there, will give you directions, it said. Hope you can come. An illegible signature. A legible phone number. One digit, like the number of the castle. I sloshed a bit more water from the pitcher into my glass. A little tired now, from the whiskey, and the day itself, I thought I should call to accept. I found my way to the hunting and phone room, looked at the wooden panel, with its wires and switches. Celia appeared in the doorway. I’d like to phone the Waltons, I said. I can’t figure out quite how this works. Kathleen does that, Celia said. A pause. She’s upstairs. Feeding the baby. Shall I call her down? I say, It’s nothing urgent. Another pause. Celia walks to the phone, turns a crank, flips several switches, then hands the receiver to me. So glad you’re here, says the Captain; heard all about you; look forward enormously; just ask Paddy for directions; eight o’clock then. Hangs up. Celia stands in doorway. Whenever you’re ready, she says. Your dinner’s there.