Someone in the House (34 page)

The cleaners’ van was pulling up when I got back, so I knew it was nine o’clock. I let them in, warning them about being extra quiet, and went to the kitchen to make coffee. The alabaster box was sitting on the table, looking innocent and harmless; but it was going to blow up like a stick of dynamite unless I could think of a good story to tell Bea and Kevin. The latter, especially; he had been tickled pink to find some ancient relics. I sat at the table drinking coffee and staring stupidly at the box while I tried to come up with a brilliant idea. Eventually I went outside and looked for dust. I had a terrible time finding any. The surfaces that weren’t covered with rich green grass were mulched or graveled or covered with rich black soil. But I managed to scrape some up, from a corner where Amy had been digging, and I dumped a couple of handfuls into the casket and dragged my weary body up the stairs. Another day was upon me and I still couldn’t make up my mind what to do about Kevin and my job. I only had a couple of weeks before I had to act, one way or the other.

I didn’t know it then, but I didn’t have two weeks. I only had three days.

III

If I have not mentioned that quintessence of modern culture, the television set, it is not because the house lacked such amenities. There were several of them, but we seldom turned them on. It might have been sheer coincidence that prompted Kevin to listen to the evening news, the day after Roger’s adventure in the cellar. Or it might have been something else.

The house was positively saccharine with old-fashioned romance. I don’t know how Bea had come to terms with what had once seemed an insoluble problem. Maybe she had decided that love was the most important thing. Maybe Roger had stopped crowing about his superior intelligence. Why try to find reasons? They were reconciled, and it appeared that Roger would be in residence indefinitely. She had driven him home to get his clothes, and then brought him back with her. If she had not been convinced that he needed her constant attention, the sight of his filthy house would have done the trick. She went around with a starry-eyed look, and Roger resembled the Cheshire cat, all one smug grin.

While their love affair bloomed, mine began to show signs of whitefly. Kevin did not refer again to the choice I had yet to make. He was as fond and considerate as ever, but there was a little crack between us, nothing so deep that it couldn’t be crossed with one long step, but I was the one who had to take that step, and I didn’t.

Kevin was also put out by the disappearance of the relics. I had to admit that the dust in the casket was unconvincing, but search as he might for a suspect, Kevin couldn’t think of any other explanation. Roger—bandaged, feeble, and afflicted with the grandfather of all headaches—was obviously incapable of making off with the things, and no one else would want them. Kevin finally decided that Amy must be the culprit. Amy wagged her tail and grinned when she was accused.

Roger joined us in the library that evening, hovered over by Bea and visibly enjoying his new status. It might have been his undesired presence that prompted Kevin to switch on the television set.

The news was the usual grim collection of disasters, local and national. I concentrated on my needlepoint and tried not to listen. Then Kevin leaned forward alertly, and I caught the word “hurricane.”

At least they were naming them after men now. This was Martin. Winds up to one hundred miles an hour. It had already killed sixty-eight people in various Caribbean islands, and it was heading northwest.

We are becoming inured to manmade horrors—murders, muggings, rapes, one per minute every minute of every day. Large-scale natural disasters still grip the imagination, perhaps because they are beyond any hope of control. We listened unwillingly to the ghastly totals—so many dead, so many injured, so many millions of dollars’ worth of damage.

Kevin jumped to his feet. “The east front is the most exposed. I’ll pick up some sheets of heavy plywood—”

“What, now?” Roger asked in surprise. “Cool it, Kevin, it’s just a storm. Probably won’t touch this area.”

Kevin gestured toward the set, where the weatherman was sketching broad sweeping lines indicating the hurricane’s possible path. “It could change direction.”

“We’ll have plenty of warning if it does.” Roger’s voice made it clear that the subject did not interest him. “I can’t think of a safer place to be; this house is built like the Rock of Gibraltar, and it’s sitting in a natural basin. Bea, how about a walk?”

Kevin continued to monitor the set all evening. The eleven-o’clock report was equivocal. It was not until the next morning that we learned Martin was definitely heading in our direction. If it hit the Carolina coast and went inland, the force of its winds would be broken over land. If, as was now expected, it made landfall farther north, the eastern portions of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania were in for trouble.

Kevin drove the truck into town, and came back with sheets of plywood, tape, and rolls of heavy plastic. By that time even Roger was forced to admit some action might be advisable. I went to the village with him to help him secure his house. It didn’t take long. Like many Georgian houses, his had functional shutters. After he had turned off everything that could be turned off and yanked out the plugs on the appliances, we went back to find Kevin balancing on a high ladder boarding up the east windows. By midafternoon the skies were dark and the wind was strong enough to make the trees bow and dance.

I had never been in, or through, a hurricane. Even an electrical storm makes my stomach ache. I wanted to spend the next twenty-four hours under my bed, preferably dead drunk. I couldn’t voice my feelings because everyone else was so nonchalant. No, nonchalant is not the word to describe Kevin, but the grim-faced intensity with which he went about his tasks convinced me he would have neither the time nor the patience to comfort me. Bea’s coolness shamed me. She was concerned about water damage to rugs and furniture, so we moved some of the more valuable pieces away from the windows, sealed cracks with tape, and covered other objects with plastic.

Late in the afternoon the telephone rang. I picked it up before I remembered that telephones are dangerous in thunderstorms. I didn’t know whether the same applied to hurricanes, so I juggled the instrument nervously for a while before I got courage enough to say “Hello.”

It was Father Stephen, calling to make sure we were ready for the big blow. (His words, not mine.) I told him Kevin had practically wrapped the house in plastic and plywood, and he laughed.

“It’s as solid as a fortress, Anne. You’re perfectly safe there.”

So he had sensed my state of nerves. I stopped pretending. “I hate storms,” I whined.

“Some people are sensitive to changes in barometric pressure, and electricity in the air—if that is the right way of describing it, which it probably isn’t. I barely scraped through physics in college.”

I appreciated his efforts to restore my morale. It is less humiliating to be sensitive to barometric pressure than to be a yellow-bellied coward. “Why don’t you come here?” I suggested.

“I’m on call,” was the calm reply.

“You mean you’ll be going out in it?”

“No more than I must, believe me. There’s nothing to worry about, Anne. Roger is there, isn’t he? Well then, you’ve two able-bodied men on hand; I’m sure Roger and Bea know what to do.”

He stopped speaking. I didn’t reply; a big lump was blocking my throat. After a moment he said, “Anne, is it the storm that bothers you? Is there anything else?”

I shook my head before I remembered he couldn’t see me.

“No,” I squeaked.

“You’re sure? Please be honest. I’ll come in a moment if—”

“No, really. Everything is fine.” It was the truth. And even if it had not been true, I couldn’t have begged for his company. There would be people injured, women having babies, houses damaged, fires. He would be needed for more serious matters than one neurotic woman’s fear of storms.

“Good,” he said. “Don’t worry, Anne. You couldn’t be in a safer place.”

After he had hung up I held on to the phone, trying idiotically to maintain the contact. I couldn’t be in a safer place. A place where phantoms walked the hall by night and tomb markers fell on people’s heads. But, I told myself, that was all over. Roger’s clumsiness had brought the brass down on his head; the rest had been hallucination or a harmless psychic outburst, now ended.

By evening it was as dark as midnight, and the gale-force wind produced an uncouth symphony of cacophonous sounds. We settled down around the big trestle table in the kitchen. It was undoubtedly the safest room in that secure house. Kevin had boarded up the small windows, and the three-foot-thick walls muffled most of the sounds. But I heard the rain begin. Within minutes it had risen to a steady roar. Bea was at the stove when the lights flickered and went out.

“Better crank up the generator, Kevin,” said Roger’s voice, from the dark.

“We’ve been on our own power for several hours,” was the reply. “The cable between the house and the shed must have gone down.”

A spark flared as his match caught one of the candles on the table. He lighted the whole batch, a dozen or more, remarking, “We’ll have a romantic dinner by candlelight. Did anyone feed the animals?”

No one had, so Kevin took care of that chore. All the pets were with us in the kitchen. They were fairly calm except for Amy, who had retired under the table when the rain began and was nervously licking my shoe. She came out long enough to eat, and retreated again.

I couldn’t eat. My stomach was tied in knots. I kept telling myself my apprehension was senseless. This wasn’t an atomic bomb, or even a tornado, which strikes with concentrated fury on a single spot. It was just a bad windstorm. It was making plenty of noise, but that was about all it could do here. Even if the windows broke or a tree fell on part of the house, we were perfectly safe. The kitchen was like a large warm cave lighted by mellow natural light instead of the glare of electricity. The cats had curled up and gone to sleep; Annabelle was a furry uncouth puddle at Kevin’s feet; Bea and Roger were sitting side by side on the settle in front of the fireplace, hands entwined, talking in low voices.

The house was secure, safe. The trouble wasn’t with the house, it was with me. As I sat with my hands tightly clenched to keep them from trembling, I knew that part of the trouble was my sense of helplessness. I wanted to be in control of what happened to me. If I made the wrong decision I was willing to pay the price, but I had to have the right to choose. One cannot decide whether or not to have a volcano erupt, or direct a hurricane’s path.

Which was big talk from a woman who couldn’t even make up her mind whether to marry a man she was crazy in love with.

Kevin wouldn’t go back with me if I decided to teach next semester. I knew that as surely as if he had told me. But three months wasn’t very long, three months should not commit me unalterably to that way of life. If Kevin wouldn’t wait three months, he didn’t want me. I could fulfill my obligations and come back—to Kevin, to the house, to a life of leisure and luxury and peace.

If Kevin still wanted me.

When Bea said sleepily, “We might as well go to bed,” I could have shouted with relief. That was what I wanted to do—go to bed, with Kevin, his arms tight around me.

“Go ahead,” Kevin said. “No reason why we should all lose a night’s sleep.”

“Aren’t you going to bed?” I asked.

“No, I want to keep an eye on things. You go, Anne. You look bushed.”

Bea murmured something to Roger. Then she said aloud, “Why don’t we move into the library? There are two couches there, and the chairs are comfortable; we can nap.”

I could have kissed her. At the same time I resented the offer. Was my state of nerves that obvious?

At first the change of scene was a relief, but before long I wished we had not moved. These walls, though thicker than normal, were not as massive as the ones in the kitchen. The sound of the storm was much more audible, and Kevin had not boarded up the long French doors, since they opened onto a sheltered courtyard. Solid and shielded as they were, they creaked under the assault of the wind.

Roger consented to recline on one of the couches, and Bea sat with him. I didn’t have to be persuaded to lie down. Irrational terror is the most tiring thing I know. From where I lay I could see the whole length of the gracious room, like a stage set or a painting. In fact, it reminded me of one of the Flemish genre paintings—a family interior, a story painting. It was exaggeratedly chiaroscuro, great spaces of darkness broken by pools of soft light that shed strange shadows. A small battery-powered electric lamp illumined the faces of the older pair. Bea’s eyes were closed, her face sagging in half-sleep. The deeply etched lines in her cheeks and forehead made her look old, but it was peaceful old age, resigned and fulfilled. Roger’s eyes were steady on her face; his lips were curved in a quiet smile.