The Damnation Game (19 page)

“Can’t smell much.”

“Good,” she said. “I thought I was losing my senses.”

She let the bundle drop to the ground, impatient with them.

“You don’t mind if I interrupt, do you?”

She shook her head. “Interrupt all you like,” she replied. The strangeness of her manner struck him more forcibly than ever; she always spoke as though she had some private joke on her mind. He longed to join in the game, to learn her secret language, but she seemed so sealed up, an anchorite behind a wall of sly smiles.

“I suppose you heard the dogs last night,” he said.

“I don’t remember,” she replied, frowning. “Maybe.”

“Did anybody say anything to you about it?”

“Why should they?”

“I don’t know. I just thought—”

She put him out of his discomfort with a fierce little nod of her head.

“Yes, if you want to know. Pearl told me there’s been an intruder. And you scared him off, is that right? You and the dogs.”

“Me and the dogs.”

“And which of you bit off his finger?”

Had Pearl told her about the finger too, or was it the old man who’d vouchsafed that vicious detail? Had they been together today, in her room? He canceled the scene before it flared up in his head.

“Did Pearl tell you that?” he said.

“I haven’t seen the old man,” she replied, “if that’s what you’re driving at.

His thought encapsulated; it was eerie. She even used his phraseology. “The old man,” she called him, not “Papa.”

“Shall we walk down to the lake?” she suggested, not really seeming to care one way or the other.

“Sure.”

“You were right about the dovecote, you know,” she said. “It’s ugly when it’s empty like this. I never thought of it like that before.” The image of the deserted dovecote genuinely seemed to unnerve her. She shivered, even in the thick coat.

“Did you run today?” she asked.

“No. I was too tired.”

“Was it that bad?”

“Was what that bad?”

“Last night.”

He didn’t know how to begin to answer. Yes, of course, it had been bad, but even if he trusted her enough to describe the illusion he’d seen—and he was by no means sure he did—his vocabulary was woefully inadequate.

Carys paused as they came in sight of the lake. Small white flowers starred the grass beneath their feet, Marty didn’t know their names. She studied them as she said:

“Is it just another prison, Marty?”

“What?”

“Being here.”

She had her father’s skill with non sequiturs. He hadn’t anticipated the question at all, and it threw him. Nobody had really asked him how he’d felt since arriving. Certainly not beyond a superficial inquiry as to his comfort. Perhaps consequently he hadn’t really bothered to ask himself. His answer—when it came—came haltingly.

“Yes … I suppose it’s still a prison, I hadn’t really thought … I mean, I can’t just up and leave anytime I want to, can I? But it doesn’t compare … with, Wandsworth”—again, his vocabulary failed him—“this is just another world.”

He wanted to say he loved the trees, the size of the sky, the white florets they stepped through as they walked, but he knew such utterances would sound leaden out of his mouth. He hadn’t got the knack of that kind of talk: not like Flynn, who could babble instant poetry as though it were a second tongue. Irish blood, he used to claim, to explain this loquacity.

All Marty could say was: “I can run here.”

She murmured something he failed to catch; perhaps just assent.

Whatever, his answer seemed to satisfy her, and he could feel the anger he’d started out with, the resentment at her clever talk and her secret life with Papa, dissolving.

“Do you play tennis?” she asked, again out of nowhere.

“No; I never have.”

“Like to learn?” she suggested, half-looking around at him and grinning. “I could teach you. When the weather gets warmer.”

She looked too frail for any strenuous exercise; living on the edge all the time seemed to weary her, though on the edge of what he didn’t know.

“You teach me: I’ll play,” he said, happy with the bargain.

“That’s a deal?” she asked.

“A deal.”

—and her eyes, he thought, are so dark; ambiguous eyes that dodge and skim sometimes, and sometimes, when you least expect it, look at you with such directness you’re sure she’s stripping your soul.

—and he isn’t handsome, she thought; he’s too used to be that, and he runs to keep himself fit because if he stopped he’d get flabby. He’s probably a narcissist: I bet he stands in front of the mirror every night and looks at himself and wishes he was still a pretty-boy instead of being solid and somber.

She caught a thought from him, her mind reaching up, easily up, above her head (this was the way she pictured it, at least) and snatching it out of the air. She did it all the time-to Pearl, to her father-often forgetting that other people lacked the skill to pry with such casualness.

The thought she had snatched was: I would have to learn to be gentle; that, or something like it. He was afraid she’d bruise, for Christ’s sake. That was why he was all dammed up when he was with her, so circuitous in his dealings.

“I’m not going to break,” she said, and a patch of skin at his neck blushed.

“I’m sorry,” he answered. She wasn’t sure if he was conceding his error or simply hadn’t understood her observation.

“There’s no need to handle me with kid gloves. I don’t want that from you. I get it all the time.”

He threw her a disconsolate glance. Why didn’t he believe what she told him? She waited, hoping for some clue, but none was offered, however tentative.

They’d come to the weir that fed the lake. It was high, and fast. People had drowned in it, she’d been told, as recently as a couple of decades ago, just before Papa had bought the estate. She started to explain all this, and about a coach and horses that had been driven into the lake during a storm, telling him without listening to herself, working out how to get past his courtesy and his machismo to the part of him that might be of use to her.

“And the coach is still in there?” he asked, staring into the threshing water.

“Presumably,” she said. The story had lost its charm already.

“Why don’t you trust me?” she asked him straight out.

He didn’t reply; but he was clearly struggling with something. The frown of puzzlement he displayed deepened to dismay.
Damn
, she thought,
I’ve really spoiled things somehow
. But it was done. She’d asked him outright, and she was ready to take the bad news, whatever it was.

Almost without planning the theft, she stole another thought from him, and it was shockingly clear: like living it. Through his eyes she saw the door of her bedroom, and her lying on the bed beyond it, glassy-eyed, with Papa sitting close by. When was this, she wondered? Yesterday? The day before? Had he heard them talking about it; was that what woke such distaste in him? He’d played the detective, and he hadn’t liked what he’d discovered.

“I’m not very good with people,” he said, answering her question about trust. “I never have been.”

How he squirmed rather than tell the truth. He was being obscenely polite with her. She wanted to wring his neck.

“You spied on us,” she said with brutal plainness. “That’s all it is, isn’t it? You saw Papa and me together—”

She tried to frame the remark as if it were a wild guess. It didn’t quite convince as such, and she knew it. But what the hell? It was said now, and he would have to invent his own reasons as to how she’d reached that conclusion.

“What did you overhear?” she demanded, but got no response. It wasn’t anger that tongue-tied him, but shame for his peeping. The blushing had infected his face from ear to ear.

“He treats you like he owns you,” he murmured, not taking-his eyes off the roiling water.

“He does, in a way.”

“Why?”

“I’m all he’s got. He’s alone …”

“Yes.”

“… and afraid.”

“Does he ever let you leave the Sanctuary?”

“I’ve got no desire to go,” she said. “I’ve got all I want here.”

He wanted to ask her what she did for bed companions, but he’d embarrassed himself enough as it was. She found the thought anyway, and fast upon the thought, the image of Whitehead leaning forward to kiss her.

Perhaps it was more than a fatherly kiss. Though she tried not to think of that possibility too often, she could not avoid its presence. Marty was more acute than she’d given him credit for; he’d caught that subtext, subtle as it was.

“I don’t trust him,” he said. He took his gaze off the water to look around at her. His bewilderment was perfectly apparent.

“I know how to handle him,” she replied. “I’ve made a bargain with him. He understands bargains. He gets me to stay with him, and I get what I want.”

“Which is?”

Now she looked away. The spume off the whipping water was a grubby brown. “A little sunshine,” she finally replied.

“I thought that came free,” Marty said, puzzled.

“Not the way I like it,” she answered. What did he want from her? Apologies? If so, he’d be disappointed.

“I should get back to the house,” he said.

Suddenly, she said: “Don’t hate me, Marty.”

“I don’t,” he came back.

“There’s a lot of us the same.”

“The same?”

“Belonging to him.”

Another ugly truth. She was positively brimful of them today.

“You could get the hell out of here if you really wanted to, couldn’t you?” he said, peevishly.

She nodded. “I suppose I could. But where?”

The question made no sense to him. There was an entire world outside the fences, and she surely didn’t lack the finances to explore it, not Joseph Whitehead’s daughter. Did she really find the prospect so stale?

They made such a strange pair. He with his experience so unnaturally abbreviated—years of his life wasted—and now anxious to make up for lost time. She, so apathetic, fatigued by the very thought of escape from her self-defined prison.

“You could go anywhere,” he said.

“That’s as good as nowhere,” she replied flatly; it was a destination that remained much on her mind. She glanced across at him, hoping some light would have dawned but he didn’t show a glimmer of comprehension.

“Never mind,” she said.

“Are you coming?”

“No, I think I’ll stay here for a while.”

“Don’t throw yourself in.”

“Can’t swim, eh?” she replied, testily. He frowned, not understanding. “Doesn’t matter. I never took you for a hero.”

He left her standing inches from the edge of the bank, watching the water. What he’d told her was true; he wasn’t good with people. But with women, he was even worse. He should have taken the cloth, the way his mother had always wanted him to. That would have solved the problem; except that he had no grasp of religion either, and never had. Maybe that was part of the problem between him and the girl: they neither of them believed a damn thing. There was nothing to say, there were no issues to debate. He glanced around. Carys had walked a short way along the bank from the spot where he’d left her. The sun glared off the skin of the water and burned into her outline. It was almost as if she wasn’t real at all.

Part Three

DEUCE

deuce
n. The two at dice or cards; (Tennis) state of score (40 all, games all) at which either party must gain two consecutive points or games to win.

deuce
n. Plague, mischief; the Devil.

V

Superstition

Chapter 29

L
ess than a week after the talk at the weir, the first hairline cracks began to appear in the pillars of the Whitehead Empire. They rapidly widened. Spontaneous selling began on the world’s stock markets, a sudden failure of faith in the Empire’s credibility. Crippling losses in share values soon mounted. The selling fever, once contracted, appeared well-nigh incurable. In the space of a day there were more visitors to the estate than Marty had ever seen before. Among them, of course, the familiar faces. But this time there were dozens of others, financial analysts, he presumed. Japanese and European visitors mingled with the English, until the place rang with more accents than the United Nations.

The kitchen, much to Pearl’s irritation, became an impromptu meeting place for those not immediately required at the great man’s hand. They gathered around the large table, demanding coffee in endless supply, to debate the strategies they had congregated here to formulate. Much of their debating, as ever, was lost on Marty, but it was clear from the snippets he overheard that the corporation was facing no explicable emergency. There were falls of staggering proportions happening everywhere; talk of government intervention to prevent imminent collapse in Germany and Sweden; talk too of the sabotage that had instigated this catastrophe. It seemed to be the conventional wisdom among these prophets that only an elaborate plan—one that had been in preparation for several years—could have damaged the fortunes of the corporation so fundamentally. There were murmurs of secret government interference; of a conspiracy of the competition. The paranoia in the house knew no bounds.

There was something about the way these men fretted and fought, hands carving up the air in their efforts to contradict the previous speaker’s remarks, that struck Marty as absurd. After all, they never saw the billions they lost and gained, or the people whose lives they so casually rearranged. It was all an abstraction; numbers in their heads. Marty couldn’t see the use of it. To have power over notional fortunes was just a dream of power, not power itself.

On the third day, with everyone drained of gambits, and praying now for a resurrection that showed no sign of coming, Marty encountered Bill Toy, engaged in a heated debate with Dwoskin. To his surprise Toy, seeing Marty passing by, called him across, cutting the conversation short. Dwoskin hurried away scowling, leaving Toy and Marty to talk.