The School of Night (29 page)

Look how instinctively she circles him in the cramped space, adjusting to his orbits. Listen to her quiet humming as she clears the worktable. Watch her slip away just before midnight to fetch him a stoup of beer.

And now watch him leave half the stoup for her. Listen to the unemphatic affection with which he says her name:
Thank you, Margaret.… Yes, Margaret, that should do nicely
. They have plighted no troth, but everything about them sings of a pact, quietly and gladly borne.

And later tonight, will they not adjourn to his feather mattress (his one extravagance)? Will he not explore her with a newlywed's vigor? And what if she slips away by morning? She will be here the following afternoon. Making herself useful, as she always does. Setting out the vials and prisms. Polishing the pewter pots and bronze disks. Chiding him for his slowness in measuring. Leaning over him as he performs his calculations, or else scratching out her own sheets of figures.

And always at some point, asking him:

—Why will you never publish?

To which he can only mumble:

—Someday … I do believe … perhaps next year …

Here and here alone does he keep his own counsel. As an atomist and an alleged atheist and a friend to the most hated man in the realm, he must let the world be if he wants it to let him be.

She knows none of this, and so she sets herself with a merry heart against all those papers, piling them in high stacks, wrapping them in pretty bows of twine—suggesting with each touch of finger that here lie the seeds of some magnum opus, germinating even now in his brain's loam.

One night, rummaging through one of his trunks, she finds the rotting remains of a secret compartment. Prying away the last fragments of damp wood, she comes up with a stack of yellow foolscap. A long chain of scraggly dust trails after it as she drags it to the light.

—What can this be, Tom?

—The annals of my failure.

She is only half listening. Already her finger is crawling toward that single word, boldly scrawled across the topmost page.

—Aurum
.

She looks up at him.

—Alchemy?

He nods. And something in him grows cold at the heat in her eye. For this is when she begins to be lost to him.

 

LONDON SEPTEMBER 2009

36

W
E DITCHED THE
Lincoln Town Car as soon as we could and grabbed the first tube at the Osterley station. And as the Piccadilly Line train bore us steadily northeast and then east toward London, we sat there, the three of us, grappling with a fundamental question.

What kind of fugitives
were
we?

We were able to agree on this much: No police dragnets were circling us. Our two captors, with their unorthodox procedures and their limited knowledge of international law, were too obviously working for a private party.

So then we paused to consider this party. Having missed one audience with us, would he not go to a similar trouble for a second? And if he was, as Alonzo fervently believed, Bernard Styles, would his capital not give him ample resources to pursue us?

That being the case, should we act under the presumption that we were being followed at all times—travel to the opposite side of London, pretend we were doing everything
but
the thing we were doing? Or should we carry on as before, confident that our purposes could never be guessed?

In the end, we chose a variation of the latter path, but with hedges. Which is to say we hung our hats in Old Brentford, a West London suburb just a couple of bus stops from Syon Park. We took a pass on the Holiday Inn and the Travelodge—too public—and lugged our bags to the Dragon's Tongue, a Victorian bed-and-breakfast about twenty years past its last renovation and two years shy of its next. The key chains were weighty oaken slabs from the age of pillions, but the TV screens were flat, the rooms came with free Wi-Fi, and the gastro-pub downstairs served mushy peas that were a bright wasabi green.

The Disraeli room went to Alonzo because he liked its crepuscular gloom. (An ancient mulberry tree kept all the sun out.) “Give me an hour,” he said, shutting the door behind him. “Or a day,” he called out a second later. Clarissa and I hauled our luggage into the adjacent Pitt the Elder chamber, optimistic but spartan, with a single cane-bottom chair and a faux-mahogany dresser and a sleigh bed with a tea-rose coverlet.

“Are we going to Syon House today?” she asked.

“More like tomorrow. Alonzo won't want to even get dressed without a plan.”

She nodded absently. Walked to the window, pulled the shutters apart, stared out at the low grave clouds that had settled over the river.

“You think we'll find it?”

“Sorry…”

“Harriot's treasure.”

“No idea.”

Two seconds later, I felt the concussion of her body next to mine, sending out tiny concentric waves across the mattress. The tickle of her hair against my cheek. A scent of bergamot.

“Are you still tired?” she asked.

“Um.” I opened my eyes. “I could
not
be.”

And by the time I said it, I wasn't.

*   *   *

This I believe: the second-best and maybe sometimes even the best thing about sharing a bed with someone is the indolent sprawl that follows. The pond formations of her breasts. Your own spent sex, lolling against your leg with a summer ease.

“Henry.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me something about yourself.”

I angled my head toward her.

“You mean like height or weight?”

“I can
feel
how much you weigh. Something you wouldn't have told me two days ago.”

I took her hand, pressed it to my forehead like a compress.

“Mm,” I said. “Drawing a blank. I think you should go first.”

So that's when she told me about her narcoleptic father. Who, being prideful, insisted on driving during family vacations. Which turned every trip into a pilgrimage of terror, punctuated at intervals by her mother's calm voice: “Lissie?” That was Clarissa's cue to swat her father on the right side of his head so he wouldn't drive them off the road.

“Why didn't your mother drive?” I asked.

“We never even thought of that as an option. I guess mothers didn't do that then.”

“And the whole situation didn't strike you as odd?”

“I just figured all dads did that. You mean they didn't?”

I kissed her on her eyebrow. Then full on the eye.

“Okay,” I said. “When I was fifteen, I wrote a poem.”

“Come
on.
I wrote ten thousand—”

“No, this wasn't about carousels or unicorns, okay? It was a Petrarchan sonnet.”

“Oh.”

“Inspired by Sally Markowitz, who was a grade below me and on the drill team, with only a kind of subliterate understanding that I was alive. So I wrote this poem, and then I showed it to my mother.”

“God.”

“Because she was an
English
teacher. And because if it passed muster with her, Sally Markowitz would have to, you know, fall in line.”

“So your mom read it…”

“And started laughing from the very first line. I think it was maybe the best laugh she'd had in—maybe ever? And then she showed it to my dad, and he started laughing.”

“And what'd
you
do?”

“Um … I went back to my room. And I pretty much
torched
that poem from my consciousness. I couldn't even begin to recite it for you now.”

She placed her hand on my sternum.

“I'm sorry, Henry.”

“No. I mean, you
asked
me, and that was the first thing I—”

“Okay.”

“So don't be.”

“I won't.”

She lay still for a while.

“Was that when you became a writer?” she ventured.

“That's when I grasped the value of studying
other
writers.”

With a peal of laughter, she rolled on top of me. Her hair was falling between my lips, and her black eyes were shining, and she was playing with my forelock, curling it around her index finger. Her breath smelled like cardamom.

“You know what, Henry? If you made that up, I will kill you.”

“And you probably could, too,” I said. “But it happens to be true.”

“All right then. I won't even ask if you cried.”

“I did not. It was a point of pride.”

“Mm.” Her eyes closed in slow stages. “You know what, Henry? We could have put
your
mom in the car with
my
dad and solved all our problems.”

For the rest of the afternoon, we lay in bed, dozing in and out, softening and hardening. Never quite pulling away. I would wake at intervals and find myself at some different quadrant of her—tasting an earlobe or the braid of spine in her lower back, describing circles around her aureole—stunned by the variety of her. For something like ten minutes, I dedicated myself to the lunar landscape of her pubic bone, the way the angles bled into roundness and the whole structure flirted with verticality before giving way to declivity.…

“Henry?”

Her voice floated down as if through an arbor.

“Are you hearing me?”

“Yep.”

“What if we left?”

“What if we—”

“What if we just gave up? Went home?”

I raised my head.

“Why would we do that?” I asked.

“Because we can.”

I rolled myself on top of her. Rested my chin on her flat, immaculate abdomen.

“Okay,” I said. “Where would home be, exactly?”

“I've given that some thought.”

“Yeah?”

“I'm currently inclined toward Kiawah Island.”

“Wow.”

“It's lovely there.”

“Of course it is, I'm just—what would we do? There's caddying, I guess. Groundskeeping…”

“I see you as a park ranger. Somewhere on the mainland.”

“Steady work,” I conceded.

“And you'd look great in the uniform. And while you're busy, I'd be—you know, making jewelry from recycled elements. And learning golf, and we could go on
poker
cruises, Henry.”

“And with you around,” I said, “we'd never have to worry about muggers.”

“There are no muggers on Kiawah. A couple alligators, that's it. You could read on the beach. Every sonnet Shakespeare ever wrote. Toes in the sand, Henry. Mojito thermos at your elbow. Imagine it.”

I tried, I really did. But when I closed my eyes and thought of beaches, I just dozed off again—only to be jarred awake by the dream-memory of Amory Swale's hand poking through the sand. I blinked myself back to consciousness and found myself gazing up the smooth white plain of Clarissa's torso. Found her watching me back.

“Or, you know, maybe I was kidding,” she said.

“It's a fine idea.”

“I know.”

“It's just—practicalities…”

“Forget I mentioned it.”

She didn't sound angry, but just to be sure I crawled toward her, until my face was directly over hers.

“So one more question,” she said.

“Okay.”

“If Alonzo weren't in the picture, would you leave now?”

“What do you mean if he weren't? He is.”

She said nothing, and with a long-dying groan, I rolled off her. Stared up at the coffered ceiling.

“Alonzo took me in,” I said. “When no one else would. I owe him.”

“I get that, I do. I just wonder—I mean, how do you know when you've stopped owing someone?”

Her finger made a skiing motion from my ear down to my clavicle.

“Because if you need someone to take you
in,
Henry, I'll do it.”

This was all the invitation I needed. At least, I took it for an invitation, and indeed, when I rolled back on top of her, her face blossomed with consent. It was only days later, when everything had come apart, that I wondered if I'd quite taken her meaning.

*   *   *

The sun went down, but I couldn't have told you when. In our room, it was a kind of permanent twilight, twinned with dawn, so that every time I thought I was waking up, I was really going back down. The outside world dimly interceded: a wheezing water pipe, fragments of a street argument, a siren (imagined, maybe). At some point, I heard the hall clock tolling the hours. One, two … I lost count after eight … and I would have sailed right back to sleep, but instinctively, I reached for the other side of the bed and, finding no one there, jerked straight up.

“Clarissa?”

Squinting into the shadows, I found her, naked, half gilded by the streetlights. Nothing more than an outline, adding weight as my eyes adapted.

She was standing near the window. Her hair was sleep-mashed, but her posture was erect and attentive.

“Clarissa?”

She turned toward me. With the most vacant eyes I have ever seen on a human being. And then she spoke.

“She's dying. We've got to help her. Margaret's dying.”

37

“L
ORD HELP US
,” said Alonzo. “What do they
do
to the chickens over here?”

He pushed away his gunmetal-gray scrambled eggs, folded his massive arms against his chest.

“And why the hell does this Margaret woman keep intruding? Who is she, anyway? And why should we care if she's dying?”

“I'm just the messenger,” I answered, putting up my hands in surrender.

“Very well,
Hermes,
should your little chippie ever decide to come down, please relay the following message. She needs to channel some new visions. On the order of
gold.
Spell the word if you must.
G-O-L-D.
”

I herded my baked beans and grilled mushrooms around my plate. Twelve hours of sleep, and I still wasn't hungry.