Walking Into the Night (4 page)

10

The guests had gone to bed.

I was the only one left downstairs; the staff had finally retired to their rooms, the kitchen maids last of all. I had turned off all the lights and was making a last tour of the ground-floor rooms to make sure that all the candles had been blown out and no cigarettes had been left smoldering. The logs had burned down in the great hearth in the assembly room, though the embers still sent up the occasional spark. Through the window I saw that a lamp was still shining in Casa del Mar. I felt better knowing that someone else was still awake. I don’t know why.

All the lights were out, yet it was bright where I stood in the middle of the reception room. The moon was now high in the sky and laid a long strip of light across the mirror-like ocean, up the hillside, across the floor—to my feet. I walked towards it, opening the terrace door. Everything was quiet. I hoped the antelope, leopard, and puma would be able to sleep tonight. I didn’t like them being locked up in cages in this place; they didn’t belong here. None of them belonged here.

The air still held the fragrance of woodsmoke and the pungent smell of pine, which I never notice except in the evenings. A reverberation came and went, a distant echo which I tried to concentrate on. But the evening’s songs got in the way—“I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright, ’cause I only have eyes for you . . .” I stepped inadvertently backwards, first two steps, then another. The moonlight pursued me, surrounded me, as if I were standing in shallow water. I looked down and stared at my feet for a while, the refrain in my ears slowly changing, the evening’s songs falling silent and the echo growing clearer in my mind.

I was walking in through the door of our house in Eyrarbakki. It was after midnight, the servants had gone to bed, little Einar was long since fast asleep. You were sitting in your chair in the living room, just finishing breast-feeding Maria. You looked up and smiled when I came in; I put down my suitcases and quietly removed my coat and hung it up. You slipped your nipple from her mouth. She was asleep, so you got up and laid her in her cradle before coming over to me. I had just returned from a month in Denmark. I put my arms round you in the middle of the room and pulled you against me, neither of us saying a word. All of a sudden you began to hum. I recognized the tune immediately— “Bei Männern,” from
The Magic Flute
—you used to play it so often when we first met. I began to move to the rhythm and you followed. I pressed you against me, couldn’t let you go, didn’t want to let you go. There was a lantern burning on top of a cupboard, shedding a faint light.

I began to dance in the moonlit reception room. How silly I must have looked! But I felt as if you were with me. It was as if nothing had changed, everything was as it had been before I lost my way. Because that’s what happened. I lost my way. But now, for a moment, I had found my way back and I shut my eyes and held on tight to your memory. You hadn’t buttoned up your blouse after feeding Maria and I undid it even further as we swayed around the room. Your breasts were hot and soft and I took your nipple into my mouth, gently because I knew it was still sore from the baby. You had stopped humming now but we continued to dance.

I didn’t know that she had come down and started to dance with me. I wasn’t aware of her, I was so far away, your breath soothing against my cheek. The moonlight lapped the floor under our feet; we undulated as if dancing in water.

“Christian,” she whispered.

I came to with a jolt.

“Fetch a drop of gin for me. Booth’s. Quickly, so we can keep going.”

The silence was broken. I thought I heard the puma snarling lower down the hill.

“What’s the matter, Christian?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry . . .”

I fetched the gin bottle from the locked cupboard and a glass on a tray. I spilled the liquor outside the glass and had difficulty cleaning up after myself.

“Christian . . .”

Leaving her behind in the middle of the room, I hurried away, trying to say good night but unable to get the words out.

My fingers smelled of gin. I noticed it when I locked the door to my room and buried my face in my hands. I had done wrong, yet again.

I harm everyone I care for.

11

When he awoke and looked outside he thought at first that there had been a frost during the night. It was dawn; a veil of fog unfurled from the sea and rolled up over the sand dunes that lined the shore and the meadows which seemed gray with rime in the early-morning light. The remnants of a dream still echoed in his head so he couldn’t immediately remember where he was. When he finally got his bearings, it occurred to him that it was dew, not frost, that bowed the grasses. He moved slowly, tugging a warm sweater over his head before opening the window and inhaling the chill air.

He heated himself water for tea in the silent kitchen. The Chief and Miss Davies had been away for a week; he didn’t know when to expect them back. The uncertainty troubled him.

The Chief had abruptly been called away. His advisers had sent a telegram an hour before the costume ball, announcing their arrival the following day. Kristjan brought it immediately to Hearst, who hardly looked at it.

They wasted no time. It was just past ten when their car appeared at the bottom of the hill; they had left Los Angeles in the middle of the night. Kristjan brought them coffee while they waited in the billiards room. They seemed on edge. The Chief kept them waiting nearly an hour. Miss Davies was still asleep; some of the weekend guests were up, having breakfast on the terrace.

He was wearing a silk robe when he finally came downstairs, holding a copy of one of his newspapers—the
San Francisco Examiner,
Kristjan concluded after a quick glance. Instead of coming directly into the room, he paused in the doorway and regarded them in silence.

“Christian,” he said after a moment, “could you bring me some fruit juice?”

Without waiting for his butler to move out of earshot, he addressed his visitors:

“I thought we hired Walter Winchell to write a gossip column about actors and entertainers. Since when did he become our expert on the Spanish Civil War?”

He flung the paper onto the table in front of his advisers. Kristjan closed the door behind him.

In the kitchen he prepared the Chief’s morning drink, a mixture of carrot and orange juice. A bee had wandered in through a gap in the window and was buzzing from one pane to the next. Kristjan watched it for a while, then opened the window a crack and let it out.

He could hear the Chief’s voice out in the passage as he approached the billiards room:

“It’s none of our business if Fascists and Communists are killing each other in Spain. We don’t support either side. I thought everyone knew that. At least the people on our payroll. Then I open my own paper and read this nonsense! Walter Winchell urging the nation to go to war in Spain! Walter Winchell, who was hired to keep our readers informed about who’s feuding with whom in Hollywood and who’s marrying whom on Broadway. Walter Winchell of all people . . .”

He frowned heavily at his guests, adding, after a moment’s pause:

“And on top of that he has totally neglected to write about Miss Davies recently. Totally neglected her . . . Perhaps he should be looking for another job.”

Kristjan handed the Chief his glass of fruit juice. The Chief beckoned him to stay. There were three of them. Kristjan knew Jack Neylan by name but he’d never seen the other two before, both men of around thirty. They were obviously nervous and their eyes flickered to Neylan in the hope that he would break the silence and state their case quickly. The Chief drank his juice slowly.

“We’re in trouble, Chief,” said Neylan at last. “It’s worse than before.”

It wasn’t the first time Kristjan had heard the Chief’s advisers complaining about his spending, and urging him to abandon his endless purchasing of works of art and antiques.

“Even if it was just for a few months,” he remembered Neylan saying over and over again one evening in New York.

The Chief normally listened patiently but let their talk and their worries wash over him, changing the subject and ending with: “You’ll take care of this for me. Shouldn’t be a problem.”

Kristjan had also heard Neylan say that the Depression had hit the Chief’s companies so hard that some of his papers and magazines were now struggling. Circulation had dropped in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston, and in addition papers like the
New York American,
the
Evening Journal,
and the
Sunday American
had all lost readers during the last four years. He knew, too, that the Chief had financed the buildings on the hill and the purchase of a castle in Wales and a mansion on Long Island with loans that he sustained by issuing debt and shares in his companies before taking out new loans to pay off the old ones. The antiques and works of art were paid for in the same way, that is to say when Hearst remembered. It had not escaped Kristjan that he had debts all over the place.

Yet he had never thought it would come to this and was stunned when Neylan described why the profit from the Chief’s business ventures was not sufficient to cover either the interest on his loans or to pay the dividends on the shares. He said it had come to the point where the banks were not only refusing to refinance their outstanding loans but also demanding that he pay them off.

The morning sunshine filtered in through the corner window, onto the billiards table, next to which the Chief stood. With his forefinger he slowly and deliberately traced the sunlight, his thoughts elsewhere. Finally his finger came to a halt. Without lifting it, he looked over towards the window.

“You must come with us to New York as quickly as you can,” said Neylan. “Preferably today or tomorrow. We have to start negotiating with the banks.”

The Chief continued to stare at the sunlight.

“What do we need to give them to make them happy?”

“A million dollars immediately. And that’s before we start selling assets.”

He removed his finger from the table.

“Sell assets? Out of the question.”

“We can’t avoid it any longer. We can’t even scrape together a million dollars without sacrificing some assets.”

They didn’t notice when she entered the room. She stood in the doorway behind Kristjan. He sensed her presence on the nape of his neck.

“I want you to sell everything I own,” she said, clearly taking them aback. “That ought to cover it.”

She departed as silently as she had arrived. The Chief left in pursuit. His advisers looked at one another, then hastily took their leave as well.

Later that day the Chief and Miss Davies drove to Los Angeles, where they took the
Super Chief
to New York. There was not a breath of wind as they disappeared down the hill, and the dust cloud thrown up in their wake hung in the air like a memorial long after they had gone.

That was a week ago. How time flies, he said to himself as the kettle whistled to let him know that the water had boiled. He moved slowly, rubbing his hands together over the steaming cup to warm them. It was an unusually cold morning and the grass was still wet with dew, no longer gray but yellow where the pale rays of the sun touched it, blue in the shade. He was the only one up; there were fewer staff in residence than usual. The day after the Chief left for New York, Kristjan had informed the temporary staff that they would not be required for the next few weeks.

The tea warmed him. When he had finished it, and the slice of bread he had buttered for himself, he meant to go round behind the main building to the workmen’s huts. He had promised to help them take the hay to the stables and was looking forward to sitting on the back of the truck with the pitchforks as they drove along the dirt tracks to the barn. He was looking forward to the sweet smell of dried grass, and to seeing the whites of the horses’ eyes as they watched him fork the hay down from the truck. And most of all he was looking forward to the physical exertion of a long, sweaty day laboring under the sun.

He opened the door and stepped slowly out into the shimmering morning, cautiously, as if not to disturb an unaccustomed peace of mind. He closed the door quietly, leaving the empty rooms behind.

12

I don’t have much to tell you tonight. Don’t take my words to mean that I hadn’t been wondering what I should write to you when I finally sat down at my desk this evening. But for some reason I couldn’t summon up the energy to reach for the pen and unscrew the cap.
Pen,
I write, but, to be more accurate, it’s the pen you gave me when I turned thirty. I’ve carried it with me ever since. I had fetched a snow-white sheet of paper and placed it in the center of the desk, adjusted its position a couple of times and brushed off some pollen that had blown in the window when suddenly I was overcome and all the words seemed to have lost their meaning. It was as if the sun had gone behind a cloud and a shadow had fallen across my mind. At that moment it seemed to me that everything I’d written to you over the past few months was empty and pointless.

I sat as if paralyzed in my chair, for this melancholy had struck without warning. Ever since this morning I had been looking forward to telling you about the mouse I found in a plant pot down in the living room the day before yesterday; all of a sudden it seemed so strangely dear to me. I dug a little hole in the garden and covered it with some bits of twig and leaves to make it cozy. I was going to describe to you how terrified it was when I took it out of the plant pot, because Helena had found it and was barking loudly and shoving her snout at it. How its little heart pounded as I carried it outside; it quivered in my hands but didn’t try to struggle, and I wondered whether it could sense—or, rather, whether it could sense in
me
—that I wouldn’t do it any harm. I had even begun to convince myself that I’d managed to communicate through my hands alone that I wished it well and would take care of it.

I dug the hole in the flower bed outside Casa del Monte. It looked as if the wind was going to pick up during the evening, so I found a place between two stones where I knew it would be safe. During the night it began to rain, the branches of the palm tree outside my window lashed the house, and the rain battered the windowpanes. I couldn’t sleep, so I dressed and went down to the kitchen, stuck a piece of cheese in my pocket, and went outside. I was drenched within seconds as I hurried down the path. I was worried that the mouse might be out in the storm, so I was mightily relieved when I lifted the leaf from the hole.

It was as if it knew I would come back. I took care not to shine the flashlight I’d brought with me in its eyes, but I couldn’t help noticing that its gaze showed unconditional trust.

I can’t explain the moment of happiness I experienced as I knelt there beside the hole in the darkness. Why a tiny mouse should have such an effect on me . . . It ate the cheese out of my hand and didn’t move even though I stroked its back over and over. Thunder shook the sky and lightning tore it apart but the mouse remained calm under my finger.

The following morning the sky was cloudless and the air smelled sweet after the rain. I knew even before I reached the hole that the mouse had gone.

That’s what I meant to write to you when I sat down in my chair this evening. I hadn’t read anything into these events but I was looking forward to telling you about them. The sheet of paper waited, blank and snowy, before me, but suddenly I was snatched away, my fingers lost their grip on the pen, and I didn’t come to myself until the cap fell to the floor with a click.

I stood up and went over to the window. Before I knew it I had begun to breathe on the glass like I used to as a boy. A circular patch of mist formed; I put out my finger and drew a little bird in it. A few seconds later it was gone.