A World Elsewhere (19 page)

Deacon nodded.

Van smiled. “We’ll have a proper meeting later, then. It will be at least a few weeks, I’m afraid. I’m off to New York in the morning. Henley will show you to the Bachelors’ Wing. You
are
still a bachelor, aren’t you, Deacon?”

Deacon looked at Landish, who nodded. Van smiled at him, his mouth closed in a tight line that curled up at the ends.

“Good night, Van,” Landish said, lifting Deacon from the sofa.

In the Bachelors’ Wing Landish joined “the Blokes,” as they called themselves, who tutored Van’s daughter, Godwin. They would, in the same room, at the same time, also tutor Deacon, who was Godwin’s age, but school was on Easter break so Landish told Deacon he would not meet Godwin for a month.

And so Godwin, as Deacon called her at first, was to be Deacon’s one and only classmate.

The Blokes. There was Gough, an Englishman who wore a paunch-disguising waistcoat and frequently consulted a watch that dangled like a golden apple from his pocket. Sedgewick, also an Englishman, who was in his mid-forties, with a red, almost scarlet complexion that reminded Deacon of Nun Too Soon, and whom Landish told Deacon that first night he deemed “abhorrent” though gave him no explanation for it. Stavely, the music tutor, a small-statured man with long white hair that Deacon thought made him look like a woman. And finally, there was Palmer—the “tutor emeritutus,” Landish called him—who was retired and quite deaf. He had been a tutor with the Vanderluydens for forty years, the last of his pupils having been Van. He was very pale and had liver spots on his face and throat and hands.

“What are liver spots?” Deacon asked.

“Everyone who lives is a liver,” Landish said. “If you live long enough, you get liver spots.”

Gough and Palmer slept in the same room, in separate, narrow beds.

“Palmer isn’t just deaf and old,” Landish told Deacon. “He needs help moving about and taking care of himself. His memory is very poor. He couldn’t get by if not for Gough.”

The Bachelors’ Wing was also known as “The Blokes.” All the Blokes were single, either bachelors who never planned to marry, or widowers. Women and children could not even visit, with the exception of the Bruces, a widow and her daughter, a Mrs. and a Miss. They lived somewhere in another part of Vanderland, but they cooked and cleaned for the Blokes.

They learned that the school for the children of the servants was about two hundred yards from the main house, obsured by a thick grove of poplar trees, and they were not taught by the Blokes but by governesses who also lived in the Bachelors’ Wing but in a tower that shared no doors or walls with The Blokes. The women had no nickname until Landish called them the Loverlesses.

In the empty days that followed, Landish found he could at least entertain the Blokes, much as he had entertained Deacon on Dark Marsh Road. He told them of Plato’s younger brother, Ditto, who followed Plato around, repeating, word for word, everything that Plato said. Socrates was exasperated with him, denouncing as unteachable by the Socratic method a student who merely repeated the questions that were put to him, and saying he would rather drink hemlock than spend another day being parroted by Ditto. He told them of an English writer who decided to call himself Charles Dickens, having previously submitted his novels under his real name, Chuck Dick. And then, one night, having still toiled for years without success, he reflected on the titles he had chosen for his books:
Great Expectorations
, a picaresque tale that followed from cradle to grave the successive owners of a brass spittoon; a book that would become
Bleak House
he had submitted to publishers as
Unbearable Abode; Pick Wick
by Chuck Dick;
The Chuck Dick Papers; The Twist Twins
—Olive and Oliver. Chuck Dick laboured tirelessly over a book he called
A Tale of Two Municipalities;
he considered calling his greatest novel
David Copperfield
, but changed his mind and called it
That Pennymeadow Chap
.

Some of the Blokes were pleased by their arrival. Gough gave Deacon a number of dime novels. The heroes Deacon liked were Jesse James, Doughnut Jack, the hero of
The Awful Atonement
, and Deadwood Dick, at the very mention of whose name the Blokes would start laughing.

“Perhaps if you spent your entire life on it, Landish,” Sedgewick said, “you might be able to finish a chapter of a dime novel.”

“The Smoker” was the largest room in the Bachelors’ Wing, about the size of the attic. The rules of the Smoker were that you weren’t allowed entrance without a smoking jacket—an exception was made for Deacon—and everyone was required to chip in on the brandy “pot.”

Deacon sat up with the Blokes in the Smoker every night, watched them smoke and drink and listened to them talk. Sometimes he would fall asleep in his chair by the fire.

“It’s as though,” Landish said one evening, “I woke one morning to find myself in the middle of another life, someone else’s whose past I can’t recall and whose future I can’t imagine.”

From time to time, Palmer and Gough would communicate by an exchange of notes, which they would write while the others watched. Palmer’s notebook was small and leather-bound, with a gold-coloured ribbon to mark his place. Most of the time Palmer simply sat there with the notebook on his lap and the stub of a yellow pencil tucked behind his ear.

It was on the second night that Palmer, when he noticed Deacon watching him, nodded and smiled at him and began to write very slowly in his notebook, which he then handed to Gough. Gough read aloud: “How are you this evening, young man?”

“I’m fine, Mr. Palmer. How are you?” Deacon said aloud. Gough swiftly wrote his response and handed the notebook back to Palmer, who read what Gough had written. The old man looked at Gough, then at Deacon and nodded and smiled again.

That night Landish and Deacon sat on their beds, facing each other. Landish asked Deacon what he thought of their new home. Deacon said he liked it though the attic was better because they had had it all to themselves and now they had to share most of it with the Blokes, but the Blokes were nice, so it wasn’t as bad as sharing rooms with Hogan would have been. And their room was small but not as small as
the bedroom in the attic and at least there were no business buckets: their bathroom was something like the bathroom on the ship, even if it was smaller.

Landish said they didn’t have their own kitchen, but at least they didn’t have to walk the gauntlet of kitchens to get to The Blokes and he’d rather be a tutor than shovel snow or dig a ditch. There were two windows, each of them far bigger than the porthole in the attic. There were two beds of the same size, too small for Landish and too big for Deacon. Deacon wished there was one big bed so he could still climb in with Landish.

He missed going out for their walks, when there had been things to watch and listen to. They spent time instead with the Blokes in the Pleasure Gardens with its carefully tended flowerbeds crisscrossed by pathways. The old men sat on benches and looked up at the sky while they talked. He kept asking to see the inside of the main house and Landish could only say that maybe one day he would see it. Van wasn’t back from New York yet but he promised to speak to him about it when he returned. And he reminded Deacon he mustn’t mention Princeton to Mr. Vanderluyden, or Captain Druken’s hat, which the wealth inspector was sending to them by the mail. They were off limits, like the story of Vivvie. He just hoped that Captain Druken’s hat would hurry up.

Deacon asked him how long they would be at Vanderland and Landish said he wasn’t sure but it wouldn’t be forever. But it startled him when Deacon asked when they were going back to Newfoundland. He got upset and said he’d told him before they left that they might never see the place again, that he’d told him they didn’t have to leave but it was too late now. Deacon started to cry and Landish said he was sorry.

“We might go back,” he said. “You never know.”

“You never know,” Deacon said.

Landish thought of the other Blokes each time he retired for the night. Grown men, but none of them owned their little rooms, or even the beds they slept in. Even though he had once called an attic home, he felt hemmed in by the walls of his room and the knowledge of how nearby the others were, merely a few feet away, able to hear every sound he made as he was likewise able to hear them, the squeaking of bedsprings every time someone moved, the creaking of the floorboards as Sedgewick paced the room in the vain hope of relieving his fear-of-God-induced insomnia. You couldn’t see the sea from anywhere. The woods were bigger and darker and they didn’t smell the same. There was a mountain on the other side of every mountain. The mountains stretched out like ocean waves, getting smaller and fainter until they disappeared into the sky.

On Friday evenings, “darky” musicians played for the Vanderluydens and their guests in the theatre. The music could be faintly heard over all of Vanderland.

Landish told Deacon that the Vanderluydens had the run of all the other rooms at Vanderland: about three hundred rooms for three people, counting the rooms for the servants who lived on the top and bottom floors and the dozens of regular guests. He wondered how many rooms lay dark and empty every night for months, even years.

Every night, Deacon knew he would dream about the dark and empty rooms so he tried to stay awake. But he fell asleep and dreamt that when he woke up, Landish wasn’t there. There was no bed next to his. He got up to look for Landish. He thought he heard the kitchen table shake like it did when Landish wrote his book, but he couldn’t find the kitchen.

When Van returned from New York, Landish asked Henley the butler to ask him for permission to go farther than the Pleasure Gardens so Deacon could see the house. Stavely, the old white-haired music teacher, lispily said it was the size of more than ten basilicas. They were given permission to go only to the rear of the house. Outside, they had
to stand far back beneath the trees to see it in full. Landish said the front was better and it was too bad that Deacon had been asleep the day they drove up to Vanderland in the motor car. Deacon’s neck was sore from looking up, but he couldn’t see the top. Landish pointed at the Bachelors’ Wing—that was where they lived—but he had to admit he wasn’t sure which of the many windows was theirs. A week later, Van unexpectedly sent over permission by way of the butler for them to see the front of Vanderland, which he called the east facade. You had to go halfway across the Esplanade—a long flat meadow in front of the house, with a road around it and a fountain in the middle—to see the central tower. It looked like a giant crown, infested with gargoyles and spires and dormers and parapets, towers and chimneys. Deacon stared up from the forecourt until Vanderland made him dizzy.

They walked round to the back and down the hill almost to Lake Loom, the man-made lake designed by Olmsted to reflect the house. Landish thought the west facade was not as striking except when it reflected in Lake Loom, which it did to eerie effect this day because of a freakishly late fall of snow. The house, hit by the setting sun, was the only part of Vanderland still above the shadow of the Ridge. The bright stone flickered like fire in the snow-surrounded water of the lake.

“Tell me about Newfoundland,” Gough said to Deacon one night in the Smoker.

“Everything’s on the hill and when we go out walking Landish puts me on his shoulders so all the men look up at me. He says it must be a nice change from dodging legs and being able to see nothing but the arse in front of me. When it’s windy it’s cold but on sunny days big white clouds make shadows on the water. At night in our attic you can hear the ‘droning’—that’s the wind. I don’t mind it, but Landish does. He sits up in the kitchen, drinking grog and reading books out loud.”

“What did you read, Landish?” Gough said.

Landish said that he read
The Divine Dromedary
, in which, in fourteen thousand lines, were related the adventures of Dante Alighieri and a camel named Virgil. Mr. Palmer smiled when he read what Gough wrote in the notebook.