Mrs. God (17 page)

Standish struck the box with his axe once more, and photographs flew all around him. Then he took aim at
JAMES
, and cracked the first one like a nut with one blow of the axe. Wads of loose paper cascaded out, and he kicked them apart.

He drove the axe into the second box of James' papers, and into the third, and then drove it down into the papers themselves and cut a great wad of them in half. Monuments of unaging intellect, Standish thought, and drove the axe into
WOOLF
. Then into the next file box, and the next, and the next, until every one had been smashed open and its contents spilled on the floor. After that he dragged the axe across the library to the second recess and started with
FORSTER
and
BROOKE
—ugh, how did he get invited?—and came to
CORN
.

Standish grinned at the thought of Theodore Corn. He smashed open the box. A few sheafs of paper flew out—Theodore Corn would of course have sheafs of paper, preferably slender sheafs—along with another gout of small square photographs.

The photographs hit the already impressive drift of papers on the floor with the clatter of falling insects. Standish bent down to pick up a random handful, assuming he would see more photographs of lumpy literary people.

They were strikingly like the photographs of Isobel.
I should have let this idiot's box alone
, Standish said to himself, feeling a premonitory tingle. He turned over various small squares of paper that had been printed with the same scant margins, the same dingy range of tones from sepia to light gray, and the same landscapes and furniture of Isobel's pictures. Many of the faces too were also in Isobel's photographs—Ford breathing through his mouth, Eliot hunching and making a face like a cat. The principal figure in this set of images was in some ways Isobel's male counterpart. A tall skinny figure in wrinkled suits, wearing unbuttoned shirts with flyaway collars, sometimes in a sleeveless Fair Isle pullover too small for him, he looked at the camera with a long lopsided rural face seamed and pocked by childhood diseases, adolescent acne, and a long attachment to alcohol. His left front tooth and incisor were missing, and his hands, twice the size of Standish's own, had joints like bolts.

What had reminded Standish of Isobel was none of this, but the man's air of aggrieved disappointment—the sense of having been cheated lifted from the photograph like an odor. Coarser than Isobel, he was just as embittered. His sly drunken face proclaimed
I deserve more, I need more
. Standish detested him even before he realized who he had to be, and then recognized that he detested him because he recognized himself in the man. If this person were an American of the 1980s instead of an Englishman of seventy years before, he might be married to someone like Jean Standish and be teaching in some dead Midwestern Zenith. He would dress better and a crown would fill the gap in his mouth. He would profess the Nineteenth-century Novel, not very well but at least as well as William Standish.

Standish flipped over another of the dark little photographs and saw the man leaning against the back of Esswood House with a leer spread across his gappy mouth and a scarf tied around his neck like a rope.

He was, of course, Chester Ridgeley's darling, Theodore Corn.

Then Standish realized that he knew one more piece of the puzzle—Isobel had taken these photographs, just as Corn had taken all the photographs of Isobel.

And this led to the final fact, as Isobel might have said the ultimate fact, which had prompted Standish's sense of foreboding when he had seen photographs spilling from Corn's box. The ninny Corn was the man Isobel had met at Esswood. Theodore Corn was her vagrant, her scholar-gipsy. He had been the father of her lost child.

Standish held the loose wad of photographs in his hands for a moment entirely empty of thought or feeling. He let them drop, and they clattered onto the strewn papers. Standish kicked at the mess on the floor. Everything about him seemed meaningless and dead. The meaninglessness was worse than death, because the meaninglessness existed at the center of a mystery, like the whorls of a beautiful pink and ivory shell that wound deeper and deeper into the glowing interior until they came to—nothing.

Theodore Corn looked up at him from a hundred photographs, sly and hayseed and unknowable.

Standish waded through the ruck of papers and smashed the axe into
POUND
. Another mass of papers flew up from a shattered box and fell, thick as leaves, to the ground. He saw Isobel seated beside Theodore Corn at the dinner table, gazing at him over the golden rim of her wineglass. He swung his axe and demolished another box.

Eventually Standish waded out of the second recess and went to the desk. The original file still sat beside the red gilt chair. Atop the desk stood the bottle of Haut-Brion. Standish looked down at Isobel's poor papers and considered carrying them over the recess and tossing them on the pile. He nudged the papers with his foot and watched them spill sideways, exposing lines and sentences of Isobel's busy handwriting. That was good: that was better. Now the sentences could lift off the page and escape into the sky.

Standish put the bottle to his mouth and drank. He examined the library impartially and found it beautiful. He looked up, and the god glared down at him, pointed his ineffectual finger. The god was made entirely of paint a fraction of an inch thick, and that the finger came forward to point was an illusion created by a man named Robert Adam, who had loved great houses and fine libraries. Standish hefted the axe in his hands. He raised it and let it fall on the desk. The axe cracked its top open. Objects Standish had not noticed, Bic pens and legal pads, fell into the desk. Other insignificant things went sailing into the library.

Late afternoon sun came streaming through the windows.

Standish dropped the axe and saw blood spatter onto the carpet. The carpet instantly drank the blood, shrinking the red spots and hollowing them into pale pink rings almost invisible against the peach.

As hungry as the house, his stomach growled.

Standish thought for a moment, then smiled and sat at the ruined desk. He found a pen nestled beside long polished splinters. He wrote
matches
on a legal pad. Then he tore the sheet off the pad and wobbled toward the door.

In the dining room the table was set for dinner. An open bottle of red wine stood on the tablecloth. Standish's mouth felt as if he had been eating ashes, and he filled the gold-rimmed glass to the top and gulped several mouthfuls before he bothered to look at the label. 1916 La Tache. It could have been the year Isobel returned to the Land, in search of immortality and the greedy embraces of Theodore Corn. What else had Isobel been looking for in 1916, in the midst of a world-engulfing war? The final curve inside the pink shell, the story inside the story, the new sentence, the source of the sound. Standish's hand slowly dripped blood on the tablecloth, and the tablecloth sucked the drops to pale circles. He smiled, and set down the glass to wrap his right hand in one of Esswood's broad linen napkins. Then he sat and lifted the golden cover. Isobel's meal steamed on the golden plate.

Standish ate. The room tilted to his left, then to his right. His whole body ached. Eventually his eyelids insisted on coming down over his eyes, and he lowered his head to the table and slept. In the midst of a grove of trees a shining baby lifted its arms and tilted up its head for a kiss. Standish stretched out his torn arms, but his feet were caught in thick silken grass like ropes. Blood dripped from the palms of his hands, and the shining baby turned its face away and cried.

Standish too wept, and woke up with his wet face cradled in the bloody napkin wound around his hand. “Oh, God,” he said, imagining that he had to go back to the library and write a book about Isobel. A tide of relief radiated out from the memory of what he had done in the library.

He wiped his face and stood up. The axe lay beside his chair like a sleeping pet, and he carefully knelt and reached for the handle. It glided into his hand and fitted itself into the folds of the napkin.

Standish dragged himself down Isobel's secret corridor to the library. He toiled through the great empty space and opened the main door. On the carpet of the West Hall lay a large yellow box of Swan kitchen matches.

Standish carried the matches back into the library, leaned the axe against a column, and went to the second recess. He pushed open the box, and an astonishing number of matches fell out into the heap of papers and photographs. He stared stupidly at the box for a moment before realizing that it was upside down. He turned it over and saw that the other, uncovered end of the box still contained hundreds of matches. Standish removed one and scratched the head against the crosshatched strip. The match exploded into bright flame.

He bent down and touched the flame to the corner of a piece of paper. As soon as the paper ignited, he moved the match to another sheet. Then he tossed the burning match far back into the recess. A thin wire of smoke ascended, and a curl of fire followed it.

Standish backed out of the recess and watched the flames eat at the papers. The paint on the bookshelves blackened and burst into circular blisters just before the fire jumped to take the wood beneath the paint. Then he crossed the library to set the papers in the other recess alight.

He dropped the rest of the matches on the floor and left by the main doors. He had more than enough time to do what had to be done next.

Standish went out into the entrance hall. An ornate clock on a marble table told him that it was five minutes to ten. He wandered down the screened passage and tugged at the front door. Velvet darkness began at the edge of the light that spilled from the house. The trees beyond the drive were a solid wall reaching from the dark ground to the vivid purple of the sky. Overhead were more stars than Standish could ever remember seeing, millions it seemed, some bright and constant and others dim and flickering, in one vast unreadable pattern that extended far back into the vault of the sky, like a sentence in a foreign language, the new sentence that went on and on until first the letters and then whole words became too small to read.

Standish walked out to stand beneath the great sentence. All of that writing in the library, the pages stuffed with words like bodies stuffed with food, would float upward to join the ultimate Esswood that was the sentence in the sky. Beyond it, invisibly, did an angered god point a finger from a whirling cloud?

Standish carried his axe back into the house.

eighteen

A
s he went up the stairs he caught the faint odor of burning, but when he turned off to the left into unfamiliar territory the faraway smell of smoke faded into the odors of old leather and furniture polish and the fresh evening air that entered the house through open windows. He passed under an arch at the top of the left-hand wing of the staircase and went into a room that was the larger counterpart of the study on the other end of the house.

A light fixture hung from the central rosette. Empty bookshelves covered two of the walls. A single rocking chair had been pushed up against a bare wall with pale rectangles where pictures had hung.

At the far end of the empty room was another arch through which Standish could see a bleak corridor. A bare light bulb dangled from a cord. Dust gathered on the floorboards, and cracks ran across the plaster walls. Two large windows with brown shades stood on one side of the hallway, two dusty brown doors on the other.

These were the windows he had seen from the Inner Gallery and the Fountain Rooms. He tugged on the ring of a window shade and gently released it upward. Across the dark courtyard his old windows glowed yellow around the outline of a misshapen child-sized figure peering out. Standish froze. Inch-Me or Pinch-Me or Beckon-Me-Hither stared at him, and Standish stared back. Then the small featureless shape disappeared. A gray whorl of smoke moved into the frame of the window. Standish imagined the secret stairs filling with smoke dense enough to push back at you if you tried to move through it. Another, deeper rift of smoke appeared in his window.

He still had all the time he needed.

Standish turned from the window and placed his hand on the first doorknob. He quietly opened the door.

Light from the corridor spilled into the first few feet of a room in which Standish made out the shape of an iron bed, a cheap wooden chair, an open suitcase on the floor. Paperback books lay scattered around the chair. He moved through the opening and closed the door. In the darkness he became aware of the pain in his hands and his back. Oily grime covered his body. He could smell fear, sweat, blood—he stank like an animal in a cave.

Inside his head he heard the sound, more an echo than sound itself, of a baby crying. Standish began to move on tiptoe across the room toward the untidy bed. When he was a foot or two from it he was able to make out the pattern on the thrown-back coverlet. The sheets were white and rumpled, and the dented pillow lay across them like a fat slug. From the wrinkled sheets floated up an odor of perfume and powder. A spattering of his own blood fell on the sheets.

Standish turned around and left the room as quietly as he had come in. The door let yellow meaningless light flood over and around him.

In the window on the other side of the hallway he saw the reflection of a crouching half-human animal, its body smeared with dirt and blood, come creeping around a door. It carried an axe in one hand. With something like glee, Standish saw that this stooped, monstrous creature was himself—the inner Standish. Twenty-four hours ago he had glimpsed him in the bathroom mirror, but now he was really out in the open. It seemed that he had been waiting for this moment all of his adult life. “
Why, Miss Standish
,” he whispered, and pressed a hand to his mouth to keep from giggling.

Through the creature's body he saw the square of fire that was the window of his old room.