Mrs. God (8 page)

“Alabaster. Striking, isn't it? As good as anything at Saltram House. They look freshly painted until you see those delicate veins in the stone.” In his ambiguous face was a full understanding of just what Standish was feeling.

Wall pushed himself forward and stood up. “Now I must take you through the main entrance and point you up the staircase. It's a little late to creep through the servants' corridor. Though I daresay in the old days the servants' corridor saw a great deal of surreptitious movement.”

Standish smiled before he understood what Wall meant. Wall led him out through an archway set between two of the alabaster columns, then through a pair of ornately carved wooden doors and into another high vast room that seemed cold and museumlike after the library.

Before them, across an expanse of dark carpet and through the middle of a double row of stiff chairs like soldiers, was another set of carved doors.

“Dining room can be reached through there,” Wall said, indicating the far doors, “and the main staircase which takes you up to the Inner Gallery and the Fountain Rooms is directly ahead of you. Until we meet again, then. We will see to your car tomorrow. Don't give it a thought.

The two men began to move down past the soldierly chairs.

“I can't help but wonder what happens to the place once Edith's children die. Who inherits the place?”

“I'm afraid there's no proper answer to that.”

“What does that mean? That you can't tell me?”

Instead of answering, Wall opened the door at the far end of the uncomfortable room, and stood waiting for Standish to go through. For a moment he reminded Standish of the landlord of The Duelists.

“I'm sorry if that was an awkward question.”

“I'm sorry if you didn't like my answer. But if you want to know anything else, ask away. You may have three questions.”

“Well, I guess I'm curious about Isobel. I mean I know she died here, and I guess I always assumed that she had some illness. Do you remember anything about it?”

Wall continued to hold the door and look down at Standish. His expression had not changed in any way.

“Did she have influenza?”

“Is that your second question?”

“Well, I know there were influenza epidemics around then.… Do you remember Isobel at all? I've never even seen a picture of her.”

“That is your third question. Of course I remember Isobel. It was a great loss for all of us when she died. Everyone here cared for her deeply.” He motioned Standish through the door, and followed him out into the great hall. “She died in childbirth, to answer your real question. I'm rather surprised that you should not have known.”

“I didn't even know that she'd had a child,” Standish said.

“The child died too.” Wall smiled and stepped away. “You do remember how to get back to the Fountain Rooms?”

When Standish reached the top of the wide staircase he turned to look back down at Robert Wall, but the entire first floor of Esswood was dark. He heard a burst of female laughter from beneath him, as if it had risen up the stairs like smoke.

In the bedroom he undressed and discovered that the sheets were delightfully cool and the bed just as firm as he liked a bed to be. He heard the lights in the Inner Gallery click off. Far away a door closed softly.

five

S
tandish and a number of other men were being held captive in a large bare cabin with a plank floor and rough wooden walls. Armed guards in brown uniforms lounged against the walls, idly watching the prisoners and speaking to one another in low unintelligible voices. At one end of the huge wooden room was a low raised platform where a man whose gray hair had been shaved close to his bullet head sat behind a desk. Stacks of pages lay on the surface of the desk, and the man examined papers one by one before transferring them from one stack to another. He was dressed in a baggy gray suit and a wide florid necktie, and the points of his shirt collar turned up. Like the uniformed guards, he looked bored. The faces of all the men, the guards and the official behind the desk, were broad, fleshy, masculine, roughened by alcohol and comfortable with brutality and death. Through windows cut into the sides of the building Standish saw snow falling steadily onto a white landscape. At irregular intervals a man holding a rifle and bundled into a heavy dark coat and a fur cap struggled past the windows, gripping the leashes of two straining dogs. All of these men were at ease with the cold and the perpetual snow. They were at ease with everything they did. The atmosphere was of unhurried bureaucratic peace.

Fearful, Standish stood in the middle of the room with the other captives. All but he wore colorless woolen garments that resembled pajamas. Standish knew that in time he too would be stripped of his jacket, shirt, tie, trousers, and shoes, and be dressed in the woolen pajamas. There was no possibility of escape. If he managed to get outside and evade the guards and the dogs he would die of exposure.

The shoulders of his fellow prisoners were bent, their heads cropped, their faces shadowy. They had reconciled themselves to death; in a sense they were already dead, for nothing could move or touch them, nothing could jar them out of their apathy.

Standish experienced the purest dread of his life.

The man at the desk was selecting the order in which Standish and his fellow prisoners were to be executed. There was no possibility of pardon. Sooner or later this bored extermination machine was going to snuff out each one of them. There was nothing personal about it. It was business: a matter of moving papers from one stack to another.

The man at the desk looked up and uttered a monosyllable. One of the guards straightened up, walked toward the group of prisoners, and seized one man by the elbow. The prisoner got to his feet and allowed himself to be pulled toward the door. Nobody but Standish watched this. The guard opened the door and handed the prisoner almost gently to a man in a dark coat and fur hat. This second guard pulled the prisoner away into the snow, and the door closed.

Standish knew that the prisoner was going to be beheaded. Somewhere out of his range of vision was a wooden chopping block and a basket that caught the severed heads.

He glanced toward the door, and knew that one of the guards would shoot him if he even touched the knob.

Standish paced around the middle of the room under the eye of the guards. Some of the other prisoners were also walking aimlessly around the room, and Standish avoided looking at them closely. Some of the men sat on the floor, their backs bowed, and some curled up on the planks as if asleep, hiding their faces in their hands. Standish did not want to see their faces. If you saw one of the faces—

—then you saw it tumbling off the block, its eyes and mouth open, the brain still conscious, still recording and reacting to the shock, the terrible knowledge …

Standish realized that he was not dreaming. Somehow he had ventured into this wretched country, been captured, condemned to death, and transported to this penal outpost with these degraded men. He looked wildly around, and the two nearest guards watched him closely. Standish forced himself to walk slowly up to one of the cabin's walls. He placed his hand on the cold wall. A swift continuous draft flowed into the room from the gaps between the boards.

The official called out another name, and in the blur of sound Standish heard
st
and
sh
. His blood thinned. A languid guard pushed himself off a wall and walked toward him. Standish could not move. The guard advanced, looking at him expressionlessly. Standish opened his mouth and found that he could not form words. He saw large black pores on the guard's stony face and a long white scar, puckered like a vertical kiss, running from his right eye to the middle of his cheek.

The guard brushed past Standish and grasped the upper arm of a man in gray pajamas just behind him. The guard began to jerk the man toward the door. As they passed Standish, the prisoner lifted his head and looked directly into Standish's face. His eyes were black and flat as stones. Standish stepped backward, and the guard pulled his prisoner away.

Standish turned around and saw a baby lying on a blanket that had been folded on a small table against the opposite wall. The baby jerked its hands toward its face, then froze. The baby's hands drifted down to its sides as slowly as if the baby were underwater. It was a new baby, red-faced, only a few days old. It wore coarse woolen baby clothes of the same material as the prisoners' pajamas. The baby seemed to gasp for air. Standish took a step forward, and the baby's arms jerked spasmodically toward its head. Puffy, swollen-looking pads of flesh covered the baby's eyes.

One of the guards shouted at Standish, who stopped moving and pointed at the baby. “I want to pick it up. What can be wrong with that?”

The man behind the desk carefully placed the paper in his hand down on a neutral space on his desk and uttered a short series of monosyllables that caused the soldier to lower his rifle and retreat to the wall. Standish swallowed.

The official turned his head to look at Standish. His eyes were the color of rainwater in a barrel. “This not your baby,” the official said in a slow, heavily accented voice. “Possible you understand? This baby not your baby.”

And then Standish understood that he had lost everything. He was to be beheaded in this ugly country, and the baby gasping on the table was not his baby. Black steam filled his veins. He groaned, at the end of his life, and woke up in a sunny bedroom at Esswood.

six

“G
ot it wrong again,” said Robert Wall. It was half an hour later. Carrying two pencils, a legal pad, and his copy of
Crack, Whack, and Wheel
, Standish closed the door from the servants' corridor and came near the table. Two places had been set. Golden domes with handles covered the plates. “You are indeed a fellow who prefers the less-traveled road, Mr. Standish.”

“I guess I am,” Standish said.

“As your tastes in literature would indicate. Let us see what is beneath these covers, shall we?”

They raised the golden domes. On Standish's plate lay an entire dried-out fish with bulging eyes.

“Ah, kippers,” Wall said. “You're a lucky fellow, Mr. Standish. We're a bit shorthanded here just now, in fact I'm off to Sleaford in an hour or so to interview some prospective help, and you can never be sure what they'll serve up at breakfast. Last week I had porridge four days running.”

Standish waited until Wall had separated a section of brown flesh from the kipper's side, exposing a row of neat tiny bones like the bars of a marimba, and inserted it in his mouth. When he tried to do the same, bristling bones stabbed his tongue and the inside of his cheeks. The fish tasted like burned mud. He chewed, glumly tried to swallow, and could not. His throat refused to accept the horrible wad of stuff in his mouth. Standish raised his napkin to his mouth and spat out the bony mess.

“And now,” Wall was saying, lifting the cover from a dish that stood between them. Standish prayed for real food—scrambled eggs, toast, bacon.

“This
is
good luck,” Wall said, exposing a pasty yellow-white partially liquefied substance. “Kedgeree.” He began loading it enthusiastically onto his plate. “An aquatic morning, this. Do help yourself.”

“Do you suppose there's any toast around here?” Standish said.

“Beside your plate.” Wall gave him a surprised look. “Under the toast cover.”

He had not even seen the second, more elongated golden lid next to his plate. He lifted it off and uncovered a double row of brown toast in a metal rack. Between the rows of toast stood a pot of orange marmalade and another of what looked like strawberry jam, each with a golden spoon. Standish ladled marmalade onto a wedge of toast.

“Something amiss with your kipper?”

“Wonderful, great,” Standish said.

“I hope you had a comfortable night?”

“Fine.”

“No trouble sleeping? No discomfort of any kind?”

“Nothing.”

“Very good.” Wall paused, and Standish looked up from smearing jam on another triangular wedge of toast. “There is one matter I must discuss with you. It's of minor importance, I'm sure, but I didn't want to bring it up last night.”

“Oh?” Standish held the jam spoon in one hand, the triangle of toast in the other.

“There seems to be some confusion about the circumstances under which you left your first teaching position. Popham College, was it?”

Standish looked at him in an excellent imitation of genuine wonderment. “Confusion?” After a bit he looked down at the objects in his hands. Thoughtfully he applied jam to the toast.

“Certainly nothing that should cause you concern, Mr. Standish, for if it were you would not be here today. But—well, I don't think I am betraying confidences if I say that we had intimations of a conflict of some kind, though nothing ever seemed positively worrisome to us.”

“Popham was a very small college,” Standish said. His underarms had become damp. “A small college is like a small town. Especially the English Department of a small college. There's an unbelievable amount of gossip. In fact, when I arrived, people were still talking about something that had happened thirty years earlier between a student and an English professor named Chester—”

“I see,” Wall said, smiling at him.

“What happened was really very simple.” He closed his eyes and remembered how Jean had struggled on the steps to the ordinary little house in Iola, Popham's larger neighbor, how she had given up on the doorstep when the nurse who was not a nurse had opened the door, how the purity of his hatred had moved him through days when sorrow or love would have killed him. “I saw things clearly,” he said, and cleared his throat. “A little more clearly than most of the other people on the faculty. It was obvious that most people in my department resented me. One man in particular, a false friend, behaved unspeakably. You could use the word betrayal. There was no unpleasantness, of course—”