The Angel's Cut (32 page)

Xas went out, and found O'Brien exactly where he expected. As he picked O'Brien up, the cat gave a little, exhausted complaint, then began to purr mightily, a loud
sawing that shook his whole body, and reminded Xas of a person rocking themselves around a pain. Xas cradled the cat, carried him indoors, and put him on Flora's bed.

The men who came to the gate of Cole's Westwood house wore pressed brown pants and button-pocket shirts, clothes suggestive of uniforms—not police or studio security, rather of municipal workers in some wealthy, self-respecting small town. They wanted to know what business Xas had with Mr Cole. Their questions were startlingly personal. They seemed not just protective, but possessive of their employer. Xas tried to satisfy them, then spotted Cole's chauffeur, Carl, and called out to him. Carl strolled down to the gate. He explained that this was Huss Hintersee, an old friend of Mr Cole's. The gate was opened, and Carl walked Xas up to the house. When they were out of earshot Carl looked at Xas and said, ‘Those people—they're like gophers. There's one, then two, then the lawn's gone.'

‘Who are they?'

‘The help, like me. Except they're all related—you know—there's a man, and the man's cousin, and his brother-in-law. Related. Mr Cole is a family business now. Only it isn't his family.'

Carl left Xas on the porch. He said, ‘No one answers the door because no one comes to the house.' He pushed the door open, then headed back to his garage.

The house was shut up, as if unoccupied. Curtains were drawn. The only light came through a porthole in the door of a below-stairs kitchen.

Cole was in bed. The bedroom smelled dank, yeasty. When the door opened he reared up and called out, fearful, ‘Who is it?' Then he said, ‘Oh, it's you,' and slumped back down.

Xas approached the bed and Cole shrank away and drew the sheet up over his mouth. ‘Are you clean?' he said.

Xas sniffed his hands; smelled milk and mild baby bile. ‘Would you like me to wash?' He could tell by the expression in Cole's eyes that the offer wasn't adequate and that Cole would not believe he'd washed unless he watched him do it. And Cole wasn't about to get out of bed.

There was a fireplace in the room, a neat mound of pine cones on its grate. The cones, frosted by dust and spider web, had probably been there since the previous summer. Since Sylvia's time. Xas knew the decorated grate was Sylvia's doing. He remembered an evening, several years ago, when he'd driven Flora up to a hotel in Colorado to visit the set of a movie Crow was directing and Cole producing, a movie in which Avril starred. Sylvia had been visiting too. She hadn't liked the hotel. She thought it grand, but cold. Xas remembered her saying that there were things that should never be empty, ‘Like a fireplace or a fruit bowl.' And then everyone else had chimed in:

‘A cradle. Or a heart,' said Avril.

‘A wallet,' said the leading man.

‘Or a bottle,' said Flora.

‘A threat,' said Cole.

And Crow, falsely earnest, ‘A future.'

And then they all looked at
him
—the only one who hadn't volunteered anything. He'd forgotten he was there—
except to listen. Besides, when he did come to consider it, there were no emptinesses, only unwelcome silences, like listening to someone out in the woods at evening calling a child and going unanswered. But whenever the longed-for voice failed to answer the silence was still God. It was God saying, ‘No,' but God nevertheless.

Crow had interrupted his thought. ‘He's going to ask us to define emptiness,' he said, and everyone laughed.

On the mantelpiece of the fireplace in Cole's bedroom Xas found a silver canister full of wax matches. He struck one and held its flame to the dry scales of a pine cone. It caught, and the fire trickled up through the kindling. Xas waited till the cones were fully alight then put his hands in the flame. It was too hot, and it hurt him. But it made no difference to his skin, only streaked it with soot. He heard the springs in the bed complain as Cole sat up.

As he was laving his hands in the fire, Xas realised that he'd done this before. He had coaxed a fire back to life by stirring its embers and rearranging its logs. He'd crouched at the grate in a room above the Cuverie in Château Vully, his wings screening the rest of the room from what little heat there was to be had from the dying fire, chilling the man standing behind him. The man—Sobran—who'd got out of his warm bed on a snowy night because an angel had knocked at his window.

It was on that night that Xas finally took Sobran in his arms meaning also to take the man as his lover. Xas remembered putting his hands into the fire, making practical arrangements to revive it, then making his
decision. Remembering, it occurred to the angel that
that
was perhaps the only occasion in his life where he'd chosen. Deliberated, then made a choice. ‘This disaster is my future,' he'd said, and then lay down over the man. Responding to an offer wasn't a choice. Coming back when called wasn't either. The gardener who broke new ground was choosing; but to hoe and harvest and
keep on
was not a matter of choice.

For a moment, as he crouched at Cole's hearth, bathing his hands in flame, Xas wondered what after all he'd done with his life—as if he had a life, and was a person.

He removed his hands from the fire. He shook them to cool them. He turned to Cole, who lay back down, no longer fearful or shrinking, but languorous.

Xas climbed into bed with and lay over the man. It was a commemorative act. He cupped the back of Cole's head with his hot, sooty hands. He kissed Cole, whose mouth was sour and teeth velvety.

Xas told Cole that he must visit Flora.

Cole shook his head. ‘I don't like to be looked at,' he said.

‘Since when?' said Xas, ‘When you broke the long-distance flight record everyone was looking at you.'

Cole nodded. He looked perplexed. ‘That's right. And it didn't trouble me straight off, then. Though I did have qualms. I tried to land beyond the crowd. I landed as far beyond them as I was able while still being on the airstrip. Then they all rushed toward me. The men were tossing their hats. It was night and hats were going up like black bubbles, as if the air was dark champagne. I had to grin and
bear all the attention, and the yelling. The crowd made a sound so loud that my good ear just decided to quit and not let anything in. It was the same during the tickertape parade. That was like a silent film—the tape coming down slowly like dry snow. I was sitting up on the trunk of a car with the Mayor of New York and he kept chattering to me. I couldn't hear a thing he said, I had to keep looking away from the crowd to read his lips. It was a grand occasion though, and it's strange to think how I went from that to…' Cole trailed off. He began to weep.

Xas brushed at the tears with his thumbs, kissed one damp temple, and then the other. ‘It's a short walk to my car,' he said. ‘The hallway is empty and so is the lobby. It's past midnight. Someone has watered the lawns and they smell good. The aspidistra are all out along the drive. My car is at the gate. The city is as quiet as Easter Sunday. I can have you back before the sun comes up. Get out of bed and come with me now.'

Cole did get up, and Xas put him in the shower and washed him. He dressed Cole, clipped his toenails, and pushed his bony feet into a pair of loafers. Then they went out.

Cole sat with Flora and hid his fear. He was mild and gentle. And when they eventually left her sleeping and walked out together, Xas took Cole's hand and said, ‘Thank you,' and ‘I love you, Con.'

‘You say “I love you”, but I hear, “Good dog, good dog”.'

‘Still,' said Xas.

‘I shouldn't have to do those things,' Cole said.

Xas opened the passenger's door for Cole then climbed into the car himself and started the engine. Cole said, ‘I won't forget you made me do that.'

He was silent for the rest of the drive. But when Xas had delivered him home, and they reached the foetid and lightless hermitage of his bedroom, Cole made an effort to meet Xas's eyes. He said, ‘She's very sick.'

‘Yes.'

Then, ‘Can you save her?'

Xas called Avril, who visited again, brought more gifts, and sat with Flora. She held Alison and remarked admiringly on how she'd grown. When she left, Avril told Xas he should have called her right after Flora had seen the specialist.

She asked Xas to walk her out to the road where her chauffeur was waiting in her car. She introduced them. She said, ‘This is Robert. When Flora has to go into hospital, you call me and, if I'm working, I'll send Robert to collect Alison. I'm sure that, between us, me and my girl Betsy can take care of the baby.' Betsy was her maid.

Avril gestured at Robert, who got back in the car and closed the door. Avril took Xas's hand. ‘Alison is Conrad Crow's daughter, isn't she? I can see now that she has his eyes.'

Xas didn't respond.

Avril said, ‘None of us was sure.' She waited, then added, ‘That's all right, you don't have to tell me.' She squeezed his hand, kissed him on the cheek, and blotted her eyes with the knuckles of her gloved hands, skilfully, so that her mascara was barely smudged.

Xas opened the car door for her, said, ‘I will call. Thank you.'

Flora was sitting in the cane chair, which Xas had carried outside and put in the shade by the back steps. He had pegged out diapers, and was now picking beans. Alison was lying on the lawn, on a rug, grasping her own feet and singing to herself. The day was so lovely that, to Flora, it seemed possible to leave only if it was impossible to stay. She tried to imagine leaving. She imagined that her body was asking her to leave.

She wasn't in any great pain, the kind of pain she'd known for years, the kind that was a goad, and issued commands like, ‘Move! Do something!' The pain that would sometimes, as if whimsically, instruct her to stay still, for stillness was like movement too, was something she had to
do
.

Dying wasn't like that. It seem to Flora that the only way to go was not to be able to stay.

Flora raised her eyes to measure the sky. She knew she was only trying to imagine dying. And she knew that her failure of imagination didn't mean she'd live. She thought, ‘Perhaps the one who leaves isn't even an “I” any more, the “I” who can measure the sky.'

She looked back at the garden. Xas was brushing the dirt from fingerling carrots. He had given Alison a wooden clothes peg. Alison had the peg in one fist and was staring at it with cross-eyed intensity. The garden was still there for Flora, whether or not she was able to fix her attention on it. Maybe—she thought—to imagine leaving she'd first have to
imagine that the garden wasn't there. She tried to do that, subtracted the garden beds, the busy angel, the baby, the small wilderness of the waste lot, the distant mountains. That left only herself, in a kitchen chair, Flora McLeod, using her imagination and failing to imagine being gone.

When Xas held Alison on his knees, facing away from him, he could look at the back of her head and see that it had just as much personality as her face. She was face down in her character already, and it had closed over her head. The fingerprint pattern of the hair on her crown was her biography. It said she was delivered, it said she consented to breathe, and to suckle, apparently bewildered by her mother's breast, this first surface. It said she learned how to send herself to sleep, comforted by her father or mother's breathing. It said she slobbered in pain with colic and was walked up and down the house on her father's shoulder. It said she learned how to talk to the wind in the cornflowers, how to sleep outdoors. It said she'd learned to manage to get food into her, and show she liked it by smiling at her father from under a froth of mashed carrot. It said she was given toys she first flung helplessly from her. It said what she'd do, given time. Her turned head said, ‘I'm by myself' and ‘I might just take off any moment now.'

Flora wasn't sleeping well. When she fell asleep she'd jerk awake, her arms and legs jumping up off the bed. Xas knew this was a symptom. He called the specialist who said there was nothing that could be done about it, short of sedating her, and, ‘It's not time for that yet, is it?'

Xas heard the specialist's ‘is it?' and knew he was being asked to make a decision. He couldn't think what to say.

Eventually the specialist broke the silence: ‘It would mean admitting her. That's the decision I'm asking you to make.'

Xas said, ‘I think she's more comfortable at home.'

‘Can you manage?'

‘Yes,' said Xas.

Xas sat in the chair in the corner of Flora's room to feed Alison her morning bottle.

Flora was in bed, propped up on pillows. O'Brien was asleep beside her, curled in a tight ball, his ribs plainly visible whenever he inhaled.

Flora said, ‘When did that chair lose its leaves?'

Xas looked over his shoulder at the cushion behind him. It was covered in floral fabric, faded by its many recent washes. The cover had shrunk, so that the cushion was fat and distorted. ‘I'm afraid the pattern has faded. I had to boil the covers, back when Alison was small and I was sterilising everything.'

Alison was still small at six months, but was doing everything that could be expected of a six month old, according to the book produced by the Children's Bureau of the US Department of Labor.

Flora said, ‘I seem to remember the leaves on the floor.'

‘The cushions?' Xas was puzzled.

‘The leaves.'

‘There was a pot plant there,' Xas said. ‘Someone moved it.' Xas frowned at Flora. Her eyes were distinguishable only
as slits in swollen flesh. She'd lost most of her eyelashes. The puffiness was like a mask. It disguised her expression. Xas stared at her, and supposed her mind was wandering.