The Dutch Wife (2 page)

The bathroom off the main bedroom really took my fancy. It was green tiled and had one of those luxurious old-fashioned showers with a dozen spouts all round the walls to let the water come at you from every angle. Even the toilet was dramatic: it stood on a little dais with brass handrails around it.

Curiously, above the green hand basin, at eye level, a clock was set into the tiles. I’d never seen a clock in a bathroom before. This one was all rusted out now: the hands had fallen off and lay like stick insects trapped behind the glass.

From the landing, we climbed another, shorter but just as uneven staircase to a huge, dark attic. In the corner I could see that the turret, which looked so impressive from the street, was really only a hollow ornamental structure supported by criss-crossing beams.

WE WENT BACK DOWNSTAIRS
and I looked around more carefully. I opened an inset door off the living room and saw—to my great delight—a library. It was almost as big as the living room, with a writing table and a leather armchair by a fireplace. I went in and took a quick look at the books. Some were very old and I didn’t recognize the authors. Others were classics you know you ought to read.

I just stood for a few minutes, looking around. I could swear I felt that odd sensation you sometimes get from old books—as though they’re aware they’re changing owners. And, like all libraries, the room was comforting—breathing softly, like some large, kindly animal.

How could I resist it?

“What a great house,” I said to Victoria. “I’m surprised it’s available.”

“Not many people want to rent these big houses nowadays,” she said. “They’re so hard to heat in winter. But I really think you’d enjoy it. And if you think it’s too expensive, I’m sure we can negotiate a lower price.” She seemed very keen on my taking it.

“Do you know who the owner is?” I said.

She blinked once or twice. “Well, there’ve been a few owners. It’s being handled by a lawyer.”

I could have asked more but I was thinking: What does it matter, anyway? I looked around the library again. It was so enticing. I saw myself, on a winter’s day, sitting in that leather chair with the fire roaring, a glass of Scotch in hand, reading some old book I’d always avoided, like Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
or maybe one of those Henry James novels that seem to go on forever.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

“Good.” Victoria sounded relieved. “I’ll get the lease ready.” Just as she said that, a huge clap of thunder sounded outside, and within a few seconds a summer rain was battering against the windows.

MY WIFE CAME BACK
from the Coast for a week to help with the move. She loved the house too, though she was a bit worried about the size and the problems of keeping it clean. We brought our own things out of storage and she retrieved our cat from her parents, who’d acted as cat-sitters while we were away. The cat was a grey, stripey, optimistic kind of a cat named Corinna (my wife’s always had cats; she believes the world would be a better place if everyone had cats to practise loving on before moving on to people). Corinna seemed delighted with the house too and roamed everywhere.

Except for the basement. She wouldn’t go down there. In fact, she’d even give a wide berth to the basement door under the staircase. Her fur would stand on end and she’d fluff out her tail to make herself look ferocious as she passed that door. Who knows what goes through a cat’s mind? We used to laugh at her, but I must admit I myself went down there only once or twice to check the ancient plumbing system or the fuse box. The door was made of some kind of heavy wood, unpainted on the inside, and it had scratch marks on it, as though one of the previous owners had kept a dog in there. The caged light bulbs in the basement ceiling were feeble, and the crude cement walls and the earthy smell were hard to reconcile with the elegant mansion above.

I even dreamed about the basement.

The night after my wife went back to the Coast, around midnight, I heard a noise and got out of bed. I went downstairs and crouched in the darkness outside the closed basement door. I could hear some creature behind it, stealthily climbing the creaky stairs. It reached the landing and the doorknob slowly began to turn. My heart was thudding. When the door opened, a beautiful creature (I was certain it was beautiful though I couldn’t see it in the dark) stood there, looking at me. I jumped at it and pushed it back down the stairs. Then I slammed the door shut and crouched again, waiting. I was quite certain that if that creature ever managed to get out of there, it would destroy me.

That was the dream. I had it that night, and then again, in almost exactly the same form, the next morning—as though it straddled the border between waking and sleeping and needed to be passed either way. I had some variation of that dream, night and morning, at least once a week for my entire stay in the old house.

– 3 –

AS I’VE SAID,
my side of the house was only one-half of the entire building. The dividing walls must have been very thick, for I never heard any sound from the other side. I imagined it must have the same big, gloomy rooms and the same forbidding basement. Victoria Gough had told me a retired History professor lived there.

During the first few weeks, I often sat at a rickety picnic table in the back yard, trying to write. I was working on a novel and it wasn’t going well. Several times, through the gaps in a high, straggly hedge, I caught a glimpse of our neighbour doing some gardening.

One day in particular, I was sitting there with pen and paper, just staring into space or admiring the trees with their lush foliage and the variety of birds that seemed to live in them. I suddenly had a sense I was being watched and looked up—and there he was, just turning away from a gap in the hedge. He was a thin man with a pinched face and a prominent jaw. He must have been well into his seventies.

He looked vaguely familiar in the way many elderly people do.

When I phoned my wife that night after dinner, I mentioned seeing him. By then, I’d had a glass or two of wine and I suppose I felt philosophic. I said how odd it was that just as babies often look alike, so do the elderly. I speculated that, in the case of babies, life hasn’t had a chance to place any distinguishing marks on them; whereas, in the case of the very old, the years have stripped away most of the distinctions. “Time seems to beat them down,” I said, poetically, “leaving them all alike again. Like hills that were once mountains ranges.”

“Hmph!” was all my wife said.

ONE MORNING, TO AVOID DOING MY QUOTA
of writing, I even resorted to pulling some weeds from a flower bed in the back yard. I happened to look up and saw my neighbour standing at a gap in the hedge and looking down at me. The sun was directly behind him so his fine white hair was tinged with gold. We were only three or four feet apart and could hardly avoid speaking.

“Good morning,” I said. I held out my hand to him through the gap and introduced myself.

His hand was bony, but his grip was quite strong.

“How do you do?” he said. “My name is Vanderlinden. Thomas Vanderlinden.” He had a soft, tenor-ish kind of voice and such alert blue eyes you might have believed there really was another, much younger man hiding in that old body. He asked me how I was enjoying the house. I told him I loved it—except for the basement. I gave him a humorous account of my nightmare.

He didn’t seem amused.

“Oh, well,” I said, “I know dreams don’t interest most people.”

“That’s quite all right,” he said. “Do you happen to have read any of the works of Vociferus O’Higgins?”

I laughed. “No,” I said, “I’m sure I’d remember anyone with a weird name like that.”

He didn’t laugh. “Not many people have read O’Higgins,” he said. “In fact, his books haven’t been published for three hundred years.”

I had a feeling I was in for a lecture.

“O’Higgins was a great student of dreams and insomnia,” said my neighbour. “His major treatise was
Spiritus Nocturnus
. Sixteen forty. In it, he claimed even God used to enjoy dreaming until He created this world. When He saw how it turned out, it gave Him such nightmares, He was afraid to let Himself fall asleep any more.”

“Wouldn’t that have been a dangerous kind of idea to publish in those days, what with the Inquisition and that sort of thing?” I said, just to show I knew something.

“Very dangerous,” he said. “But then, O’Higgins wrote a lot of dangerous things. And indeed, he was burned at the stake for them, eventually. His work’s full of quite ingenious thinking for a man of his time. One of his theories was that dreams are the soul’s memories of the body.”

I was puzzled by that.

“He seemed to mean,” he said, “that when you’re asleep the soul—which is supposed to be pure—remembers the body as a dangerous, chaotic place it’s been forced to inhabit. But, according to O’Higgins, it actually longs for the body with all its flaws.”

I nodded politely. “Was that what they burned him at the stake for?” I said.

“Not at all,” said Thomas Vanderlinden. “What they objected to mainly was another section in his book. In that part, he posited that religion itself was dreamt up by the weakest human beings—those who need to believe in a divine order in all things. They have to keep finding evidence for that order everywhere, so that they can congratulate themselves for being right. On the other hand, the strongest human beings need no religion. They believe chaos is at the root of everything and they find unlimited evidence of it and are convinced that those who can’t see it are nothing but fools.” He smiled a tight little smile. “That was the idea they burned him at the stake for. And they burned every one of his books they could find. Only one or two copies survived.”

I was trying to think of something to say that would make me sound intelligent. “How absurd,” I said, “for someone to be burned at the stake over that kind of thing.”

From the way Thomas Vanderlinden looked at me, I couldn’t be sure he agreed with me. “Time for my lunch now,” he said abruptly, and disappeared from the gap in the hedge, leaving me standing, quite astonished at this entire conversation with a man I’d just met.

I SAW HIM IN THE GARDEN
frequently after that and we’d invariably talk. But never small talk—he had no interest in that. I guessed he missed having an audience of students for his scholarship and I’d become a substitute. He admitted to an excessive love of reading. “It’s probably a kind of drug,” he said. “Have you read any of Balthazarus of Rotterdam? Late sixteenth century?”

Of course, I hadn’t.

“Balthazarus believed that the sensation—or lack of sensation—of being immersed in a book is actually thought, thinking itself,” said my neighbour. “Perhaps it’s that disembodied feeling that makes reading so addictive.”

“Ah,” I said.

On another occasion, he defended his enthusiasm for curious ideas he’d find in old books: “Most modern scholars think these old notions are like the light from stars—impressive enough, but dead nevertheless.” He looked at me with those unblinking blue eyes. “But even if that’s true, I always think there’s no harm in admiring the ingenuity of the minds that invented them. Wouldn’t you say so?”

Naturally, I agreed.

“Certainly, no one would deny the world has progressed in the last few hundred years,” he said. “But, I wonder: has it progressed in the right direction?”

I was glad to see he really didn’t expect an answer from me.

ON ANOTHER OF THOSE SULTRY MORNINGS
as I was making some coffee I heard a loud wailing. It was an ambulance and it pulled up at my neighbour’s pathway. Not long after, I saw him being wheeled out on a stretcher.

As soon as the ambulance left, I went over to his door and pushed the old brass bell-button. A little nunnish woman of middle age with a brown, round face answered. I’d seen her once or twice walking along the street.

“Is everything all right?” I said. “Is there anything I can do?”

“The professor’s been taken ill,” she said. “It’s happened before but this time it’s bad.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “By the way, I’m your neighbour.”

“Yes, he’s mentioned you,” she said.

I was about to ask if she was his wife, when she said: “I work for Home Makers. I just clean the house and sometimes cook. It’s lucky I was here when he felt ill.”

There was no more to say so I was about to go.

“He left me a message for you,” she said. “He hoped you’d visit him in the hospital.”

“He did?” I was surprised, considering the short time I’d known him.

She assured me that was the message.

“He’ll be in Camberloo General,” she said.

“Then maybe,” I said, “I’ll drop by some time.”

I didn’t really intend to.

– 4 –

TO GET TO THE POINT
of all this: one afternoon, three days after Thomas Vanderlinden was taken away, I happened to be driving along Regent Street past Camberloo General when I made up my mind—on a whim—to drop by and see him.

I found him in one of those little private rooms, propped up in bed. He was hooked up to various machines and had an oxygen mask on. He turned his head when he heard the door and took off his mask, like a scuba diver, surfacing. “How kind of you to come,” he said.

His voice was quite strong, but I could see that he was indeed very sick. His already thin face was strained, and though his eyes were alert enough, there was a certain look in them—I suppose of someone who’s seen the shadow of death.

“How are you?” I said.

“Oh, fine, fine,” he said. “It’s so nice of you to visit me. I know you must be busy.” He was aware by then that I was struggling with a novel.

Hanging on the wall beside him was a wooden cross, for this hospital had once had religious affiliations. He saw me looking over at it.

“I can’t help seeing it when I’m lying here,” he said. “I know it’ s meant to have an edifying effect, but it makes me think more of a kite about to take off.”

That was the first time I’d heard him say something I was sure was meant to be funny.