The House That Jack Built (18 page)

    'All right, then. Norman can stay. But careful where you walk, Norman, okay? I don't want you kebabbed, the way that surveyor was.'

    'Do you mind not saying kebabbed?' asked Norman. His eyes were very large and swimmy behind his spectacles. 'Morton was a friend of ours. You know, my mom and me.'

    Craig cleared his throat, said 'Sorry', although he didn't sound it.

    They climbed the left-hand staircase. The risers creaked, and they could hear the pegs straining, but the stairs on the whole were very firm. Norman's flashlight played sword fights between their legs, and cast humped and jumping shadows on the walls.

    'It's a good thing it's summer,' Norman remarked, shining his flashlight down to the hallway below them. 'This place would be freezing, else.'

    'I think it's cold enough now,' said Effie. She could feel a terrible deadness in the house; a sense of memories that had gradually sunk to the floor, and gathered in crevices; and words that had turned into powdery ash. They reached the landing that overlooked the hallway, and Craig opened the double doors, which swung back silendy, to reveal a gloomy red-carpeted anteroom, with a single tilted-over chair in it. At one dme, there must have been sofas to sit on and mirrors on the walls. The screw holes for the mirrors were still visible. Norman flicked his light around, from floor to ceiling, and then diagonally across the walls, and said, 'This part of the house is pretty good. You're looking at decoraung costs here - paint, paper, carpeting, that's all. You could leave it till last.'

    There were two doors on the opposite wall of the anteroom: a single door on the right which led to the corridor that ran the length of Valhalla's second storey, and a pair of solid oak double doors, stained and marked but still in near perfect condition. Effie approached them, and touched them with her fingertips. They were elaborately hand-carved with roses and briars and lilies; and the faces of scores of hooded women with their eyes closed, all with their eyes closed. Above the women's heads were curly carved clouds, like a Durer etching, and ravens flying.

    'This is so strange,' she whispered. But she found it alluring, in a way. It had the same allegorical quality as the stained-glass window on the other side of the house: a riddle, but an explanation too, if only you knew what it was trying to explain. 'They're not dead, these women, because they're standing up… But why are their eyes closed?'

    'And look at this,' said Craig, coming up behind her. 'There's a man with his back turned, just the same as the window… and a tower, with flags. And look at this writing, on the flags.'

    Cut into each of the banners, in exact serif script, were the words Samvi, Sansavi, Semangelaf.

    Norman peered closely at the doors, lifting his spectacles so that he could see them in more detail. 'They're really wild, these doors. You couldn't reproduce them today. Where would you get the craftsmen? I mean look at those faces, man, you could almost believe that they're living and breathing. You could almost believe that they're going to open their eyes, and scream at you.'

    'Don't,' Effie admonished him. 'I'm edgy enough as it is. If I thought for one moment that they were really going to open their eyes-'

    Craig rapped one of the women's faces on the bridge of the nose, hard, with his knuckle. 'Happy?' he asked Norman, half jocular and half aggressive. 'What did I say to you before? No more haunted house stuff.'

    Effie was tempted to mention the sobbing that she had heard in the blue-carpeted bedroom. She even started to say, 'You may not think it's haunted, but-' But she thought she heard somebody catch their breath - a woman - and her tongue curled up in mid-sentence and she stopped herself. She looked around, both frightened and excited. Yet neither Craig nor Norman appeared to have heard anything, and they both carried on as if nothing had happened.

    Craig took hold of her arm, and said, 'It's spooky, I'll give you that. But spooky isn't real. Spooky is all in the mind.'

    'I'm pleased you're so confident,' said Norman.

    Craig twisted both handles of the double doors, and opened them up. They stepped into the master bedroom, a huge room with floor-length windows overlooking the gardens (although they were inky black now, because it was night). Above their heads there was a domed ceiling with small clerestory windows pierced in it, and faded murals of flying angles with immense feathery wings and coral-snakes like venomous zigzag bangles, and diving cormorants and yellow macaws.

    Norman flicked his flashlight from one side of the dome to the other, and Effie saw fruit trees and flowering vines, and a forest thick with pale cream lilies. A nude man stood with his back turned. A woman in a black nun's habit stood with her eyes closed.

    'My mom thinks it's supposed to be the Garden of Eden,' Norman remarked.

    Craig paced around, looking up at it. Time and grime had mottled the flesh colours and rotted the apples on the Tree of Knowledge. In fact, on closer inspection, it wasn't just time and grime that gave it such an air of decay. There were thistles growing up between the lilies, the waterways were clogged with weed, and many of the trees were infected with parasitic fungus. If this was the Garden of Eden, it was the Garden of Eden after the Fall.

    'It wouldn't take much to clean this up.' Craig asked Norman, 'Do you happen to know who painted it?'

    'It was a local artist, Ruden McCane. He used to paint covers for Collier's and Woman's Home Companion. He was pretty famous. But Jack Belias could have afforded anybody. He could have afforded, like, Norman Rockwell. Or Maxfield Parrish. Or even Magritte, I guess.'

    'I like it,' said Craig, nodding with enthusiasm. 'I really like it.' Then, 'How about this picnic? I'm starved. You going to join us, Norman?'

    'Sure thing.'

    Craig tossed him the car keys, quite hard. 'In that case you can bring up the hamper, and the lamps, too.'

    Norman held up the key ring with one finger, and Effie thought for a moment that he was going to refuse. But he gave Craig an exaggerated grin and said, ' "Please"?' and off he went.

    When he came back they unrolled their futon in the centre of the floor, shook it to plump it up, and then positioned four pressure lamps, one at each corner. Craig spread out the large plaid blanket from the car, as well as a waterproof groundsheet, while Effie opened up the picnic hamper that Pig Hill Inn had prepared for them, complete with plates and glasses and silver cutlery and red-check napkins. The hamper was packed with cold roast chicken, stuffed tomato salad, fresh colonial bread dotted with fragments of pecans and candied peel. Craig opened a bottle of Lanson champagne which had been kept chilled in a plastic wrapper.

    'This is the life, hunh?' said Norman, sitting cross-legged and throwing his hair back over his shoulders. 'You wait till you get this place, like, all fixed up. You won't know yourselves.' The pressure lamps cast his shadow huge and wavering on the wall behind him, like the shadow of a witch or a hooded nun.

    'So you really think you can do something with this place, then.'

    'Sure. I've got the feel, that's the great thing. Got to tell you, though, I'm not really an expert. I studied a year at art school, in New York, but I could never draw too good and I quit. I mean I drew better than Picasso, but who couldn't. So I studied architecture for three years. I thought I was going to be Frank Lloyd Wright the second, but I didn't have the brain. I couldn't get it together with all those stress factors and all that load-bearing stuff.' He rolled his eyes. 'All that calculatin'. And concrete left me cold. But I did have a real good feel for old buildings, and taking care of them, and respecting what the men who first built them had been trying to achieve. So I started helping some of the local builders, real craftsmen that were friends of my mom, guys with beards, like, who knew about gam-breled roofs and shingle-sheathing and rusticated brickwork.'

    He took a glass of champagne. 'I guess I'm more of an entrepreneur, if you know what I mean. I'm good at, like, getting people together. But restoring this place, that's my dream. When we came here for picnics, my mom and me, I used to look at this house and think, you know, what was it like when it was new, and perfect, and there was shiny copper on the roof, and flags flying.'

    Craig sat down beside him. His face looked oddly distorted in the upward light from the pressure lamp, large nose, puffy eyes. 'Let me tell you something, Norman… Valhalla's going to look like that again.'

    'Oh, hey,' Norman interrupted. 'I forgot to tell you. I found a window guy. A glazier, in Kingston. He's an old guy who used to do churches and stuff like that. I showed him the blueprints, and he's sure he can restore your windows. He can still make window-glass by the crown method, that's where they spin it around into a big circular sheet, like, and then cut it up… but you always end up with what they call a bullion, you know, that knobby bit in the centre. But of course they didn't have bullions here at Valhalla… the place was too quality. In the old days,you could tell that somebody didn't have too much money because they used the bullions as well as the plain part.'

    Craig slapped him on the shoulder. 'Don't worry… we'll get it all back together. And that's great, about the window guy.'

    

    

    They had finished their third bottle of champagne and Effie was growing drowsy. She would have given a hundred dollars to be back in her bed at the Pig Hill Inn, but Craig and Norman were both still talkative and hyped-up. They played cards for over two hours, with a seriousness that was completely out of proportion to the fact that they were staking only nickels and dimes; and while they played they devised grandiose plans to replace all the carved oak panelling, and restore the floors with patterned parquet. They discussed the gardens, and the tennis courts, and who they could find to restore the landscaping.

    At last, however, Norman ran out of loose change, and they exhausted the subject of restoring Valhalla, and fell silent, and finished what was left of their champagne. Effie felt that Craig and Norman had begun to develop a strange bond between them. They disliked each other in almost every way that she could think of, and were completely indifferent to each other's values; but their enthusiasm for restoring Valhalla was so great that they had reached a complex kind of compromise.

    Norman's digital watch beeped the hour. 'Don't you think it's time we tried to get some sleep?' asked Effie.

    'I want to do some prowling around first,' said Norman. 'I want to do some listening. It's amazing what you can tell about a house just by listening.'

    Craig looked around. 'I'm not ready to go to sleep yet. This place has such a feel to it.'

    'How about a horror story?' Norman suggested. 'We always used to tell each other horror stories, when we were like camping out.'

    'I don't know any horror stories,' Craig told him. 'I guess you could say that international commercial law is pretty horrific, but I don't think that US Treasury vs Hong Kong Securities would make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.'

    'Oh, come on,' said Effie snuggling the blanket around her shoulders. 'I feel creepy enough already. And cold. And tired.' She didn't say frightened, although she was. She didn't like the way that their huge shadows kept dancing and dipping on the bedroom walls. And she couldn't help listening for footsteps of a man running downstairs, or the anguished, remote sobbing that had come from the blue-carpeted room on Valhalla's third storey.

    Norman drained his champagne in three swallows, wiped his mouth, and said, 'Okay… I'll wander around for a while, then I'll grab some zees myself. Oh... don't worry. I brought my own sleeping bag. I have to put up the roof on my car anyway, in case it rains.'

    'It won't rain,' said Craig, flatly.

    'The forecast said that it might.'

    'It won't. Believe me, it won't.'

    'It might, and if it does, I don't want my car filled up with water, okay?'

    Craig reached into his pocket, took out his slim Gucci billfold, and slapped a $50 bill onto the futon. 'Fifty bucks says that it won't.'

    Norman stared at it, and then said, 'Okay, man, you're on. But I don't have fifty dollars on me right now.'

    'I'll trust you. So long as you leave the roof of your car down.'

    'Hey, supposing I win, and it does rain?'

    'Then you can spend your fifty drying it out.'

    Effie said, 'Craig… you never made bets like that in your life!'

    She was not only astonished: she was upset. She detested gambling. Her parents had always worked hard for their money, and so had she, and that was why she felt protective about it - unlike her Uncle Bernard, who had lost automobiles and jewellery and savings accounts at Saratoga Race Track. One evening, he had lost his house at the poker table while his family unsuspectingly slept in it. The next morning, Effie's cousins had all turned up on their doorstep, three of them, dazed, bewildered and homeless, carrying blankets. Only the kindness of Uncle Jack's creditor had made it possible for them to keep a roof over their heads.

    Norman stood up, a little unsteadily. 'You know something? I never drank champagne before. But I think I could get used to it. If my restoration business works out good. I'm just going to take a look around. I want to catch this sucker by surprise, know what I mean? Houses move, when you're asleep. I could tell you a story about a house that was never the same, from one long day to the next. Houses move, man. They're living: they're animate. Can't you feel this place breathing? I've seen doors change position; I've seen beams rearranged. One of the guys I use for carpentry, old Henry Sneider, he swears a whole Dutch barn rebuilt itself once, in like two or three days. He was supposed to be knocking it down, but every morning he came back and it was halfway built back up again… with nothing to show who did it. No footprints, no wood-shavings, nothing. You can still see it standing today, over at Salisbury Mills. I could tell you more, man. There's a house in Manitou where the windows turn red. I mean solid red, like blood.'