The House That Jack Built (9 page)

    'My God, it's a disaster,' said Effie. Immediately, she wished she hadn't. But then immediately after that, she was glad she had. She couldn't go on treading on eggshells for ever. She wanted Craig to recover from his 'accident', but part of that recovery was getting back to normal, allowing herself to speak her mind. He had been so angry lately, so impossibly angry, that she had fallen into the habit of biting her tongue; and she didn't want to do that any more.

    But Craig said, 'You're right. Just look at the state of that roof.'

    He continued to drive slowly through the rain down the winding driveway that curved around the right-hand side of the lawns. Effie could see hardly anything except streaking rainwater and gloomy shadows, and the dazzling reflection of Norman's headlamps in her rearview mirror. But then the driveway rose in a gradual gradient until it reached a wide brick-paved circle in front of Valhalla's main entrance. In the centre of the circle stood the sinister, headless statue of a naked woman, her back encrusted with lichen, like a diseased cloak. In one hand she carried a broken dagger. In the other she was holding up something that looked like a sackful of dead puppies, although it was too burdened with dripping moss for Effie to see it very clearly.

    Norman pulled up behind them, climbed out of his car and came scuttling towards them through the rain. He knocked on the window. 'Do you have an umbrella?' he shouted, over the thunder.

    'Two,' Effie reassured him.

    'Good. You're going to need them. There's a couple of places the roof has come down.'

    Effie took hold of Craig's hand. 'Craig… really, do you think there's any point in doing this? It must have been a beautiful house once, but look at it now. We couldn't even afford to repair the roof.'

    'You said yourself that we were only looking, okay?'

    She didn't know what to say. He had that old, warm look in his eyes. He kissed her forehead, and then kissed her cheek, right beside her nose, and then he kissed her on the lips.

    'There's no harm in looking, is there?'

    She kissed him back. He must have shaved very closely this morning, because his cheek was unusually smooth, like well-polished leather.

    Norman's hair was beginning to drip, his nose wrinkled against the rain. 'Are you coming, like, or what? I mean, I don't mind standing here for the rest of my life catching pneumonia, but I was kind of concerned for you guys. People can get a cramp if they stay in cars too long.'

    'Come on,' said Craig, and opened the car door. And Effie thought, with a smile of resignation:
I won't be able to stop him, not just yet.
Today, he's all excited. Tomorrow, or the day after, he'll have seen how bad it is, and worked out the costings to put it right. Two or three million just to make it weatherproof again, and even half-habitable; another three to four million to furnish it and carpet it and make it look like home.

    Craig hobbled around to the back of the car, took the umbrellas out of the boot and opened them up. Even so, Effie screamed as they hurried through the rain. 'God, it's cold!' They climbed the semi-circular brick steps which led up to the portico, and found themselves facing Valhalla's double front doors - weathered, dull, with scarcely any paint left on them. In the centre of each door was a heavy, corroded knob. On the right-hand side hung a bell-pull, cast in bronze in the shape of a snarling wolf.

    'Do you think we ought to ring, just to warn the ghosts that we're here?' joked Craig.

    Norman didn't seem to think that was particularly funny. 'You see this bell-pull? It's supposed to be Coyote, the Native American demon. If you pull it and you're not welcome, or you've come to the house with evil in your heart, it'll, like, bite your hand off.'

    'Where'd you learn that hogwash?' asked Craig. He took out the key that Walter Van Buren had given him, and fitted it into the door.

    'Excuse me, that's not hogwash. My mom told me. She's an expert on all that kind of stuff. She said it's something to do with the doorway facing east.'

    'Your mom's been here?' asked Effie. Craig was having trouble with the lock.

    'Oh, sure, we used to bring picnics up here, pretend we were rich. It's pretty nice when it's sunny.'

    At last Craig managed to turn the key in the lock. He pushed the door and it swung open in complete silence. 'Come on, then,' he said. 'Let's see just how much of a disaster this is. Or maybe it isn't.'

    They stepped through the doorway into a huge oak-panelled hall, with a pale marble floor. There were two wide oak staircases, one on either side of the hall, both leading up to a galleried landing. On the newel posts of each staircase stood bronze statuettes of naked women, each holding up a torch. The glass flames from each torch were broken, and one of the women was headless, like the statue outside.

    Effie looked up. There were high leaded windows on either side, through which she could see the lightning still flickering. Dozens and dozens of panes of glass had been broken, and the marble floor was crunchy with grit and splinters.

    There was a strong, strange smell in the house, too. Not dry rot or wet rot, which she would have expected, but a pungent smell like some kind of liniment - camphor and menthol and aniseed. It reminded her of changing-rooms and clinics and the hospital where her father had died. She suddenly thought of her mother, standing at the very end of a long, brightly-lit corridor, her face devastated by what had happened, like a smashed jelly-jar.

    Norman had brought a powerful flashlight with him, and he switched it on. The beam darted up to the landing, then back down again, then pointed at the floor. 'This hall area is pretty sound. The floor's good, just needs cleaning up. There's a marble restoring company in Albany, Schuhmacher's, they'll probably do it for you for less than four thousand.'

    'Four thousand?' Effie repeated. 'Just for cleaning the floor?'

    'It's terrific marble, imported from Belgium. Beautifully brecciated. That means kind of a broken pattern. You don't see marble laid like this, not these days. It's not purbeck, it's proper genuine marble. It would be worth the money, like, just to see it, the way it was.'

    'Four thousand isn't bad, for a floor like this,' said Craig, with his back turned. His voice echoed so much that it sounded as if he were hiding under the right-hand staircase and speaking from there; and that his twin was speaking from the gallery.

    The flashlight beam jumped up to the windows. 'The floor may be reasonable, but the windows will cost you. These are all handmade, full lead glass. Some of them are overscaled, like these. Some of them are underscaled.'

    Craig turned around. For a second, he looked foxy-eyed again, but then he said, 'What does that exactly mean, overscaled and underscaled?'

    'Oh… it means that some of them are bigger than they traditionally ought to be, right? and some of them are smaller. It's kind of an architectural trick, you know, to make them look more varied. Whatever, none of them are standard, so you're looking at two or three hundred thousand dollars' worth of specialist glazing; and that's if we can find somebody cheap, who'll do it for the glory.'

    Craig nodded, but said nothing. It seemed to Effie that his nod was echoed; albeit silently; as if the house understood that here was somebody who found it exciting. She had seen women at cocktail parties unconsciously imitating Craig's affirmative nods,
oh, yes, Craig, yes, Craig, yes
, and that was usually when she ostentatiously linked arms with him, in case there was any mistake about the fact that he was happily married.

    The flashlight darted up to the galleried landing, and illuminated a coat of arms, carved out of mahogany. 'See that?' said Norman. 'That was put up by the guy who built Valhalla, Jack Belias. There's a bobbin in one quarter… that's to represent his textile business. Then dice in the opposite quarter, because he was crazy for gambling. Then a dragon, because the name Belias was supposed to be something to do with dragons, like. Then a skull.'

    'What was the skull for?' asked Effie.

    'I don't know. Life and death, maybe. Jack Belias was known for taking ridiculous risks. I guess he was so rich, he thought what the hell. He flew airplanes, drove race-cars and powerboats and all that kind of stuff. He used to have a revolver on his sideboard, that's what they say, with one bullet in it and every day before breakfast he used to spin the cylinder, stick the muzzle in his mouth and pull the trigger.'

    'That motto underneath… do you know what that means?' asked Craig.

    '
Non omnis moriar?
Who knows?'

    Effie said, 'That means something like, "Not all of us shall die". No, no, wait a minute, it's first person singular. It means, "I shall never completely die".'

    'Pretty creepy for a haunted house,' said Norman, and shone the flashlight under his chin so that his face looked like a glowing, disembodied death mask.

    'I thought I told you no ghost talk,' Craig reminded him, sharply. 'My wife doesn't like it.'

    'I don't mind,' said Effie. 'I like a good ghost story. Just don't ask me to spend the night here, that's all.'

    Thunder rumbled indigestively, but the storm was obviously moving away south-eastwards.

    'Come take a look at the ballroom,' Norman suggested. 'Fishkill really did a job on it. It's a pity they ran out of money.'

    He led them beneath the broken windows where the rain sprayed in, and along the panelled corridor that took them along the southern side of the house. Their feet crunched on shattered glass and grit. Through the overscaled and underscaled windows, Effie could see the terrace outside, and the rain steadily sifting across the lawns. Most of the terrace was humped with lumps of black, halfliquefied moss, and impossibly tall thistles grew up between the bricks. She felt as if she were walking through Sleeping Beauty's castle, neglected for a hundred years. She could almost believe that there were people still sleeping in the bedrooms upstairs. She couldn't explain it, but there was certainly a feeling that Valhalla hadn't been deserted. While the roofing collapsed and the rooks made nests in the chimney stacks; while rainwater poured through the ceilings and windows cracked in the summer heat, the house hadn't died, but simply closed its eyes and slumbered.

    She reached out and took hold of Craig's hand, and he clasped it warmly.

    'Can't you just see us living here?' he asked her. 'Talk about style. We'd have to dress for dinner every single evening.'

    'Dress for dinner? We'd have to dress to go to the bathroom.'

    He laughed, and kissed her. 'I forgot you. I forgot how funny you were.'

    She kissed him back, and what started out as a small peck on the lips became a sudden, urgent embrace. It was only broken up by Norman turning around with his flashlight.

    'Oh, excuse me. Didn't mean to break anything up or nothing.'

    'That's okay,' Effie told him. 'Realty over one hundred thousand square feet always has that efFect on me.'

    But Craig held her hand in both of his hands; pressed it like a lily in a bible; and his eyes were bright.

    'Then shall I awake to the original fervour, upright and alone in an ancient flood of light, lilies! and one of you for innocence.'

    'Mallarmo,' Effie breathed.

    'You remembered.'

    'Remembered? I never forgot.'

    They followed Norman along the corridor until they reached a wide pair of double oak doors, with an arched Gothic-style architrave. 'My mom says the ballroom is definitely haunted. In fact it's one of the most haunted loci in the whole house, except for one bedroom upstairs, which is so seriously haunted that she won't even go within fifty feet of it.'

    'I thought you were supposed to be encouraging us to think about buying,' said Effie, squeezing Craig's hand tighter. 'Not scaring us half to death.'

    Norman shook his long wet hair. 'Hey, don't worry about me. I don't care if you want to buy it or not, except that it could give me some work if you did. I'm here to give you the guided tour, for which Mr. Van Buren will slip me a ten-spot. And a few ballpark costings, if you want them. That's all. Anyhow, you'd be amazed how many people love the idea of a house with ghosts in it. They even pay extra.'

    He opened the double doors. 'Besides,' he added, 'you shouldn't pay too much attention to what my mom has to say on the subject of the supernatural. My mom thinks that just about every building in the Hudson River Valley is possessed by spirits. Even the Cold Spring supermarket. She says that, at night, the shopping carts roll up and down the aisles on their own. Nobody pushing them.'

    'That's even spookier than a haunted ballroom.'

    But it wasn't. Because when Norman opened both doors, and they saw the ballroom for themselves, they saw a silent, dusty room that must have been peopled by the kind of memories that, for most of us, are only fairy stories, and dreams, and half-forgotten snatches from black-and-white movies.

    It was over a hundred feet square, with a high pillared gallery all the way around it. Its ceiling rose right up to the roof of the house, and was pierced by an elegant oval skylight. None of the glass in the skylight was broken, but it was clogged with fallen leaves and obscured with livid green lichen. From the centre of it, a long chain hung down. Presumably it had once carried a large chandelier, but now it ended in nothing but a huge hook and four electric wires bound with insulating-tape.

    Effie walked through the diagonal beam of the flashlight across the floor. She was entranced. The room was dusty, but it had been immaculately restored, with gilded acanthus leaves on the pale stucco pillars, and elegant bronze wall-lights in the shape of women's hands holding up blazing glass torches. The window frames and the panelling had been stripped and polished, although the polish had a breathed-over look from damp and neglect. The floor had been completely relaid and still looked highly-burnished even beneath a two-year coating of dust.