The Night Stages (7 page)

It wasn’t until he had completed several dozen preparatory drawings that he realized that it was the sensibility of his own past he was attempting to recover, the sharpness of that post-adolescent vision that had been so available and clear when he had been moving from place to place without plans or obligations. Occasionally, when he was working on the maquette, this sensibility came so palpably near he felt he could almost reach out and touch the time that had engendered them.

On a frigid, pre-dawn morning in late March, Kenneth left his house and studio and walked through the town to the train station with the letter from the committee in the pocket of his long grey overcoat and only one suitcase in his hand – his crated art supplies and a trunk filled with personal items had been delivered to the quay the previous afternoon. The station itself was hidden behind mountainous banks of plowed snow, but as he turned onto the short street that led to the tracks, he
saw the veil of yellow light that rose from the facade’s windows. The door of a pickup truck slammed, startling, in what had up until then been total, glacial silence. Then he heard the train, and though he knew it was still a long way off, he quickened his pace.

T
he first thing Tam sees when she wakens in the dim morning light is the flat grey fog framed by one of the large windows of the terminal. Wrapped in her coat, with her handbag for a pillow, she has managed to achieve a few hours of sleep by lying down on the banquette. As she lifts herself into a semi-upright position, she regards the neutral greyness behind the glass. She is nowhere, and she feels nothing but a sense of disorientation. And then she recalls the journey in the car, the flight over the ocean, and the particular weather pattern, emotional and actual, that has resulted in her waking in this place. Niall walks into her mind, and the pain sets in; familiar, dogged, unavoidable. She rises quickly to her feet.

She thinks about making inquiries at the Airlines desk, as she had on several occasions the previous evening and afternoon. But the answer to the question she would ask the two uniformed attendants is so obvious in the face of the blurred images beyond the glass, she decides against this and returns
to the banquette. Other passengers have awakened now and are either making their way toward the washrooms or are sitting in their wrinkled clothing, stunned and defeated-looking, staring at the floor. Some had tried to engage her in conversation the previous day, hoping, she assumed, to pass the time. But there is no talk in her, nothing beyond a long train of memories and an inner annulment.

There is a small fool in this mural, she thinks, as the painting comes into focus; a fool disguised as a child. The fool wears a tri-cornered hat and is positioned at ground level, almost but not quite at the centre of the picture, one of several children placed in a row. The figure is genderless, though fools were traditionally male, were they not? As far as she knew, no woman had embraced this particular vocation, at least not as a performer. Niall might know or, if not, his boss McWilliams. There was more than likely something Shakespearean about fools and weather that both men would be happy to quote. Puck, maybe, but was Puck a fool?

Her first husband was a fool of sorts, she decides, but essentially blameless, though thoroughly irritating in his foolishness. Her father is a different kind of fool. Opinionated, sometimes blind to the suffering of others, and, always opportunistic, he is the kind of fool who preys on the foolishness of others. But perhaps she is being too hard. Her parents were kind enough people really, at least until her father entered the commercial world. Before the war they had been rich in a courteous manner, presiding over their village and the tenants in it in a vague, good-natured, almost listless way, following a
system of life that they believed had always been, and would therefore continue to be, in effect. The idea that there might be some other system that would be more just had simply never occurred to them. Tam had tried to convince herself that she had run away because, even as a child, she could understand injustice and wanted no part of it. But she has to admit now that this was not the case, not when she was a child and not later either, when the village was gone and her father had become a successful industrialist, using the family name for his construction company: Edgeworth Enterprises. She hadn’t even run from that, not really. She had run because she could never make a viable agreement with structure, and what the structure was attached to made no real difference, even though, there near the mountains, among those country people, with Niall circling her life, she had been sometimes happy in a way that almost made her believe she would remain so forever.

The small dry goods shop, at the west end of her childhood village of St. Derwent, was attached to the shopkeeper’s home. A curtain hung at the back of the shop beyond which one could glimpse a dark hallway that led into the mysterious domestic interior. This had fascinated her as a young child. But the shop itself had fascinated her as well: she had been intrigued by bright objects in battered wooden bins, or wrapped packages placed on long shelves on either side of narrow aisles. She was always told to remain on a high stool near the counter while
her nanny gossiped with the shopkeeper. Mrs. Bentley, she thinks, or Mrs. Benchley. It was there, at the age of six, that she had learned that the following autumn, after her seventh birthday, she was to be sent away to school. There will be no governess for her, her nan had said, and no job for me either. She had loved her nan, whom she had never seen again, and loved her still in some buried, deep way, often dreaming about her very early in the morning so that she would wake with the comforting feeling that this uncomplicated, affectionate woman was sleeping in the next room.

She glances at the large, welcoming woman on the far right of the mural. Her nan, sort of. Yes, a bit like her. Some of the painted children are gathered around this woman, though they seem to be paying no attention to her.

It was the anticipated loss of her nan that had made her slip from the stool, at a moment when the adults had changed the topic to a story concerning the drinking habits of the grocer, and pass quietly beyond the curtain. Here was a dark, transitory space with a door at one end leading to a long, tapering, under-the-stairs broom closet the contents of which she could barely make out in the gloom, though she recognized the shape of a wooden stepladder and crawled under it. Soon she had wrapped herself up in an old rug she found. Her feet faced the closed door, and her head was under the first of what would have been the house stairs. She had always liked lying on the floor of a room, imagining what it would be like to walk on the ceiling, and the inverted stairs were challenging enough in this fantasy to distract her. She
determined to stay there for a long period of time. This she had done, all through her nan’s hysterics which had erupted not long after her disappearance, and all through the stillness, later, after the shop had gone quiet. She stayed when she heard voices once again: policemen questioning the shopkeepers, and even when she heard the husband tell his wife that the village pond would be dragged. This news frightened her enough that she wondered if she could ever leave the spot to appear in front of her sometimes explosively bad-tempered father. She finally emerged, however, the next morning, after a fairly good sleep under the rug, and walked into the kitchen of the house. The shopkeeper had screamed and then rang Tam’s father. “I’m hungry,” were the first words she had said. And she was.

When she went away to school, and in spite of what she had told Niall about her childhood, she had, for a while, loved the order of the day and of the surroundings, the desks arranged in rows, the bells that marked out the time for each activity, how numbers ran up and down in columns and words marched along in a straight line. And she kept close to her heart the fact that art classes were held three times a week in a room full of easels and unlimited paper of every size and texture. She drew horses mostly, and the skyscrapers of New York that she had seen in magazines, because she intended to live in one of these as soon as she could arrange to do so. She was at the top or near the top of her class in every subject – she
couldn’t imagine laziness – but she could be wild as well in the dormitories and out of doors, often running with the older girls or taunting them from a distance when they refused to let her join in a field hockey or netball game. She knew instinctively that by the time she was old enough to be granted inclusion in such activities, she would no longer want them. All through her life, once she had gained anything she had previously desired, the thing itself would immediately lose lustre.

She had run away from the school for the first time when she was twelve, after half a year of elaborate planning, hoarding of weekly allowances, sweets, and biscuits, and a spate of cheerful cooperative behaviour that was designed to put the school authorities off the scent. Her report card from that term praised her mature demeanour and leadership qualities and insisted that she was a credit to her school; a suggestion she would have scoffed at at the time – had she known – but that merely amused her when she came across the report in a drawer years later.

She had enjoyed the school’s riding lessons with all the various sides of her nature. In spite of having told Niall that her favourite time was after lights out, when she could no longer see the place, each week she would look forward to the warmth of the animals and the fleeting sense of freedom that came to her when she was able to move the horse from a canter into a gallop, which is precisely what she did the day she escaped. Except that when she reached the limits of the field, rather than turn back, she encouraged her mount to jump the
fence. The fact that she was able to do so successfully seemed like a sign to her that she had taken the right decision, and she therefore encouraged the animal to jump the next fence as well, an act that placed them both firmly on a country lane where they trotted contentedly toward an unknown horizon.

She was fully happy then, as she would always be when the truant was alive in her, and she listened with satisfaction to the sound of hooves on gravel mixed with the faint jingling and crackling of the pocket money and wrapped sweets in her backpack. How perfectly simple escape was – there had never been anything holding her back – and she wondered why people didn’t do it all the time, why they departed each day at a time arranged by others in order to sit in shops and offices and classrooms they despised. She was also certain that her costume – breeches, jacket, riding cap, and boots – did not identify her as a schoolgirl the way her daily uniform did. (This was naive on her part, as she would eventually discover.) In her backpack there was also a brassiere, stolen from one of the senior dormitories, and a pair of mittens, brought along not because she thought she might be cold but because, the following morning, she intended to ball up the mittens and stuff them into the brassiere. She believed that the whole contraption, combined with her unusual tallness, would immediately make her eighteen years old and unrecognizable as a child to any onlooker. She had also stolen a few carrots and an apple from the school kitchens so that she could feed the horse.

She slept outdoors for two nights, which she had enjoyed, or so she told Niall. But in spite of the false breasts, she was
apprehended on the High Street of a village as she rummaged through a garbage pail looking for food. The sweets had run out and, anyway, had soon lost their charm. Everyone appeared to know who she was. No one mistook her for an eighteen-year-old. It seemed that she had been travelling toward and not away from the school to which, in no time at all, she was unceremoniously driven by the local constable. Her father, who had been of course already called, motored over, and in the midst of a conference with the head mistress, it was decided Tamara should return home for a few weeks in order to cool down. In any case, it was very near the Easter holidays. Once situated in the old nursery at the oddly named Edgeworth Hall, a place haunted by her vanished nan, she announced she would bolt again were she ever forced to return to the school.

As it turned out, her upper-crust parents had been considering the almost unheard-of notion of sending her to the local school anyway, for diplomatic and social reasons. Secret negotiations for the upcoming airfield were underway, and her father, who since the First World War had harboured a militaristic mindset (never mind that as a senior officer he had seen precious little live action), was intrigued by the idea of having such a large and aggressive toy right at his doorstep, and that, combined with a seat in the House of Lords, made him a key player in these negotiations. Furthermore, he had taken to investing in concrete and almost fully owned the
company that would become Edgeworth Enterprises. After the war the business flourished to such an extent that in spite of its being primarily concerned with the various motorways that were being constructed, there would be few projects in which E.E. did not play at least some part. His nickname, among thousands of labourers he would never meet, would be “Concrete Charley.”