CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Sunday again. I only know the day because when I wake up Agnes is gone. Rosalind too.
Standing in the hallway in my bathrobe, the house empty around me, I do something I never have. The howl is so loud the glasses on the table shiver. The howl is so loud I astonish myself. I didn't know.
.
Monday. Another letter comes: but this one has a stamp, and isn't a death threat. It's from Mr. Barker. Would I mind settling the bill? I hand it to Agnes along with my bankbook. She takes them both, wordlessly, her eyes flickering, scanning my face fast like I am the horizon and a storm is coming. For some reason a memory comes to me: her hand pressing the old brass key into mine. This house is yours, Henry, she'd said.
That key is in my pocket as it always is- I have never questioned the impulse to keep hold of it- and she watches as I fish it out. Her eyes widen as I put it atop the wallet in her outstretched hand.
"Hart," she says, sharply, warningly, the nickname she hasn't used since I was young, in the tone she hasn't used since I was young.
And this might, after all, be a childish thing to do, but sometimes returning a burden to its source is the best way to truly relinquish it.
.
Wednesday. Last night, staring past the meal I didn't want, disembodied, the room a blur of candlelight and old dust, I felt a hand holding mine. I looked down. Her arm had stretched across the table, and her wrinkled thumb smoothed slowly over the scar on my knuckle.
"Just half," she said.
I did not want half, or any of it. I didn't want to be in the house at all. With my free hand I picked up the fork and put it in my mouth over and over again as many times as it took. It tasted like nothing.
"I'm sorry," I told her. "I don't mean to be an ass. It's only that I don't feel well."
The candle's flame reflected as bright catlike slits in the centers of her eyes. She smiled. "Half is all I asked for. "
It hadn't occurred to me that all these years she has been waiting to see if, unlike Row, I can withstand my own grief. So often I am thoughtless. I reached across the table myself and gripped the little claw in mine.
.
A patter behind me in the hallway, not a draught but Rosalind, and I realize the sound I have been ignoring is her soft little voice pestering me: My lord, my lord.
I turn around.
"My lord. Excuse me. May I ask you... Mrs. Hastings won't say. May I ask... what has happened to Mr. Tulloch?"
I regard her. "I don't know. I think he's gone to sea again," I say. And as I'm saying it I realize it must be true, and I have not till now accepted it.
Her face falls, her little white heart-shaped face suddenly forlorn in the hallway, like a pretty owl. She blinks at me.
"I'm so sorry, my lord," she says, and blushes, and looks down.
I have to smile. "Thank you," I say, because there is no other reply. She was attached to him, of course. And of course we understand one another in this. The violence of my attachment to him may have been evident before, but must be unmistakeable now: earlier this morning, I saw my own face in the hallway mirror.
.
Walking through the field, a shadow passes over me, and looking up I see the great, white-barred wings wide and trembling, the ends of the feathers translucent as tortoiseshell against the sun. I wonder how I must look to the hawk, a tall, bumbling, inefficient thing beetling slowly through the high grass, leaving a crooked trail crushed in its wake. And now the hawk's eclipsed me and is already gliding in a low curve to the stand of beeches. I imagine its trail, could I see it- the displaced air in an arc across the sky, leaving the molecules of its acrid, papery scent trailing behind like the streamers on a kite. And now, although I don't want to, I see in place of the sky the old map from the sea-chest, and imagine a shining penciled line moving forward across the stained blue paper, across the sea, towards the horizon, away from me.
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Often I think of the story of the dog and the bosun. It is only now that I understand what Seamus meant. I am the dog, of course. Always. Sometimes I am also the bosun. Because I cannot- will not- accept the truth of the dog, because I am abusing it for my own security, it bites me, will always bite me. And I don't blame it.
What is the bosun to do? I imagine him crouching in the red waste of the Australian bush, holding a scrap of meat in one hand. In the other is the rope. "Come on, then," he's whispering to the shadow circling him. "Come on." Why would he do this? Why would he need the dog in the first place?
Now I am imagining the bosun, falling asleep in his dismal cot with the ship listing and swaying around him. He has no dog, this time, and nothing guards his door. A footfall in the passage, a hand creeping through the dark towards him, and the bosun's lips slide away from a long, yellowed incisor.
.
I can find no compromise, Row's note said. Originally these words meant nothing to me. Later, when I had earned perspective, I assumed the impossible compromise to be between oneself and the society which fears and suppresses you. Now another explanation has occurred to me. What we call compromise is, in fact, just panic in the face of loss.
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Strange that it's taken me so long to come back here. It was not as though I've forgotten it. Because there's no one to help me up, I've brought along a notched plank and a length of rope. Even so, I've skinned both shins.
The breath coming from the diamond crevice is not sea air, I don't think, even though it's damp and clammy. It must be the wind that rolls across the underground river. As I'm crawling through the scurf of dust that blankets the cave passageway I try not to remember how it was the last time, when he was with me, his soft and rapid panting at my heels.
And then, my heart expands. The crevice opens wide, I am standing, I am walking fast in the brilliant velvet dark through the cathedral, towards the heart, towards the secret river. I'm not afraid at all. My feet place themselves, I do not fall, the smooth spires of melted rock brush my shoulders; I know where I'm going. I don't stop to wonder how.
And here it is, the ground beneath me slanting, sloping up- I don't wonder, either, how it is that the sound and scent of water is now above me- here are my shoulders pressing through the fissure, the soles of my boots finding footholds, my hands clutching, climbing. Here is the rasp of my breath pressing from my chest as I force myself through the last gap. And here are the droplets, the mist peppering my blind face, the droplets springing up and spattering my throat. A churning, like a constant wave. I put out my hand in the blackness and the cold registers before the wet does, as though I have thrust my hand into a cold cave within the cave. Then I feel the cold battering it, pushing it down: I am touching a waterfall. This river, it runs straight down. Somewhere in the side of the cliff is the tunnel of its secret origin- the pond, I think, endlessly emptying- and somewhere below me, maybe miles, exists the break in the cliff, undersea, where it pours itself back into the coast.
And on the other side of the waterfall is the strange invisible perfume. Now that I am so close I can name it. So faint, but there is no mistaking it. Not strange, really. Only odd because now I can recognize it without ever having known it.
I smell wolves.
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At one point the waterfall must've been a flood compared to the misting stream it is now, because it's tunneled out a bell-shaped cavern in this rock. As I move away from the water the floor slopes upward again and I find, with my hands, a ledge with a hollow beyond it. It's dry, smoothed, inviting. Cool and comfortable. The smell is stronger here. I hoist myself up and fall into it, sliding; it cups me like a hand. A second ledge against the wall is shoulder height but this one is covered in bumpy sticks- bones?- not bones- they have the cold, knobby smoothness of dried skin-
I whip my hand back.
I'd forgotten the matches until now, but even as I'm pulling the box from my pocket the voice in my head starts up: do you really need to see what it is? Then the snap of yellow light opens, and I see what the body that is laid out on the ledge is composed of, and my held breath comes out in a laugh.
The bones are coated with waxy skin because they are candles- dozens of them- all set into the stumps of their predecessors, knocked over, insect-eaten, half burnt. Beside them are piles of books so mildewed they've become furred loaves of pulp, the covers obliterated. Beside that, a winter hat of raw wool, similarly destroyed. Surrounding all of this, and myself, is an oubliette of smooth rock. Cozy. With a blanket on the ledge that now looks like a frayed, flattened animal. With a pile of actual bones I must've crawled past on my way in: the last occupant neglected to empty the trash on his way out.
I am in a library. It must have been Row's, but as I sit in the center of it, unaccountably comforted, I become aware that it has belonged to all of us. Our den when we are wolves, in which to eat what we've caught without shame, in which to sleep in pure security. And our library when we are men and in distress, to be calmed by each other's narratives, and by the endless rush of quiet water.
.
Which brings me, of course, to the process of sewing up my heart. I can continue walking in the forest and starving myself to death. It would be the easiest way, and has the most appeal. If I keep on the way I am, it will only take another month or so. But I know what Seamus would have to say about that. And lately I can't shake the image of his face across the chessboard from mine, dim in the firelight, brow lifted, waiting on my move.