The Towers of Love (8 page)

“Well,” he said again, “I think it's wonderful. She—I suppose she loves him.”

“Oh, she insists she adores him. And he insists he adores her. They were here for a week-end. He was very sweet. He said, ‘I hope you'll forgive me for wanting to take your beautiful daughter away from you, Mrs. Carey.' As though I were Mother Carey and Pansy were one of my chickens! I said something very witty and original. I said, ‘Don't be silly, Austin. I'm not losing a daughter. I'm gaining a son.' And do you know what he said then?”

“What?”

“He said—‘Gee, thank you, Mrs. Carey.' He's a stockbroker.'

“Well, I still think it's nice.”

“Yes. Nice is exactly what it is. I mean, he's perfect for Pansy. She needs somebody exactly like that.”

“You didn't have anyone else picked out for her, did you?”

“No, not really. Oh, of course if I were
picking
husbands for Pansy—which obviously would be impossible—I might have picked someone a little more exciting. A prince, for instance, or at least an ambassador. But this one will do, I guess, as well as any other.”

“You don't sound exactly overjoyed about it,” he said.

“It's taking me a little time to get used to it, that's all,” she said. “Oh, he's very substantial. All that side of the Callender family—he's Henry Callender's son, his mother was a Mead—are substantial. Of course there are other Callenders, and thank God he's not one of them. He said to me, ‘Mrs. Carey, I want you to know that I have a private income of ten thousand a year.' I said, ‘Why, Austin, how perfectly astonishing!'”

“Well,” he said. “Well, well.”

“Yes. Anyway, you'll meet him to-morrow. He's the one who's coming. You'll probably like him. He's dull, but nice. You may find him amusing.”

“What about Pansy? Where's she going to be?”

“Oh, that's the other thing. Pansy phoned me to-day from Boston. She's flying to Colorado Springs to visit Joanne Gibbs again, for a rest. She was just there at Christmas, of course—for a rest. What she needs another rest for, I can't imagine. My God, she's been resting ever since she got out of Vassar.”

He laughed softly.

“She'll be gone for two weeks. She and Austin want to be married in June. When else? She sent you her love. She said she was sorry not to be able to see you, but I said you might still be here when she gets back. As far as I was concerned, I told her, I wanted you to stay here for ever and ever.”

He sipped his champagne and swirled it slowly in his glass.

“Do you think you might still be here—two weeks from now?”

“I don't know, Sandy. I don't know.”

“Well, that's what I told Pansy. I told her your plans were still indefinite. I told her your news, how you'd sold your business for an enormous sum to Joe Wallace. She was so pleased, sent you her love, her congratulations, her good wishes, and all that. I told her I just didn't know how long you would be staying, that I'd like it to be for ever and ever. Was that the right thing to tell her?”

“Yes, that was the right thing.”

“Because your plans
are
still indefinite, aren't they? Oh, I know you must have lots and lots—lots of schemes and ideas. I know that's something your father will want to find out tomorrow—what they all are. You can tell him, if you'd like, but I don't even want you to tell me about them, baby, I really don't, because you know me—I probably wouldn't understand any of them! I'm such a dumb-bell when it comes to business, but I know you have lots and lots of plans.”

“Yes,” he said. “Lots and lots.”

She looked at him. “Do I detect a note of sarcasm in your voice?” she asked him. “Is this what success has done to you?”

“It's not that,” he said. “It's just that I'm quite capable of making my own plans, Sandy.”

“Of course! Of course you are. I never meant to imply you weren't. Oh, I've upset you somehow. You're angry with me.”

“You're the one who seems upset,” he said. “I can tell. Just leave my future to me, please, Sandy.”

“I'm sorry. It's just—oh, it's just so many things on my mind at once. I guess it's the thought of my little girl going that upsets me. The passage of time. Before I know it, I'll be a grandmother.”

“It was bound to happen some time, Sandy,” he said.

“You don't think Pansy would dare do that to me, do you? Make me a grandmother? Do you? Pappy!” she cried. “Pappy! More champagne. Why aren't you pouring champagne?” The little Filipino hurried into the room, took the bottle from the cooler, and quickly refilled Hugh's empty glass. “Are we ready for the second bottle yet, Pappy? Don't you
dare
stop pouring champagne until we tell you to. No one's
nearly
soused enough yet. We want to get fried. We want to get absolutely stinko, Pappy.”

It was a characteristic of hers—a defence, perhaps—that whenever liquor was being served she inevitably urged people to drink more and more. “Quick!” she would cry. “More cocktails! We want to get potted. Nobody's even tiddly yet and we want to get simply squiffed. What in the world is the matter? Where in God's name is the hooch?” All the while, of course, she drank nothing. It was a tactic that was possibly designed to cover up the fact that she was not drinking. Or possibly, by getting everyone else to drink more than he should, she reinforced her own morale, her own stalwart abstinence. It had been—he tried to think now—it had been at least twelve years since she had stopped drinking and had begun substituting, for alcohol, quantities of tea and ginger beer.

It had been right after his brother Billy's death in 1947 that her drinking had become so much worse, and the years following that had been terrible years for them all. Those years had receded now, and faded, but he could still remember the old, chilling fear he had felt at seeing his mother drunk. Drinking, for some curious reason, had not made her gayer or wittier, as one might have supposed it would. Instead, it withdrew her, pulled her into some dark and solitary place, some cavity where, removed from life, she could not be reached at all. Drinking had made her quieter, sullen and taciturn, instead of livelier. She never laughed when she was drunk, though he remembered sometimes she had screamed. Most of it she had done during the day, alone, though she had often shared her drinking bouts with his Aunt Reba; and so, for the most part, coming home in the evening, the rest of the family saw only the results, the disaster, saw her sitting silently in the corner of a room—on a little stool, perhaps, or even on the floor—her eyes dazed and unblinking in the masklike ruin of her face, her shoulders hunched and still, her partly finished drinks around her. During those two or three years the quiet terror of her drinking had stalked through the house. Sometimes she would burst out of her silence into a violent tantrum. Once, he remembered, she had gone to the kitchen and, in front of Maria's weeping eyes, had systematically broken all the dishes. And she had had a number of serious falls. Once she had come into his room late at night and fallen on the floor. A week later she had fallen on the stairs and, when they found her, her hip was broken, and it was this injury that had meant she could never ride again. She had recovered from that, and the drinking continued. The family—all of them—had tried to do everything they could, and finally, when she had lost so much weight and seemed so sick that they had decided to put her in a sanatorium—she had suddenly stopped.

She had just stopped. No member of Alcoholics Anonymous had reached her, no clergyman. The family doctor had admitted that he could take no credit for it. It had been something, apparently, that she had resolved on her own to do. And that, Hugh supposed, was one of the most remarkable things about her. Perhaps it was something she had been brooding about and planning to do during all those evenings and afternoons, sitting in her solitary corner; perhaps not. They never knew. All they knew was that from somewhere, some reservoir of strength within her had been tapped, and she had stopped and never had a drink again. “The more I know of your mother,” an old family friend had said to him once, “the more I think that she is truly a magnificent woman.” There was some kind of magnificence in her, surely. She had never talked about the drinking years, never mentioned them. All she had ever done since had been, whenever there was a party, to go from guest to guest and cry, “Nobody's had enough to drink. Quick, more cocktails! Nobody's tight enough. What's the matter with everybody? Let's get frazzled!”

They were finished with dinner now, and Hugh realised that, at her bright insistence, he had drunk a whole bottle of champagne. He was feeling a little lightheaded, but he supposed he should be grateful that she had not managed to get him to drink the second bottle. They were rising from the table, and his mother was saying, “Baby, I'm going to turn in early. Do you mind? I'd love to play gin or backgammon with you, but I've got such a busy day tomorrow. Your father's coming home in the morning, and then the party to-morrow night and Austin Callender coming. Will you excuse me?”

“Sure, Sandy,” he said, smiling. “You get a good night's sleep.”

“But don't feel
you
need to go to bed. Have a brandy or something. Have fun. Do something. Take the car and go somewhere. Do something gay. Don't let your poor old grey-haired mother dampen your fun. After all, this is your holiday.”

“I think I may go for a walk,” he said.

“Oh, good. Kiss me good night.”

He kissed her cheek and she squeezed his arm. “So proud,” she whispered, and he went with her out into the hall and watched her as she mounted the stairs, chiffon fluttering all around her. At the landing, in front of Venus, she turned and blew him a kiss.

“Good night, Sandy.”

He went out on to the terrace. The night was very dark; there was no moon and only a few remote stars. He stood for a while in the cold darkness, admiring it, his hands in his pockets, and the champagne raced warmly in his blood. He extracted a cigarette from his jacket pocket and lighted it. Then he started slowly across the invisible terrace, feeling his way with his feet as he went. It had been so long since he had walked on this terrace at night that he had forgotten its contours, forgotten where the levels sharply changed, where steps ran down. Over the sound of the waterfall he could hear the splashing of the fountain that stood in the centre of the terrace and he walked towards it, guided by the sound. Then, in the blackness near his feet, he saw four pale discs. He knelt to see what they were and, with his hand groping towards these spots of whiteness in the dark, he found that they were four white narcissus blossoms that had opened in the circle of planting around the fountain; only four. He lowered his face to the blooms and sniffed the sharp, swift, sweet odour, and it dizzied him so that he almost fell forward on his hands in the flower-bed, and he thought: Of course I wanted to come home. He had been willing to come home because this was where it all began; the sudden springs that blossomed into summers, the hesitant at first, then hurrying, falls, the plunging winters; friends, school, family, all the speeding seasons of his life began here. And he stood up and walked slowly around the fountain.

There were lights now that he could see on the opposite hill from the Everetts' house, which was spread out, low and rambling, against the trees and the night. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven lighted windows. And then, as if he had commanded it to do so, the Everetts' front door was opened, creating a new rectangle of light, and he saw Edrita's slim figure outlined in front of it. Then the door was closed and, for a second, he couldn't tell whether she had gone in or out. Then he could see another light—an orange dot that came and went, came and went—her cigarette. It moved quickly, nervously, back and forth as though she were pacing the same short strip of lawn over and over. He watched her, wondering what she was thinking, wondering if she could see the light of his cigarette too, and as he watched, something that he was not willing to define, and yet in a way could define, stepped up its beat in his body. He walked to the edge of the terrace and, raising his two index fingers to his lips, he had been about to give the long, low whistle that had always been their signal, when something that had begun to happen behind him made him stop and turn. It was a dark, flickering light that bobbed about against the closed curtains of his mother's window. He felt suddenly sick. Oh, God, he thought. Is she doing that again? Hasn't she ever stopped doing that?

He knew what the quivering light meant. In her room there was a movie projector and a screen. She was running the projector. There was only one reel of film that she ever watched. It was the reel of Billy, the only reel of him she had. If Billy had lived, he would be twenty-eight now, but he had been just fourteen when he had died—killed in that senseless accident in a soccer game on the playing fields of Exeter. He had been kicked in the head (just lightly, lightly), as goalie, and the boy whose toe had accidentally struck him when he had fallen, leaping to block the ball, had never been able to believe that he had done more than to knock Billy out. They had called time in the game and waited—waited for Billy to wake up, but he never had. “I just tapped him in the head with the toe of my shoe,
lightly
, so lightly …” he could remember that other boy's pale face saying; saying it to them when they had arrived; saying it to the others in the school; saying it to his own parents, who had also come; saying it to everyone, to anyone who would listen. (“So lightly, so lightly.”) But that light, light toe-touch had killed him, and suddenly there was nothing left of Billy but a reel of home-movie film taken the summer before he died.

The film lasted barely five minutes, and Hugh had seen it so often that he did not have to be in the room any more to see it. Watching the flutter of changing light behind the curtains, he could see the film's action clearly in his mind. Its only sound was the clicking projector's sound. It began with Billy running down the wide stone steps of the house. It was not at all a good movie. His mother's hand had wobbled badly while she was taking it. Billy's fair face—he had been blond, like his mother—advanced and receded in focus so that in one instant it was clear and in the next it was blurred. Shafts of jagged white light pierced through the film in all directions as his mother had let her lens drift into the sun. The image moved up and down with his mother's hands on the camera; it bleached out, became strong, disappeared, but still it was Billy. At the foot of the steps Billy stopped, smiled, and waved at the camera. Then his mouth worked for a second or two, forming words with his lips that his mother had never been able quite to make out, and that she had never been able to remember from that summer. (“I think he's saying that he has a new filling in a molar. See—see how he's opening his mouth very wide, to show. I'd taken him to the dentist that week. I'm sure that's what he's saying”; then she would stop the projector, rewind the film a little way, then play that part again: “See—see how he's opening his mouth?”) Then Billy lifted one leg high in the air, reached out for it with his hand and touched his toe, spun around twice on his left heel, showing off for the camera. Then Billy seemed to stoop, as if to pick up something, some object on the ground, and in that instant the screen went inexplicably dark and, when it burst into light again, it was a different scene, a different day, another part of the summer, and Billy was on the beach at Chatham in a pair of yellow-and-white-striped swimming trunks. He stood on the sand, his chest rising and falling as if he had been running, arms akimbo. He noticed the camera, smiled, and waved at it again. Then he ran towards the surf, and the camera followed his run, bouncing up and down, as he made it all the way to the water, stopped short as the water touched his feet, winced, turned, and said something that was very clear—“It's cold.” He kicked a wave arrogantly, scornfully, then turned, and started up the sand again, running. And there, with Billy running towards the screen, it ended.