1985 - Stars and bars (13 page)

He tried one door. It was locked. So too was the one adjacent. He tried a door on the other side. It swung open. The room was dark, the curtains were drawn, and no lights were on. He stood poised in the doorway for a moment, listening. Not a sound. He saw a small sitting room with some old leather armchairs. There was a strong smell of stale cigarette smoke. Were these Gage’s rooms? Or Beckman’s? Through aj ar double doors in one wall he could make out a single bed. There was a gleaming aluminium stereo set placed on some shelves amidst a rubble of LPs, magazines, newspapers and stacks of books. Some pictures hung on the wall beyond them but the gloom was too intense to make them out. He walked carefully over to them, stepping round the piles of reading matter and scattered records.

He stopped suddenly. A small light glowed on the stereo’s console. The turntable was revolving. A record was playing soundlessly. He could feel the echo of his heart beat rebound from the roof of his mouth. His startled eyes followed a wire which led from the stereo set across the littered carpet and onto a divan tucked into a far corner of the room. Someone was lying on it.

‘Who’s that?’ a woman’s voice said. ‘Duane? Keep your fuckin’ hands off of my records.’

Thick-throated and trembling, Henderson stood to attention.

‘Ah, no,’ he said. The person lay on her back, as far as he could see, and had made no move to turn round. .

Henderson began to talk. ‘Terribly sorry to wander in name’s Dores actually looking for Mr Gage’s paintings, um…’ He took a pace or two forward. He started explaining again. Now he could see that the person lying on the divan was a very small young woman—Cora Gage, doubtless. Henderson stopped talking because he realized she couldn’t hear him. She wore headphones and very dark round sunglasses. She sat up, removed her headphones and turned her sightless eyes in his direction.

‘If you’re not Duane who the hell are you?’ Her voice had the faintest of Southern accents. She expressed no surprise at a stranger walking, uninvited, into her room, her tone was weary and dry.

‘The name’s Dores.’ Henderson explained again who he was and why he’d made the mistake of coming in. He held out his hand then snatched it back, realizing she couldn’t see the proffered gesture. He could hardly say ‘shake’ like some cowboy in a saloon.

‘He hangs his paintings in his own rooms,’ she explained. ‘Across the corridor. But he keeps them locked up. So Freeborn and Beckman can’t get at them.’

‘Ah.’ This made no sense, but, then again, that was hardly surprising.

‘
Awe
.’ She imitated him. Henderson charitably ignored this. Blind people were preternaturally sensitive to noise, he knew; she was probably savouring the timbre of his voice, as if making some sort of a sonic filing card for her memory, as sighted people might make a note of a face or a view. She was wearing jeans and a man’s shirt. She swung her legs off the divan and sat on the edge. She was very small and thin, not much more than five feet, he guessed. She had a pale, sallow face and wispy untidy brown hair scraped into crude bangs on either side of her head. In the blurry light, with her round opaque lenses, she looked like some mutant night-creature, some lemur or potto.

‘I assume you’re English,’ she said, looking straight in front of her. Her hand groped along the coverlet and came in contact with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She lit one with only the briefest of hesitations.

‘That’s right, yes,’ he said, in the eager respectful tones he used to all cripples, deformed or socially disadvan-taged people he met. His voice said: ‘You have been born with a handicap but I am not shocked or repelled. On the contrary, I respect and admire you for your efforts in overcoming it and will treat you exactly as if you were normal and entire.’

‘I have an illogical but profound dislike of the English,’ she said.

Henderson laughed. A come-on-you’re-joking chuckle.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘Nothing. I—’

‘Why did you laugh, then?’

Henderson looked about him as if calling on an invisible audience for support.

‘Well, because I assumed you were joking, I suppose.’

‘Why?’

‘Well…’ Good God! ‘I suppose because one just doesn’t say that sort of thing in all seriousness to someone one’s just met moments before.’

‘Oh, doesn’t one? But I do. I hate the English.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it.’ He sensed a hot pelt of embarrassment cover his entire body. He backed off a couple of steps and waved his hands about.

‘Perhaps if I, if we, were to get to know each other I might, um, be able to—ha ha—persuade you to, to, reconsider. Or at least exclude me from the general slur.’ Somehow he had reached the door. He wished he hadn’t given that little laugh.

She puffed on her cigarette and made no reply.

‘Well, I won’t disturb you further. Sorry to have—’

‘Goodbye, Mr Dores.’

‘Bye.’

He shut the door and walked slowly down the corridor. He understood what Shanda meant. What an astonishing woman, he thought. What a…bitch, there was no other word for it, blind or no. He shook his head in sagacious sorrow. He wondered what had brought it on. Had her blindness been caused by a crash in an English make of car, a Jaguar or Aston Martin, say? Or had she been a forceps delivery handled by a clumsy and strong-fingered English gynaecologist? He turned the corner realizing with some distaste that his armpits were moist and squelching. No, there was something deeper there: that sort of aberrant hate—if he was any judge of human nature—was to do with affairs of the heart turned sour. Unrequited love. Probably ditched by an Englishman for a girl who could see. Some right-thinking, sensible, sane, pragmatic Englishman. Turned her into a bitter, chainsmoking, reclusive anglophobe. He trotted down the stairs, feeling marginally reassured by his armchair psychology, and saw Freeborn come in the front door. He resisted the temptation to check his watch.

‘You still fuckin’ here?’ Freeborn said pointing at him. ‘You got about a hour and a half.’

Henderson slowly arrived at the foot of the stairs.

‘Look, I might as well tell you,’ he said nervously, ‘that I’m not leaving here until I have completed my business with your father.’

Freeborn, who had been heading across the hall in the direction of the kitchen, abruptly changed course and strode powerfully over. Henderson raised his hands to chest level, then tugged at the loose skin on his neck.

Freeborn put his huge face with its dense, neatly clipped beard very close to Henderson’s.

‘Listen, you English fuck. You ain’t gonna do
no
business with my father. It’s been done, see? Those pictures are sold already. He’s a old man. He don’t know what he’s been talking about, so get yo’ shit out of here.’

‘Your father has asked my company to do a valuation on his paintings and I don’t intend to leave until
he
tells me to.’

Freeborn looked at him. ‘You been warned, man.’ He spread his hands reasonably, ‘I can’t say fairer than that. Just don’t fuck with me.’

‘The last thing on earth I want to do is ‘fuck’ with you,’ Henderson replied bravely. ‘I suggest you take the matter up with your father if you’re unhappy about my being here. I’m simply doing my job.’

‘Yeah, and look, keep away from Shanda, heah? I catch you messin’ with her, boy and you—’

‘I was only making a telephone call, for God’s sake.’

‘That’s my fuckin’ phone, man. You keep yo’ chicken-shit hands off of it, no good English mofo.’ With that he turned and marched off into the kitchen.

Henderson went slowly back upstairs to his room. This sudden hostility from all quarters left him feeling weak and thoughtful. He wondered, once again, if Beeby knew what he was talking about…And what, moreover, had Freeborn meant by the statement that the pictures had been sold already? Or was that all his clenched fist of a brain could come up with as a ruse? Like a lot of people, Freeborn could at’times give the impression of being astonishingly stupid, but it was too risky an assumption to elevate into a truth. He resolved, for what seemed like the hundredth time, to quit the Gage mansion the minute his evaluation was done.

Feeling sorry for himself in this way made him think of Irene, his comforter. Perhaps he might just still manage to entice her south after all if he wrote to her. She might not answer the phone but surely she’d open a letter. After he had finished here—if all went well—he could justifiably claim a couple of days off. Irene might relent at the prospect of a weekend in Charleston or Savannah…

He took a writing pad and envelope from his case and sat down and wrote her a letter to this effect, well larded with apologies and excuses for his craven behaviour on the night of the ‘mugging’, and concluding with as overt a declaration of love and affection as he had yet allowed himself (‘with absolutely
all
of my love, H.’). He was wary of sentiment. Or rather he was all in favour of sentiment but uncertain, not to say ignorant, of how best to express it.

As he sealed the envelope it prompted thoughts of the last letter he had written. He wondered vaguely whether lance-corporal Drew would be able to enlighten him about his father’s death…And what would his father have made of his son’s current predicament, he asked himself? Perhaps the saddest and most lasting consequences of Captain Arnold Dores’s death in the Burmese jungles in 1943, Henderson thought, was that he, his son, had no vision of the man, no personal private image to cherish or be consoled by aside from purely fanciful or wishful ones. Such photographs that the family possessed were almost counter-productive. In blurry black and white they showed a neat, thin man in baggy flannels with a small moustache and very short hair. Even the more professional shots were undermined by a forced and unnatural smile that exposed the rather wide—and to his son’s eyes, unsightly—gap between his father’s front teeth. These second-hand images were further disappointing in that they confirmed the distressing fact that Henderson drew most of his features—his square face, his rather small nose—from his mother. He didn’t look like his father at all.

If the only sort of immortality we are guaranteed, he thought, going to the window and looking out at the wilderness of the back garden, is the image of ourselves that lives on in the minds of those who survive us, then his father had been singularly unfortunate. He tapped the edge of the envelope against his thumbnail. Even his widow’s reminiscences were commonplace and uninspiring. ‘A charming sweet man,’ was the last verdict his mother had passed, when questioned by her son; but she said that about everyone she didn’t actively dislike. Perhaps she’d forgotten, he thought. But that made him angry: people had a duty to remember. Friends and family ought to talk and gossip about the dead as if they were alive…

He turned away from the view and paced unhappily about the room. Maybe he should get Melissa to summon Bryant home. Tell her that this mad Southern scientist was experimenting on her daughter in his ‘labrotory’…He sighed with exasperation. Then he realized he’d forgotten about Freeborn’s latest threat. He’d have to work on the amenable Shanda, make sure that he could phone whenever Freeborn was out of the way, and perhaps get her to relay any messages secretly to him. How typical of Loomis Gage not to allow a phone in his house! he thought angrily. It was precisely the sort of selfish affectation millionaires went in for…He told himself to calm down. He found he was still irritated by his encounter with the blind and mysterious Cora. It was lucky he was so pro-American, he reasoned, otherwise the Gage family would have given him serious grounds for a bit of Yank-bashing. But they weren’t Yanks, he realized, they were ‘Rebs’ or ‘Confeds’ or whatever they called themselves.

His complaints were interrupted by the sound of a car arriving. He wondered if it were Gage. But the blast of rock music that ensued some minutes later informed him that the driver had been Duane.

The noise forced him downstairs to the kitchen where Alma-May made him a processed cheese and gherkin sandwich for lunch. She professed ignorance to the two questions he asked of her, namely, where was Gage and when was he due back?

‘Duane said your car had a flat this morning,’ she said.

‘I thought it was something like that.’

‘Mr Gage toP him to get it fixed.’

‘Oh. I’m very grateful. Do you think he could put on the spare, if it’s not too much trouble?’

‘I’ll tell him.’

A
fter lunch, Henderson realized there was nothing for it but to walk into Luxora Beach and post his letter. At least it was something to do.

At the front door he saw Shanda teetering around outside her mobile home on her high heels.

‘Shanda,’ he called softly, and went over.

‘Hi. How’re y’all doin’?’ She had both her hands pressed into the small of her back, her belly straining fiercely against the material of her smock. Henderson felt a little uncomfortable talking to someone who was so ostentatiously pregnant, but he persevered.

‘Um, look, Shanda, I was going to ask, that’s to say I was wondering if you might just possibly see your way to doing me a little favour,’ he began confidentially, but then stopped as he saw her eyes cloud with incomprehension.

‘It’s my back,’ she said slowly. ‘It’s killing me.’

Henderson pinched his nose. There was no alternative; he’d have to speak American otherwise they would be here for hours.

‘Well, shucks,’ he began again, trying to recall his Huckleberry Finn and Ring Lardner. ‘I reckon I jist plum done gone and forgit to ask you to do me a service, like, goshdarn it.’ It was a little overdone, he admitted, but, like an orchestra tuning up, he had to get in key.

‘Oh yeah?’ Shanda’s look was uneasy and relieved at the same time, like a monoglot U.N. delegate whose malfunctioning translation machine has just been restored, only to hear news of a military coup back home.

‘If’n you all done git some calls,’ Henderson persevered, ‘could you all tell me? On the sly like?’

‘Well…’

‘I’d sure be mighty grateful.’

‘OK. I guess.’ She looked around. ‘I don’t know if Freeborn…’ She frowned then smiled. ‘What the hell, he ain’t around much. He don’t tell me nothing, either. I’ll tell you when he’s away, so you can use the phone too.’ She smiled again—conspiratorially—and rubbed the back of her neck with a hand.