Good Hope Road: A Novel (18 page)

‘Eat up, eat up, dear,’ a smiling Ellie urged Madeleine, hands on her hips. ‘Men like women with some meat on their bones.’

Jim rolled his eyes.

The Major had been sitting silently in his chair all this while, Ellie’s nonstop chatter serving as a barrier of sorts, behind which he could safely withdraw, relieved to be able just to enjoy his food and listen in on the conversation. Now, however, he stirred, feeling compelled to intervene.

‘Ellie, that’s enough,’ he remonstrated mildly. ‘Madeleine,’ he asked, gallantly changing the subject, ‘what do you think about the mural contest at Radio City Hall?’

‘Oh, Georgia O’ Keefe deserves to win!’ she said. ‘Those vibrant, fantastical flowers of hers – the city could use some of that lushness amongst all that steel.’

The Major smiled, saying he was betting on Davis’ abstract of Manhattan instead.

‘Yes, yes, that’s all very fine and fancy,’ Ellie scoffed, ‘but who’d like some pie?’

Later, Ellie whisked Madeleine off on a tour of the rooms upstairs, showing her the exquisite sets of pearls and garnets that had belonged to Jim’s mother, and her antique tortoiseshell combs, still wrapped in tissue paper. Opening a drawer, she took out a handful of old photographs. She looked at each one before passing it on to Madeleine, her expression suddenly wistful.

‘The Major with his older brother, William,’ she said, pointing to the two laughing young men standing shoulder to shoulder. ‘Nearly five years between them, but they were a pair all right. You’d always see them together, out and about, hunting and fishing side by side. So different in their ways, but devoted to each other. Bill was the loud one, with an eye for the girls and a natural at just about anything he tried. Football star, and captain of the swim team too, if I remember correctly. Went off to West Point and it was all he’d ever wanted, to be an officer, right from the time he was a child, is what I heard. The Major now, he was the quieter one, always reading. Took his own sweet time to get to know anyone new, but once he opened up . . .’ Ellie smiled.

‘So where’s Bill now?’ Madeleine asked curiously, trying to reconcile the image of the Major, so young, still only a slender-faced teen and laughing with such abandon in the photograph, with the man downstairs.

Ellie sighed. ‘Got thrown from a horse not long after he joined West Point. Wasn’t much anyone could do and he died soon after. It tore the family apart, with the Major taking it especially hard.’

She sighed again, sifting through the stack in her hands before finding the photograph she wanted, of Bill in his cadet’s uniform. ‘Something to think about isn’t it, how different things might have been if Bill hadn’t had that accident, if it’d been him, like it was always meant to be, going off to war? But that’s not what happened. It was the Major who went off to enlist, insisting it was the right thing to do.’ She shook her head. ‘Maybe it was right, or maybe he was just trying to do what his brother would have done, but whatever the reason, turns out that it was James who became Major Stonebridge after all, not Bill.’

She drew another photograph from the stack, this time of the Major and his wife, on their wedding day.

‘How come they didn’t have any more children?’

‘She wanted to. He did too, before. “Five children,” she’d always say, “one for each day of the week”. “That’s a damn fool notion,” he’d reply, “what about the weekend?” “The weekend being for rest,” she’d say to him, laughing. With the war though . . . everything was different after that. He made it back home alright, which was a blessing, but—’ She shook her head pensively again. ‘He was never quite the same. I’d catch her crying.’

She straightened her back, face brightening as she handed Madeleine yet another photograph. ‘Now this one – you recognise him, don’t you?’

‘Jim.’

It was a photograph of the family, taken beneath the old apple tree. Madeleine ran a finger over the freckle-nosed little boy, his bare knees pressed into the earth, an arm close about his dog.

‘Judy,’ Ellie remembered. ‘The setter, her name was Judy.’

‘Mrs Stonebridge looks kind,’ Madeleine said softly.

‘She was. It was a hard day for Jim when she passed.’

‘He never talks about her.’

‘Not one to talk much at all, is he now? But take it from me, that boy feels things deep.’ Ellie laughed and patted Madeleine’s hand. ‘Well, you’ll see that for yourself, I’m sure.’

‘You sure were a hit with Ellie,’ Jim said indulgently as he saw her off later that evening. Sliding his hands about her waist, he drew her close.

She laid her hands on his chest, spreading her fingers wide and then closing them again, back and forth, like the pleats of a fan. ‘Not bad for a flatlander, I take it?’

He grinned. ‘Not bad at all.’

She’d stayed a while after Ellie had left, so that it had been just the three of them, sitting beside the fireplace. She’d been unusually quiet, still thinking about the photographs that Ellie had shared, quiet enough that Jim looked enquiringly at her; she’d smiled and laid her head against his shoulder. He’d brought out the ivory chessboard from the library while the women were upstairs, and the two of them sat down to a game. The Major shook out his newspaper and turned on the radio, Jim listening with half an ear as he concentrated on the chessboard.

Madeleine had dreamily watched their reflections in the black mirror, father and son, and her as well, in this montage of simple domesticity, and as she did, she became slowly aware of a deep-rooted contentment. A sense of womanliness, warm and full, a sensation, entirely novel, of being needed, as if she were the link, so long missing, that rendered this tableau complete.

They’d played for a while, stopping when the snores emanating from the Major’s armchair indicated that he’d fallen soundly, peaceably asleep.

Madeleine looked teasingly up at Jim now, her hair picking up the colours of the sunset. ‘I believe I’m a hit with the Major too.’

He shook his head regretfully. ‘Nah, you put him to sleep.’

She laughed. He drew her closer still, sliding his hands down the curve and flare of her spine, further, cupping the swell of her buttocks. She gasped at the press of his fingers. He began to slowly knead that soft, yielding flesh and she arced her hips against his, sparking a deep hunger inside him as he bent his face to hers.

Madeleine came over more often after that visit, and the Major gradually grew increasingly at ease around her. She instinctively avoided all talk of the past now, except for what information he might suddenly volunteer – that the beams in the kitchen came from a ship that his grandfather had sailed on, for instance, or that Jim, one Christmas, had thought to present his mother with a dead toad. She’d unwrapped it and screamed with fright, flinging it right across the room and startling them all with the strength of her throwing arm.

The Major had kept something aside for Madeleine one afternoon. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe you’ll have seen one of these in Boston.’ He handed her a framed letter, the writing on it faded and thin. ‘A rat letter,’ he said drolly, ‘penned by my great-grandmother. Folks used to say she had a witchy sense about her. She came up with this spell to rid the house of rats.’

She’d placed the letter in a box of punched tin and hidden it in the cellar. Years later, when the Major was helping his father replace a creaky floorboard, they’d found it in the hole beneath, beside a handful of river pebbles and a doll mould made of copper, coated with verdigris. The Major recalled the hole being narrow and deep, just large enough for a boy’s hand. The doll mould had been especially strange, with its green-tinted head and stiff limbs. Inside the box, they’d found the rat letter, written on paper fashioned from linen rags.

I have borne with you till my patience is gone. There are no words adequate to express my displeasure. You raid our seed corn, make holes in more apples than you can eat in a hundred yellow lifetimes. You create a ruckus at night, waking the baby who cries something awful through daybreak.

Devils, spirits of the bottomless pit, heed me now, and depart with all speed. Look not back! Begone and never come here again, for
we are now in arms against you
! I hold nothing back – you shall hear the whole. We are preparing water to drown you, fire to burn you, cats to catch you, dogs to skin you and clubs to maul you. Unless you wish to be dyed in fire and brimstone, you Satans, quit at once.

Go to Hannah Watkins’ instead.

(This is for the cellar rats. Please give notice to the chamber and garret rats as well, for
we are plotting against you all
.)

Madeleine started to laugh. ‘She had a temper, that’s for sure! Poor Hannah Watkins, whoever she was. Did the rats leave?’

‘They certainly did,’ the Major said, a twinkle in his eyes. ‘Whether or not to Hannah’s, I can’t say, but they never did return here, not once in all these years.’

‘Now if only great-great-grandma had come up with something for the rats in the barn,’ Jim observed laconically, and the Major grinned.

When Madeleine asked if she could take the Claude mirror outside so that she might paint the old apple tree in its reflection, the Major hesitated, but nonetheless agreed.

‘He’s grown very fond of you,’ Ellie remarked later. ‘To hand over his precious mirror like that – he gets all kinds of antsy if he’s away from the thing for too long.’

‘Was it Mrs Stonebridge’s?’ Madeleine asked.

‘That monstrous thing? No, he brought it back from France. Mrs Stonebridge didn’t say anything, she wasn’t the sort to, but I knew she didn’t like it, not from the start. It gives me the creeps too.’

Madeleine looked incredulously at her. ‘Why? It’s beautiful.’

Ellie snorted. ‘To look in it, it’s as if the colour’s been taken away from everything. Whoever heard of a black mirror, anyhow? In earlier days . . .’ she paused, remembering. ‘I shouldn’t be saying so much, but in earlier days, after the Major had just returned from the war, all he’d do was sit before that thing. Sit and stare into it, rain or snow or shine. Sometimes through the nights even; I’d come in the next day, and there he’d be, still in his chair, looking into that blackness.

‘The thing is, there was nothing to see. I mean, at night, sitting there in the dark,
what
was he looking at, all those hours?’

Madeleine leaned against the stone wall of the orchard. She set down her brush, staring at the mirror propped beside her. There was a spare beauty to the reflected trees, the green of their leaves dulled to an elemental glaze. They were almost lovelier leached of colour, she thought, an inner honesty revealed.

‘Do you think it’s spooky too?’

‘The mirror?’ Jim looked at her, amused. ‘Ellie, I’m guessing. Don’t go setting too much store by what she says, she gets these odd notions sometimes.’

‘I’ve heard that some mirrors hold ghosts, that images of people are locked inside the glass. If you look into one between the light from two candles, you’ll see someone who’s passed on.’

Jim chuckled.

Madeleine touched a finger to the mirror. Its reflection seemed pale and wraith-like in the glass. What was the Major looking for, Ellie had wondered.

What
, Madeleine thought suddenly to herself,
or was it ‘who’
?

he Major flung the newspaper from himself with such force that it flew against the mantel, scattering in a flurry of pages across the wooden floorboards. ‘They voted against it,’ he said bitterly. ‘They vetoed the Bonus Bill.’

Rising to his feet, the Major began to pace back and forth, muscles coiled so tight that the damaged leg seemed almost to be mounted on some stiff and disparate spring as it jolted and dragged behind him.

‘It was only the House Ways and Means Committee,’ Jim said carefully. ‘There’s still the Senate hearing.’

‘Damn fool politicians. Crooks, the lot of them. Crooks! How could they veto it with a clear conscience? This is back pay for God’s sake, owed to every man who shipped out with Uncle Sam’s Army. But they don’t care. They don’t give a damn.’ The Major banged a palm on the table. ‘Look at the coverage it got, for crying out loud – a measly couple of inches – while that Lindbergh case has been on the front page for weeks.’