Little, Big (45 page)

The Summer House he sat in wasn't much changed from the time his namesake had lived and died there. No one had been able to think what to dowith the boxes and portfolios of pictures, or felt up to disturbing what seemed a careful order. So they only patched the roof against leaks, and sealed the windows; and thus it stayed while they thought. The image of it would now and then pass through one or another of their minds, particularly Doc's and Cloud's, and they would think of the past stored up there, but no one got around to unsealing it, and when Auberon came to take possession no one disputed him. It was headquarters now, and contained all things necessary for Auberon's investigations: his magnifying glass (old Auberon's in fact), his clack-clack folding measure and roll-up tape measure, the final edition of
The Architecture of Country Houses
, and the diary which contained his conclusions. It also contained all of Auberon's pictures, which Auberon the younger had not yet begun to look into; the pictures that would end his quest as it had the elder's, through vast superfluity of ambiguous evidence.

Even as it was he wondered if the thing about the orrery weren't dumb after all, and his arrangement of string and pencilmarks open to more than one conclusion anyway. A blind alley, as lined with mum sphinxes as the others he had gone up. He stopped tilting back the old chair he sat in, stopped vigorously chewing the end of his pen. Evening was gathering; no evening more oppressive than one like this, in this month, though at nine years old he didn't attribute his oppression to the day and the hour, or call it by that name. He only felt how hard it was to be a secret agent, to go in disguise as a member of his own family, trying to so insinuate himself among them that, without his ever asking a question (that would expose him instantly) the truth would be spilled in his presence because they would have no reason to doubt he was already privy to it.

Crows cawed away toward the woods. A voice, blown around the Park with odd alteration, called his name, and announced dinner. He felt, hearing the long-drawn melancholy vowels of his own name, at once sad and hungry.

Lilac saw sunset elsewhere.

"Magnificent!" Mrs. Underhill said. "And terrifying. Doesn't it make your heart beat high?"

"But it's all made of cloud," Lilac said.

"Hush, dear," Mrs. Underhill said. "Someone's feelings could be hurt."

Made of sunset was more correct: all of it, the thousand striped war-tents obscured in the wreathing smokes of orange watch' fires, and their curling pennants striped the same in sunset colors; the black lines of horse or foot or both, picked out with silver weaponglint, that receded as far as the eye could see; the bright coats of captains and the dark gray of guns being drawn up under their command against empurpled harricadoes—the whole vast encampment, or was it a great flotilla of galleons, armed and under sail?

"A thousand years," Mrs. Underhill said grimly. "Defeats, retreats, rear-guard actions. But no more. Soon . . ." The knobby stick was under her arm like a commander's baton, her long chin was held high. "See?" she said. "There! Isn't he brave?"

A figure, burdened with armor and with weighty responsibilities, walked the poop, or toured the breastworks; wind stirred his white whiskers as long almost as himself. The Generalissimo of all this. In one hand he held a wand; just then, the sunset altered, the tip of the wand caught fire. He gestured with it toward where the touch-holes on his guns would be, had they been guns, but then thought better of it. He lowered the wand, and it went out. From his broad belt he drew out a folded map, unfolded it, peered nearsightedly at it for some time, then refolded it, replaced it, and took up his heavy tread again.

"The die's cast now," Mrs. Underhill said. "No more retreating. The worm's turned."

"If you don't mind," the stork said, her voice faint between labored pants, "this altitude's too much for me."

"Sorry," Mrs. Underhill said. "All done now."

"Storks," the stork panted, "are accustomed to sit down, once a league or so."

"Don't sit down there," Lilac said. "You'll sink right through."

"Downward then," Mrs. Underhill said. The stork ceased to pump her short wings, and began to descend, with a sigh of relief. The Generalissimo, hands on his gunwales or his machicolated belvedere, stared eagle-eyed into the distance, but failed to see Mrs. Underhill salute him smartly as they passed.

"Oh, well," she said. "He's as brave as they come, and it's a fine show."

"It's a fake," Lilac said. It had already shape-shifted into something even more harmless as they sank.

Curse the child, Mrs. Underhill thought irritably. It was convincing, convincing enough. . . . Well. Perhaps they oughtn't to have entrusted it all to that Prince: he was just too old. But there it is, she thought: we're all old, all too old. Could it be they had waited too long, been too long patient, retreated one final furlong too many? She could only hope that, when the time at last came, the old fool's guns would not all misfire, would at least give heart to their friends and frighten briefly those on whom they were trained.

Too old, too old. For the first time she felt that the outcome of it all, which could not be in doubt,
could
not, was in doubt. Well, it would all be over soon. Did not this day, this very evening, mark the beginning of the last long vigil, the last watch, before the forces were at last joined? "Now that's the tour I promised you," she said over her shoulder to Lilac. "And now . . ."

"Aw," Lilac said.

"With no complaints . . ."

"Aaaawww . . ."

"We'll take our nap."

Lilac's long-drawn note of complaint altered, surprisingly, in her throat, to something else, a sudden mouth-opening thing that stole over her like a spirit. It went on opening her mouth wider and wider—she hadn't thought it could open so wide—and made her eyes close and water, and sucked a long draft of air into her lungs, which expanded with a will of their own to take it in, Then, just as suddenly, the spirit was gone, releasing her jaws and letting her exhale.

She blinked, smacking her lips, wondering what it was.

"Sleepy," said Mrs. Underhill.

For Lilac had just yawned her first yawn. Her second came soon after. She put her cheek against the rough stuff of Mrs. Underhill's broad cloak, and, Somehow no longer unwilling, closed her eyes.

When he was very young, Auberon had begun a collection of postmarks. On a trip with Doc to the post office in Meadowbrook, he had begun idly examining the wastebaskets, having nothing else to do, and had immediately come up with two treasures: envelopes from places that seemed fantastically distant to him, and looking remarkably crisp for having come so far.

It soon developed into a small passion, like Lily's for bird's nests. He insisted on accompanying whoever was traveling near a post office; he conned his friends' mail; he gloated over distant cities, far states whose names begin with I, and, rarest of all, names from across the sea.

Then one day Joy Flowers, whose granddaughter had lived abroad for a year, gave him a fat brown bag full of envelopes sent her from every part of the world. He could hardly find on the map a place which had nOt stamped its name on one of these pieces of blue flimsy. Some of them came from places so distant they weren't even in the alphabet he knew. And at a stroke his collection was complete, and his pleasure in it over. No discovery he could make in Meadowbrook's post office could add to it. He never looked at it again.

It was the same with old Auberon's photographs, when at last young Auberon discovered them to be more than a record of a large family's long life. Beginning with the last, of a beardless Smoky in a white suit beside the birdbath made of dwarves which still stood by the Summer House door, he had dipped tentatively, then sorted curiously, and at last hunted greedily through the thousands of pictures big and small, elated with wonder and horror (here! Here was the secret, the hidden ones revealed, each image worth a thousand words) and for a week was almost unable to speak to his family for fear of revealing what he had learned—or rather thought he was about to learn.

For in the end the pictures illuminated nothing, because nothing illuminated them.

"Note thumb," old Auberon would write on the back of a dim view of gray and black shrubbery. And there was, in the undisentanglable convolvulus, something that looked very much like a thumb. Good. Evidence. Another, though, would annul this evidence entirely, because (with only speechless exclamation marks on its back) here was an entire figure, a ghostly little miss in the leaves, with a trailing skirt of dew-glistening cobweb, pretty as a picture; and in the foreground, out of focus, the excited figure of a blond human child looking at the camera and pointing out the wee stranger. Now who could believe that? And if it was true (it couldn't be, how it had been faked Auberon had no idea, but it was just too stupidly real not to be fake) then what good was the maybe-a-thumb-in-the-shrubbery and a thousand others just as obscure? When he had sorted a dozen boxes into the few impossible and the many unintelligible, and saw that there were dozens of boxes and portfolios yet to go, he shut them all up (with a mixed sense of relief and loss) and rarely thought about them again.

He never again opened the old five-year diary in which his own notes had been made either, after that. He returned the last edition of the
Architecture of Country Houses
to its place in the library. His own humble discoveries, or what had seemed like discoveries—the orrery, a few interesting slips of the tongue made by his great-aunt and his grandmother—heart-startling as they had once seemed, had been swamped by the thick flood of torturous pictures and worse notes on them which his namesake had made. He forgot about it all. His secret-agentry was over.

His secret-agentry was over, but he had by this time gone so long in disguise indetectably as a member of his family that by slow stages he had actually become one. (It often happens so with secret agents.) The secret that was not revealed in Auberon's photographs lay, if it lay anywhere, in the hearts of his relatives; and Auberon had for so long pretended to know what they all knew (so that they would reveal it to him by accident) that he came to suppose he did know it as well as any of them; and like his evidences, and about the same time, he forgot about it. And since, if they had ever really known anything that he didn't know, they too had all forgotten it or seemed to have forgotten it, then they were all equal and he was one of them. He even felt, just below consciousness, that he was aligned with all the rest of them in a conspiracy that excluded only his father: Smoky didn't know, and didn't know they knew he didn't know. Somehow, rather than separating them from him, this joined them to Smoky all the more, as though they kept from him the secret of a surprise party planned for Smoky himself. And so for a while Auberon's relations with his father grew a little easier.

But even though he stopped scrutinizing others' motives and movements, a habit of secrecy about his own persisted in Auberon. He often put false faces over his actions, for no good reason. Certainly it wasn't to mystify; even as a secret agent he hadn't wanted to mystify anybody, a secret agent's task is just the reverse of that. If he had a reason at all, it may have been only a desire to present himself in a milder, clearer light than he might otherwise have appeared in: milder and clearer than the dim-flaring lamps by which he perceived himself.

"Where are you off to in such a tear?" Daily Alice asked him as he wolfed his milk and cookies at the kitchen table after school. He was in this autumn the last Barnable still a scholar in Smoky's school. Lucy had stopped going the year before.

"Play ball," he said, his mouth full. "With John Wolf and those guys."

"Oh." She half-refilled the glass he held out to her. Good lord he had gotten big lately. "Well, tell John to tell his mother I'll be over tomorrow with some soup and things, and see what she needs." Auberon kept his eyes on his cookies. "Is she feeling any better, do you know?" He shrugged. "Tacey said . . . oh, well." It seemed unlikely from Auberon's air that he would go tell John Wolf that Tacey had said his mother was dying. Probably her simple message wouldn't even be passed. But she couldn't be sure. "What do you play?"

"Catcher," he said quickly. "Usually."

"I was a catcher," Alice said. "Usually."

Auberon put down the glass, slowly, thinking. "Do you think," he said, "that people are happier when they're alone, or with other people?"

She carried his glass and plate to the sink. "I don't know," she said. "I guess . . . Well, what do
you
think?"

"I don't know," he said. "I just wondered if . . ." What he wondered was whether it was a fact everyone knew, every grown-up anyway: that everyone is of course happiest alone, or the reverse, whichever it was. "I guess I'm happier with other people," he said.

"Oh yes?" She smiled; since she faced the sink, he couldn't see her. "That's nice," she said. "An extrovert."

"I guess."

"Well," Alice said softly, "I just hope you don't creep back in your shell again."

He was already on his way out, stuffing extra cookies in his pockets, and didn't stop, but a strange window had suddenly been flung open within him. Shell? Had he been in a shell? And—odder still—had he been seen to be in one, was it common knowledge? He looked through this window and saw himself for a moment, for the first time, as others saw him. Meanwhile his feet had taken him out the broad swinging doors of the kitchen, which grump-grumped behind him in their way, and through the raisin-odorous pantry, and out through the stillness of the long dining room, going toward his imaginary ball-game.

Alice at the sink looked up, and saw an autumn leaf blown by the casement, and called out to Auberon. She could hear his footsteps receding (his feet had grown even faster than the rest of him) and she picked up his jacket from the chair where he had left it, and went after him.