Piranha to Scurfy (25 page)

11

My key came home before he did.

There was no note to accompany it. I knew where it had come from only by the postmark. No one answered the phone, either at Gothic House or at Ben’s London flat. I drove to Gothic House, making the detour through the town to reach it, and found it empty, all Ben’s possessions gone.

I phoned the estate agent and put the house up for sale.

A month passed before Ben surfaced. He asked if he could come over, and once with me, he stayed. The translation was done. He had worked on it unremittingly, thinking of nothing else, closing off his mind, until it was finished.

“Helen went back to her husband,” he said. “He took her home to Sparta, and she brought the heroes nepenthe in a golden dish, which made them forget their sorrows. My author got a lot of analytical insights out of that.”

“What was nepenthe?” I said.

“No one knows. Opium? Cannabis maybe?” He was silent for a while, then suddenly vociferous. “Do you know what I’d like? I’ve thought a lot about this. I’d like them to build a road right through that village, one of those bypasses there are all these protests about. They never work, the protests, do they? The road gets built. And that’s what I’d like to hear, that some town nearby has to be bypassed and the village is in the way, the village has to be cut in half, split up, destroyed.”

“It doesn’t seem very likely,” I said, thinking of the forest, the empty, arable landscape.

After that he never mentioned the place, so when I heard, as I did from time to time, how my efforts to sell Gothic House were proceeding, I said nothing to him. I didn’t tell him when I heard, from the same source, that old Mrs. Fowler had died and had left, in excess of all expectations, rather a large sum.

By then he’d shown me the diary and told me his story. In the details he told me far more than I often cared to hear. He was still sharing my house, though he often talked of buying somewhere for himself, and one evening, when we were alone and warm and I felt very close to him, when the story was long told, I asked him—more or less—if we should make it permanent, if we should change the sharing to a living together, with its subtle difference of meaning.

I took his hand and he leaned toward me to kiss me absently. It was the sort of kiss that told me everything: that I shouldn’t have asked or even suggested, that he regretted I had, that we must forget it had ever happened.

“You see,” he said, after a few moments, in which I tried to conquer my humiliation, “it sounds foolish, it sounds absurd, but it’s not only that I’ve never got over what happened, though that’s part of it. The sad, dreadful thing is that I want to be back there, I want to be with them. Not just Susannah—of course I want
her,
I’ve never stopped wanting her for more than a few minutes—but it’s to be with all of them that I want, and in that place. Sometimes I have a dream that I am—back there, I mean. I said yes to the offers, I was accepted, and I stayed.”

“You mean you regret saying no?”

“Oh, no. Of course not. It wouldn’t have worked. I suppose I mean I wish I were that different person it might have worked for. And then sometimes I think it never happened, that I only dreamed that it happened.”

“In that case, I dreamed it too.”

He said some more, about knowing that the sun didn’t always shine there, it wasn’t always summer, it couldn’t be eternally happy, not with human nature the way it was, and then he said he’d be moving out soon to live by himself.

“Did you manage to sell Gothic House?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t tell him the truth, that I’d heard the day before that I had a buyer, or rather a couple of buyers with an inheritance to spend, Kim Gresham and his wife. Greshams have always liked to live a little way outside the village.