Someone in the House (10 page)

I probably would not have heard it if I had been tucked in bed where I belonged. The doors in that house didn’t creak. All I caught was the double click as the knob turned and went back. I assured myself that Kevin had probably gone downstairs for a snack or a book. Then the other noises began, and my neat, substantial structure of common sense fell in ruins.

I won’t describe them in detail. But Bea’s imagination had not been overactive; there was no way, no way at all, that the sounds could have been anything except what she had assumed them to be.

And there were two voices.

Even in the murmurs of soft loving the girl’s tones were distinct and exquisite, like pianissimo singing. Girl, not woman; the timbre was as light as a child’s. Now I knew why Bea had used the words she had chosen. There was someone there, a person, a “who.” It wasn’t just her voice, it was a sense of presence.

Not until sighs and soft breathing succeeded the ecstatic culmination did I realize that I was clutching a fold of the curtains in a sticky hand and that my own breathing was faster than normal. Poor Bea. I had done her an injustice and I shared her shame. Not because what I had heard disgusted me—it didn’t, it was beautiful—but because I was playing voyeur, or whatever the equivalent may be for someone who listens.

Finally—and how sickeningly bedroom farce it sounds—I heard the bedsprings creak. Belatedly realizing what this signified, I sped across the room and with infinite care opened my door just wide enough to peer out.

The lights in the hall were always left on at night. They were soft and shaded, just enough glow to prevent accidents and deter burglars. At first I saw nothing except a curve of narrow hallway, fading into darkness toward its end. Then Kevin’s door opened.

He was naked, and his body was so beautiful that I caught my breath. One of the marble statues of classical Greece, the Doryphorus come to life—glowing brown flesh instead of white stone, glistening with a faint sheen of perspiration, as the bodies of the athletes had gleamed with oil. He was half turned away from me. His weight rested on one foot; one arm hung at his side, the other was raised, the hand extended, as if it touched something I could not see. The pose was like that of Polyclitus’ classic statue, but his face had not the remote calm of the Lance-bearer. His lips were curved in a soft, closed smile, and his eyes were focused on something…something close to him, a few inches shorter, a few inches away.

I saw nothing. But I knew when the something moved away. Kevin’s eyes followed it; his body turned like a compass needle seeking the north.

In the shadows of the passageway a faint glow appeared. “Shape without form, shade without color; Paralyzed force, gesture without motion….” But it was moving, slowly, drifting toward the dark. Then the vague outlines shifted and solidified. Misty-white, twisting like a wisp of fog, surmounted by a golden shimmer. In another moment it would have been recognizable. I didn’t wait. Smoothly and silently I closed the door. Smoothly and silently I crossed the room. I managed to get into bed before I started to shiver, all over, chilled to the bone in the warm air of that summer night.

5

BEA HAD A DATEto go sightseeing with Roger next day. They intended to leave early.

I remembered that when I awoke, with profound thanksgiving. I had five or six hours to figure out what I was going to tell her.

It may seem ridiculous that after seeing the whole sensible world turn topsy-turvy I should be chiefly concerned with what I was going to say to Bea. But that was the crux of the matter. I might have talked myself into believing nothing unusual had happened if I had been the only one involved. Psychoanalysis and modern skepticism have provided us with a variety of comfortable cop-outs and assured us that practically everything is normal. Just offhand I could have come up with several neat explanations for those two voices Ithought I had heard.

But Bea had heard them too.

If she was suffering from frustration and messed-up hormones, then so was I. Glib phrases like “collective hallucination” and “mass hypnosis” made slippery patterns in my mind. I had no doubt—such is the comfortable stupidity of the smug at heart—that something of the sort accounted for my final fantasy. The gestures of a skilled mime can create a world of people and objects for his audience; how much more effective the behavior of a man who really believes in what he thinks he sees? So intense was Kevin’s belief in his dream lover that he had hypnotized me into believing too. If I had stood there watching for a few more seconds, I would have seen her clear—white robes, golden hair.

I talked myself into believing this rubbish without too much difficulty, but it still left me with a problem: Kevin. I didn’t know much about abnormal psychology, but I had the impression that few sexual aberrations are considered sick these days. Perhaps making love to an imaginary partner was just one of those pleasant little variants that would make a psychiatrist shrug tolerantly. But opening the door for an invisible woman? Talking to her—and answering back? Kevin’s voice was a deep baritone shading to bass. He could never have mimicked that soft soprano consciously.

My unpleasant meditations were interrupted by a knock at the door and a voice yelling my name. It was Kevin’s voice—the bass-baritone—and such was my state of nerves that I actually screamed out loud. Kevin promptly flung the door open.

“What the hell—” He broke off, staring at the spectacle I presented, bolt upright in bed, eyeballs bulging, both hands clutching the sheet under my chin.

“You look,” said Kevin, “like Clarissa Harlowe waiting to be ravished. Have no fear, fair virgin, you are safe from me. What’s the matter—nightmare?”

“Yes. I mean, no. I mean…”

Kevin was dressed for tennis. He sat down on the foot of the bed and studied me critically. I managed not to shrink back.

“You scared me, yelling like that,” he said. “I thought you’d hurt yourself. Or seen a mouse.”

“I do not scream when I see a mouse. I was—er—asleep. You startled me.”

“Oh. Sorry. You hardly ever sleep this late. I started to wonder whether you had OD’d, or something.”

“Funny,” I said.

“Want to play tennis?”

“For God’s sake, I haven’t even had my coffee. How can you make such obscene suggestions?”

Kevin grinned. “My dear girl, if you think that is an obscene suggestion, wait till you hear my excerpts from the Restoration dramatists.” A puzzled expression came over his face. “What are you doing in here? You weren’t in your room, and Bea’s things were in there, so I cleverly deduced you had switched rooms. How come?”

My experience of the previous night was rapidly taking on the insubstantiality of a nightmare. Surely this man was not the one I had seen transfigured and entranced. His blunt question gave me an opening, but I chose my words with care.

“I told you yesterday,” I said. “Don’t you remember?”

“Oh, yeah, so you did. I was thinking of something else at the time. Whose idea was it?”

“Bea’s.”

Kevin’s face fell. I could have laughed out loud. I had damaged his precious male ego. His reaction was so blessedly normal I was sorry I hadn’t let him hang on to his delusions.

“Oh,” he said.

“Apparently you snore.”

“I do not!”

“Well, you make noises. Peculiar noises.”

“I’ve never had any complaints before.”

His expression had changed from hurt pride to outrage. He couldn’t be acting. It was obvious that he had not the slightest recollection of what had happened. Was that a good sign or a bad sign? I had no idea.

I promised to join him at the tennis court as soon as I had had some breakfast. When I got there he was banging balls against the backboard, still sulking over my multiple insults. The game restored his good humor—he beat me badly, as he usually did—but it reduced me to a lump of sweating protoplasm. The weather was savagely hot and humid, and by the time we finished playing, clouds were mounting up behind the hills.

By early afternoon the air was like a Turkish bath, but the rain still held off. My physical discomfort was only exceeded by my mental confusion. My brain felt like pea soup. I decided to have a swim. The tepid water felt good, but it didn’t help my thinking. I was floating on my back in a state of utter mindlessness when Kevin appeared. He stood poised for a moment on the edge of the pool, arms over his head, before he dived, splitting the water as cleanly as a knife. It was beautiful to watch. Suspecting that his next move would be to grab my ankle or my arm and pull me under, I started swimming with more speed than grace.

I had noticed—what red-blooded female wouldn’t?—that Kevin had a good body. When he was stripped for swimming, practically all of it was visible; the previous night I had seen very little more of him than I had seen many times before. Why, then, had I been struck all in a heap, like a teenage groupie? There had been something different about him—or about me. The cause, dear Anne, is in thyself, that thou art crazy.

When the first roll of thunder echoed from behind the trees I scrambled out of the pool, followed by Kevin’s jeers.

“Swimming pools are dangerous in thunderstorms,” I yelled at the sleek dark head that lay atop the smooth water like a reminder of the French Revolution. Kevin opened his mouth to reply, forgot to tread water, and sank. Laughing, I ran in to change.

I now understand something about human nature I couldn’t comprehend before—why people who have been wiped out and almost killed by a volcano or some other natural disaster move right back to the same place after they have cleaned up the debris. They do it because they don’t believe it will happen again. They didn’t believe it would happen in the first place. Oh, sure, Vesuvius blows up every now and then—it can happen—but it will not happen to them. Human beings have an astonishing capacity to ignore what they don’t want to believe. Here I was alone in the house with a man who entertained imaginary ladies in the middle of the night; and twelve hours after I had watched the performance I had convinced myself I must have been dreaming.

He was so normal! In spite of his snide remarks he was not far behind when I fled the pool. Together we went through the now-familiar routine of securing the house against the storm, closing windows, collecting the animals. Together we settled in the library, Kevin with a can of beer, I with a glass of iced coffee. We joked about poor Amy, who was trying to climb into Kevin’s chair with him. I stroked Pettibone, who had settled on my lap and was purring vehemently.

“She likes me,” I said.

“Cats purr when they are nervous,” Kevin said. “She’s probably afraid of the storm.”

“Thanks a lot.”

The skies outside were night-dark. Kevin switched on the lamp beside his chair and reached for a book. It was a handsome volume elaborately bound in brown calf, with tooled gold decorations.

“What are you reading?” I asked lazily.

“This? It’s a history of the Mandevilles—the family that owned the house back in England.”

“The name sounds familiar.”

“Wasn’t to me. They weren’t anybody in particular; in fact, they were a dull lot.”

“Then why are you reading it?”

“Damned if I know,” Kevin said cheerfully. “I guess I keep hoping I’ll discover some florid Victorian scandal.”

“The real identity of Jack the Ripper?” I suggested. “The name of the mistress of Prince Albert?”

“I didn’t know he had a mistress.”

“He must have. Nobody could be that pure and loyal to a boring woman like Queen Victoria without breaking out sometimes.”

“Well, if he did, she wasn’t a Mandeville. They didn’t do anything interesting.”

“I take it they were the ones our friend Rudolf bought the house from.”

“Right. There were no male heirs left in 1925; both the sons had been killed in World War I.” Kevin tossed the book aside. “I’ll have to go farther back,” he said, as if to himself.

“Back? To what?”

“The people who owned the house before the Mandevilles. They only lived in it for a few generations—bought it in the early nineteenth century from a family named Leventhorpe.”

“So?”

“Well, it’s just that…” Kevin eyed me warily. “If you laugh, I’ll put toads in your bed.”

“I won’t laugh.”

“A place like this—it’s like a trust, you know? I’m the last, or the latest, of a long line of people who have lived here, looked to the house for shelter, kept it going, you might say. It gives a person a sense of continuity that’s rare in this day and age. I mean, some of the stones in these walls are over five hundred years old.”