The Towers of Love (29 page)

“Yes, it was Edrita.”

“But you didn't marry Edrita, did you, and Edrita didn't marry you. You married Anne, and Edrita married someone else. No, Hugh, the trap is us. The trap is us.”

“But we're human beings. We can do what we want,” he said.

“Are we? I don't think so—not any more. Maybe you still are, Hugh, but I don't think so. And as for me, I know I'm not. As I said, I'm just a non-person. A ghost.”

“You're not a ghost, Pansy,” he said.

“Oh, Hugh,” she said. “You're always so nice to me. You'd better go now and tell Austin.”

“We'll talk about this to-morrow,” he said. “I want to do whatever I can. I want to see if we can't work this out some way.”

From the darkness where she was, she said nothing now.

“Get some rest, Pansy,” he said. “Get some rest and we'll talk to-morrow.”

“Yes, I am tired,” she said. “Good night, Hugh.”

“Can I bring you anything?”

“No,” she said. “And please—don't let anybody else come in to see me to-night—Sandy or Reba or anybody. I don't want to talk to anybody for a while.”

“All right,” he said. “Good night.”

He went out and closed the door and went slowly down the brightly lighted stairs.

Austin Callender jumped up quickly again when Hugh came into the room. “You were gone so long,” Austin said, “I got kind of nervous.”

“I'm sorry, Austin,” he said. “But she just doesn't want to talk to anybody right now. She's exhausted, you see, and—”

“But that bears out my dope theory, doesn't it?” Austin said. “The fact that she's exhausted? Why else would she be exhausted unless she's suffering from the after effects of some kind of dope? Don't you think?”

“Well, maybe that's what it is,” Hugh said.

Austin stood hesitantly in the middle of the room, shifting his feet, unwilling to go. “What do you think, Hugh?” he asked. “Do you think that she'd be feeling well enough to see me tomorrow?”

“I'd give her a day or so,” Hugh said. “Call her in a day or so, Austin, and see how she's feeling.”

Austin's face fell. “Well,” he said. “All right, if that's what you think is best. I'll wait a day or so, Hugh, and then call her.”

“Good boy.”

“Well, good-bye, then,” Austin said, trying, without much success, to trace a smile on his face.

“Good-bye, Austin.”

“And thanks for the—you know, all the encouragement, Hugh. I really needed it.”

“Don't mention it.”

“Good-bye.”

Hugh followed Austin across the black and white marble squares of the hall to the front door, and they shook hands. The night outside was chilly. Austin put on his blue cashmere scarf, grey chesterfield coat, his grey hat, and his grey mocha gloves. Thus transformed, and armoured in his outerwear, he gave Hugh a little wave of his hand and went down the white stone steps to his car, clean-cut, square-shouldered, erect, responsible and confident, the light from the doorway glinting on his well-shined shoes.

Alone in her room, Pryor Carey Lord lay for a long time on her quiet bed. Then she got up and crossed the room, and turned on one of the pair of lamps on her writing-table. She stood for a time at the window, looking out at the darkness that contained all that she knew from memory—the terrace and the fountain and the pear tree in the corner beside the stone bench. But all of these were invisible now, and hidden, in the night. There was not a single light anywhere, not a pinprick to reveal any familiar thing, or any area of landscape which she knew was there. The only sound in the night was the waterfall that poured incessantly in her mind, and she turned away from the window.

Then she sat down at the little writing-table. From a drawer she withdrew a single pale-pink sheet of stationery, and smiled at the words “Rampanaug Towers” that were emblazoned across it. She picked up a pen from the desk. “My darling—” she began. She wrote a few more words.

Then she stood up and lighted a cigarette. She filled her lungs a few times with smoke, then stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray. She wondered suddenly where her father was. When she was a child he had been the one who had lifted her up on to her horse, handed her the reins, adjusted the stirrups for her feet. Summers at the Cape, he had taught her to swim, and she had always known, when the combers began lapping over her head, that he would seize her beneath the armpits and lift her out. But he was not here now. There was no one anywhere who would help her now.

And all at once there seemed nothing else in the world to do, and she turned quickly and went into the bathroom. She put on fresh lipstick in front of the mirror and ran a hairbrush several times through her hair. Then she filled a water-glass and took the little bottle of yellow tablets from the shelf in the medicine cabinet and emptied its contents into her cupped palm. She swallowed them then, as many at a time as it was possible to swallow. When they were gone, she looked at her face one more time in the mirror.

Then, feeling young and cheated and alone and, at the same time, queerly triumphant, she went back into her bedroom and put on the little black kid shoes that lay on the floor by her bed. They were a very special pair of shoes, they were good-luck shoes. Then, wearing the special shoes, she lay down across the bed again, reaching for the satin comforter that was folded at the foot of the bed and, pulling it up around her, tucked it in tightly on all sides, tucked it close under her chin, and said a little prayer.

Hugh's father came home a few minutes after eight o'clock. “Pansy here yet?” he asked.

“Yes, she's upstairs taking a rest. You know about it then.”

“Your mother phoned me at the office. I had a couple of things to clear up. I couldn't get home right away.”

“Well, Pansy's here,” Hugh said.

“I think I'll go up to see her,” his father said. “Just to sort of say hallo.”

“I wouldn't if I were you, Dad,” he said. “She told me she doesn't want to talk to anybody yet.”

“Oh.” His father looked disappointed. “Well, how's she taking it, Hugh?”

“She's taking it,” Hugh said. “I guess that's all that can be said about it, Dad. She's taking it.”

“Oh,” he said again. “Well, it's too bad. It's a tough thing to take. But—well, in time she'll get over it. Everything will be all right.”

“Yes, perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps everything will be all right, Dad.”

“Where's Sandy?”

“She's in her room. Reba's with her.”

“Oh. Well, I'll go up and see what she wants to do about dinner,” his father said.

“Dad,” Hugh said, “I called your office around half past three. They said you'd left for the day.”

“Oh,” his father said. “Well, I've been in and out—in and out—most of the day. That Hartford client still. If you wanted to talk to me, why didn't you leave a message? You know I always call in to the office to see if there are any messages.”

“Well, it doesn't matter,” Hugh said, “as long as Sandy got hold of you.”

“Yes, she got hold of me. She left a message. So—well, I'll go up and see what she wants to do about dinner,” he said again.

At about eight-fifteen the telephone rang in the library, and Hugh picked it up in the middle of the first ring. “Hallo?” he said.

“Ready with your call to Colorado Springs, sir,” the operator said.

And when the other man's voice came on the phone, Hugh said, “Jim? Jim, this is Pryor's brother Hugh. Jim, I want to know if you can come East right away. Can you get a leave or something? It's very important that you try to come East right away. Do you need money? Because if you do, please tell me and I can wire you some …”

And from nearly two thousand miles away he heard the quiet voice of the young man he had never met saying, “Don't worry about that, sir. If Pryor needs me, sir, I'll be there as fast as I can. You see, sir, she's my wife …”

And Hugh had felt so jubilant, so sure suddenly that he was, through some ingenuity of his own, managing to steer his family narrowly from the very brink of tragedy, that he could only say, “Good … good …”

At half past eight, when Pappy came up to Pansy's room with a plate of supper on a tray, and when he tapped on her door and there was no answer, he opened the door a little way and peeked inside. And she looked so peaceful sleeping there in the light from the single lamp that he hated to disturb her, and so he entered the room quietly, placed the supper tray on the table beside her bed, and tiptoed out again.

Fifteen

So much happens when one is very young that one doesn't understand at all, or that one never takes the trouble to understand. Flowers bloom, parents quarrel, storms come and pass, the seasons change. Through it all runs a single thread of self, giving an illusion of continuity to all that happens. Seen through one's own eyes, when one is very young, the misadventures of life are merely pauses in the pattern, interruptions in the harmony, and one is sure that, in time, the trouble—the storm, the quarrel, whatever it is—will blow over and that, as Hugh Carey's father had put it, everything would be all right. It is with a certain shock of adjustment that one realises that there are some things which will never blow over, and will never be all right.

There is the inevitability and unalterability of death, for one thing, which is not a pause at all, but a final thing, and comes followed by the knowledge that the person who has died simply will never appear again and that the world of people one has known now possesses an empty space. Hugh could remember his grandfather's death, even though he had been barely five years old at the time, and he could remember sitting in the old swing behind the house, thinking about his grandfather who had died yesterday, and feeling very lucky to be part of an event that was causing so much consternation and activity in the family, feeling very proud, because none of the children he played with had ever known anyone who was now dead. He had watched everyone's behaviour very closely—the friends who came and went with little gifts, the men bringing flowers, the Carey cousins and the Pryor cousins who came from different parts of the East to participate in what was happening. And he had enjoyed the particular attention that all these people paid to him. As he swung, back and forth in the little swing, people in dark clothes had walked out into the back garden just to see him, to pat him gravely on the head and to kneel, holding the swing ropes, and kiss him on the cheek and say kindly, “Dear little Hugh. You will be a good little boy for your mother and daddy, won't you?” And he had promised them, smiling, that he would. One always promised to be good.

They had paid some attention to Billy too, but they had paid more attention to Hugh because he was the older and Billy was still a baby who could not even talk, and, of course, this was all before Pansy was born, so there was no Pansy for them to pay attention to. He could remember, later, running through the house while everyone had gone off to the church, crying, “I'm dead! I'm dead!” with the servants running after him, trying to make him be quiet, to show respect, trying to get him to sit in his room with a colouring book, to do anything that would preserve the house's hush. But he had been too excited and happy about everything that had gone on to be quiet, to do anything but run wildly through the house. Only later, much later—perhaps it was a week, perhaps a month later—did the thundering knowledge come to him that what had happened simply meant that his grandfather's stooping figure would never again come towards him, to offer him a ginger snap or a copper penny if he had been good, or to slap his wrist if he had misbehaved.

“When you press your face very close to the grass …” Edrita had said. He was sitting on the grass beside Edrita now, in the wood-enclosed field far behind the house—the field that once, on a walk together long ago, his father had said was like an enchanted valley. He had spread out his old Army field jacket on the grass, and they were sitting on that. They had walked most of the way saying nothing, and now they were sitting in the same kind of poised silence. Hugh hunched forward, putting his elbows on his knees, and looked at the lighted cigarette between his fingers.

“How are they all taking it?” Edrita asked finally.

“Oh, can't you imagine how?” he said. “They're taking it just beautifully. The Pryor women are strong. The Pryor women are brave.”

“It's just so cruel and senseless,” she said. “It just doesn't bear thinking about at all.”

“That's right,” he said.

“And your father—how is he?”

“He's—well, he's a man. Men like Dad never cry. They just bottle it all up somewhere.”

“Your nice father. He's such a very nice man.”

“Yes.”

She shuddered.

“Are you cold?”

“No. No, I'm just thinking of that poor little girl. Poor, lost little girl.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

“She was always very proud and fond of you,” Edrita said. “I'll always remember that—how she always admired you. Her big brother. I used to think, watching Pansy, how much fun it must be—how lucky a girl must be—to have a big brother.”

He nodded.

“She felt very close to you, I know,” Edrita said.

“It's funny,” he said after a moment, “but I don't remember that we were really ever very close. There was always that gap in our ages. I used to think of her as just a little kid, just a baby sister, and I hated to have her tagging along. I wish—”

“I know, I know,” she said.

“But at least, last night when I talked to her, it did seem as though we were really quite close. And that's a nice thing.”

“Yes.”

“Last night she said I was the only one she wanted to talk to.”