What Time Devours (21 page)

But even as he felt the excitement of the thought, he wondered if the play was not better with the darker inconclusion of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, less romantically conventional though it was.

Less conventional, more like life
, he thought, thinking briefly of his most recent squabble with Kumi.
Which is less a squabble and more a stage in a longer tactical engagement the end of which might yet be closer to
Love’s Labour’s Lost
than any more hopeful sequel . . .

Thomas looked up and saw, on the other side of the river, a couple in earnest conversation. He probably wouldn’t have given them another thought, but the woman, who looked at least sixty, suddenly shouted “No!” with surprising ferocity. She had long, unkempt black hair slashed with gray and her eyes, though dark, were wide and staring. As he watched her, she started to rant, gesticulating and pointing at the man, who had his back to Thomas and the river, though it was impossible to hear what she was saying. The excess of her fury was alarming. Some of it was measured and even rhythmical so that Thomas would have thought they were doing a scene from a play if the woman had not seemed so out of control. She waved her hands and pointed at the man—a long stab with her bony finger—and Thomas thought she was calling him names, long hyphenated insults.

“Bunch-backed toad . . . !” he thought she yelled.

Or perhaps he imagined that, because the line seemed right, old Margaret screaming her venom at Richard III.

The man seemed to take it without response, or with muttered words that didn’t carry across the Avon. His hands flitted a little, as if in calming gestures, but they were small, dwarfed by the woman’s rage.

Then, quite suddenly, it was over. The woman marched away and the man, hunched-shouldered and wilted, turned quickly toward the water before walking slowly back toward the scaffolding surrounding the Memorial Theatre.

Thomas blinked. It was his former professor, Randall Dagenhart.

CHAPTER 40

Thomas called Kumi twice before she answered. He had been putting it off because he had begun to enjoy himself, playing sleuth and academic in this quirky and history-laden place, and a part of him didn’t want her irritation with him to spoil that. He wanted to tell her all about what he was doing, share it with her, but he thought there would be some awkwardness first so he had delayed. Normally, when he sensed a problem he dealt with it as directly as possible, but with Kumi he knew she sometimes needed time. If he forced the issue, the reconciliation would take longer in coming.

She sounded weary and distant, though the line itself was clear. He said he was sorry for not calling before and she said it was fine, that she was sorry she had been so upset. He should have been glad, but she sounded so tired, so lacking in emotion that even the apology didn’t sit quite right. He asked about work and her classes and she answered briefly, that same blankness in her voice, so he told her what had happened since they last spoke, including the episode in the castle ruins. That, he hoped, would kindle a little sympathy.

“But you’re okay?” she asked.

“Right as rain, as they say here. Do we say that too? I’m losing track.”

“I think so,” she said.

She sounded distracted still and her concern for his welfare, the root of her anger when last they spoke, was perfunctory at best.

“You okay?” said Thomas.

“Sure. Just tired.”

“Should I leave you to it?”

“To what?”

“I don’t know,” said Thomas. “Work. Rest. Whatever.”

“Maybe.”

“Is there something on your mind?”

“Not really,” she said. “I’m just . . . I don’t know. Can we talk about it later?”

“You aren’t in danger, are you?” he asked.

It sounded like a line from a bad movie, and as soon as he said it he wished he hadn’t, though in the circumstances it wasn’t an unreasonable question. She had been in danger because of him before. But he wasn’t ready for her response, which was a whispering, breathless laugh like a series of sighs, which gradually turned into something else. He realized with a start that she was crying.

“I have cancer, Tom,” she said. “Breast cancer. They found a lump a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t think it was anything. A cyst maybe. I would have mentioned it last time but I was mad at you for not calling, and I really didn’t think it was anything. But they biopsied it . . .”

“Wait,” said Thomas. “What? Cancer? How can you have cancer? I don’t understand.”

And he didn’t. There was nothing she could say that would change that, so he just listened.

She told him not to come, that it would do neither of them any good, that she trusted her doctors and felt she was in good hands. She would know more soon about what they planned to do and when. Thomas stood there, his teeth clamped together to lock the sound in, nodding like an idiot. Then she repeated it all again, and wept, and he listened, nodding, until his phone card ran out and the line went dead.

CHAPTER 41

Thomas drifted around Stratford as if wrapped in a fog. He had been like this since the phone call, since he’d heard that word, and he had spent the evening shut up in his room, pacing, or sitting in silence for hours at a time. He slept in the armchair, fading in and out, dreaming dreams he forgot immediately but that left the impression of panic and apprehension like footprints under his window. The only one he remembered was the last, Daniella Blackstone, her strange, mismatched eyes vacant and her head bloody, tapping against his Evanston kitchen window and mouthing Kumi’s name. When he woke this morning it was waiting for him, like some taloned beast nestled in the corner.

So he walked, and when he had done that for a couple of hours he called Deborah Miller on her cell phone, staring blankly through the call box window while she picked up.

“No, tragically you didn’t wake me,” she said. “I had to come in to Valladolid to help with the lab. If you’d called later—you know, at a decent time when I could be expected to be out of bed—I’d be on site where you only get a signal if you climb above the jungle via a specially built four hundred foot tower. Made of wood.”

Thomas, who had forgotten she would be in Mexico, interrupted, speaking gently but insistently. He told her simply. She was quiet for a while, and he thought she might be crying. When she spoke, it was to ask the question he had known she would get to eventually.

“Are you going to go to Japan?”

“She said not to,” Thomas said. “I don’t know. She seems to want to just . . . you know . . . carry on, as if everything is the same. But maybe I should just go. Be with her.”

“For her, or for you?”

“Both, I guess. Does it matter?”

“Maybe not,” said Deborah. Thomas had never heard her so quiet. “Maybe she needs normalcy.”

“And I’m not part of that,” said Thomas.

“Thomas,” she said, and now she was back to her usual assured self, “this isn’t the time to feel sorry for yourself. Not while you are dealing with her, at least. You have to do and say the things she needs from you. If you think that what she really needs is for you to go to her, then hang up and go. If you want to go so that you can feel better, feel like you’re doing something, forget it. A neighbor of my mother’s had terminal cancer twice.”

“Is that a joke?” said Thomas.

“Kind of,” said Deborah, “but it’s true. And she kept going because she didn’t have time to stop. She refused to. I’m not giving you some new-age mind-over-matter crap, Thomas, but from what I’ve heard, attitude is important when you have cancer.”

He nodded, wincing slightly at the word.

“You’ve not been part of her life for the last few years,” she said. “Not the day-to-day, work, meals, sleep kind of life anyway. If you go out there now, it’s not normal. It all becomes a big deal.”

“A big deal . . . ?”

“I know it
is
a big deal, but she can’t think of it like that. She needs to work right through it. Stay on task. Isn’t that the Kumi you know?”

Thomas hesitated.

“You don’t think I should go,” he said.

“I think she’s probably being honest when she says she doesn’t want you to. Not now. Not yet. Don’t take it personally. It’s not about you.”

Thomas took the bus into Stratford and joined the sprawl of Shakespeareans taking tea and smoking on the steps of the institute. Anything to focus his mind. He nodded to Taylor Bradley but made no move to speak to him, and as soon as the group began to return inside for the eleven o’clock session, he lowered his head and pushed through before anyone could close the door on him.

He sat at the back of the seminar room, which was full. He didn’t care who was speaking, or about what. It was just something to do so that he could think. Or not think.

It was, it turned out, the Julia McBride show. There she was, sitting at a table, flanked by her graduate students, Angela on her right, Chad on her left. The moderator—a hawkish-looking Scottish woman with a defiantly thick accent, introduced them, and the graduate students tried not to look proud and terrified as their meager accomplishments were cited, while Julia, serene, sipped bottled water from a glass. The panel was titled “More Early Modern Bodies.”

Thomas didn’t really listen. From time to time a phrase caught his ear, a quotation usually, but though he understood the words, he didn’t grasp what the papers meant. Chad’s—which used the twin Dromios in
Comedy of Errors
to say something about how Renaissance (or, as he preferred to say, Early Modern) identity was shaped by clothing—was the least professional of the three, though it seemed workmanlike enough. But whereas his sounded like it was reinventing the wheel a bit and substituting fervor for deep knowledge, Angela’s was clearly the coming-out party. She talked about clothing buttons: their manufacture in the period, the various styles, how they signified rank and allegiance, and the way they “served as gateways between the public and the private.” A part of Thomas wanted to laugh, but the more she talked, the more compelling her case became, and when she segued into a discussion of key “button moments” in the plays, ending with Lear’s dying “pray you, sir, undo this button. Thank you,” he was convinced. It reminded him of what he had loved about scholarly research, when some unnoticed little detail became a fulcrum on which the entire work seemed to pivot, shifting it so that it seemed new and revelatory. For a moment, Angela’s paper concentrated his mind on history and literature and the significance of the body, rather than its disease.

Julia McBride was obviously the headline act, but it was tough to follow Angela, and Julia seemed more nervous than he had ever seen her. The paper seemed solid enough and was warmly received, but she seemed out of sorts, and when Chad fielded a question about clothing and started talking about servants’ attire in general, she cut him off irritably. When it was all over, she spent an age fiddling with her sheaf of notes, and Thomas was sure she was avoiding having to talk to anyone. That might have been as well, because it was Angela who had gathered the telltale huddle of admirers.

“Interesting panel,” said a woman beside him.

Thomas found himself standing next to Katrina Barker.

Time to wheel out further evidence of my unbelonging
.

“Yes,” he managed. “Who knew buttons could produce so much material?”

She started to nod, then picked up the pun and began to laugh.

“Excellent,” she said, wagging a finger as she sailed through the crowd like the
Queen Mary
.

Thomas slipped out of the room, down the hall, and out the front door before he had really decided to leave. His hesitation outside cost him, and when he turned to go back in, he found Mrs. Covington looming.

“If you intend to come in, you will need to have registered,” she said, intoning the words like some high church minister.

Thomas just turned and was walking away when someone fell into step beside him. Chad.

“Good paper,” said Thomas.

“Could have been better,” he said.

He didn’t look at Thomas, so there was no gratitude for the politeness even in his face.

“Not staying for requests from editors to submit to their journals?” said Thomas.

“Right,” said Chad. “No, I’m running errands for Professor McBride. As befits my stature.”

“I’m sure she was very proud of your work.”

“Yeah?” said Chad, with a quick, sneering glance. “What would you know about it?”

“You know,” said Thomas, rounding on him, “I’m really not in the mood to be condescended to by a jumped-up little nothing like you, so just take the compliment and shut up, all right?”

It was like he’d slapped him. The boy withered, lost at least a decade, and flushed. He opened his mouth but couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I’m sorry,” said Thomas. “I’ve just had some not-so-great news and . . .”

“It’s okay,” said Chad, lowering his eyes. The boyish humility was already morphing back into surly adolescence.

“She obviously values you, is all I’m saying,” Thomas offered. “Julia, I mean.”

“Yeah, when she needs someone to go buy her a jump drive she values me,” Chad said, scowling. “But when it comes to answering questions about my work—
my
work—that’s another story.”

“I’m sure she wouldn’t have set up the panel if she didn’t respect your work.”

“Oh, she respects it all right,” he muttered. “Maybe a little too much.”

“What does that mean?”

The boy colored again and looked down: a kid caught talking in church.

“Nothing,” he said. “Forget it. Look, I’m going this way. I’ll see you later.”

And he peeled off down a side street at a jog. Thomas wasn’t sure if it was just the result of the boy’s professional anxieties combined with Thomas’s putdown, but he was sure that Chad was retreating, kicking himself for whatever he thought he had revealed.