I'll Let You Go

CHAPTER 48. Aftershocks

“I didn’t want to tell you,” said Lucy, one windswept August afternoon.

She had invited Toulouse to join her in the latest addition to what she called Stradella Fields, a charming Russian-style gazebo crammed with more pinecones and willow-work than Twig House itself, and not far from where Edward had been found in the wayward buggy. Afternoon tea was something new for her, as were many things English. For most of the summer, she’d affected an accent that could only be called a poignant variation on the real thing. Lucille Rose, as she insisted on being called, put a cool face on her passionate interest in the Royals (especially Lady Sarah Chatto), and was surprisingly fluent in the languages of, say, Damien Hirst or Hussein Chalayan. She devoured back issues of Hello! and once, when Epitacio drove them home from a visit with Toulouse’s father, they detoured around the Beverly Hills Farmers’ Market on Cañon Drive — seeing fruit sellers in their stalls, she turned up her nose and hissed, “Look at those yobbish costermongers!”

Settling back on the silk mohair club chair beside the vert de mer fireplace, Lucy took a sip from her cup, then scrunched her brow. “I didn’t want to tell you, but it looks as though I’m going to be living in Europe.”

Toulouse nearly choked on his crumpet. “What do you mean?”

“England, mostly — that’s where I’ll be going to school.”

“But how? Why—”

“When Trinnie and I were in Iceland, we met the Hectares. As in Lord Hectare. They are bloody rich. I got on quite well with Amanda — she’s their daughter. And they asked if I wanted to come stay with them.”

“Staying with them is one thing. Living is another.”

“Then bugger it all, Toulouse, they asked if I wanted to live with them, OK? It’s not like they don’t have room — they just bought Sutton Place for forty million pounds. It’s a bleeding castle.”

“Bleeding or bloody?”

“They’re so rich it’s both, you arse. We’ll be going to Monte Carlo first; they have a cliff house Aunt Trinnie says is très Belle Époque. They’re quite friendly with the Grimaldis, you know. We’re going to see Charlotte, Princess Caroline’s daughter — we’re almost the same age. She’s got a bulldog called Romeo, isn’t that sweet? I so love a little bulldog! And one of Lord Hectare’s best friends is the man whose family makes ink for all the world currencies. Isn’t that brilliant?”

We shall return to the cousins in a moment, for the above scene is not yet done; but first a little context should be provided, as months have gone by that were relatively unaccounted for.

The departed invalid-genius became both muse and, daresay, mascot for Toulouse and his parents, offering his imprimatur to the baby steps that the reborn family took each day. They invoked him often; the boy became a sacred spot in their secret garden, a wistful, contemplative presence that eased not only the sorrow of his being gone but that of their own sad history. Practicing a gentle psychomancy, Toulouse felt closer to him than ever.

Yet as one family knitted together (two, if we include the Motts), another unraveled in the wake of his passage. Joyce emerged from paralysis to throw herself into work with manic compulsion. The Candlelighters bought up more ground (all that was left, in fact) at the Westwood park, but awakened more phantoms than were put to rest. For it was no longer the cracked tower that haunted her neighborhood but rather the empty monuments of Olde CityWalk — not to mention the east wing of the main house, where sat the tub in which she had poured water over her son’s bird-like, terminal frame. In the hour of the wolf, it was not unusual for Winter to awaken Dodd on the intercom with news that Candelaria had espied the mistress barefoot and febrile, moondancing about the Mauck with its ghostly incubus of buggy within. When, to break the terrible cycle, the doleful billionaire sold off both vehicles without warning, Joyce took to her bed for weeks.

Each day, she visited his grave, which by late summer was surrounded by others, who kept their respectful distance; she could not bear anything encroaching on Edward just yet. As in Castaic, the dumpster tribeschildren were given biblical names, and the Candlelighters (which now included the Palisades lesbians, who had since made Joyce godmother of their son) stuck colorful pinwheels in the fresh plots, with tiny name-banners attached. Whirligigs spun in the wind, and Dot thought them a welcome addition, even though she knew they brought much grief to the eldest Trotter, whose visits to his own humble memorial had for the most part quit. Her sister Ethel said it was a family affair and to stay out of it, which she did.

Among Edward’s papers was an epigram the boy had lifted from the pages of his Roman middle-namesake (a name bestowed by his grandfather); he had pasted it on a photo-montage of stones like an epitaph. Joyce thought the text to be morbid, but dutifully had a plaque engraved and set in the ground — a guilty compromise for having betrayed his dream of anonymity:

EDWARD AURELIUS TROTTER 1990–2001

“Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you.”

After a few months, the old man returned to the park and for the first time attended his grandson’s grave. He was disgusted by its meagerness. The tacky windmills whirred in the periphery of his vision, but he refused to acknowledge them. Still, he was moved by the inscription — at least she got something right.

Louis Trotter had actually taken the initial steps of filing a suit to disinter the boy and bring him “home”—but the lawyers (if one can imagine), not to mention Katrina, were strongly opposed. Trinnie even brought their old friend Dr. Kindman to bear and warned her father flat-out that she would never speak to him again if he dared follow through with such an action. Besides, she asked, where would Edward be traveling but to another empty field? She had a point. After all these years, the great patriarch couldn’t decide on a memorial for himself, let alone for his grandson. What it came down to, then, was pride and entitlement. In life and in death, it seemed always to come to that.

He began bringing the boy flowers. One afternoon, he even trod the Candlelighters’ turf for a closer look at the “charity cases.” Mr. Trotter clasped his hands at his lower back, clucking and chuffing in largo. How freakish and asinine! he thought. Selfish devil-woman.… He kicked himself for having hired her in the first place — none of this might have happened! But then Edward mightn’t have happened, either. His lip began to tremble with the sadness of it.

With the skillfully combined efforts of Dot and Sling Blade, warring parties were given hints as to when one or the other would most likely be paying respects; in short order, a schedule was mentally drawn and strictly adhered to. Thus, the old man and his daughter-in-law were never to see each other at that cemetery — or anywhere else, for that matter — again.

The reader has not yet been treated to any private moments between the departed wunderkind and his dad, and for good reason. They did not have many. (Though somewhat awkward in each other’s presence, they adored one another no end.) What they did have was an arrangement; the charter and by-laws of their corporation, so to speak, had been drawn up at Edward’s birth and become a living, immanent article of faith. The father, neurotic in a way diametrically opposed to his wife’s dysfunction, had sworn to his Maker he would always be there for his son, a declaration never voided.

But let us dig a little deeper for those who may wonder what effect Edward’s loss had upon a man whose emotions, even under normal conditions, seemed inscrutable at best. Dodd’s worst fear was to have taken his son for granted. Perhaps more than anyone, he had been cognizant of Edward’s mortality, but hadn’t the courage to face it head-on, preferring instead to shower him with the outrageous comforts that only material things can provide. In other words, he was afraid he hadn’t shown the boy enough affection. A psychiatrist briefly consulted some weeks after Edward’s passing helped the billionaire (who, because of recent fluctuations, had fallen on the Forbes list to number forty-one but would give his detractors much comeuppance in coming quarters) to recognize that he had demonstrated his love in the best and deepest way he could — and that Edward had surely felt it. Wiping an eye, Dodd was certain this was true, and left the man’s office satisfied.

At around this time, the motive behind his collection of empty buildings came home to roost. When he learned that his son had been researching his own demise all along, he thought: how strange are these Trotter men. Each obsessed with death or the trappings thereof — for what was an empty building but a monument to the once-alive? Those were his monuments, Dodd’s cenotaphs and sepulchres, spread across the land. At escrow, he felt the same tidy relief one did upon inoculation against disease (the disease of death). In the past five years he had acquired nearly eighty companies, spinning off or turning over those that couldn’t be absorbed by the healthy corporate body. He despised himself when on weak or dismal days — and by a kind of accountant’s synaptic legerdemain — he took comfort in regarding Edward as a gloriously failed acquisition.

Lucille Rose generally suffered in silence, evincing the characteristics her grandfather had attributed to her some pages back. But the overarching one — his observation that she gleaned from the best of those whom she knew and loved — held fast and true, for in mourning she showed an uncommon valor: such a trait was Edward’s gift, and what he would have wished of her. It can be recalled that Mr. Trotter made note of his granddaughter’s big-heartedness and this too held true, even though that heart was like a river that had changed course so it would not flood her brother’s land — for there was a moment upon his death when she could not control the waters, which threatened to engulf both her and his memory. The trip to Iceland was the right cure for that, and to her aunt she would always be grateful. In time, the river would run near Edward again, as sure and strong as the Thames, and would never leave him.

So: in the Russian gazebo she told her cousin she would soon be living the expatriate’s life. A fleet of planes at the heiress’s disposal guaranteed that no one in the Trotter clan — or outside, for that matter, i.e., such indispensables as Boulder Langon — would ever be more than a half day away. Yet Lucille Rose (who would in a matter of weeks pluck out the thorny Lucille and become a mere Rose) still somehow managed to make Toulouse feel that prohibition and embargo were in the air and that he might not see her for years — or at least not until she was an older woman of eighteen or twenty.

“Would you come with me, Toulouse?” she asked demurely.

He thought she meant England.

Tea had cooled, and by the time Candelaria arrived with hot water, they were already heading toward Olde CityWalk. Lucille Rose clutched her new snakeskin Smythson — Amanda Hectare said python was the “rage”—while Pullman gambol’d about, and she slapped and kissed and fussed over the creature all the way to the Boar’s Head. “Oh oh oh!” she cried (very Liz Taylor in National Velvet). “You’re the one I’m really going to miss! Oh, Pullie, you’re the one! You’re the one!”

“What’s going to happen to your book?” asked Toulouse.

“I don’t know,” she said cavalierly. “I sort of lost interest … now I just mostly use it to jot down places I want to go and people I’d like to meet.” She shook the python pad like a tambourine. “I’m not sure I really want to be an actual writer anymore — unless it’s for a magazine, like British Vogue. Oh, bugger it all! I mean, I’m good and everything, but … I talked to Mr. Hookstratten, and he was very upset. He had brilliant plans for Blue Maze. But as Grandma Bluey has sung before: Que sera, sera! Besides, if I still want to, England will only make my writing better. I mean, all the brilliant writers are from England. The Brontës, the Austens, Emily Dickinson … and bloody Shakespeare!”

“Emily Dickinson is not from England.”

“Well, Dick-ens is, so bugger off!”

When she led them past the Boar’s Head and the Majestyk, Toulouse wondered what she was up to.

“Anyway,” she said, “I never did really ‘crack the case.’ ”

“Case? What do you mean?”

“The mystery. What was the ‘mystery’ of the Blue Maze?”

“Well maybe,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, “maybe the mystery was that there is no mystery.”

She stopped in her tracks, as if giving his suggestion the gravest consideration — for a moment, Toulouse thought he’d saved the day and handed her a reason to live again. Jumping for joy, she could at last go back to being plain old Bel-Air Lucy. They would ride together to school as they always had, and everything — well, most everything — would be just like it used to be.

“Too cliché,” she said.

He followed her to the hangar.

The 747 simulator was being picked up Monday and given to a charitable group. Lucille Rose climbed the stairs, turning midway to see if he had followed.

“Where shall we go?” asked the randy aviatrix, once they had settled in. It was dark; only the instruments were illuminated. “Oh my God — Heathrow, of course!”

She punched something in, and the cockpit began its subtle gyrations.

She reached over and kissed him. He unbuttoned her blouse and, for the first time ever, saw her breasts. She dropped his hand to her thigh, then moved it up. Her face was hot and tears sprang from her eyes. He watched her as they kissed like he always had, certain she was distressed by the same recollection: Edward surprising and embarrassing them as they groped in the plane. But that was far from her mind. She loved him so, yet he loved another — the orphan girl — and there wasn’t a thing in the world she could do. (Her brother was dead, and there was nothing she could do about that, either.) She was truly excited about leaving. England lit up before her, tactile and redolent: she had already dreamed herself there and could smell its trees, soot and chilled air. She was inordinately excited for her life … but she bloody loved Toulouse Trotter and always would, with every fiber and filament of her body, with every red hair she had and with the red blood that beat through her bloody, bleeding over — river-run heart — nothing to do about it, nothing to do …

Oh bugger! Oh bollocks! Oh brilliant! Oh, Toulouse—

But that wasn’t why she threw herself at him now … he would not want her for her little tits or for the pulse that shook her neck like explosives deep within a building being demolished; he would not want her for the thing she guided his fingers toward, and would not want her for her smile or kindnesses or funny girl-detective ways. He would not want her for any of that. No: he loved another, and she could not change what wasn’t meant to be. Just now she wanted what she wanted — merely to touch him, to breathe in his smell and his hair and feel his clumsy hands stumble-bum over her. Not, as her aunt might have put it, such a terrible way to say good-bye.