Locked rooms

Chapter Eighteen

Not much to look at, actually. Certainly nothing grand enough to impress our Pacific Heights neighbours: an original one-storey house made of stripped logs with a newer two-storey addition to one side, cedar shingles going slightly mossy on the roof. However, standing and looking at the way it sat on the earth, one became convinced that here was a house whose doors would shut true, whose windows would not rattle in a breeze, whose porch floor would not attack a child's running feet with splinters.

Father had called it the Lodge, and although Mother had complained that the name made it sound like the gate-house to a manor, the name had prevailed. In this basic summer house on the lake, we had been Family. When we were in San Francisco, my father had worked long days, appearing in our lives briefly in the evenings, generally granting us one whiskey-and-soda's worth of time in the parlour or library before he wished us a good-night and sat down to dine with Mother. Week-ends were better, but often he and Mother were taken away by social obligations—either that, or Levi and I were dragged along for social obligations thinly disguised as family events, such as one memorable picnic at the beach that ended with me bloodying the nose of the snobbish son of the bank's vice-president, who had dared to make a remark about my little brother's Jewish features. Family museum trips were better, but too highly organised to be much fun.

Here, however, Father had been himself. Which was only proper, since he had built the Lodge with his own hands.

The original building had comprised four spacious rooms: an all-purpose sitting room at the front, a grand fireplace and dark-panelled walls, and beside it a smaller room that had served as my father's bedroom in his bachelor days, converted into a billiards and smoking room after my mother came. Behind these rooms were the kitchen, with the table at which we often took breakfast, and the dining room, opening onto a broad stone terrace that nestled between the back of the original Lodge and one side of the two-storey sleeping addition. The newer wing, five bedrooms and two baths, had been added (along with electric lights and hot-water heaters) when he had brought civilisation, in the form of Mother, back from England.

Father had lived in a tent among the trees for the better part of two years during the construction of the Lodge, which coincidentally amounted to the time it took his parents to withdraw their demands that he return to Boston and assume his responsibilities there. He had chosen the trees, helped to cut and haul them, milled the boards, and stacked them to dry. He had learnt a score of trades in the course of the building, become a brick-layer and a glazier, a carpenter and a plumber. He'd rebuilt the fireplace chimney three times before he was satisfied that its draw was clean, and spent a solid month experimenting with the decorative wood-work on the porch railing.

Despite the later additions, this house was his from foundation stones to roof-tree; every time he walked in, he looked around and made in the back of his throat a small sound of profound relaxation. It was, it now occurred to me, the precise equivalent of my mother's touching of the mezuzah as she entered the Pacific Heights house.

“Do you want me to open the door?” asked Flo at my shoulder.

“No,” I said sharply, then softened it to, “Thanks, but I was just remembering how lovely it was to come here, and get away from the city.”

“Really?” she asked dubiously. I laughed, suddenly seeing the rustic building through the eyes of Miss Florence Greenfield, and she hastened to add, “I mean, I'm sure it's a very nice house, and I know a lot of people have summer places or hunting lodges or things, especially with Prohibition and all, but it's just, well, I'm not really a briars-and-brambles kind of a girl.”

“Not to worry, Flo—the plumbing works, there are no bears here, and I'm sure we'll find it clean and tidy. It's only for a couple of days, and if it's too dreary you two can always go back early.”

But as I stepped forward with the key, it occurred to me that Flo was the one responsible for the transformation of the Greenfield house, and that to a woman with Deco sensibilities, the rusticity of the Lodge might prove a challenge.

The key moved easily in the lock; I stepped across the threshold: no trace of mustiness in the air. The house was cool, certainly, but as we moved into the rooms I was relieved to find it as tidy and dust-free as it had ever been—clearly the interdiction against trespass in the Pacific Heights house had not extended here. There were even a couple of fairly recent Saturday Evening Posts laid on the table between the sofas, just as Mrs Gordimer had used to provide for us. I told myself that Norbert would have informed her that I was coming to California, and therefore a visit of the Lodge's owner to the lake was possible—it was better than thinking that the poor woman had replaced these offerings and removed them, unused, every time she'd cleaned over the past decade.

Flo's cautiously polite noises had turned to honest appreciation as soon as she had seen the interior, and now, as she worked her way towards the back, her voice took on a note of enthusiasm and even—once she saw the view—wonder.

“Oh, Mary, this is perfectly swell! It's like something from a fairy-tale book, the flowers and the lawn and the lake—and look, there's even a boat, just sitting and waiting.”

I moved, reluctantly, to join her at the expanse of windows that formed the back wall of the original cabin, and saw that, indeed, the little sail-boat lay ready. One glance at its trim paint told me that it had also been recently placed there—no doubt by the stout Mr Gordimer, grumbling and snapping at one or another of his youthful assistants as they wheeled the vessel out of the boat-house and down to the dock. He'd always knelt, laboriously, to pass a clean cloth over the boat's prow before nodding to himself, then climbed to his knees, turned his back on the gleaming object, and marched up the dock and the lawn with the weight of the world on his shoulders, muttering glum but inaudible invective to himself all the way—most of his conversations were conducted with himself.

I'd once caught my mother smiling at his retreating back; when she'd noticed me watching her, she had winked, as if we shared a secret.

I pulled my eyes from the waiting boat and made myself look at the wide stretch of green that spilled down to the water's edge: my mother's realm. Father had built the house, but Mother had formed the garden, and my dread for this spot was greater than any other. She had spent hours here every day we were in residence, pruning and weeding, planting the flowers and shrubs she had brought from the city, putting into effect the changes she had worked out with the help of Micah—who, as far as I knew, had never set foot here. It was all her, from the tiny pink rose she had placed in the shelter of the apple tree to the dancing fuchsias she had placed in shady corners and the wild-flower seeds she had scattered in the lawn, every inch of it her vision and her labour. I was afraid that seeing the garden without her in it would act like a knife in my heart.

But I had reckoned without the effects of time: What I saw was not her garden. Oh, the bones were there, the trees and shrubs she had planted, the shape of delineation between cultivated and wild, but the flesh had changed beyond anything she had known. The lilac, once a trim and obedient resident of the far corner, now appeared to be making serious inroads on the native growth. Another shrub—a peony, I thought—was halfway to being classified as a tree; the tiny pink rose had all but overcome the apple in a riot of colour; and the English flowers she had nurtured around the perimeter had long ago broken for freedom in the lawn. The grass, which Mother had always preferred shaggy as compared to the tight trim of English lawn-grass, was nearly a meadow; although it had been mown in the past couple of weeks, pink daisies and yellow dandelions gave it the appearance of a tapestry.

It was startling at first, then reassuringly foreign. And as I began to relax out of my apprehension, two thoughts came to me: that it was indeed magical, as Flo had said; and that it was precisely what my mother had been working towards. I was grateful that Mrs Gordimer had not inflicted her tightly pruned system here.

My ruminations were interrupted by a voice previously unheard here—Donny's, coming from the next room.

“I don't know about you girls, but I could sure use a drink after that drive.”

“Oh, yes!” Flo exclaimed. “A nice long drink, sitting on the lawn, watching the sun go down, that would be heaven. There probably isn't any ice,” she added sadly.

“There probably isn't any booze,” Donny commented, his voice saying that this was clearly a more serious problem. “I knew we should've brought along something stronger than fizz. All I've got's my flask—I don't suppose we could unearth the local boot-legger at six o'clock on a Sunday afternoon?”

“There should be both,” I said, and followed his voice into the kitchen.

If the Gordimers had laid out the magazines and the sail-boat in anticipation of an unannounced visit, they might well have put milk in the ice-box, tea in the cupboard, and bread in the bin. I pulled open various doors and found them occupied as I had expected, so I took the ice-pick from its customary drawer, wiped off its rust on the clean dish-towel that hung below the sink, and handed it to Donny.

“Chip off some bits from the block in the ice-box. Flo, you'll find glasses in the second cupboard there. And unless the mice have figured out how to use a cork-screw . . .” I laid my hand on the tea caddy that sat on the set of narrow shelves along one wall, and tugged. Then I tugged harder, hanging my weight against it. Flo and Donny both stared, no doubt wondering both why the caddy had been glued down, and why I so wanted it off. Slowly, the apparent canister gave way, tipping forward: Its tin sides concealed, not tea, but a lever for unlocking a sliding door. With a grinding protest of gears long unoiled, the caddy folded itself face-downward on its shelf. I stuck my fingers against the edge of the shelf, pulled hard, and the entire wall of shelves trundled slowly to the left and vanished behind the cupboards.

I turned to grin at my amazed companions, both of them crowding to see beyond my shoulders. “My father had an oddly elaborate sense of humour,” I explained. “He used to offer my mother a glass of tea, and this is what he meant.”

“And that in the days before the Volstead Act!” Flo said.

“Even more appropriate now,” I agreed. I started to move forward into the dim hidden closet to peruse the bottles, then stopped dead at a tinkle of glass skittering across the floor. “Don't come in, there's glass on the floor. Some of the beer bottles probably exploded in a hot spell. However, apart from that, there appears to be pretty much whatever you like,” I said to Donny. “Gin?”

“Any vermouth? I could make us a shaker of martinis.”

I'd never had a martini, but I obediently handed out the bottles. While he and Flo searched the cupboards for a shaker of some kind, ending up with a decidedly rustic Mason jar, I found a broom and swept up the shattered bottles—two of them. I also gingerly took the remaining three out to the dust-bin, although they were probably no hazard in the cool of that day. When I returned, I was checking over the other contents of the hidden closet when an arm snaked past me holding a cold, clear glass.

“Cheers,” said Flo. I took the glass, lifted it in response, and took a swallow. After that, I stood where I was for a while until my eyes had stopped watering. Flo studied the shelves with her own clear eyes. “What a nifty little room, Mary. Like a safe-room.”

“More or less. My father figured that there would be long stretches where the house was empty and didn't want to leave things out in the open to tempt passers-by. Not that there's anything particularly valuable here, but there's the candelabras, and a nice set of old silver in that chest, and two or three of the cameras he used to fiddle with.”

“Ooh, and a phonograph! Does it work?”

“I should think so, although the music will be old.”

“How sweet, we can lace up our whalebone corsets and tap our toes decorously to the old songs. Donny, be a sport and wrestle that old Victrola out onto the lawn, would you?” She followed him, clutching a stack of recordings in one hand and her drink in the other; I ran a last eye over the shelves, made a mental note to find some oil for the mechanism, and wrestled the door shut, tipping the tea canister back upright to lock it.

We drank rather a lot that evening, between the martinis, the wine Flo had brought for our picnic dinner, and a bottle of very old brandy from the hidden store-room. We drank and we laughed and we listened to the music of another generation, Flo and I taking turns dancing with Donny on the uneven stones of the terrace. When it was dark, we placed candles in the three tarnished candelabras and ate our picnic on the lawn. The night was so still that the candle flames scarcely moved, and the occasional moth drawn by the light was soon extinguished. Afterwards, we returned to the terrace, where Flo and Donny danced in and out of the light. They found a tango, a dance that had been new and racy during my family's last two summers here, and set about it with great seriousness that soon gave way to laughter. I realised that I was rather drunk and very tired, and that before too long I would become maudlin; to top it off, we hadn't made up the beds.

With a sigh, I put down my glass and went to see about sheets and things, only to find that the ever-efficient Mrs Gordimer had made up every bed in the place except that of my parents' room. I took my own childhood room, not even seeing the walls or tables, simply divesting myself of spectacles and shoes and tumbling in between the sheets, there to weave gently to and fro on a sinking ship into the depths of unconsciousness.

And struggled up from the dark comfort of sleep at the sound of a voice.

“Huh?” I asked sensibly.

“I said,” came Flo's voice, “do you want a sleeping draught?”

“No, thanks,” I told her, and put my head down again.

I came awake again in the quiet hour before dawn, when a faint light brought shape to the undrawn curtains. As my mind returned to me through the fog of the previous night's drink and the deepest night's sleep I'd had in ages, three thoughts came with it.

The first was that the years spanning the ages of fourteen and twenty-four were long indeed. In my case, they had been longer than for most people: Very little remained of the girl whose hair-brush lay on the table, whose books inhabited the shelves.

The second came, wryly, as, “And being the married matron here, I was supposed to act as chaperone.” I had no idea where Flo and Donny ended up, and frankly had no intention of looking into the matter.

Last was the thought that had me sitting up in bed and patting along the bed-side table for my spectacles: hidden room.

I had searched every inch of the Pacific Heights house on Saturday and found nothing there that joined up with the third of my dreams, the dream of walking through a house and showing its rooms to my friends, all the while aware of the key in my pocket, the key to a hidden apartment. I had searched my family house both literally and figuratively, looking for an actual, physical concealed hideaway or even a place that possessed the same sensation of secret and personal knowledge, and found neither. My father's library had contained the closest facsimile of that sensation, but when I folded myself up beneath his desk (abashedly, checking first that the door was bolted) and curled my legs to my chest, it had not been the same.

But the casual expertise with which I had reached for, then worked, the hidden-door mechanism off the kitchen—even though I could not remember ever being allowed to work it myself as a child—had contained precisely that blend of the hidden and the known, the important buried within the everyday. I wanted to see that room again, now.

Once upright, I discovered that not only was I unsteady, but I was dressed in the same crumpled trousers and shirt I had worn from the city the day before. I cast the garments off and took my childish bath-robe from the wardrobe, thinking to slip out to the motor and retrieve my possessions, but one step outside my door and I nearly went sprawling over the valise. With a silent word of thanks to the hard-headed Donny, I carried it inside, scrubbed myself with a cold cloth in the bedroom's flowered basin, and dressed in warm trousers and a pull-over sweater. I picked up a pair of shoes and tip-toed down the stairs, where I became aware that Donny was behind the door to the first guest-room, the one with the largest bed. Demurely, I stepped into the main wing of the house before I could locate my other guest by her snores, shutting the connecting door behind me.

To my mother, one of the great blessings of the Lodge had always been the relative lack of servants. We ended up roughing it, yes, but we were also granted a degree of privacy we rarely found in the city. Not that Mother did all the work herself—just that my father before her had trained the Gordimers to slip in and out like the elves of a fairy-tale: Meals appeared as if by magic, dinner dishes she didn't feel like washing up were miraculously restored to their shelves by morning, clothing left in the hampers materialised a day or two later, freshly ironed.

The polite fiction of our independence here was maintained by the unspoken agreement as to the times of day we would be absent from kitchen and bedrooms. Mrs Gordimer and a changing régime of assistants let themselves in once in the afternoon, then in the evening, during which times the dishes were made clean, the cupboards and wood-box filled, and the oven stocked with an evening meal. The other times of day we fended for ourselves, leaving a note on the kitchen table if we had any request.

Thus without a maidservant's help, I laid a handful of kindling atop the stove's embers and put the kettle on, finding an unopened tin of MJB coffee in the cupboard beside a fresh packet of Lipton's tea, a jar of Mrs Gordimer's blackberry jam, and similar basics. While the water was heating, I stepped into my shoes and went onto the terrace.

The last stars were fading as the sky grew light; the lake was a sheet of black glass with a mist gentle over its surface. Everything was so completely still and utterly magical, merely drawing breath seemed a disturbance.

After a time, the sound of water boiling drew me back. With a regretful glance at the calm, I returned to the house, opening the noisy packet of tea and wincing at the clatter of the cup and the suck and snap of the ice-box door. Unearthing a thick travelling-rug in the cedar chest near the entrance, I carried it and my milky tea outside.

I must have spent an hour there on the tapestry lawn that flowed into the lake, sipping my tea, wrapped in the fragrant blanket, watching the morning come. The fish began to rise for insects, dotting the sheet-glass water with rings; a tall white bird stood in the reeds near the dock, perusing for frogs. The beauty of the moment made my bones ache with pleasure, and when at last the morning's ethereal perfection had faded and it had become just another lovely day, I felt complete and calm in a way I had not for many weeks.

I gathered up my cup, draped the now-damp rug over a bench where the sun would soon hit it, and went inside to look at my father's hidden room.

I worked inside the room for an hour before the sound of water in the pipes betrayed a guest's waking. I made haste to shut the secret door and went to wrestle with the tin-opener, and had the coffee finished by the time Flo came in, yawning and tousled and looking far more beautiful with her skin pink from sleep than she did with rouge and paint and immaculate hair. I poured her a cup of coffee; she mumbled something that wasn't quite words, drifting away into the sitting room. A suspiciously brief time later, Donny came through from the sleeping wing, dressed in a white 'Varsity sweater and plus-fours. He, too, accepted coffee, although he was somewhat more communicative than Flo, dropping into a kitchen chair and, after asking my leave, sticking a cigarette into its holder and lighting it.

“This is a peach of a place,” he said. “My parents have a summer house, but since every one of their friends has a house in the same square mile, it's just like being back in the city, only cooler.”

“Where is that?” I asked.

“In Chicago. They're still there, in spite of the winters. I've tried to get them out here, but they're sure the place'll shimmy down around their ears.”

“Yes,” I said with a grin. “Half my friends in England assume that San Francisco collapses on a yearly basis.”

“Flo said you're in London?”

“I do have a flat there, but we live on the south coast. I also spend a lot of time in Oxford.”

“That's right, she said you were a, whatchamacallit, bluestocking.”

“She probably said I spent my life with my nose in a book.”

“Something like that. Can't manage it, myself. Books, I mean. Ever since I graduated, anything but a novel brings me all out in hives.”

He had a nice laugh, pleasantly crooked white teeth, and—although he'd taken a minute to make the razor-sharp part down the middle of his hair and slick it into place—a nicely rakish blond stubble on his square cheekbones. He might not be much of a one for books, but in addition to being restful on the eyes, he was intelligent, thoughtful, and seemed to care a great deal for Flo. I was, theoretically, a member of the same “jazz generation” as the rest of Friday night's party, but in truth I hadn't known many of this sort of social animal with any intimacy, and hadn't expected to find a solid foundation beneath the self-consciously blasé pleasure-seeker. Maybe it was because Donny was a little older; maybe he was just made of stronger stuff.

Hearing our voices, Flo re-appeared. “Morning,” she said, taking the chair between us. “Is there any more coffee?”

Donny reached for her cup and stood up; as he went past, he mussed her already on-end hair affectionately. “Not a morning girl, my Flossie.”

“Hell, I'm full of pep,” she protested, then yawned.

He poured her coffee, placed it in front of her, then started opening various cupboards and taking things out. “How do you like what my old man calls ‘cackle berries'?” He held up a pair of eggs.

I placed a half-hearted objection, saying that I really ought to be doing the cooking for them, but Flo said, “Donny loves to mess around in the kitchen. It's going to drive the cook bananas, when we're married.”

“I didn't know,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“Oh, we haven't set a date or got a ring or any of that hooey,” she told me. “When we do, Mummy will take over, and it'll be just another rotten bore. We'll probably elope, but right now we're having too much fun. Plenty of time to be respectable when our livers give out.”

I shot a quick glance at Donny; he was breaking the eggs into a bowl, but from the side of his face, I thought perhaps the wild boy of the Blue Tiger might be more ready for the ring than his girl-friend was.

“Well, in any case,” I said, “it's a good thing he likes to cook, because otherwise you'd be eating burnt food chipped from the pan. I am no chef.”

Donny scrambled the eggs with some herbs that I hadn't noticed growing along the outer wall of the cabin—at least I assumed they were herbs and not some poisonous weed. The eggs tasted good, whatever the herbs' Latin names, eaten with sausages from the ice-box and toast heaped with Mrs Gordimer's jam. We ate on the terrace, which gathered the morning sun nicely. When our plates were polished and the toast basket was empty (Flo having pressed the last pieces on me) I cleared the table and made more coffee, returning to find Flo stretched out on one of the deck-chairs with her face to the sun, eyes closed like a cat.

“I'm gonna bake in the sun all day,” she declared.

“You'll get horribly red and sore,” Donny warned her.

“Oh, don't be wet, Donny. I don't care. I think I'll just move down here to the sticks and turn into a turnip.”

“A red turnip,” he commented.

“There should be a couple of beach umbrellas in the boat shed,” I offered. “If they haven't fallen to pieces. And canoes, a badminton net, and lawn bowls, if you're interested.”

The umbrellas hadn't fallen to pieces, not quite, and when Donny came across the lawn with a pair of them across his shoulder, he said that the shed's other forms of entertainment seemed in decent shape as well. He drove the pole of the most promising umbrella into a place in the lawn chosen by Flo, raising its ribs gingerly. The fabric had a few holes in it, but it held, and Flo spread a rug underneath it and settled down with a sigh of satisfaction. He installed the other one nearby. We all lay down, and lethargy descended.

Thirty-five minutes later, the lack of stimulation drove all three of us into motion. I was the first to tire of watching the humming-birds in the fuchsias.

“I'm going to see if I can find something to read. Can I bring either of you anything from the house?”

Donny leapt up with an eagerness that betrayed his own growing need for action. “I'll take a stroll into the village and see if I can find a paper,” he declared.

“Mrs Gordimer will be happy to get you one,” I offered.

“Nope, I'll stretch my legs and then I can be a sloth the rest of the day. And I want to know how the baseball went.” But before I could comment on how unlikely and wholesome an interest in baseball was in a jazz-baby like him, he added, “I've got some money riding on it.”

Flo, too, was on her feet. “I'm going to put on my bathing suit.”

Donny left in the direction of the village, Flo disappeared into the house and came out in a skimpy bathing costume, settling onto her rug, and I returned to the hidden storage room. I searched every inch of its walls, examined every object on the shelves, pushed and manipulated every shelf and hook, but nothing gave way, no concealed entrance or trap door came to light, to lead me into the locked rooms of my dream.

There was nothing here.

When Donny came back, the bounce in his step proclaiming how the scores had gone, he too changed into his costume and persuaded Flo to bathe in the rather murky waters. After a while, I scrubbed my hands and went down to the umbrellas, where I found Donny had arranged three of the deck-chairs from the now sun-drenched terrace. He and Flo lay sleeping, hair damp from their swim, chairs three decorous feet apart, faces turned towards each other in slumber.

I smiled, and sat down in my own chair, remembering only as my backside hit the wood that I had neglected to bring a book from the house.

But I stayed where I was, effectively alone on the lawn, nothing to distract me but the sound of two men in indistinct conversation from the other side of the lake.

What had the hidden-room dream meant, if not an actual, physical place?

Dreams, I knew, were not some mythic message from Beyond. Dreams are speech from the unconscious mind, messages couched not in the logical terms of daylight consciousness, but in a twilight narrative of glimpsed images and impressions. Repeated dreams, worked over and over, generally had a purpose: In my case, the flying-objects image had taken me by the hand and eventually led me to the realisation that I had been in San Francisco during the earthquake, thus opening up an entire segment of my childhood that I had closed away. The second dream, that of the faceless man, was rooted in a specific incident that clearly had terrified my six-year-old self, an event that had rested unquiet over the intervening years until I could finally bring it to light and put it to rest—I felt certain, thanks to Holmes' discovery of the old woman's reminiscences, that that particular nocturnal visitor would trouble me no more.

Both dreams had their origin in frightening incidents, two events that had been wrapped about and reshaped by my unconscious mind to soften their sharp edges—until, triggered by the realisation that I was heading to the place where both had occurred, like bits of psychic shrapnel they worked their way to the surface.

But the third dream appeared to be without antecedent. I could find no concealed rooms, either here or in Pacific Heights; moreover, the dream had always been very specific: I knew about the rooms, and needed only to put the key to the door and step inside. Yet in both houses I had actively searched, and although memories awakened as I went along—freely and comprehensively in the Lodge, piecemeal and grudgingly in San Francisco—in neither place had I felt that throb of recognition that told me I was getting close to the door.

Perhaps Tom Long had been right. When I'd heard those precise Chinese accents telling me of Matteo Ricci's memory palace, I'd been frankly indignant, that this stranger might presume to see into my mind. But maybe I'd been too quick to dismiss his suggestion that the hidden rooms were not of stone and wood, but were located in the recesses of my mind.

Like an object so familiar to the eyes it goes unseen, I had habitually walked past my own history, freely displaying the rest of the house to all and sundry, knowing yet not knowing what lay behind its surfaces. My entire childhood had become a self-inflicted blind spot—I had complacently passed by the locked rooms of my past for so long, fingering the key in my pocket, that I no longer knew where to find the door.

I sat where I was for a long time, staring unseeing at the lake. The sun crept its way onto my toes and up my ankles. Eventually, Flo and Donny stirred, bantered, rose. They raced down the lawn and down the dock to dive into the lake, which looked so lovely and cool that I changed into my own very conservative bathing costume and joined them. Afterwards, we took some lunch, and when a breeze came up we experimented with the little boat, ending up using the oars more than the sail. Sunburnt and replete with the pleasures of childhood, we returned to a house that was fragrant with beef and onions, a rustic casserole left in the oven for us by Mrs Gordimer. We hurriedly rinsed the lake water from our skin and changed into our dinner wear, then threw ourselves on the food as if we had not eaten in days.

Later, when the dishes were virtuously dried and put away, we lit the citronella candles on the terrace and took our coffee out there.

Flo eventually broke the long silence, crossing the legs of her heavy silk lounging pyjamas and giving a sigh of contentment. “Golly, what a swell day this has been, Mary, just the tops. Thanks for letting us crash your party.”

“It's been a pleasure,” I told her in all honesty. An unexpected pleasure, I could have said, but did not. “Thank you both for coming with me.”

“You did look pretty down. On Friday, I mean. I don't know what was wrong, but you looked like a real flat tire before you got some bubbly into you.”

She was too polite to ask, but I could see no real reason not to tell her why I'd been troubled—after all, I'd told a relative stranger that same night. “I had some bad news, Friday morning. An old friend of the family died.”

“Criminy, Mary, why didn't you say—”

“Oh, she died a long time ago, it's just that I only found out on Friday.” Flo's expressions of distress faded to a more appropriate level—after all, how close a friend could this have been, if it took me so long to hear about it? A question, indeed, that I had been asking myself. “She was the doctor who helped me, after the accident. A, well, a psychiatrist. I was in pretty bad shape then, mentally as well as physically, and she helped a lot. I'd hoped to see her, but I discovered she actually died within a few weeks of the time I went back to England in the winter of 1914. She was murdered.”

“Murdered! How absolutely dire! What was her name?”

“Ginzberg. Leah Ginzberg.”

“But—wait a tick. That sounds familiar.”

“She was famous, wasn't she?” Donny asked. “That was just after I came out from Chicago, and I remember a buzz about it. She was killed in her office, wasn't she?”

“That's right,” I said. “I wouldn't have said she was famous, but your friend Jerry knew of her. Or was it Terry? Terry, right. He and I were talking while I was resting my feet at the dance, and it came up.”

“Gosh, yes!” Flo exclaimed. “I remember now, she was famous—the Lady Mesmerist, they called her.”

“She did use hypnosis sometimes,” I agreed.

“There was some trial, wasn't there?” Donny's voice went thoughtful as he searched his memory. “She'd helped some girl come up with a memory, and the cops were making a stink, saying she was turning the courtroom into a vaudeville stage.”

“Really?” I said doubtfully. Flo chimed in.

“Wasn't that the girl claiming she had been assaulted? Mummy wouldn't let me see the papers, but I snuck them out of the trash. Yeah, they were saying the only reason she was making the charge was because she wanted to be an actress and thought it would get her noticed. Like the Fatty Arbuckle case, only that was later. And this girl didn't die.”

“She was a dancer—chorus line, not ballet,” Donny added, for my sake, “and told everyone she'd been knocked cold during the attack, and forgot the details. And your doctor friend helped her remember them—only the police said it was all hooey, that she'd just helped the girl come up with a story for why she hadn't made the charges when the attack happened instead of waiting nearly a year.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” I told them. “Dr Ginzberg used hypnosis to help me put together what happened during the accident—I'd sort of . . .” My voice trailed off as I was hit hard by what I was about to say. With an effort, I finished the thought: “I'd pushed it away, even the parts I could eventually remember. So yes, she was probably accustomed to working with helping people retrieve their repressed memories.”

I found myself smiling, a little sadly, at this last. A patient invariably feels that the intense relationship she forms with her psychiatrist is entirely unique and essentially personal; it is always a jolt to realise that it is also one of a score such relationships the psychiatrist holds simultaneously: a part of the job.

Donny lit a match, his handsome face coming brightly into view then fading into a mere outline in the glow of the cigarette. “Didn't they think one of her loonies went nuts in the office and killed her? I don't remember ever hearing who it was—the papers are never as good in following up a story as they are in telling you in the first place, are they?”

“It was never solved,” I said. Both of them went quiet at this reminder that we were speaking of a friend, not an anonymous victim. Then Flo stirred.

“What happened with the girl's case?”

“I think it was dropped,” Donny answered. “Yes, there was some hokum about the man having the doctor killed, but wouldn't he have knocked off the girl instead?”

“Wonder what happened to her?”

“She went back to work. Used to be one of the dancers at the Tiger, in fact.”

“The Blue Tiger, where we were Friday? Is she still there?”

“She wouldn't be, no—she'd be too old even for the chorus now.”

“Billy's no spring chicken,” Flo commented, in what sounded like an objection.

Billy? I thought, then: Ah. Belinda Birdsong, the saucy chanteuse.

Donny gave a snort, and said, “Billy was old when he was in short pants.”

Hmm. Another Billy, then. Unless this was another of the slang turns my American contemporaries used, where a girl was “old man” and a man “young thing.”

Flo giggled. “Don't be absurd, Donny. Billy never wore short pants; he was born in a skirt.”

“Wait a minute,” I broke in. “Are you saying that Belinda Birdsong is a man?”

My two companions flew into gales of laughter, making me realise that I'd sounded like someone too ancient, or too naïve, to have imagined such a thing as a man acting as a woman. “No, honestly,” I protested, “I've seen men impersonating women before, but a person can usually tell. Are you sure?”

This set them off again, into the sort of choking noises that can only come from a risqué joke. “Oh, yes,” Donny got out at last. “No mistake.”

“Do you care to tell me why?”

The cool edge to my question reminded him of his manners. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn't mean to . . . That is to say, yes, I'm sure Belinda's a man, 'cause I saw his, er, fittings one evening. I was walking by his dressing-room when someone threw open the door at a . . . revealing moment.”

“I see.”

“As did I. Gave me quite a trauma, I tell you, seeing the, er, lengths the boy would go to to conceal—” A slapping noise came out of the darkness as Flo chastised him, and I made haste to move the subject on a step.

“I'm impressed. Their throat usually gives them away, the Adam's apple, you know, and a degree of exaggeration in their manners. He's very natural.”

“They all are.”

“What, you mean the others on the stage were all men, as well?”

“Not the chorus line, but the three other singers, yes.”

I'd never even suspected it. Alcohol, of course, was partly to blame for my lack of perception, and the room's thick, smokey air, but on reflection, I decided that the reason I had failed to notice was that, in England, such acts as I had seen were generally in small and seedy cabarets, not in a glittering palace the size of a warehouse with a big, slick jazz band to accompany its internationally known singer.

“Well, fancy that,” I said in the end, vowing to myself never to tell Holmes of my failure. We sat beneath the stars and the sliver of new moon, speaking of other things, and after a while Donny brought out a ukulele and sang in a surprisingly sweet tenor a bouncy melody assuring us that “It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo',” some of the words of which escaped him, and another tune (this one sung in a startling imitation of a Negro woman) about Mamma going where Papa goes. He played songs I did not know and others of my childhood, and although the ukulele has never been one of my favourite instruments, under the stars and beside the lake that night, it seemed the only appropriate music in the world.

Eventually, when the moon had slid beneath the hills and the Milky Way was a bright smear across the firmament, we took ourselves to bed.