Recalled to Life

PART THE FOURTH
Golden Grove
ONE

'I have sometimes sat alone… listening, until I have made the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming by and by into our lives.' The morning sun through the window first warmed, then woke the gaunt-faced man. He lay without moving, for until he moved, he could almost forget what he was and recall something of what he had been. His thoughts drifted like dust motes in the sunbeams, inconsequential, uncontrolled, touched by golden light for a moment, then gone. The door opened. Marilou Bellmain said, 'You're awake.' 'Like Lazarus,' he said, trying a smile. 'I heard Lazarus was reluctant.' 'He can't have had a wife like you.' 'I bet he didn't have your gift of the gab. You ready for breakfast?' 'I think I shall get up for it.' 'You think that's wise?' she said. 'Shouldn't you rest up a few days till you get your strength back?' 'All otherwise to me my thoughts portend,' he said. 'I want to get up while I still can. And besides, like Milton's Samson, I feel I may be getting a few visitors during the course of the day.' 'Like who?' she said suspiciously. 'Like friends and neighbours dropping by to see how I am.' He pulled back the sheet and she came forward to help him, saying, 'I don't want people tiring you out.' 'Hush, dear,' he said.

'At the first sign of fatigue, you may rush forward dragon-like to burn them off.' He looked at himself in the dressing-table mirror and said sadly, 'I'm like Samson at least in this. I've lost my hair.' ‘It'll grow again.' 'Now they've stopped the treatment? Yes, there may be time to complete my Americanization with a crew-cut. I'm sorry, I don't mean to upset you with my morbidity.' 'I don't mean to let it show.' He put his thin arms around her comfortable waist. Once a slim, elegant woman, she had thickened out as he had wasted away, as if by eating for two, she could keep them both alive. He said, 'Marilou, you're the best thing that ever happened to me. You more than make up for all the rest.' She looked at him seriously and said, 'All? You can't mean that.' 'I can't change it, so I've got to add it up and balance it out. And I must admit my life looked like bankrupt stock till that day we bumped into each other in Mexico City. After that, you can't argue with the figures.' She stooped to him then and pressed her lips to his, no peck for an invalid but a full-blooded kiss. She said, 'You want to get dressed as well as get up?' 'Certainly I do.

Only whores and the Bourbons receive visitors deshabilles.' 'These visitors again,' she said. 'You are expecting someone, aren't you?'

'Not exactly,' he said slowly. 'But I've felt for some time now that someone, somewhere, perhaps more than one, was on their way to see me.

And they won't have to hang around too long, will they? Sorry again.

But Marilou, my darling, promise me this. Whoever comes asking for me today, let them in. Turn no one away. No one.' ‘If that's what you want,' she said. 'But just today. After today, I call the shots, OK?'

'Agreed,' said James Westropp. 'Now go and start breakfast.' 'Sure you don't want a hand?' 'An English gent may on occasion allow a lady to take his clothes off, but putting them on he reserves to himself.' 'Is that so? Well, this is America and we do things our own way here.'

'Wrong,' he said. 'This is the capital city of the Colony of Virginia, preserved as it was when my great-great-great- great-grand something was your undoubted sovereign, so when I speak, you'd better jump.'

'I'm jumping,' she laughed, and went out. And now James Westropp rose slowly, steadied himself against the bed, then opened the wardrobe door. Above the hanging rail there was a shelf. He reached his hand deep inside this, groped around for a moment, then withdrew it holding a shoebox. Temporarily exhausted, he sat down on the bed till he got his breath. Then he opened the box. It contained a small automatic pistol, an old buff envelope, and an ormolu pillbox with a coat of arms on the lid. He shook it. It rattled. He glanced in his dressing-table mirror and studied his wasted features. 'Coals to Newcastle,' he murmured. Then he stood up once more and began to dress himself for his visitors. Less than two miles away Cissy Kohler stood under a shower and raised her face to the stinging jets. After three decades of English trickles, she had forgotten the fierce delight of a real American shower. She would have to take care not to become addicted. Already her skin was developing the pink puffiness which comes from too much exposure to hot water, but it was hard to step out of this burning stream which eased her tense muscles, misted up her scarred mind and almost threatened to wash away the ingrained memory of those prison years. She twisted the control of Cold, gasped as the temperature dropped by forty degrees, and switched the flow off. As she towelled herself vigorously, she took note for the first time that she was beginning to put on weight. She had no particular interest in food, merely ate what was put in front of her, but clearly what was being put in front of her now was much more likely to show in front of her than the rigid diet of Her Majesty's Prisons. What was more interesting than the actual changes to her flesh and her skin was the fact that she had noticed them. Was she experiencing the return of vanity? Could it really be that as this climactic confrontation approached after so many years, instead of trying to refine all she felt, all she had experienced, into clear unambiguous phrases, she was letting her energies be sidetracked into looking her best? She turned to the long bathroom mirror. It was misted up and for a moment the pink figure she could see dimly through the vapour was the girl she had been the day before that endless yesterday. She reached forward with the towel and drew aside those misty curtains. She took a long steady look at the picture revealed, then slipped into her bathrobe and went out into the bedroom. Jay Waggs was standing in the doorway.

'Hi, I knocked but guessed you couldn't hear me for the shower. Hey, you look almost happy. Is that a smile I see?' ‘I was thinking: Why look your best when your worst will get you by?' 'Yeah? I'll need time to work on that one. Meanwhile I've news for you. That cop, the one I hit. He's staying here, the same hotel. I saw him coming in to breakfast, then he got paged to the phone.' Cissy Kohler shrugged. 'So he's here. He's got no authority.' 'We don't know that. We don't know who he's working for. He bothers me.' Cissy said, 'He's the kind of man, if I'd hit him I guess he'd bother me too.' Waggs said, 'If that wasn't so true, it'd be almost a joke. Ciss, you're very lively this morning. I knew this reunion scene was something you wanted, but I don't anticipate it being something to make you happy.' 'What's happy?' said Kohler. 'Don't be deceived. Jay. I'm ready, that's all.'

'Good girl. First, though, I think maybe I should talk to the fat guy, find out where he's coming from. I don't want him spoiling things.'

'You're very brave, Jay,' she said. 'No, I'm not. I'll wait till he's finished his phone call, then follow him back into breakfast. Cops don't like beating up on people in public, and besides, he doesn't look the kind of guy will spoil good food by fighting over it. You wait here for me. Half an hour at most. After all this time, half an hour's going to make no difference, is it?' 'No difference at all.'

'Good girl.' He left. She locked the door, rolled and lit a cigarette, and thought about Jay. She felt he was delaying, not just because he had a reason for delaying, but also because, now the moment was close, he felt a dragging reluctance to take the final step. She sensed this motive in him because despite her bravado that was the way she felt too. What she didn't know was why he should feel like that. Curiosity about other people's motives was like concern for her appearance, an insidious growth to be quickly excised. She stubbed out her cigarette and got dressed. Her make-up took a little time because when she turned to her mirror, she found she was crying. The only way to stop the tears was to understand what they were for. It wasn't too difficult. She was crying for the ghost of herself she had seen in the misted bathroom glass. Once known, she was able to apply her make-up with steady hand, check that she could pass for living even in the dawn with the sun before her, and go out to lay her own ghost forever.