Stars and bars

Chapter One

Henderson hired his car. He had asked for a medium-sized model, yet what he got was bigger than anything on the roads in Britain. The girl at the rental agency assured him that this was the standard size. They had larger cars if he wanted one. He said no.

In the car the bonnet seemed to stretch ahead like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. He slotted the gear into ‘drive’, touched the accelerator and the car pulled strongly away. He couldn’t hear the noise of the engine. The power steering, he discovered, allowed him to manoeuvre with two fingers. The thought of barrelling down the freeways in this behemoth suddenly sent a tremor of boyish excitement through his body, displacing his gloom and disappointment. God, this is fun, he thought as he surged up the ramp from the underground car park, it’s like some sort of massive toy.

By the time he had driven home, collected his suitcase, and then driven uptown to Melissa’s apartment, the steely blue car had lost the glass from a tail light, acquired a scratch running the length of one side and received a dent in the left hand front wing. Furthermore, on the course of his journey he had been described as a cunt, a fuckhead, a jiveass honky, a ‘sackashit’ and a ‘muthafuck-ah’ by the other snarling drivers he had fouled up or interfered with in some way or other. Pedestrians — meek, timid creatures in Britain — had kicked his tyres and thumped the bodywork with their fists. One particularly irate jaywalker went so far as to gob — greenily and with astonishing volume — on his windscreen. He managed to park not too far from Melissa’s door but sat still in his car for five minutes or so (windscreen wipers going) trying to regain his composure.

♦

Melissa welcomed him at the door, Candice yapping in her armpit.

“Hello, darling.” Their cheeks touched, he felt her hair sharp on his face.

“Candice, don’t shout at Henderson.”

They went through into the main room. Gervase joined in the shrill noise. He thought: if we ever get married again, those dogs are out — pronto.

“She’s just packing her things. Won’t be a second.” Melissa sat down beside him on the enormous sofa and took his hand.

“Are you OK, baby? You look tired.”

Henderson told her of his troubled night — post-mugging — of the garbage men and their matutinal seminar group. Melissa looked genuinely sympathetic. She put her hand on the back of his neck and scratched his nape gently. It was an automatic gesture; Henderson recalled it from their early days; it brought him out in a warm rush of affectionate goose-pimples.

“The sooner we get you installed here the better,” she said.

He felt grateful and secure. Melissa had things under control. He was suddenly certain he would be happy with her. He put his hand on her shoulder: so thin, so neat. The silk of the eau-de-nil blouse was cool under his palm. He felt the thin strap of her bra. It would be silk too, he knew: crisp and clean on that day, with a discreet and pretty edging of lace.

“I can’t wait,” he said, with a slight tremble of sincerity in his voice, and touched her neck with his lips. This was a mistake, he realized at once, remembering how she sprayed her neck liberally with perfume. He sat up, his mouth full of a sour foreign taste. Bryant came in.

“Could I have a drink of something?” he asked, swallowing acrid saliva. “Coke? Seven-Up?”

“Bryant, honey, can you get Henderson a Coke?”

“Why can’t he get it himself?”

“Bryant?”

“It’s all right,” Henderson said. “No problem. I’ll go.”

He drank some water in the brilliant kitchen. When he came back, Melissa had gone somewhere, and Bryant was standing alone in the room.

“Well,” he said. “Yes, whe…well.”

Bryant looked at him as if he were slightly mad. She was wearing blue striped trousers that stopped at mid-calf, a very old faded grey T — shirt and an expensive looking leather jacket, all pockets, flaps and buckles. Her hair was tousled and uncombed.

Spoilt brat, he thought. Those dogs wouldn’t be the only inhabitants of the Wax household to get a rude awakening when he moved in. He put his hands in his pockets and looked around the room as if he were seeing it for the first time. This is absurd, he thought. She is a fourteen-year-old girl and I am a thirty-nine-year-old man. So why do I feel nervous? He stopped himself just in time from whistling ‘Nymphs and Shepherds’. Bryant looked at him, apparently quite relaxed. It’s true, he reflected, she is very cool and mature for a teenager. He thought of himself at her age; his awkward, boiling adolescence. His freezing fearful schooldays, the chasms of timidity, the deserts of anguish he had daily to traverse. No points of comparison there. What had been wrong with his education, his environment, his family? Think what torments he would have avoided if he had been like Bryant.

“Where’s Irving?” he said, with a gasp of relief, finally thinking of something to say.

“Don’t know.”

“Ah.” Henderson nodded vigorously, spun round on his heel, slapped his pockets as if searching for a missing wallet. This was some travelling companion Melissa had foisted on him: he’d have more fun with a Trappist monk. He resolved to drive south with the greatest possible urgency.

Melissa came in with the two dogs and they prepared to leave. Bryant crouched down and embraced the animals.

“Bye, Candice. Bye, Gervase. Be good, I’ll see you soon,” she said in a fake-sad voice. For an instant Henderson saw the young girl in her.

“Phone me,” Melissa said, hugging her daughter. “Lots. And you too,” she whispered in Henderson’s ear as she kissed his cheek. She glanced down. “Gervase, stop it!”

Henderson had imagined that the pressure on his lower leg had been caused by contact with the sofa edge, but looking down saw Gervase trying to fuck his ankle with slant-eyed, panting ferocity.

“Agh! Get off!” He sprang to one side stamping the animal free from his leg. For the second time that day he wished he had his sabre. Fleche attack: Pekingese kebab.

“I’ll be back next week,” Henderson said, turning back to Melissa. “I’ll see you the—Jesus Christ!” The mutt had somehow gained the arm of the sofa and was trying to bury its head in Henderson’s groin.

“What’s wrong with that dog?” he demanded. “Shouldn’t you have it seen to? Spayed or whatever?”

“Come on, Gervase. Don’t be a naughty boy.”

Bloody dogs! he swore to himself, picking up Bryant’s case and backing out of the door.

“Bye, Gervase! Bye, Candice! Bye, Mom!”

“Say goodbye, Gervase, Candice. Say goodbye to Bryant and Henderson.”

The most sensible women could be reduced to idiots when it came to animals, Henderson thought, contenting himself with a brief wave. There was not the slightest possibility of him actually vocalizing a farewell to those dogs, he vowed. He’d never be able to meet his eyes in the mirror again.

They hummed down in the lift, the faint barking soon lost to earshot, and with little fuss installed themselves in the car.

“Well,” Henderson said, hands on the wheel. “Here we are. Go South, young lady.” He looked round to see if she had caught the allusion, but Bryant was too preoccupied searching her multitude of pockets for something. She found it, and turned to face him, blowing hair out of her eyes.

“Smoke?” she said, offering him a squashed pack of cigarettes.

The Holland Tunnel plunged them beneath the Hudson River. They emerged on the far bank to drive through Union City to the mighty overlapping clover leafs of junction seventeen of the New Jersey Turnpike. Bryant was on to her third cigarette and Henderson saw the road ahead through a thin grey mist. His eyes smarted and his nose itched with incipient sneezes. Bryant sat with her legs folded beneath her, her head propped on a fist, looking emptily at the shabby cityscape passing by.

They motored south among a surge of large, surprisingly dusty and battered cars and truly enormous lorries, all changing lanes and shifting about the road — as fidgety and illogical as a school of fish. As Henderson became used to the eccentric driving conditions (so different from the impeccable lane-adherence on British motorways) his initial tension was slowly replaced by irritation. Why hadn’t he simply refused to take Bryant? Said it was impossible? It was typical, he saw, of his own particular weakness. He was too easily manipulated and put upon; too decent and obliging for his own good. He did everything Melissa asked of him and here was his reward: a rude, taciturn, chain-smoking ingrate as his travelling companion for the next two days. He was tempted to drive through the night to Richmond (home of the Wax grandparents) just to get rid of her. He felt a tear crawl from his left eye and squinted round to see Bryant lighting her fourth cigarette from the dashboard lighter. She lit the cigarette with the unreflecting professional ease of the habitual smoker, applying the little glowing hotplate to the end with barely a glance, inhaling and puffing smoke from the corner of her mouth until the tobacco caught.

“You can get lung cancer from cigarettes, you know,” he said.

“Sure. And emphysema and cardiac arrest and they kill cowboys. I know all that.” She sat back and smiled for the first time. “It’s a calculated risk. Don’t you ever take risks, Henderson?”

“Not if I can help it,” he said.

She looked at him. “No, I guess not.”

♦

They drove on through New Jersey. Sometimes the turnpike was raised high on stilts over a baleful marshy landscape, studded with small brown lakes and acres of tall reeds. Here and there a huge concrete and glass power station would rear up like an island, its cooling towers disgorging steam, humming wires looping out from its hot dynamos to feed the sprawling suburbs and distant cities — Edison, Metuchen, Plainfield, Sayreville. Power-lines, he saw, were everywhere. Electric cables had a prominence and visibility in America that was wholly unlike the neater, tidier Europe. Now he thought of the power stations as vast mills, churning out their miles of cable to enmesh the entire country with its warp and weft; cables that festooned every townscape and street-view, a great tangled net of fallen rigging over the land, holding it together. The effect was, he thought, to make everything appear messier and half-finished, ramshackle and rundown. American streets and roads looked, to his eyes, unnecessarily fussy, with wire and cable stretched all over the place.

There was generally, he saw, as he looked at the scene on either side of the turnpike, more ironwork of all kinds in evidence: from the gawky, teetering TV aerials to the criss-cross cantilevers of the road signs, most of which looked in need of a paint. In Britain, he thought, we maintain our street furniture to an extraordinarily high degree; everything looks new and neat on the roads. Gangs of men roamed the country furiously repainting the white dashes of the lane dividers. He thought of some of London’s streets with their multitude of lines and zig-zags: double yellow or single, the various flashes on the kerbs, the grids and arrows. You needed a dictionary to park your car these days.

But here everything looked well-used. The verges were dusty and ragged; where road ended and verge began was a matter of real ambiguity. In England edges were distinct. Kerbstone production had never seen such boom years. Verges were sharp, and well-defined: finished off, beaded, seamed. Sometimes in America you saw the same rectitude, but usually edges were frayed and worn. There was no manic energy expended in maintaining them.

So what? he thought later, suddenly bitter. Here energies were directed to making the important things work — like telephones, food production, heating and cooling — not dissipated in buffing up roadsigns or polishing cats’ eyes. By their verges and street furniture shall ye know them…

His sombre mood continued to darken as they bypassed Philadelphia. He was getting thoroughly disenchanted with the belching smokestack in the front seat beside him. For the most part he drove in tight-lipped silence. He could be as sulky and withdrawn as any spoilt teenager, he told himself with quiet satisfaction: no trouble in descending to that level at all. He contented himself with looking at the scenery and pondering on its strangeness: all the houses made of wood; the astonishing number of playgrounds, tennis courts and baseball diamonds scattered generously about.

Unfortunately his ill-humour seemed to make Bryant relax, as if it had been the very self-consciousness of the adult-child relationship that irked her. Now he was being selfish too, she seemed to unwind. She switched on the radio for a while and sang quietly along to some of the pop-songs. She proffered the odd remark: “Hey, look at that neat car!” or, “I spent a weekend in Philadelphia one night.”

Henderson confined his replies to monosyllables, then she said: “Do you know that you have really a lot of hair growing out of your ears?”

Henderson did indeed know. It was one of the catalogue of alarming body-changes he’d been registering recently. He had rather too much hair growing out of his nostrils too, if it came to that, for his liking. He certainly didn’t care to be reminded of it.

“These things happen, you know,” he said. “As you grow older your body changes. It’ll happen to you too,” he observed with some relish. “Things will happen to your body when you’re a mature woman that you won’t be too pleased about.”

“I’ll have plastic surgery.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

She shrugged. “So how old are you, then?”

“Thirty-nine.”

“Is that all?”

“What do you mean ‘Is that all?’”

“I don’t know. I guess I thought you were older.” She scratched at something on the dashboard. “I mean, Grandpaw Wax has got hair in his ears too. You’ve almost got as much as him. I just figured you were, you know, older.”

Henderson felt himself colouring. The nerve, he thought. The little bitch. He tried desperately to think of some way of getting his own back.

“We’re staying at the Jefferson-Burr tonight, aren’t we?” Bryant asked.

The Jefferson-Burr was one of Washington’s grander hotels. If you hung out of certain bathroom windows you could glimpse the White House lawn. Melissa had booked two rooms.

“No,” Henderson lied, revenge inspiring him. “It was full up.”

“Oh. Where are we staying, then? The Hilton?”

“No, no. It’s a little way off yet. I’ll tell you when we get there.”

Chapter Two

‘Skaggsville Motor Hotel’, a tatty billboard proclaimed at the side of Highway 95, along which they now drove, “Next junction.”

“Here we are,” Henderson said.

“You’re kidding!”

“Best I could do at short notice.”

The motor hotel stood in an expanse of crowded carpark. It was long, three stories high and as functional as a tool box. Henderson ordered Bryant to stay in the car while he ‘checked’ their reservation.

The lobby was carpeted in worn orange sunburst pattern, with matching curtains. Underfoot it felt vaguely adhesive. It was ideal. By the reception desk was a little noticeboard.

THE SKAGGSVILLE MOTO HOT WELCOMES

THE DELAWARE FIBRE-GLASS CURTAIN

WALLI G CONVENTIO

“Welcome to the Scaggsville Motor Hotel,” echoed a small plump receptionist. “Are you with the convention, sir?”

“Me?” Did he look like a fibre-glass curtain-walling contractor, he wondered? “No, no. I just want a room for the night.” He put down his credit card on the desk. “Two! rooms.”

She looked at a chart. “We don’t have two rooms left, sir. The convention.”

“Oh.”

“I have a junior suite.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like an extra large room with two double beds, some armchairs. Sorta like a suite but in one room.”

He thought. What should he do? Press on?

“Your name, sir?”

“Dores. Look, I’ll be back in a second.”

He dashed outside to the car.

“They’ve only got one room. A junior suite.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

He realized he was getting in a bit of a flap. Calm down, he told himself. He went back in. Bryant followed at her own pace. Henderson signed his name on a card, was given his key and told where he could find the room.

“Great,” he said, a little worried. This wasn’t quite how the revenge was meant to function. He turned. Bryant was looking at a mildewed picture of the Capitol hung on the plastic pine panelling.

“Enjoy your stay, Mr and Mrs Dores,” carolled the friendly receptionist. Henderson whirled round in horrified protest, but the girl was on the phone. Good God, he thought, this is probably some sort of federal offence — crossing state lines with a minor masquerading as a wife.

Bryant looked at him through thin eyes.

The room was at the very end of a very long corridor. Outside the door was a mumbling drinks dispenser and an ice-machine. They had a good view of the car park.

The same orange sunburst pattern encountered in the lobby prevailed here too.

“This is it,” he said. “Not too bad.”

It looked lived-in, certainly. By keeping his eyes restlessly on the move and never allowing them to settle for a second he found it was just about possible to avoid noticing the many little rents and stains and cigarette burns, legacy of a thousand previous occupants.

There were, as promised, two double beds, and a pale green, three — piece plastic suite with the bonus of a baby’s cot in one corner. Henderson looked in vain for a shred of natural fibre or piece of wood. Perhaps that was why the curtain-wallers had their convention here — they felt at home.

“I’ve seen worse,” Bryant said, not nearly as put out as she should be. She turned and looked at him.

“Let me get one thing straight,” she said. “This ‘Mr and Mrs’ business. You’re not going to try and fuck me, are you?”

“Good God, no! I wouldn’t dream…How dare you…A simple error on the part of—”

“Relax,” she said. She was beginning to sound like Teagarden. Henderson mopped his burning face, aghast at the obscenity of the notion.

Bryant threw her jacket on the bed. “Just checking.”

♦

They ate in the hotel dining room at half past seven. It was full of large men rather uncomfortably and selfconsciously dressed for ‘business’ in suits and ties. Henderson ordered a steak, which overlapped his plate by a good inch on either side. Bryant had a vegetarian salad and three cigarettes.

Henderson managed about eight square inches of his steak and pushed it aside. He felt strangely depressed, which he put down to having been in Bryant’s company for most of a day. This didn’t bode well for the marriage. He sighed, and thought about tomorrow. He wondered when they would get to Atlanta. Beeby had phoned Gage to let him know Henderson was on his way. They would make an early start in the morning; get Bryant dropped off as soon as possible…He looked around the dismal dining room, suddenly missing New York. He wished he were staying at the Jefferson-Burr, instead of this anonymous hotel. Too clever by half, he considered ruefully. This was what happened when he tried to be malicious or cunning: he ended up inconveniencing himself. He was condemned to remain ineffectual, tolerant and nice.

Bryant tipped saccharine into her Sanka.

“What exactly are you meant to be doing on this trip?” she asked.

Henderson told her about the Gage collection, its significance, what he had to do when he saw the paintings.

“Where does he live, this old guy?”

“Somewhere called Luxora Beach.”

“Are you going there?”

“Later. I’ll get directions in Atlanta.”

“Are you staying with him?”

“No. I’ll probably stay in a local hotel.”

“Could I come?”

“What!?”

“Can’t I come with you? I’ve never been to the real South.”

“Absolutely out of the question.”

“Come on, Henderson, I won’t get in your way.”

“Completely impossible.”

“I just can’t stand the thought of a week with Grandma and Grandpa. You don’t know what they’re like.”

“Too bad.”

“Ple-ease.”

“No. No. En oh.”

“God!” She looked genuinely irritated. Touche, at last, he thought triumphantly, smiling to himself. She couldn’t take being denied.

♦

After dinner Bryant went back to the junior suite complaining of a headache. Henderson walked down another quarter of a mile corridor to the bar. It was called The Barbary Coast but for the life of him he could see no thematic reflection of this motif in the place’s wholly unremarkable decor. It was filled with grim curtain-wallers who were being entertained by a haggard country and western chanteuse seated at an electric organ on a small dais at the end of the room. Two bored waitresses in very short beige satin dresses ferried drinks to and fro.

Henderson sat at the bar, sipped at a large Scotch and thought about phoning Irene in an attempt to rebuild a few of the burnt bridges. Unaccountably, as he sat and drank, he found himself getting more and more dejected and heavy hearted. He looked suspiciously at his whisky. He felt an immense weariness of spirit descend on him, as if some deity had personally and unequivocally confirmed that all the follies and inexplicable cruelties of the world were man’s lot, and that attempts to ameliorate them were utterly vain and futile.

He looked around him. The curtain-wallers’ faces were slumped with a similar bitter wisdom. Was it something to do with the Scaggsville Motor Hotel itself, he asked himself? Some curse on the hapless building? Some maverick charge in its static electricity? He wondered if he had been drugged…Then he realized what the source of the universal tristesse was.

The haggard chanteuse had a repertoire consisting solely of the most morose country and western numbers in the songbook. She set her Japanese electric organ (thin as an ironing-board) to plangent, and sang heartrendingly of suicide, abortion, adultery, desertion, mental and physical cruelty, alcoholism and terminal illness. Her own face, pale and scored beneath dyed blue-black hair, seemed to testify to first hand experience of these various afflictions — but perhaps that was merely the side-effect of singing that type of song each evening.

The tune she was currently playing seemed vaguely familiar; a recent or current hit, Henderson thought. He listened to a verse.

Each gnat she cooked me a fan dinner,

Each gnat I throwed it on the floor,

Then I took my sailf to town,

Till the mornin’ come aroun’

Drinkin’, gamblin’ ‘n’ sleepin’ with some whore

She switched her machine to ‘soughing violins’ for the chorus (“I was the happiest, meanest, full-time, sigried-up sinner”) but Henderson decided that he’d had as much as he could take.

He walked down the endless corridors feeling markedly more happy with every step he took away from the mournful saloon. Some convention, he thought. He had heard they were usually an excuse for a riotous booze-up. The curtain-wallers would return home to their wives shriven and repentant.

He let himself quietly into his room. The lights were out, Bryant seemed to be asleep. He went softly into the bathroom. The basin area was scattered with pots and tubes, grips and make-up. Long fair hairs clung tenaciously to the wet enamel.

He confirmed that the door was locked and took off his clothes. His body had a yellowish whiteness under the lights. He swiftly checked out the crisis areas. His nipples, once neat buttons beneath a shading of chest hair, had grown into wide pink coarse teats. Always rather hefty, he had never worried unduly about putting on weight: he ate and drank as he wished and carried the usual penalty padding as a result. But now he had critical weight loss: his buttocks were disappearing. They were shrinking. His trouser seats, usually stretched and shiny, were now loose and flapping. He turned sideways and looked in the mirror. A good kilt-wearing arse, a Scottish girlfriend had once complimented him. If he wore a kilt now its rear hem would hang inches lower than its front — be brushing the backs of his calves. And, talking about legs, his legs were going bald. Normally covered in a springy furze, his legs, from the knee down, had gone smooth and shiny. And yet all this extra hair was sprouting from his ears and nostrils…He wondered if some backstreet trichologist would transplant his nasal and aural growth; re-sow it on the desert slopes of his shins.

He stepped into the shower. For getting on for thirty years he’d never considered his body. It did its job; it looked fair enough; its distribution of muscle and hair was unexceptionable. But now it was saying ‘hold on a moment’, ‘hang about, friend’. It was getting tired of staying in shape, it was getting clapped out, the first signs of four decades of wear and tear were manifesting themselves. It was getting old.

He plunged his head beneath the powerful jet of the shower, trying to forget. Even in the crummiest motel you got a decent shower. He remembered the shower he had had installed in his London flat. It had a weak, two-inch spread. It pattered feebly on one shoulder when you stood beneath it; it took five minutes to dampen your hair. Getting the temperature right required meticulous hairfine adjustments of the taps — you needed the touch of a safe-cracker.

After he had dried himself he wondered what to do about getting into bed. He normally slept naked but realized that, tonight, probity demanded he make a change. He pulled on his underpants and stepped quietly into the bedroom.

Bryant sat up in bed smoking, her bedside lamp on. She was wearing pale blue cotton pyjamas, monogrammed ‘B. W: Henderson stood there, suddenly conscious of the crammed codpiece of his Y-fronts, his hairless legs, his fat nipples. He slid into his bed between the crackling nylon sheets.

“You shouldn’t smoke in bed, you know,” he grumbled. “With the static in this place we could be vaporized in a white flash.”

Bryant ignored him.

“And you left the bathroom in a mess.”

“Mom wants you to call her, I phoned while you were out.”

“Oh. Right.” He felt pleased. He prodded New York. As he was waiting for Melissa to answer, Bryant leant forward to stub out her cigarette. As she stretched for the ashtray he got a clear view down the front of her pyjama top. Her small firm breasts with small, odd, domed nipples. He felt embarrassment and shock clog his throat.

Melissa answered.

“Melissa? It’s Henderson.” His mind skittered about. My God, he thought, my hands are shaking.

“Henderson, darling, thank you. It’s so kind of you. I really want you to know that I appreciate it, darling. I really do.”

“Don’t mention it.” So American: all this sincere gratitude for a returned call.

“Are you sure it’s not inconvenient?”

“No, no. Not at all. Quite the opposite.”

“God, you are wonderful. I’d forgotten. You lovely man, you. There aren’t many men who’d do this, I know. I want you back here quickly.”

Doubt began to seep through his body.

“Well, it’s not much—”

“Modesty. Come on, Mr Englishman. I love it! No, darling, I just wanted to tell you myself that I think it’s so kind of you to ask her. And you know it’ll be interesting for her too: see you at work, learn about—”

His scalp crawled with a horrible sick alarm as he suddenly realized what she was talking about. Melissa nattered on about how she’d phoned Grandma Wax and explained the new plans. Henderson turned and looked at Bryant. She had snuggled down in her bed and was smiling innocently at him. He felt a rush of loathing for this premature adult as he muttered assurances into the phone. He said goodbye.

“That is one of the most scheming, most disgraceful acts of…lying I have ever witnessed,” he began, his voice shaking with rage.

“God, Henderson, I won’t get in the way.”

“I don’t care, it’s pure bloody selfishness.”

“What’s so selfish? Why can’t I come? I won’t get in the way. You’re the selfish one. You don’t want me to come. Why not? What’s so wrong with me being there?” Her tone was injured, a wronged child’s voice full of that hectoring self-righteousness which appears when children know they’ve got an adult on the run.

He ranted on for a while, but he knew it was too late now. What was worse, he knew she knew.

“I can’t understand why you’re so fired up,” she said with arch, false innocence. “Look how pleased Mom was. Don’t you think that’s nice?”

She was right, but he didn’t admit it. Perhaps it was a sign: that he should concentrate on Melissa, forget Irene…

He lay awake for hours, itchy between the nylon sheets of the Scaggsville Motor Hotel. He ran through the burgeoning options that had suddenly appeared in his life. The road ahead had seemed so straight and sure; now he faced a fan of avenues. He fretfully pondered the alternatives as the cold drinks dispenser shuddered dismally outside his door and the ice-machine’s thin lonely rattle punctuated the very slow progress of the night.

Chapter Three

Interstate 85 carried them safely through the Carolinas. The weather had grown steadily warmer as they drove south. Now, in Georgia, the late-afternoon sun burned down from a clear blue sky and Henderson switched on the air conditioning in the car. They motored along, windows up, in a chill cell. Outside the country was — to his eyes — surprisingly, but monotonously, wooded, with a tough-looking breed of average-sized pine predominant. The highway cut straight through this consistent greenery, the only variation coming with the thin towering signs of the gas stations, roadside motels and supermarkets at junctions and intersections. Holiday Inn, Omlette Shoppe, Cowboy Barbeque, Bi-Lo, Starvin’ Marvin’, Food Giant, Steak and Ale, Wife-Saver. These signs, a hundred feet high, like enormous cocktail stirrers, loomed over the forest.

On the drive south from Skaggsville Henderson had remained terse, resolutely maintaining his anger. But Bryant seemed not to care: indeed, she was almost cheerful, singing along or beating out a rhythm to the songs — now exclusively country and western — that came over the radio. Henderson had traversed every wave band in fruitless search for music that wasn’t gravid with sentiment, but in vain. The only alternatives were religious stations offering prayer-ins, waterproof bibles (“for pool-side reading”) or ghastly homilies.

“Don’t you like country and western?” Bryant asked.

“I loathe it.”

“I like it. It’s sort of…true.”

“My God,” Henderson said, “if that’s your version of ‘true’ then I feel sorry for you.”

“OK. So what’s not true about them?” Bryant persisted.

“Look, I don’t want to talk about it,” Henderson said. “It’s bad enough having to listen to that…that pap, without having to indulge in close reading of the lyrics.”

Bryant shrugged, and found a new station. Henderson looked at her thin arm with its shine of blond hairs as she twiddled the dial. He felt edgy and uncomfortable beside her now. He was almost sure, moreover, that she wasn’t wearing a bra. He wished devoutly that he hadn’t caught a glimpse of her breasts last night. It was curious the changes it had wrought in his view of her: no longer a petulant minx whom, for the sake of her mother, he had to tolerate, the ‘glimpse’ had introduced new ingredients into her personality — femininity, nubility…sex.

♦

They saw Atlanta from a long way off, the towers of its downtown district silhouetted against the sinking sun, a few small, bruise-coloured clouds dawdling above the city.

“We’d better phone now, I suppose,” Henderson said.

“Do you think it’s far away?”

“What?”

“Luxora Beach.”

“Well, it’s one hell of a drive to a coast, that’s for sure.” The same thought had occurred to him earlier.

“Maybe it’s on a lake.” She was looking at a road map. “There are a lot of lakes around here.”

“Maybe.”

They pulled off the freeway at the next junction. Henderson found a phone booth while Bryant went in search of a ‘comfort station’, whatever that was.

He tapped out the number Beeby had given him. It rang for a very long time and he was just about to hang up when a woman answered.

“Yeah?”

“May I speak to — with — Mr Loomis Gage.”

“What?”

“Loomis Gage. May I speak—”

“What?”

Jesus Christ. “Loo-mis. Gage.”

He heard her shout someone’s name. Through the phone came a faint noise of a television set, then a man’s voice.

“Yeah? Who is it?”

“Mr Gage? Mr Loomis Gage?”

“No. Who are you?”

“My name is Dores. From Mulholland, Melhuish — New York. I’d like to speak to Mr Loomis Gage.”

He had to repeat this three times; the man seemed to be some sort of imbecile.

“Oh yeah.” Then suspiciously, “Oh yeah… Don’t hang up.”

Henderson fed more money into the phone. The man came back.

“You was expected this morning.”

“There must be some mistake.”

“Beckman’s been waiting in Atlanta all day.”

“I couldn’t have got here any sooner, I’m sorry.”

“Well, he’ll be at the corner of Peachtree Street and Edgewood on the hour. Can you make it for six?”

“I think so.”

“He’ll look after you.”

This is preposterous, Henderson thought. “What does he look like?”

“Thin, kinda long fair hair.”

The man hung up.

Henderson realized his palms were sweating. He suddenly felt a bit fearful. The set up was so weird; mad, even. He thought of his usual valuation trips: a pleasant weekend in some sumptuous house; civilized, cultured talk about art. Christ only knew what Beeby had landed him in. He began to wish that he’d let Ian Toothe come in his place; it certainly would have saved him a lot of problems.

Bryant returned from her comfort station.

“So what happens?” she asked.

“We’ve got to meet a man called Beckman at a street corner in Atlanta.”

“Sounds good.” Her eyes widened. “What then?”

“I’m not absolutely sure.”

♦

They drove down the extreme length of Peachtree Street. Atlanta seemed halfway through some sort of massive redevelopment programme: crumbling façades on old buildings gave way to empty brick-strewn lots, then some spanking new skyscraper surged up from a multi-level piazza with thickets of trees and gurgling fountains and fishponds. As they got near the city centre the buildings grew higher and more impressive: vast circular hotels, mirror glass cliffs dominating small landscaped parks and squares.

The streets seemed oddly quiet, in strong contrast to New York at this hour. They were a little early for their rendezvous, only three blacks lounged at the corner of Peachtree and Edgewood, so they parked the car and wandered around for a while. They went into a concrete cave and took an escalator deep down into the earth. At the bottom they emerged into the immaculate concourse of a vast subway station, clean, shiny and vacant. A couple of ticket collectors looked curiously at them.

“Where is everybody?” Bryant whispered. “It’s like being in the future.”

They went back up. A very thin white man with straggling long blond hair twitched and shimmied on the corner, looking edgily at the blacks.

“Mr Beckman?” Henderson said.

The man whirled round in alarm, arm raised as if to ward off a blow. Henderson leapt back.

“At fuckin’ last,” the man said. “I’ve been waiting here six fuckin’ hours.”

“I explained—”

“You got a car?” He had a thin, lined face. A narrow palate with soft overcrowded teeth.

“Yes.”

“I’m in that pickup.” He pointed to a blue pickup with large fat wheels and gleaming chrome. “Follow me.”

Henderson followed the pickup through Atlanta’s suburbs. Soon they were on another freeway. He saw signs for Anniston and Birmingham. They were driving west. He wondered if they were going to Alabama. He suddenly wished he were back in his apartment in New York, or strolling down to the Queensboro gym for a sabre bout with Teagarden. Bryant stared fixedly at the pickup ahead.

“Wow, is that guy weird. Did you see his eyes?”

“I wasn’t looking at his eyes. Did you see his teeth?”

“He kept blinking all the time, like he had grit in them.”

They drove west for an hour or so, then turned off at a town called Villa Rica. From there they followed a succession of two-lane country roads. It grew darker. Henderson switched on his headlights. They drove through tiny townships — Draketown, Felton. Bryant pored over the map.

“Any idea where we are?” Henderson asked.

“No. I’m kinda lost.”

“Are we in Alabama or Georgia?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I don’t know.”

They drove on. Bryant switched on the radio.

“…terminally ill. And he said to me, ‘Father, what will heaven be like?’”

The voice was deep and mellifluous.

“Oh no,” Bryant said disgustedly, reaching out.

“Leave it on a second,” Henderson said, horrified.

“…and I could not answer the man, dear friends, that…terminally ill man. What is heaven like? I had no reply in his hour of need. Just then my dog, Patch, who I had left in the car outside, somehow managed to get out and came running into this man’s house to look for me. I heard him scratch on the door. I opened it and let him in. And then, friends, I knew. So I said to this…terminally ill man, ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘heaven is like this room. Patch has never been in this house before but he entered this room with absolute trust and confidence and without fear. Why? Because he knew that I, his master, was inside. So you too may go to the Lord and scratch on the door of heaven with trust and confidence and no fear. We do not know what is in the ‘room’ of heaven, but we know that God is there and we need have no fear of joining him inside. Good night everybody. Tune in next week on W.N.B.K. in Tallapoosa for the ‘Sunday Sermonette’. This is the Reverend T.J. Cardew. God bless you all. Amen.’”

“Good grief,” Henderson said.

“Can we find some music? This is boring.”

Eventually, after another half-hour’s driving they saw a sign. “Welcome to Luxora Beach.” Then another: “Lions Club of Luxora Beach welcomes you.” Finally: “Luxora Beach city limit. Pop. 1079.”

By now it was quite dark. They drove by single storey wooden houses on either side of the road, then into an area of street lighting. It revealed a narrow main street flanked on one side by a railway line. Beyond the railway line was a wide tarmacked area fronting a shabby mall of flat-fronted, flat-roofed stores. Henderson read ‘Luxora Beach Drugs’ above a dark window. All the windows were dark except for one bar. The red neon bow tie of a Budweiser sign and the blue rosette of the Pabst logo set pretty highlights on the matt dusty cars parked outside.

Beckman’s pickup turned and bumped across the railway line. Henderson followed suit.

“Wrong side of the tracks,” he said with a nervous chuckle.

They left the metalled road and drove along a winding dirt lane with — from what he could see through the dust Beckman’s wheels threw up — scrubby undergrowth on either side.

Presently they passed through rickety wooden gates and beneath a wrought iron arch with ‘The Gage Mansion’ written on it in dirty white scrollwork. In front of them in the faint moonlight, Henderson could make out the bulk of a rather large house ahead. The drive swept them round in a generous semi-circle. The headlights picked out small groups of tall trees which seemed strategically placed to aid some landscaped composition. Lights shone from a few windows.

The pickup stopped. Henderson stopped. He looked at Bryant who returned his nonplussed stare. For the briefest of moments they seemed allies. He stepped out of the car. In front of the house was an immense double-wide mobile home made of ribbed aluminium and some sort of plastic wood veneer. Powerlines hung between it and the house. Looking back Henderson saw that the drive formed a perfect circle. He moved away from the car in an effort to gain some better conception of the architecture but it was too dark. It was, he thought anyway, of little consequence. Even the finest building would have been vitiated by the hideous adjacency of the mobile home. He wondered why it was there.

“He’s inside,” Beckman shouted from the pickup and drove off round the drive and back out of the gates again.

Inside the house or the trailer, Henderson asked himself? He removed their cases from the car.

Bryant was peering in a curtained porthole punched through the ribbed aluminium.

“There’s people inside,” she said.

There was a call from the house. “Mr Melhuish, is that you?”

“Oh God,” Henderson said weakly. “Let’s go.”

He and Bryant climbed up a dozen or so steps to a wide wooden verandah which appeared to circle the house. A small man stood outside double front doors.

“Mr Melhuish,” he said, and shook Henderson’s hand vigorously. “A pleasure to meet you, a real pleasure. I’m Loomis Gage.”

“My name is Dores,” Henderson said apologetically. “Didn’t Mr Beeby explain I was to come?”

The small man laughed cheerfully.

“Dores, Melhuish. Who gives a rat’s rump? It’s all the same to me. Come on in.”

They stepped through the doors into the hall to be greeted by a considerable blare of noise. From somewhere above them came the thump and twang of rock music, and from a room on the right a television boomed.

“This is my stepdaughter!” Henderson said, obliged to raise his voice. “Bryant Wax! Stepdaughter to be, that is!”

Bryant looked around her with mild curiosity. “Hi,” she said.

“You do business with your family?” Gage shouted back.

“Well…!”

“I like that!”

“What?”

“I said, I like that!”

“Rarely!”

“Excuse me one moment!” Gage took some steps up the stairs.

“TURN THAT DAMN MUSIC DOWN!” he roared.

He paused, ear cocked. The volume was reduced. He descended and opened the door of the room that contained the TV. It was quite dark, apart from the bright colours on the screen. Gage turned the noise off but left the picture flickering. He switched some lights on.

“That’s better,” he said. Loomis Gage was small and plump, and clearly very old, though he seemed sprightly enough. His face had its full quota of tucks and dewlaps and his eyes were watery. Yet he had a shock of pure white hair, as dense and springy as a teenager’s, which seemed at odds with his advancing years. His nose was noticeably snub too, Henderson saw, and thought it a curiously indecent feature on a man as venerable as this. Gage wore a short-sleeved yellow sports shirt and khaki trousers. His neat pot belly pushed against an engraved silver buckle the size of a side plate.

“Please sit down,” he said. “You too, Brian.”

“T,” said Bryant. “Bryantuh.”

“You’re a girl, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“I knew it.” He glanced proudly at Henderson. “I may be an old man but I can still recognize females — even if they’ve got men’s names.”

Henderson looked around. No pictures on the walls. The room was large and wood panelled. Twin ceiling fans stirred the warm night air. The furniture was old, worn but comfortable looking. Nowhere was there any sign of ostentatious wealth. He felt a brief twinge of unease.

Bryant was engrossed in the silent TV.

“Can I offer you a drink, Mr Dores? Bourbon, Martini?”

“A beer would be very welcome.”

“A beer would be very welcome,” Gage chuckled to himself. “I like that.” He pressed a bell push on the wall.

“So you’re the man who thinks he can sell my paintings for me.” He looked Henderson up and down. “How old are you?”

Why was there so much speculation about his age these days? “Thirty-nine,” he said. He heard a car pull up outside.

“Thirty-nine,” Gage repeated. “How old do you think I am?”

“Sixty-five?” Henderson guessed, and was rewarded with a bleat of sardonic laughter.

“I’m as old as the century, my boy. But I’m as healthy as my sons. Hell, I’m healthier.”

Henderson didn’t know what to say.

The door opened and a dark, big man came in. He wore a tight embroidered denim suit and had a scalloped warlock’s beard.

“Sorry, Dad. Didn’t know you had company.”

“Come on in. This is Mr Dores. His daughter, Bryant. This is my son, Freeborn.”

“Very pleased to know you, sir,” he said sincerely to Henderson, shaking him vehemently by the hand. “And you, Miss Dores.” He took some paces backward. “If you all will just excuse me I won’t derange you further.”

He had glossy, springy hair like his father, Henderson saw, except it was black. He looked like a professional wrestler or an amusement arcade proprietor: someone on the very fringes of the entertainment business. He had heavy gold-coloured rings on several fingers. He smiled at everybody and left.

A dull-looking middle-aged woman came in. She looked tired and hostile.

“Alma-May,” Gage said, “will you make up Cora’s old room for Mr Dores’s daughter. We have an extra guest.”

“What?” The outrage was genuine. “No way!”

“Alma…”

“God sakes.” Muttering, she left.

“Don’t go to any trouble,” Henderson said quickly, “we were planning to stay in a hotel.”

“Well, abandon your plans, Mr Dores. I won’t hear of it. Damn. Forgot to ask her to bring your beer. I’d better get it myself.” He went out through a door at the far end of the room. Outside, Henderson heard Alma-May’s voice raised in passionate argument.

“Now see what you’ve done,” he said accusingly at Bryant, but she ignored him.

“Mr Dores?”

He looked round. Freeborn’s bearded face smiled at him from the doorway.

“May I have a word, sir? If it’s not too much trouble. In private.”

“Of course,”

Henderson followed him out through the front door onto the porch. Freeborn, he noted, was not only large and tall but also very fat. But it was all held roughly in place by the strength and tightness of his shirt and trousers.

Freeborn smiled and scratched his beard. At last, Henderson thought, somebody sane.

“Excuse me asking, sir, but am I right in thinking you are the man from the New York auctioneers which wants to sell my Daddy’s paintings?”

So there were paintings. “Yes, that’s right,” Henderson said amiably. “We have the privilege to—”

“I think, to be fair, that I should inform you of a certain fact which has a bearing on your business.”

“What’s that?”

“That if you don’t get your fuckin’ ass out of this house by noon tomorrow I’m gonna bust yo’ fuckin’ head with it.” His voice was still reasonable, the smile still in place.

Henderson felt something slip and slide in his intestines.

“Look here—”

“You gonna be one sorry fucker if you ain’t gone. Know what I mean? Sorry.”

Henderson nodded. Freeborn patted his shoulder.

“You got the idea. Nice meeting you, Mr Dores.”

Henderson stood alone for a couple of minutes breathing very shallowly in an attempt to restrain the trembling that suffused his body. The last time anyone had threatened him in such a direct, virulent and intimate way had been at prep-school. Nothing in his experience as an adult had prepared him for such seemingly disinterested aggression.

He walked carefully back inside. Gage and Bryant sat side by side on a couch watching TV.

“There’s your beer,” Gage said, unconcerned by his absence. “Relax. We’ll talk business in the morning.”

Henderson sat down docilely and sipped his beer. His head seemed to be full of clamouring voices all shouting competing instructions and plans of action. This must be what it’s like for Ike on a busy morning in the diner, he thought aimlessly, feeling a new admiration for the man’s expertise…He concentrated. Should he tell Gage of his son’s unprovoked menace and threat? But how could he? He’d barely been in the Gage mansion for five minutes. “Excuse me, Mr Gage, but your son says he’s going to bust my head with my ass.” No, it wasn’t on. He had to speak to Beeby, that was what, and at once.

“Mr Gage? Could I make a phone call.”

“I’m afraid I won’t have a telephone in my house. But Freeborn has one in his trailer. He won’t mind.”

“It’s quite all right,” Henderson said. “Hate to disturb him. Not important.”

♦

He sat on wordlessly with Gage and Bryant trying to concentrate on the television. Within minutes he was totally lost, as the programme — a love story, he surmised — elided confusingly with the commercials every two minutes, it seemed. More confusingly, the same people — or astonishing lookalikes, appeared to be acting in both. Soap flakes, shampoo, dog food, then the young couple were meeting in a bar, they seemed happy. They were joined by young happy friends…but that turned out to be an extended beer advertisement. He wondered distractedly if the young woman and the dog had been part of a commercial at all. He tried to recollect the upshot of the scene he had witnessed: was she happy or sad as she walked through the woods with her canine friend? Suddenly a fat man was sitting on the bonnet of a car and making fantastical guarantees. Henderson’s brain reeled. He thought he glimpsed the young lovers again but they were still selling beer. Eventually he saw the credits roll and he knew that it was over, whatever it had been. He hoped they were happy. He sat back exhausted, his brow aching dully from the constant frown he had been wearing.

A woman of incandescent beauty announced that she would read the ‘World and National News’.

“Mrs Nazarine Kilgus, Furse County assessor, announced today that the annual ‘How’s Your Health Fair’ will be held next month at the Olar National Guard Armory in Olar. Mrs Kilgus said that everything would be free, except for an optional blood test which will cost eight dollars.”

An hour later, halfway into a movie — this, Henderson had managed to follow — Gage stood up and switched off the TV.

“Shuteye at the Ranchero Gate,” he announced and rang the bell for Alma-May. She didn’t appear, so Gage himself led them upstairs. He ran briskly up to the top landing and stood there waiting for them.

“Not even out of breath.”

“Most impressive,” Henderson said.

They walked along a passageway towards the rear of the house. As they passed one door they heard rock music thumping away. Gage beat fiercely on this and shouted “Shut that noise up now!” It died away to a muffled throb, like the distant pulse of a generator.

“I loathe and despise that modern music,” Gage said. “Which is why I have the television on so loud. I’d rather mindless babble than that garbage he listens to.”

Gage opened a door. “Bathroom. He, by the way, is Duane, Alma-May’s boy. Beckman sleeps up at the front. Cora and I are opposite you on the other side. Freeborn and Shanda have their trailer. Alma-May has her annexe behind the kitchen.” He paused. “One other thing I should tell you. We’re vegetarians here. So no meat or fish in our diet.”

“Fine,” Henderson nodded.

“Good,” Bryant said.

Bryant was shown to her room and was bidden goodnight.

“Everything OK?” Henderson asked her.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing, nothing.” He hurried on to his own room. At the door Gage shook his hand solemnly.

“Breakfast is very informal, Mr Dores. Show up when you’ve a mind and help yourself. We’ll talk in the morning.”

Henderson watched him go, wondering if he’d missed his best opportunity to inform on the alarming Freeborn. He felt strange and frightened, suddenly out of his depth. He went into his room and sat down on the bed.

Once, on holiday in the Mediterranean he’d been sailing alone in a dinghy a mile or so away from the beach. Beneath him was bright clear turquoise water, with the odd dark patch of rock or weed sometimes visible on the sand floor a few fathoms below the keel. And then he’d sailed over the edge of the continental shelf, or some great chasm in the sea bed, and the sparkling turquoise had given way to a dense cold inky blue. The little boat sailed on as before, the sun’s heat on his shoulders was unfaltering, but at that instant he had felt like screaming. All those black miles of water beneath him, pale things swimming there. He turned back at once. He had a horrible fear of depths…

He pulled back the coverlet on his bed and noticed with a spasm of irritation that it was unmade. He saw the folded sheets resting on a chair in the corner. This Alma-May person, he reasoned, was clearly some kind of housekeeper so why didn’t she keep house? Angrily he made up the bed. Even without Freeborn’s unprovoked venom he would have needed no encouragement to leave this bizarre household at the earliest opportunity. Tomorrow he and Bryant would check into the nearest hotel — nearest decent hotel — Gage’s objections notwithstanding, and take things from there. At least, also, he’d be obeying the letter of Freeborn’s injunction if not the spirit.

Somewhat composed, he opened the long floor to ceiling windows at one end of the room and saw that a smaller balcony ringed the house on this upper level too. He stepped out, leant against a pillar and gazed at the dark countryside. He could hear Duane’s rock music faintly, carried to him on a gentle breeze, then it stopped suddenly. In the darkness beyond, crickets kept up their monotonous creaking. A big moth fluttered heavily past him and into his lighted bedroom. He leant out and looked up at the sky. The stars were there, reassuringly occupying their ordained places. A line of some half-forgotten poem came into his head. ‘The lines are straight and swift between the stars’ or something. He felt slightly calmer out there in the open beneath their neutral light. He rested his hands on the balcony’s balustrade and breathed deeply, wondering first how soon he could leave the house and second when he could encourage Bryant to return to the Wax grandparents.

He massaged his face. Perhaps the paintings would make the difference. He longed suddenly for the Mulholland, Melhuish office, the comforting bulwarks of his job, his routine, his colleagues. Out here he felt weak and unprotected, alien and unfamiliar. Freeborn had threatened to ‘bust his ass’. Why, for God’s sweet sake? What was he to Freeborn or Freeborn to him?

Panic and fear assailed him once again and he knew too — with a profound weariness — that sleep was out of the question this evening. The long march of the night lay ahead, the tossing and turning, the pillow-punching and posture changing. He sighed, feeling a deep sympathy for himself, and turned back to his room.

The large moth — the size of a wren, it seemed to him — that had fluttered past him on the balcony was now clumsily attacking the ceiling light, casting a leaping giant shadow over the walls and bed. Henderson wondered what to do: whether he could fashion a weapon big enough to deal it a mortal blow or pray it would fly away of its own accord. He was reluctant simply to swat this large and rather magnificent creature. He felt protective about butterflies and moths: they formed a select subclass of insects which he charitably spared from the normal ruthless pogroms he visited on the other members of their kind.

As he stood there impotently the moth settled obligingly on the wall near the ceiling. He stepped on the bed and cautiously pinched its clasped wings between thumb and forefinger. The moth’s legs bicycled vainly in the air as he carried it gingerly to the window giving on to the balcony. But then, somehow, a wing came off and the moth dropped to the floor with a soft thud, its loose wing fluttering down like a leaf to join it moments later.

Henderson felt shocked. The moth flapped and scrabbled uselessly on the wooden floor, turning in tight circles. Henderson imagined a thin moth-scream of horror and pain. Spontaneously, he stood on the damaged insect, hearing a faint crunch — like standing on a biscuit — before kicking the lifeless body out onto the balcony. He felt exhausted. The simplest acts — the most banal necessities and plans — seemed to bring in their train only absurd and trying consequences.

He undressed wearily, switched out the light, and got into bed. He felt wide awake, his mind as active as a candidate’s, sitting a crucial exam. He heard the dull bass of rock music start up again. Duane, Alma-May’s son. How and why was his aural tyranny over the household tolerated? And who was Cora? What was he going to do with Bryant? Would Freeborn really bust his ass at noon tomorrow? Would the Gage collection solve Mulholland, Melhuish’s problems? Was it likely that Irene would forgive him? And Melissa? These and other thoughts jostled and elbowed their way through his mind as he turned on the left, then on the right, lay supine, then prone, discarded his pillow, retrieved it, doubled it, weighted the bedclothes with dressing gown and guilt, kicked them off and somehow, at some time, found some minutes of repose.

Chapter Four

Cautiously, Henderson entered the Gage kitchen the next morning. He felt bad: tired and irritated, but not so irritated as to welcome a confrontation with Freeborn. But there was no sign of him, or anyone else for that matter. This was a little surprising as he had assumed that Bryant at least would be present as her room had been empty.

He poured himself a cup of coffee from a jug stewing on the cooker. Alma-May came in and nodded curtly in response to his ‘Good morning’.

“Is Mr Gage about?”

Alma-May indicated a letter propped on the breakfast table. It was addressed to Henderson, was from Loomis Gage, and informed him that he could view the paintings that afternoon when he, Gage, returned from unspecified business matters.

Henderson realized that this delay would of course violate Freeborn’s noon deadline; but surely, he reasoned, he could count on the protection of Gage senior? One thing was clear: he couldn’t move to a hotel until he’d seen the paintings.

“Have you seen Bryant — Miss Wax — by any chance?”

“She done gone off with Beckman, early this morning.”

“Good Lord. Where?” he said with alarm. Melissa would never forgive him if…He stopped. Alma-May’s head had jerked round sharply at this invocation of the Good Lord’s name.

“To Hamburg.”

He felt suddenly weak, then realized this must be Hamburg, Ga., or Hamburg, Ala., or wherever.

“Why? May I ask?”

“To the labrotory. Beckman’s lab.”

This was getting out of hand.

“His labrotory — laboratory — in Hamburg?”

“You got it.”

“I see…and Mr Freeborn? Is he…?”

“On the road.”

And what does that mean, he thought?

“What does he do, on the road?”

“He sails.”

“?”

“Sails things, Co-mercial traveller. Sails medical wadding. You know: lint, bandages, restraining straps. Got a line in mouthwashes, suppositories. That kind of thing.”

“So it’s just us alone in the house,” he said with a fatuous little laugh which he instantly regretted. No rock music emanated from Duane’s room so he assumed the boy was away.

“There’s Miss Cora,” Alma-May reminded him with heavy suspicion. “And Shanda.”

“Oh, yes.”

After breakfast — egg plant hash and some pale-grey tasteless sago⁄porridge-like substance — Henderson decided that the first priority was to phone Beeby.

Encouraged by Freeborn’s absence he approached the double-wide mobile home outside the front steps and knocked on the door.

It was opened by a young, quite pretty girl in an advanced stage of pregnancy. She wore a grubby white smock with blue piping and incongruous high-heeled strappy shoes. Her copious blond-streaked hair had been badly permed into what was meant to look like a mane of cascading curls, and two brittle wings were flicked back at each temple. A gold chain with an’S’ on it hung around her neck which was disfigured with a raw-looking love-bite.

“Are you the man from New York?”

Henderson confessed he was, after getting her to repeat the question a couple of times. This was no doubt the person who had answered the phone yesterday. She had a powerfully glottal, twanging, accent.

“Oh.” She stood in the doorway at the top of three steps twiddling a cigarette lighter in her hands, apparently content to stare.

“I wonder if it might be possible for me to make a telephone call?”

“A half-owned car?”

“A telephone call.”

“A left front hall?”

He picked up an invisible receiver and dialled the air.

“Oh. You want to phone. C’mon in.”

Henderson climbed the steps. The trailer was surprisingly capacious, or rather would have been if the vast amount of junk inside had been removed. The room was dark, the curtains being drawn, and only one table lamp was lit. There were many anonymous-looking white parcels and packages stacked against the walls which he took to be supplies of medical wadding.

“I’m Shanda Gage.”

“Henderson Dores.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

She showed him to a glass and wrought-iron chair beside a small table, upon which stood a telephone. He sat down and smiled, not trusting the simplest words. Shanda moved listlessly about the room shifting packages with a knee, going through the motions of tidying up.

Henderson called Beeby, collect.

“How’s it going?” Beeby asked. “Gage called briefly this morning, said you’d arrived. Everything seems OK, looking good. What’s the place like?”

“It’s a mad house,” he said softly, glancing at Shanda.

“What? Speak up.”

“Fine. Lovely old place.” If Beeby thought things were going well there was no point in relaying Freeborn’s threat.

“What about the paintings?”

“Seeing them this afternoon.”

“Wonderful, wonderful. Keep in touch.”

“Bye, Thomas.”

Henderson hung up. Shanda came out of a doorway with a tray holding two coffee cups. Henderson braced himself.

“Thanks,” he said, smiling and nodding.

Shanda sat down opposite him. She pressed the top of a black lacquered toy roundabout-thing beside her and it began to rotate slowly, a music box somewhere in its innards playing ‘The Blue Danube’. After a second or two various little doors in its side sprang open to reveal niches filled with cigarettes. Shanda helped herself to one.

“Smoke?”

Henderson shook his head and held up a hand. He took a sip of his coffee and concentrated on what Shanda was saying. She had paused in the act of putting the cigarette in her mouth. She held it inches away from her lips, the lighter flaring in her other hand. She looked at the ceiling. Henderson noticed it was spattered with stains.

“Freeborn’s in Montgomery,” she said, with all the deliberation of an aphorist.

“I see.”

“He’s a good husband.” She stuck the cigarette between her pink lips and lit it, dragging avidly on the smoke. Henderson’s eyes smarted in sympathy for the infant in her womb. She sat back in her chair and scratched an ankle. She had thickened with pregnancy, her shoulders and upper arms were creamy and soft with excess fat. He suddenly thought of the loathsome Freeborn paying his vampiric attentions to her neck, which was also soft and creamy, he noticed, with three well-defined creases in it. Shanda blew smoke at the ceiling.

“Freeborn’s a salesman.”

“Mm-hmm?”

“Yeah. I don’t care for that Cora, do you?”

“Who?”

“Cora Gage. Freeborn’s sister.”

“I’ve yet to meet her.”

“No, Cora. Freeborn’s sister.”

“I. Don’t. Know. Her.”

“You will.” She rolled her eyes and scratched the underside of one heavy breast. She stubbed out her cigarette. Henderson and Freeborn Gage junior breathed a sigh of relief.

“Where you from?”

“England.”

She gave a little shy chuckle. “You know, I’m trying but I just can’t make out what you say. You know, it just sorta sounds like ‘Mn, aw, tks, ee, cd, ah, euh’ to me. Sorry,” she shrugged.

“Can I?” He did his telephone mime.

“Oh sure. Go ahead.”

He called Irene, collect.

“Will you accept a collect call from Henderson Dores, Luxora Beach—”

“No I will not.” The phone went down.

“Not at home?”Shanda asked.

“No.”

“Did Freeborn ever tell you that I was fourth alternate in the Miss Teenage South Carolina pageant?”

“No.”

“Well, I was. It was last year. We were married then but he told me to enter for it all the same; you know, under my own name? I’ll be twenty next month so I guess it was my last shot. And, well…” she patted her belly.

She pointed to a large silver column on top of the television set. It looked like a scale model of an elaborate cenotaph. Politely, he inspected it. ‘Shanda McNab’ it said, ‘Fourth alternate’. Once on his feet he considered he could decently leave. Shanda brushed past him to open the door. She already smelt sweet and farinaceous — of milk and talcum powder — he thought.

“Use the phone any time,” she said. “It’s nice to talk. I don’t get many visitors coming by. And that Cora, well, you can’t talk with her.”

“Thank you,” Henderson said. “Bye for now.”

He noticed the increasing heat of the day and the undisturbed blueness of the sky as he crossed the drive to get a better view of the house. But then as he walked by his car he saw to his astonishment that one of its front wheels was missing, the axle resting on a pile of bricks. He felt a sudden shock and outrage, followed by disquiet — like a householder opening his front door to discover his home burgled and vandalized. Who? How? Why? Questions yammered again in his brain. Of the three cars and a pickup that had been parked outside the house the night before only one — a particularly large dusty green monster, the colour and patina of a battle-scarred tin helmet — remained. He told himself to calm down. There was doubtless some perfectly innocent explanation. He probably had a puncture and one of the household had thoughtfully removed the tyre to get it repaired. It couldn’t be any plot to immobilize him…He laughed scornfully — out loud — at the suggestion. The noise of his laugh sounded pretentious and hollow. There was, he realized, one sure way to find out. He opened the boot. His spare tyre was there. He could change it any time he wanted. He felt relief slither down his spine to weaken his knees.

However, he couldn’t be bothered changing his tyre now. Too hot. He walked out into the middle of the grass circle ringed by the drive and looked back at the Gage mansion.

It was an old solid-looking wood and brick plantation house, with none of the pseudo-Grecian elegance of those usually featured in tourist brochures or films about the Civil War. The ground floor was set on a semi-raised basement and was reached by wide steps which gave on to the two tiered encircling porch supported, on the ground floor, by double stuccoed-brick columns. The split-shingled pavilion roof, with a steep hip, formed a cover for the upper gallery, the roof slope supported here by unembellished wooden colonettes. Four small brick chimneys were grouped at the centre. It was a fine, nicely proportioned house, derived in the main from the French Colonial style, he saw. At some stage its woodwork had been painted green but wind, rain and time had rendered this down to a flaky lichenous mixture of sludge-greys and browns. It was in need of some care and attention, but had it been in the most gleaming pristine condition it could have done nothing to counteract the awful proximity of Freeborn’s mobile home, parked a mere six or seven yards from the front steps. The large number of dirty motor vehicles usually nosing at its sides didn’t help either. It was like some old broken-down sow giving suck to an assorted metallic farrow. Neglect and indifference were all it seemed to evoke; few traces of its romantic past lingered in the air.

The small park it was set in was better tended. The coarse tough grass had been cut back to ankle height. The scattered trees were tall and in fine leaf. From his bedroom window that morning he had looked out onto a garden at the back of the house, wild and overgrown and in riotous flower, the gravelled paths and their low box hedges almost obscured by the profusion and fecundity.

He walked round the side of the house. From here he could see the clapboard extension built onto the back which, he imagined, composed Alma-May’s annexe. He pushed open an askew wicker gate in the tangled hedge that marked the garden boundary and made his way with difficulty along a path to emerge at a small square of lawn. Here the grass was knee high and alive with butterflies. He picked a flower from a nearby shrub and smelt it. Sweet and musky: redolent of Shanda.

He looked up at the rear elevation of the house. A smaller set of steps led down from the porch to the garden. Because of the wide porch and gallery and the overhang of the roof it was hard to gain an accurate idea of the house’s size: just how many rooms it had and how they were laid out within the basic rectangle of the design. He started counting windows on the upper storey. Eight. He thought he saw someone move behind one of them but then he couldn’t be sure. A minute later he heard the sound of a car starting and then driving away. Shanda? Alma-May? Cora?

He went up the back steps and tried the back door. Locked. He followed the porch round to the front door. Some of the windows he passed were firmly shuttered and he wondered if the rooms behind them held the Gage collection.

He walked into the hall. The house was quiet and felt empty. He wandered around the ground floor, peering into rooms he hadn’t visited. There was a large dining room, a ‘den’ with a dust-mantled ping-pong table, another reception room with all the furniture shrouded in sheets, with the exception of a large grand piano. Such paintings as were on the walls were framed prints, family portraits or water-colours by patent amateurs.

He went quietly upstairs. He paused at the top checking for noise. Nothing. He put his hands in his pockets and hummed tunelessly to himself, wondering if he really should be prowling around in this way. To his right ran a corridor off which were Duane’s, Bryant’s and his rooms. He turned left. He opened a door and looked in. An utterly characterless bedroom with scattered clothes and an unmade bed. On a chest of drawers stood a sizeable component from an internal combustion engine. Beckman’s room? Other doors revealed a large walk-in closet heaped with folded sheets and towels, a bathroom and another room, entirely empty. The corridor led him round a corner. Two doors were set on either side of the passage which came to an end at a casement window overlooking the back garden.

He tried one door. It was locked. So too was the one adjacent. He tried a door on the other side. It swung open. The room was dark, the curtains were drawn, and no lights were on. He stood poised in the doorway for a moment, listening. Not a sound. He saw a small sitting room with some old leather armchairs. There was a strong smell of stale cigarette smoke. Were these Gage’s rooms? Or Beckman’s? Through ajar double doors in one wall he could make out a single bed. There was a gleaming aluminium stereo set placed on some shelves amidst a rubble of LPs, magazines, newspapers and stacks of books. Some pictures hung on the wall beyond them but the gloom was too intense to make them out. He walked carefully over to them, stepping round the piles of reading matter and scattered records.

He stopped suddenly. A small light glowed on the stereo’s console. The turntable was revolving. A record was playing soundlessly. He could feel the echo of his heart beat rebound from the roof of his mouth. His startled eyes followed a wire which led from the stereo set across the littered carpet and onto a divan tucked into a far corner of the room. Someone was lying on it.

“Who’s that?” a woman’s voice said. “Duane? Keep your fuckin’ hands off of my records.”

Thick-throated and trembling, Henderson stood to attention.

“Ah, no,” he said. The person lay on her back, as far as he could see, and had made no move to turn round.

Henderson began to talk. “Terribly sorry to wander in — name’s Dores actually looking for Mr Gage’s paintings, um…” He took a pace or two forward. He started explaining again. Now he could see that the person lying on the divan was a very small young woman — Cora Gage, doubtless. Henderson stopped talking because he realized she couldn’t hear him. She wore headphones and very dark round sunglasses. She sat up, removed her headphones and turned her sightless eyes in his direction.

“If you’re not Duane who the hell are you?” Her voice had the faintest of Southern accents. She expressed no surprise at a stranger walking, uninvited, into her room, her tone was weary and dry.

“The name’s Dores.” Henderson explained again who he was and why he’d made the mistake of coming in. He held out his hand then snatched it back, realizing she couldn’t see the proffered gesture. He could hardly say ‘shake’ like some cowboy in a saloon.

“He hangs his paintings in his own rooms,” she explained. “Across the corridor. But he keeps them locked up. So Freeborn and Beckman can’t get at them.”

“Ah.” This made no sense, but, then again, that was hardly surprising.

“Awe.” She imitated him. Henderson charitably ignored this. Blind people were preternaturally sensitive to noise, he knew; she was probably savouring the timbre of his voice, as if making some sort of a sonic filing card for her memory, as sighted people might make a note of a face or a view. She was wearing jeans and a man’s shirt. She swung her legs off the divan and sat on the edge. She was very small and thin, not much more than five feet, he guessed. She had a pale, sallow face and wispy untidy brown hair scraped into crude bangs on either side of her head. In the blurry light, with her round opaque lenses, she looked like some mutant night-creature, some lemur or potto.

“I assume you’re English,” she said, looking straight in front of her. Her hand groped along the coverlet and came in contact with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She lit one with only the briefest of hesitations.

“That’s right, yes,” he said, in the eager respectful tones he used to all cripples, deformed or socially disadvantaged people he met. His voice said: “You have been born with a handicap but I am not shocked or repelled. On the contrary, I respect and admire you for your efforts in overcoming it and will treat you exactly as if you were normal and entire.”

“I have an illogical but profound dislike of the English,” she said.

Henderson laughed. A come-on-you’re-joking chuckle.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. I—”

“Why did you laugh, then?”

Henderson looked about him as if calling on an invisible audience for support.

“Well, because I assumed you were joking, I suppose.”

“Why?”

“Well…” Good God! “I suppose because one just doesn’t say that sort of thing in all seriousness to someone one’s just met moments before.”

“Oh, doesn’t one? But I do. I hate the English.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.” He sensed a hot pelt of embarrassment cover his entire body. He backed off a couple of steps and waved his hands about.

“Perhaps if I, if we, were to get to know each other I might, um, be able to — ha ha — persuade you to, to, reconsider. Or at least exclude me from the general slur.” Somehow he had reached the door. He wished he hadn’t given that little laugh.

She puffed on her cigarette and made no reply.

“Well, I won’t disturb you further. Sorry to have—”

“Goodbye, Mr Dores.”

“Bye.”

He shut the door and walked slowly down the corridor. He understood what Shanda meant. What an astonishing woman, he thought. What a…bitch, there was no other word for it, blind or no. He shook his head in sagacious sorrow. He wondered what had brought it on. Had her blindness been caused by a crash in an English make of car, a Jaguar or Aston Martin, say? Or had she been a forceps delivery handled by a clumsy and strong-fingered English gynaecologist? He turned the corner realizing with some distaste that his armpits were moist and squelching. No, there was something deeper there: that sort of aberrant hate — if he was any judge of human nature — was to do with affairs of the heart turned sour. Unrequited love. Probably ditched by an Englishman for a girl who could see. Some right-thinking, sensible, sane, pragmatic Englishman. Turned her into a bitter, chainsmoking, reclusive anglophobe. He trotted down the stairs, feeling marginally reassured by his armchair psychology, and saw Freeborn come in the front door. He resisted the temptation to check his watch.

“You still fuckin’ here?” Freeborn said pointing at him. “You got about a hour and a half.”

Henderson slowly arrived at the foot of the stairs.

“Look, I might as well tell you,” he said nervously, “that I’m not leaving here until I have completed my business with your father.”

Freeborn, who had been heading across the hall in the direction of the kitchen, abruptly changed course and strode powerfully over. Henderson raised his hands to chest level, then tugged at the loose skin on his neck.

Freeborn put his huge face with its dense, neatly clipped beard very close to Henderson’s.

“Listen, you English fuck. You ain’t gonna do no business with my father. It’s been done, see? Those pictures are sold already. He’s a old man. He don’t know what he’s been talking about, so get yo’ shit out of here.”

“Your father has asked my company to do a valuation on his paintings and I don’t intend to leave until he tells me to.”

Freeborn looked at him. “You been warned, man.” He spread his hands reasonably, “I can’t say fairer than that. Just don’t fuck with me.”

“The last thing on earth I want to do is ‘fuck’ with you,” Henderson replied bravely. “I suggest you take the matter up with your father if you’re unhappy about my being here. I’m simply doing my job.”

“Yeah, and look, keep away from Shanda, heah? I catch you messin’ with her, boy and you—”

“I was only making a telephone call, for God’s sake.”

“That’s my fuckin’ phone, man. You keep yo’ chicken-shit hands off of it, no good English mofo.” With that he turned and marched off into the kitchen.

Henderson went slowly back upstairs to his room. This sudden hostility from all quarters left him feeling weak and thoughtful. He wondered, once again, if Beeby knew what he was talking about…And what, moreover, had Freeborn meant by the statement that the pictures had been sold already? Or was that all his clenched fist of a brain could come up with as a ruse? Like a lot of people, Freeborn could at times give the impression of being astonishingly stupid, but it was too risky an assumption to elevate into a truth. He resolved, for what seemed like the hundredth time, to quit the Gage mansion the minute his evaluation was done.

Feeling sorry for himself in this way made him think of Irene, his comforter. Perhaps he might just still manage to entice her south after all if he wrote to her. She might not answer the phone but surely she’d open a letter. After he had finished here — if all went well — he could justifiably claim a couple of days off. Irene might relent at the prospect of a weekend in Charleston or Savannah…

He took a writing pad and envelope from his case and sat down and wrote her a letter to this effect, well larded with apologies and excuses for his craven behaviour on the night of the ‘mugging’, and concluding with as overt a declaration of love and affection as he had yet allowed himself (“with absolutely all of my love, H.”). He was wary of sentiment. Or rather he was all in favour of sentiment but uncertain, not to say ignorant, of how best to express it.

As he sealed the envelope it prompted thoughts of the last letter he had written. He wondered vaguely whether lance-corporal Drew would be able to enlighten him about his father’s death…And what would his father have made of his son’s current predicament, he asked himself? Perhaps the saddest and most lasting consequences of Captain Arnold Dores’s death in the Burmese jungles in 1943, Henderson thought, was that he, his son, had no vision of the man, no personal private image to cherish or be consoled by aside from purely fanciful or wishful ones. Such photographs that the family possessed were almost counter-productive. In blurry black and white they showed a neat, thin man in baggy flannels with a small moustache and very short hair. Even the more professional shots were undermined by a forced and unnatural smile that exposed the rather wide — and to his son’s eyes, unsightly — gap between his father’s front teeth. These second-hand images were further disappointing in that they confirmed the distressing fact that Henderson drew most of his features — his square face, his rather small nose — from his mother. He didn’t look like his father at all.

If the only sort of immortality we are guaranteed, he thought, going to the window and looking out at the wilderness of the back garden, is the image of ourselves that lives on in the minds of those who survive us, then his father had been singularly unfortunate. He tapped the edge of the envelope against his thumbnail. Even his widow’s reminiscences were commonplace and uninspiring. “A charming sweet man,” was the last verdict his mother had passed, when questioned by her son; but she said that about everyone she didn’t actively dislike. Perhaps she’d forgotten, he thought. But that made him angry: people had a duty to remember. Friends and family ought to talk and gossip about the dead as if they were alive…

He turned away from the view and paced unhappily about the room. Maybe he should get Melissa to summon Bryant home. Tell her that this mad Southern scientist was experimenting on her daughter in his ‘labrotory’…He sighed with exasperation. Then he realized he’d forgotten about Freeborn’s latest threat. He’d have to work on the amenable Shanda, make sure that he could phone whenever Freeborn was out of the way, and perhaps get her to relay any messages secretly to him. How typical of Loomis Gage not to allow a phone in his house! he thought angrily. It was precisely the sort of selfish affectation millionaires went in for…He told himself to calm down. He found he was still irritated by his encounter with the blind and mysterious Cora. It was lucky he was so pro-American, he reasoned, otherwise the Gage family would have given him serious grounds for a bit of Yank-bashing. But they weren’t Yanks, he realized, they were ‘Rebs’ or ‘Confeds’ or whatever they called themselves.

His complaints were interrupted by the sound of a car arriving. He wondered if it were Gage. But the blast of rock music that ensued some minutes later informed him that the driver had been Duane.

The noise forced him downstairs to the kitchen where Alma-May made him a processed cheese and gherkin sandwich for lunch. She professed ignorance to the two questions he asked of her, namely, where was Gage and when was he due back?

“Duane said your car had a flat this morning,” she said.

“I thought it was something like that.”

“Mr Gage told him to get it fixed.”

“Oh. I’m very grateful. Do you think he could put on the spare, if it’s not too much trouble?”

“I’ll tell him.”

Chapter Five

After lunch, Henderson realized there was nothing for it but to walk into Luxora Beach and post his letter. At least it was something to do.

At the front door he saw Shanda teetering around outside her mobile home on her high heels.

“Shanda,” he called softly, and went over.

“Hi. How’re y’all doin’?” She had both her hands pressed into the small of her back, her belly straining fiercely against the material of her smock. Henderson felt a little uncomfortable talking to someone who was so ostentatiously pregnant, but he persevered.

“Um, look, Shanda, I was going to ask, that’s to say I was wondering if you might just possibly see your way to doing me a little favour,” he began confidentially, but then stopped as he saw her eyes cloud with incomprehension.

“It’s my back,” she said slowly. “It’s killing me.”

Henderson pinched his nose. There was no alternative; he’d have to speak American otherwise they would be here for hours.

“Well, shucks,” he began again, trying to recall his Huckleberry Finn and Ring Lardner. “I reckon I jist plum done gone and forgit to ask you to do me a service, like, goshdarn it.” It was a little overdone, he admitted, but, like an orchestra tuning up, he had to get in key.

“Oh yeah?” Shanda’s look was uneasy and relieved at the same time, like a monoglot U.N. delegate whose malfunctioning translation machine has just been restored, only to hear news of a military coup back home.

“If’n you all done git some calls,” Henderson persevered, “could you all tell me? On the sly like?”

“Well…”

“I’d sure be mighty grateful.”

“OK. I guess.” She looked around. “I don’t know if Freeborn…” She frowned then smiled. “What the hell, he ain’t around much. He don’t tell me nothing, either. I’ll tell you when he’s away, so you can use the phone too.” She smiled again — conspiratorially — and rubbed the back of her neck with a hand.

“Thank you, Mam,” Henderson said. “Our l’il ol’ secret. Have a good day now.”

He walked off, rather impressed with his grasp of vernacular. Still, now at least the outside world would be able to make contact. One step in the right direction.

♦

It seemed surprisingly hot for April and during the trudge into town along the featureless lane he was obliged to remove first his tie and then his jacket. A mile or so up the road, Freeborn roared dustily past him in his big car, one hand high out of the window, his middle finger spearing the air. Henderson, checking instinctively that there were no witnesses, gave him a V-sign back. It all seemed a bit feeble and adolescent, but, as with Bryant, he found it no problem descending to Freeborn’s level.

Sweaty and not a little footsore he arrived some fifteen minutes later at the main street of Luxora Beach. In front of him was the railway line and beyond that the road. To his left was the shopping mall. The neon of the bar signs still burned palely in the afternoon air. The town was very quiet — in fact he could see no-one on the streets at all. Above the main street, strung on a wire cable, a set of traffic lights blinked redundantly. There were no cars to stop.

He crossed the railway and headed towards the wooden spire of the Baptist church. Down these side roads were small businesses and stores: Luxora Beach auto accessory, Luxora Beach agricultural wholesalers, electrical goods, Dr Tire, Luxora Beach Fertilizers — Herbert Hackett Last Jnr prop. “Real Manure”—Luxora Beach grain and seed merchants.

At the post office — not far from the church — a wooden building flying the Stars and Stripes, and below it the Stars and Bars, he posted his letter (express) to Irene. He noted the glass boothed public telephone outside it and wondered if he should try and call her again, but on reflection decided to let the letter do its work first.

He walked back to main street, business over. What an effort, he thought, just to post a letter. The afternoon sun was still beating down fiercely and there was still little sign of life. He stood in some shade on the raised wooden sidewalk and looked up and down the dusty road. Where am I? he thought. What am I doing in this place? He longed for a car or a lorry to drive through town. On the door of the shop next to him was a notice: “Closed Sunday. See you in church.”

He thought suddenly — illogically — of his father.

Perhaps it was because he felt as strange and out of place here as his father must have at times in the foetid jungles of Burma. From placid drizzling Hove to hot dangerous Burma…Henderson looked about him. He tried to imagine Arnold Dores standing beside him now. The thin man in his baggy trousers, his short oiled hair, his neat moustache. What would he say? What advice would he offer? Would he smile, and expose the unfortunate gap between his front teeth? “Now look, son, if I were you, I’d—” What? He exhaled. The fragile chimera of Arnold Dores disappeared.

A large maroon car started up in the parking lot in front of the mall. It drove slowly along before turning to bump across the railway tracks and wheel onto the main road. He saw that there were two girls in the front seat with blonde hair like Shanda’s and a lot of make-up. They cruised leisurely past him, staring at him with candid curiosity. They wore scant T — shirt tops, tight across their breasts. The car was battered and filthy. Old cigarette packs, magazines and handbooks were piled in a loose drift between the dashboard top and the windscreen. The car moved on slowly down the road; it seemed to trail a frisson of sexuality, like smoke — of the most tawdry and flashy sort, he conceded, but impressively potent for all that. Somewhere there was a life in Luxora Beach.

Intrigued, and smiling to himself he crossed the road. There is a look, he thought, watching the car disappear from sight, that is common to a huge proportion of American girls. It ran the gamut from Shanda to millionaires’ daughters. First there was the mane of hair or an attempt at a mane — blonde preferably, but not essential. Then there is a lot of mascara and all the rest: blusher, eye-shadow and lipstick (usually pink). And then something must glint or glisten on the head — earrings most commonly, but a necklace or hairslide would do. He added some more details to the archetype — pushed-up breasts, white strappy high-heeled shoes — as he headed for the Gage mansion road. Then he saw Beckman’s pickup parked in front of the bar with Bryant sitting alone in the front seat. He changed course.

“Have a nice day?” he asked caustically.

“Oh hi. Yeah, it wasn’t bad. He’s not so weird as I thought. He’s weird, but not that weird.”

“In future do you think you could possibly let me know when you’re going on an outing?”

“I was just keeping out of the way. I thought you’d be pleased.” She picked at the material on her trousers. “Seen the paintings?”

“No. Gage has been away.”

“Beckman says they’re already sold.”

“Well he’s wrong,” he said impatiently. “Where is he anyway?”

“In the bar.”

“Right. I’ll ask him.”

Henderson paused at the door, second thoughts crowding in on him. Then he pushed through the door.

For four o’clock in the afternoon the bar was astonishingly busy (so this was where everybody was) — and very dark. There must have been two dozen men in the long, thin room. As his eyes grew accustomed to the murky atmosphere he saw that they were all white, all wearing work clothes, and all more or less drunk. Tentatively, he approached the bar. In addition to purveying alcohol it also sold, he noticed, handkerchiefs, a range of pens and combs. All the fitments and plastic advertisements for beer were decades old.

“What’ll it be?” the pasty-faced, oily-haired barman asked him. No Southern courtesies here.

“I’m looking for Beckman Gage.”

“BECKMAN!” the barman shouted down to the end of the room. There, Henderson saw an ancient mechanical skittle machine and Beckman bent over it.

Beckman gave up his game and wandered over, beer bottle in hand. He wore similar clothes to the men in the bar — denim and a checked cotton shirt. Odd garb for a laboratory, Henderson thought, but then again, he probably swabbed the floors.

“Hi,” Beckman said. “Beer?”

“Please.”

Beckman’s longish, straw-coloured hair gave him an initial appearance of youthfulness, but when his face was scrutinized its lines and wrinkles were more apparent. Henderson guessed he was in his mid-thirties — far too old for Bryant, he reassured himself.

A long-necked beer bottle was banged down on the bar and its top flipped off with an opener.

“Could I have a glass, please?” Henderson said without thinking. The barman looked at him with heavy suspicion — as if he’d just asked for the ladies’ room — before raking around on some shelves beneath the bar and presenting him with a thick, finely scratched and semi-transparent glass.

“Cheers,” Henderson said. Beckman smiled, his eyelids fluttering like an ingenue’s. He seemed to blink about two times a second, Henderson calculated: it must be like seeing the world lit by a stroboscopic sun. To his alarm he sensed his own blink-rate going up in sympathy.

“Thanks for taking Bryant to your, ah, lab.”

“Hey, a pleasure. Nice kid. Sure talks a lot.” Blink-blink-blink-blink.

Pause.

“She’s my step-daughter. Or soon will be.”

“I know. Congratulations.” Bat-bat-bat-bat.

Henderson turned away and forcibly held his own fluttering eyelids steady with thumb and forefinger. Making eye-contact with Beckman was instant conjunctivitis. He addressed the beer in his glass.

“What is it exactly that you do at your lab?”

“Well, I’m what’s known as an elementary particle physicist. You know, quarks, neutrinos, anti-matter — that sort of thing.”

“An elementary particle physicist?” Henderson strained to keep the laughing incredulity out of his voice. The poor guy. “Fascinating.”

“I think so.”

There was another pause. Then Beckman said, “Listen, please don’t worry about my blinking. It happened in Nam. I nearly got blown away.”

“Really? I hadn’t actually noticed…I thought…” Henderson changed the subject. “Bryant said something about the paintings — your father’s paintings — already being sold.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Some months ago. Freeborn sold them.”

Henderson felt a twinge of alarm. “Are you sure?”

“I guess so.”

“There must be some mistake.”

“You tell me.”

“Who did he sell them to?”

“Some guy called Sereno. I don’t know. Maybe you’d better ask Freeborn.”

I’d better ask old man Gage, Henderson thought, I’m sure he’ll be fascinated.

“Can I hitch a ride back to the house?”

“Surely. Let’s go.”

They went outside and got into the pickup, Bryant sitting between them. She had put on sunglasses — maybe to hide her blinks, Henderson thought. She seemed very at ease and unconcerned.

They bumped off down the track.

“When I was in Nam,” Beckman began, unprompted, “‘68, Dac Tro province. No, it was Quang Tri. They called an airstrike on this hostile ville. ‘Cept the fuckin’ airforce dropped the bombs right on our fuckin’ platoon. Three dead, six injured. I woke up two days later in a hospital, not a scratch, but just blinking like shit. Haven’t stopped since.”

“God,” Bryant said in awe. “You’ve been blinking like this all these years?”

“You got it.”

“Didn’t you get any compensation? Some sort of pension?” Henderson asked politely.

“For what? I told you, I didn’t have a scratch. I didn’t even get a fuckin’ purple heart. They sent me right back in.”

“Good God,” Henderson said, “that’s barbaric.”

“But at least you weren’t dead,” Bryant said. “Like the other guys.”

“Yeah. That’s something, I suppose.”

They arrived at the house. Alma-May was sweeping the porch.

“Evening,” Henderson said. “Mr Gage back?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, good.”

“But he’s gone away again. He was looking for you. For to show you the paintings, he said.”

“Bloody hell… Excuse me.” Henderson looked around him exasperatedly. “Did he leave any message about the paintings?”

“No.” Alma-May swept dust over his shoes. He moved aside.

“Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“No.”

♦

That evening, Henderson and Bryant watched TV after being served something called ‘turnip cakes’ and a watery ratatouille. Beckman disappeared into his room. From upstairs came the remorseless bass thump of Duane’s rock music. Henderson got a bad headache at about half past nine. He went out into the warm night, stood on the porch and stared at the yellow windows of Freeborn’s mobile home. He found no answer there and so went up to bed.

Chapter Six

“Yeah, we was on patrol near Loc Tri. No, no, it was Dhat Pho. Man, we was pissed. A real jerk-off patrol. Then we sees this like buffalo thing — kinda like a big cow? You know? — in a paddy field. That’s where the gooks grow their rice.”

“In a paddy field? I see.”

“Yeah. Well, I guess it was about, oh, a hundred and fifty yards away. No, let’s see, maybe a hundred and thirty.” Beckman Gage, elementary particle physicist, frowned as he tried to recall the exact distance. “Let’s say one-forty. Anyway, so the sergeant says, “The first guy to off that buffalo gets a six-pack on me.” Yeah. Well, I was like carrying the machine gun. The other guys start firing…”

Henderson felt himself nodding off. He’d had a good forty-five minutes of campaign anecdotes since lunch-time.

“…and I laid ten rounds of tracer up its ass. It just sorta disintegrated. Like pink foam!” Beckman gave a dry chuckle and shook his head over the folly of his youthful days.

Henderson looked at his watch. He hadn’t left the house all day in case he missed Gage, but the man hadn’t returned. Bryant had gone shopping with Shanda in Hamburg, which turned out to be five or six miles away. He had been crunching his way through one of Alma-May’s special salads — hard boiled eggs, raw potatoes, squash and some tough purple leaf — when Beckman had arrived from his lab.

“It was kinda like the time we was doing hearts and minds in Tro Nang. No Doc Tri—”

Freeborn came in. Henderson never thought he’d be even a tiny bit glad to see him, but he was. All the same he gripped the edge of the kitchen table defensively. However, Freeborn seemed to have forgotten about his deadline and ignored him.

“Beckman, can I have a word? Outside.” He looked darkly at Henderson. He and Beckman went out into the hall.

Henderson heard Freeborn bellow, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” at Duane. Then about two minutes later he returned alone.

“Listen, you English dick, the only reason I ain’t breaking your balls is that I love my father.”

Henderson couldn’t follow the logic of this argument.

“I give you one final warning,” he went on. “If you so much as mention the name Sereno to my father you’re a dead man.”

“Look, I just want to do my job and get out of this…out of here,” Henderson insisted. “You and your father can sort out your own problems. I’ve got no axe to grind.”

Freeborn hitched his tight jeans up, and pointed at him.

“I’m going away for two days. If you’re still here when I get back then you get your ass waxed. Got it?”

“Don’t worry. I shall be long gone.” Perhaps it was the anaesthetic quality of Beckman’s battlefield yarns but Freeborn’s threats didn’t seem to perturb him that much today.

They looked at each other for a while. Why does this man dislike me so much? he wondered. What little scheme of his has my arrival foiled?

Alma-May interrupted their stare.

“Get out of my kitchen,” she ordered grumpily. “I got to make you all dinner, your Daddy says.”

“What dinner?” Freeborn asked.

“He’s having a big dinner for Mr Dose here. He’s invited the preacher and his wife.”

“T.J. Cardew? Shit. And Mrs Cardew? Aw no.”

“That’s the only preacher we got. And y’all got to be there, your Daddy says.”

♦

Dinner was to be served at seven thirty. Guests were to foregather in the sitting room downstairs from seven onwards. Henderson bathed and put on his last clean shirt. He had only brought three, not anticipating his stay to be so protracted. He knotted his tie and combed his hair. As an afterthought he ran his comb through his densening eyebrows. He’d have to get them cut back soon, like a hedge. It had been one of the most boring days of his life, waiting vainly for Gage to show up. Bryant and Shanda had returned from Hamburg at 4.00. When Henderson asked her how she got along with Shanda she had said it had been ‘fun’.

He walked down the passage and knocked at her door.

“You ready?” he called in a loud voice.

“I’m drying my hair!” she shouted. “Five minutes!”

They had to shout because Duane was playing his rock music at exceptionally high volume this evening.

Henderson wondered if Duane would be honouring them with his presence that evening. He was curious to see what the youth looked like.

Gage himself was due to arrive — so Henderson had learnt — with his two guests later, T.J. and Mrs Cardew. Cardew was the minister in Luxora Beach. Henderson recalled that someone named Cardew had been responsible for the sermonette he’d listened to the other night. He assumed they were one and the same. Were T.J. simply his initials or was it some obscure Baptist rank, he asked himself as he walked down the stairs. He heard the clatter of plates from the kitchen and the distant clamour of a raging argument from Freeborn’s mobile home. Good, he thought. With a smile on his face he sauntered into the sitting room.

“Oh,” he said. “Hello again.”

Cora Gage had been brought down and had been placed squarely in the middle of the largest sofa. She was wearing a plain black dress and some sort of effort had been made to get her hair in order. She even possessed — Henderson took the liberty of staring — a smear of pale orange lipstick on her lips. She wore her dark glasses (like pennies on the eyes of a corpse, he suddenly thought) and, inevitably, she was smoking, her pack of cigarettes and lighter nestling in the sag of her lap.

“Help yourself to a jolly old drink,” she said, looking straight in front of her.

“Thank you.”

Set out on a table at one side were various types of whisky and bourbon, some bottles of beer and what looked like a five-gallon flagon of wine — Californian, he read. With considerable effort he managed to up end this and splash some into a glass and reasonable amounts onto the table. He tried to mop this up with a paper napkin but only succeeded in making it fall apart and also getting his hands wet. With a little thrill of pleasure he wiped his hands dry on the cushions of a nearby armchair.

“Cheers,” he said.

“Oh jolly old cheers.”

She really was an objectionable young woman, he thought. He stared at her thin body. The black dress was tight enough to reveal slightly out-of-proportion breasts — out-of-proportion in that someone her size, he felt, really should be flat-chested. He sat down opposite her.

“Pleasant evening,” he said.

“Is it?”

“Well, yes. The weather—”

“Oh, it’s the weather you’re talking about. Of course, the weather. Very English of you.”

“I just thought…”

He didn’t finish. There was a pause.

“Do you know why I dislike the English so much?” she said.

“I wasn’t really prepared for sun. Funnily enough.”

“I think, of all the reasons — spitefulness, condescension, pseudo-amateurishness — it’s that air of superiority you affect whenever you open your mouths.” She said all this very matter-of-factly, as if she were remarking that Alma-May had the afternoon off on Thursdays.

“It seems unusually warm for April,” he persevered. “But then of course we’re so much further south.”

“It doesn’t surprise me at all that you have this…this international reputation as hypocrites.” She puffed at her cigarette. “The loud claim to be acting in the public interest which in reality disguises a ruthless self-interest.”

“Quite overpoweringly hot today, walking into Luxora. Do you have a rainy season here?”

“We call it ‘winter’, in our quaint way.”

“Vague sort of tropical feel, if you know what I mean.”

Ash dropped into her lap. Get your own ashtray he said to himself cruelly, if you can.

“This sort of smugness, self-satisfaction…”

Henderson curled his upper lip in a smug self-satisfied sneer.

“…and yet you seem to be genuinely surprised when you’re not treated as number one any more. Genuinely.”

“It’s extremely kind of — Duane? — to fix my car.” He was not going to be drawn by this girl, no matter how angry he got.

“And you still assume that the rest of the world wants to ape the British way; ape your manners, ape your style, ape your attitudes.”

Something about the repeated use of the word ‘ape’ made him bulge his lower lip with his tongue and allow his hands to dangle, knuckles inward, from his elbows. He crossed his eyes and mimed picking a nit from his hair and popping it in his mouth.

“Really, these are the wildest generalizations,” he said, composing his features, and now rather enjoying himself. It was childish, he realized; like making faces at the teacher’s back as she wrote on the blackboard, but rather wicked fun. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure they were still alone.

“Sad,” she said. “Pathetic.”

The finality in her voice made him suddenly irritated with her. He leant forward and silently mouthed “Oh do fuck off you stupid woman.” He could see twin images of himself in her opaque lenses, bulging faced, exophthalmic.

“You too, asshole,” she said, getting to her feet and strolling over to the drinks table where she poured herself a shot of whisky. “Still, I enjoyed the show. I liked the ape best.”

Henderson’s hand shook so much that Californian wine slopped over the rim onto his trousers. With a brief drum-roll of glass on wood he set it down and dabbed at the stain with his handkerchief. He leant back in his armchair as a shiver ran the length of his body. He opened his mouth to say something but all that emerged was a thin, reedy piping noise — like a sick or injured peewit — but nothing else. His seized brain had gone out of control. No conceptual structures existed to cope with this sort of massive social shame, a gaffe of such epic proportions.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and leapt to his feet in alarm. It was Loomis Gage.

“Sorry to have missed you earlier, Mr Dores.” He seemed not to have noticed Henderson’s starting eyes or oozing brow. He felt like a horse saved from a burning stable, almost whinnying in panic.

“Don’t mention—” the words turned into a cough. He pounded his chest with a fist. “Not at all.”

“I trust Cora’s been looking after you.”

“We’ve been having a most interesting conversation, Dad. Haven’t we, Mr Dores?”

“Pweep.”

“I want you to meet my other guests.” Gage swept his arm round. “Our preacher from Luxora Beach, the Reverend T.J. Cardew and his wife Monika.”

Henderson turned to greet the couple in the doorway. The Reverend T.J. Cardew was a dapper, fleshy, youngish man (mid-thirties, Henderson guessed) with curly black hair and long thin sideburns that terminated sharply at his jawbone. He wore a sober black suit, a red shirt with silver metal tabs on the collar and a loud checked tie. His wife sported a lime-green dress over which she’d thrown a white net shawl. She had square gold framed glasses and reddish brown hair which was wound and back-combed into a beehive. She had a big frame and seemed larger all round than her husband. Her face was sullen, despite her bright red lips and pale blue eyelids. The primary colours did little to disguise the fact that she was deeply bored.

Henderson shook hands with them both. He tried not to look at Cora.

“How do you do? How do you do, reverend?”

“Very nice to know you, Henderson. Just call me T.J.”

Henderson doubted that he’d actually ever be able to do this, but smiled encouragingly.

“T.J. knows Europe well,” Gage confided. “And Monika there is in fact of German origin. Mr Dores is from England.”

Monika Cardew looked marginally more interested.

“Where in Germany are you from?” Henderson asked dutifully.

“Berlin.”

“We met,” T.J. interjected, “when I was serving there. As chaplain to the 43rd airborne.”

“An army bride,” Monika said flatly. She had a noticeable German accent.

“What’ll it be, T.J.?” Gage asked.

“Oh, I think a drop of the Goat, as usual, Loomis.”

“You must try some of this, Mr Dores,” Gage said, holding up a squat brown bottle. Henderson took it from him and looked at the label. “Henry’s Goat,” he read. “Sour Mash Bourbon.” On the label was a fine engraving of a tethered goat, and in the background a queue of people waiting outside a tumbledown wooden shack.

“Sippin’ whisky,” Gage said. “The secret of my survival.”

Gage poured him out a large measure in a small glass. Henderson, still shaky from the sudden revelation of Cora’s normal vision, allowed himself a sizeable gulp. The liquid had a thick smooth quality and slid down his gullet as easily as an oyster.

“Very pleasant,” he said, before what seemed like a small fragmentation grenade exploded in his stomach. A column of flame rose up his oesophagus. He shuffled his feet and breathed thin streams of hot vibrating air out through his nose. Some sort of dazed smile, he hoped, registered on his features.

“Goodness,” he said.

“Sort of creeps up on you,” Cardew laughed unattractively.

Gage administered more drinks and regularly pressed the bell to summon Alma-May.

“That boy sure loves his modern music,” Cardew said, acknowledging the bass rhythms vibrating from Duane’s room.

“Do you like rock music, Mr Dores?” Cora asked him innocently, lenses unsparingly focused on his face.

“No I don’t as a matter of fact. I prefer classical music.”

“You and Cora have something in common, then, Mr Dores,” Gage said, putting his arm round his daughter. “She is a wonderful pianist. Will you play something tonight for us, honey? After dinner?”

“No.”

“No persuading our Cora.” Cardew beamed. Gage seemed unperturbed by the abrupt refusal. Alma-May came in with a tray of canapes followed by Freeborn and Shanda. Shanda’s eyes were bloodshot and she looked sulky. Henderson stood up and offered her his seat but Freeborn steered her away to a sofa.

“I understand your daughter is with you, Henderson,” Cardew said. “That’s nice.”

“Well, actually,” Henderson began, then decided that it might be as well to leave the reverend in his ignorance. Cardew leant over.

“I understand too that she’s a very attractive teenager.”

Henderson didn’t know how to respond. “Takes after her mother,” he commented edgily.

“Oh, yes?”

“How is Patch?” Henderson said.

“Who?”

“Patch. Your dog. Scratching on heaven’s door, with no fear.”

“I’m sorry?”

“In your sermon. On the radio. I listened to it.”

“I don’t own a dog, Henderson. I’m allergic to fur.”

“But you—”

“What you might call poetic licence.”

“Some more Goat?” It was Gage dispensing bourbon.

“Please,” Henderson offered his empty glass. He was getting used to its virulence.

Gage seemed in a good mood. His plump face was flushed, his dense hair a little tousled.

“The man who made this stuff in the old days was called Henry Stewart. A Scotchman. He had his own still in back of his house and he also had a prize billy goat. And the good ole boys, when they wanted a refill, would take their nanny goats along to be sired. If they were asked where they were going they would say they were going round for Henry’s goat. And the name stuck.”

“Fascinating story.”

Gage sat down on the arm of Henderson’s chair.

“In fact that’s how I met Hem and Scotty in Paris. In the twenties. I was in the American bar at the Ritz and these two guys came in. They’d already had one too many, I could see. Then this one guy — Hem — says, “You got any Henry’s Goat?” I couldn’t believe it. I went right on over and introduced myself. Seems Hem got a taste for it when he was working on the Texas Star Bugle.”

“You mean the Kansas City Star,” Henderson said politely.

“No, no. It was the Texas Star Bugle.”

“And you got to know them?”

“Sure. I knew them all — Hem, Scott, Gertie, Alice, Pablo. Hell, I was rich in those days. I don’t pretend it wasn’t me picking up the tabs that they liked, but,” he paused, “it was good, as Hem used to say. And I wanted to buy some paintings and they told me what to buy. Good paintings.”

“Ah, yes, the paintings.”

“I’ll show you after dinner.” Gage squeezed his shoulder affectionately. Henderson felt a sensation of calm spread through his body for the first time since he had arrived in Luxora Beach. He felt suddenly fond of Loomis Gage and his patchwork memories. Or maybe it was simply the Goat going to work.

“Let me freshen that for you.”

Cora came round with a silver casket filled with cigarettes. Henderson noticed that Beckman and Bryant had arrived. Bryant and Shanda were engaged in a serious intimate conversation.

“Cigarette, Mr Dores?” Cora asked.

“No thanks,” He kept his eyes on her right shoulder.

“Are you enjoying your visit to the South?”

“Very much.”

“You don’t mean that, do you? You can’t wait to leave.”

“Hardly. Well—”

“But you’ve got perfect manners.”

He was beginning to find her constant irony intensely wearying.

“It so happens that one of the things I happen to believe in very strongly,” he said, in a low voice, a little more forcefully than he had intended, “is that there are certain decencies, certain social routines that we should observe whatever the cost. Otherwise it…” he shrugged, he hadn’t really considered the consequences. “It all falls apart.”

“And you wouldn’t see that as typical British hypocrisy? Say one thing when you mean the other?”

“Not at all. We all have duties and obligations that bore us. Total honesty doesn’t work in society—” he was encouraged by his fluency—“The alternative to that is a sort of, a sort of ghastly Californian candour where everything in the garden is lovely no matter what the evidence to the contrary is. No, that is, disrespect intended,” he added, his confusion returning.

“Mmm,” was all the reply she made, as if she had just had some thesis confirmed. “Excuse me.”

Henderson felt himself panting slightly as if he’d just run upstairs.

“I find Cora a fascinating girl, Henderson, don’t you?” Cardew whispered into his ear. “Very intellectual. She was a very promising student in medical school. Dropped out, just like that. No reason. No one knew why. But that…impulsiveness adds to her attraction.” They both looked at her, then she turned round and looked at them. Cardew raised his glass.

“Why does she wear those sunglasses all the time?”

“I really don’t know, Henderson,” Cardew said. “As far as I’m aware there’s nothing wrong with her eyes. She rarely removes them. They give her a — heh! — mysterious allure, don’t you think?”

Henderson sipped his Goat.

“Will we be seeing you and your lovely daughter in our church this Sunday, Henderson?”

“Well, reverend—” he blinked fiercely. The Goat had brought on a sudden attack of double vision.

“T.J., please.”

“I’m afraid we will be gone by then.”

“Oh.” He frowned. “Loomis told me you’d be here at least two weeks.”

Henderson almost dropped his glass. “There must be some misunderstanding.”

“No doubt, no doubt. We have a strong and loyal congregation here in Luxora Beach, Henderson. I think you would enjoy our service.”

“Alas, reverend.” Henderson spread his hands apologetically, observing a social routine.

“T.J., please. All my flock know me as T.J. I don’t stand on ceremony. Would you pass me a cigarette, Henderson?”

Alma-May came in. “It’s ready,” she said, and left.

Henderson drained his glass with relief and stood up, only to find the room had acquired a gradient which he hadn’t noticed before. He adjusted his stance to compensate. Three glasses of Goat were clearly enough.

The guests filed across the loud hall into the dining room. Henderson heard Beckman telling Monika about a fire fight in Due Pho province. Shanda waded over towards Henderson.

“Evening, Mr Dores.”

“Howdy,” Henderson said. “Y’all doin’ fine?”

“Oh yeah. I guess.”

Cora’s head snapped round at his words. Everyone had to raise their voices over the rumble of Duane’s music.

“Can’t you hush that moron up for an hour or two?” Freeborn demanded angrily of his father.

“It’s the boy’s only pleasure,” Gage called back amicably. “We won’t hear it in the dining room.”

“I’ll get that baboon,” Freeborn muttered and set off up the stairs.

“That’s why we moved into the trailer,” Shanda said. “Freeborn and Duane kept beatin’ up on each other. They just don’t get along.”

They went into the dining room. Henderson had glanced into it briefly on his furtive patrol of the house the day before. A dull crystal chandelier hung above a long polished table. The room was panelled and the panels had been painted a creamy pale green. On the walls were family portraits, done by local artists, he assumed. He recognized the Gage children: slim beardless Freeborn, Beckman, and Cora, as a young girl of about twelve, minus her sunglasses. On an end wall was an older Victorian oil of a plump bearded man in a navy blue military uniform.

“My father,” Gage said, noticing him looking at it. “It’s not for sale,” he added with a smile. “He died when I was two. In the Philippines. The gu-gus—”

“Daddy,” Cora said, “I don’t think we want that story before dinner.”

They all sat down under Gage’s direction. He placed himself at the head of the table, Henderson on his right, Monika Cardew on his left. Beside Henderson was Shanda and beyond, Cardew and Cora. Across the table were Beckman, Bryant and an empty seat for Freeborn who, Henderson assumed, must still have been remonstrating with Duane.

A confused shouting came from behind the door. Then Alma-May burst in with a tureen of soup in her hands, followed by an oddly cowed-looking Freeborn.

“You tell him to leave Duane alone, Mr Gage,” she said, crashing the tureen down on the table angrily.

“I just ast him to turn the goddam noise down, is all,” Freeborn grumbled petulantly, sitting down.

“It’s all right, Alma-May,” Gage soothed. “We won’t bother him again.”

Alma-May sullenly served up the soup which was solid with vegetables. Then she effortfully dispensed wine from another five-gallon carafe. Henderson drank his wine, chewed the soup and listened to Shanda who he discerned after a minute or so, was telling him about her day with Bryant in Hamburg. Beyond her he could see Cardew leaning too far across the table talking energetically, and with wide gummy smiles, to Bryant, who looked back at the reverend with overt suspicion.

“How are you liking Luxora Beach?” Monika Cardew asked.

“Urn. Very…Yes, liking it a lot. Yes. What I’ve seen.”

“There’s not much to see,” she said.

“Why is it called Luxora Beach?” Henderson asked in mild desperation. “Is there a lake nearby, or a river?”

“Good question,” Gage said. “We’ve got the Ockmulgokee river flows by the town, but there’s no beach that I know of. Ask T.J.” He distracted the reverend’s attention from Bryant’s breasts.

“T.J., Henderson has a question for you.”

“Yes, Henderson?”

“I was wondering how you explain the beach in Luxora Beach?”

“Well, gosh darn. Do you know, Henderson, I’ve never thought to ask.”

“Just curious.”

“Good golly, it only goes to show what a stranger’s eyes can illuminate for you.” For some reason he whipped out a little notebook from his breast pocket and wrote something down. “How long have we lived here, Monika dear?”

“Eleven years,” Monika said with feeling.

“And I never thought to ask. Thank you, Henderson, thank you sincerely. I shall endeavour to find out the answer.”

“Just idle curiosity.” He emptied his glass.

“Freeborn, will you offer our guests more wine?”

Alma-May cleared the soup plates and returned with more dishes. She set down crammed bowls on the table: great mounds of various beans, corn on the cob, some sort of sopping green vegetable, curious knobbled dumplings.

“Down home cooking for our English guest.” Gage raised his glass.

A heaped plate was set in front of Henderson.

“What are these things?” he said weakly, playing for time. He didn’t feel in the least bit hungry. What was more, Henry’s Goat was having a curious effect on his body. Bits of him seemed to go numb while others prickled with an urgent rash.

Beckman pointed to the green stuff. “That’s turnip greens,” he said. “And that — the rice and beans — is hoppin’ John. That’s black-eyed bean stew. And those are corn dogs.”

“Hoppin’ John?” Henderson said. “Why that name?”

“Because,” Freeborn said at his shoulder, sloshing wine into his glass, “once you’ve ate it, it sends you hoppin’ to the John.”

Henderson laughed nervously; he thought it safer. Though no one else did.

“And that bean stew?” Freeborn continued. “It’s been stew once but I don’t know what it is now. Hyar-har.”

Henderson filled his mouth with hoppin’ John. Inoffensive stuff. He drank some more wine, then wondered if that were wise. Perhaps it was the mix of Californian plonk with Henry’s Goat that was making him feel so odd. Now, light-headedness was alternating with nausea. He looked down the table. Bryant’s eyes and expression seemed to be communicating a message of some sort but he couldn’t decipher it. Cora sat behind a place that contained a solitary pile of beans. There was a babble of conversation as everyone tucked into their main course.

“Why are you a vegetarian, Mr Gage?” Henderson asked. “Religious reasons or just taste?”

“Oh no, I’m not a vegetarian.”

“But why?”

“Not me personally. Alma-May is. She turned vegetarian two years ago. Won’t have meat or fish in the house. Point blank refuses. What else could we do?”

“Oh. I see…”

“Are you familiar, Henderson…? Henderson? I was saying are you familiar with Upper Heyford, England?” It was Cardew, shouting across Shanda’s back.

“It’s near Oxford. An air base, I think. Yes, I know it vaguely.”

“Henderson, please call me T.J.”

“Right.”

“You see I was stationed there for a while. I don’t suppose you know a Mr John Fairchild of Upper Heyford?”

“No. I’m afraid—”

Freeborn interrupted. “That’s where we got our bombs and missiles, yeah? And, yeah, can you tell me,” he went on, warming, “what you Britishers have got against our bombs and missiles?”

Henderson chewed manfully on his beans, wondering how he could get off this topic.

“I think, um, the main objection is that we, that is, Britain, don’t have any control over the—”

“Of course not. They’re our bombs. We made ‘em. You got your own, don’t you?” Freeborn’s expression seemed to say Q.E.D.

“Tell me, Henderson, is there a reason for the name of every English village?” Gage asked, frowning thoughtfully.

“Well, yes, often. ‘Chipping’ as in Chipping Sodbury means there was a quarry there. ‘Hurst’ as in—”

“Henderson?”

“Yes, Shanda.”

“My maiden name was McNab. That’s a Scotch name, right?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“I thought so.”

“We are allies,” Cardew said, intensely. “What I personally can’t understand is this hostility between allies. I mean we are there — our weapons, our young men — to defend the West.”

“Luxora Beach…” Gage said, obliviously. “You know, I think I like the fact, you know, that there isn’t a logical reason. There’s too much logic in the world. I like it sorta…arbitrary like that.”

“There is a Luxor on the Nile,” Cora said, dryly. “Perhaps it was an Egyptian who settled here first.”

“But that’s logic again, Cora. You’re looking for logic.”

Freeborn leant across the table and pointed his fork at Henderson. “I mean we had to win World War One and Two for you guys, and we’ll probably have to do it for World War Three and Four.”

“I think the argument,” Henderson said, “is that you’re fighting your wars in Europe, as it were. That if Europe is the battleground, then it suits…I mean, not that I…” He felt his head spinning.

“Actually I believe there were no Egyptian immigrants to this country in the eighteenth century,” Cora said with mock solemnity.

“Come to think of it, when was the town founded?” Gage asked. “T.J.?”

“Excuse me, Loomis, I have to deal here with something Henderson said. Now, Henderson—”

“Could you pass me the turnip greens, Henderson?” It was Beckman. “Just sorta shove them down thisaway.”

“That statement of yours, Henderson.”

“What statement?”

“It whitewashes the American blood spilt in Europe.”

“Actually, I wasn’t quite saying that, um, J.P.,” Henderson felt the controls slip from his hand.

“Look, there’s an easy answer,” Gage said cheerfully. “If you don’t want us there, say the word and we’ll haul ass. Save us a slew of dollars, that’s for sure.”

“I find your remarks, Henderson, deeply disquieting. Do our own allies in Europe really—”

“With respect, T.V., that’s not the point at issue.”

“Henderson, say can you reach over that wine?”

“OK, OK, so the Reds take over England,” Freeborn said. “So who gives a sick dog’s dump?”

“Freeborn, please!”

“Is England the same place as Scotland or what?” Shanda asked. “That’s what I want to know.”

“Why, Henderson, why does ant-eye nuclear always equal ant-eye Uncle Sam?”

“To be honest, M.P., I think you’ve lost the gist—” he had to strain to hear now, above the crescendo of noise. Everybody was talking.

“Hell, man, we’re all ant-eye war, aren’t we? I tell you in Nam—”

“Henderson, I would say this to you. To your people, Henderson. Tell them, Henderson, tell them we are your friends. Do not turn us away, for God’s sweet sake!”

“Look, E.T., or whatever your blasted name is—”

“Man, when you got incoming, hell, are you ant-eye war!”

“Why, Henderson, why?”

“Why what? You stupid bloody—”

“—leave you alone, then see what happens—”

“—you got Scotland, OK. You got England—”

“—wasting slopes in Dac Tro—”

“—God’s abiding love—”

“—someone who’d been to Egypt?—”

“WAAAAARGH!!”

Everyone stopped talking at once. The scream had issued from the lips of the Reverend T.J. Cardew. He had leapt wildly to his feet, knocking over his chair, and was now white with pain and clutching his right knee with both hands. In the subsequent alarm and fuss, amid the shouted questions and commiserations, Henderson saw Bryant surreptitiously bring her hand up from beneath the table and replace a fork.

Henderson stood up and felt the room wheel and bank. He heard the black-eyed beans, hoppin’ John, corn dogs and turnip greens in his stomach clamouring for the open air. “Excuse me,” he mumbled, and left the room. He ran to the front door, sprang down the front steps and vomited into an azalea bush.

He leant weakly against the wall, the world still tilting and reeling. He hawked and spat and kicked loose earth over such bits of his regurgitated meal as he could see. He moaned quietly to himself. He felt terrible. Rough careless hands were clenching his intestines, tugging and squeezing. He breathed deeply, recalling a Teagarden drill. Controlled relaxation. Inhale, exhale. Controlled relaxation.

There was a breeze outside. It blew across the moonlit grass bringing with it a scent of pines. He looked up at the constant, uncomplaining stars. He heard the distant rush of a freight train on the Luxora Beach line, and the human cry of its call. If he hadn’t felt so ill and drunk he might have been overcome with melancholia.

He wandered about in a rough figure-of-eight pattern, had a final spit and was about to go back inside when he heard the sound of a telephone from Freeborn’s mobile home. He stumbled across. Yes, definitely ringing. He swithered for a moment. Should he go and get Freeborn? Something about the tone of the ring, he thought wildly and fancifully, made him convinced it was a call from New York. He tried the door. Locked. The phone continued ringing. He ran to the front steps, ran back to the door and tugged vainly at it. The ringing stopped. In his anger and frustration he punched the door and bruised his knuckles.

“Ouch! Bastard!” he swore.

He turned round and saw the orange glow of a cigarette on the porch.

“Having fun?” Cora said.

“The phone,” he said. “It was ringing. Then it stopped.”

Strange displacements and shiftings were still going on in his abdominal region. The last thing he required was a conversation with Cora.

“So I heard. How are you feeling?” She looked oddly malignant in her black dress and black glasses in the darkness of the porch.

“Not so good. I think I’d better make my excuses.”

“Daddy wants to show you his paintings.”

“Oh yes, of course. Gladly.” He climbed the front steps. The smell of her cigarette smoke mingled with that of the pines and the lingering acidity of his vomit. It was not a pleasant conjunction.

“Everything has sort of calmed down in there,” she said. “T.J. explained that the pain was an old football injury. It sometimes gets him like that. Out of the blue.”

“Ah.”

“Your daughter looked a little sceptical.”

“Yes. She would.”

There was a pause.

“Look,” Henderson began. “I want to apologize about my behaviour earlier. It was unforgivable. I don’t know what possessed me. I mean, even if you had been blind…that’s to say, well, really, it’s hardly the sort of thing one should do — especially at my age.” He looked out at the night. “Appalling.”

“Don’t worry about it. And, remember, I did rather lead you on.”

The porch light was switched on. It was Gage.

“Feeling better, Mr Dores? The Goat can get you that way.”

“I needed a breath of fresh air.”

“A breath of fresh air. I like that. Ready to do business?”

Henderson said goodnight to Cora and wearily followed Gage back inside and upstairs.

He felt a new wave of nausea hit him as Gage unlocked his door and switched on the light. Henderson saw a generous sitting room with a bedroom off it, a replica of Cora’s suite across the passage. There was an old leather Chesterfield, an antique escritoire and a large glass-fronted, largely empty bookcase against one wall between two windows. The other three walls were covered in paintings and photographs, most of the larger canvases with brass picture lights over them. On one wall in pride of place was a large amateurish oil of a woman, idealized and prettified, and surrounding this were numerous black-framed photographs.

“Mrs Gage,” Henderson was informed. “God rest her soul. Died fifteen years ago.”

Henderson wandered over. The photographs were an odd mixture. Gage shaking hands with various dignitaries — Henderson recognized two American presidents, a toupeed crooner and Ernest Hemingway — and a large photo of a café scene that bore the heading ‘Paris, 1922.’. There were various studio portraits of the Gage offspring, charting the usual transformation from smiling child through shifty adolescent to banal adult.

Suppressing a belch, and making a mighty effort to clear his head he turned to the paintings. If he hadn’t felt so drunk and under the weather he would have been elated, the object of his visit having finally been achieved. In the event, it was as much as he could do to keep them in focus.

Beeby’s summary had been accurate. On the first wall were four not very remarkable, school of so-and-so, muddy Dutch landscapes of the late seventeenth century, he guessed. There was also, with this group, a portrait of a bearded man and a small allegorical work.

The other wall was devoted to the twentieth century. Henderson noted the two large Sisley landscapes — a river lined with poplars, an orchard screening red-roofed barns — a Derain — a green barge on a red river — two bold still lifes, a rather run-of-the-mill Braque cubist portrait, a Utrillo street-scene under snow, and two shimmering, translucent Vuillard interiors.

“That’s where I had rooms,” Gage said, pointing to the Utrillo. “Max painted it for me.”

Henderson knew he should be computing value and expressing huge enthusiasm but a fair portion of his mind’s attention was still claimed by the structural redevelopment going on in his torso. It sounded like men moving furniture from room to room.

“A remarkable collection, Mr Gage. I like them very much.”

“I bought them all in one year,” Gage said nostalgically, “1922. I had more money than I knew what to do with.” He laid a hand on Henderson’s shoulder. “Tell the truth, I went to Europe for a good time, no intention of buying paintings. But there you are. I met Hem and Scotty. They said a man like me ought to collect some art, so I did. Bought direct off of some artists, off their friends, one or two dealers and shipped them home. I thought about buying some more over the years, but there didn’t seem much point. I had my paintings. I liked them. I didn’t need any more.”

“I can see exactly what you mean,” Henderson said, diplomatically. “There’s no point in accumulation for accumulation’s sake.”

He moved back to the Dutch paintings.

“I bought those because I was homesick,” Gage said. “They reminded me of round here.”

Henderson couldn’t spot any similarity between the wet sombre landscapes and the countryside near Luxora Beach.

“And that feller there reminded me of my father. And the other one,” he indicated the allegory. “Hell, it’s just a dirty painting.” He caught hold of Henderson’s elbow and whispered in his ear. “Tell you a secret. It gave me a hard on when I saw it in the gallery. Still does, sixty years later.”

To avoid having to reply, Henderson peered closer. The painting was small, twenty by fourteen inches approximately. In a rather badly painted allegorical landscape — crags, woods, cataracts, stormy mouse-grey clouds, a distant view of sea and luxuriant islands — was a simple columned temple or shrine. Within this, glimpsed between the widely spaced columns, were two women. One woman was in the traditional sackcloth and ashes of mourning. She knelt, hands clasped, but her head was turned away towards the other. Even though she was in an attitude of prayer her face wore a broad smile. The other woman — dark, slim, younger — was laughing too. She was holding up the skirt of her robe to reveal her pudenda. She had plump creamy thighs, slightly parted. Her vaginal crease was clearly visible and some tiny single-haired brush had been used to touch in a near-transparent smoke of pubic curls. By her feet was a jug.

The smiles on the women’s faces were wide — almost crude grins — wide enough to reveal their teeth.

He looked at the young girl again. To his shame he felt a stirring in his trousers. He turned quickly to the portrait. Some hefty Dutch burgher with a dense beard. There was a slight resemblance to the portrait in the dining room. He remarked on this to Gage. He had to say something.

“And you say your father died when you were two?”

“That’s right,” Gage said.

“My father died before I was born.”

“I’m sorry,” Gage apologized, as if he were in some way responsible.

“He was killed in Burma, in the war. The Second World War.”

“Now, there is a coincidence,” Gage said. “My father died in a war too. In the Philippines.”

“What war was that?”

“Our war against the Philippines.” This was news to Henderson. “1898 to 1902.”

“What on earth was the United States doing fighting a war against the Philippines?”

“I don’t rightly know,” Gage said thoughtfully. “We killed three million of them, too.”

“You’re joking.”

“No sir. But the gu-gus got my Daddy. When they killed him they cut off his pecker and stuck it in his mouth.”

“Good God! How appalling!” Henderson touched his mouth and his groin reflectively.

“Nasty little war, that one,” Gage said. “Seems that’s what the gu-gus did to their victims.”

“The ‘gu-gus’ are the Philippines?”

“That’s right. But I don’t think there’s any call for that kind of mutilation.”

“Lord no,” said Henderson, unsettled. “Absolutely not.”

Then, to his astonishment, Gage dropped into a boxer’s crouch and fired a volley of jabs at the air in front of his face. Henderson was almost sick on the carpet, so taken aback was he. He reeled away.

“You a boxer, Mr Dores?” Gage said, still darting lefts and rights.

“No. I…no I’m not.”

“That’s a fair fight. Whew.” Gage stopped and patted his chest. “But there’s no such thing as a fair fight outside of a sporting arena, wouldn’t you agree?”

“It’s a point, I suppose. I don’t really know.”

“Five’ll get you ten your father didn’t die in a fair fight. Just like mine.”

“I’ve no idea.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Funnily enough I’ve been trying to discover for the last year how in fact he did die. Been writing to men who served with him, that sort of thing.”

“No such thing as a fair fight. Remember that.” Gage paced up and down his room. He seemed strangely flushed and excited. “You a sportsman?”

“Not really. I do a bit of fencing from time to time.”

“Fencing? You mean?” he did a hand-twirling flourish and lunged with an imaginary sword.

“Yes.”

Gage laughed. “Are you putting me on?”

“No, no, I assure you. I enjoy it.”

“The word ‘foible’ comes from fencing, am I right?”

“Yes. The foible is the weak part of the blade.”

“Foible…” Gage paused. His exertions had tousled his thick white hair. Henderson noticed how it seemed to spring straight up out of his skull for an inch before its weight caused it to fall over. A remarkable head of hair, he thought. Gage was looking at the carpet and tugging at the loose skin beneath his jaw.

“Know what unites us, Mr Dores? Every swinging dick, as we used to say in the army?”

“Well, it depends…”

“We all want to be happy, and we’re all going to die.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“You might say those are the only two unchallenge-ably true facts that apply to every human being on this planet.”

“Indeed.” Henderson’s eye shifted nervously about the room, glancing at the paintings. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ etc…That sort of thing seems a little rarified sometimes in this day and age.”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself. Tell me something, Mr Dores.” Gage wandered over to the Vuillards. “We all want to be happy and we’re all going to die. Wouldn’t you think that if everybody knew that, acknowledged that, things would be different?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah…” Gage frowned. There was a pause.

“I think these are my favourites,” Henderson indicated the Vuillards. “Magnificent.” He was disturbed and unsettled by the little old man. Vaguely shocked, too, by the news of Gage senior’s hideous mutilation. He wondered if his own researches into his father’s death would turn up something as distressing. Better perplexed ignorance, perhaps, than that sort of knowledge…He grimaced. Some blend of complicated writhing and uncoiling was going on in the depths of his abdominal cavity. He forced himself to concentrate.

“With paintings of this quality we would be happy to waive our seller’s commission. Naturally, there will be a full colour catalogue and—”

“Let’s talk about the details tomorrow, Mr Dores. It’s getting late.” He opened the door; he looked a little troubled. “And I must get back to my guests.”

Henderson said he thought he would go straight on to bed as he was still feeling the worse for wear. Gage left him at the top of the stairs and he walked slowly along the corridor to his room. As he passed Bryant’s room she came out.

“Hi,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

“Where are you off to?”

“Duane asked if I wanted to listen to some of his records.”

“Well, try to keep the noise down, OK?”

“Sure. And listen, Duane says he’s sorry but he’ll try to get your tyre back tomorrow.”

“Good. Look, what, um, happened with Cardew?”

“Oh God. He kept sorta trying to twine his legs round mine, so I let him have it in the knee with a fork.”

“Oh.”

“Dirty old men. I hate them.”

“See you tomorrow. Goodnight.”

♦

As he undressed, Henderson felt overwhelmed with tiredness. He climbed wearily between the sheets and laid his head with a sigh of relief on his cool pillow. Within seconds it became uncomfortably warm. He turned over. His ears were like hotplates. He lay on his back, breathing steadily, trying to summon up a mood of controlled relaxation. He was still awake an hour later when he heard the Cardews’ car drive away.

At least and at last he had seen the paintings, he told himself. He farted noisily. What had he eaten? Was it the corn dogs, the hoppin’ John or the turnip greens? Or was it all down to Henry’s Goat?…He’d phone Beeby with the good news tomorrow. He couldn’t see any major problem with Gage; they got on fine and he seemed happy enough to sell. He pondered vaguely on Beck-man’s notion of Freeborn’s premature sale. They were so obviously Gage’s personal possessions it seemed inconceivable that his son would have any independent claim on them himself.

But why was Gage selling? It was a question he rarely asked of his clients — it was none of the auction house’s business. Often, though, some reason was voluntarily given: security concerns, death duties, a move — but seldom, however, the most common: poverty. He strongly suspected this was what applied here. Gage was broke. Clearly he had been rich once, but everything about the household spoke of galloping penury.

He wondered how he would get through to Beeby the next day. Freeborn had said he was going away so perhaps he could prevail on Shanda without fear. He didn’t fancy having to walk into Luxora Beach every time he wanted to make a phone call…And when was that cretin Duane going to fix his car? He was paying good money for it precisely to afford him the mobility he now required, and yet it stood uselessly outside on three wheels, gathering dust.

Thinking about phoning Beeby reminded him of the call that had come through to Freeborn’s trailer. He felt sure it had been for him, but who? Beeby? Melissa checking on Bryant? Irene? The mild sensual stimulus provided by Gage’s sixteenth-century bit of erotica set up aches of longing for Irene. She should get his letter by tomorrow…He had to get her down here, to patch things up. He couldn’t let one disastrous night ruin everything. He would send her a first class return ticket to Atlanta, book them both into the plushest hotel they could find and have three or four undisturbed days together after this whole business was over. He ran through half-a-dozen scenarios of their reunion. Sleep had left him far behind now, he realized. He should get up and read, make notes on the paintings. He compiled a swift catalogue in his head, estimating possible prices. The Dutch paintings were curiosities and worth nothing significant. But the Sisleys and the Vuillards were important, and the Braque…He thought suddenly of Gage’s father and his father. They had both died in the East in a war and had never known their sons. A strange coincidence. It made him warm to the little man…Still gets a hard on from his dirty painting…

He found himself thinking again of Gage’s father’s horrible death. Surely nothing so dreadful would have befallen Arnold Dores in Burma? To his surprise he found himself worrying for his father’s safety, as if he were still alive and still involved in his perilous mission. Take care, Dad, he said to himself — and then rebuked himself for his absurd sentiment. It had been an odd moment, though, a kind of eerie time shift. He felt suffused by a low, steady sadness, which gradually gave way to unease. He hoped he wouldn’t hear of anything too awful…

Chapter Seven

The next morning Henderson got out of bed and fell over. He sat on the floor for a few seconds and watched his hands shake. A largish prism seemed to be wedged between his spine and his rib cage. The internal triangle. His viscera felt stuffed to capacity with gravel. His eyes throbbed painfully, as if they had been removed from their sockets, bounced up and down on the floor and reinserted. He crawled back between the sheets.

Bryant looked in later to inform him she was going to Atlanta with Duane to buy some records. Henderson waved her on her way. At lunchtime Alma-May brought him a pickled cucumber and chopped onion sandwich. He crawled out on to the balcony and threw it in the garden.

In mid-afternoon he received a visit from Cora.

“How are you feeling?” she said. She stood in the centre of his room, cigarette burning in one hand. She seemed quite friendly now.

“Not so good,” he replied. “Very weak. Chronic indigestion. Intermittent nausea. It must be that sipping whisky.”

“You got a phone call, Shanda says. A Miss Irene Dubrovnik? You’ve to phone back.”

“Oh! Oh right. Good. Thanks very much.”

She left and Henderson shakily got dressed. His back was aching, as if his spine couldn’t take the strain of keeping his body erect. He went to the lavatory and sat there for five minutes, teeth gritted and eyes watering with the pressure, but nothing shifted.

He tottered carefully down the stairs and shuffled over to Shanda’s trailer. Out in the park an old black man drove about on a miniature tractor cutting the grass.

Henderson knocked at the door and Shanda let him in.

“Can I use the phone?”

“The phone? Sure.”

He sat down warily on the glass and wrought iron seat. He wondered what Shanda did with herself all day. She settled down on a sofa and leafed through a magazine. He punched out Irene’s number. He felt excited but a little inhibited by Shanda’s presence and subdued somewhat by his weakened state.

“Hello, Irene. It’s Henderson.”

“Hi. I got your letter.”

“Look, I’m really sorry about all the—”

“Forget it. How are you?”

“Actually, I’ve got the most appalling indigestion. I drank something called Henry’s Goat and ate something called hoppin’ John.”

“Redneck food, Henderson. You’ve got to be reared on that stuff. Have you had grits yet?”

“It feels like it.” Perhaps that caused the stuffed-gravel sensation. He shifted slightly in his seat, turning his back towards Shanda who was listening with candid curiosity. He felt huge relief and gratitude at this restoration of feeling between him and Irene.

“Listen,” he said, “can you get down here?”

“I don’t know. When?”

“This weekend. We can stay in a hotel. Then we’ll take a few days and drive around. Charleston, Savannah, somewhere like that.”

There was a pause.

“OK, maybe I can get down on Friday night.”

“I’ll meet you at the airport. Atlanta.”

“No. I don’t know which plane I’ll get. I’ll come straight to the hotel.”

“Great. Hang on a sec.” He turned to Shanda. “Shanda, what’s the very best hotel in Atlanta?”

“Excuse me?”

“Hotel. The very best. In Atlanta.”

“Well…I guess Monopark 5000. But it’s real expensive.”

It sounded more like a brand of hair conditioner than a hotel, but he would have to take her word for it. He relayed its name to Irene, who said she’d heard of it and the massive complex of shops, plazas, banks and adventure playgrounds out of which the enormous hotel soared.

“See you there,” he said. “Friday night.” His voice went hoarse. “Bye.” He put the phone down.

“Was that your wife?” Shanda asked. “I mean your fiancée. Bryant’s mommy?”

“No.” He thought quickly. “A business associate.” No word of Irene’s trip must reach Bryant’s ears. He asked if he could make some more calls (“seein’ as how he wuz darned well a’sittin’ by the phone”) and received Shanda’s permission. She went off into the kitchenette to make him some coffee. He called Beeby and told him the good news, gave him a description of the paintings and approximate market prices and said that Gage seemed entirely happy and prepared to sell through Mulholland, Melhuish.

Beeby’s joy was profound. “We are all in your debt, Henderson. Great news. When are you coming home?”

Henderson told him of his plans to drive around for a few days, explore the South a little further.

“Take as long as you like, my dear boy, as long as you like. What about the Dutch paintings?”

“Very average, as you thought. There is one curiosity.” He described Gage’s dirty picture. “I can’t place the myth. I thought Pruitt might know.”

“I’ll ask him. Enjoy yourself.”

Henderson put the phone down. Shanda came back with a cup of coffee. Her love-bite had faded to a brown smudge. Her distended breasts swung unrestrained, it seemed to Henderson, beneath a bright floral-patterned maternity dress. They sat and chatted as best they could for a few minutes. He thought she asked him if he and ‘Bryant’s mommy’ were going to get married in a church. He told her no, and sketched out the arguments in favour of a registry office wedding.

“I’m sorry?”

“Registry office.”

“Red just offed his what? His wife?”

Did they have registry offices in America? “No. A registry office.”

“Air defence officer? Who? Red?”

“Fiss. Fiss. Aw-fiss.”

Shanda lit a cigarette and smiled worriedly at him.

“You know, it’s still not working,” she said. “Sometimes it’s fine an’ I hear you OK. But other times it just goes. I’m lost.”

Ten minutes later, Henderson stepped exhausted from the trailer. He walked around the side of the house, belching quietly to himself in an attempt to dislodge the ball of warm air trapped behind his rib cage. He wandered down the cool overgrown alleyways of the back garden feeling slightly more at ease. Apart from his clogged and costive body, his life was beginning to pick up again. He was finally getting on with his job and was reconciled with Irene. The last few days had been an absurd and regrettable hiccough. It was as if in driving south he’d passed into some anarchic and frustrating time zone — like Alice falling down the rabbit hole — but now things were returning to normal.

He pushed through a screen of laurels to find himself on the banks of a large brackish stream. On the far bank was a dense pine wood. Over to his right was a stone bench, upon which sat Cora.

“Mr Dores,” she called. “Come and admire the view.”

He joined her on the bench. She wore black cotton trousers and a white blouse, and with her short hair looked obscurely Chinese.

“The view?”

“My mother planned to construct a ‘vista’ here. But it never got made.”

“I see. Shame.” They sat and looked at the pine trees some thirty or forty feet away across the stream.

“I suppose you think,” she said, “that it’s a rather pretentious idea. A Southern lady playing at being a landscape gardener.”

“Not at all,” he said defensively. He changed the subject. “I was very impressed by your father’s collection.”

She turned her sunglasses on him. “Is he going to let you sell them?”

“I hope so.”

“Do you like ‘Demeter and lambe’?”

“That’s the one where…”

“The girl is holding up her dress. Yes.”

“What did you call it?”

“‘Demeter and lambe’. It’s written on the back of the canvas. I don’t know who the hell they are, though.”

“I can fill you in on Demeter, I think. Goddess of the harvest. Her daughter, Persephone, was kidnapped by Hades, god of the underworld, one day while she was gathering flowers. Demeter goes wild with grief, permits no harvest for a year. Mankind about to perish, Zeus persuades Hades to release Persephone. Harvests restored. I don’t know where lambe fits in. One of the rarer Greek myths, I suppose.”

“I suppoase sowe,” she imitated his accent. Henderson smiled. He could take a joke.

“Are you married, Mr Dores?”

He explained — roughly — the position in regard to Melissa.

“You divorced her and now you want to remarry? Why?”

“Well…I think because I now realize that the only time I was truly happy was when I was married to her and, well, I think I can be happy again.” He was a little astounded at his honesty. Having uttered the sentiment he reassessed it in the light of his recent phone call to Irene. Was it true? Yes, he told himself and remarked again on the boundless capacity for self-deception that resides in every human being.

“So I take it Miss Dubrovnik isn’t your intended.”

“Who? Oh no. Why would…what would make you think that she might have been?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that when I told you she’d phoned you looked so pleased.”

“She’s a colleague. She, ah, had some important news for me about the paintings. Actually I’m meeting her in Atlanta on Friday. Some problems of dating, provenance, that sort of thing. Seventeenth-century Dutch is not really my area.”

“What is?”

“Late nineteenth. I’m what’s known as ‘an Impressionist man’.”

“The Impressionist man,” she said grandly.

“Yes.” He couldn’t tell why he felt uneasy.

“I see.”

“May I ask you something?” he said, emboldened by the friendly turn the conversation had taken.

“You may.”

“Why do you wear your sunglasses all the time?”

She looked at him. “Because I’m an Impressionist man as well, yo’u might say. An Impressionist woman.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Because everything looks nicer. The country, the weather, the people. They all look more as they should.”

Henderson wasn’t quite sure if she were being serious. “You mean as you somehow imagined they would? Ideally speaking.”

“Let’s say, as I think they should. Without my glasses the world doesn’t look as bright or as richly coloured. The people look nastier too.” She puffed at her cigarette, sending small clouds up into the branches of the tree that overhung the bench.

“Stands to reason,” Henderson said without much conviction.

“Do you want me to take them off?”

“Well, I…I mean only if—”

She took her sunglasses off and turned her face towards him. It seemed an almost profane and indecent gesture, as if she’d suddenly exposed her breasts or, like the girl in the painting, raised her dress. Her eyes seemed small and were brown like beer. English bitter, he thought, how apt. Her face seemed bland and empty. It was impossible to assess — with the removal of such a dominant feature — whether she was pretty or plain. It was like a good friend shaving off a beard he’s worn for ten years. Someone entirely different — unknown — is exposed beneath.

Henderson felt uncomfortable. A fly buzzed round her face and she flapped it away. The removal of her sunglasses seemed to imply an intimacy between them, as if she were doing something specially for him. He hadn’t asked her to oblige, he reminded himself.

“I think,” he said with insincere gallantry, “you look much nicer with them off.”

“Remember I’m seeing you differently, too,” she said, scrutinizing him. “I’ve torn away a veil.”

He smiled edgily. The fly buzzed back, around his head this time. Just then the distant sound of rock music came from the house.

“You’re not quite so hostile to us Brits, today,” he said.

She laughed. “Life can get a little boring around here. Don’t blame me if I try to liven it up a little. Create some tension. I like to draw people out, you know. Force them to be themselves.”

“Well, your blindness was very convincing. Your contempt for the English, too.”

“What about your contempt for us Americans, then?”

“What contempt? We don’t have any contempt for you. I don’t, certainly.”

She looked hard at him. “Well, we don’t care, anyway. We know it’s all brought on by envy.”

He decided not to be drawn out any further.

“Why are you living here, if you don’t mind my asking? I heard you dropped out of medical school.”

She replaced her sunglasses. “I was going to be married,” she said in a quiet, solemn voice. “Three days before the ceremony my fiancé was killed in a car crash. I came back home. That was six months ago.”

“Oh. I’m really sorry.” He felt very sad, all of a sudden. “I didn’t realize…”

“Actually, that’s not true.”

“Really.” He felt angry, all of a sudden. What was true in this family?

“I was at medical school. After a while I just couldn’t see the point. All those illnesses, you know. Not just the big heavy ones; it was the horrible little ones; the ‘syndromes’, the ‘diseases’, the ones named after people. Too many of those to cope with.”

There was a pause.

“Duane seems to be back,” Henderson said. “Will he have fixed my car or is that too much to hope for?”

“See you later, Mr Dores.”

♦

That afternoon Henderson took polaroid snapshots of all the paintings. Going round clockwise from the door, he measured each painting, took it off the wall to check the back, made a brief description and noted the title, if it was signed — recorded the position — and dated. Back in New York he would consult the catalogue raisonee of each artist but he felt instinctively that all the paintings were ‘right’.

He broke off for dinner. His saliva glands squirted into action when Alma-May entered with a large steaming casserole dish containing what she described as ‘spaghetti bongaleeze’. It turned out to be a vegetarian version, however, with various types of nut substituted for the meat. It was reasonably tasty, though, and Henderson ate his modest portion with some enthusiasm — mixed with vague qualms about whether one could actually overdose on vegetable fibre. His bowels seemed to have shut down entirely: the drains were well and truly blocked.

Pudding turned out to be apple pie, cooked in a roasting tin with inch-thick wholemeal pastry. Alma-May had halved the apples but this was the only concession she had made to fruit preparation. In his portion Henderson found a twig with a few leaves on it. Perhaps Alma-May simply lined her roasting tin with pastry, set it on the ground in the orchard and shook the trees till the fruit fell in…

Bryant seemed quite content and after dinner went back upstairs to rejoin Duane and his music. Henderson caught her alone for a moment and asked her if she were enjoying herself.

“Sure. It’s OK.”

“You’re absolutely positive you don’t want to go home?”

“Yes. I’ll stay.”

“Did you have a good day in Atlanta?”

“It was all right.”

“Tell me, what’s Duane like?”

“He’s OK.”

♦

He sat and watched television with Gage and Beckman until about eleven o’clock and then went to bed. He undressed and looked at his naked body in the mirror. His belly was as hard and distended as a gourd. He looked at his hairless shanks and collapsing buttocks and was not well pleased with what he saw. He made a half-hearted resolve to exercise. Perhaps he should take up jogging? But then he remembered he did exercise: he fenced. He did a few zencing drills, up on his toes and lunging until his calves ached. Then he climbed into bed.

He thought for a while about his coming reunion with Irene. It was, he thought, a little uncharacteristic of her to relent so quickly. Perhaps she had missed him? Perhaps, he speculated, she had fallen in love with him? This, however, proved beyond the powers of his imagination.

He settled down on his back waiting for the night to pass. From time to time there were ominous rumblings and pingings from his hard bloated stomach. What he needed was some stodge: some cholesterol, carcinogens and red meat. Alma-May’s regime was too harsh: more suited to an animal, some robust herbivore, a camel or a giraffe; some beast with a mouth full of flat grinding molars, and whose idea of a delicacy was to strip the bark from a sapling. His model of late twentieth-century man just wasn’t designed for such rigours. If he didn’t have some monosodium glutamate within the next twenty-four hours he’d start getting the shakes.

He heard Duane’s music stop and the night noises were left to themselves. He worried vaguely for a while about the population explosion, the disappearing rain forests and the destruction of the ionosphere by aerosol sprays and at some point in the small hours consciousness left him.

Chapter Eight

The next morning Henderson completed his rough catalogue and showed it to Gage.

“All that remains to be settled now, Mr Gage, are the prices and the date of the auction.” He handed over his estimate of the paintings’ value.

Reserve

Estimate

Sisley

Le Verger a Voisins

$500,000;

550,000–650,000

Sisley

Les Toits de Marly

$500,000

600,000–700,000

Derain

La Belandre Verte

$300,000

400,000–500,000

Van Dongen

Still Life

$100,000

100,000–150,000

Van Dongen

Still Life

$100,000

125,000–200,000

Braque

A l’Atelier

$280,000

350,000–500,000

Utrillo

Montmagny en hiver

$200,000

250,000–300,000

Vuillard

Petit Dejeuner

$200,000

225,000–300,000

Vuillard

$150,000

Interieur Bleu

200,000–250,000

§

“You’ll see that the reserve column totals $2,330,000,” he said. “That’s the minimum for which we will allow them to be sold. Needless to say that price is kept strictly confidential. I’ve based it on current sale-room performance, but, for example, I think Vuillard is grossly undervalued at the moment, but there you are. Anyway, absolutely no problem about meeting the reserve, I’m sure. Lots of them will go much higher as well. The Braque, the Sisleys…”

“Two million three,” Gage pondered. “Where do you guys make your money?”

“We charge the buyers a ten per cent commission on top of the sale price. We normally charge the seller a rate too, but in this case we are happy to waive it.”

“Nice business. What about the landscapes?”

“I don’t think we’re likely to clear more than another, oh, $100,000 if we’re lucky.”

“I see.”

“Well, it’s been a pleasure—”

“You mean you’re finished?”

“Well, me personally. There’s the insurance, packing, transportation, catalogues, exhibition and advertising to be taken care of, but that will be in the hands of our very capable staff. If you’re happy with these reserve figures, then there’s nothing more for you to worry about.”

“Oh.” Gage seemed disgruntled.

“Is there anything wrong?”

“I guess I didn’t figure you’d be through so fast.”

“I am just the valuer and assessor,” Henderson explained. “My job is really quite straightforward. And I have,” he added gently, “been here since Sunday — five days. I’m usually no longer than an afternoon.”

Gage appeared to be deep in perplexed thought. “I see. I suppose you’ll be going soon.”

“I thought tomorrow.”

“Mmm.”

Henderson left him and went to check on his car. He wondered what was bothering the old man. He had put up with the bizarre household purely because of the importance and magnitude of the sale. Us valuers, he told himself a little smugly, don’t like to linger. Pruitt Halfacre rarely took more than an hour.

He walked down the front steps. It was another clear hot day. His car had already acquired its coating of dust and its metal sides were hot to the touch. He walked round it and saw with irritation that the wheel still had not been replaced. Bloody Duane, he thought. There was nothing for it. He took off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He had last changed the wheel on a car some time in the 1960^s on a motoring tour of the Loire valley, but all he could remember of the exercise was some hideous complication with the jack and subsequent acrimonious row with his then girlfriend.

He walked round to the back to open the boot and noted that the small flap over the petrol cap was ajar. He looked closer. The cap was loose. He strongly doubted whether any petrol remained in the tank. He opened the boot. The spare tyre had gone.

He made a couple of circuits of the car muttering and nodding to himself with an expression of sardonic wisdom on his face, like a man whose worst suspicions about human kind have just been unequivocally confirmed.

“Everything OK?” It was Shanda standing at the doorway of her mobile home fanning herself with a magazine. She came carefully down the steps and teetered over in her high heels, like a soft-soled bather on a cruel shingle beach. Henderson pointed to the petrol tank.

“No pet…No gas,” he said.

“I know. Duane syphoned it out this morning. He said to tell you.”

“Why? Good God. What’s he playing at?”

“He din’t have no gas in his car.”

Henderson put his hands on his hips and looked round at the scenery.

“He took your spare, too. He said you’d got all different types of French tyres on your car. He’s trying to get them matched.”

Henderson rubbed his eyes. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said.

“Look, your jacket’s fallen on the ground.” Shanda bent down to pick it up, but, for some reason — her high heels and the disequilibrium of Freeborn Gage jnr — she fell over, giving a little squeal of alarm. Henderson helped her up. Shanda was giggling, and he wondered suddenly if she were a little drunk. Her pregnant belly bulged against his hip bone. It was soft and springy, in strong contrast to his own cast-iron gut. She put an arm on one of his shoulders while, wobbling on one leg, she attempted to adjust the strap of a high heel. Henderson stood there patiently, a reliable leaning post. He heard a car and looked round. Duane, he earnestly hoped, with two wheels and some fuel. But no: it was Freeborn.

The car thumped to a halt and Freeborn bounded out, not bothering to shut the door behind him. Shanda gave a low groan — she was still struggling with her shoe.

“Hi, darlin’,” she called. “Get your friends?”

Henderson saw two suited, smart-looking men get out of the car behind her advancing husband. Shanda became bipedal. Freeborn’s ten spread fingers pronged fiercely into Henderson’s soft chest, bruising, and propelling him with disturbing ease back against his car.

“Ouch! Steady on!”

Freeborn now had a forefinger practically up Henderson’s left nostril. His large face loomed three inches away. Henderson had a close-up view of the fjord-like contours of his carved and clipped facial hair. What painstaking efforts it must require, the thought entered his mind, unbidden, to shave around those gulfs and promontories, those peninsulae and bays each morning-surely defeating the ostensible purpose of growing a beard in the first place, namely to rid one of the necessity of that tedious chore.

“I fuckin’ warned you, scumbag!” Freeborn’s breath had a curious antiseptic tang. Perhaps the result of a judicious swilling of the mouthwash he peddled along with his medical wadding.

“Come on,” Henderson said, hurt. “She fell over. I helped her up.”

“You don’t touch her, heah?”

“What was I meant to do? She couldn’t get up, she was like a turtle on its back or something. Helpless.”

“You calling Shanda a turtle? Bastard!”

Freeborn hit him in the stomach, and something terrible happened to his jammed intestines. He fell to his knees. Everything went red and fizzing for an instant. He heard Shanda scream. His vision cleared and he blinked away his tears. It hadn’t really hurt. How remarkable! He stood up unsteadily. He backed off. Pingings and rumblings were coming from his gut, like a dam about to break. He farted uncontrollably. Freeborn advanced on him rubbing his sore fist. There was only one thing for it now, Henderson calculated. Total panic. He turned and ran.

Too late he realized he should have run down the road to Luxora Beach. He sprinted up to the trees at the park’s edge and looked back. Ungainly Freeborn lumbered after him yelling imprecations. More gainly Henderson dodged his swinging punches easily and ran back towards the house.

“Stop him, stop him!” Shanda beseeched. Freeborn’s two guests looked on in open-mouthed astonishment.

“Who?” Henderson shouted.

“You, you!”

Did she want him to stop, or stop Freeborn?

Freeborn pounded up, his face florid, his breath coming in hoarse, phlegm-rattling gasps. Henderson looked quickly about him, then snatched a bamboo cane prop from a flower bed. The large sunflower it supported keeled gently over as if in slow motion.

Henderson held the cane in front of him. Left elbow on hip. Controlled relaxation: fleche attack, cuts to the head. Freeborn stopped abruptly, a look of puzzlement on his face. Shanda’s whimpering died away as they all contemplated Henderson on guard.

Henderson flourished his cane, wiggling the tip at Freeborn’s face. Nobody moved. Then Henderson suddenly felt tired and foolish. He sensed the beginnings of a blush through his sweat.

Freeborn turned away.

“Get me a beer, honey,” he said and spat two or three times on the ground. He turned to his guests. “Gentlemen, let’s go inside.” With uneasy smiles the two men skirted Henderson and went into the trailer. Freeborn followed, and Henderson was left alone.

He stuck the cane back in the border and attempted to right the fallen sunflower. As he picked it up, the great nodding head, the size of his own face, came away in his hand.

♦

That afternoon, after a lunch of pan-fried nut rissoles and turnip slaw, Henderson went in search of Duane. Mobility was his chief concern now: he had to be in Atlanta in twenty-four hours for Irene.

“He ain’t here,” said Alma-May. She didn’t know nothing about ‘no tize’.

On the way back into the hall from the kitchen he met Freeborn and his two guests. There were no introductions. Freeborn ignored him as he ushered the two men up the stairs. Henderson assumed they were going to see Gage. He wondered what for.

He went outside and made his way to a ramshackle collection of old sheds some distance away from the main house. Here he found the old black gardener who kept the grounds in order. Henderson asked him if he knew where he might lay his hands on a spare tyre and a gallon of petrol.

“Luxora.” The old man said. “Dr Tire. They’s a gas station there too. You can get gas there.”

“Thank you,” Henderson said, smiling politely.

Returning to the house, he quickened his pace when he heard the dull throb of music emanating from Duane’s bedroom.

He knocked on the door, failed to make out any reply and pushed the door open. The walls were covered with shiny posters of rock stars and sportsmen. There was a lingering foetid smell of unwashed, overused sheets garnished with a hint of ashtrays long unemptied. The noise of the music was immense and palpable. It seemed to stir strands of his hair. Four speakers the size of travelling trunks stood in each corner of the room. Bryant sat alone on the bed, crosslegged, smoking, bobbing her head to the rhythms of the drums.

“Bryant!” he shouted.

She looked round, got up and turned the music down.

“What do you want?” she said.

“I’m looking for Duane.”

“He’s not here.”

“I can see that. What are you doing here?”

“He said I could listen to his records any time I want.”

“Well, he’s got two of my tyres and a tankful of petrol and I’d like them back.”

“I know. God, he’s only trying to help,” she said disgustedly.

“It’s a funny way to render assistance. Why did he have to syphon my petrol?”

“He’d run out of gas. He had to have gas to take your tyres to try and match them. I said he could.”

“Very decent of you…Tell him to get it all back together by tomorrow morning. We’re leaving.”

“What?”

“Well, you’re leaving. I’ve got a business appointment in Atlanta. Make up your mind whether you’re going back to New York or Richmond.”

Bryant said nothing. She took a trembling drag on her cigarette. Henderson noticed it was hand-rolled.

“I say, that’s not dope, is it?”

To his utter consternation Bryant started to cry. She began to sob and sniffle. She sat down on the bed. After some thought, Henderson sat down beside her. He felt a disquieting dampness beneath his thighs; it was rather like sitting on a river bank. He stood up.

“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to accuse you of smoking grass, or whatever.” Now she was pushing all her fingers repeatedly through her hair.

“Ah just go away and leave me alone, you…” She leant over the amplifier and turned the music up again.

With a sigh, and overlooking the implicit oath, he left the room. On the landing at the head of the stairs he encountered the sauntering figure of Cora.

“Hi,” she said. “I hear that you and Freeborn nearly came to blows over Shanda. Very chivalric.”

“We did come to blows. Or rather blow. There was only one actually delivered — American, too.”

“But then you were going to play swordfighting, I hear.”

“Self-defence,” he said, a little frostily. “Anyway I’m off tomorrow. All done. All ‘through’, as you say.”

“That was quick.”

Henderson explained that in fact it was slow. He then told her of the mysterious offence he had caused Bryant.

Cora shrugged. “What do you expect? She’s probably finding it hard to come to terms with you as a father.”

Henderson considered there was some rightness in that observation. He realized he treated Bryant as if she were a slovenly waitress in a restaurant, with hectoring aggression, rather than in any spirit of paternalistic good will. He had never felt at ease with her and after that night in Skaggsville their relationship had acquired even less welcome contours…

He felt suddenly depressed at the thought of his impending marriage to Melissa. It wasn’t so much Melissa that he was reluctant to take on; it was the prospect of a lifetime’s tense and problematic contact with Bryant and metal-mouthed Irv that got him down. He pursed his lips. Then he realized that by some association of ideas — prompted no doubt by recollections of the view down Bryant’s pyjama top — he was staring vacantly at Cora’s chest. She crossed her arms.

“How old is Duane?” he asked. “As a matter of interest.”

“Oh. I don’t know, really. Thirty-three, thirty-four, I guess.”

“Thirty-three? Thirty-four?”

“Didn’t you know?”

“Good God.” He felt an obscure but powerful sense of worry. “I’d somehow got the notion he was seventeen or eighteen. Thirty-three…”

Cora laughed unrestrainedly. It was the first time he’d heard her laugh, he reflected.

“Are you going straight back?” she asked.

“Not directly. I’ve got this business meeting in Atlanta first.” He wasn’t really concentrating; he was busy reconstructing his identikit of Duane.

“With Miss Dubrovnik?”

“Who? Oh yes. Yes.” He thought wildly. “I told you about it. It’s a problem of dating one of the paintings. I’ve taken polaroids, close-ups…technical matter I’m not really equipped to deal with.”

“So she’s some sort of genuine expert. Unlike you.”

“Mmm.”

“Is she Yugoslavian? That name—”

“Yes. Yes, I think so. Originally, you know.” They stood and looked at each other for a beat or two. She doesn’t believe me, he thought. I wouldn’t believe me either.

“You don’t happen to know,” he said, “who those two men were with Freeborn, do you?”

“Don’t you know them? They come from your home town.”

“What? Hove? Surely not.”

“No, stupid. Roach City. They own a gallery in New York.”

Chapter Nine

Henderson clattered down the front steps and set off at a brisk walk for Luxora Beach. Although riven with worries at this new problem, he could still muster an intense frustration at having to walk miles to get to a telephone. It was like living in the Wild West, some frontier town in the 1890^s. The next thing they’d be telling him that the Indians had cut down the wires to make ornaments…

He glowered at Freeborn’s trailer and paused. Was it worth risking it? Would Shanda let him in if he wasn’t there? But what if he was? He kept on walking.

He was drawn up again by faint cries behind him. He looked back, saw it was Alma-May and retraced his steps.

“Mr Dose! Mr Dose!”

“Yes, yes. Here I am.”

“Got a message from Duane. He called Shanda ‘bout ten minutes ago. He says he can get the tyres for your car.”

“Excellent. When?”

“Saturday.”

“But that’s useless.” He actually stamped his foot in the dirt of the drive. “I’m going away tomorrow.”

“It’s them French tyres, he says.”

Henderson stroked his forehead with the fingers of both hands. He had strong doubts about this ‘French tyres’ excuse. Duane had probably pawned them to buy records. “This is madness,” he said rhetorically. “I arrived here on Monday. My car has a puncture. Some ghostly figure volunteers to fix it. A week later it’s still out of action. Madness.”

“What’s a ‘puncture’?”

♦

The walk into Luxora Beach took place beneath the full glare of the late-afternoon sun. Henderson arrived at main street in his now familiar state of perspiration and irritation. In a petulant assertion of his own rights as an individual he decided to visit a gas station at one end of the street that — he had noticed previously — bore the sign ‘drive-thru burgers’. He crossed the railway tracks and the main road and made his way down the raised sidewalk to the gas station. A pickup and a car were parked outside the flimsy shack. A girl — blonde like Shanda, bold make-up, gleaming earrings — leant out of the window talking to two other girls in a maroon car. They looked vaguely familiar: he had seen them — laughing — on his last visit to town. They all stopped talking as he approached. A straining extractor fan hauled thick air from the kitchen. There was a powerful smell of fried onions and cooking oil.

He examined the menu.

“A quarter-pounder please.”

“Onions? Mustard? Pickle? Ketchup?”

Affirmative on all four counts. He paid and the burger duly arrived: a grey ice-hockey puck in a mean bun, a brown ruff of onions and the sectioned knob of a gherkin poking out beneath it. He took a huge jaw-cracking bite. Oil dripped down his chin onto his tie. He snorted astringency from his nostrils. His eyes watered. Mustard and ketchup squelched between his teeth. Still chewing, he took a long draught of Coke. The girls in the car watched him in horror-struck curiosity. He might have been Neanderthal man wolfing the steaming flesh of a mammoth. Bliss.

He heard the rap of knuckles on glass and looked up. Beckman sat behind the wheel of the pickup beaming hugely. I can’t escape this bloody family, Henderson thought, and wandered over.

“Hi there, Henderson. Like our squirrelburgers?”

Henderson managed a smile. “Just felt like some meat. I’m not really used to a vegetarian diet, you see.”

“That ain’t meat, man.” Beckman gave a high, delighted laugh. “Or, anyways, surer ‘n’ shit it don’t come from no steer.”

There was, Henderson had to confess, a faint aftertaste now, the like of which he’d never previously encountered. A sort of renal gaminess, but somehow artificial tasting — as saccharin is to sugar — chemically engendered. He sent his tongue into the crevices and corners of his mouth. He pumped his saliva glands. He could not only taste it, it also filled his nasal passages, seeped along his sinus, like gas in a mineshaft.

“It’s not squirrel, really, is it?” he said, in the sort of weak voice that pleads to have confirmed that a leg is being pulled.

“Minkburgers,” Beckman grinned. “Weaselburgers.” He gave a hoot of laughter. “Stoatburgers.”

Henderson dropped his cooling rodentburger in a trash can and gulped down his Coke.

“Come and have a beer,” Beckman invited.

Henderson said he had to make a phone call first but would see him in the bar in a minute or two. Slowly he made his way towards the post office. He now felt distinctly queasy. What with the current marmoreal state of his bowels it would probably be with him for weeks.

He slumped into the phone booth, and requested information to provide him with the number of Mono-park 5000. Then he dialled the hotel. A series of cheerful girl-voices booked him a suite for the following night. Would he like a suite with a whirlpool bath? Why not. This brought to mind images of mixed bathing with Irene and he began to feel slightly better.

He gulped air. The prism wedged between spine and sternum had had its corners worn down like a pebble on a beach, and had shrunk to the size of a large cooking apple. He badly needed a drink to wash away, or at least mask, the taste of the burger which seemed, if anything, to be getting stronger. He headed for the bar.

There were about ten pickups and cars parked outside the bar. Inside there was a lot of raucous laughter of Cardew’s ‘heh-heh-heh’ variety and much upending of beer bottles. He saw Beckman at the skittle machine and nervously made his way through the denimmed throng muttering apologies and bestowing edgy smiles. The machine was simplicity itself. A wooden ball was rolled down a chute — the direction and gradient of which one could alter — in an attempt to knock down the skittles. Those bowled over were re-righted by means of string attached to their crowns. The only mechanical device in the game twitched this taut whenever a skittle was floored.

Beckman crouched intensely over the chute, emitting a holler of glee every time he knocked any skittles over. It seemed a strangely banal pastime for an elementary particle physicist, Henderson thought, but maybe this was simply his way of unwinding after a trying session with the quarks and neutrinos darting quantumly around his lab.

“Let me buy you a drink,” Beckman offered, after a few more games.

They approached the bar. Two beers were produced, plus a glass (unrequested) for Henderson, accompanied by a look of condescending pity from the etiolated bar-keep and curious glances from the relentlessly joshing good ole boys.

“Don’t worry about it,” Beckman said comfortingly. “They think all you English are fags anyway.” He pulled at his own bottle. “So, how’s it going anyway?”

“Just about finished,” Henderson said. “We’ll be off tomorrow.”

“Hell, I thought you were going to be here for weeks.”

Henderson explained in broad outline what his job entailed. He also mentioned his immobile car and Duane’s worthless promises. He wondered if there was anything Beckman could do to speed up Duane’s repair work.

“Look, no problem, I’ll drive you to Atlanta,” Beckman volunteered. Henderson told him of his business meeting at Monopark 5000 (greeted by a whistle of admiration from Beckman’s lips) and his wish to spend a few days touring the more scenic regions of the South.

“No sweat,” Beckman continued. “You take my pickup. Come Saturday, when Duane’s fixed your car I’ll drive it into Atlanta and we can trade. I’ll meet you Saturday, say, four, corner of Peachtree and Edgewood, same as before.”

“Great,” Henderson said. “Saturday at four, then. Turned out to be a lucky day after all. It started badly,” he explained.

“Hell, I knew it would be a good day for me. Been feelin’ good since this morning.”

“Oh, yes? Why’s that?”

“Simple. Had me a five turd crap before breakfast. Can’t beat it for settin’ you up.”

“Really?” He paused, there really was nothing one could say in response. He tried not to imagine this source of contentment. “I’m very grateful, Beckman. This meeting, it’s very important.”

“No problem. What are friends for?” His fluttering lids made the remark seem incongruously coy. Henderson felt another twinge of alarm at this announcement of his new status, but he decided not to challenge it. Instead he asked another question.

“Do you happen to know who those two men are who arrived today with Freeborn?”

“You mean Ben and Peter? Nice guys.”

“Who are they? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“They’re friends of Freeborn. Some kind of business partners? They had a big deal going or something. They were down here about a year ago. They’re the guys he sold the paintings to.”

Henderson screwed up his face. “Are you sure?”

“Well, something like that.” He looked at his watch. “Shit. I gotta get back.”

Henderson sat silently on the drive back to the house pondering the news. What had Freeborn done? Sold the paintings — his legacy, no doubt — to finance some nefarious deal? Mortgaged them in some sort of way? Then his father goes and ruins everything by deciding to sell them himself. H. Dores, Esq. turns up, and sets off a panic. It certainly explained Freeborn’s hostility.

He was still pondering the ramifications of this plot when he stepped into the-hall. Gage, Freeborn and the two men were standing at the foot of the stairs chatting amicably.

“Henderson,” Gage called. “Come and meet our two friends.” Gage seemed almost unnaturally cheerful, Henderson thought. He was introduced to the two men; one, Benjamin Sereno; the other, Peter D. Gint. Sereno was small and dark. He had an enormous moustache that seemed constructed on a different scale from his body, but which, Henderson swiftly realized, was deliberately intended to obscure or draw attention from his lips. He had lips like Toulouse-Lautrec: thick, claret-coloured and wet. They made Henderson (still queasy from his rodentburger) even more nauseous: they reminded him of thin fillets of liver, or, due to the hirsute proximity of the moustache, a wound in the flank of an animal. He swallowed a mouthful of saliva. They shook hands. He noticed an ostentatious carbuncled ring set with a red stone. A lot of American males sported these, Henderson had observed, only Serene’s stone was held in an inch-high plinth and must have weighed a pound.

Gint was burly with receding blond hair. His short collar was prominently monogrammed P.D.G. At some point in his youth his entire face had been ravaged with acne, leaving him with skin pitted like a peach stone. The scourge was still not past: an angry wen pushed his collar askew, a mini-Krakatoa about to blow. Whatever they looked like, Henderson thought with mingled worry and relief, it certainly wasn’t New York gallery owners.

“You’re with Mulholland, Melhuish, right?” Sereno said amicably.

“Yes. Yes I am.”

“Fine firm.” He nodded. “Congratulations.”

“Good firm,” Gint agreed. He had a soft voice that didn’t match his face.

“What’s the name of your gallery?” Henderson asked, disingenuously.

They looked at each other. “Well, Sereno and Gint,” Sereno said. “You mean you haven’t heard of us?”

“I’m afraid not. I’ve only been in New York a couple of months. Whereabouts is it?”

“It’s in back of Canal,” Gint said. “Between Eldridge Street and Alien Street.”

“Is that the lower east side?”

“You got it.”

“Ah.” Henderson suppressed his shout of laughter. He looked at Gage. The man seemed unperturbed by this information. They might as well have said their ‘gallery’ was in Harlem or the East Bronx. But the smiles were all polite, waiting for the conversation to continue.

Cora came down the stairs. To Henderson’s surprise Sereno went to meet her.

“Cora,” he said. “Good to see you again.” He kissed her on the cheek. To Henderson this came as a shock, almost an affront. Those fat wet lips on Cora’s small face.

“You remember Peter?” Sereno said.

Gint raised a hand. “Hi. We met last time.”

“Are you guys staying with us?” Cora asked, in familiar tones.

“No. In Atlanta.” Sereno offered Cora a cigarette and lit it for her. “Monopark 5000. Quite a place.”

Henderson tasted voleburger in his mouth.

“Isn’t that where you and your colleague are staying tomorrow?” Cora said. How did she know? Shanda.

“Hey, that’s wonderful,” Sereno observed. “Let’s all have dinner. Freeborn, Cora, Shanda, you and your colleague.”

“Alas, I’m fully occupied that night. Very sorry.”

“Carbon dating,” Cora said.

“Dating who?” Gint said, then laughed. Sereno joined in with enthusiasm.

“That wit,” Sereno said. “I love his wit.”

“Could I have a word?” Gage said softly, touching Henderson’s arm. “In my room.” He trotted off up the stairs. Henderson made his goodbyes to the gallery owners and followed obediently.

Gage stood in his room at the escritoire studying some documents. He waved Henderson to a chair and handed him a piece of paper. It was a list of his paintings with prices beside them.

“I’ll come right out, Henderson. Sereno and Gint have made me an offer for the paintings.”

Henderson saw that the figures approximated closely to his own, except in one crucial degree: Sereno and Gint were offering $100,000 each for the four Dutch landscapes, the portrait and the allegory.

“But this is absurd,” Henderson said in desperation.

“Have you seen what they’re offering for the landscapes? They must be mad.”

“It’s up to them. Their estimation of the value.”

“But nobody would ever pay this amount. It’s preposterous.”

“One man’s opinion, Henderson.” He moved away to look at the Dutch paintings. “I must confess,” he kept his back to him, “that I feel you have been a little — what shall we say? — hasty in pricing the landscapes. I ask myself…I wonder if your urge to leave us has influenced your evaluation.”

Henderson protested loudly. Gage turned.

“Look, I want to sell through Mulholland, Melhuish,” he said benignly. “For the sake of my friendship with Eddie Mulholland and, if I may say so, with you. But I can’t afford to make a half-million deficit.” He came over and patted Henderson’s shoulder. “I’d like for you to stay on a few more days. Consider the Dutch paintings some more.”

“But I’m going to Atlanta tomorrow. Then, um, other business demands—”

“I’m really sorry to hear that. But I appreciate your time. Thanks for coming down.”

Henderson felt faint. He improvised. “Actually, this meeting in Atlanta is with a…an art historian and expert, precisely to do with, ah, some ambiguities in my dating of the Dutch paintings. It may, in fact I’m sure, it’ll cause me to reconsider.”

“Great. So, have your meeting and return here. Let me know the result.”

“Yes.” Henderson shut his eyes.

“I’m in no hurry. My decision can wait a few days.”

Henderson stood up. “May I ask how you got to Sereno and Gint.”

“They’re business associates of Freeborn. Freeborn suggested I get a second bid on the paintings. It makes sense. He called them up and they came on down.”

“I think I should tell you that I think they know as much about art as I do about medical wadding.”

“Can I be honest? I don’t really care, Henderson. I’m not giving the paintings to a museum. They are offering me cash now. I don’t have to wait for an auction.”

“I’d be very suspicious—”

“I think that’s my business, Henderson. Freeborn has told me that they are new to the art world. They’re starting out. But so what? They’ve got money.” He punched Henderson lightly on the shoulder. “Healthy competition, Henderson. A fair fight. Stay on a few days. Think, relax, enjoy yourself. I’m sure we’ll work everything out.”

♦

Henderson walked slowly down the stairs. This was disaster from a quarter he’d never anticipated. Nightmarish possibilities and problems presented themselves to him. What would Beeby do if they lost the sale? What would Irene say about another cancellation? That was the first priority: he had to phone Irene, put her off for a few days. Then warn Beeby of the new developments.

He walked outside and listened for noises from Freeborn’s trailer. It seemed quiet. Perhaps he had gone off somewhere with Sereno and Gint. He could hear the faint sound of a television. Shanda watching a soap. He knocked. Let it be Shanda, let it be Shanda, he prayed.

Freeborn opened the door. Behind him Henderson saw Sereno, Gint and Shanda watching TV.

“What the fuck do you want?”

“Is there any chance…? I’d be most grateful if I could…could I make a phone call?”

“No.”

The door was slammed shut. Henderson thought he heard him say “It was that English asshole,” followed by loud laughter, but perhaps it was just the television. He suddenly didn’t feel like telephoning anybody. He would just have to take his chances and endeavour to make the best of it.

Chapter Ten

Henderson packed glumly the next morning. His fear and concern over the arrival of Sereno and Gint had grown. What was going on? Could they really buy the Gage collection for three million? Or was it all part of some monumental bluff?…

Another portion of his brain writhed with apprehension at having to tell Irene of the radical truncation of their little holiday together. He was hoping now that his one night with her would be a sufficiently lyrical experience for her to forgive him. He would have to choose his moment with care…

Also, in Atlanta with its functioning telephones, he would call Beeby and tell him of this new development and work out some sort of a counter attack. Perhaps they could guarantee the reserve prices; work up the Dutch pictures’ value somewhat; suggest to Gage that — given enough publicity — the sale price might go even higher on the Sisleys or the Braque? That might work.

As he closed his case he felt thankful that in one area at least — his nether regions — everything was functioning normally at last. The squirrelburger, like some potent catalyst, had shifted the blockage in the small hours of the morning. It had proved to be the most efficient laxative he had ever encountered. He felt altogether fitter, younger—lighter — than he had done since arriving in Luxora Beach. And despite his looming crises he experienced too a repeating tremor of excitement at the prospect of seeing Irene. It seemed like years since he had spent some time in the company of a human being with whom there were reciprocal feelings of affection. Here there was only strangeness, cynicism and malevolent dislike.

He walked down the passage to Bryant’s room. He had told her last night that she too was leaving and had given her a choice of destination. She had opted sullenly for New York with no trace of her earlier protests. Perhaps she was, after all, keen to get away as well.

He knocked on her door. No answer. Duane’s room was quiet. Henderson knocked again and pushed the door open. The room was empty. Propped on the pillow was an envelope addressed to him. He tore it open.

Dear Henderson,

I have decided not to go back home. Duane and I are going to be married. Don’t worry. We love each other. I will tell Mom.

I thought it would be best if I wasn’t here when you left. See you tomorrow. Have a nice time in Atlanta.

Bryant

P.S. Duane says he is going to get you a complete new set of tyres.

Henderson watched his hand shake, the paper crackling in his fingers. He felt a sudden terrible fear at the wrath of Melissa, like some wretched vassal’s of a warlord. He tugged at his lower lip, tested some teeth for looseness. He swallowed. Calm down, he told himself, this is a fantasy, pure fantasy, it can’t happen. She’s a minor; she’s only fourteen. She can’t marry a man old enough to be her father. Who was this invisible Duane? What sort of evil perverted slob was he? And what a fool he had been to allow them so much time in each other’s company. Two teenagers listening to records…He put his hand on his heart. It was beating ferociously. He turned the letter over and wrote: “I will talk to you when I get back. On no account tell your mother anything. H.”

This new problem added itself to the others jostling for prominence in his brain, loud hooligans looking for trouble, trying to make life hell. They were penned up at the moment — just — but they could break out at any time, storm the streets.

In a perplexed trance, with a dumb, cretinous look on his face he walked down the stairs and outside. His car stood on four piles of bricks, tyreless. The bonnet was open. He looked in. Nothing obvious seemed to be missing, but his ignorance of the internal combustion engine was total. Solenoids, carburettors, magnetos could have been sequestered for all he knew.

He felt an immense futility descend upon him and he bowed his head impotently under the strain.

“Hi, there.” He looked up. It was Shanda. Did she keep watch on him, he wondered, irritated. She was like some omnipresent guardian of the front steps.

“Hello.”

“What happened to your car?”

“Duane.”

“That boy. I guess he means well, but…” She left her reservations unspoken. “Boy?” Henderson thought. Why do they refer to a thirty-four year old man as a boy? There was the source of his misconceptions.

“You wanna use the phone? Freeborn’s away.”

“No thanks.” He paused. “What’s Duane like?” he said slowly.

“Duane? Well…” Shanda came closer. Henderson thought he smelt alcohol on her breath. “Myself, I think he’s a little bit, you know, weird.”

“Oh God.” Henderson felt his weakness return, a sort of mild ache in his spine and knees. If a member of the Gage family pronounced someone ‘weird’ then the reality must be truly alarming. But no, he told himself firmly, that problem was shelved until tomorrow; more pressing disasters awaited his attention. He climbed into Beck-man’s pickup.

“You are coming back, aren’t you?” Shanda said with a note of alarm.

“Yes,” he said. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

“Oh good. Y’all have a good time now, hear?”

♦

From this side of the country, too, Atlanta was visible from many miles off. Like gothic cathedrals in medieval times, a reassuring prominence always on the horizon. The skyscrapers of the downtown district were hazy and indistinct against the soft lucency of the mid-afternoon sky. The more miles he put between himself and Luxora Beach the better he felt. He had even quite enjoyed roaring along the highway in Beckman’s pickup.

When he reached Atlanta he had some problems locating the hotel in the city’s daunting system of one-way streets. He could see it, three or four blocks away, an impressive slab of steel and reflecting glass, but he seemed able only to circle it: no street led directly there — it hovered out of reach, a massive illusion. Eventually he parked the pickup and attempted to make his way there on foot. He saw signs for the ‘Monopark complex’, then ‘Monopark 5000 hotel’. He went through an arch beneath a shopping mall, up a dark ramp of a corridor and pushed through swing doors at the far end.

He found himself in a tall brilliant lobby. Thick wands of sunlight shone through vast overhead windows onto a marble floor. There appeared to be numerous entrances. The one through which he had emerged was clearly not the most significant. Various doormen and bellhops stood around in stylized cavalry uniforms: boots, hats, gold epaulettes, even dinky sabres at their belts. At the rear of the lobby was what appeared to be a dense wood of twenty-foot high trees. In front of this forest was a long reception desk. This Henderson approached with due reverence and awe. The experience was, he thought, akin to appearing at Heaven’s gate with the sin — virtue equation still in balance.

“Dores,” he said to the tanned cavalryman. “D, O, R, E, S. I have a reservation.”

“Good afternoon, sir,” he said. “Welcome to Monopark 5000.” He tapped out the name on a computer keyboard. There was a whirring and clicking and the machine fed out a piece of plastic with holes punched in it.

“What’s this?” Henderson asked. “A credit card?”

“Your key, sir. Need some help with your case?” The smile never budged.

“No thanks. I can manage.”

“You are in suite 35 J. Follow this path,” he gestured at an opening in the forest wall, “go through the atrium and take the scenic elevator to the thirty-fifth floor. Enjoy your stay at Monopark 5000.”

“Right.” Henderson picked up his bag and looked dubiously at the path, which was signposted ‘To the atrium’. He felt like an explorer leaving base camp. “Goodbye,” he said to the man and set off.

He had imagined that the trees were merely a decorative screen but he was wrong. He found himself in a copse, a grove, a veritable spinney of weeping figs, silver birches and stands of bamboo. A soft greenish light filtered down from above, xylophonic music burbled from hidden speakers. Other paths bifurcated from his. ‘Convention reservation’, he saw, ‘To the Indian village’ and ‘Swimming Creek’. These signs were deliberately ‘olde west’: chunks of varnished wood with the message burnt on with a branding iron. The frontier theme was enhanced by the sudden appearance from behind a tree of a waitress in fringed buckskin waistcoat and miniskirt. Henderson gave a shrug of alarm. There were stripes of warpaint on her cheeks and forehead.

“Cocktails, sir?” she asked. “At the Indian village.”

“What? Oh, no. I’m looking for the atrium.”

“Keep right on to the end of this path.” She slipped away into the trees.

He followed her instructions and broke out into a towering atrium some twelve or fourteen stories high. Before him stretched a lake, blocking his way, some thirty yards across, dotted with islands furnished with seats and sprouting plants. Over on the left of the far bank was a cluster of wigwams which on closer inspection turned out to be a large restaurant and bar area. On the balconied far wall, a dozen scenic elevators rose up and down, some of them disappearing into holes in the roof like silent glass scarabs.

Henderson let out a spontaneous gasp of surprise. He had heard of this new breed of American hotel: the hotel as wonderland, as secular cathedral, as theme park — but his imagination had been deficient. Plants grew everywhere, fountains splashed, the light was pale, neutral and shadow-free.

A cowboy wandered over and handed him a wooden paddle.

“Good God, what’s this for?”

“For the canoe, sir.”

Henderson looked to his right. Sure enough, a dozen canoes were tethered to the concrete bank.

“Do you mean I’ve got to paddle myself across to the elevators?”

“I can do it for you, sir, but a lot of our guests like to make their own way.”

He saw an intrepid couple set off, little shrieks of delight coming from the wife.

“Oh. Right.”

The cowboy let him down to a canoe, deposited his bag in the bow and helped him in. Henderson settled down.

“Listen, are you sure these things are stable? Perhaps you’d better—”

The cowboy pushed him off. “Enjoy your stay at Monopark 5000, sir.”

Henderson found himself drifting into the middle of the lake. He looked about him. The various islands were linked to the far bank by large round stepping stones. Indian maidens tripped across these carrying drinks from the huge gloomy bar area. Hesitantly, Henderson dipped his paddle in the water and performed a couple of gentle strokes. The canoe, thin aluminium painted to look like birch-bark, skidded easily across the surface and clanged into the side of another canoe traversing the water. This was occupied by a high-ranking military man — a general, judging from the stars that flashed on his shoulders — in a smoky green uniform.

“Sorry!” Henderson laughed. “Haven’t quite got the hang of this. Ha ha.”

“Remember to paddle on both sides,” said the general, with a false grin, and pushed him away — a little more forcibly than need be, Henderson thought, as his canoe turned through 180 degrees and he found himself facing the forest grove again.

He dug his paddle in and the canoe moved off in a smooth arc. He cut across the bows of some more competent guests.

“Hey, watch out for the rapids!” one of them called- or at least that’s what Henderson thought he said.

“What?” he shouted back over his shoulder, a little alarmed. It seemed to him not inconceivable that in Monopark 5000’s fanatical pursuit of verisimilitude they should have installed genuine wilderness hazards: rapids, submerged rocks, alligators…However, his call went unheeded and, his attention distracted from his course, he soon had another collision, this time with a cocktail island.

“Pow! Pow! Pow!”

Henderson looked up. A little boy shot at him with levelled fingers from behind the cover of the circular banquette seating.

“Waylon, stop that,” his father commanded. “Having trouble?” he called to Henderson. “Can I throw you a rope?” Other people on the island stood up, smiling at Henderson’s seaborne invasion of their territory.

“Hit the beach!” called one, to tumultuous laughter.

“Pow! Pow!”

“I’m fine,” good sport Henderson called out with artificial gaiety. “Lost my compass.” More laughs.

“Pow! I got him, Dad. Pow! I shot him, I shot him!”

“Waylon, stop it, I told you.”

Cursing under his breath, Henderson leant forward and pushed off. He would like to connect the flat of his paddle with the little brat’s head. The canoe shot backwards in a tight spiral.

“Watch out!” someone screamed from behind.

Panicked, Henderson thrust his paddle into the water too forcefully. His arm plunged under the surface up to the elbow. Furious, he threw his paddle down and tried to wring his sodden sleeve dry.

“Watch where you’re going!” shouted two angry guests avoiding his drifting canoe.

“Sorry!” Henderson called merrily, though his-throat was thick with anger and frustration. “Lost control.”

“You’re not supposed to fool around like this, you know,” a heavy-jowled, blue-rinsed matron admonished from the prow of a canoe being manoeuvred by a grinning cowboy.

“I know,” Henderson replied, then forced his ‘jolly’ voice out between gritted teeth. “Sorry!”

After a couple more minutes and half a dozen more cheery cries of “Sorry!” he finally gained the opposite bank. Utterly exhausted, he was helped ashore by two vastly amused cowboys who assured him they’d never seen anyone have such difficulty before. Henderson felt as if he’d just completed a two-week outward-bound course. His arm dripped water, the muscles in his neck were in spasm and his shirt was transparent with sweat. What sort of demented, perverse architect had designed this hotel, he wondered. He was going to write to the owner, insist that some sort of causeway or bridge be provided for those not aquatically inclined.

He held his damp sleeve away from his side as he ascended in the scenic elevator. The splendour of the panorama below — grove, lake, islands, scudding canoes — was entirely lost on him.

He walked down the corridor on the thirty-fifth floor, past suites G, H and I, towards suite J which lay at its end. As he fiddled with his piece of card, inserting it in a slot at the side of the door frame, the general with whom he’d collided on the lake stepped out of suite K opposite. The smile on his face dissolved.

“Oh,” he said, badly concealing his disappointment at the sight of Henderson. “Finally made it.”

“Yes,” Henderson said. “Great fun.”

The general looked up the corridor, grunted and disappeared back inside. He was obviously expecting someone, Henderson thought, as, with a buzz, his door swung open.

Suite J was plushly and lavishly appointed, right down to a scattering of little china ornaments on various surfaces. There was a small sitting room, and off this was a bedroom with a canary yellow, kingsize bed. In the bathroom the large triangular bath was canary yellow too. Moreover, it was oddly ribbed, and provided with several curious moveable chrome nozzles and hand grips. This was the whirlpool he’d so blithely requested, he realized. He looked at the luxury of the room and hoped the expense would be worth it. He thought Irene might be taken by the whirlpool bath.

He took off his wet jacket and pungent shirt and decided to try the bath out. A hot bubbling soak was just what he required. For ten minutes he studied the instruction manual on how to operate the whirlpool mechanism, then set various dials and switches on the wall and ran the water. When it was full he stripped off and climbed in. The hot water was ideally soothing. For a moment he wondered if he should even bother with the whirlpool option, but decided that he might as well get his money’s worth. He reached up and flipped the switch. At first nothing happened apart from a humming and grinding noise. Then suddenly the bath erupted in foam, as if he’d been attacked by a shoal of piranhas, and heavy fists thudded simultaneously into his body.

He screamed with shock and pain — one thundering misdirected jet had pulverized his groin — and leapt out of the bath. His body was red and throbbing. He felt like a huge bruise. The tub frothed and gurgled like an acid vat in a horror film. He switched it off and within seconds it became an ordinary hot bath again. He decided not to get back in: the pleasure had been spoiled, somehow.

Wearily he got dressed and checked the time: four thirty. He wondered when Irene would arrive. The evening, she had said. He sat down and phoned Beeby. He told him only that Gage was unhappy with his valuation of the Dutch paintings and was stalling on fixing a date for the auction. Beeby couldn’t understand. Was Henderson absolutely sure they were insignificant pictures? Yes, Henderson said, no doubt, very run-of-the-mill. However, he was checking out the portrait — which was why he was in Atlanta, needed a reference library, he lied fluently. Beeby sounded worried and impressed on him the need to bring matters to a speedy conclusion. Henderson told him the results of his valuation and said he thought Gage was looking for another half-million for the Dutch paintings. Out of the question, Beeby said, they’d make a huge loss, especially if they underwrote the reserve. They batted ideas back and forth for a while to no great effect. Eventually Beeby exhorted him to do his utmost and told him he had Pruitt Halfacre on another line.

“Henderson. How’s it going?”

“Well, up and down, Pruitt.”

“You know that painting, the allegory? I’ve been doing some work on it; it could be Demeter and lambe.”

“Good God, you’re right.” Henderson was very impressed.

“But it’s not.”

“No?”

“It’s Demeter and Baubo. Very unusual.”

Pruitt told him it was a variant myth. After Persephone had been stolen by Hades, Demeter had wandered the world, crushed by her grief over the loss of her daughter. However, in Eleusis she had been jolted out of her sorrow, and had broken her fast, by a serving maid, either called lambe who, in one version, told her dirty jokes or, in another, called Baubo, who made Demeter laugh by raising her skirts and exposing her genitalia. After that Demeter ceased to mourn for Persephone and the world got its harvests back.

“The fascinating thing is you only find that myth in the Songs of Orpheus and Protrepticus by Clement of Alexandria.”

Henderson wrote it all down. “Pruitt,” he said, “I’m phenomenally impressed. Great help.”

“Who’s the painting by?”

“I don’t know. But it’s no good. It was just the myth that floored me.”

“It is a little arcane, for sure.”

“Absolutely. Listen, Pruitt, do you know a New York gallery by the name of Sereno and Gint?”

“Never heard of them.”

“I thought so.” He said goodbye and put down the phone. He took out his polaroids and looked at the painting again through his magnifying glass. He put the magnifying glass down and thought about what he had told him. Odd myth. It made no sense. He phoned Melissa.

“Henderson! At last, when are you coming home?”

“Very soon, I hope,” he said with feeling.

“How’s Bryant? She sent me a postcard. She seems to be having a good time.”

“She is.” He swallowed. “She’s made friends with a…a very nice girl called Shanda.”

“Oh good. Darling, I’m so grateful to you, honestly. You’re sure she’s no trouble.”

“No. Not at all.”

“Baby, I’ve got to run. Dying to see you. Irving sends his love.”

She hung up before Henderson could send his love back to Irving. He felt suddenly uneasy about the barriers of deceit he was erecting. To Beeby about Sereno and Gint; to Melissa about Duane; to Irene about their planned holiday…

Beeby phoned back. How much did Gage want for the Dutch paintings? Henderson repeated the Sereno-Gint estimates.

“Good Lord,” Beeby said. “But if they’re so mediocre how can he ask so much for them?”

“He’s a shrewd old devil. He knows we want the others.”

“All right. Go to $50,000 each. But he must pay for insurance, printing the catalogue and advertising. We might just break even. Let’s pray one of the others comes good. The Sisleys are fine, you say?”

“Yes. I’ll do my best, Tom.”

“I’ve never done this before, Henderson. It goes against the grain. We must have a date for the auction soonest, too. When will you be back?”

“Monday or Tuesday,” he said without much confidence.

He hung up. He passed both hands over his face, tugging at his features, pulling his eyelids down, flattening his cheeks. He felt disturbed and unsettled but not just because of the farcical events on the atrium lake. They were deeper qualms he was suffering: more spiritual and metaphysical. His self-doubt, his lack of faith in his own capacities, always considerable, had grown these last few days like a tumour. He was beginning to feel unable to cope. The struggle to fit his personality to his new environment, to emulsify with his chosen culture like oil and vinegar, just wasn’t happening. It was too unyielding; he and America just weren’t creating the harmony he had expected. It simply wasn’t enough, clearly, to be keen, to wish earnestly for something to happen. Perhaps all marriages were made in heaven, he thought glumly. He had an awful foreboding nothing was going to work out.

And what then? Back to England? But he had been miserable there. All his hopes resided here. To fail to find himself in the U.S.A. didn’t bear contemplation. He felt, for the first time in his life, slivers of black despair begin to insert themselves into his spirit. Like the first pins in a voodoo doll. What was it Gage had said? “We all want to be happy and we’re all going to die.” It didn’t leave you much.

He heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor and immediately recognized their weight and cadence as Irene’s. He ran joyfully to the door and threw it open. Across the corridor the general did the same. They both looked at the astonished face of a black maid.

“Mo’ towels, sir?”

Henderson and the general sheepishly accepted a towel each. Henderson noted that the general was in mufti.

“I thought,” Henderson began, smiling.

“I’m expecting someone,” the general said. He was wearing loud checked trousers of the sort favoured by champion golfers, a short-sleeved shirt and a silk scarf tied at his throat. It looked incongruous beneath his hard taut face and cropped grey hair. Out of uniform he had lost all his confident authority. Just another man. He raised a palm and stepped back inside.

Henderson called the front desk and asked where the best reference library in Atlanta was and, after a brief pause, he was given the relevant information. He heard more footsteps in the corridor — not Irene’s, he was sure — followed by a knock on the door. He got up and opened it.

“Room service, sir.” A white-jacketed waiter carried a tray holding champagne in an ice bucket and a large plate of smoked salmon and brown bread.

“There must be some mistake.”

“This is 35J?”

“Yes.”

“And you are General Dunklebanger?”

“No. I think you’ll find him in there. In 35 K. K not J.”

By this time the general had come to his door.

“General, I think this is for you.” Henderson was amused to see the embarrassment on the general’s face.

“Oh yeah. Yeah, I guess…Just take it right on in. Sorry to bother you,” he said to Henderson.

Henderson shut the door, and smiled. He doubted somehow that the champagne was for Mrs Dunklebanger. Mind you, he thought, it’s not such a bad idea. He phoned room service and ordered the same for him and Irene. The episode — a glimpse of the human face behind the military machine — had cheered him up somewhat. He went back into the bathroom and ran his electric razor over his chin once more, concentrating on the skin round the lips, until it was completely smooth. Irene often refused to kiss him if there was a hint of bristle. “What do you think it’s like for me?” she would say. “You try rubbing your face with sandpaper, see how sexy it is.”

The phone rang.

“Henderson?” It was Irene. “I’m at the airport. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“I’ll see you downst—” But she had hung up.

He felt hollow-chested with pleasant anticipation. He shut his eyes and tried to conjure up Irene naked. The broad shoulders, the low flat breasts with their tiny nipples, her unshaven armpits, the black dense hair on her cunt, her strong legs…He took a deep breath. God, how he had missed her.

On the way down in the scenic elevator he scanned the canoes plying back and forth but none of them contained Irene. He debated whether he should meet her at the front desk but decided not to deny her the pleasure of seeing and experiencing the atrium and its marvels herself. It was certainly busier than when he had arrived. The cocktail archipelago were fully populated and noisy. All the canoes seemed to be in demand.

He went into the bar area. The wigwams were in fact canopies over private booths. Vegetation grew lushly everywhere. The tables and chairs had a rough-hewn makeshift aspect and the long bar looked like a reconstituted corral. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a few ponies tethered here and there. At the bar the barman sported a feather head-dress, wampum beads and buckskin. He raised his hand and said, “How.”

Hang about, Henderson thought, this is taking the leitmotif a little far, isn’t it? He checked that no-one was looking then raised his own palm — swiftly turning it into a neck scratch.

“How. A bloody mary, please.”

“Right away, sir.”

The drink arrived in a glass the size and shape of a storm lantern. A whole hand of celery sprouted from the top. Henderson picked it up and sucked self consciously on a straw. Everything in this ‘hotel’, he thought, conspired to make him ill at ease. He put his glass down and went in search of the gents’ toilet.

Here at least some sort of orthodoxy and normal scale prevailed: white tiles and chrome. He had half expected to be issued with a spade and instructed to go and dig a hole. He took his place at the urinal trough, unzipped and let fly. His gaze rested blankly on the white tiles in front of him.

“Hi there,” came a voice from his left. He ignored it. People just didn’t talk to each other while they urinated — it wasn’t done.

“Mr Dores.”

He looked round with genuine irritation. It was Sere-no, in the next but one stall. To Henderson’s astonishment Sereno leant sideways and extended a hand over the vacant space. Good Christ! Henderson gasped inwardly, he surely doesn’t expect me to shake hands while I’m peeing? This was intolerable. But Serene’s hand remained. Henderson, swapping hands, shook Sereno’s briskly and briefly.

“Hello,” he said stiffly, and returned his gaze to the tiles.

“You remember my partner, Peter Gint?”

Henderson looked round. Beyond Sereno was the pebble beach of Gint’s face. Why were they peeing together? Like girls at a discotheque?

“Hi there,” Gint said softly, reaching round Sereno’s back. After a horrified pause, Henderson leant over and shook his hand. I don’t believe I’m doing this, Henderson thought. Why don’t we hold each other’s tinkles?

“Good to see you again,” Gint said.

“Mng.”

“Some hotel,” Sereno opined. “Eighth wonder of the world.”

They all finished simultaneously. Henderson washed his hands with untypical thoroughness, lots of soap and hot water. Sereno combed his hair and moustache.

“Please join us,” he said as they walked out. He indicated one of the nearer cocktail islands. Henderson saw Freeborn, Shanda and — to his surprise — Cora.

“Really, thank you, but I’m meeting—”

“HEY, HENDURSIN!” Shanda waved and called. He saw Cora’s shades snap round.

“Come on,” said Sereno. He seemed annoyingly confident. Shouldn’t they, as rivals for the Gage collection, be warily circling each other?

They made their way to the island, Henderson being extra careful with the stepping stones.

“Why, hello there,” Cora said. “Is your ‘colleague’ here yet?”

“Expecting her any moment.”

“Sit here,” Shanda ordered. She was clearly drunk. In front of her was an enormous beaker full of blue liquid and chunks of fruit. She dragged him down.

Sereno spoke. “Would you and your colleague — what did you say her name was?”

“Dr Dubrovnik. Dr Irene Dubrovnik.”

“She’s Czechoslovakian,” Cora said.

“—like to have dinner with us?”

“I’m afraid duty calls. But thanks all the same.”

“Did you say ‘Czechoslovakian’?” Shanda asked.

“How’s her English?” Cora asked.

“Excellent.” Henderson desperately scanned the open surface of the lake. He saw Irene being paddled across by a cowboy. She was looking about her with an expression of aghast incredulity. Henderson rose to his feet.

“Well, good to see you,” he said. “Enjoy your dinner.”

“Do bring your colleague over, we’d love to meet her,” Cora said disingenuously.

“Oh. Right.” He picked his way back across the stepping stones and strode round to the place the canoes berthed. Irene was being helped ashore.

“My God, Henderson,” she said in a loud voice. “This hotel. I can’t believe it.” She leant forward to kiss him.

“No kissing!” Henderson said, trying not to move his lips. “Don’t kiss me!” He shook her formally by the hand.

“What?”

“We’re being watched.”

“Who by?”

“The Gage family.” He took her elbow in one hand and her small case in the other and began to walk her round towards the cocktail island.

“But so what? For Christ’s sake.”

“Listen. You’re called Dr Dubrovnik, you’re an art historian from Czechoslovakia.”

Irene stopped. “Henderson, I’m warning you.” Her voice was stern. “I’m not playing any of your stupid games.”

“Please, it’s vital. Just for a minute or two. I’ll explain later.” He felt a light sweat moist on his face. They made their way across the stepping stones. He glanced at Irene. Her eyes were narrow.

“Dr Irene Dubrovnik,” Henderson announced, and introduced her to the other members of the family.

“A pleasure to meet you at last,” Sereno said. “I’m familiar with your work.”

“How. Do. You. Do?” Cora said slowly, as if talking to a peasant or simpleton. “Welcome. To. Our. Country.”

“D’you miss Czecho, Chechlso, Miss Dubronik. Nik?” Shanda burped.

“May we offer you a drink?” Sereno asked, all oleaginous charm, signalling an Indian maiden.

“Yeah. I’ll have a large scotch, straight up with a twist,” Irene said, looking at Henderson.

They sat themselves down. More drinks were ordered. Some sort of tremor had established itself in Henderson’s left thigh and, mysteriously, his indigestion had returned. He felt a fire in his throat. To his alarm and dismay he found himself sitting between Sereno and Freeborn. Cora lit a cigarette and exhaled. Irene vigorously fanned the air.

The drinks arrived. Henderson buried his head in the cool clump of celery frothing from the top of a new bloody mary. Please God, he prayed into the leaves, let her play the game.

“Dr Dubrovnik,” Cora said. “Excuse me, Dr Dubrov-nik?”

Irene refused to acknowledge the pseudonym.

“Isn’t this hotel quite astonishing?” Henderson piped up. “I had quite a problem with my canoe, I must say.”

“What’d he say?” Shanda asked Gint.

“His canoe,” Gint said.

“Mr Dores,” Sereno breathed in his ear. His large moustache and glossy purple lips were close to his face. “We may be rivals, but I’m glad that we can behave in a civilized way.”

Henderson stood up. “No rest for the wicked,” he said cheerfully. “We must leave you good people to your dinner.”

“Wha’she say?”

“Thanks for the drink.” Irene drained hers in a gulp.

“Goodbye, Dr Dubrovnik,” Cora said.

Irene ignored her.

“Dr Dubrovnik?”

“Goodbye,” Henderson said, hauling Irene away by the arm.

They walked off. Henderson waved farewell. Just made it, he thought, as nausea joined forces once more with indigestion.

“Don’t ever land me in that kind of shit again,” Irene said coldly. “I don’t want to play in your fantasies.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was necessary. Things aren’t going so well…” He sensed this wasn’t the moment to tell her of the cancelled trip. “That chap Sereno’s trying to buy the paintings too.”

“Who’s that weird girl in the shades?”

“Gage’s daughter, Cora.”

“God, spooky.”

They were in the scenic elevator. Irene looked out at the vista and laughed. “Jesus Christ, Henderson, only you would choose a place like this.” She leant against him. He took in her appearance for the first time. She wore a dark green jersey dress with buttons down the front and flat-soled beige shoes. He ran his hand down the warm furrow of her spine. No bra.

In the room the champagne and sandwiches had been delivered. They had a glass of champagne. They kissed. He pulled her through into the bedroom and they fell on the bed. Irene propped her head on a hand and looked down into his face.

“Has it been a bad week? Really that bad?”

“The worst ever.”

“Poor Henderson.”

“Let’s not talk about it.”

“But I want to hear everything.”

“Later.”

“Well at least it’s all over now.”

Henderson swallowed. Was this the moment to tell her? But Irene ducked forward and kissed his forehead. He shut his eyes. Then he felt her lips on his left eyelid. Her dark mouth closed hot over the socket. The tense tip of her tongue massaged the eyeball through the lid. Technicolour photomatic explosions seemed to brighten the inside of his skull. His left side erupted in goose-pimples.

“Stop it, please,” he said weakly. She pulled back and he opened his eyes. Her face was blurry through warm pink tears.

“What’s that?” he said. “Where did you learn that? It’s appalling.”

“I like to feel your eyeball squirm beneath my tongue. It sort of throbs.”

“But I can’t see any more. It hurts.”

“It’s designed to stimulate me, dummy.”

He unbuttoned her dress at the neck and pushed it back to reveal one breast, pale and flat with its small immaculate nipple, milk-chocolate brown. He pressed his weeping eye against it. He felt his nausea and indigestion dissolve into relief. At last, he thought, at last.

He got up and took off his tie and shirt. He kicked off his shoes with pantomimic abandon, removed his socks and trousers. Irene lay on the bed and watched him with a smile. He eased off his increasingly taut underpants.

“Well, hello there,” Irene said.

He slid onto the bed to join her. He found it pleasantly erotic to be naked while she was clothed. Methodically he undid more buttons to expose both breasts. He bent his head.

“Let’s stay here tomorrow,” Irene murmured. “This hotel is fun.” She kissed his crown.

Henderson sat up. “Ah,” he said slowly. “I was going to tell you. There’s been a hitch. I’ve got to go back.” Blankly, he watched himself detumesce — the organ showed uncanny prescience, he thought.

“What? To New York?”

“No. Luxora Beach.”

“Bastard,” she said with chilling matter-of-factness, doing up her buttons. “But you needed a quick fuck, just the same.”

“Listen, it wasn’t like that, honestly,” he pleaded. “I’ve only just found out. Everything has suddenly gone horribly wrong. Nothing but disasters.” He launched into a garbled desperate narrative about Gage, the picture, Beeby. The arrival of Sereno and Gint, Freeborn’s man-oeuvrings, Gage’s second thoughts, Bryant’s shocking betrothal to Duane…

“And who the shit is Bryant?”

“Oh Christ…Ah, she’s a girl…”

“You can’t help it, can you? You sad fuck.”

“She’s only fourteen. She’s not a friend. Jesus.” He shut his eyes and pulled the coverlet around him.

“So what are you doing with a fourteen-year-old girl?”

“She’s the daughter of…Thomas Beeby. I promised him I’d—”

“Bullshit, Henderson. You prick. You English prick.”

Why, he thought wildly, should the adjective make the noun more pejorative?

There was a knock at the door.

“Bloody hell!” Henderson swore. He jumped off the bed and grabbed his dressing gown. But Irene had already gone to the door. He heard a voice. A woman’s voice.

“Oh. I’m sorry. Is this…is this 35?”

Henderson fought furiously with an inside-out sleeve.

“That’s what it says on the door,” Irene replied coldly.

Then he heard a wail, a keening, distressed cry. Christ, who can it be, he thought? Bryant? Cora? Melissa? Shanda? Fearfully, he peered through the crack at the door jamb. He saw Irene, her arms folded sternly across her chest, confronting a young blonde woman in military uniform with corporal’s stripes on her sleeves. She was sobbing fiercely into her cupped hands. A WAF or WAC, he thought: what ghastly new nemesis is this? Then the woman looked up and screamed in his direction.

“Alvin, you bastard! I never want to see you again!” She turned and ran down the corridor.

Alvin? Just a moment. His spearing hand finally engaged the stubborn sleeve. He sprang to the door.

“What fucking game is this, Alvin?” Irene demanded.

Just at that moment the door opposite was thrown open and a harassed General Dunklebanger appeared, zipping up his flies. He looked disbelievingly down the long corridor at the fleeing WAC.

“Mary?” he said looking piteously back at Henderson and Irene. “Was that Mary?”

“I think there’s been—” Henderson began, but he was interrupted by a bellow of primeval grief from the general, who set off thundering down the passageway after his beloved. Henderson took a few futile paces after him. He saw the general arrive at the lift doors just as they closed in his face. He darted to and fro — there were three lifts serving the thirty-fifth floor — pressing buttons frantically. Eventually another lift arrived and he leapt in. Henderson shook his head in astonishment. A few other guests had emerged from their rooms to see what the fuss was. Henderson realized he was in his dressing gown. He returned to his own door. It was locked. Oh Christ no. He tapped softly on it with his finger tips.

“Irene,” he whispered. “Open up. I can explain everything.” He looked over his shoulder and smiled reassuringly at the curious guests.

“Irene,” he hissed. “For God’s sake open up!” He rapped again.

He had to wait a full ten minutes. He passed the time whistling quietly to himself, pacing unconcernedly to and fro in a tight oval, affecting profound interest in the pattern and texture of the corridor carpet for minutes at a time. Finally the door opened and Irene stepped out. She had her case in her hand.

“I’m getting out,” she said. “You stay in the madhouse with the crazies. Goodbye.”

She walked purposefully away. Henderson dithered for a moment.

“Irene, wait,” he called.

Further down the passage a man’s head popped out of a doorway.

“For God’s sake, will you people please party in your rooms?” he demanded of Irene.

She said something to him in reply that caused him to start back in shock.

Henderson ran back inside and started to pull on his clothes. There was nothing to be gained by pursuing her in his dressing gown. He felt an ascending panic stirring within him. Irene’s tone had been so uncompromisingly final. She couldn’t leave, he told himself: she had to hear him out. Given his predicament, anyone would understand. She couldn’t abandon him like this. He clawed on his jacket and trousers. He pulled on his left sock and found his left shoe in a corner. He looked around the room for his other shoe and sock. He found the sock, but not the shoe, such had been the frivolity with which he had disrobed.

“Oh God, please,” he prayed out loud, peering under the bed. He saw it: at the back in the middle, flush against the skirting board. He tried to reach it but his fingers were inches short. He struggled mightily to shift the bed but, for some unknown reason, it appeared to be bolted in place. In his mind’s eye, he saw Irene being paddled across the atrium lake. There was nothing for it. He ran awkwardly out of the room and sprinted like a club-footed athlete down the passage to the lifts. He pressed the descend button. Obligingly, one lift was already ascending rapidly to his floor. 33, 34, 35, bing!

The door opened. For an instant he saw General Dunklebanger leaning despairingly against the lift side.

Then, with a cry of pure rage, the general surged out, fingers closing round Henderson’s throat and they fell grappling to the floor. The man was wiry and tough, but Henderson — strengthened by his own urgent needs and panic, and his body brimming with adrenalin — struggled free.

The general was on his knees, panting hoarsely.

“Leave me alone, you mad bugger!” Henderson shrieked. The lift doors were still open. The general got to his feet, adopting a shaky wrestler’s stance and began to advance on him again.

“She got the wrong room number, you bloody cretin!” Henderson yelled in frustration. “It’s not my fault!”

The general paused, then folded to the floor in a heap, making childlike crying noises. Henderson jumped over him and into the lift. The doors slid to. Henderson punched button number one.

As he emerged high in the bright space of the atrium, he peered out hopefully at the scene below. There was Irene. Just getting into a canoe. The lift came to a halt, and Henderson ran out. “Irene!” he called. “Wait!”

The atrium floor was busy with people. Henderson dodged his way through the crowd to the canoe embarking point. Some child shouted “Look, mom, that man’s only got one shoe!”

A small queue had formed at the lakeside, all the canoes were in commission. Henderson pushed his way to the front.

“Excuse me, sir, but would you wait in line? It’ll only be a couple of minutes.”

Henderson saw Irene approaching the far bank.

“Irene! Wait!” he bellowed plaintively across the water. Everybody looked around. Except Irene.

“Give me a canoe!” he begged.

“Sir, please! Two minutes.” The cowboy’s strong arms held him back.

Henderson looked at the lake. He could see the bottom clearly through the dancing water. Eighteen inches down, two feet at the most, he calculated.

He jumped in.

He went in up to his waist, gasping at the shock of the cold water. “Waist deep!” he exclaimed with mad outrage. “That’s dangerous. What about safety regulations?…”

He began to slosh his way heavily across to the far shore, arms above his head, a creaming bow wave at his waist, like a determined marine invading some Pacific island. There were shouts, laughs and a few screams from onlookers and hotel staff, but he was possessed with unfamiliar singlemindedness. He forged on through the water. Canoes took avoiding action. “Irene, wait!” he cried again. To his dismay he saw her get out of her canoe and march into the forest.

“Stop that woman!” he bellowed hoarsely. “She’s sick. She’s forgotten her medicine.”

Willing hands reached out to help him as he reached the far bank.

“Life or death,” he gasped. “Matter of.” And stumbled into the trees.

He broke out into the lobby and limped-ran — clunk-splat, clunk-splat — across to the main doors, leaving a trail of wetness like a slug. A taxi pulled away into the main street. Another rolled up promptly to take its place at the foot of the steps. The driver leapt out at the sight of the distraught and dripping Henderson.

“Follow that cab,” Henderson croaked.

“Hey, man, no way.” The taxi driver was fat and needed a shave. He blocked Henderson’s access to the car, short stubby fingertips laid gently on Henderson’s heaving chest.

“Look, it’s a matter of life and death, for God’s sake!”

“Sure it is. That’s what they all say, bub. But no way you gettin’ in my cab like that, man. Soakin’ wet, only one shoe. No way.”

“I’ll give you a hundred dollars!”

“Let’s see your money.”

Henderson wrestled with his sopping hip pocket and produced his wallet. He opened it up: an anthology of credit cards, two tens and three singles.

“You don’t got no hundred bucks, man. You just better go on back inside, dry yourself off.” The taxi driver considerately helped him back up the steps to the lobby, Henderson suddenly as quiescent as a chronic invalid being ushered back to bed. “Go on now, man. You go on change your clothes. Then I’ll give you a ride.”

♦

A dark listless resignation had settled on Henderson as he was paddled back across the atrium lake. A large and curious crowd watched him disembark, Sereno and Cora amongst their number.

“Is Dr Dubrovnik all right?” Sereno asked.

“That was some display, Mr Dores. Most impressive,” Cora said. Her lips weren’t smiling, but her dark lenses obscured eyes bright with amusement, he felt sure. But he was too weak and overcome to make any riposte. He limped off towards the scenic elevator and his lonely room.

Chapter Eleven

Predictably, Henderson slept briefly and uneasily, troubled by violent dreams, that night. But in the morning found, to his surprise, that his mortification and embarrassment did not reach the zenith he might have suspected. Too many potential disasters lay ahead, with hectoring claims on his attention. And besides, there was nothing he could do about Irene now, he realized. It would have been utterly pointless to have followed her to Atlanta airport and attempt to engineer a reconciliation in the departure lounge. That would have to await his return to New York, whenever that might be.

As he lay alone in the big bed, he thought back over his manic wade through the atrium lake more with astonishment than shame or self-rebuke. He tried to recreate the thought processes that had led him to behave in such a rash and wildly conspicuous manner, but in vain. It was as if the semi-shod, disappointed lover bellowing his anguished pleas across the crowded pond had been another person, such was the uniquely strange nature of the act. He had, he realized, for the first time in his life, given absolutely no thought to the reactions of others. He hadn’t cared; he had been totally indifferent to opinion. He frowned.

The one meagre consolation of the whole saddening business was that he was now freed to concentrate on securing the pictures for Mulholland, Melhuish. Beeby’s new offer on the Dutch pictures, some judicious hope-raising on the prospective auction prices of the Sisleys…Gage needed money; money would have to be the spur. Publicity, prestige exhibitions in London; they carried no weight.

He got out of bed. Then there was Bryant and Duane. He got dressed. He hoped desperately that a firm talking-to and reminders of Melissa’s monstrous displeasure might make the girl see sense. He couldn’t imagine what had got into her head. Duane, a thirty-four-year-old layabout with a liking for loud music and a chronic incapacity to fix cars…what could a pretty, privileged girl like Bryant see in an almost mythically disfavoured human being like that?

He ordered breakfast from room service. He felt also, if he were honest with himself, a certain amount of jealousy. If she could want to marry a lout like Duane, why was she so hostile to him? Good Lord, he thought, I’m beginning to sound like Pruitt Halfacre. But this morning, awash with self-pity and hurt, he needed to be liked by someone.

His breakfast was wheeled in. Coffee and orange juice in a sunny chair. He was still unsettled, he realized, by one of his dreams which had been unusually virulent and detailed. It was about Irene, and in the dream she had cut his head off with a small, not very sharp knife. He had felt no pain and managed to protest throughout his decapitation, seeking some explanation for this hostility. Irene — her breasts bare, as they had been the night before — said only one thing: “Because you’re weak, weak, weak,” and then renewed her efforts with the knife to the rhythm of her words.

As he sipped at his orange juice he squirmed anew at the phantasms of his unconscious mind. Irene’s erode violence, her breasts swaying and bobbing as she sawed, gouts of his own blood fountaining up from his torn throat and severed windpipe. It was lucky, he thought, that he was no Freudian, otherwise he’d be in a bad way: rather a lot of guilt and self-contempt swilling around. Just as well, he reflected, that his art-historian training provided him with the reference and he didn’t need to go poking around in his id…It was all clearly derived from Judith and Holophernes by Artemisia Gentilleschi…or by Jakob van Hoegh.

He wondered vaguely what to do for the rest of the day. Thinking of Jakob van Hoegh reminded him of his ostensible purpose in visiting Atlanta. He might as well spend some time in the library, going through the motions, see if there was anything that would conceivably justify revaluing the landscapes.

The William Russell Pullen library of Georgia State University proved happily to be not far from the Mono-park 5000 complex. Henderson paid off the taxi driver and wandered through a modern plaza with scattered fir trees and curious-looking lights. He entered through wide glass doors set in the blank brick façade. Nobody noticed him, nobody demanded credentials. He consulted a bright wall map, hummed up a few floors in a lift, asked a pretty co-ed where Fine Art was and duly discovered the relevant well-crammed rows of bookshelves.

After some time spent browsing through books on seventeenth-century Dutch painting he further confirmed his belief that Gage’s dank mundane landscapes were nothing more than that. He flicked through his notes on the paintings. ‘Demeter and Baubo’ caught his eye. ‘Protrepticus — Clement of Alexandria.’

He sought out a reference librarian, a cheerful girl called, so the identity card of her lapel informed him, Ora Lee Emmet. Ora Lee, after some punching of keys on a VDU and a search through hefty catalogues, said that the only copy of Clement of Alexandria’s Protrepticus that they possessed was an inferior French translation on microfilm.

Half an hour later, Henderson sat before a blue screen and twiddled up the glowing text. Old Clement, as far as Henderson could make out, was ranting on at all the base and obscene rites and rituals associated with classical mythology.

“How can we be astonished at Barbarians,” Henderson translated slowly, “when the Tuscans and the rest of Greece — I blush to talk of it! — possess in the figure of Demeter a religion which is absolutely shameful?”

Henderson turned the wheel. Clement recounted the story. Demeter wanders round Greece searching for Persephone. In Eleusis, exhausted and toute desolee, she sits down by a well. Eleusis is inhabited by shepherds and swineherds. And Baubo. He translated on:

“Baubo, having received Demeter, offers her a drink (a mixture of farine, d’eau et d’une espece de menthe). But Demeter refuses it because she is in mourning. Baubo (tres chagrinee and deeply offended) uncovers her private parts and exhibits them to the Goddess. At this sight Demeter accepts the drink — delighted at the spectacle!”

Outraged of Alexandria railed on at the Athenians and I quoted some lines from the song of Orpheus.

“Baubo drew aside her robes to show all that was obscene. The Goddess smiled, smiled in her heart, and drank the draught from out the glancing cup.”

§

Henderson switched off the machine.

What did it all mean? A good laugh is the best medicine? Keep your sunny side up? There’s nothing worth getting that depressed about? Everything’s pointless?

He moved floor to find the classical dictionaries. There was, predictably, vast material on Demeter, of her grief and fasting after the loss of Persephone, the breaking of her fast and the ending of her mourning at Eleusis. In every version, however, that had been achieved by lambe and her dirty jokes. So who was Baubo?

Half interested, he began to leaf through other books on classical mythology looking for references on Demeter and Baubo. He found only one in Myth, Ritual and the Primitive Mind by Max Kramer.

♦

“Vulgar comedy and lewdness,” he read, “was common ritual practice. Its purpose seems originally to have been for the promotion of fertility, but it came later to be associated more generally with the dispelling of evil spirits and as a favoured antidote to gloom and despair. Thus Hercules released the hapless Cercopes — whom he was on the point of killing — when they had caused him to laugh over their jokes about his astonishingly hairy buttocks (Melanpygos); and the same ritual significance is found in the story of Demeter and Baubo, when Baubo made Demeter laugh by raising her skirts and exposing herself to the Goddess when Demeter was in mourning for Persephone.”

♦

He sat slumped at his desk. It was late afternoon. He hadn’t worked so hard in years, and although he was exhausted he felt a vague exhilaration. He chewed on the end of his pen, suddenly remembering Irene back in New York; Bryant and Duane’s impending marriage; Sereno, Gint and Freeborn. He looked round the tranquil library, the ranked booths, the earnest students — all dressed for the athletic field, it seemed — hunched over their books. He contemplated the stacks of learned volumes piled in front of him, the dull gloss of the illustrations, the crammed rows of type…He turned his head and gazed out of a window at the sunlit towers of downtown Atlanta. What shambles waited for him out there?

He yearned suddenly for the warm security of study and research; the ostrich calm of the library; the utter pointlessness of some scholarly avenue up which he could pedantically stroll for the next decade or two. Out there, in the hot streets, in Luxora Beach, in the Gage mansion, life lounged like a gunslinger, waiting for him — nothing but hurt, dissatisfaction and baffling twists and turns ahead.

He remembered when, as a little boy, two brothers who lived along the road had briefly taken him up as a friend. They were slightly older than him — robust, dirty-kneed, wild little beggars, he recalled — who came round to his mother’s house on any pretext.

“It’s Philip and Colin,” his mother would tell him. “They want you to come out to play.”

“But I don’t want to go out and play,” he would wail. “I want to stay inside.”

He sympathized strongly with his younger self. That was exactly how he felt at the moment. He longed to stay indoors; he didn’t want to go out and play.

Thinking of his home and his childhood in this way reminded him of his quest for news of his father. He thought for a moment of telephoning New York, of asking the doorman to go through his mail to see if Drew had replied. But what if there was a letter? He couldn’t have it sent down here, and he certainly didn’t want its contents read over the phone.

He ran his fingers through his hair. Wearily he closed his books and assembled his notes and photographs. Beckman would be waiting. The time had come.

Chapter Twelve

It was remarkable, Henderson thought, how swiftly anger and frustration could dispel calm and serenity no matter how assiduously these last two emotions were cultivated. He looked at his watch. Six o’clock. He had been waiting two hours at the corner of Peachtree and Edgewood for Beckman and his car. Two empty hours. Enough was enough.

He walked back to Monopark 5000 to collect his case. He had managed to secure a place in the hotel car park for Beckman’s pickup, and had left his overnight bag with a receptionist in the lobby. He would simply return to Luxora with the pickup. Too bad if that idiot was waiting at another street corner.

In the lobby he picked up his bag.

“Hope you enjoyed your stay at Monopark 5000,” the receptionist said.

“Well…I certainly won’t forget it.”

“We won’t forget you either, sir. Come back and see us again.”

“We’ll see.”

“Excuse me?”

Henderson turned. It was General Dunklebanger, checking out. He looked terrible — worn and harrowed — despite his smart uniform.

Oh Jesus, Henderson thought, this is all I need.

“Look, I’m really sorry about last night,” Henderson began. “They’d already got our rooms confused, it was nothing to do with me. Just bad luck — rotten luck, that’s all.”

“Did she say anything?” The general’s voice trembled, his dark eyes were bright with potential tears. “Anything at all? Anything she said. I’ve been looking all day. I can’t find her, you see.”

“Well…All she said was ‘Alvin, you bastard, I never want to see you again’, and ran off.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

“Just, ‘Alvin, you bastard’?”

“Yes. And ‘I never want to see you again’. You’re Alvin, I take it.”

To Henderson’s alarm he saw tears bulge at the lower lids of the general’s eyes and glide their way down the seams and fissures of his weatherbeaten face.

“I’ve got to find her,” he repeated, and took his bottom lip between his teeth.

“All the best of luck.” Henderson thought hard, trying to help. “She was in uniform. Won’t she have to report back to base at some point?”

The general clutched Henderson’s arm. “You’ve got to help me. You’ve got to help me find Mary.”

“Look, I’m terribly sorry for you, I really am. But there’s no way I—”

“Please. You’re the only one.” Now he held both of Henderson’s shoulders. Henderson tried to ease himself free. Surely they wouldn’t end up grappling on the floor again?

“What can I do?” he said. “If it’s any consolation my girlfriend ran out on me too about five minutes later.”

“You see. Together we can find her!”

Gently Henderson prised off the general’s fingers from his shoulders.

“Really, there’s nothing I can do. I’ve got problems enough of my own. Massive problems. If only you knew—”

“You’ve got to help me,” the general said in a loud, cracking voice. Heads turned.

“No,” Henderson said. Poor guy, he thought. “I must go. I’m positive she’ll be back any moment.”

“WAAAH!” bawled the general, standing in the middle of the lobby as Henderson backed away.

“MWAH — WAAH — WAAH!” His hands hung limply at his sides, twitching as his shoulders heaved.

“What did you do to that man?” a shocked passer-by demanded.

The general blubbered noisily on. Receptionists scurried anxiously out from behind the long desk to lead him gently away into the trees. People glared hostilely at Henderson. Astonishingly, a few women had begun crying too — in sympathy, Henderson supposed. He felt unmanned, full of worry. Everyone wore preoccupied, troubled faces. If a general in uniform can cry like a baby, they seemed to be thinking, where does that leave the rest of us?

♦

His mind full of this baleful, admonitory image, Henderson drove back to Luxora Beach through the gathering dusk. He drove west, into the fire of the setting sun, which rinsed the few thin bars of cloud with a salmony golden light. He could feel a murky depression settling on his brain. He switched on the radio in search of distraction. Twanging guitars heralded a familiar tune.

She never said a single angry word to me,

Tho’ I cheated on her every gnat and day.

She smiled when I come home

No, she never raised a moan

An’ I laffed when I heard her ‘n’ the children pray.

§

Henderson remembered the tune from the Skaggsville Motor Hotel. He listened on with horrible fascination.

Tho’ he’s the happiest, meanest, full-time, signed up sinner

Don’ forget that he’s your only paw, Lord, forgive him for his sins, an’—

Henderson switched the radio off and drove to Luxora Beach in heavy doleful silence.

When he arrived in Luxora it was late. The main street, as ever, was devoid of traffic but there was the usual cluster of cars and pickups round the bar. The neon signs — the red bow, the blue rosette — shone cheerfully in the night. He stopped the pickup. Someone came out and he caught a glimpse of crowded figures, blurred by smoke, and the high excited voices of people having a good time. For a moment he felt like going in to join them, but he knew what a dampener his presence would be to the locals, so he started up and drove on down the lane to the Gage mansion.

The lights were on in Freeborn’s trailer, but the main house was quite dark. Henderson parked the pickup, got out, stretched. He stopped stretching when he saw that his own car wasn’t there any more, just one brick — a crude rebus — stood in its place. He sighed. Did this mean that Beckman was still prowling the wrong junction in Atlanta waiting for him to appear? Or had Duane decided to change cars for him?

He clumped up the front steps and into the hall. No music, ergo, no Duane. And probably no Bryant. He felt an odd relief at having to postpone that confrontation. He switched on some lights, and the TV for company, before wandering through to the kitchen in search of some food. To his considerable disquiet he realized he was treating the Gage mansion as though it were his home.

In the kitchen he found a barely warm loaf-thing, dark brown, as though made of meat. On closer inspection this turned out to be nuts, beans and pulses set in some sort of spongy dumpling. The fridge yielded a plastic box full of grated carrot. He cut a slice of nut loaf and added a spoonful or two of carrot. He was beginning to wish he’d stopped for a weaselburger in Luxora, but he was really too hungry to care.

He sat down at the frugal meal and started the long chew. He heard the sound of a car arriving, then Beckman sauntered in.

“Hi, Henderson. See you got back OK. Sorry to miss you, but I figured you were coming back anyways so it din’t matter none.”

“You mean you didn’t go into Atlanta at all?”

“You got it.”

Henderson thought of his two-hour wait at Peachtree and Edgewood. “Why not?”

“‘Cause you didn’t have no car, man. It wasn’t there this morning.”

“What do you mean it wasn’t there?” He felt the sense of baffling weakness descend on him which he now associated with life in Luxora Beach.

“I got up this morning, no car. Simple as that.”

“Duane?”

“Could be. I heard he was trying to get it fixed up and all.”

“But there was nothing wrong with the bloody thing!” He drummed his fingers on the table. The crying general, the disappearing car…These were like portents in a Shakespearean play. Beckman was talking again.

“Some cars are real dogs. I remember back in Quarig Tri we had an A.P. C. was a real mother. Always throwing tracks, breaking down. One day we woke up an’ it warn’t there. Just like yours. Seems the sarge got stoned with some chopper pilots, drove it off to the airfield. They picked it up — used one of them big fuckers, a Chinook — flew out over a jungle and dropped it off. Figured if Charlie Cong picked it up it’d do the war effort more good fouling things up for the gooks.” Beckman laughed at his anecdote, tucking his thin blond hair behind his ears, his eyelids fluttering like the wings of a hovering bird.

“Well hello,” Cora stood in the doorway, cigarette held beside her face. “My father would like to see you.”

So there were people at home, Henderson thought.

“Catch you later,” Beckman said. “Wait till you hear what happened next.”

Cora and Henderson walked up the stairs together.

“How do you get on with Beckman?”

“Fine, fine. He tells me all about life during the Vietnam war.”

“You do realize that he was never out there.”

“Sorry?”

“He was 4F. Because of his eyes. Nervous complaint.”

“No, I didn’t know. I was sure—” He felt obscurely shocked at this news. He didn’t know why. Nothing at the Gage mansion was what it appeared to be — he should have learnt that by now.

“Dr Dubrovnik get off OK? No ill-effects from your stroll in the lake? Walking on water takes some practice, I hear.”

“Oh, God. It was…everything went wrong. It’s difficult, um…”

“Don’t worry.” Cora laughed, but kindly. “But I was very impressed. Somehow it was the last thing I’d ever have expected you to do.”

“Same here,” he said thoughtfully. Then, “Look, I’d be terribly grateful if you didn’t mention anything to Bryant. I wouldn’t like her to get the, you know, wrong idea.”

“Or Bryant’s mother.”

“Yes.”

“Dr Dubrovnik wasn’t the most convincing art historian.”

“Well…” He made a wry face.

“Bit of a dark horse, Mr Dores, aren’t you. Lead a complicated sort of life.”

“Not usually,” he said candidly. “But since coming here everything has got rather out of control.”

They were outside Gage’s door. Cora looked quizzically at him for a moment.

“Go right on in. He’s expecting you.” She turned to her own door.

Henderson knocked and went into Gage’s room. It was empty and the double doors to the bedroom were closed.

“Henderson. Give me two minutes,” came Gage’s voice from behind them.

Henderson took the opportunity of scrutinizing Demeter and Baubo again. There was the Goddess in her tattered widow’s weeds laughing at the serving maid’s outrageous display. The grin was crude, badly rendered, but was wide enough to reveal the Goddess’s teeth. Baubo was laughing too. They were having a good time, that was clear enough.

“Come on in,” Gage called from his bedroom. Henderson walked through. Gage was shirtless and was patting his damp ruddy cheeks with a towel. His old chest and shoulders were covered in surprisingly dense grey hair.

“Having a shave,” he said, and put on a clean shirt. “How are you, Henderson?”

“Oh. Fine.”

“A successful consultation in Atlanta?”

“Yes and no.”

“Freeborn tells me you created quite a stir. Something about shouting and wading across the atrium lake?”

Henderson coloured. “Ah. Yes. I can—”

“Freeborn was insistent that anyone who behaved like that wasn’t a man to do business with.”

“There is an explanation. Of sorts.”

“I listen to Freeborn but I rarely take his advice.” He paused. “I guess you had your reasons.”

Henderson scratched his cheek. “Yes. I think I did.”

“Well OK. Things I did when I was your age…” He came over and put his arm round Henderson’s shoulders. “We got to sow our wild oats, don’t we? Otherwise what the hell’s the point? Know what I mean?”

“We all want to be happy and we’re all going to die.”

“You’re learning, Henderson. You’re learning.”

Henderson smiled. Gage patted his shoulder.

“I like you, Henderson. Like you a lot. You’re a bit quiet and withdrawn, but I’ve got to say I like you.”

Henderson didn’t know what to reply. He liked Gage too, he realized. He felt fond of the little old man. He wanted to tell him that, but something prevented him.

“Thanks very much,” he mumbled.

Gage smiled and shook his head sadly.

“Now. What about our business?”

“I’ve spoken to Mr Beeby and we’ve thought again about the Dutch paintings. We will raise the reserve to $50,000 each. I know that’s not as much as Sereno and Gint, but if we get anywhere near our estimates on the others, you’ll do much better.”

Gage spread his hands. “There you are. A little extra consideration can work wonders.”

“All the other conditions remain the same of course.”

“Well, I think we’ve got a deal.” Gage held out his hand. Henderson shook it. Gage’s grasp was cool and dry.

“I’m delighted,” Henderson said. He felt a thudding in his chest, a slackening. “Truly delighted.”

“I don’t think my son will be very pleased. Neither will Mr Sereno or Mr Gint. But they are my pictures after all.”

Henderson quickly ran through the next stages of the operation — packing, shipping, insuring.

“How soon can you sell them?”

“A month, perhaps slightly longer. We need to publicize, announce—”

“Good. Well, the sooner the better. I won’t disguise from you, Henderson, my need for the money. The Gage mansion, Beckman’s lab, Freeborn’s medical-wadding venture, and various so-called ‘sure things’ he’s gotten me involved with, Cora’s…Well, these last few months Cora hasn’t cost much — but she has to be looked after. It’s all drained away over the years.”

“I see,” Henderson said, sympathetically.

“Know how I made my first million? Parking lots. Right after World War One. I saw all these new cars on the roads and I thought guys will start driving them to work and are gonna need someplace to leave them. I had a little money saved up and I bought myself a vacant lot in down town Atlanta. Levelled it out, painted some lines on the ground. The first real parking lot in Atlanta.”

“You know, my parking lot was a kind of peculiar shape so I had to draw a plan of how to get the most number of cars into the place. Then I had my idea.” Gage paused, and adjusted his stance as he got caught up in his story.

“I took out a series of patents on parking lot design. Filed them at the patent office. You look at any old parking lot today. What do you see? The basic grid, the parallelogram, the chevron, the interlocking chevron. I had patents on them all in the early twenties. Everyone who had a parking lot had to pay me to use the design. I had three lawyers touring the Southern states serving writs. The money came flowing in. I bought more land for parking lots. Before I knew it I was the biggest parking lot operator south of the Mason-Dixon line. I made my first million, and then some more. But then in 1924 the Supreme Court declared my patents invalid and the bottom fell out of parking lot design for ever.”

“Good Lord,” Henderson said. “It seems such an obvious idea.”

“All the best ones are, son. Every time I see a parking lot today I could weep. And those multi-storey ones…What the hell. It didn’t bother me that much. I’d bought this place. I’d been to Europe and I had my art collection. In 1935 I got married.” He paused.

“I only had that one good idea which made me all my money. I thought I had good ideas later but it turned out I was only going to be allowed the one.” He laughed to himself. “Amazing how easy it goes, money. I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich, now I’m getting poor again and there’s no doubt it’s better being rich. Money can’t buy you happiness they say — and it’s true, I guess — but it can buy you one hell of a lot of other things.” He looked at Henderson. “You get me two or three million, Henderson, and I’ll see the century out happy.”

“I don’t think you need worry. The Sisleys alone will—”

“You a happy man, Henderson?”

Henderson was a little taken aback. “Well, I wasn’t. But then I thought I knew what would make me happy. But now I’m not so sure.” He rubbed his hands together and put them in his pocket. “I’m afraid that doesn’t make much sense.”

There was the sound of someone coming into the next room.

“Loomis,” came a voice. “It’s me.”

“Ah,” Gage said, looking at his watch. “A little early, but never mind.”

They both went through into the sitting room. Standing in the middle of the carpet was Monika Cardew, in a bright orange dress, tight around the hips, and white high-heeled shoes. Her hair was still in its complicated beehive.

“You remember Henderson, Monika.”

“Of course. How do you do?”

“Hello,” Henderson said, trying to look insouciant.

“We won’t be a second, Monika. Help yourself to a drink.”

He followed Henderson to the door and opened it. He smiled.

“Fine woman, Henderson. See you in church.”

Henderson shut the door. For a moment he stood incredulous. Then, remembering his good news, clasped his hands together, looked heavenward and said “Thank you, God.”

“Everything go well?” It was Cora standing in her doorway.

“Yes. I think so. We got the pictures after a bit of renegotiation. I’m afraid your friend Mr Sereno has had a wasted journey.”

“He’s not my friend.”

“I thought—”

“Wrong.”

Henderson nodded. “That was, um, Monika Cardew.”

“Yeah. She comes once a week. When T.J. goes to Tallapoosa to record his Sunday Sermonette.”

“I see.”

“It’s been going on for years. Why else do you think Daddy spends so much time with T.J.?”

“Good point.” He paused. “Well, I must get to a phone. It will have to be Luxora Beach. I can’t quite see Freeborn allowing me to communicate my news over his line.”

“Are you walking?”

“No choice. My car has disappeared into thin air.”

“Feel like some company? I’d like a walk.”

♦

Henderson and Cora went down the front steps and out into the night. It was warm but from time to time a coolish breeze would blow. Cora wore an old blue cardigan over her baggy grey T — shirt and black cotton trousers. Soon they turned a bend in the road and the lights of the house were lost to sight. They walked along in silence for a while. All about them was the melancholy sound of crickets. It was, Henderson thought, one of the earth’s most evocative of noises. Like an owl’s hoot or a gull’s screech, it summed up a whole cargo of emotions and moods. Now he felt sad and relieved, weary and grateful, strangely mature and wise. Up above him the stars shone in their confusing constellations.

Cora paced along beside him, a small intent figure, the top of her head bobbing at the level of his elbow. She lit a cigarette and he smelt the smoke. As soon as they had stepped outside she had removed her sunglasses. He looked sidelong at her now but it was too dark to make out her features. What a curious, complex person she was! he thought. He couldn’t figure her out at all. Had she really abandoned a career in medicine? Or was that another Gage mansion fantasy? What was she doing whiling away her life in her father’s house? Smoking, reading? Listening to classical music? And what did she do for sex? he suddenly wondered crudely, and then felt embarrassed by his prurience. He found himself trying to imagine her naked: the slight girl’s frame, with full breasts and a woman’s hair…oddly stimulating.

“Lovely night,” he said, derailing that train of thought. “You haven’t, um, seen Duane and Bryant by any chance?”

“Bryant’s in with Shanda watching TV, I think. I don’t know where Duane is. There was some talk of him taking your car into Hamburg.”

“Bryant told me that she and Duane wanted to get married.”

“That’s not funny, Henderson.”

“It’s not meant to be. It’s true.”

“You’re kidding.” She stopped.

“I wish I were.” They started walking again.

“It sounds very unlikely to me. I mean, God, you know what Duane is like.”

“Actually, as surprising as it may sound, I’ve yet to clap eyes on him. He’s just some sort of malevolent spirit who’s commandeered my car, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Well, when you meet him you’ll know what I’m talking about. God, marry Duane!”

They had reached Luxora Beach. Henderson didn’t know whether to be comforted or alarmed by Cora’s words. They crossed the mall and stepped over the railway tracks.

“Bar seems to be doing a roaring trade,” he observed.

“Well, it’s all we’ve got.”

They walked down a dark side-street to the lambent phone box outside the post office.

“Won’t be a second,” he said. As he put through his collect call to Beeby he looked at Cora’s small neat figure pacing around outside. She paused to light a cigarette, looked up and caught his eye. She had an oval pleasant face, he could see, now that it wasn’t disfigured by her dark lenses. She gave a mocking curtsey. He doffed an invisible cap.

Beeby answered.

“Thomas,” Henderson said. “It’s done. He agreed.”

“You’re sure?” Beeby gave a shout of exhilaration. “Henderson, you amazing man!”

“We shook hands on it ten minutes ago. I’ll get everything tidied up tomorrow, be back in the office Monday.”

“Fine. Superb. But I thought you were taking a holiday?”

“Slight change of plan.”

“Have it another time.”

“Right.”

“You’re a marvel.”

After some more praise, he hung up. He made one more call, to Melissa.

“Melissa, darling, it’s—”

“Get her out of there, you bastard, or I call the cops!”

“What? Who?”

“My baby, you bastard, that’s who! You’re meant to be looking after her. She called me today, says she wants to marry someone called Duane. I mean, Duane? I ask you. Look, Henderson, I’m warning you—”

“Calm down, Melissa, calm down, for God’s sake. There’s no need to worry.” He felt his armpits moisten. “It’s nothing, some girlish fantasy she has. A stupid crush. There’s no problem — we’ll be back on Monday.”

There was a pause. Melissa started again, this time tearful.

“But I am worried, Henderson, I am. She said she wasn’t coming home, that she was going to stay with this Duane person. She said she was very happy. It just didn’t sound like her.”

“Exactly,” he soothed. “A passing infatuation. She doesn’t know what she’s saying, really. I’ve already spoken to her. Everything will be fine and we’ll be back on Monday, I promise.”

He uttered some more consoling platitudes and hung up. He wondered how he had managed to sound so confident and reassuring — he didn’t feel it. He stepped outside the box, shaking his head.

“It’s uncanny. One problem clears up, another steps into line.”

“What is it?”

“Bloody Duane and Bryant. That was Bryant’s mother, reaching hysteria point. The stupid girl phoned home.”

“Take it easy,” Cora touched his arm. “I’ll get Daddy to talk to Duane — end of problem. He always does what Daddy tells him. Always.”

“Would you? That’d be wonderful…I don’t know what she’s playing at. She’s only fourteen, for Christ’s sake. At fourteen I still had two years to go to my first kiss.”

Cora laughed disbelievingly.

“No it’s true. We tend to be late developers in England — if we develop at all. They lock you away, you see, for the duration of your adolescence with lots of other boys.” He frowned. “It’s a long haul,” he added.

They set off back through the town to the Gage mansion.

“You know that painting, the one you call ‘Demeter and Lambe’?”

“Yeah. What about it?”

“Well, I’ve discovered it’s not Demeter and lambe. It’s Demeter and Baubo.”

“So? Is that important?”

“Not really. Vaguely interesting.” He explained what he had learned of the myth. “It seems that Demeter broke her fast and came out of mourning when Baubo flashed her…her privates at her.”

“Her privates? You mean her cunt?”

“Well, yes.”

“Say what you mean, Henderson, say what you mean.”

“Sorry. I was just wondering what it could be all about. What it all signified.”

“Demeter has had her daughter stolen, right? She goes into a kind of deep mourn. But she cheers up when Baubo shoots her a view of—”

“Precisely.”

“Well it seems pretty obvious to me what it’s all about.”

“Does it?” He looked across at her. She looked back at him. He stumbled on a stone. Cora grabbed his arm.

“Christ!”

“You OK?”

They had stopped on a deserted stretch of the road. There was no moon yet, but a clear faint light from the stars. The crickets breeped steadily about them. Henderson knew, with sudden insight, both what he was about to do and all the good and strong reasons why he shouldn’t. These crisis points had occurred before: he recognized the right path, recognized the wrong, and chose the wrong. Sufficient to have stood but free to fall. It was, he felt, an understanding periodically offered him of a certain truth about the human condition. But perhaps, he thought, as he bent down to kiss Cora, that is a little grand. Not the human condition, then: the Dores condition.

His pouting lips met mid-air. Cora had stepped back. He clumsily reached out for her but she batted his arms away.

“What are you trying to do, Henderson? God. Bug off, will you?”

“I thought—”

“I don’t want to kiss you, Henderson. What makes you think I do? Why do you have to try and kiss me?”

He was glad the night hid his knotted, boiling face.

“Jesus,” he began. “Misinterp. Look, I…Christ.”

“I like you, Henderson. You’re a nice guy. It’s a big asset. But I don’t want to make it with you.”

He swallowed. “A ghastly misunderstanding. Misreading. I got carried away. I’m terribly, terribly—”

“Relax.” Her voice was softer. “It’s no big deal. Now we know where we stand.”

He nodded wordlessly.

They set off again, walking up the road in silence. Cora gave a little chuckle and from time to time looked over at him. Fool, he said to himself, fool fool fool FOOL. They turned a corner and the house was in front of them. Lights shone from all the windows.

“Looks like everybody’s home all of a sudden.”

They walked across the park to the front steps.

“Listen, Cora,” Henderson started, dry-throated, but was interrupted by the front door being flung violently open. It was Alma-May, weeping piteously.

“Cora, baby! Cora, darlin’! Your Daddy’s dead, baby. Your Daddy’s dead!”

Chapter Thirteen

“Your father promised me — we shook hands on it — just minutes,” Henderson cleared his throat to rid his voice of the tremble, “just minutes before he…passed away — literally minutes — that Mulholland, Melhuish were to auction his pictures.”

“Fuck you,” Freeborn said. “You’re lying, you bastard. Jesus, you don’t expect me to believe this shit? You fuckin’ English dork!”

“Mr Dores,” Sereno said. “We have only your side of the story. Well, it’s not enough, I’m afraid.”

“Look, I told Cora—”

“He did,” Cora said. “That’s true.”

“So fuckin’ what? It’s just words. Ain’t no proof. I say we take Ben Sereno and Peter Gint’s offer now, ‘stead of waiting for some pissant faggot auction in New York.”

“These people,” Henderson said, with genuine anger, indicating the two gallery owners, “are total frauds. I wouldn’t trust them an inch.”

“There’s no call for such accusations,” Sereno said, quite untroubled by the slander.

“Shut yo’ fuckin’ mouth,” Freeborn said to Henderson, pointing a finger at him. “They’re my pictures now an’ I says they go to Sereno and Gint.”

“One minute, Freeborn,” Cora said. “There’s Daddy’s will. Beckman and I may have some say.”

“I’ll go along with Freeborn,” Beckman mumbled. “Just as long as I’ve got my labrotory.”

“Anyway, that will ain’t read for two fuckin’ weeks.”

“Look, do you think we might conduct this discussion without constant profanities?” Henderson said.

“Fuck yo’ ass, English shitbird!”

Freeborn, Beckman, Cora, Henderson, Sereno and Gint were in the sitting room. Across the hall in the dining room on the long table lay Loomis Gage, cold in his coffin.

Half an hour after Henderson had left him and Monika, Duane had returned to the house and had duly switched on his music. According to Beckman, who was passing through the hall, his father — wearing a dressing gown — had appeared at the top of the stairs and had bellowed furiously, “Duane, turn that damn music down!” Then he had shuddered, gone white, twitched and fallen over. Duane came running out of his room, picked Gage up and carried him back to bed. Beckman, with rare spirit of diplomacy, drove Monika Cardew home and collected the local doctor. By the time they got back, Gage was dead, and Duane — who was sitting impassively beside the body — said it had happened only moments before. Freeborn, Sereno and Gint had returned from whatever carousing or plotting they had been engaged in five minutes prior to Henderson and Cora’s fateful arrival at the front steps.

All that night there had been a hectic traffic of doctors, undertakers and the — happily innocent — T.J. Cardew. Loomis Gage’s instructions had been for a quiet family funeral. There seemed no purpose in delaying further and the service was scheduled for the next afternoon, four thirty.

And here they all were, Henderson thought, bickering about the spoils with typically wicked speed. Talk about funeral baked meats furnishing forth marriage tables…He felt a shocked sadness at Gage’s sudden demise. The family — with the exception of Alma-May — seemed to have accepted it with easy stoicism. He had liked the sprightly old man, more than he had realized. He remembered their last conversation with regret: Gage had offered him his affection but he had been too reserved or too tramelled up in securing the paintings to respond. What had he said? “Thank you very much.” He was disgusted with himself, but then that was always the way, he reflected bitterly, you always leave things too late. As for old Gage, it might have been more apt if he had died some minutes earlier in the arms of Monika Cardew—petit mart suddenly grand — rather than through the effort of shouting at a parasitic lout to turn his rock music down. But the ‘grand design’, he was aware, was very proficient when it came to faulty timing.

He felt too, along with his sadness, the bitter certainty of what he knew would be eventual defeat. Freeborn had assumed an air of swaggering authority, of the sort favoured by junior officers who have just led a successful coup d’etat. Cora alone could do nothing to counter her brother’s new sway; and the full effect of Beckman’s deluded craven apathy was more than apparent. He had been so close, he thought with a surge of harsh selfishness. If only Gage had died a few days later…

He slumped in his chair for a moment, the utter waste of all his efforts confronting him. He made one final desperate, futile try.

“Mr Gage,” he said seriously, mustering all his formality and gravitas. “Mr Sereno, Mr Gint. As far as I am concerned, Loomis Gage and I had made a binding agreement. If you proceed independently I have to warn you of potential legal—”

He leapt from his chair as Freeborn sprang across the room after him. Sereno, Gint and Beckman held him back.

“You say you had an agreement,” Sereno said coolly, once Freeborn’s lurid oaths had subdued.

“There must have been,” Cora said. “He told me. He wouldn’t have mentioned it otherwise, would he?”

“Did you witness any agreement?” Sereno asked Cora, as Freeborn was resettled in his chair.

“No.” A glum, sidelong look at Henderson.

“Did anyone witness it?” Sereno asked.

“No. But—”

“You’re welcome to take us to court, Mr Dores,” Sereno said. “But I don’t think you’ll get very far.”

They all looked at Henderson. He stood up.

“You’re making a terrible mistake,” was all he could think of to say.

♦

The afternoon sun warmed the pates of the large crowd of mourners in Luxora Beach’s small, uncrowded cemetery. Henderson stood with the Gage family who were ranked behind the Reverend T.J. Cardew. Across the grave on the other side was a group of some forty or fifty local people. The Stars and Stripes and the Stars and Bars on the post office flagpole flew at half mast. The streets were empty, shops were closed, even the neon beer signs in the bar windows had been extinguished. Henderson looked around for Bryant, but she didn’t appear to be present; neither was her beau or her future mother-in-law. Shanda had said she thought they were making their own way to the cemetery, but Alma-May had been so stricken with grief it wasn’t clear if she would have been able to stand the strain.

Henderson hadn’t felt like coming at all, but considered he owed it to old man Gage. He had been transported to the cemetery in a car containing Sereno, Gint, Cora and Shanda (Freeborn and Beckman were coming behind with the other pall-bearers) and had had to maintain the control over his disappointment and bitterness for another hour or so. Sereno had offered him his hand and said, “No hard feelings.” Against his better wishes, Henderson had shaken it.

All around him now was the sound of discreet muffled lamentations as Loomis Gage’s body was strenuously lowered into the ground. Henderson looked dry-eyed at the cross atop the wooden spire of the Baptist church. Gall and wormwood, he thought, goats and monkeys. Someone up there is having fun at my expense. He tasted ashes in his mouth.

Then, as if in a dream, he heard his name being called. He looked around with alarm to discover he was the cynosure of all eyes. T.J. Cardew was pointing at him and talking in the loud overstressed voice preferred by preachers and soap-box orators.

“…yes, Mr Henderson Dores, of London, England, was an inspiration to me. It was his words that came instantly to mind when I heard of the death of my dear friend Loomis Gage. His innocent and yet profound words. Tell them what you said, Henderson, tell our good friends, the good people gathered here today.”

Henderson took a frightened half-pace to the rear. What on earth is the man talking about? he asked himself in quickening panic. What was he meant to say? Should he fall on his knees perhaps? Dim memories of revivalist meetings capered through his mind. Play for time: cry ‘Hallelujah’?

“I’m sorry,” he said, fingers on the knot of his tie. “I don’t, um…”

“Those simple words, Henderson, when we first met,” Cardew prompted with a sad smile.

“Oh.” He racked his brains.

“What you said to me — a question — at our first meeting. Remember? The question you asked me?”

“Oh yes…Got you.”

“Go on, Henderson. Repeat your question.”

“How is Patch?”

“I’m sorry?”

“How is Patch? That’s what I said. When we met.”

“No, sir.” A slight tautening of irritation sent Cardew’s smile momentarily awry. A mutter of curiosity passed through the crowd, like a cough in an auditorium.

“I refer,” Cardew continued, “to that simple and touching inquiry you made of me. “Tell me, T.J.,” you said, “tell me, T.J. How do you explain the ‘Beach’ in Luxora Beach?” Do you remember now, Henderson?”

“I’m afraid I don’t actu—”

“And I said,” Cardew turned back to the crowd. “I said to Henderson. Henderson, I said, “Why, Henderson, I do not know, Henderson.” And friends, I didn’t know. And yet I’ve lived among you now these last eleven years. And I thought of Henderson’s simple, childlike words—“How do you explain the ‘Beach’ in Luxora Beach?” when I was brought the news of my good and dear friend Loomis’s untimely sleep in the Lord. I thought, simple Henderson here, a visitor to our town, asks an obvious, very simple question, to which I cannot reply. And I bethought to myself, T.J., I said, T.J., how little we know of the good Lord’s will, how much we take unthinkingly for granted when a simple almost foolish question can reveal—”

“Excuse me, TJ.” A tall old cadaverous man held up his trembling hand. “But everybody knows why Luxora Beach is called Luxora Beach. It’s because the early settlers done planted a grove of beech saplings they’d brung from Europe. ‘Cept they all died the first summer-the saplings that is. It should be Luxora Beeches — B, E, E, C,H,E,S.”

“Well thank you kindly, George, thank you. As I was saying, friends, Henderson’s childish, ignorant question—”

“Hold on there one second, T.J.” a plump red-faced man interjected. “George is wrong. See, time was, the Ockmulgokee river took a mighty swerve hereabouts and threw up a perfect crescent of white sand on the bank. When the first settlers arrived they found sand dollars on the beach. Now, Luxora was the name of the first mayor’s wife. The town used to be called Luxora’s Beach.”

“Well, thank you, Willard Creed. Henderson’s thoughtless, stupid question—”

“Willard Creed, that ain’t true, an’ you know it.” A thin old lady with pale blue spectacles stepped forward shakily. She addressed her remarks to Henderson. “You see what happened was that the first trading posts here were set up by the Luxora Bleach company of Montgomery, Alabama in 1835. The store had a big sign up saying ‘Luxora Bleach’ and folks kinda like the sound of—”

“THANK YOU, MY FRIENDS!” yelled Cardew over the hot debate that had sprung up. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Amen.”

♦

Henderson walked listlessly back through the town with Cora.

“I think somehow Cardew blames me,” Henderson said. “He refused to shake my hand after the service. He seemed terribly upset.”

“I think that’s the kind of funeral my father would have enjoyed.”

“Really?” He looked at her. He dropped his voice. “Listen, Cora, I haven’t had a chance…I’m terribly sorry about last night…I got carried away.”

“Eoh, don’t mention it,” she said in her English accent.

“Pride comes before a fall,” he said, as they walked past the post office. “Better get it over with, I suppose.” He paused by the phone box. “I wonder what Beeby will say?”

♦

“I want your resignation on my desk tomorrow morning,” Beeby said in a tense furious voice. “How could you let me down in this way, Henderson? How could you?” He slammed down the phone. Henderson gently replaced the receiver and stepped numbly out of the box.

“How was it?”

He screwed up his eyes. “Pretty bad. He’s just fired me.”

“My God! But it’s not your fault.”

“Oh, he’ll come round. I hope. Just a bit steamed up at the moment.”

He was surprised at his comparative equanimity — until he realized it was false and that in reality he was in mild shock. Beeby had been beside himself, mad. Very badly let down, he had said, very, very, very disappointed. Henderson had never heard him speak with such icy purpose, not like his usual self at all.

They went over to the car. Sereno and Gint were in the front, Shanda crying softly in the back. Henderson slid in beside her. Cora liked to be next to a window so she could smoke.

“A very moving service,” Gint said softly, craning round.

Henderson patted Shanda’s shoulder and said, “There, there.”

They drove back to the Gage mansion in silence. Henderson suddenly felt oddly calm. Everything had gone so wrong that, for the first time in ages, he experienced some sort of certainty about the future. When all hopes are dashed, life becomes simply a matter of getting through the hours and days, he reasoned. With no ambitions or aspirations, a banal and docile survival is all that is required. Melissa outraged, Irene estranged, the pictures gone, jobless…all the various enterprises and schemes that had dominated his waking moments for the last few weeks were no more. Time stretched ahead for him empty and unalluring.

He would have to start again, that was all, fill up the next three decades or so with new ploys and distractions. But he would lower his sights somewhat: no grandiose or pretentious notions about ‘change’ or ‘finding himself’. A return to England was the first priority: lowered sights were more at home there. He’d reclaim his Baron’s Court flat from his niece and her friends and, as for work, his pulse didn’t exactly quicken at the prospect, perhaps take up that promised commission on the Odilon Redon book…

Back at the Gage mansion he found Bryant packing her suitcases.

“Good girl,” Henderson said. “We’ll be off first thing tomorrow.”

“You will. We won’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m going away with Duane, to Kansas.”

“Kansas? Why Kansas?”

“Girls can get married at twelve there.”

“You’re joking!”

“No.”

“But that’s disgusting. Obscene.”

Bryant explained that now Loomis Gage was dead and Freeborn was the new head of the household, Duane didn’t think he could stay around much longer, as he and Freeborn hated each other. So they were going to Kansas, where they could get married without delay.

Henderson took in this new setback with the phlegmatic patience of the consistently thwarted. He reminded Bryant of her age and Duane’s, and the likely reaction of her mother.

“I’ll take care of Mom,” she said defiantly. “It’s not your responsibility. If I want to do something you can’t stop me and neither can she.”

Henderson looked at her. She had changed in the brief time they had spent together. No longer a wilful, spoilt adolescent, she had turned into a wilful, spoilt adult. He was suddenly convinced too that she and Duane had slept together. He found this very depressing.

“Bryant, seriously…Duane?”

“Do you know him?”

“No.”

“There you are.”

In actual fact, he was on the point of giving them his blessing; he felt terminal exhaustion loud at his back, hurrying near. Bryant took a soft-pack from her jeans pocket and lit a cigarette.

“If you knew Duane you’d feel different,” she said wistfully. “He’s a sweet lovely person. Very kind, very gentle.” She exhaled and looked dreamily at the smoke billow and disperse.

“Where is he, by the way?”

“He’s getting your car. And buying our tickets.”

“At last.”

He stood up. No, this was all wrong. This wasn’t going to happen. He felt a sudden urge and strong determination to thwart Bryant’s projected nuptials. Why? he wondered…To curry favour with Melissa? Possibly, although that seemed something of a lost cause. To prevent a young girl ruining her life? That sounded altruistic and noble enough but if he were honest he didn’t care that much about what Bryant did with her life. No, he reflected, he had to stop the rot, that was all — and soon. The answer had something to do with not bending, not succumbing to the endless massive flow of events and phenomena. He’d been powerless to resist the current that swept him along, however fiercely he battled.

Perhaps a passionless, disinterested attempt at deflecting someone else’s might have more success.

“Well,” he said, stirrings of an idea beginning to shift around in his brain. “It’s your life, and you can do what you want, as they say.”

Chapter Fourteen

Henderson packed his small case with his few possessions then went in search of Cora to tell her he would be leaving the next day. She was sitting in her room looking out over the wild garden. There were no lights on but a pink glow from the evening sun cast gauzy, kindly gleams over her room and its shabby furniture.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “that it’s been such a bad time for you. I hope you get your job back.”

“Who knows? Maybe it was the wrong job?” He smiled thinly. “I don’t think I’m really suited to this place.” He gave her a brief resume of his past fond ambitions, of his conviction that everything was going to change for the better once he arrived in America.

“How very sad for you,” she said without a trace of mockery. “Losing your hopes — that’s much worse than losing the paintings.”

He found her sincerity oddly disturbing. He didn’t know what to say. “What will you do?” he asked. “Go back to medical school?”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ve got plenty to do. But what about you?”

He sketched out, with flimsy enthusiasm, his return to London, the flat, the book on Odilon Redon, growing steadily more downcast as he did so.

“What about your Dr Dubrovnik?”

“I think those hopes foundered in the atrium lake.”

“Poor Henderson,” she said. “We haven’t treated you very kindly in this country, have we?”

“Could have gone better, I suppose.”

She took off her dark glasses and smiled ruefully at him. “I am sorry about the pictures. Daddy left everything to Freeborn — the pictures, the house, what’s left of the money — I don’t need to see the will. He was a firm believer in primogeniture — very English of him.”

Henderson shrugged. In the evening light her sallow skin had turned the colour of a tea rose. He wondered if he should try and kiss her again. But then he further wondered why, given his past record, he should still wish to unleash more troubles upon himself. But his reluctance wasn’t due to prudence, he realized: it was that famous reserve asserting itself again. Later, he’d regret not trying, he knew. That was the great feature about reserve: it walked hand in hand with regret; left you sadder but no wiser. You never knew what might have been.

He stood up. “I’ll be making an early start…” He held out his hand.

Cora shook it with facetious solemnity. “Jolly good luck and all that,” she said.

He smiled foolishly, looking a fool again. Perhaps he should have kissed her, after all…he felt a vast impotence, and tears of self-pity stung his eyeballs. He edged crab-like to the door, gave a resigned but reassuring grin and left her room.

♦

That evening Henderson and Bryant sat alone in the sitting room. Cora remained upstairs, Beckman was out somewhere and Duane had not returned. The absence of Duane — and necessarily the absence of his car — was something of a nuisance but otherwise the conditions suited his plan perfectly.

A red-eyed, sniffling Alma-May provided them with a supper of pulse stew and cinnamon pear bake and they watched an hour or two of TV.

“And where is Duane?” Henderson asked casually, about half past ten.

“He’ll be back,” Bryant said. “If not tonight, tomorrow morning. He said he had a few things to finish up before we left. Said they were important too — he might take some time.”

For an instant Henderson wondered if Duane himself were having second thoughts about a lifetime with Bryant, but she seemed unperturbed by his not returning. Still, he had to press on with his own scheme. He couldn’t assume Bryant would be conveniently abandoned.

Fifteen minutes later he announced he was going to make some coffee and would Bryant like some? A glass of milk, she said, and a cookie, not taking her eyes from the screen where angry hoodlums shot at each other from speeding cars.

In the kitchen, he prepared the drinks. From his pocket he removed his sleeping pills and poured the powder from three capsules into the milk.

“Henderson?”

He looked round with a guilty start. It was Shanda. She glanced over her shoulder and toppled into the centre of the kitchen on her high heels. She leant against the table and gave her belly a heave, like a man adjusting a heavy pack.

“Whacha doin’?” she said.

“Milk. For Bryant.”

“Oh.” She paused and flicked her wings of hair with the backs of her fingers. “You leaving tomorrow? Going to New York, Alma-May said.”

“That’s right.” He stirred Bryant’s milk as if that were what one always did with milk.

“Can I come with you?”

The clatter of the teaspoon against the glass rang like an alarm bell. Milk slopped onto the table.

“What?!”

“I have to get away, Henderson,” she said in a rush. “I can’t stand it here. I got to get far away. Someplace like New York. I want to go along with you.” Shanda said this fast but tonelessly, staring at the savage points of her high-heeled shoes.

“Good God, Shanda,” he blustered, appalled at this notion. “Don’t be absurd. I–I—I…I mean, of course you can’t come away with me.”

“Of course I kahn?” Her eyes widened with hope.

“Can’t, kahn’t. You kahn’t.” Desperation. “Kent. You kent come with me. You kent.”

“Please, Henderson. I hate Freeborn. I hate the trailer, I hate the fuckin’ medical wadding all over the place. I hate the smell of mouthwash. I hate the—”

“But-Jesus-what about the baby?”

“I don’t care,” she said darkly. “I’m not happy here. That’s all that matters.” She touched his arm. “Please!”

“No, Shanda. No, no, no.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. No way.” He picked up his coffee and Bryant’s spiked milk. The irony did not escape him: drugging a reluctant companion, spurning the eager.

“Just think about it, please? Think about it some more? I just have to get far away, that’s all. You’re the only person I know who lives far away.” She followed him to the door. “Don’t say anything now. I’ll talk to you in the morning.” She clattered off back to her trailer.

Thank Christ, he thought, I’ll be long gone. He felt a thrill of excitement about his planned abduction. He went through to the sitting room and told Bryant of Shanda’s request.

“She’ll do anything to get away from Freeborn.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“God, does she hate that guy.” She took a large gulp of her milk. “Mng. Is this fresh?”

“From the carton.”

“Probably yak milk or something.” She drank the rest and munched her biscuit. A few minutes later she looked at her watch. “I guess Duane’s not coming tonight. I was hoping you and him could have a talk. So you could tell Mom more about him.”

“Shame. Perhaps I’ll catch him in the morning.”

“Yeah, well I’m sacking out.” She got up. “See you.”

“Sleep well.”

♦

After she had gone he sat on in front of the television. He wrote a brief note to Cora explaining his hasty and unorthodox departure and giving her his New York address, should she ever feel inclined to visit, while he was still in the country.

After midnight, he switched out all the lights and went softly upstairs. He slipped the note beneath Cora’s door. He paused outside Gage’s rooms. One last look at the paintings. He tested the door. Locked. Freeborn had secured his property already.

He crept around the passageway. Beckman was away too. He went into Bryant’s room. She was snoring slightly, her mouth slack, drool dampening the pillow.

In his own room he made sure everything was ready for a prompt departure and lay down fully clothed on his bed to wait. For once insomnia proved a blessing; there was no danger he would fall asleep.

He felt strangely calm. The act he was about to commit did not appear so outrageous in the setting of this bizarre household—de rigueur rather, almost run-of-the-mill. Everything had gone wrong, but from somewhere he seemed to be deriving the capacity to act.

The hours moved by with their usual heel-dragging lethargy. He watched a wand of moonlight move across the wall and transform itself into the replica of a window, widening slowly, and then slowly begin to thin again. He got up for a drink of water and listened to the dark house, replete with night noises: clicks, creaks, the settings and stirrings of old timber. A platoon of burglars could move about without fear of detection.

He paced about his room in stockinged feet trying to imagine the future and confer on its prospects some dim allure. There was — surely, certainly, incontestably — room for another monograph on Odilon Redon? Time indeed for a reassessment of this exotic minor artist, with his fantasy and sentimentality. Sentiment was in vogue again, he thought he remembered someone saying, or about to be in vogue. If he could tap that vein…?

When he got back to New York, he told himself, lying again on the bed, supine, head resting on the cradle of his interlocked fingers, he was going to be quiet and dignified. People — Beeby, Melissa, Irene — could rail at and abuse him as they saw fit (he checked his watch, just after three) and he would smile sadly and keep his own counsel. He would not be provoked; he would remain grave, sober, sagacious…The star and moonlit replica of the window pane had acquired a faint peachy hue in the bottom two quadrants. A prefiguring of dawn. The light seemed to flicker and shift. He rubbed his eyes. A faint but sinuous ripple appeared, as if a muslin curtain had been stirred by a breeze.

Curious, he got up and went to the window. At the very foot of the silver garden a bonfire was burning. Quite a large fire too, he saw, gilding the trees and bushes with highlights of orange. He couldn’t hear the noise of the fire and for a moment all he registered was the scene’s strange and disturbing beauty.

Then he saw a broad-backed figure move in front of the flames: a thickset, masculine shape. Then, his eyes beginning to ache from the effort of focusing, it seemed to shimmer into a slim elfin one. He caught another glimpse of the wraith before it retired to the shadows. Henderson felt suddenly frightened. What the hell was going on? What was burning there?

He pulled on his shoes. He had to investigate, if only to see whether this worrying bonfire and its attendant might prove any obstacle to his own plans, due — he looked at his watch again — to be set in motion very shortly. He crept out of his room: all was dark, and, if not silent, as inactive as before.

He stepped carefully through the kitchen and out onto the back porch. Now he could hear the faint crackle of the flames. Allowing his eyes to become adjusted to the dark he waited some thirty seconds or so before advancing into the garden. The nail sickle of a new moon and the congregation of stars obligingly lit his way. He edged tentatively along an overgrown alley, pausing from time to time to listen to other noises, staring at the flickering flames to see if the mysterious stoker still tended his pyre. All he could hear apart from the- electric trill of the crickets was the sound of his own breathing and the endless surge and flow of the blood in his ears.

He crept closer, moving from bush to shrub, from tree trunk to tree trunk. Then he saw a tall oddly pear-shaped figure step in front of the fire. Henderson hid some twelve or fifteen feet away. The flames illuminated a heavy expressionless face. Henderson knew instantly who it was. He stepped casually out of the bushes.

“Hi there, Duane.”

Duane turned round unconcernedly: “Yeah? Who is it?”

“What’re you doing?”

Duane peered at him. “Mr Dores, yeah? Hi.” He had dark hair, parted in the middle and falling to his collar. His face had a stubborn, prognathous — but otherwise inoffensive — aspect. He was carrying a lot of extra weight, but his height and big frame compensated for the excess.

“Good to meet you, sir. An’ hey, listen. I’ll get your car tomorrow. I promise.”

“Great.” Henderson felt untypically calm. He looked at the fire. Its fuel seemed to gleam and glint strangely.

“What are you burning?”

“Oh. Mr Gage’s pictures.”

Henderson felt his adam’s apple swell to block his throat. He knelt down. Testing first with licked fingertips he slid a semi-charred stick from the fire’s edge. It had been a thin finely worked section of frame, some of the dull gold moulding was still unburnt. Using it as a poker he prodded at the contents of the fire. Frames, nothing but frames. Some intact, some broken. Empty frames with a few crisp, blackened shreds of canvas adhering to them.

“Why have you burnt them?” he asked quietly, not wanting to provoke or cause offence.

“He told me to.”

“Who?”

“Mr Gage.”

“When? Why?”

Duane put his hands in his pockets and gazed at the fire. “Well, you know, after he had his kind of attack…Beckman took Monika home and went for the Doc. I picked Mr Gage up and carried him back to his room. I felt kinda bad seein’ as how he’d been shouting at me, and all. That it was sorta on account of me, like…” Duane paused.

“He was, ah, you know, breathin’ all sorts of wheezes and gasps and he says, “Duane, you got to do one thing for me.” I says, “Sure thing, Mr Gage, what’s that?” An’ he says, “You gotta take those paintings off of the walls and burn ‘em. Burn ‘em all. And don’t let Freeborn or Cora or Beckman see you doing it. Don’t let anybody know.” So I said OK, good as done. And then he said swear. So I swore on the Bible and my mother’s head. He told me to do it as soon as I could…” Duane kicked aimlessly at a jutting frame.

“And then, I guess, he died. Though I couldn’t be sure. Then Beckman and the Doc came in.”

Henderson picked up another section of frame. Holding it to the fire he could read the careful copperplate of its inscription. “Edouard Vuillard (1886–1940).” He tossed it back on the fire. So much for the Gage collection. Smoke and cinders.

“But why did he ask you to burn them?”

“Hell, I don’t know, Mr Dores. Maybe he didn’t have any more use for them seein’ as he was dying. Maybe he didn’t want for anybody else to have them. They were his own, sorta thing. Not anyone else’s.” Duane spread his hands. “Listen, I’m just doing what he told me, you know? I swore I would.”

“I suppose so.” Henderson rubbed his forehead.

“Mr Dores?”

“Yes?”

“Did, uh, Bryant like kinda say anything to you? About us?…Not you an’ me. Me an’ Bryant. I’d sure like to talk with you—”

“Let’s talk about it in the morning,” Henderson said. He was suddenly reminded of his kidnapping plans. He had to keep Duane out of the way.

“I think I’ll get back to bed,” he said cautiously.

“I’ll just stay on here. Make sure it all burns away. Check it don’t spread, sorta thing.”

“Good idea. In fact you’d better make absolutely sure. Be very careful.”

“Don’t worry, sir. I’ll make sure.”

“See you in the morning.”

“Sure, and hey, I’ll get your car back. Sure thing. Nice talkin’ to you, Mr Dores.” Duane held out his big hand.

Henderson shook it, smiled, and walked quickly back into the house. In his room when he bent down to pick up his bag he thought he would faint. He paddled air onto his face with stiff hands. He felt as though some tiny but vicious fist were pounding him repeatedly in the chest. His legs trembled dramatically. Easy, boy. He summoned up one of Eugene Teagarden’s breathing drills, flaring his nostrils, voiding his lungs. Nymphs and shepherds. In, out. Come away. Inhale. Exhale. Cough. Come come come co-ome away.

Then, marginally composed, he crept into Bryant’s room.

Speed was crucial now. He switched on the light. Bryant slept on, mouth open, still snoring. Her clothes lay scattered all over the room. He thought of trying to gather them into her suitcase but decided there wasn’t time. Anyway, the girl had enough clothes as it was. He picked up a pair of green jeans and a yellow sweatshirt. He would simply pull them on over her pyjamas…

He knew, or rather he thought he knew from their effect on him, what the consequences of taking three sleeping capsules were. One was not comatose and could be woken. And from there one could stay awake with some prompting, could walk, even talk a bit, just like someone who — logically enough — had been roused from deep sleep. The difference was that the sensation of bleary baffled consciousness never departed, as it did from a normal sleeper, normally roused; rather it prevailed for a further twenty-four hours. Or at least that had been his experience. He remembered his own stumbling, blunt day after he had taken the pills. His head turned quicker than his eyes. His hands were composed of ten calloused thumbs. His bottom lip grew oddly heavy, irresistibly inclined to hang free from its partner. Saliva pooled in every oral cavity, causing embarrassing spillage, or else constant loud draining noises. After he had spent a couple of hours in the office like this, Beeby had ordered him home. Now Henderson was counting on Bryant being similarly inconvenienced.

“Bryant,” he hissed, and whipped the sheet back. He whipped it up again and turned away, one hand on his mouth, one across his forehead. The fist started punching again. He looked stupidly about the room. She was naked.

Bloody thoughtless bitch! he swore petulantly. He saw her pyjamas crumpled by the bed. He rubbed his hands across his face as if he were washing it. His palms were warmed by the heat of his brow and glowing cheeks. There was nothing for it. He prayed Duane was still diligently supervising the fire. He pulled down the sheet again.

He felt guilt and shame swill through his body as — despite stringent moral injunctions to the contrary — he stared at Bryant’s nude body in fascinated curiosity. The firm pointed breasts, the soft pale nipples, the skin stretched tight over the staves of her rib cage, the etiolated trace of a bikini bottom, the oddly touching, thin, vertical stripe of pubic hair…He had to wake her up. He sat beside her. But first — evil Henderson — he covered a breast for a second with a hot shivering palm.

“Bryant. Wake up.” He shook her, grabbed her wrists and hauled her into a sitting position.

“Wha…?”

He pulled the sweatshirt over her slubbed blinking face, tugged it down over those accusing breasts. Working like a harassed mother — he concertina-ed the legs of the jeans and directed her boneless feet through the holes. Tug. Up to the knees. Keep the eyes on the toenails: chipped and scarred with aubergine varnish.

“Wha’s happ…”—swallow—“…ning, Hndrson?”

“We’re going.” Tug, heave. “Lie down. Make a bridge.”

“Wha?”

“Make a bridge.” He slid a hand, palm uppermost, between the warm sheet and her warm buttocks and lifted. She held it there. Mohican crest. He pulled.

“OK.” There just remained the zip on the fly. He was disgusted to notice a straining behind his own.

“Hold it.” Zip. Soft cilia brushed the knuckle of his forefinger. Then he pushed his hand down the left sleeve of her sweatshirt, located her left wrist and pulled it through. Right sleeve. She was dressed. He licked his lips and tasted salt. A palm wiped across face came away slick and shiny.

“Hennerson. I wanna go…sleep.” Her eyeballs rolled, white in the sockets for a second.

He found some shoes, flat creased gold moccasins, and slipped them on her feet. Then he had a flash of inspiration. He tore a leaf out of his notebook and wrote in capital letters:

DEAR DUANE,

IT’S NO GOOD. I DON’T LOVE YOU ENOUGH TO GO AWAY WITH YOU. I’VE GONE BACK TO NEW YORK WITH HENDERSON. IT’S ALL OVER. SORRY.

BRYANT.

He couldn’t fret over composition or style. He just hoped Duane could read. He folded the note, wrote ‘DUANE’ on the front, and left it prominently on the pillow.

“Come on,” he said to Bryant. “We’re going to meet Duane. Don’t make a sound.”

He took her hand and led her out of the room. She came docilely. She lurched and staggered a bit and once said ‘Duane’ in a loud clear voice but they made their way down the stairs without being discovered and without too much difficulty. Henderson unbolted the front door and stepped outside onto the porch. There was a faint dawn-lightening in the sky by now, the stars were almost gone. His brick still stood in place of his car: even if the car had been there he realized he couldn’t have used it. He had to leave with maximum stealth. And he was running a little late. He was counting on Duane not visiting Bryant’s room until after breakfast.

With his case in one hand and the other on her elbow he guided Bryant down the steps. The large bulk of Freeborn’s trailer was completely dark. He felt the sweat cool on his face.

“See Duane?” Bryant mumbled.

“Shh. Yes.” Goodbye, he breathed at the Gage mansion, goodbye forever.

“Let’s go.”

“Henderson? Is that you?”

He whirled round almost dropping his case with shock and surprise.

“Whatcha doin’?” Shanda stood at the foot of the trailer steps, wearing a pale grey dressing gown.

“We’re getting out of here,” he whispered.

“I heard noises earlier. Were you movin’ around?”

“No.” It was probably Duane. “Goodbye, Shanda.”

“Hey, wait on a minute. I’m coming too.”

“No!”

“Henderson, I can just go right on back in there and wake Freeborn. I’m sure he’d like for to know what you’re all doin’ out here.”

“Oh God, Jesus H. Christ. OK. Anything. But hurry, for God’s sake.”

“I’ll be two minutes.”

He felt his sinuses thicken and clog and his eyes screw up of their own accord. It could have been a sneeze but he knew it was tears of frustration. He shook his head angrily.

“Shanda?” muttered Bryant, lolling against him.

“Yes, she’s coming too.”

Subjective hours later Shanda appeared. Henderson kept expecting the broad figure of Duane to amble round the corner of the house. Shanda wore a print dress beneath — what looked like Freeborn’s denim jacket. She carried a small nylon hold-all.

“Let’s go,” she said conspiratorially. “Hi, Bryant honey.”

They set off down the road to Luxora Beach, Bryant’s feet dragging rather at Henderson’s brisk pace, Shanda making surprisingly good progress in spite of her high heels.

“What’s wrong with her, Henderson?”

“She took a couple of sleeping pills.”

“What?”

“Pills. Sleeping bloody pills.”

“Oh. Got you.”

“Are you sure you didn’t wake Freeborn?”

“Sleepin’ like a hog. Are you sure it wasn’t you come by earlier? About three or four times?”

“No.” Duane lugging pictures no doubt.

They pressed on along the dark lane. The crickets were almost silent, only the odd solo voice joined by an early chirping bird. There was a refreshing moist coolness in the air. The dark had retreated; the light was grey and silver, the trees and bushes still and opaque. Glancing to his right he could see Shanda, taking giant unsteady strides in an effort to keep pace. Henderson slowed, out of respect for the jolting embryo.

Soon they arrived at Luxora Beach. A few lights were on; the solitary traffic light hanging above main street shone amber, amber, amber. The bar was dark and inert; no neon gleamed. They paused at the railway line. Shan-da wiped some drool from Bryant’s sweatshirt front. A distant rumble in the east turned into a monster truck which thundered needlessly through the town.

“Are you sure she’s OK?”

“Yes,” Henderson looked around. “She’s jist plum tuckered out.” Three cars stood in the otherwise deserted mall. What now?

“What now?” Shanda said. She lit a cigarette and leant against the stanchion of a railway warning sign.

“A bus, I thought. An early morning bus to Atlanta.”

“A bus? Are you kidding? Ain’t no bus in Luxora.”

Henderson smiled stupidly. Of course not. He was thinking of tiny English villages, all with local bus routes. Stoppers. What a fool…Just then he longed for an English bus, with its hard furry seats, its smell of wet coats, stale cigarette smoke and diesel. A surly fat yob of a driver with badges and a pencil behind his ear.

“OK, so we gotta hitch a ride,” Shanda said.

They crossed tracks and waited. An odd forlorn threesome, Henderson thought. Shanda solicitously checked on Bryant, who was swaying about and mumbling that she was tired.

“You want a smoke, honey?”

“No. She can’t smoke.”

“OK.” Shanda stretched back, both hands supporting her spine. “I’m glad I could come along, Henderson,” she said sincerely. “I appreciate it.”

“Mmm.”

“No I mean it. I couldn’t have stood it there any more, with Loomis gone and all. Loomis was the only person could keep Freeborn down.” She shook her head. “You just get me to New York. Should be far enough away.” She flicked her cigarette out into the road. It was getting distinctly lighter. Behind the church somewhere Henderson heard a car start up. Some upstairs windows shone yellow. A door slammed. A banal cock crowed. The flags on the post office flagpole still hung at half mast for Loomis Gage.

Henderson stood on the dust verge and looked down the grey road. He felt his body was about to petrify from the tension. A smoky lemon stripe in the east heralded the approach of the sun. For an instant he had a sensation of the rushing massive rotation of the earth. It was ten o’clock in the morning in England, the sun was shining on the Atlantic, it was the wee small hours in Los Angeles. A mile or so away the efforts and genius of some dead European artists had been reduced to ashes by a dim, innocent galoot, and their owner was starting the long process of decomposition in a box beneath the earth up on that hill. And meanwhile he, Henderson Dores, stood by the side of a side road in the hinterlands of America, with his enemy’s pregnant wife and a drugged abducted girl, trying to hitch a ride to New York. What did it all add up to, he asked himself. Where was the sense?

He heard the sound of a car, then saw its headlights.

“A car,” he said.

Shanda advanced two steps into the road. Henderson shook Bryant awake. She had been leaning against him, his elbow locked beneath her armpit. A looping filament of saliva glimmered between his jacket shoulder and her mouth, then she brushed it apart with a flopping wave of her hand.

Shanda stuck out her thumb and her pregnant belly. The car turned out to be a pickup. It stopped. The driver was a young man in a peaked cap.

“Mornin’,” he said. “Where you all goin’?”

Shanda explained. Henderson couldn’t hear what she said but stood behind her with a friendly grin on his face. The door was opened and Shanda and Bryant got in.

“You get in back, darlin’,” Shanda said. Darlin’? He obeyed. The back of the pickup was empty apart from a spade and two piles of sacks in the corners. Henderson sat down on one of them.

“Y’all OK back there?”

“Yes,” he said faintly, and the pickup moved off with a lurch. The other pile of sacks stirred, sat up and panted. A black dog, of indeterminate breed. A little unsteadily, like a man on a heaving deck, it advanced across the ribbed floor of the truck, its claws scratching on the pressed steel.

“Hello, boy,” Henderson said wearily. A bit of rope led from the dog’s collar to an attachment on the truck side. The dog sniffed at Henderson’s knee and gave it a cursory lick. It took a step or two forward and nosed at his groin. What is it about me and dogs, he thought. The dog was intrigued and snuffled more enthusiastically, its tail beating gently against the tin cab back.

Henderson crossed his legs and turned away.

“Shoo,”he said. “Clear off.”

The dog sat down and looked patiently at him for the rest of the journey.

♦

At Atlanta airport, where the obliging driver had taken them, Henderson climbed stiffly out of the back and retrieved his suitcase. Bryant had been asleep the whole journey and had to be woken up again. The driver helped Shanda out and shook Henderson by the hand.

“Thank you very much,” Henderson said.

“Good luck, sir,” the driver said seriously. He was a young chap with, Henderson was surprised to notice, no incisors in his top row of teeth.

“God bless you, sir. God bless you.”

“Thanks. Don’t mention it.”

When he’d gone Henderson asked Shanda what she had said to him.

“I said we was married, I was pregnant and Bryant was my little sister who was, you know, not quite right, you know, in the head? And that you had said she could come and live with us. He thought that was real kind. Then I said our car had broke down and we had to catch a plane.”

Henderson looked suspiciously at Shanda. In the clarity of the early morning sunlight she seemed obnoxiously fresh. Her dyed blond hair gleamed and was quite fetch-ingly tousled if one ignored the inch of dark brown root that was exposed here and there. Her large milky breasts and swollen belly strained at the pattern of her dress. She had rolled up the too-long sleeves of Freeborn’s jacket and he noticed for the first time a little tattoo on her right forearm, but he couldn’t make out what it was.

Bryant stood for a moment unsupported, blinking like an idiot, her head wobbling, as if unwilling to rest on the slim pedestal of her neck.

“Duane now,” she said.

“Let’s get inside,” Henderson said. “I’ll get the tickets.”

He couldn’t get on the first four flights out of Atlanta, but eventually found them three seats together on a plane leaving at half past ten. They left Bryant sleeping soundly on a velveteen bench and went in search of a coffee shop. There, Henderson drank some orange juice but pushed away his plate of fried eggs and bacon garnished with a scone and jam. Shanda tackled hers with speed and efficiency.

“What are you meant to do with that?” Henderson asked, pointing at the scone. “I’ve always wondered.”

“The biscuit?”

“The scone.”

“We call it a biscuit. Usually I just cut it in half and leave it.”

He smiled encouragingly and watched her eat. Now he thought about it he should in fact be very angry with Shanda for foisting herself on him in this way, but he was too tired to get indignant. There would be time enough to sort things out when he got to New York. He rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours. So what else was new? He pressed hard, with all ten fingers, on his zygomatic arch, closing his eyes. They would have discovered his absence now at the Gage mansion. Would Duane have realized his betrothed had been spirited away? And would Freeborn, Sereno and Gint have learned of the destruction of the paintings? He supposed he should have been experiencing some sense of outrage but nothing was forthcoming. The usual priorities seemed absurd today.

Shanda lit a cigarette.

“Y’all right?” she asked, blowing a gust of smoke into the air.

“I don’t know,” he said seriously. “I really don’t know.”

♦

Henderson, Shanda and Bryant made their way through the fabulous modernism of Atlanta airport. They boarded a driverless subterranean train in which a robotic disembodied voice told them where to stand and where to alight. At the robot’s first words, Shanda gave a squeal of pleasure and Bryant said “Duane?” They zipped along beneath the airport and disembarked at the correct place. Now the air was filled with a soft maternal voice breathing information about the various modes of transport available within the terminal complex. Henderson felt suddenly safe and secure, until he realized that was precisely the effect aimed for and so became prickly and irritated.

They walked for — it seemed — a good mile down the plush spur of a terminal concourse until they found their departure lounge, full of immaculate businessmen.

Their tickets had been issued in the names of Mr, Mrs and Miss Dores. Bryant fell asleep whenever she sat down and woke up obediently whenever they had to move. An attentive, concerned stewardess allowed the Dores family to board the plane first because of Shanda’s condition. As he ushered a mumbling Bryant—“Duane, Duane,”—down the aisle, one of the cabin staff asked if she were all right.

“She’s retarded,” Henderson said with a sad smile. “She thinks she’s in a train.”

Sympathy and prompt service cocooned them from then on. Henderson asked Shanda to conceal her tattoo (an intertwining of the letters F, G and S, M set in a garland of leaves and flowerlets) as he thought it didn’t chime with the aura of sacrifice and endurance that enshrouded them. They sat down and then had to move when Shanda requested a seat in the smoking section (they lost some moral ground there) but eventually they were established.

The plane filled up with large clean businessmen, slinging, briefcases in the overhead racks, breaking open newspapers, folding expensive trenchcoats with reverential care. Then two dozen enormous young men with very thick necks and wearing identical blazers swayed down the aisle to calls of welcome and good luck from many of the passengers. (A circus act, Henderson thought? A eugenics experiment?) Shanda excitedly told him who they were and what they were doing — the Ranchers gunning for the Cowpokes or something — but he assumed he had misheard.

And then the engines started and the plane moved away from its ramp and taxied out to the runway. Soft bells pinged, calm voices ran through crisis procedures and Shanda tried to order a screwdriver. As the engine noise increased and the plane began to rush down the runway she reached across the dozing Bryant and took his hand.

“I hate flan,” she said.

So did he, he suddenly realized, but hadn’t got round to thinking about it.

Damp palm stuck to damp palm. Shanda shut her eyes and crossed herself. A bubble of saliva popped on Bryant’s lips and Henderson looked past Shanda’s contorted face out of the window. He saw the wonderful airport and the parked planes, then the nose lifted, the plane left the ground and angled up into the sky. In the glass oval he glimpsed spreading suburbs, a new factory, tall glass buildings and a lot of trees. And he left the South and his troubles behind.