The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

Tessa Hadley
The Card Trick

from The New Yorker

IT WAS 1974: not a good year, clothes-wise, if you were an eighteen-year-old girl, tall and overweight, with thick, curling hair and glasses. Gina liked best to wear a duffel coat, underneath which she imagined she hid herself. But this was summer, and she was on holiday, and she’d had reluctantly to leave the duffel coat at home. The fashion was for smocks and long skirts with deep frills and cotton prints, so she mostly wore a Laura Ashley dress in a blue sprigged cotton that was meant to look as if it had been faded by long-ago haymaking in meadows of wildflowers; its buttons gaped open across her bust and it was tight around her hips and its effect on her, she was quite sure, was not rustic but hulking and vaguely penitentiary. Sometimes as she walked, bitter tears stung her eyes at the idea of the sheer affront of her ugliness forcing itself upon the successive layers of the air. At other times, she was more hopeful.

Today, at least, the sun was not shining. When it shone-and it had shone every day since she arrived-it made things worse; it seemed such an insult to nature and beauty not to want to peel off all one's clothes and run around on the beach, not to be happy. But now the sky was a consoling soft gray, which dissolved from time to time into warm rain, and everybody was more or less muffled under raincoats and umbrellas. Because it was raining, Mamie had driven inland with Gina from the house on the coast, to visit Wing Lodge.

Mamie was her mothers friend, and Gina was staying with her and her family for a fortnight; although to call her a friend did not quite explain the relationship, since Mamie was also a client, for whom Gina's mother made clothes. Mamie was small and very pretty, with sloping shoulders and ash-blond hair and a face that was always screwing up with laughter. Her tan was the kind you can get only in the South of France. (She had a house there, too.) Her clothes seemed effortless-today, for example, a Liberty print blouse under a cream linen pinafore-but Gina had seen some of these things in the making and knew how much effort actually went into them: the serious scrutiny of pinned-up hemlines in front of the mirror, Mamie bringing things back ruefully, apologetically, after a week or two, with a nagging suspicion that a sleeve had been set in too high, or an inspiration that the seams would look wonderful with two rows of overstitching.

She was being very kind-very encouraging-to Gina. She had not made any mention of the Laura Ashley dress or of the barrette that had seemed an appealing idea when Gina brushed her hair that morning but was now bobbing against her cheek in a way that suggested it had slid to an altogether wrong and ridiculous place.

They stopped off on their way to Wing Lodge at a tearoom by the side of the country road; they were the only customers in a small room crowded with unbalanced little chairs and glass-topped wicker tables, smelling of damp and cake.

It’ll probably be instant coffee, Mamie whispered with conspiratorial amusement. (Gina only ever had instant at home.) But I don’t care. Do you? Or we could always risk the tea. And you’ve got to have a Danish pastry or something, to keep you going.

Complicatedly, Mamie was making reference to the fact that Gina clearly oughtn’t to be eating pastries of any kind; but her diet, which was perpetual during this period of her life, alternating drearily between punishing obedience and frantic transgression, had been thrown into such chaos since she’d been staying at Mamie’s-on the one hand, she was too shy to refuse the food that was pressed upon her; on the other, she didn’t dare to raid the fridge or the cupboards in between meals-that she didn’t even know whether she was being good or not. She took advantage of the lack of clarity to agree to the pastry.

Gina had just had her A-level results-three As-and she was prepar- ing for her Cambridge entrance examinations in November. Mamie professed an exaggerated awe of her cleverness.

You really make me so ashamed, she said, when she had finished charming the gray-haired waitress and giving very exact instructions as to how she liked her tea (“pathetically weak, no milk, just pour it the very instant the waters on the leaves, I’m so sorry to be such a frightful nuisance”). We’re such duffers in my family. We’ve hardly got an O level between us- and that's after spending an absolute fortune on the children's education. Josh simply refused to go back to Bedales to do retakes. Becky left the day she was sixteen. She never even sat any exams. How I’d love for one of them to have your brains.

I’m not that special, Gina lied, her voice muffled through damp pastry flakes.

Somewhere in the deepest recesses of herself, Gina pitied Mamie and her children, precisely along the lines that Mamie suggested. The children- three older boys and a girl Gina's age-certainly weren’t clever in the way she was. She’d never seen them reading a book; they hadn’t known the other day at breakfast who Walter Gropius was; and she was sure that they were sublimely ignorant about all the things that seemed to her ultimately to matter in the world: literature and painting and the history of ideas. But that arrogant intellectual reflex felt so remotely subterranean as to be almost inconsequential, compared with her willingness to acknowledge every advantage that Becky and Josh and Tom and Gabriel had on the surface in the here and now, in honor and envy of which she was horribly ready to abase herself. And Mamie was surely disingenuous in her praise of Gina's brains. She was just being kind. She wouldn’t have exchanged brains, really, for the easy personable charm that all her children had, not if it meant that they’d have awkward bodies and thick glasses.

And, even if they weren’t clever, Mamie's children didn’t actually say stupid things, as Gina did, tongue-tied with bookish awkwardness. On the contrary, they were funny and chatty and informed about practical matters. They confessed to being indifferent to politics but were sincerely charming and generous with the woman who came to clean and cook and iron for them every day, whereas Gina didn’t know how to talk to her. And then they were masters of arts that Gina knew she would never be competent in, no matter how hard she tried: tennis, for example, and motorcycling, and snorkeling. She couldn’t even ride a push-bike.

Gabriel, the oldest, had a darkroom and developed his own photographs; Becky posed for him, unembarrassedly arranging her face to look its best whenever called upon. If Gabriel turned the camera on Gina, she swiveled away, protesting and sulking, so he soon stopped trying. The house was filled with vivid black-and-white pictures, in which the lives of this family seemed poignant and enchanting, even beyond what you could grasp in ordinary everyday contact with them. Gina studied the photographs with the same yearning she felt over the fashion pictures in magazines: trying to understand how one might possess oneself with such certainty, and know so confidently how to live.

They were all beautiful. Gabriel and Becky looked like Mamie, small with pretty faces, turned-up noses, and huge eyes. The others looked like their father, who was in the South of France with friends. (A separation that seemed to Gina, whose parents did everything together, both strange and significant: her mother had hinted, out of confidences accorded while she was crawling around a hemline with her mouth full of pins, that all was not well in Mamie's marriage. Still, Dickie's absence was a great relief. Gina had seen him only once or twice, when he came to pick up Mamie after a fitting, but it had been enough to know that he was terrifying, tall and tanned and savagely impatient.) Tom and Josh-Josh was the nearest boy to Gina in age-were tall, with slim long bodies, fine skin taut over light strong bones, sensitive-knuckled hands and feet. She had got used to their near-nakedness on the beach in swimming trunks, or bare-chested in cutoff jeans. It was 1974: they wore their sun-bleached hair long, and they walked barefoot everywhere.

The spare bedroom Gina was staying in was on the ground floor of the house, and it opened onto the hall, whose dark parquet was always dusted with a layer of fine sand blown in from the beach. She spent a lot of time in her room-“working,” she told them-and sometimes, when she peeped out of her door to see if the coast was clear to visit the bathroom, she saw the prints of the boys’ bare feet in the sand, crossing the hall to the kitchen or the stairs. For some reason, this moved her, and her heart clenched in an excitement more breathlessly sexual than if she’d seen the boys themselves.

The visit to Wing Lodge had been part of the pretext for Gina's coming to visit Mamie in the first place. It was the house where John Morrison, her favorite novelist, had lived, and she had desperately wanted to make a pil- grimage there; but she was beginning to wish that she could have come on her own. She was burdened by her sense of Mamies kindness: Mamie had clearly never read any of Morrison's books, and she could have no good reason, surely, to want to see his house. Gina worried over the things that Mamie would probably rather have done, and in more congenial company.

But when they arrived in the little town and found the house on one of its oldest streets, behind the church, a more complex unease began to dawn on Gina. Wing Lodge stood back behind a walled front garden, which even in the rain was very lovely: pale roses bowed and dripping with water, a crumbling sundial, a path of old paving stones set into the grass, leading to a bench under a gnarled apple tree.

Isn’t it just charming? Mamie exclaimed, pausing on the porch to shake off the umbrella she had gallantly insisted on sharing with Gina, so that they were now both rather wet. This is such a treat. Thank you so much for bringing me here. I can’t imagine why we’ve never been before.

Gina had thought that at last, at Wing Lodge, she would be on home ground. She knew so much about John Morrison, a friend of Conrad and Ford, given a complimentary mention by Henry James in “The New Novel.” She had written the long essay for her English A level on his use of complex time schemes. She loved the spare texture of his difficult, sad books, and felt that she was exceptionally equipped to understand them. Faced with his most obscure passages (he wasn’t elaborate like James but compressed and allusive), she trusted herself to intuit his meaning, even if she couldn’t quite disentangle it.

But as she followed Mamie through the front door into the low-ceilinged hall she realized that she had miscalculated. She was not entering one of Morrison's books, where she could feel confident; she was entering his house, where she might not. Two middle-aged women sat at a table on which leaflets and a cash box were arranged; wood paneling polished to a glow as deep and savory as horse chestnuts reflected the yellow light from a couple of table lamps; tall vases of flowers stood against the wall on the uneven flagstone floor. Gina stepped flinchingly around a Persian rug that opened like a well of color at her feet.

This is Gina, Mamie told the women as she got out her purse to pay. She's the daughter of a very gifted and creative friend of mine. We’re here today because she loves John Morrison's books so much and has written her A-level essay about him. She's very, very bright.

The women's smiles were coldly unenthusiastic. They advised the visitors to start in the room on the right and make their way around to the study, which was arranged as it had been in the writers lifetime. If they went upstairs at the end of the tour, they would find an exhibition of editions of the works. Which might interest you, one of them suggested skeptically.

The house was furnished-sparely, exquisitely-with a mixture of antiques and curiosities and modern things: a venerably worn Indian tapestry thrown across an old chaise longue, an elm Art Deco rocking chair, drawings by Wyndham Lewis and Gaudier-Brzeska. It was dark everywhere, and the lamps were on in the middle of the day: the low, deeply recessed casement windows were running with rain and plastered with wet leaves. Mamie moved through it all with a kind of hushed rapture, absorbing the aura of the great man, despite the fact that she had no idea what he was great for.

So sweet! she whispered emphatically. What a darling place. What treasures.

Gina thought perplexedly of the letters Morrison had written from Wing Lodge: full of damp walls and leaking roofs and smoking chimneys and penetrating cold, as well as self-deprecating confessions of untidiness and neglect. She hadn’t imagined that his house would be like this. How could he have afforded all these possessions? The rooms were like Mamie’s: glossy with value and distinction, a kind of patina of initiated good taste.

Do they live here? she asked. Those ladies?

Oh, I should think so, wouldn’t you? It feels very much like a home, not a museum. The widow stayed on here, apparently, until a few years ago. So I suppose they’ve just kept a few of the rooms as she left them. It's only open a couple of afternoons a week.

There was a photograph of Anne, the American wife and widow, on the plain writing table in the study: young, with a Katherine Mansfield fringe and bobbed hair and a necklace of beads the size of cherries. Morrison had been a world wanderer, with a Scottish father and a Norwegian mother. (You could feel the influence of a certain Scandinavian neurasthenia in his novels.) He had settled down at last, here in the South of England, written his best books here, and died here, in his fifties, in 1942.

Can’t you just imagine being able to write at this desk? Mamie said encouragingly.

Gina looked at her dumbly across the charming room, with its waxed floor slanting quaintly to the window, unable to say how unlikely it seemed to her at this moment that anyone could ever have written anything worth reading in a house like this. She thought of art as a sort of concealed ferocity, like the fox hidden under the Spartan boy's shirt. It seemed to her that any authentic utterance would be stifled by the loveliness, the serene self-completeness of this room. What could one do here but self-congratulate: write cookery books, perhaps, or nostalgic reminiscences?

At the same time, she was filled with doubt, in case she was deluded, in case it turned out that art was a closed club after all, one that she would never be able to enter, she who had never owned one thing as beautiful as the least object here.

Sometimes Gina emerged victorious from her struggle with Mamies pressing hospitalities, and succeeded in staying at home while everyone else went to the beach. (The sea was only a few minutes’ walk across the dunes from the front door, but the beach they liked best for swimming and surfing was a short drive away.) She heard and winced at the little crack of impatience in Mamie's voice-“I suppose it's awfully impressive, to want to have your head buried in a book all day”-but that was worth incurring in exchange for the delicious freedom of having the house to herself for hours on end.

She didn’t really spend all that time studying. She drifted from her books to the windows to the kitchen cupboards, eating whatever Mamie had left for her almost at once, and then spooning things out of expensive jars from the delicatessen (only enough so that no one could ever tell) and ferreting out the forgotten ends of packets of cakes and biscuits and nuts. She made herself comfortable with her bare legs up over the back of the collapsed chintz sofa, hanging her head down to the floor to read Becky's copies of Honey and 19. In fact, she took possession of the lovely weather-washed old house with a lordly offhandedness that she never felt when the others were around. She ran herself copious baths perfumed with borrowed Badedas in the old claw-foot tub with its thundering taps. She tried on Mamie's lipstick and Becky's clothes. She browsed through the boys’ bedrooms with their drawn curtains and heaps of sandy beach gear and frowsy smells of socks; she experimented with their cigarettes and once, for a dizzying hour, lost herself over a magazine of stunningly explicit sex- ual photographs she found stuffed down between one bed and the wall. (She didn’t know whose bed it was, and the next time she felt for the magazine it was gone.) She sat in a deck chair on the sagging picturesque veranda whose wood had been rainwashed to a silvered gray, drinking Campari in a cocktail glass with a cherry from a jar and a dusty paper umbrella she’d found in a drawer; afterward, she cleaned her teeth frantically and chewed what she hoped were herbs from the garden so that no one would smell alcohol on her breath.

Once, after about an hour of this kind of desultory occupation, she happened to glance up through the open French windows from her dangling position on the sofa and was smitten with horror: she had been sure that they had all gone to the beach, but there was Tom, stripped to the waist, cutting the meadow of long grass behind the house with a scythe, working absorbedly and steadily with his back to her. Tom was particularly frightening: moody like his father, skeptical of the family charm, dissenting and difficult. Actually, he was the one whom Gina chose most often for her fantasies, precisely because he was difficult; she imagined herself distracting, astonishing, taming him.

Appalled to think what he might have seen of her rake's progress around his mother's house, she scuttled to her bedroom, where she spent the rest of the long day in what amounted to a state of agonized siege, not knowing whether he knew she was there, paralyzed with self-consciousness, avoiding crossing in front of her own window, unable to bring herself to venture out of her room even when she was starving or desperate to use the loo. Tom came inside-perhaps for lunch, or perhaps because he’d finished scything-and played his Derek and the Dominoes album loudly, as though he believed he had the house to himself. Gina lay curled in a fetal position on the bed, worrying that he might open the door and find her, but worrying, too, that if he didn’t find her, and then learned that they had shared the house for the whole afternoon without her even once appearing, he might think her-whom he barely noticed most of the time- insane, grotesque.

She wept silently into her pillow, wishing he’d leave, and at the same time mourning this opportunity slipping away, this afternoon alone in the house with him, which was, after all, the very stuff of her indefatigable invention. They might have conversed intelligently over coffee on the veranda; she might have accepted one of his cigarettes and smoked it with offhand sophistication; he, surprised at her thoughtfulness and quiet insight, might have held out his hand on impulse and led her off on a walk down among the dunes. And so on, and so on, until the crashing, inevitable, too-much-imagined end.

When Gina was at her unhappiest during that long fortnight, she wanted to blame her mother, and for short passionate private sessions she allowed herself to do so. Her mother had been so keen on her accepting Mamie's invitation, ostensibly because she was worried that Gina was studying too hard but really because of a surreptitious hope, which had never been put into words, though Gina was perfectly well aware of it, that Gina might get on with Mamie's boys. “Get on with”: it wouldn’t have been, not for her mother, any more focused than that, a vague but picturesque idea of friendly comradeship, the boys coming, through daily unbuttoned summertime contact, to appreciate Gina's “character,” as her mother optimistically conceived of it. Boys, her mother obviously thought, would be good for Gina. Apart from anything else, they might help to make her happy. But it would be disingenuous to make her mother solely responsible: when the holiday had been suggested, Gina had not refused. And this could only have been because she, too, had held out hopes, less innocent ones even, which appeared, in the event-as she should have known they would-to have been grotesquely, insanely, and characteristically misplaced.

There came another day of rain. At the end of a long afternoon of Monopoly and a fry-up supper, Mamie was suddenly visibly afflicted with panic like a trapped bird, shut up alone with her charm and a brood of disconsolate young ones, in the after-aroma of sausages and chips. When she proposed a surprise visit to friends who had a place twenty miles along the coast, she hardly paused to press Gina to join her, or Josh, either, who was building card houses on the table and said he didn’t want to go. She and Becky and Tom and Gabriel set off with a couple of bottles of wine, some dripping flowers from the garden, and a palpable air of escape in their voices as they called back instructions and cautions, Tom shaking the car keys out of his mother's laughing reach, refusing to allow that she could manage his old car, which needed double declutching.

Gina was going home the next day. Mamie would run her into town to catch the train. Probably that was the explanation for the comfortable flatness she felt now; it didn’t even occur to her to mind that Josh had stayed. She knew with a lack of fuss that it had nothing to do with her; he had stayed because he didn’t feel sociable and because he had become idly fixated on a difficulty he was having with the card houses. The sound of the car driving away dissolved into the soft rustle of the rain, beneath which, if she pushed her hair back behind her ears to listen, she could also hear the waves, undoing and repairing the gravel of the beach. When Gina finished putting away the dishes, she sat down opposite Josh, watching him prop cards together with concentrating fingers; she was careful not to knock the table or even to breathe too hard. They talked, speculating seriously about why it was that he couldn’t make a tower with a six-point base; he had built one right up to its peak from a three- and a four- and a five-point base, but for hours he had been trying and failing to do a six. Josh had a curtain of hair and a loose, full lower lip that made his grin shy and somehow qualified. There was silky fair beard growth on his chin. He was gentler than his brothers, and had a slight lisp.

There was a second pack of cards on the table, rejected for building towers because the corners were too soft. Gina picked it up and fiddled with it on her lap without Josh's noticing. The six-base tower came down with a shout of frustration, and Josh washed his hands in the mess of cards.

D’you want me to show you a card trick? Gina asked.

O.K., he said. Anything. Just don’t let me begin another one of these.

Actually, I’m not going to do it, she said. You are. Put those cards out of the way. We’ll use this older pack. It feels more sympathetic.

He was amiable, obliging, clearing the table, his eyes on her now, watching to see what she could do.

I’m going to give you power, she said. I’m going to make you able to feel what the cards are, without looking at them. You’re going to sort them into red and black. It's not even something I can do myself. Look.

She pretended to guess, frowning and hesitating, dealing the top few cards facedown into two piles. I don’t know. Black, red; black, black, black; red, red. Something like that. Only I don’t have this magic. I’ll turn them over. See? All wrong. But you’re going to have this power. I’m going to give it to you. Give me your hands.

He put his two long brown hands palm down on the table. She covered them with her own and closed her eyes, squeezing slightly against his bony knuckles, feeling under the ball of her thumb a hangnail loose against the cuticle of his. Really, something seemed to transfer between them.

There, she said briskly, Now you’ve got the power. Now you’re going to sort these cards into black and red, facedown, without looking. Black in this pile, red in this. Take your time. Try to truly feel it. Concentrate.

Obediently, he began to deal the cards into two piles, doing it with hesitating, wincing puzzlement, like someone led blindfolded and expecting obstacles, laughing doubtingly and checking with her.

I have no idea what I’m doing here.

No, you have. You really have. Trust it.

He gained confidence, shrugged, went faster: black, red, black, black, red, black, red, red, red… Halfway through, she asked him to change it around: red cards on the right pile now, and black cards on the left. Readjust. Don’t lose it. It's really just to keep you concentrating.

Then, when he’d put down his last card and looked at her expectantly, she swept up the two piles and turned one over in front of his eyes. So you see, if it's worked, this one should run from red to black… Look, there you are!

She spread the second pile, reversing it so that it seemed to run the other way. And, this one here, from black to red…

Oh, no. No! That's just too weird. That's really weird, man. How did you do that? Jesus! He laughed in delighted bafflement, looking from the cards up to her face and back again.

She was laughing, too, hugging her secret. Do you want me to do it again, see if you can guess? Only, hang on a sec, I need the loo.

He didn’t notice that she took the second pack of cards with her to the bathroom to prepare them. (“Shall we use these newer ones, see if it works with them?”) Gina couldn’t quite believe that he didn’t see what she was doing. She had worked it out for herself the first time the trick was done on her.

It's just spooky, he said in awe, shaking his head. It doesn’t make sense. There's just no way I could be getting these right. You must be making me deal them right, somehow.

No, it's you, it's you, she insisted. I can’t do it. It's only you.

He wouldn’t let her tell him how it was done, although she was longing to explain. He was right: it was better to hold off the climactic revelation with its aftermath of gray; the power of the mystery he couldn’t break was a warm pleasure, satisfying and sensual between them. They ran their eyes over each others face in intimate connection, smiling. He brimmed with puzzlement, and she was replete with knowledge.

As they leaned toward each other across the table, she could smell his sweat and the nut-oil odor of his skin, which had been soaking up the sun all summer. She could suddenly imagine with vivid realism, as she hadn’t been able to do in all her daydreams, what it would be like to be pressed up against him, existing in the orbit of that hot decent embrace. She could imagine how the male taste and smell of him could become known to her and comfortable, as familiar as her own. In fact, leapfrogging audaciously over all the things that hadn’t happened between her and Josh, she found she was actually even imagining herself bored and constrained in his arms, hunting around for something more, pushing away from him. She was shocked at this intimation that the impossible dream of bliss might conceivably turn out, in some later phase of existence, not to be enough for her.

The moment slipped away. After the third time, they gave up the trick and played Mastermind and battleships, exchanging talk in low, lax, friendly voices. The others returned, crashing through the garden, tipsily exalted, looking around at their home, surprised that it seemed not to have changed in their absence. When Gina climbed between the sheets in her pajamas, she found the pleasure of the evening persisting, a soft surprising parcel under her lungs. She examined it, and thought that it was probably happiness, a small preparatory portion of the great ecstasies she supposed life must have in store for her.

It was twenty-five years before she visited Wing Lodge again.

This time she was alone. She remembered that she had been there before, with Mamie, although she couldn’t quite imagine why she had been staying with her; there had never been any real intimacy between their families. Dickie and Mamie had divorced not long afterward, and Mamie had died recently. One of the boys had drowned, years ago-she couldn’t remember which. The visit now was uncharacteristic of Gina. She never went to stately homes or birthplaces; in fact, she gave ironic lectures at her university on the enthusiasm of the masses for traipsing humbly and dotingly around the houses where they would most likely-as recently as sixty years ago-have been exploited as estate hands or scullery maids. But then this was an unsettled time in her life, and she was doing uncharacteristic things. She had been divorced for five years, and now her new lover wanted to move in with her. On impulse, leaving her son with friends for the weekend, she had booked herself into a hotel and come down to this little town to be alone, to think.

She hadn’t imagined that she would actually go inside Wing Lodge, although she had been aware, of course, that the town she had chosen to think in was the one where John Morrison, who remained her passion, had spent his last years. She had had a quixotic idea, perhaps, that by moving around in the streets he must have moved around in she might attain something of his clarity; needless to say, the streets remained just streets, full of cars and tourists, and, for someone used to London, there were disconcertingly few of them to explore. She had, with determined austerity, not brought any books away with her, imagining that not being able to read would concentrate her mind. But the habit of years was too strong to break overnight, and so, over drawn-out coffees in the wood-paneled tearoom, where the waitresses still wore white frilled aprons, she found herself reading the menu over and over, and then the ancient injunction against asking for credit in red calligraphy above the till, and then the discarded sports pages of a newspaper, rather than dwelling at last and with a new penetration on the purpose and shape of her life.

So it was in flight from herself, almost, and also because there simply wasn’t that much else to do, that she eventually joined the little party of visitors being taken around Wing Lodge. She was a middle-aged woman now, tall and statuesque in a tan linen skirt and jacket, with a mass of thick dark curls in which new gray hairs were sprouting with a coarse energy that made her suspect that age was going to impose itself differently than she had envisioned: less entropy, more vigorous takeover. There were copies of her book about Morrison's novels in the little bookshop upstairs, but she wasn’t going to own up to that; she followed the guide obediently about and listened with amusement to the way the wonderful works abounding in disruptive energy became, in the retelling, so much sad sawdust, so much argument, as Pound put it, for old lavender.

She wondered, too, whether the place was really arranged as it had been in Morrison's time. He and his wife had never had much money, even in the years of his critical success; and the couple was reported to have been indifferent to creature comforts. Friends had complained that although the conversation was excellent you never got a decent meal or a good nights sleep at Wing Lodge. Gina recognized one or two drawings that she knew Morrison had possessed, and a few things that he might have brought back from the East. But the rest must have come after he died, when his wife had inherited money from her family in America; it was then, perhaps, that she had turned Wing Lodge into this tasteful little nest. No doubt the frail, ladylike guide and her frail, ladylike, possibly lesbian companion, who presumably lived here quietly together on the days when they were not intruded upon by a curious public, had also added their bit of polish to the deep old charm.

In the study, where Morrison's writing table was set out with pens and notebooks, as if he had just this minute stepped out for a walk in the fields in search of inspiration, there was also a shallow locked glass case in which were displayed first editions of the novels and some of Morrisons longhand drafts, as well as the copies that his wife had typed up on her Olivetti, and on which Morrison had scribbled furiously in his dark soft pencil. Gina had handled his notebooks and manuscripts and was familiar with his process of composition.

When the others had moved on, she peered closely into the case at one of the notebooks. These longhand drafts were not difficult to read, although Morrison's handwriting was odd, with large capitals and crunched-up lowercase. She recognized the text immediately. It was the scene in “Winter's Day” when the middle-aged daughter declares her love for the doctor, in the house where her father is dying. They have left her father with the nurse for an hour, and the doctor is trying to persuade Edith to get some rest. A lamp is burning, although it is already light outside; they are surrounded by the overflow of chaos from the sickroom-basins and medicines and laundry. Edith tells the doctor, who is married, that she can’t bear the idea that when her father is dead he will no longer come to visit. “Because we shan’t have our talks-you could have no idea, because you’re a man and you have work to do, of what these mean to me. My life has been so stupidly empty.” She presses her face, wet with tears, against the woolen sleeve of his jacket. The doctor is shocked and offended that Edith's mind is not on her father. Also, he is not attracted to her: he pities her, and her plain looks, haggard with exhaustion, and bad teeth.

There were few corrections to this passage in the notebook. It was a kind of climax, an eruption of drama in a novel whose texture was mostly very still. But Morrison must have cut part of this scene in a later version. In the published book, all Edith said when she broke down was “Because we shan’t have our talks… I will miss them.” Gina's eyes swam with tears as she bent over the case, reading the original words. She was astonished. She never cried, she never got colds, so she didn’t even have a tissue in her bag. Luckily, she was alone. She wiped her face on the back of her hand and decided not to follow the rest of the tour group upstairs to the bookshop. Instead, she made her way out into the exquisitely blooming back garden, and found a seat under a bower overgrown with Nelly Moser clematis and some tiny white roses with a sweet perfume.

Why did it move her so much, this scene of a woman relinquishing power over herself? It ought to disgust her, or fill her with rage-or relief, that a whole repertoire of gestures of female abasement was now, after so many centuries, culturally obsolete. No one would dream of using a scene like that in a novel these days. That wet face, though, against the rough woolen sleeve, sent Gina slipping, careering down the path of self-abandonment. (Was the sleeve still there in the published version? She couldn’t at the moment remember for sure.) She could almost smell the wool and imagine its hairy texture against her mouth, although none of the men she had loved ever wore that kind of tweedy jacket, except her father, perhaps, when she was a little girl. It was sexual, of course, and masochistic: female nakedness rubbing up against coarse male fiber. There was the threat of abrasion, of an irritated reaction on the finer, more sensitized, wet female surface.

You could see how it all worked. You could rationally resist it, and you could even-and here was the answer, perhaps, to the question that had brought her down to Wing Lodge in the first place-feel sure that you would never be able to surrender yourself like that ever again. And yet the passage had moved her to unexpected tears. There was something formally beautiful and powerful and satisfying in it: that scene of a woman putting her happiness into a man's hands. Next to it, all the other, better kinds of power that women had nowadays seemed, just for one floundering moment, second best.

Gina sat for a long time. A bee, or some beelike insect, fell out of the flowers onto her skirt, and she was aware of the lady guide looking at her agitatedly from the French windows, probably wanting to close up the house. And there came to her, in a flood of regret for her youth, the memory of a card trick, the one where you secretly sorted the pack into black and red in advance so that your victim wouldn’t be able to put a card down wrong.