1985 - Stars and bars (12 page)

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 Mulhol-land, 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.

C
autiously, 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.

TmShandaGage.’

‘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 Dbres, 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. Beck-man’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.