Locked Rooms (29 page)

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

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

“Huh?” I asked sensibly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where is that?” I asked.

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

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

“Flo said you’re in London?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A red turnip,” he commented.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was nothing here.

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

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

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

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

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