Locked Rooms (31 page)

“That” was a half-opened door revealing a library of extraordinary richness. Walls twenty feet tall laden with leather-and-gilt spines; high, angled work-tables displaying precious Mediaeval manuscripts; racks of ancient scrolls and papyri; long gleaming tables calling out for scholars and behind them a glimpse of soft leather chairs inviting a more leisurely read before the fire.

In other words, Paradise.

But in the dream I merely shrugged, pulled the door shut, and said, “It’s nothing important.” I then went on to show my companions the intricacies of the decorated stairwell.

Nothing important?
How the hell could Paradise be unimportant? And why was this third dream still with me, lingering at my shoulder like some telegraph boy awaiting a reply? The other two dreams had politely faded away as soon as their messages had been delivered. If I had accepted the message of this one, that the hidden rooms represented the portions of my past that I had closed away from myself, then why hadn’t it drifted away as its brothers had? Instead it had returned, with greater urgency and detail than ever—my dreaming mind could not have been more insistent had it grabbed my shoulder and shouted in my ear, but for the life of me, I could not decipher its meaning.

One thing was clear: I would have no more sleep that night. Putting on my glasses and dressing-gown, I padded downstairs to make myself a cup of tea.

I took it out onto the terrace and sat in the darkness, but the night air was uncomfortably cold and damp, and before the cup was halfway empty I retreated inside, at something of a loss.

I missed Holmes. The realisation surprised me somewhat, since it had only been three days, and we were often apart for far longer than that. Perhaps it was Flo’s talk of marriage, perhaps my need to converse with someone who spoke my language, but at that moment, I’d have given a great deal to have him sitting across the kitchen table from me.

Leaving the tea on the table, I went upstairs to retrieve one of the books I had brought with me; halfway down the corridor I paused, and turned towards the stairway.

My parents’ bedroom was at the rear of the addition’s upper floor. I had not gone in the room on Sunday, merely glanced through the door-way, seen that Mrs Gordimer had not made up that bed, and shut the door. Now, before I could reconsider, I opened it and stepped inside.

The light from the hall-way showed me a slice of the room: floor-boards, carpet, bed, lamp-shade, wall. I made my way around the bed to the lamp on the night-table, and switched it on.

A simple room, considerably smaller than its counterpart in Pacific Heights. A single, built-in wardrobe for clothing, a small dressing-table for my mother, a private bath-room, and, on the opposite side of the room, French doors leading out onto a balcony wide enough for two chairs and a low table. And between the doors and furniture, bookshelves.

Those shelves, laden and much used, made this room more a boudoir than a chamber for sleeping. Books in the bedroom—serious books, and in great number—were considered an oddity; that I had known even as a child. However, I did not know, then or now, if my mother’s intentions had been to bring the best of the outer world into her private chambers, or to keep her private life insulated from the world.

In either case, this room was where she spent what free hours we gave her. My father would take us swimming or out in the boat, and when we looked back at the house, Mother would be here reading, either on the balcony or just inside the glass doors. And it was not that she was shutting us out, for we were welcome to join her, with our own books or choosing one from her shelves. Other activities, board games or cards, were taken elsewhere; books from the shelves generally remained in the room, with cautious permission granted rarely for their removal. It was a room where my mother’s worlds overlapped. A holy place, as it were.

Odd, I reflected: In Pacific Heights, I thought of books in association with my father and his library; here, it was my mother’s books that dominated, while my father pursued more active forms of entertainment.

I went forward to the shelves, finding them as neat as they had always been: spines pulled evenly half an inch from the edge, a book-end at the right end of each row to allow for additions, every book, large or small, novel or theological treatise, English, Hebrew, or other, arranged by the author’s last name. I had asked her once, when I was first reading—was I six? No, it must have been the previous year, if we had gone to England shortly after the 1906 fire—how she could order names when they were in different alphabets, and she had showed me how to transcribe Hebrew letters into their Roman equivalents. Thus, I saw
stood easily between Hightower and Hindermann. I used the same system on my own shelves. When, that is, I could be bothered to shelve them properly.

The tight ranks of the books and my ingrained hesitation to borrow from those ordered shelves stayed my hand from reaching out and plucking one or another from its brothers. Instead, I wandered away to look over the rest of the room. The bath-room was bare and bright, its tiles clean and the usual detritus of such places—soap, bathtowels, and shaving equipment—tidied away, no doubt by Mrs Gordimer. Now that my attention was finally brought to the subject, it occurred to me how difficult it must have been for the woman to know just how to go about her cleaning duties. Regular dusting and the occasional scrub, yes, but what to do with the stubs of soap left by two dead people? Sliding open the top drawer of the chest beneath the wash-basin, I found Father’s razor and soap-brush, and below it Mother’s hair-brush and pins, but little of a more ephemeral nature.

On a sudden thought, I left the bright tiled room and walked over to the narrow door into the clothes closet. It smelt of cedar, but faintly, and although the clothes were still hanging there, they had all been pushed to the far ends of their rails, as if that was as far as Mrs Gordimer had been prepared to go without further orders.

I sat for a while at my mother’s dressing-table before I could take up the tarnished silver powder-box that had waited ten years for the return of its owner. I pulled up the top and waited until the faint upsurge of powder reached my nose: a pang, nothing more, not even when I lowered my face to the powder and drew in a full breath of it. The still, small voice of my mother was not in the powder, nor had it been in the bedroom itself, nor in the house. A whisper of the voice, faint as a ghost, came from the shelves of her most beloved books, and so I went there and waited, unaware of the quiver of tears in my eyes until they spilt down my face.

Damn you, I told my mother’s shade, why did you have to agree to come down here that last time? Why hadn’t you pushed a little harder, insisted that the thousand and ten jobs in San Francisco made a trip down here impossible, that we could as easily have a final family week-end in the city? Why?

I caught myself before the maudlin tears could overwhelm me. She hadn’t meant to die, hadn’t meant to take Father and Levi with her; it wasn’t her fault that I had been left alone in the world. No one’s fault at all, except my own.

Cleaning my glasses on the shirt of my pyjamas, I issued myself orders: Get a book to read, go down and make yourself another cup of tea, since that one on the table is sure to be cold as ice. Pull yourself together.

I took a volume at random from the shelves before me, spoiling their pristine order, walked around the bed to turn off the bed-side light, then went out of the door, shutting it quietly but firmly, and descending the stairs to the kitchen.

I settled at the table with my fresh tea and the book, but I did not open it. Instead, I stared over the top of my cup at the shelves that were also a door and at the tea canister that was a lever, not really seeing either.

The more I thought about it, the more I felt that Mr Long’s suggestion had been in the right direction: The concealed apartment was in no earthly mansion, but rather lay within the walls of Matteo Ricci’s memory palace, and the reason I could let myself into it with such ease (at least, I could in my dream) was because I had placed it there myself: built it, closed the door on it, turned the key in its lock. The hidden apartment was my past, the childhood I had locked away and forgotten almost completely under physical pain coupled with the shock of abandonment and the wretchedness of guilt. I alone, the least worthy of the four Russells, had survived: better by far to walk unburdened and amnesiac from the desert of my past than to carry around the lush memories of what I had lost.

Yesterday my intellect had begun to accept the meaning; nonetheless, that morning’s version of the dream had all but shouted at me, “It’s not that simple.”

Not that the interpretation was wrong, just that an intellectual recognition did not take it far enough.

A badly burnt creature will forever shy away from fire; until two weeks ago I had shied away from my past, denying the very possibility that I had gone through the events of 1906, allowing it to remain concealed behind the later trauma of the accident.

And yet, the victim of fire often remains perversely fascinated with flame, incapable of leaving it alone. And so my scarred mind had found reason to bring me, first to San Francisco itself, and then to this lakeside retreat by way of a piece of road that I’d had no intention of revisiting: Unwanted journeys all, yet each step of the way, each painful brush of memory, had brought to me a degree of mastery and self-respect. The prod of one object after another in the Pacific Heights house had made me wince, but I had also felt the dormant pieces of my past begin to unfurl and come alive within.

Then, when I had begun the journey down the Peninsula, the process of memory had changed. To use the image my dream had provided, this place had been an entire self-contained apartment, fully furnished with the people and events of the past, waiting for me to step inside and finally claim it.

And so it had proved: Coming here, I had known what the village would look like before we drove into it; I had anticipated Mrs Gordimer and her work, known what the Lodge would look and feel like before I turned the key, and been able to lay my hands on specific items without having to pat around blindly for what logic told me had to be here. I
remembered
this house, in a way I did not my more permanent home in Pacific Heights, where each event, it seemed, had to be laboriously prised open, each person and memory all but chiselled from the walls.

The Lodge, I thought, was how memory was supposed to work: fully and openly, not grudgingly and piecemeal.

So then why was the third dream so damnably insistent? Not a physical hidden room, not the general opening up of my past—what? What was it I hadn’t yet explored, what did I still shy away from confronting?

(Their deaths)
my mind whispered to me, but before the phrase was complete I was already on my feet and moving to the kettle, reaching for the tin of coffee, wondering even if Flo had left one of her cigarettes downstairs because although I didn’t normally smoke I found myself craving one, the nicotine and the calming ritual of lighting and puffing.

While the coffee was brewing I went to my bedroom and put on some warmer clothes, then took a cup outside where I could sit on the terrace and watch the stars fade, but as soon as I had sat on the low stone wall and drawn my feet up the whisper came again.

(Their deaths.)

I jumped down from the wall, took a swallow of the scalding brew, and set the cup down again, where it clattered so badly it nearly leapt from its saucer. The air of the terrace was suddenly cold, and I hugged my coat around me and walked to the end of the stones and back again, pausing again to take another drink from the cup that persisted in shaking between my hands. I paced to the end of the terrace and back again until I began to feel like some lion in its cage, then abandoned the coffee and the terrace and set out blindly across the wet grass.

(They died)
and Yes, damn it, they died, and the immediate cause of their deaths was my irritable adolescent self tormenting my brother and forcing my father to take his eyes off the road. Only he shouldn’t have done so, because he was an experienced driver and almost never did that, he’d driven across the country and never got into trouble, not once, and it was a terrible road but he knew it was a terrible road and he was well used to it.

But other people who knew the road went off it as well, as evidenced by the thin insurance man clambering around on the rocks in precisely that spot.

Odd, I thought idly, to happen across the investigation of a motor accident when it was a motor accident that had brought me to that place. And then I heard the voice begin to speak in my ear again and I made a violent turn to shake it off, dimly aware that the ground beneath my feet was sloping down.

(They—)

All right—Yes, they died! Mother, Father, Levi, they all died, but then again people did, all the time. Dr Ginzberg had died, and Mah and Micah, all the time people died. Although actually, no, come to think of it, it wasn’t all the time, it was all at the same time that they’d died.