Mr. Fox (17 page)

Beside me, Jonas began to pray. I don’t know how I knew he was praying, since he didn’t speak and his lips didn’t even move. But he was praying. For a moment I tried to see this situation from Jonas’s perspective. But I couldn’t do it at all.
I will never think the way you do, Jonas. You see, my father is a murderer, and yours is not.

 

 

I looked back at my father, to see what he thought about Jonas praying. My father was amused, and I followed his lead.

 

 

I think I’m going to have to go—

I think I’m going to have to go.

“Go where?” S.J. asked. He was at the other end of the line. I phoned him, at home, at four a.m., and he answered.

“Where do you think you have to go?” S.J. asked again. Where indeed . . .

My family was a mistake,
I think.
The three of us.

“Will you come and get me?” I asked him. “Please.”

“Now?” We were talking about a seven-hour drive through the dawn, and through rush hour. If he started now, he’d be here at about noon. Anything could have happened by noon. They were going to cremate my father at nine a.m. It sounds amazingly stupid, but I was convinced I’d burst into flames with him. I’m bound to my father. How did this happen? I’ve been running from him.

“I’ll come,” S.J. said.

“No.” It scared me that he was so willing. I know I’d asked him to, but his “yes” was impossible to decipher—what was it supposed to mean?

“I want you here. For observation.”

“Haha. I’ll take the train,” I said.

“All right. I’ll take a couple of days off.”

“You can’t. People need you.”

“So do you,” he said. “Call me when you’re on the train.”

I nodded, and I very carefully wrote down the address he gave me.

When I sat down at my computer, checking e-mail before bed, I saw that I had opened twelve identical windows, and Daphne Fox smiled coyly at me out of each one.

 

 

I’m no good at train journeys. Half an hour of scenery (which I try to admire), half an hour of the sound of the train on its track, and I have seen and heard enough—my legs begin to jiggle frenetically entirely of their own accord. I began to fall asleep, but the empty seat beside me made me watchful. I didn’t want to fall asleep and wake up and find someone sitting there looking at me. Yelena, Daphne, anybody. The dead are capable of creeping up on you when you aren’t looking, just as capable as the living are.

I kept myself awake with phone calls—to my agent, to explain that I’d be away for a while.

“What? How long for, exactly?”

“I don’t know. My father died.”

“Oh . . .” He didn’t say that he was sorry—honest man, my agent: “Take all the time you need, darling. Call me if you need anything.”

He got off the phone quickly. I called Jonas next, and told him where I was going, in case he was interested. Jonas was suspiciously enthusiastic.

“Sounds promising, Miel,” he said.

“Does it?”

He sighed.

“And it’s Mary, by the way,” I said. People shouldn’t think that they can call me Miel just because my father has gone, as if I’m a little girl who was hiding from an ogre. Now they’re all walking around calling out that I can come out now. Well, it’s too late.

It took almost as long to get to Brier Moss by train as it would have by car. Six and a half hours later I climbed out of a taxicab and walked up to a house that stood alone behind a large flat whorl of a garden, almost out of sight of the road. Grasshoppers ticked away in the bushes as I knocked on the front door. S.J. answered, in pyjamas, barefoot, and carrying a towel. Drops of water clung to his lips and ran down his chin, and as I followed him into the house he ducked his head beneath the towel and emerged with his hair standing on end. The hallway smelt strongly of polish and paint; its walls were a very strong and spotless white. No stand for coats and hats, no mat for wiping muddy feet, no carpet, even. The other downstairs rooms were unfurnished and painted the same white as the hallway, until we came to his study, which was walled with shelves that stopped only at the ceiling. There was a ladder attached to the shelves by a wooden claw, the sort of ladder I’d only seen in bookshops—on it you could move around all the books and climb, touch all of them, pluck the exact book you wanted out from amongst the rest yourself. They all looked medical—gynaecology, psychiatry, neurology.

He was watching me. “What do you think?”

I set my bag down by the door and walked around, looking.

“Cosy.”

There was only one chair, and that was behind the desk, which faced the French doors and the late afternoon. I could see how someone would want to live only in this room and abandon the others. But nobody actually does that. You have to at least have something to look at or sit on in the other rooms, even if only for form’s sake. I told myself I would wait a little while and then point that out to him. There was a plate on his desk with three squares of iced cake on it. Each cube had been firmly and largely bitten into just once, and then left. It seemed a strangely dainty thing to do.

“Wait here,” he said, and disappeared.

I looked out through the French doors and said to myself, ‘What . . .’ It was such a bare garden. Nothing flowered. There was just green grass levelled low in every direction. It was the sheer effort of maintaining these conditions that amazed me. Because things grow. Wherever there is air and light and open space, things grow. So much cutting and uprooting must be done to keep a place like this bare.

My phone rang in my pocket. It was S.J.

“Have you left the house?” My voice pitched higher than I’d have liked it to. But I hadn’t heard him leave. And I didn’t want to be alone in this house. He tutted.

“I’m on the roof,” he said. “Meet me up there.”

“How—”

“Go round to the side of the house—not the side where the cedar tree is, the other side. There’s a ladder. Climb up.”

I hung up and did as I was told, leaving my bronze pumps on the grass and stepping quickly into the sky—not quite running; there was dew on the soles of my feet, and the iron frame beneath me creaked a little too much for my liking. But I went up with ease, the walk was easy, and I didn’t look down once.

He was waiting for me at the top, as he had said. He took my hand and pulled me off the top step and onto the flat tiles. There were two chairs ready, with a single lantern set between them. The chairs faced north, looking out over rooftops and hills, and the roads dipped deep in them. The view made me dizzy; the same scene endlessly multiplied. It could have been a trick done with mirrors, vast ones. Dusk was only just falling, and I heard moths stun themselves against the lantern, the hard flicker of their wings as they sprang away again. S.J. poured whisky from a jug into shot glasses and toasted me. “Here’s to visions,” he said.

I drank, and realised it wasn’t whisky. It started off like liquid gingerbread, then lingered on the tongue, deep and woody, the way I imagined tree sap tasted.

“What’s this?”

“Nonalcoholic. Nutmeg, mostly.”

“Nutmeg? That’s meant to be an aphrodisiac, isn’t it? It tastes nice.”

“Yes. And in large doses, it’s a psychotropic agent.”

I spat my drink back into the glass. I never want visions. They’re not fun.

“Mary,” he said suddenly.

“Yes?”

“I didn’t do anything to Daphne.”

“Okay.”

“I tried to take care of her—to help her. And I couldn’t.”

His voice was completely steady, but he was crying. “She slipped through my fingers every time.”

I wiped his tears away with my hands.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

“I didn’t speak to anyone for three days after I found her. I mean, I didn’t speak to anyone who didn’t have to speak to me. Nobody called. They knew what had happened, but they didn’t call. I stared at the phone. I understood what was going on—I’ve done it myself. When someone’s bereaved you think they want to be alone, or that they don’t want to talk, or that they only want to talk to someone close to them. Someone closer than you are. So you don’t phone. You assume that the poor bastard is being inundated with calls from other people, and you don’t phone.” His voice grew halting. “They were—long days. I wanted to talk. To anyone. I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to be with people. But mostly I stayed here. I tried not to go too far from the house, because I thought that if I got too far away I might decide not to come back. And it would be a shame not to come back. The house is all right. It didn’t do anything wrong—”

“People should have called,” I said. I was angry. Why wasn’t he angry? “Even if they tried and it was engaged they should have kept trying. They didn’t even try. I would have called.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And I’d have said anything that came into my head. I’d have read you the weather forecast. We should have known each other back then.”

There was something childish, something timidly happy, about the way he smiled as he listened to me. As if he had been promised something so good that he was trying to manage his hope, trying not to believe it until he saw it with his own eyes.

 

 

Later he showed me where I would sleep. The room was crammed with a four-poster bed hung with grape-coloured velvet, which I gaped at as I walked around it. I heard the creaking of a rocking chair but couldn’t find the chair itself at first—the space was complicated by folding screens and empty vases and trinket boxes. I began counting the different vases, lost count, began again. At some point this room must have been bursting with flowers. Five foxgloves stood up like spread fingers in one of the vases. There was a dressing table and chair in there, too, and a kind of mirror closet—it was a box of mirrors that had a latch and pulled open so that you could stand surrounded by every possible view of yourself whilst dressing.

Daphne’s room. Daphne had been gone for four years. This was the state of things, him living in two rooms—just his study and a bedroom, the one next door to this. I tried not to show that it made me sad.

We undressed. He turned the light out and lay down beside me. He kissed me, and parted my legs with the stroke of his hand. He was gentle at first, and rocked slowly, then he pressed all the breath out of me, little by little. At first it was good, and then it wasn’t good. Our bodies were cold and it hurt when he moved inside me. I didn’t wince or cry out. I kept my eyes firmly closed.

(He’ll stop once he feels that it’s hurting me.)

But he didn’t; he stopped when he was finished.

“I can’t stay here,” he said, and he left, stumbling over things—shadows, slippers, whatever was on the floor.

Minutes pricked shallowly, like thorns. I shivered in my chemise. I’d never slept in a four-poster before—my dreams came framed by the purple velvet of the canopy. I kept waking up, or thinking that I did—I couldn’t tell. This was Daphne’s bed. Daphne Fox had lain here, looking up into this canopy. How had she lain? What had she looked at? Was it here that he had found her? The pounding on the door, the footsteps rushing towards the bed, the sound he made when he found her dead. He’d have shaken her, I imagine, slapped her, tried to revive her, dragged her about, knelt over her with his mouth pressed desperately to hers. Now, in her bed, I tried to find her. I lay on my front, but it was too suffocating, so I changed and lay listlessly on my side, my head on my arm, pretending to be a woman who didn’t want to live. Then I turned onto my back, and cold surged all along my body. My hands followed it. How full my breasts were, how soft my stomach; in death everything froze. But my thighs were warm, and the bedclothes were soft against my back, and there was the smell of the foxgloves. . . . My bones moved with suppleness under my skin as I pushed my hips upwards, rocking against my fingers. . . . It became almost too much. Who is touching me? Me, it’s only me, only me. The heavy wetness on my fingers, as if I’d smeared them with honey. When it was over, goose bumps forced themselves up from every patch of bare skin.

And the handle of the bedroom door clicked as it turned from the outside, and the door swung open.

I shot upright and jerked the bedclothes up around me. But no one appeared in the doorway, and when I marched up to it, there still wasn’t anyone there. I looked up and down the empty passageway. In a very small voice I said, “S.J.?”

His bedroom door was closed.

I closed mine, too, and returned to bed, only to be jolted from sleep by the sound of the door opening again. It was not a dream or any sort of reverie. There was something terrible about watching the door come open the second time. It opened all the way, and with such force that I don’t know what stopped it from slamming against the wall.

I didn’t call out. I closed the door again. There must be something wrong with the door frame, or the way the door had been set in it when the place was built. It happened, doors popping open of their own accord, bad builders taken to task. The third time the door opened it felt as if I was being told very sternly to go. But go where? Get out, clear out.

I stood, half asleep, and held the door closed for two hours or so. It began to feel as if I was shaking a small, cold, smooth stump that had been proffered in place of a hand. When I’d had enough of that I sat, then lay on the blue carpet, hardly aware of what I was doing, or where I was. The door opened again as soon as I let go of the handle.
Let it stay open, then; let it stay open.
I heaved myself back into bed as a collection of parts, concentrating on getting my arms up over the edge, torso, legs.