The Ghosts of Kerfol (11 page)

“That’s him!” she cried. “There he is.” And the party seemed to flow back to life, limbs unlocking, voices resuming. Suze dragged Tres with one hand and Gerard with the other and assaulted the man, demanding to his back that he identify himself at once or she would fetch the authorities.

But when he turned, it was only the old smiling Breton gardener, the real McCoy this time, nodding his cap politely, his sun-crinkled eyes bemused but patient with youthful indiscretion.

Suze laughed, letting go her protectors’ hands. She buckled, she was laughing so hard, her heartbeat plummeting, and maybe it was nerves, but to save face, she strode forward and followed her earlier whim. She kissed the good-natured old fellow quickly on the lips, which left him stunned and possibly mortified, the butt of some wealthy brat’s joke. She felt she had betrayed rather than pleased him somehow. The gardener wiped his mouth primly, turned, and disappeared into the dappled avenue with his clippers.

Suze spun round to face her wayward party — drunk with hilarity and savoring her mistake — and waved them back toward the house.

“That’s some fiend you’ve got there, Suze,” said Gerard as they climbed the lawn. “What’s more, if that’s how you treat an intruder, I hope to have the pleasure of trespassing soon.”

By midnight, the gin was beginning to wear off and with it her shallow ardor for Tres (maybe she didn’t want him — with Stan so close in her thoughts — but Peg certainly didn’t deserve to have him, either).

Suze left the ruckus in the library behind and went out into the great hall with its echoes and painted ceiling. She walked to and up the far staircase, her eyes adjusting to the darkness, and wandered the shadowy halls in the closed west wing. Most of the doors she tried were locked. Contractually, they were inhabiting only the east wing, but she was restless and starved for solitude, so she turned all the knobs until one opened. It was a long room overlooking the rear of the estate and the distant orchard of gnarled black tree trunks entreating the moon.

She sat on the sheet-shrouded daybed to drink in the quiet with her gin.

As her eyes began to adjust to the silvery light, dim objects in the room came into view: an ornate brass clock, uncovered, strangely; the legs of a mahogany dressing table visible under a sheet; a large painting on the wall facing the daybed.

Something about the picture gave her pause.

It was the necklace.

The woman in the portrait, whose features were partly painted over, had on the very necklace Suze now wore. The artist had captured its glint and rich waved contours well and crisply, and the likeness thrilled and terrified her.

The others seemed suddenly very far away indeed. Before she broke from the main gathering, she’d looked in on the band, which had broken for chow and spilled into the kitchen with bow ties askew and pressed white shirts coming untucked. Craving their easy banter now, she stood abruptly, then raced down the hall and down the steps with her empty glass. The band was with the others in the library, someone told her, so she headed back that way and almost ran smack into Tres, lolling in the hallway, smoking, alone.

He caught her lightly by the wrist, stabbing out his cigarette in a glass on the sideboard, and spun her over to him like a clumsy dancer. This might have charmed her under other circumstances, at least for a minute, but she felt too unnerved and tired to join in or even protest.

She closed her eyes and pretended his shirt was Stan’s, that she could rest against his breastbone, and for a minute this strange boy was silent and let her, something Suze felt more than naturally grateful for. “You’ll have to come back,” she whispered, pulling away lightly, “and play some other day. I’m calling it a night.” She motioned with her chin, her hair falling at a slant down her cheek. “And they don’t know it yet, but they are, too.”

“I’ll do that.” Tres smiled with only half as much guile as she was used to.

“Good.”

He wasn’t Stan, but she could pretend. Suze kissed him good night. Just because. And she almost meant it.

Tres didn’t come to the next soiree, and she allowed herself a small dose of disappointment. She wandered about feeling adrift, unreal, lonely. Suze stood in a noisy corner with her eyes closed, swaying, and could almost feel Stan’s hands strong in her hair, moving fast under her raccoon coat in the roadster.

She remembered the act of dressing for him to undress her: turned-down hose and powdered knees, scarlet screen-star lips like Clara Bow’s, painting her mouth small and pert and bee-stung. Dressing for him had given her life meaning, ritual. She was a package for him to open. That was her gift to Stan, and she gave it over and over, and now she had his child inside her to show for it, was carrying his breath and blood in her body, and she would maybe never speak to him again. He would never know. And whom could she tell? Not Daddy or Emily. Damn Emily.

The one time she’d tried to tell her, they were visiting the residence hall at Wellesley that would become their new home in the fall. The need to tell someone was pressing so hard, Suze wondered if the baby hadn’t become a mind, grown beyond its mere two-month shape, taking her over from within. Despite Emily’s grouchy ranting about marriage and the college marriage market, Suze took solace in her own eyes in the powder room mirror and began to shape her announcement. “Stan,” she said, because it all began there, didn’t it? It began with Stan.

But she hardly got his name out.

“Oh, get over him, Suze.” Dour Emily rolled her eyes. “He’s done nothing but lead you on and leave you at the curb. If this is what it means to be in love, then hang love.” She smacked her just-rouged lips and pinched her cheeks to color them, as if her appearance mattered to anyone. “Love undoes you,” she badgered. “Love makes you different. Makes you weak. You used to be a real person. I used to be able to talk to you.”

Had Suze expected mercy?

“Now you make me sick.”

Suze had felt the sting of this rant on two levels. Eager to be relieved of her secret, she had also let down her guard, left herself open to Emily’s envy. It was weak, and it was thoughtless, and she felt something inside close to Emily forever. Perhaps it was the place the baby now inhabited. Private knowledge she as a woman had been initiated into and Emily had not, and couldn’t fathom, much less sympathize with.

Repairing the grave arch of her brows with a tweezers from her handbag, Suze had countered, “You’ve always been a little sickly, Emily, with your chills and sniffles and meek ways. A little
wet,
you know.” Suze snapped her compact closed. “You’re all wet. So get out and find someone else to rain on.”

It began to rain on Wednesday, and by the time Daddy departed again and the weekend parties could begin, the moat was swollen, and the vast, sculpted lawn was a swamp.

Suze had not told Daddy about the mean man in the garden any more than she had told him about Tres or the others, the worldly and parasitic array that always knew when to show up and usually had the money to blend in. For all her father knew, it was just Suze and Peg, playing croquet on the big lawn and sipping lemonade.

When the crowd began to merge into one form, a screaming harpy in beads and tweed, she whispered to Tres, “Let me show you my favorite room in the house.”

“Oh? Why your favorite?”

“It’s quiet and looks out on the back patio. It feels a little haunted somehow. I’ve never had the nerve to go in daylight. When I wasn’t drunk.”

He reached into the fray for a passing bottle and topped off her champagne. “Well, don’t let’s break with tradition now.”

They toasted, drank, drifted apart from the others. Their heels made no sound, even when the music became muted and distant, when the laughter came in traces.

When they reached the room and slipped inside, Suze asked, “So whatever happened to that princess? In that story of yours?” Tracing Tres’s ear with her tongue, she led him to the daybed under the darkened portrait of the woman in the necklace. She had come to think of it as
her
necklace.

“‘If you truly love me,’ the stranger said”— Tres stroked her bare neck — for mindful of Daddy’s warnings, she had thought to remove the treasure and place it in a drawer before she got too drunk. Hidden it. It was one thing to pretend Tres was Stan while he was kissing her, but did she trust this local boy? She did not. She let her sable stole fall as he began to recite his folktale, the rain making light music on the old-fashioned lead windows, a slanting in the wind.

Conjuring Stan was something she did often, at the petting parties her older college friends had invited her to and later at her own parties. (
She’s the
queen
of parties,
blowhard Peg always said.)

“‘. . . if you love me, you will make me a gift’”— Tres yanked the dusty sheet off the daybed —“‘of the silver key that unlocks the gates of the sea.’”

Suze let her dress fall round her ankles, and with her eyes closed, she could almost conjure it, the smell and feel of Stan’s skin, the veins in his wrists as he smoothed the hanging hair from her face. The cushions were a silky chill beneath her back, and his weight a warmth. There was no moon tonight, and she could make out nothing in the painting, though she knew it was there.

Tres settled alongside her, lean and whispering. “‘No!’ said Dahut. ‘Impossible!’ Her father kept the key day and night on a chain round his neck, but the prince swore that if she got him the key, he would spirit her away to his kingdom of riches, where she would reign as queen. That night, she crept into her father’s chamber. As the old king slept, she sneaked the key from his neck and returned with it to her lover.

“‘Here is the key,’ Dahut said. ‘Let us leave.’ But the prince was silent. He snatched it from her and went from the palace laughing, for he was the Devil in disguise —”

“Are
you
the Devil?”

Tres kissed her neck, and it was Stan’s kiss. Stan’s whisper. “Don’t interrupt,” he breathed. “Dahut watched her prince throw open the gates. There was a great creaking and tearing sound as seawater began to surge and curl through the sleeping city —”

“You really like this story, don’t you?” Suze slurred, and he nibbled her fingers gently as he whispered, and she could hardly keep her eyes open.

“To this day, fishermen docked in Douarnenez on misty mornings hear the sound of church bells in the sea below, calling the faithful. If ever a sailor answers, it’s said, the lost city of Ker-Ys will bob above the waves and become capital of all France. There’s a Breton proverb:
Pa veuzo Paris, e tiveuzo Ker-Ys
—‘When Paris shall sink, Ker-Ys shall emerge.’”

She shuddered for effect, but ended up giggling.

She giggled and giggled and curled up like a little sea-swept shrimp, exhausted, with her head reeling and the rain a lullaby.

Suze woke near dawn with a stain on her memory, hung over, and it took some time to orient herself. Sunday. Kerfol. The east wing. She sat up abruptly. In daylight, green eyes looked down at her.

My eyes.

The face in the painting was her face.

Suze wrestled her way out of the sheet and stood, queasy and reeling, strangely modest all of a sudden. She groped her stole from the back of a chair, flung it over her shoulders, and went forth with hand extended as if she might meet her image partway, as if the painting were a mirror and she might take her own hand and be led away to the little boat under the moon in the land where the Bong-tree grows, where Stan would be waiting, and they’d dance by the light of the moon, themoon, themoon.

The same moon out there now, setting over Kerfol. But her own frame in unfamiliar clothes, a stranger staring down with her face but as cold and distant as the moon, themoon, themoon was just too terrible. She turned to tell him, “I have to tell you . . . Stan, I have to tell you.”

Something te
rrible.

Something wonderful.

The figure under the sheet lay very still, and for a moment Suze hesitated. As she lifted the fabric like a magician unveiling astonishment, it was not Stan beneath, welcoming and beloved; it was not even Tres, whose youthful close-shaved face she now recalled with desperate clarity; it was the hideous old impostor from the garden, leering, the man with the pointy beard and eyes like ice. She screamed and fell back on the floor, scrabbling sideways like a crab in a confusion of shadows, a black lunging, a pulse — within or without, at once — deafening, and the last thing she saw was her own face. Beautiful in that necklace.

T
HEIR TOUR GUIDE, JULIET
, was breathy in all the right places, a master of the dramatic pause. The stories of this house intrigued her; that was clear, though she’d probably told them a hundred times to a hundred busloads of blue-haired ladies. Juliet seemed genuinely interested in what she was saying, which wasn’t an easy thing, Meg understood. Why invest or reveal yourself when irony was safer? Sarcasm. That was
Meg’s
medium.