The House That Jack Built (8 page)

    'We're just viewing,' Effie explained. 'We don't need a builder.'

    Norman crammed the rest of his Saltine into his mouth, and wrapped up everything else in his National Enquirer. 'Sure, I know you are. But Mr. Van Buren said that it wouldn't hurt.'

    'All right, then,' Craig agreed, still foxy-eyed. 'It won't hurt. Now, shall we go?'

    He stalked back to the BMW just as an ear-splitting clap of thunder exploded right over their heads. There was a moment's pause, and then fat, warm spots of rain began to fall. Norman took Effie's elbow and said, 'Better hurry. The good old firmament's just about to open.'

    Craig climbed into the car and slammed the door. Norman was just about to open the passenger door for Effie when she held his arm and said, 'What did Mr. Van Buren tell you, Norman? I mean, we're viewing, that's all.'

    Norman shrugged. 'Mr. Van Buren said that anybody who wants to look at a house like Valhalla usually wants to buy a house like Valhalla, and who is he to stand in their way. You know what houses are like. They're the same as crack cocaine. Either you don't even think about it, or else you'll kill for it.'

    'And what do you think?'

    'I don't know. Whatever makes you happy.'

    'Look at us. Do you think Valhalla could make us happy?'

    Norman raked his hair back from his forehead with both hands, and shrugged. 'For a while, I guess. But there you go. It's just like my mom says. Happiness has to come to an end sooner or later, otherwise it isn't happiness.'

    

    

    Norman followed them up the track, only two or three feet behind their rear bumper. His silencer was holed, and his engine burbled so loudly that Craig and Effie could hardly hear themselves think, let alone talk.

    'You look annoyed,' Effie shouted.

    'I would have preferred it if we could have looked around the house on our own.'

    'Norman seems okay. A little eccentric.'

    'A little eccentric? A guy who thinks that a balanced diet means eating food in complementary colours?'

    Effie laughed. Although she was perplexed by Craig's extraordinary itch to look at Valhalla, she was pleased and relieved by the way in which he seemed to be relaxing. Maybe that was what he needed - a diversion, something else to think about apart from Japanese businessmen and anti-trust suits and nightmarish 'accidents' with hammers.

    'Do you know something. I forgot how spectacular the Highlands can be,' said Craig. 'Especially in this weather. Look at that lightning, down in those valleys. Spectacular.'

    'You wouldn't like to live here, though, would you? You're a city boy. You always said that lightning striking the Empire State was spectacular.'

    'Well, you know what they say. Home is where the heart is.'

    Effie shrugged. She was irritated, in a way, that Walter Van Buren had sent Norman to meet them, because Norman would give Craig all kinds of ideas about restoration and what it would cost. Walter Van Buren might have appeared soft and colourless and laid-back, but it was obvious that he hadn't been selling million-dollar properties up and down the Hudson River Valley for thirty-eight years without learning quite a lot about the psychology of realty, and which houses virtually sold themselves, and to whom, and why. But maybe it was a good thing, in a way, because it would give Craig something to take his mind off his 'accident'.

    They would never be able to afford Valhalla, not by any stretch of the bank balance, even if its previous owners had kept it in habitable condition; and she didn't think for a moment that Craig would seriously want to make an offer for it. But if it occupied his attention for a week or two, if it helped to restore his masculinity and his sense of pride, then she was happy to go along with it.

    She didn't understand why Valhalla interested him so much. He didn't understand it himself, not yet. He had never imagined in his whole life that he would want to live in the Hudson Valley Highlands; and he had warned plenty of his own clients against overstretching themselves when it came to buying property. Too many of them had lost their houses in the late '80's. His best friend Josh Marias had lost a beautiful waterfront property in East Hampton, along with his equally beautiful wife.

    Maybe the wild and isolated setting appealed to him; and the name Valhalla, hall of dead heroes; and something else - something as strong as hunger or thirst or sexual desire. It was the feeling that you had to be a man to live here, king of the mountain. Rich, successful, and smouldering with self-esteem. You wouldn't have to go out looking for the world. The world would come looking for you.

    Craig, annoyed as he was that they hadn't been able to view Valhalla alone, wasn't altogether displeased that Norman was here. Norman could show Effie that Valhalla was not just a dream but a practical possibility. Norman could tell her in dollars and cents.

    If Norman could work out a bare-bones budget which Effie could accept, then later he could add some of those luxury items which the grand mansions of the Hudson Valley deserve. Gilded taps, marble floors. A library pungent with oak shelving and leather-bound books. Swags and curtains and carpets as hushed as sin. A billiard-room.

    The rain lashed against their windscreen harder and faster, just as the line of dark, deformed oak trees rose into view. Craig drove right up to the gates and then slewed to a stop. He forced his way out of the car door against a wind that was gusting up to 50 m.p.h. and shouted at Effie, 'Let's hope this is the right goddamned key!'

    He went up to the gates and lifted the heavy rusted padlock. The wind sounded hollow and threatening, like somebody blowing across the neck of an empty jar. Rain spattered his cheeks and measled his shirt. Lightning danced across the horizon as he twisted the key into the padlock's opening; and he thought, apocalyptic? Yes, I'm going to be apocalyptic. I'm opening up the gates to a whole new life. Thunder bellowed right over his head, just as Norman came running through the rain to help him.

    'That's probably pretty stiff!' Norman shouted. 'It hasn't been opened in years!'

    'I can do it,' Craig told him. 'I didn't do gung-fu wrist-exercises for nothing.'

    'Okay, great. But if gung-fu doesn't work, I have a couple of cans of easing oil in the car.'

    'I can do it, okay?'

    'Okay, sure. But let's get hustling, right?' Norman's trousers were snapping in the wind and he was obviously trying hard not to be panicky. 'It's not such a dazzling idea, you know, standing about on top of a mountain in a full-scale electric storm, holding a pair of iron gates. Well, actually, it could be a very dazzling idea.'

    The padlock was stiff, and gritty with rust, but slowly it yielded. The levers clicked open one by one, and then Craig was able to drag out the rusted hasp.

    'Hey, how about that?' said Norman. 'Eat your heart out, Sylvester Stallone.'

    Together, inch by scraping inch, Craig and Norman forced open the right-hand gate, and fastened it back with a corroded old hook buried in the grass.

    'I guess you know Valhalla pretty well!' shouted Craig against the wind as they did so.

    Norman's glasses were steamed-up and speckled with rain, and his hair was flying everywhere. 'Me and my friends used to play here, when we were kids. Ran around everywhere: sitting rooms, ballroom, kitchen, halfway up the stairs. No further, though. Didn't dare, because of the ghosts.'

    'Ghosts! You and that Walter Van Buren guy, you're as crazy as each other!'

    Norman shouted, 'Who knows? I don't believe in ghosts. I did then, though, when I was eight years old. Didn't you?'

    'Let's get moving,' Craig told him.

    'You're the supremo, supremo.'

    'That's right. I'm the supremo. And, listen, no more crap about ghosts. I don't want you upsetting my wife.' They drove through the gates of Valhalla and into the shadowy avenue of oak trees. The day was already dark, but the trees blotted out so much light that Craig had to switch on his headlamps to see where he was going. Behind him, Norman switched on his headlamps, too, and Craig had to flick his rearview mirror into its night-driving position to prevent himself from being blinded.

    'Jesus, he's all brains, this young pal of ours,' he told Effie sarcastically, his eyes wincing against the bright reflected light.

    'What do you expect? He's a kid. Give him a break.'

    'What? He must be twenty-two, twenty-three, easy.'

    'That's still a kid.'

    'What kind of a kid runs his own house-restoring business?'

    'An enterprising kid, I'd say. And I happen to like him, stupid diet and all.'

    'Maybe you're right.' Then he gripped her hand and unexpectedly kissed it. 'I love you, do you know that? I don't know how you've managed to put up with me, but I do. And, yes, I like Norman, too. He could use a haircut, but I like him.'

    As the BMW jounced between the oaks, Craig deliberately slowed. Now that he was here, he wanted to savour his first view of Valhalla, he wanted to tantalise himself. He knew it was ridiculous, of course. But he felt Valhalla drawing him closer and closer; and what was strangest of all, he wanted to be there, he needed to be there. He felt a magnetism as strong as gravity.

    At the same time, he felt the first needlings of a sharp and inexplicable sense of regret.
I should have been here long before now - I would have been, if my life had turned out different. This is where I belong. Why did I never find this place before?

    'Do you know what?' he asked Effie. 'Did you ever feel that your whole destiny was waiting for you, just around the corner?'

    She looked at him - his broad-jawed, handsome face, his thick Kennedy-style hair. He was smiling in a way that she hadn't seen him smile for months, since long before his mugging, and she suddenly felt that she had managed to set him free. He looked like Craig Bellman again, the tall, humorous law student who had pushed in beside her at the Corner Bistro on Jane Street, and asked her if she liked Mallarmo.

    'What's Mallarmo? A drink?'

    'He's a French writer. He wrote, "Oh, mirror! How many times, for hours on end, saddened by dreams and searching for my memories, have I seen myself in you as a distant ghost!" '

    She had stared at him in astonishment. 'And?'

    'And, I don't know. You just looked like the kind of girl who would find that really impressive.'

    Maybe he had reminded her too much of her father. He had always liked to take charge of everything. The only difference between Craig and her father was that her father had grown gender and more understanding with every new responsibility, a warm and loving patriarch; whereas Craig had grown harder and more obsessive and had eventually lost the courtesy that it always takes to compromise.

    Now that they were here, at Valhalla, she began to recognise him again. It was unexpected, and frankly it was wonderful. It gave her the same warm, confused feeling that she had experienced that night at the Corner Bistro. Who is this man? How can he talk like this?

    
'Que de fois et pendant les heures, desolee des songes el cher-chant mes souvenirs, je m'apparus en toi comme une ombre loin-taine.'

    'What?' he said.

    'Don't you remember? Mallarmo.'

    For one split second he looked cross. Then he seemed to realise what she was talking about, and smiled.

    '
Une ombre lointaine
,' she repeated, and rested her head against his shoulder. 'A distant ghost.'

    Lightning cracked and cracked again, and the whole world turned electric white. Thunder bellowed so loudly that Effie felt as if the sky was literally collapsing on top of her, and she covered her head with her hands.

    'It's okay, sweetheart,' Craig told her, cupping his hand reassuringly around the back of her head. 'Come on, sweetheart. There's nothing to be scared of.'

    They jostled along the coarsely-shingled driveway through the trees. On either side of them, the oaks were champing and churning in the wind, like panicked horses. Quite suddenly, however, they drove out onto an open crest; and below them they saw a wide, wide field of long, rain-beaten grass - a field that had once been a croquet lawn, or a tennis court, or several tennis courts. Overlooking the field was a stone terrace, like a low medieval rampart, black with moss, with a derelict fountain and overturned urns.

    Beyond the terrace was the house itself, Valhalla. It was raining so hard now that Craig had to switch the wipers full on; but even through the cascading rain and the madly-flapping wiper blades, they could both see what a breathtaking building it was.

    'Will you look at that,' said Craig, stopping the car for a moment.

    The house was huge, three storeys high, built of dark brownish-red brick, with stone-framed windows. It had originally been constructed in the form of a giant cross, like a cathedral, but later additions of outbuildings and stables had changed it into an L-shape. It was unashamedly Gothic, in the style popular after World War One, especially among successful speculators and war profiteers. This was a house that had been built to give its owner dignity, and status, and a feeling of old inherited wealth.

    The sky behind the house was as dark as a poisoned pond, but Valhalla's rooftops shone, and its windows glittered, almost as if it were occupied. Its chimneys were so tall that they trailed in the clouds, and they could have been smoking. It was only when the lightning crackled that Craig and Effie could see that the windows were blacked out and broken, and that the roofing had collapsed in places, exposing the rafters to the rain. As they drove closer, the extent of Valhalla's dereliction became increasingly apparent.