Colony (66 page)

“Why would he want to punish us, Grammaude? Nobody here has ever done anything to him; he’s never even been here except that summer, and then it wasn’t we who harmed him, if you recall.”

“I recall better than you can possibly know, Darcy,” she said. “But you forget, he was here when he was very small, with his mother. He’ll have remembered that, I think, no matter what he says. And there was harm done to her, or at least I imagine he would see it that way. He would think it grievous harm, and it was I who inflicted it. I cannot imagine what she might have told him, but I feel sure it is me—and, because of me, you—whom he wants to punish. I think Warrie has had only one great love in his life, and it was neither of his wives and none of his other women. His love died last year, of the life she led. If it were not for me, she might have led a far different life, perhaps in a far different place. Perhaps

even here in Retreat. And so here he is, determined to lead it for her. More than that, even. Determined to own it, as she never could.”

“You mean his mother? Grammaude, what on earth could you possibly have done to her? She was a grown woman when she left here the last time.”

“No.” She shook her head, looking out at the satiny mauve of the sunset bay. “No. Elizabeth was never a grown woman.”

“You said you only convinced her to…stand on her own feet, was it? I wish you’d tell me what you meant.”

“I will, darling, when it’s time. One day soon, I promise.

It’s not important because he’s not a threat to you any longer.

That’s all I ever cared about. And I can tell he’s not. He can’t get his hands on you and he can’t have Liberty, so he’s simply…not important. Let’s enjoy having the sun porch back and have maybe one more of these before dinner. And then I think I’ll start that new Martha Grimes. I’ve been putting it off until a night there was nothing on TV.”

As July faded into August, I became gradually aware that the colony was neatly split over the matter of Warrie Villiers and his avowed mission in Retreat. With the coming of August, traditionally the busiest month in summertime Maine, the luncheon and cocktail parties escalated, and there was a regatta and tea every weekend afternoon at the yacht club, and dances and card parties and movies almost every evening.

Everyone who had been putting it off all summer had an enormous pay-back cocktail party, and it was possible, if one wanted, to go out every noon, twilight, and evening for the entire month. Neither Grammaude nor I wanted to, but we ventured out to the ones she felt we could not refuse, and at each one Warrie was the subject of heated conversation. With her undetectable but infallible social antennae, Grammaude invariably knew ahead of time which gathering he would not be attending that evening, and it was to those that we went, and it was at those that the war—for it was that, a little war—was waged.

“It’s just not right for one person to own so much property up here,” the younger people would say. “It’s dangerous; he could do anything with it. We don’t really know him, after all. Who knows where that money comes from? You know what his mother was.”

“It’s not you who has to pay the taxes and insurance on these old barns,” the indignant older ones would retort. “It’s not you who lives on a fixed income and can’t do the upkeep and can’t find help. What would you have us do? We’ve known his grandparents and some of us his great-grandparents; his family has been here longer than almost anyone’s.

This way we can keep our cottages and have the money to keep them up, and not see them sold to just anybody. Do you want people from Florida or Texas to come here and put in
swimming pools,
for God’s sake?”

“No, but how do you know he means what he says?”

“How do you know he doesn’t? What could he do but re-sell them? We’d have to do that ourselves, or you would when we’re gone.”

And so it went, night after perfect amethyst night, for it was one of the loveliest summers I have ever seen on that coast. Cool, bright, blue-edged, crisp—and salted with the faint corruption that was Warrie Villiers and his foreign money. I hated the thought so much I simply stopped listening to the never-ending debate, which in any case went nowhere. I sipped my drinks and went out onto porches or terraces and

looked at the still twilit bay and smelled the ripe pineladen smell of highest summer, that absolute pinnacle that was like a jeweled gear frozen in the moment just before it ground forward again toward autumn. It filled me up and smoothed me out and sang in my blood and ears like wine, and I was determined to let nothing and nobody spoil it. Warrie Villiers was so far from my thoughts in those few perfect days that he might as well not have existed.

But then I came home from the hardware store in Blue Hill one afternoon and found him leaning over my grandmother as she lay on the sun-porch chaise, striking his palm with his forefinger as he drove home point after point to her, and saw her white, still face looking resolutely up at him, and I whirled on him like a dervish.

“Out!” I said furiously. “Out this minute! What do you mean coming over here waving your finger in Grammaude’s face like that? You know she doesn’t want you here, and neither do I. I want you to leave this instant. Look at her, she’s white as a sheet.”

He got up and nodded to Maude, his face flushed. He looked crestfallen and contrite. I stood between them, my hands clenched into fists at my sides. He turned away and started out, and then turned back.

“Mrs. Chambliss, I’m truly sorry,” he said. “I didn’t come here to hound you, and I can see now how I must have sounded. I just…I wanted you to know that I have arrangements with about half the cottages along this side of the shore now, all the way down to the yacht club and around the other way up to the Aerie. I thought you’d feel more comfortable about what I’m doing if you saw that your oldest friends and neighbors trust me. I’ve even got a promise from your son that he’ll think about my offer. I really am on your side—”

“Warrie!”
I shouted.

“I’m going,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry. I won’t come again.” He bowed to Grammaude and left the porch. I strode along behind him, following him over the stile to the yard of Braebonnie. For an instant, old sensations, old memories, dove and shrieked at me. The dark lawn, the dark porch, only moonlight on the face of the bay, only starlight, and above, against the night sky, one yellow-lit window. I had not stood in this yard for twelve years.

He turned to face me, in the late sun again, his hands in his pockets. His full, dark face was flushed, and there was perspiration at his hairline.

“I really am sorry, you know,” he said. “I truly thought she’d feel differently if she knew about the others. I only meant to reassure her.”

“Well, you didn’t,” I said hotly. “You bullied her; you were bending over her shaking your finger at her. I wish you could have seen yourself. Goddamn it, Warrie, why is this house so important to you? You have all the others. Why aren’t they enough? How much of Retreat do you want?”

“It’s just that I don’t want to see it go to the developers after she’s gone. After all, how long can she last? And I know you don’t want it.”

“Well,” I said, glaring at him, “maybe I do, after all. Maybe I’ve changed my mind. You said yourself people do. So there’s no more reason for you to bother her again. And if you do, I’ll get…I’ll get a restraining order or whatever I have to get.”

He laughed and held up his hands, palms out. “No need.

Though the idea of anyone on Cape Rosier being able to produce a restraining order is piquant, I must say. No, if you want the house yourself, that’s the end of it, of course. I’m only interested in helping out the old ones who don’t have heirs. I apologize, Darcy, to you and your grandmother. I wish that we might have been…friends. Just that.”

“Well, if that’s what you wanted, you picked a hell of a way to go about it,” I said, and turned and went back over the stile to Liberty. But I felt oddly ungracious. Somehow I knew that he would not approach Grammaude about the cottage again.

“That’s the end of that,” I said, sitting down on the edge of the chaise and taking her hands. They were cold, but the color was back in her face, and her eyes sparkled.

“That was wonderful, darling,” she said. “I couldn’t have done better myself.”

“Was I yelling that loud?”

“You know how sound carries down here by the water. He did sound sorry, didn’t he? I wonder about what? Probably that you want Liberty after all.”

“Grammaude—”

“I know. It was only to get rid of him. Still, I’d like to think…oh, well. You know, it bothers me terribly that those poor old fools along the shore have signed their cottages over to him, and as for Petie…well, I’ll deal with Petie later. I could simply threaten to disinherit him—”

“You wouldn’t! Petie is your heart!”

“No, I wouldn’t, of course. And you’re right, he’s much of my heart, but I really suspect you have a bit more of it. The thing about Petie is that he’s never really known it. Now you, my dear redheaded minx, must surely know.”

A great wash of fatigue flooded me. I slumped on the chaise. The scene with Warrie was only the culmination of the small, continuous subterranean drumbeat of tension that had pounded me over the past few weeks. But it all had its genesis in him.

“I know,” I said. “I do know that if I don’t know anything else, Grammaude. Tell you what, if you’re as tired as I am, let’s have chowder on trays in front of the fire and go to bed right after. I really don’t think either

of us needs to sit up with a shotgun across our knees tonight.

I think the old homestead is safe.”

“I hope so,” Grammaude said. “I hope so.”

The next afternoon twin bunches of roses came for Grammaude and me from the florist in Blue Hill. Mine were yellow and hers were a wonderful rose-coral. The cards read, simply,
I am truly sorry. Warren Villiers.

“I’m throwing these right out,” I said.

“I’m not,” Grammaude said. “They’re my favorite color. I wonder if Mark Graham told him? They must have cost him a mint. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, Darcy.”

And so for the next week, we went about the slow, symmetrical business of the colony with Warrie Villiers’s roses glowing in the background like amulets. By the time they had faded, he had made no other move toward Grammaude but to nod pleasantly to her and to me when he saw us on the sun porch or at the general store or the post office, and once, when she had a cold and stayed in bed for two or three days, he brought a small terrine of chicken and artichokes over and left it on the porch with a note that said,
This is the Gallic
idea of comfort food. I hope it lives up to its name.
It did; it was delicious, and she and I ate all of it at a sitting.

“Maybe he could open a restaurant,” I said, licking my spoon.

“Maybe he will,” she said.

I took the washed casserole back on a day that the black car was gone, thinking I would not run into him, but when I opened the screen door at Braebonnie to go up on the porch, he was there on the old glider. His foot and ankle were wrapped in an Ace bandage, and a pair of crutches lay beside him on the deck-painted boards.

“What on earth?” I said.

“Sprained it stepping off the curb in Castine yesterday, right on Main Street,” he said. “It’ll be okay in a week or so, they tell me.”

“Where’s your car?”

He grimaced.

“I hired a kid at the gas station to bring me home and take it back. It needed tuning anyway. He’s going to work on it and bring it back in three or four days. Somebody will follow him and take him back. At least I hope he brings it back. He looks like a fledgling repo man to me.”

I laughed. I knew that station and the young man in question. He had leered so covetously when I stopped one day for gas that I almost spoke sharply to him, until I realized that it was Mean Green’s car he coveted and not me. He did indeed look adept at spiriting cars away in the dead of night.

“I know,” I said. “I dare not take my car back there. I could tell he lusted after it.”

“No wonder,” Warrie said. “It’s a wondrous machine, that car. This IT that happens, it is—ah,
merde,
no?”

I laughed aloud. I had forgotten how funny Warrie could be. “It is. Are you going to be able to manage?” I said.

“Oh, sure. I’m getting good with the crutches. And I need to drop some flab, anyway. I’ve stocked up on tuna fish. I’ll be skinnier than old Mrs. Stallings by the time I’m off these things.”

I was silent for a moment, and so was he. Then I said, “I’d be glad to—” and he said, at the same time, “Listen, Darcy, I wanted to—”

We stopped, smiling.

“I could bring you something for supper till you can get around better,” I said tentatively, wondering what possessed my tongue. But what sort of enemy, what sort of danger, could he possibly be, flat on the

glider and unable to move around? I’d offer the same to anyone.

“I’d be very grateful,” he said. “I’ll be able to manage after a bit, but I’m on pain medication now that makes me woozier than hell, and I’m afraid I’ll set the place on fire if I light the stove. I’ve meant all summer to get a new electric one in here. This old job must be thirty years old.”

“Get gas,” I said. “Everybody has it. We usually lose power up here at least five times a summer, when it storms. I wonder that we haven’t before now. At least you’ll be able to cook when we do.”

“Good idea,” he said. “Thanks for thinking of it. Listen, Darcy, I just wanted to say again that I’m sorry—”

I shook my head and got up, preparing to leave. I did not want another apology.

“No, I want to say this, and then I’ll drop it,” he said.

I waited.

“I know that I hurt you terribly that last summer,” he said slowly. “I’ve thought of it often. I wish I could undo it, but I can’t. You were…you were a small miracle, and I just threw it away. I’ve never stopped regretting it. I don’t want anything more from you or your grandmother, though I’d have been very proud to have you as my friends. But I did want you to know that.”

“Well, thank you for telling me, Warrie,” I said, aware that the flush was creeping up my neck again and hating it. “You needn’t have, but it was…a nice thing to do. Now. I’m making chicken pie from a recipe my great-grandmother had, and I’ll bring a plate for you. You needn’t come to the door; just leave the screen unhooked and I’ll put it on the table by the door where the keys stay.”