Hymn (2 page)

‘Mr Denman,' Sergeant Houk told him, with heartbreaking professional gentleness, ‘do you want to sit down and take a look at these things? The wallet contains a social security card and credit cards belonging to Celia Jane Williams, as well as business cards from this restaurant, and two photographs of a man who I now recognize to be you.'

Lloyd looked mechanically around, and then dragged over a rattan chair, and sat down. Sergeant Houk handed him the wallet, and then the charm bracelet. Detective Gable coughed uncomfortably, and sniffed.

This can't be real, thought Lloyd. Something's slipped, something's gone haywire. This is not me, this is somebody else. Or maybe I'm still asleep, and this is nothing but a dream. But I can feel the wind. I can hear the gulls crying. And there's Waldo, staring at me pale-faced through the tinted glass window, and Waldo wouldn't stare at me like that, so apprehensive and so sorrowful, if this weren't real.

He opened the wallet. He stared inside. The embossed label said F. David, Del Mar. He knew it was hers. He had been with her at the Flower Hill Shopping Center when she had bought it. He didn't have to look at the credit cards, but he did. Sears, Exxon, American Express. Don't leave home without it.

‘Where were these found?' he managed to say, his lips woolly and numb.

‘They were found on the body of a white Caucasian female aged about twenty-nine, in the parking lot outside McDonald's Restaurant, Rosecrans Avenue, at 11.30 a.m. this morning,' said Houk.

‘She was blonde,' added Gable, trying to be helpful, trying hard to be sympathetic. ‘She was pretty, by all accounts, with blue eyes. She wore a red chequered shirt and blue 501s.'

Lloyd didn't look up, but rubbed his thumb across the white leather wallet again and again, as if he were expecting a secret message to appear. ‘Red chequered shirt?' he asked.

‘That's right, sir. Red chequered shirt and 501s.'

‘Outside McDonald's on Rosecrans?'

‘That's correct, sir.'

‘I don't understand,' said Lloyd, and he didn't. He was so sure that Celia was in San Francisco that he was prepared to call her now, at the Performing Arts Center, even though he knew she was right in the middle of a lecture on reading operatic scores. Just to call her and say, ‘You're there, aren't you, in San Francisco?' And to hear her say, ‘yes! of course I am!'

‘And what did you say? Fatally burned? Dead?'

Sergeant Houk sucked in his cheeks even more cavernously. ‘I'm sorry, Mr Denman, but it sure looks like it. I mean, there's still a possibility it isn't Ms Williams. Somebody could've stole your fiancée's wallet. But I wouldn't count on it.'

‘What the hell are you talking about?' Lloyd protested. ‘She flew out of here Sunday afternoon! I put her on the flight myself! She was giving five lectures on Wagner and operatic technique, and then she was coming directly back home! There's no conceivable reason why she should have come back to San Diego before Saturday, none at all. And I can't believe she wouldn't have called me.'

‘Well, there must have been some motive,' Sergeant Houk said, gently. ‘The only trouble is, we don't yet know what it was.'

Detective Gable said. ‘She wasn't under any kind of strain, was she? Worried about this lecture tour, anything like that? Some people crack up without any warning whatsoever, just crack up, and the next thing you know they've left their family and their friends behind and they're riding lettuce-trains all over the country.'

Lloyd slowly shook his head. Lettuce-trains? He couldn't make any sense of what they were telling him. It was totally unbelievable that Celia was dead. On Sunday morning they had lain side by side in bed together with fresh coffee and the Sunday paper and the sun striping the sheets. She had leaned on her elbow, one hand thrust into her tangled blonde hair, and said to him, ‘We're going to have babies, aren't we?'

He had finished reading Calvin & Hobbes and then leaned forward and kissed her forehead. ‘Sure we're going to have babies. A boy like me and a girl like you.'

She had smiled a distant smile. ‘One will do.'

‘Just one? I want a dynasty!'

‘One's enough. If you have a baby, you know, you live for ever.'

But she hadn't had a baby, hadn't even had the chance to have a baby. Now she was dead, impossibly and unimaginably dead. No life everlasting, nothing.

The tears dripped down Lloyd's cheeks and he didn't even know that he was crying.

‘When did this happen?' he asked, trying to remember if he had experienced any unusual feelings during the day. Any feeling of coldness, any sudden sense of loss. But lunchtime had been chaotically busy, and for most of the afternoon he had been writing up his accounts. He couldn't recall anything but frantic hard work and wondering how to keep laundry costs down. Ah Kim's had just put up their prices two cents a napkin.

Houk said, ‘It seems like she poured petrol over herself. Kind of a ritual suicide. One of the cooks from McDonald's managed to reach her with a fire-extinguisher, but it was too late.'

‘She killed herself?'

‘I'm sorry, Mr Denman, it sure looks that way.'

‘I don't even know what she was doing there,' Lloyd protested. ‘I mean—what in God's name was she doing there? She wasn't depressed, she wasn't upset.'

‘I'm sorry, Mr Denman, we really don't know. We don't even know how she got there. There were no private vehicles anywhere in the vicinity left unaccounted for, and nobody saw a woman riding a bus with a petrol can.'

Lloyd dragged out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes. ‘God, what a waste. God, what a terrible waste. I can't tell you how . . .' he stopped, his throat was too tight, and his mouth didn't seem to work. She had killed herself, burned herself to death, and she hadn't even tried to tell him what was wrong. That was what hurt. She hadn't even asked him for help.

Sergent Houk waited for a long moment. Two of Lloyd's waitresses had arrived, and Lloyd could see them anxiously talking to Waldo, and glancing out at the balcony now and again. He gave them a hesitant wave, but they probably didn't understand what he was doing, or else they were too upset, because they didn't wave back.

Sergeant Houk glanced around at them, and then carefully took back the wallet and the charm bracelet. ‘You'll have these back as soon as possible, Mr Denman. Meanwhile there's one thing I'm going to have to ask you to do. It won't be easy, but we do need somebody to come downtown to the mortuary tomorrow morning to identify Ms Williams' remains.'

Remains, thought Lloyd. What a forlorn, contradictory word. When your soul has left your body, nothing remains. Only memories, only a scattering of objects. Clothes, photographs, a voice that speaks over and over again on video-recordings, an endlessly repeated smile.

‘We'll have to ask you a few more questions,' Sergeant Houk told him. ‘We're going to have to piece together everything that happened.'

Lloyd nodded. ‘All right, I understand.'

Detective Gable laid his hand consolingly on Lloyd's shoulder. ‘You okay, sir? You want a ride home or anything?'

‘No . . . no thanks,' Lloyd replied. ‘I have a restaurant to run.'

The two policemen left him out on the balcony, and went to have a word with Waldo. Essentially, it was ‘keep an eye on him, he's already in shock'. Then they left. Lloyd sat alone for a long time, unaware that the restaurant wasn't filling up, that no customers were coming in. Waldo had put a hastily-chalked sign outside saying Closed: Family Bereavement and Suzie was calling up all the customers who had made reservations, cancelling them all apologetically, and offering them free Fish Depot cocktails the next time they came.

Lloyd stood up, and leaned against the rail of the balcony. The ocean lay below him like molten solder, with a gradually wrinkling skin. The seagulls turned and cried. Lloyd wondered if one of them were already Celia, circling around La Jolla Cove, looking for him.

Waldo came out and stood a little way behind him. ‘You all right, Mr Denman?' he asked, at length. ‘You want a drink, maybe?'

Lloyd shook his head. ‘No thanks.'

‘You want that I should drive you home?'

‘I don't know. I don't feel real. I feel like I'm here, but at the same time I'm not here at all. Can you understand that?'

Waldo came up and clasped Lloyd's shoulder. ‘It's a beautiful evening, Mr Denman. The cove is beautiful. Do you know what they say in Lithuania, when somebody dies on a day like this? They say that God loved them so much that he lit all the lamps of heaven to guide them on their way.'

A little after eight o'clock, Lloyd drove himself back to North Torrey. He switched on the car radio but KFSD was playing ‘Un Bel Di Vedremo' from Madame Butterfly and he couldn't bear it; it had always been Celia's favourite. He drove the rest of the way home with tears running down his cheeks.

As he turned into the driveway, a lantern was alight on the front verandah, and the living-room lights were shining, but only because they had been tripped by automatic timers. There was nobody waiting for him, and now there never would be.

He parked his white BMW in the driveway and killed the engine. He stayed behind the wheel for three or four minutes, trying to decide if he really wanted to go inside. She was dead, but all of her clothes would still be there, her towel would still be hanging in the bathroom. Her photograph would still be smiling at him from his night-table. Most painful of all, he would still be able to smell her. Red, by Giorgio of Beverly Hills.

He had opened the BMW's glovebox to find the remote-control for opening the front gates, and her sunglasses and her lipstick had been lying inside, just where she had last tossed them. He had opened the lipstick case. Cantata Red.

The evening was growing shadowy. The air was thick and warm, and there was a strong smell of eucalyptus and pine. Up above him, it looked as if God had stirred boysenberry jelly into the sky, the way Lloyd's mother used to stir boysenberry jelly into his milk when he was a kid. I prefer boysenberry to any ordinary jam, somebody sang in the back of his brain.

At last Lloyd climbed out of the car, slammed the door, and walked up to the house with the terrible reluctance of true grief. The ocean gleamed knowingly through the ferns—that peek of the North Shore for which they had paid so much, and about which they had teased themselves so often. They had even considered renaming the house Peek House.

He opened the front door and went inside. The house seemed so pillow-silent that he was almost tempted to call out, ‘Hello? Celia?'

His shoes barked across the hallway, which was floored in bleached and polished oak; but were silent across the living-room, which was thickly carpeted in cream-coloured wool. He walked right to the middle of the living-room and looked around, as if he hadn't been here for years. There was a strong smell of oak, and new rugs. I prefer boysenberry to any . . .

The living-room was painted plain pottery white and furnished with tasteful sparseness. Celia had always preferred simple furniture, open spaces. If only Lloyd had known how complicated her mind was. There were two couches, upholstered in pink-and-blue glazed cotton; two French-style armchairs; and a coffee-table with a driftwood sculpture on it, as well as a neatly marshalled stack of Opera News and Musical America.

On the walls hung vivid oil paintings by local artists. A view of the Presidio, domed, white-walled, in shimmering sunlight. Next to it, a portrait of a Mexican woman, standing by an open adobe, selling lemons from a basket. The portrait was entitled, Who'll Buy My Lemons?

But the centre of visual and emotional gravity in the living-room—in fact the centre of visual and emotional gravity in the whole house—was Celia's ice-white Yamaha grand piano, which Lloyd had given her when they first moved in. That piano had meant commitment, and permanence. A house of their own, a relationship which was going to last. ‘After all,' Lloyd had told her, ‘you can storm out of the door with an overnight bag, but you can't storm out of the door with a grand piano.'

Fatally burned.

Lloyd went over to the piano and picked out two or three plaintive notes. All those years that Celia had practised. All those years that she had dedicated to Wagner and Verdi and Puccini. Fingers flying across the keys. Eyes closed, voice uplifted. Fatally burned. He played the first three bars of ‘Evergreen' because he could never play opera: love, soft as an easy chair . . . then stopped, and closed the lid over the keyboard, turning the key. From now on, it was going to stay silent, unplayed. Nobody else was going to touch it.

On top of the piano, meticulously arranged, was Celia's collection of scrimshaw—whale-ivory carvings from Nantucket and Salem and the Barbary Coast. Some of them dated as far back as 1720, but her favourite had always been the fragment of twenty-thousand-year-old fossilized mammoth tusk, exquisitely carved by Bonnie Schulte, one of the most accomplished scrimshanders in America.

Lloyd had promised Celia another Bonnie Schulte piece for her birthday. But the only carving she needed now was her headstone.

It was so difficult for Lloyd to believe that their life together was all over, when it had scarcely started. Even worse, there was nobody that he could call. Celia's parents were both dead, and although she had mentioned an older sister in Denver, Colorado, Lloyd had no idea of where her sister lived, or what her married name was, or how to get in touch with her.

He poured himself a glassful of Wild Turkey from the heavy crystal decanter on the black-enamelled Spanish linen-chest which they had brought back from Baja. His hand was shaking, and the decanter clattered against the rim of the glass. He walked through to the bedroom with his drink in his hand and stared at the big oak bed. On the wall behind the headboard was a stylized painting of two California quail, touching beaks, and Celia had said that it was a painting of them, kissing, in another incarnation.

‘You want to come back as a quail?' he had asked her.

She had smiled. ‘Better to come back as a quail than not to come back at all.'

On impulse, he called the Miyako Hotel, in San Francisco.

‘I want to speak to Ms Williams, please?'

A pause, and then politely, ‘No Ms Williams registered here, sir.'

‘Maybe she checked out. Was she there yesterday, or the day before?'

‘No, sir. Nobody by the name of Williams.'

‘How about Denman? Anybody by the name of Denman?'

‘No, sir. Denbigh, but no Denman.'

Lloyd hung up, frowning. Celia had told him on the phone last night that she was calling from the Miyako, he was quite sure of it. She had even mentioned the Japanese meal she had ordered from room service, the teriyaki shrimp. But unless she had registered under a totally different name altogether, she hadn't been there at all.

Plainly, she had been deceiving him. But why?

He swallowed whisky, and thought to himself: maybe the grand piano hadn't been enough to hold her back, after all. Maybe she had found herself a new lover.

He paced around the living-room, his mind helter-skeltering. A lover? It didn't make any sense. Celia had always told him the truth, even when it hurt. She wouldn't have fallen for another man without telling him. She couldn't. Besides, she had seemed to be deliriously happy. Come September, they were going to be married: they had even talked about how many children they wanted, and what they were going to call them. Joseph for a boy, Tershia for a girl.

And, if she had fallen in love with another man—really fallen in love—why had she set herself alight?

He leafed through the telephone book, and found the number of Sylvia Cuddy, Celia's best friend from the San Diego Opera (designer glasses, sensual pink lips, wildly tangled hair). He jabbed the phone-buttons with his middle finger, then tucked the receiver under his chin and waited for Sylvia to answer.

‘Sylvia? It's Lloyd.'

‘Well, hello! This is a surprise! How can I help you?'

Lloyd found himself swallowing tightly. A throatful of burrs. ‘Sylvia . . . I'm afraid I have some really bad news.'

He heard himself telling Sylvia in a clogged-up voice that Celia was dead. He heard Sylvia denying it. He heard himself say that it was true. He was desperately sorry, but it was true. He didn't even know whether he believed it himself. Maybe he was making some kind of surrealistic mistake, like one of those films where you pick up the wrong suitcase and open it up and voila! no pyjamas, no dirty rolled-up socks, no shaver, only four million dollars' worth of pure heroin, in plastic bags.

‘Sylvia . . . I've been trying to find out who might have seen Celia last . . . before she left San Francisco.'

A hesitant pause. ‘San Francisco? What do you mean?'

‘She was lecturing for the opera in San Francisco, wasn't she? A two-week engagement at the Performing Arts Center.'

‘Well, she may have been lecturing, Lloyd, but it wasn't for us. She never told me anything about it.'

‘When did you last talk to her?' asked Lloyd.

‘Why, just yesterday morning. She told me she was calling from home.'

‘You mean from here? From La Jolla? What did she say to you?'

‘I don't know . . .' Sylvia confessed. ‘Nothing much, really. She gave me her recipe for veal tarantino, the one I was always nagging her about. Then she said something about how excited she was, looking forward to the future. Then she hung up.'

‘She didn't say anything unusual? Anything that struck you as weird?'

Sylvia thought about it for a while. ‘I'm not sure. I suppose the whole phone call was weird, in a way—just suddenly calling me out of the blue to give me that recipe. And the way she said, at the end, “Well, goodbye, Sylvia. It was so final. I said, “You sound as if you're going on a trip.” But she didn't answer.'

Lloyd slowly replaced the receiver. The more he discovered about Celia's last moments, the more mysterious and unsettling they appeared to be. He had imagined that he and Celia had shared everything. Their friendship, their passion, their ambitions, their most inconsequential thoughts. Now he felt that a mask was slipping, and that a different Celia was coming into view, a Celia who had kept herself secret. A Celia who had told him lies, and lied to her best friend, too.

Through the open door to the bedroom, he could just see Celia's photograph laughing at him, the photograph he had taken in the courtyard at the Rancho Santa Fe. What are you laughing at, my lady? he thought. What were you doing in that car-park today, dowsing yourself with petrol and setting yourself on fire?

He walked through to the bedroom, picked up the photograph and stared at it closely, trying to see if her face gave anything away. Most of all, Celia, why didn't you tell me what was worrying you? Why didn't you ask me to help?

Maybe she had, he thought, but maybe he hadn't understood. The pain of that was almost more than he could bear, and he uttered a sob of grief that hurt his throat.

He drained the last of the Wild Turkey, holding the decanter upside-down until the last drop had fallen into his glass. Plip, the last drop. Then he struggled awkwardly out of his trousers, and bundled the Danish duck-down quilt around himself, and huffed and puffed, and made a determined effort to sleep.

She's dead, she's gone, but you have to sleep. If you don't sleep, you won't be able to cope with the restaurant, and Waldo, and everybody else who's depending on you.

Soon the quilt grew impossibly hot, so he untwisted himself, and lay spread-eagled across the bed, feeling drunker than he had ever felt in his life. The mattress tilted and swam as if it were adrift off Point Loma. His whole head seemed to be filled with potentially explosive whisky fumes.

‘Celia?' he said, knowing that she wasn't there, but drunk enough to defy reality. ‘Celia, I love you, for Chrissake! Don't you know that? Celia!'

Celia didn't answer, Celia was gone, burned in a carpark on Rosecrans Avenue. Tomorrow he would see her body for himself, and then maybe he would be able to accept it. He slept, with his mouth hanging open, and dreamed that he was arguing with his realtors. You said there was a conversation pit. This isn't a conversation pit, it's a grave. Then he dreamed about the restaurant kitchens. Louis was stirring the fish stock, oblivious to the giant lobsters that crawled and heaved and clattered around the floor, blue-black and glistening, slowly waving their claws at him. The swing doors swung. Ee-urk-ee-urk! There was somebody behind him, running away from him. He pushed his way into the corridor. The restaurant was blazing. All around him, naked women were running screaming in all directions, with their hair alight. Eeeeeeeeeee!!!!

He opened his eyes. He was still drunk, but he was conscious that he had heard a noise. He lay still, tense, listening. A creak, a rustle, a hollow-cheeked whisper like the draught of a door opened, and then closed. He listened even more intently.

Something dropped with a thud, and rolled. Then a drumming, tumbling noise. Lloyd swung his legs out of bed, and made his way unsteadily out of the bedroom door, jarring his shoulder painfully on the doorframe.

Shit, that hurts. He may have said it out loud. He stopped, swayed, almost lost his balance, listened.

The house was silent. But he was sure that he could feel something, feel somebody moving. He was sure that he could sense somebody breathing. He was supposed to be alone, wasn't he, now that Celia had gone, and yet he was sure that he wasn't.

His next-door neighbour, Hal Pinkerton, had always nagged him about buying himself a gun. Now he wished very much that he had listened. He could imagine a six-foot sixteen-stone black junkie with sweaty muscles and a Rambo knife waiting for him in the living-room, next to the conversation-pit that was more like a grave.

He patted the wall, searching for the lightswitch. He found it, and switched it on. He stood blinking at an empty living-room. Nobody there. Only the painted face of the Mexican woman, with her unbought lemons. Only rugs and floors and furniture.

When he looked over toward the grand piano, however, he realized that something was different. All of the scrimshaw had disappeared. Twenty or thirty pieces of carved whale-ivory, which Celia had carefully and artistically arranged on the piano-lid. Now the top of the piano was completely bare.

Lloyd went up to the piano and laid his hands flat on the lid. Cool and shiny and white as death. The Chinese always said that death was white. He looked around, but nothing else seemed to be missing. Who the hell would risk breaking into a house for the sake of a couple of dozen pieces of scrimshaw?