Small World (40 page)

The chopper took them low over the house, so that its shape, a hollow-hearted square, was clearly visible. The studio was a curious pie-wedge of a building, two-stories high and ablaze with glass to the north, and roofed in solar panels that collected the sun from the south. Lucy found herself suddenly twitching with curiosity. Nick, reading her wonder-livened face, was pleased, and laughed.

The chopper landed on a smoothed area half a mile from the house, which shone white as old bones in the strong sunlight. A muscular woman of indeterminate age met them with a pony and a small trap. She had smiles for Lucy and the children but her pale blue eyes set in a long bony face sparked with curiosity. She waited patiently for Nick to finish helping the pilot with their bags, and then enfolded him in her long arms like a long-lost son.

’Nicholas,’ she greeted him, pounding his back with her big raw fists.

He hugged her back, swinging her off her feet.

‘Ma,' he sang happily. He set her on her feet carefully. ‘There. Ma, this is Lucy Douglas. Laurie. Zach. Meet Ma Blood.’

The woman's olive skin was flushed with pleasure and excitement. She took Lucy’s hand, and then the children’s one by one, with great solemnity.

‘Pleased, I’m sure,’ she said, and giggled.

She turned and seized a suitcase in either hand, and swung them up into the trap, even as Nick, protesting, dived for them.

‘Himself,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘is out milking the goats. He’ll be back for tea. Pretty quick. He told me where to set you down.’

She hoisted the children into the trap, where they settled, giggling among the heaped luggage.

‘Come on now,’ Ma Blood prodded them.

There was time, Nick assured Lucy, for a brief ocean swim after settling into their rooms. It was a short run from the glass doors that opened from their bedrooms onto the beach, over coarse dunes, to the sea. The ocean was cold, but the children seemed not to feel the chill. Lucy plunged in, thrilled by the unexpected buoyancy of salt water, and the force of the waves that lifted her and pushed her back to the sand.

After splashing with the children awhile, Lucy crouched under a thick towel on the beach, digging her hands idly into the sand for the feel of it, and watched them play. Nick stayed with them, playing at sharks and sea monsters, teaching them to open their eyes under water. The old man spoke from behind her.

‘Mrs. Douglas,’ he identified her.

She jumped, and turned to looked up at him. The sun was behind him, his face obscured with a large floppy Panama. But the large, caftan-draped body radiated an unexpected force, his voice, strong and resonant, and the more startling because of its resemblance to Nick’s.

She had begun to rise, even as he reached down to assist her to her feet. The hand she grasped was extraordinary, an enormous hand, large even for the heavy-bodied man who extended it. The fingers were as fat as cigars, flattening at their points into calloused, broken-nailed wedges. Liver spots made archipelagoes over their high-boned backs but the wrists and lower arms, where the sleeves of the caftan were pushed back, were knotted with muscle under the aged skin.

‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ Lucy stammered.

He did not shake her hand, only squeezed it gently. His skin was papery to the touch, dry but not cold, and scratchy where ragged calluses were built up along the fingers.

His face, obscured in shadow, was like one of the two-decades-old newspaper prints which were most commonly reprinted, the most recent of his public faces. Black and white masks, revealing less than they disguised, she thought. The light behind him outlined his bull neck, the heavy musculature that bespoke a massive chest, and the slight stoop forward, a small signature of age. Lucy turned over in her memory the half-forgotten photographs, the trio of self-portraits, from her art school textbooks. The young Sartoris, and how long ago had he been young, had been an athlete, a wrestler, and a horseman, but was rumored to be incredibly ugly of face. She had no clear impression of what he was supposed to look like, and for the first time wondered if the photographs had been deliberately obscure, the portraits consciously distorted. Peering at him, she looked for Nick in him, and saw only shadows.

He looked beyond her, to Nick and the children, cavorting in the surf.

’There have been no children here in decades,’ Sartoris said slowly. ’I had forgotten how queer and wonderful they are. I didn’t think there was anyone left on this earth with the courage to make new people.’

Lucy laughed. ‘Not courage, but thank you anyway. I was younger then. I think the right word is foolhardiness.’

She couldn’t see him smile, but a throaty chuckle emerged from :he shadows of the Panama. He gestured to Nick, just then noticing that Lucy was no longer alone on the beach.

And my son. Is it foolhardiness that led you to him?’

Startled by the faint contempt in Sartoris’s voice, she replied, tightly, ‘I’m sorry, that’s none of your business.’

Sartoris laughed out loud then and there was pleased surprise in it. ‘I wish you luck, Mrs. Douglas.’

Nick was splashing toward them, with Zach riding his shoulders. Dancing around them, Laurie tried to wet Zach with handfuls of water, and only doused Nick. Zach, from his invulnerable perch, kicked and chortled triumphantly.

After introductions were made, the old man gestured toward the sun, now low in the sky. All at once, the bathers felt chilled and faintly silly, playing manners in scanty swimsuits. Lucy hustled the children up the path toward the house. Behind her, the conversation between father and son came to her in distant rumbles and splashes. When she turned to look at them, just before entering the house, she saw they still loitered in the dunes, face to face, well beyond earshot. Nick was hunched against the gently rising night breezes, his hands shoved into the pockets of his terrycloth beach jacket, thrown on over his sea-wet skin. There was the solemnity of bearers at a funeral in their stance. Lucy could only guess at what passed between them, perhaps something concerning Lady Maggie,

Bringing the children to the terrace for tea a few minutes later, Lucy found Sartoris ensconced in a peacock-backed wicker chair, his back again to the sun. Nick was still showering off the sand and salt.

‘Come and sit with me,’ Sartoris directed the children, patted cushioned wicker chairs to either side of him.

So quickly did they obey him, that he cast a quick, sardonic glance at Lucy, and said, ‘Well-raised little people, I see.’ Without response, Lucy took a chair opposite him. Raising her children this far nearly on her own, she wasn’t about to make apologies to anyone for her methods.

‘Is your mother very strict?’ Sartoris proceeded to ask her children.

Zach nodded
of course.
His attention was on the table, already set with plates of cookies and other delicious-looking tidbits, as well as an awesome stoneware teapot.

‘Yes, sir,’ Laurie agreed. ‘All the other kids say so.’

Lucy laughed a little uncomfortably at this evidence of her neighborhood reputation.

‘Would you pour, Mrs. Douglas,’ Sartoris asked, and when Lucy nodded and moved to heft the heavy teapot, he settled back in his chair. ‘My mother was
very
strict,’ he informed Laurie and

Zach. ‘Oh, yes.’

Pausing to pass teacups to the children, he went on, ‘Why, she never would allow me to have all the sweets I wanted at tea. “Just two, Leighton,” she always said, “so as not to insult cook,” and if I took more, she’d put me in bed without my supper.’

Laurie’s eyes were round with sympathy. Zach eyed the goodies nervously. Perhaps he was going to be forbidden more than two as well.

And now that I have no mother to forbid me such things, I have a doctor who says much the same thing. He leads me to believe that a decent wedge of that gateau, the lovely chocolate one with the walnuts and cherries on top, would put me right in my grave.’ Zach gasped in horror.

'But perhaps a small sliver will only make me deathly ill. Possibly it will even immunize me, as minute doses of poisons are supposed to immunize one against supposedly fatal administrations. Would you slice me just the thinnest piece, Mrs. Douglas? And much bigger ones for Miss Laurie and Master .Zach.’

i’d be pleased to,’ Lucy said cheerfully. Leighton Sartoris’s mother, no doubt Pouring at the Great Tea Table in the Sky, must be feeling checkmated.

‘And allow me to select something for you. The madeleines all but
parlez vous.
Mrs. Blood is sadly wasted on me. I think she must be ecstatic to have guests to appreciate her talents.’

The children, their faces shining with anticipation and a measure of relief that somehow the vaguely threatened limitation had magically dissipated, chorused thanks yous and fell to.

And you,’ the painter asked Lucy, ‘what will you have?’

‘Oh, just a madeleine.’

He cocked his head mockingly. ‘Don’t tell me your mother only oermitted
one'!
No? You’re dieting? The richest country in the world,’ he disapproved, ‘and all the women practicing for a famine. All those bones. I should think lovemaking would be positively painful. Possibly noisy, clattering, clicking, like so many castanets.’

Lucy studied her teacup and lied cheerfully, ‘Actually I’m not; !‘m trying to set a good example.’

The old man barked an incredulous laugh.

I heard that,’ said Nick, coming onto the terrace from the house. ‘I hope you’re not trying to set too good an example. If it’s food, I’ll feel like a pig, and if it’s love, well, I’ll be very lonely. ’ He bent to kiss the top of her head lightly. ‘I’ll take three of everything.’

Lucy’s cheekbones grew warm; she bit quickly into her madeleine. Now her plate was rather priggishly empty. Defiantly, she pluckd a chocolate-laced croissant from among its brethren.

‘Ha,
mon pere,'
Nick told his father, ‘she’s seen through your crafty ways.’ To Lucy: ‘He likes to corner his guests so they feel they can’t eat, or they’ll be giving into his bullying. That way, he gets all the goodies. And never mind the stuff about skinny women either. My mother never weighed more a hundred and ten pounds, except when she was pregnant with me, when she got up to, what was it, eight stone. I never heard any complaints then about noisy bones.’

Sartoris snorted. ‘There’s no explaining love, is there?’

Nick turned the conversation skillfully to other matters. First, he provoked Sartoris into telling the children about the island, how he came to live there, and how he lived there, nearly self-sufficiently, he and Mrs. Blood, who appeared magically to refresh the teapot and the plates. When the old painter tired, Nick contributed funny stories about goings on at the Dalton. The children, sated with food, fell to giggling and playing at tea party together. The old man, studying them in silence, while Nick talked, noticed their boredom first.

i’m rather tired,’ Sartoris announced.

At that moment, Lucy noticed the bluish smudges beneath Zach’s eyes, and Laurie’s tired giggle. Suddenly, she too was bone-weary.

‘Mrs. Blood and I are accustomed to a rather late dinner. Perhaps you will forgive me if I rest a while before joining you. Ethelyn would be happy, Mrs. Douglas, to prepare a light meal for your little people, and sit with them while you and Nicholas dine with me later.’

‘Thank you,’ Lucy said, and in spite of her tense tiredness, smiled.

The old man rose with some effort and touched her hand lightly before leaving.

‘Good show,’ Nick whispered to the children, and the two adults carried the little ones off for a quiet time. Behind them, the last pool of sunset color darkened and disappeared with the light.

Lucy was conscious of Nick’s approving glance as she sat down to dinner. She had her hair up, and her shoulders were bared by her simple sundress. Stealing frequent glances at Nick, she couldn't help feeling good. He seemed inordinately, unreasonably happy.

The tension she had sensed in him over his mother was gone, exorcised by his father’s presence, some private ritual of grief that had occurred on the beach between the two men, by her presence and her children’s, she could only guess.

She was proud of him. She had never heard him as intelligent and witty, sparked by the male peacock in him, strutting for her, ind pricked by the unspoken criticism of his father. He brought :he Dalton to life, exposing his own love of it. In the wake of >jrtoris’s widening silences, it struck her that Nick was trying to convince his father of the worth of his life’s work, of his own worth.

Sartoris had seated himself at the far end of the table, where the diffuse lights from paired candelabra that lit the room barely -eached. Wearing a hooded caftan in rough linen gave him a -lonkish look and effectively veiled even his profile from Nick and

Lucy.

i’m sorry,’ he said at last, ‘to be such a poor dinner companion. Like Scrooge, I’m plagued with ghosts. When one arrives at my ige., one discovers the most lasting of emotions is regret. Or, in :he case of the grievously sinful, like myself, guilt.’

Nick was silent, communing with the tablecloth, or his own guilts. Lucy reached out impulsively and took the old man’s left hand.

i thought I could bury her with all the years I’ve lived apart -om her. I thought I could live here and paint my daubs like a landelion in a bit of Lucite. When I knew she was gone,