Locked Rooms Part 22

"You'll get horribly red and sore," Donny warned her.

"Oh, don't be wet, Donny. I don't care. I think I'll just move down here to the sticks and turn into a turnip."

"A red turnip," he commented.

"There should be a couple of beach umbrellas in the boat shed," I offered. "If they haven't fallen to pieces. And canoes, a badminton net, and lawn bowls, if you're interested."

The umbrellas hadn't fallen to pieces, not quite, and when Donny came across the lawn with a pair of them across his shoulder, he said that the shed's other forms of entertainment seemed in decent shape as well. He drove the pole of the most promising umbrella into a place in the lawn chosen by Flo, raising its ribs gingerly. The fabric had a few holes in it, but it held, and Flo spread a rug underneath it and settled down with a sigh of satisfaction. He installed the other one nearby. We all lay down, and lethargy descended.

Thirty-five minutes later, the lack of stimulation drove all three of us into motion. I was the first to tire of watching the humming-birds in the fuchsias.

"I'm going to see if I can find something to read. Can I bring either of you anything from the house?"

Donny leapt up with an eagerness that betrayed his own growing need for action. "I'll take a stroll into the village and see if I can find a paper," he declared.

"Mrs Gordimer will be happy to get you one," I offered.

"Nope, I'll stretch my legs and then I can be a sloth the rest of the day. And I want to know how the baseball went." But before I could comment on how unlikely and wholesome an interest in baseball was in a jazz-baby like him, he added, "I've got some money riding on it."

Flo, too, was on her feet. "I'm going to put on my bathing suit."

Donny left in the direction of the village, Flo disappeared into the house and came out in a skimpy bathing costume, settling onto her rug, and I returned to the hidden storage room. I searched every inch of its walls, examined every object on the shelves, pushed and manipulated every shelf and hook, but nothing gave way, no concealed entrance or trap door came to light, to lead me into the locked rooms of my dream.

There was nothing here.

When Donny came back, the bounce in his step proclaiming how the scores had gone, he too changed into his costume and persuaded Flo to bathe in the rather murky waters. After a while, I scrubbed my hands and went down to the umbrellas, where I found Donny had arranged three of the deck-chairs from the now sun-drenched terrace. He and Flo lay sleeping, hair damp from their swim, chairs three decorous feet apart, faces turned towards each other in slumber.

I smiled, and sat down in my own chair, remembering only as my backside hit the wood that I had neglected to bring a book from the house.

But I stayed where I was, effectively alone on the lawn, nothing to distract me but the sound of two men in indistinct conversation from the other side of the lake.

What had the hidden-room dream meant, if not an actual, physical place?

Dreams, I knew, were not some mythic message from Beyond. Dreams are speech from the unconscious mind, messages couched not in the logical terms of daylight consciousness, but in a twilight narrative of glimpsed images and impressions. Repeated dreams, worked over and over, generally had a purpose: In my case, the flying-objects image had taken me by the hand and eventually led me to the realisation that I had been in San Francisco during the earthquake, thus opening up an entire segment of my childhood that I had closed away. The second dream, that of the faceless man, was rooted in a specific incident that clearly had terrified my six-year-old self, an event that had rested unquiet over the intervening years until I could finally bring it to light and put it to rest-I felt certain, thanks to Holmes' discovery of the old woman's reminiscences, that that particular nocturnal visitor would trouble me no more.

Both dreams had their origin in frightening incidents, two events that had been wrapped about and reshaped by my unconscious mind to soften their sharp edges-until, triggered by the realisation that I was heading to the place where both had occurred, like bits of psychic shrapnel they worked their way to the surface.

But the third dream appeared to be without antecedent. I could find no concealed rooms, either here or in Pacific Heights; moreover, the dream had always been very specific: I knew about the rooms, and needed only to put the key to the door and step inside. Yet in both houses I had actively searched, and although memories awakened as I went along-freely and comprehensively in the Lodge, piecemeal and grudgingly in San Francisco-in neither place had I felt that throb of recognition that told me I was getting close to the door.

Perhaps Tom Long had been right. When I'd heard those precise Chinese accents telling me of Matteo Ricci's memory palace, I'd been frankly indignant, that this stranger might presume to see into my mind. But maybe I'd been too quick to dismiss his suggestion that the hidden rooms were not of stone and wood, but were located in the recesses of my mind.

Like an object so familiar to the eyes it goes unseen, I had habitually walked past my own history, freely displaying the rest of the house to all and sundry, knowing yet not knowing what lay behind its surfaces. My entire childhood had become a self-inflicted blind spot-I had complacently pa.s.sed by the locked rooms of my past for so long, fingering the key in my pocket, that I no longer knew where to find the door.

I sat where I was for a long time, staring unseeing at the lake. The sun crept its way onto my toes and up my ankles. Eventually, Flo and Donny stirred, bantered, rose. They raced down the lawn and down the dock to dive into the lake, which looked so lovely and cool that I changed into my own very conservative bathing costume and joined them. Afterwards, we took some lunch, and when a breeze came up we experimented with the little boat, ending up using the oars more than the sail. Sunburnt and replete with the pleasures of childhood, we returned to a house that was fragrant with beef and onions, a rustic ca.s.serole left in the oven for us by Mrs Gordimer. We hurriedly rinsed the lake water from our skin and changed into our dinner wear, then threw ourselves on the food as if we had not eaten in days.

Later, when the dishes were virtuously dried and put away, we lit the citronella candles on the terrace and took our coffee out there.

Flo eventually broke the long silence, crossing the legs of her heavy silk lounging pyjamas and giving a sigh of contentment. "Golly, what a swell day this has been, Mary, just the tops. Thanks for letting us crash your party."

"It's been a pleasure," I told her in all honesty. An unexpected pleasure, I could have said, but did not. "Thank you both for coming with me."

"You did look pretty down. On Friday, I mean. I don't know what was wrong, but you looked like a real flat tire before you got some bubbly into you."

She was too polite to ask, but I could see no real reason not to tell her why I'd been troubled-after all, I'd told a relative stranger that same night. "I had some bad news, Friday morning. An old friend of the family died."

"Criminy, Mary, why didn't you say-"

"Oh, she died a long time ago, it's just that I only found out on Friday." Flo's expressions of distress faded to a more appropriate level-after all, how close a friend could this have been, if it took me so long to hear about it? A question, indeed, that I had been asking myself. "She was the doctor who helped me, after the accident. A, well, a psychiatrist. I was in pretty bad shape then, mentally as well as physically, and she helped a lot. I'd hoped to see her, but I discovered she actually died within a few weeks of the time I went back to England in the winter of 1914. She was murdered."

"Murdered! How absolutely dire! What was her name?"

"Ginzberg. Leah Ginzberg."

"But-wait a tick. That sounds familiar."

"She was famous, wasn't she?" Donny asked. "That was just after I came out from Chicago, and I remember a buzz about it. She was killed in her office, wasn't she?"

"That's right," I said. "I wouldn't have said she was famous, but your friend Jerry knew of her. Or was it Terry? Terry, right. He and I were talking while I was resting my feet at the dance, and it came up."

"Gosh, yes!" Flo exclaimed. "I remember now, she was was famous-the Lady Mesmerist, they called her." famous-the Lady Mesmerist, they called her."

"She did use hypnosis sometimes," I agreed.

"There was some trial, wasn't there?" Donny's voice went thoughtful as he searched his memory. "She'd helped some girl come up with a memory, and the cops were making a stink, saying she was turning the courtroom into a vaudeville stage."

"Really?" I said doubtfully. Flo chimed in.

"Wasn't that the girl claiming she had been a.s.saulted? Mummy wouldn't let me see the papers, but I snuck them out of the trash. Yeah, they were saying the only reason she was making the charge was because she wanted to be an actress and thought it would get her noticed. Like the Fatty Arbuckle case, only that was later. And this girl didn't die."

"She was a dancer-chorus line, not ballet," Donny added, for my sake, "and told everyone she'd been knocked cold during the attack, and forgot the details. And your doctor friend helped her remember them-only the police said it was all hooey, that she'd just helped the girl come up with a story for why she hadn't made the charges when the attack happened instead of waiting nearly a year."

"I suppose that makes sense," I told them. "Dr Ginzberg used hypnosis to help me put together what happened during the accident-I'd sort of . . ." My voice trailed off as I was. .h.i.t hard by what I was about to say. With an effort, I finished the thought: "I'd pushed it away, even the parts I could eventually remember. So yes, she was probably accustomed to working with helping people retrieve their repressed memories."

I found myself smiling, a little sadly, at this last. A patient invariably feels that the intense relations.h.i.+p she forms with her psychiatrist is entirely unique and essentially personal; it is always a jolt to realise that it is also one of a score such relations.h.i.+ps the psychiatrist holds simultaneously: a part of the job.

Donny lit a match, his handsome face coming brightly into view then fading into a mere outline in the glow of the cigarette. "Didn't they think one of her loonies went nuts in the office and killed her? I don't remember ever hearing who it was-the papers are never as good in following up a story as they are in telling you in the first place, are they?"

"It was never solved," I said. Both of them went quiet at this reminder that we were speaking of a friend, not an anonymous victim. Then Flo stirred.

"What happened with the girl's case?"

"I think it was dropped," Donny answered. "Yes, there was some hok.u.m about the man having the doctor killed, but wouldn't he have knocked off the girl instead?"

"Wonder what happened to her?"

"She went back to work. Used to be one of the dancers at the Tiger, in fact."

"The Blue Tiger, where we were Friday? Is she still there?"

"She wouldn't be, no-she'd be too old even for the chorus now."

"Billy's no spring chicken," Flo commented, in what sounded like an objection.

Billy? I thought, then: Ah. Belinda Birdsong, the saucy chanteuse.

Donny gave a snort, and said, "Billy was old when he was in short pants."

Hmm. Another Billy, then. Unless this was another of the slang turns my American contemporaries used, where a girl was "old man" and a man "young thing."

Flo giggled. "Don't be absurd, Donny. Billy never wore short pants; he was born in a skirt."

"Wait a minute," I broke in. "Are you saying that Belinda Birdsong is a man?"

My two companions flew into gales of laughter, making me realise that I'd sounded like someone too ancient, or too naive, to have imagined such a thing as a man acting as a woman. "No, honestly," I protested, "I've seen men impersonating women before, but a person can usually tell. Are you sure?"

This set them off again, into the sort of choking noises that can only come from a risque joke. "Oh, yes," Donny got out at last. "No mistake."

"Do you care to tell me why?"

The cool edge to my question reminded him of his manners. "Sorry," he said. "Didn't mean to . . . That is to say, yes, I'm sure Belinda's a man, 'cause I saw his, er, fittings one evening. I was walking by his dressing-room when someone threw open the door at a . . . revealing moment."

"I see."

"As did I. Gave me quite a trauma, I tell you, seeing the, er, lengths the boy would go to to conceal-" A slapping noise came out of the darkness as Flo chastised him, and I made haste to move the subject on a step.

"I'm impressed. Their throat usually gives them away, the Adam's apple, you know, and a degree of exaggeration in their manners. He's very natural."

"They all are."

"What, you mean the others on the stage were all men, as well?"

"Not the chorus line, but the three other singers, yes."

I'd never even suspected it. Alcohol, of course, was partly to blame for my lack of perception, and the room's thick, smokey air, but on reflection, I decided that the reason I had failed to notice was that, in England, such acts as I had seen were generally in small and seedy cabarets, not in a glittering palace the size of a warehouse with a big, slick jazz band to accompany its internationally known singer.

"Well, fancy that," I said in the end, vowing to myself never to tell Holmes of my failure. We sat beneath the stars and the sliver of new moon, speaking of other things, and after a while Donny brought out a ukulele and sang in a surprisingly sweet tenor a bouncy melody a.s.suring us that "It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo'," some of the words of which escaped him, and another tune (this one sung in a startling imitation of a Negro woman) about Mamma going where Papa goes. He played songs I did not know and others of my childhood, and although the ukulele has never been one of my favourite instruments, under the stars and beside the lake that night, it seemed the only appropriate music in the world.

Eventually, when the moon had slid beneath the hills and the Milky Way was a bright smear across the firmament, we took ourselves to bed.

Chapter Nineteen.

Tuesday was a day of leisure, an unlooked-for holiday from care, during which we at last eased into the att.i.tudes appropriate to a summer house. The weather cooperated in the venture, with a slight high fog to keep the sun from waking us too early, then burning off to present us a day worthy of the Riviera. Flo and Donny appeared, yawning and tousled, to exclaim in appreciation of the sparkle off the lake. Flo turned on her heel and went back to don her bathing costume, and while Donny was studying the potential contained in the cupboards, she trotted down the lawn and to the end of the dock where she stood, pulling on her red bathing cap, before launching herself off the end into the water.

Donny produced griddle-cakes (apologising all the while for the lack of some spice or other that his mother used and which, he claimed, defined the dish) until we were groaning, and we then merrily abandoned the mess in favour of reading in the lawn-chairs.

They had both brought novels, although at the moment both were buried in other things. Flo was reading one of the Sat.u.r.day Evening Post Sat.u.r.day Evening Posts that Mrs Gordimer had left in the sitting room, chuckling over an F. Scott Fitzgerald story called "How to Live on $36,000 a Year." I glanced automatically at the book beneath her as I settled onto my chair. "Heavens, Flo," I said, "what is that door-stop of a book you've got?"

"It's Ulysses, Ulysses," she said with a giggle. "A friend bought it in Paris and smuggled it in disguised as a five-pound box of Swiss chocolates. Have you read it?"

"Not yet."

"They say it's hot stuff."

"It had better be, considering the size of it. And what's that you have, Donny?"

"Cross-word puzzles," he replied, holding up a peculiar book that had come with a pencil attached to it. "Just hit the shops, and a friend said it was going to be all the thing. Can't see them catching on, myself. They're tough."

The more ordinary-looking book on the gra.s.s underneath his chair said The Plastic Age, The Plastic Age, by someone named Marks. "I presume that's a novel?" I asked. by someone named Marks. "I presume that's a novel?" I asked.

"You bet," he said. "Everyone's talking about it-nearly got itself banned for the hot bits. The story of a fellow's undergraduate years. What about you?"

"A book on feng shui. It's a kind of Chinese philosophy." I saw their faces go blank, and thought I should perhaps redeem myself a little. "I did read a book on the boat out that had been banned for years. Have you read Jurgen Jurgen?"

They'd heard of it, wanted to know how "hot" it was, but I had to admit that the moral outrage of the censors probably had less to do with the petting scenes than with the fact that it was G.o.ds who were doing the petting. Donny trumped my bid of Jurgen Jurgen by saying casually that he'd met Scott Fitzgerald at a week-end in France the previous summer, but as I'd found Fitzgerald's stories a somewhat tedious glorification of childishness-and American East Coast aristocratic childishness at that-I had little to say. Eventually I returned to my Orientalia, they to their stories, and the sun continued its complacent way across the sky. by saying casually that he'd met Scott Fitzgerald at a week-end in France the previous summer, but as I'd found Fitzgerald's stories a somewhat tedious glorification of childishness-and American East Coast aristocratic childishness at that-I had little to say. Eventually I returned to my Orientalia, they to their stories, and the sun continued its complacent way across the sky.

We ate lunch, and then Donny wanted to try the canoes. Flo protested that the sun was too hot, but he offered her one of his long s.h.i.+rts, and that (along with a wide straw hat from the house) mollified her. They paddled, they swam, I joined them and sat out, and then it was somehow evening, and the happy melancholy of physical repletion coupled with too much sun settled over us. We had a drink, and dinner, and played billiards in the front room until the worst of the mosquitoes had been driven off by the citronella.

Around ten o'clock Donny proposed another swim. Flo and I begged off, but he was set on it, and strode down the lawn into the darkness. After a minute, we heard a splash, then the rhythmic sounds of arm strokes.

"Do you suppose he went in fully dressed?" I asked Flo. He was by no means drunk, so I wasn't worried about his safety, but I was curious.

"No, there'll be a line of clothing down the lawn come morning," she told me.

The sound of his strokes faded and grew dim, then nonexistent. "He seems a strong swimmer," I said dubiously.

"Gosh, you don't need to worry about Donny-for two bits he'd swim across the Golden Gate. You'd never know he had scarlet fever when he was a kid, would you?"

"It doesn't seem to have affected him."

"It did, though. He tried to join up in '17, but they wouldn't have him. A d.i.c.ky heart. That's when he came out here-he was too wild about it to stay at home where all his friends had joined up, had to get away. Bit sensitive about it, you know?"

"I won't say anything."

"Crazy, really, he's strong as an ox. h.e.l.l, they even took my father, who was old."

"Yes, your mother told me he'd been killed in the war."

"Bet she said he was her husband, too." I heard her chair creak and protest as she sat up suddenly, then heard the sound of her cigarette case opening. In a minute, the flare of a match lit her face.

"Do you mean to say they weren't married?" I asked tentatively.