Only Pretending
“Coffee sounds good,” Hawksquill said to the ancient lady beside her.
“It does,” Marge Juniper said. “Only I’m not sure whether it’s worth the trouble of going for it. You know.”
“Will you allow me,” Hawksquill said, “to bring you a cup?”
“That’s very kind,” Marge said with relief. It had been quite a trouble to everyone getting her here, and she was glad to keep to the seat she’d been put in.
Good, Hawksquill said. She went after the others, but stopped at the table where Sophie, cheek in hand, stared down as in grief, or wonder, at the cards. “Sophie,” she said.
“What if it’s too far?” Sophie said. She looked up at Hawksquill, a sudden fear in her eyes. “What if I’m wrong about it all?”
“I don’t think you could be,” Hawksquill said, “in a way. As far as I understood what you meant, anyway. It’s very
“Lilac,” Sophie said.
“That,” Hawksquill said, “was odd. Yes.”
“Ariel,” Sophie said, “won’t you look at them? Maybe you could see something, some first step…”
“No,” Hawksquill said, drawing back. “No, they’re not for me to touch. No.” In the figure Sophie had laid out, broken now, the Fool did not show. “They’re too great a thing now.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Sophie said, spreading them idly around. “I think—it seems to me I’ve about got to the end of them. Of what they have to tell. Maybe it’s only me. But there doesn’t seem to be any more in them.” She rose, and walked away from them. “Lilac said they were the guidebook,” she said. “But I don’t know. I think she was only pretending.”
“Pretending?” Hawksquill said, following her.
“Just to keep our interest up,” Sophie said. “Hope.”
Hawksquill glanced back at them. Like the circle Blossom had tried to make, they were linked strongly, even in disorder, by their opposite hands. The end of them… She looked quickly away, and signalled reassuringly to the old woman she had sat by, who didn’t seem to see.
In fact Marge Juniper didn’t see her, but it wasn’t fading eye-sight or failing attention that blinded her. She was only absorbed in thinking, as Sophie had abjured them, how she might walk to that place, and what she might take with her (a pressed flower, a shawl embroidered with the same kind of flowers, a locket containing a curl of black hair, an acrostic valentine on which the letters of her name headed sentiments faded now to sepia and insincerity) and how she might husband her strength until the day she should set out.
For she knew what place it was that Sophie spoke of. Lately Marge’s memory had grown weak, which is to say that it no longer contained the past time on deposit there, it was not strong enough to keep shut up the moments, the mornings and evenings, of her long life; its seals broke, and her memories ran together mingling, indistinguishable from the present. Her memory had grown incontinent with age; and she knew very well what place it was she was to go to. It was the place where, eighty-some years ago or yesterday, August Drinkwater had run off to; and the place also where she had remained when he had gone. It was the place all young hopes go when they have become old and we no longer feel them; the place where beginnings go when endings have come, and then themselves passed.
Midsummer Day, she thought, and made to count out the days and weeks remaining until them; but she forgot what season this was she counted from, and so gave it up.
Where Was She Headed?
In the dining room Hawksquill came upon Smoky, loitering in the corner, seeming lost in his own house and at loose ends.
“How,” she said to him, “do you understand all this, Mr. Barnable?”
“Hm?” He took a time to focus on her. “Oh. I don’t. I don’t understand it.” He shrugged, not as though in apology but as though it were a position he found himself taking, one side of a question, the other side had lots to be said for it too. He looked away.
“And how,” she said then, seeing she ought not to pursue that further, “is your orrery coming? Have you got it working?”
This too seemed to be the wrong question. He sighed. “Not
“What’s the difficulty?”
He thrust his hands in his pockets. “The difficulty is,” he said, “that it’s circular…”
“Well, so are the Spheres,” Hawksquill said. “Or nearly.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Smdky said. “I mean that it depends on itself to go around. Depends on its going around to go around. You know. Perpetual Motion. It’s a perpetual motion machine, believe it or not.”
“So are the Spheres,” Hawksquill said. “Or nearly.”
“What I can’t understand,” Smoky said, growing more agitated as he contemplated this, and jingling the small objects he had in his pockets, screws, washers, coins, “is how someone like Henry Cloud, or Harvey either, could have come up with such a dumb idea. Perpetual motion. Everybody knows…” He looked at Hawksquill. “How does yours work,” he said, “by the way? What makes is go around?”
“Well,” Hawksquill said, setting down the two coffee cups she carried on a sideboard, “not, I think the way yours does. Mine shows a different heavens, after all. Simpler, in many ways…”
“Well, but how?” Smoky said. “Give me a hint.” He smiled, and Hawksquill thought, seeing him, that he had not often done so lately. She wondered how he had come among this family in the first place.
“I can tell you this,” she said. “Whatever makes mine go around now, I have the definite impression that it was designed to go around by itself.”
“By itself,” Smoky said doubtfully.
“It couldn’t, though,” Hawksquill said. “Perhaps because it’s the wrong heavens, because it models a heavens that never did go by themselves, but were always moved by will: by angels, by gods. Mine are the old heavens. But yours are the new, the Newtonian, self-propelling, once-wound-up-forever- ticking type of heavens. Perhaps it does move by itself.”
Smoky stared at her. “There’s a machine that looks like it’s supposed to drive it,” he said. “But it needs to be driven itself. It needs a push.”
“Well, “Hawksquill said, “once properly set… I mean if it had the star’s motions, they’d be irresistible, wouldn’t they? Forever.” A strange light was dawning in Smoky’s eyes, a light that looked like pain to Hawksquill. She should shut up. A little learning. If she hadn’t felt Smoky to be effectively outside the scheme the rest of her cousins were proposing, which Hawksquill had no intention of furthering, she would not have added: “You may well have it backwards, Mr. Barnable. Drive and driven. The stars have power to spare.”
She picked up her coffee cups, and when he reached out a hand to keep her, she showed them to him, nodded and escaped; his next question would be one she couldn’t answer without breaking old vows. But she wanted to have helped him. She felt, for some reason, the need of an ally here. Standing confused at a juncture of hallways (she had taken a wrong turning away from the dining room) she saw him hurrying away upstairs, and hoped she hadn’t set him on fruitlessly.
Now where was it she was headed? She looked around herself, turning this way and that, the coffee cooling in her hands. Somewhere there was a murmur of voices.
A turning, a juncture where many ways could be seen at once; a Vista. No memory mansion of her own was built more overlappingly, with more corridors, more places that were two places at once, more precise in its confusions, than this house. She felt it rise around her, John’s dream, Violet’s castle, tall and many-roomed. It took
