Little, Big

hold of her mind, as though it were in fact made of memory; she saw, and it swept her into a fearful clarity to see, that if this were her own mind’s house, all her conclusions would now be coming out quite differently; quite, quite differently.

She had sat this night smiling among them, listening politely, as though she were attending someone else’s religious service, mistaken for a member of the congregation, feeling at once embarrassed at their sincerity and aloof from emotions she was glad not to share, and perhaps just a little sad to be excluded, it looked like fun to understand things so simply. But the house had meanwhile been all around them as it was all around her now, great, grave, certain and impatient: the house said it was not so, not so at all. The house said (and Hawksquill knew how to hear houses speak, it was her chief skill and great art, she only wondered how she had been deaf to this huge voice so long), the house said that it was not they, not Drinkwaters and Barnables and the rest, who had understood things too simply. She had thought that the great cards they played with had come to them by chance, a Grail stashed amusingly with the daily drinking cups, an historical accident. But the house didn’t believe in accidents; the house said she had been mistaken, again, and this time for the last time. As though while sitting aloof in some humble church, among ordinary parishioners who sang corny hymns, she had witnessed some concrete and terrible miracle or grace, she trembled in denial and fear: she could not have been so horribly mistaken, reason couldn’t bear it, it would turn dream and shatter, and in its shattering she would awake into some world, some house so strange, so new…

She heard Daily Alice call to her, from an unexpected direction. She heard the coffee cups she still held rattling faintly in their saucers. She composed herself, took courage, and pulled herself out of the tangle of the imaginary drawing-room where she had got stuck.

“You’ll stay the night, won’t you, Ariel?” Alice said. “The imaginary bedroom’s made up, and…”

“No,” Hawksquill said. She delivered Marge’s coffee to her where she still sat. The old woman took it abstractedly, and it seemed to Hawksquill that she wept, or had been weeping, though perhaps it was only the watering of aged eyes. “No, it’s very kind of you, but I must leave. I have to meet a train north of here. I should be on it now, but I managed to get away to here first.”

“Well, couldn’t you…”

“No,” Hawksquill said. “It’s a Presidential train. Waiting on princes, you know. He’s taking one of his tours. I don’t know why he bothers. He’s either shot at, or ignored. Still.”

The guests were leaving, pulling on heavy coats and earflap hats. Many stopped to talk with Sophie; Hawksquill saw that one of these, an old man, wept too as he talked, and that Sophie embraced him.

“They’ll all go, then?” she asked Alice.

“I think,” Alice said. “Mostly. We’ll see, won’t we?”

Her eyes on Hawksquill, so clear and brown, so full of serene complicity, made Hawksquill look away, afraid that she too would stutter and weep. “My bag,” she said. “I’ll get it, then I must go. Must.”

The drawing-rooms where they had all met were empty now, except for the dim figure of the old woman, drinking her coffee in tiny sips like a clockwork figure. Hawksquill took up her purse. Then she saw that the cards still lay spread out beneath the lamp.

The end of their story. But not of hers; not if she could help it.

She glanced up quickly. She could hear Alice and Sophie, saying goodbye to guests at the front door. Marge’s eyes were closed. Almost without thinking she turned her back to Marge, snapped open the purse, and swept the cards into it. They burned the fingertips that touched them like ice. She snapped the purse shut and turned to leave. She saw Alice standing in the drawing-room door, looking at her.

“Goodbye, then,” Hawksquill said briskly, her icy heart thudding, feeling as helpless as a naughty child in a grown-up’s grip who’s yet unable to quit his tantrum.

“Goodbye,” Alice said, standing aside to let her pass. “Good luck with the President. We’ll see you soon.”

Hawksquill didn’t look at her, knowing that she would read her crime in Alice’s eyes, and more too that she wanted even less to see. There was an escape from this, there had to be; if wit couldn’t find it, power must make it. And it was too late now for her to think of anything but escape.

Too Simple to Say

Daily Alice and Sophie watched from the front door as Hawksquill climbed quickly, as though pursued, into her car, and gunned the motor. The car leapt forward like a steed, and arrowed out between the stone gateposts and into the night and fog.

“Late for her train,” Alice said.

“Do you think she’ll come, though?” Sophie said.

“Oh,” Alice said, “she will. She will.”

They turned away from the night, and shut the door. “But Auberon,” Sophie said. “Auberon, and George…”

“It’s okay, Sophie,” Alice said.

“But…”

“Sophie,” Alice said. “Will you come sit up with me a while? I’m not going to sleep.”

Alice’s face was calm, and she smiled, but Sophie heard an appeal, even something like a fear. She said, “Sure, Alice.”

“How about the library?” Alice said. “Nobody will go in there.”

“Okay.” She followed Alice into the great dark room; Alice lit a single lamp with a kitchen match and turned it low. Out the windows the fog seemed to contain dull lights, but nothing else could be seen. “Alice?” she said.

Alice seemed to wake from thought, and faced her sister.

“Alice, did you know all what I was going to say, tonight?”

“Oh; most of it, I guess.”

“Did you? How long ago?”

“I don’t know. In a way,” she said, sitting slowly on one end of the long leather chesterfield, “in a way I think I always knew it; and it just kept getting clearer. Except when…”

“When?”

“When it got darker. When—well, when things didn’t seem to be going as you thought they would, or even the opposite. Times when—when it all seemed taken away.”

Sophie turned away, though her sister had spoken only with a deep thoughtfulness, and in no way in reproach; she knew what times it was that Alice spoke of, and grieved that she had, even for a day, for an hour, deflected her certainties. And all so long ago!

“Afterwards, though,” Alice said, “when things seemed, you know, to make sense again, they made an even bigger sense. And it seemed funny that you could ever have thought it wasn’t all right, that you could have been fooled. Isn’t that right? Wasn’t it like that?”

“I don’t know,” Sophie said.

“Come sit,” Alice said. “Wasn’t it like that with you?”

“No.” She sat by Alice, and Alice pulled a multi-colored afghan, Tacey’s work, over the two of them; it was cold in the fireless room. “I think it just kept making less sense ever since I was little.” So hard to speak of it, after so many years of silence; once, years ago, they had chatted about it endlessly, not making sense and not caring to, mixing it with their dreams and with the games they played, knowing so surely how to understand it because they made no distinction between it and their desires, for comfort, for adventure, for wonder. Very suddenly she was visited with a memory, as vivid and as whole as though present, of her and Alice naked, and their uncle Auberon, at the place on the edge of the woods. For so long had her memories of those things come to be in effect replaced by Auberon’s photographs that recorded them, beautiful pale .and still, that to have one return in all its fullness took her breath away: heat, and certainty, and wonder, in the deep real summer of childhood. “Oh, why,” she said, “why couldn’t we have just gone then, when we knew? When it would have been so easy?”