The Lamorna Wink

PART IV. Stella by Starlight

54

Dan.

Standing down here and looking up at the dimly lit window, seeing a tall man with light hair in the room that held Daniel’s piano and where he wrote his music, of course she thought it was Dan.

It was easy enough to make the mistake, wasn’t it? No, not really, if there was no music. That alone should have told her. She would have heard the piano. God, if only she had heard it!

It had seduced her before she’d ever seen him, that music, even though she’d never thought of herself as an ingrained music lover. She listened to it, of course, and liked it. (She was afraid her taste might be somewhat banal.) But music had never affected her like that, never.

That day she had brought boxes of pastries for a children’s party-the little boy’s birthday-and while she’d been standing in that huge marble and granite foyer, the piano, from somewhere at the top of that magnificent staircase, had started. Thundered, really thundered, making her sway where she stood. The rolls, the flourishes, the arpeggiated chords were so beautiful she had to keep her eyes on the marble floor to keep from doing something really stupid-weeping or something.

“My husband,” said Karen Bletchley in uninflected tones, by way of explanation, as she tore off the check she’d been writing for the pastry.

Chris’s mouth went dry as she took it. She knew that Karen Bletchley was looking at her as if she was used to women swooning on her doorstep.

And was she, Karen, so used to that music, to hearing it, she could define it simply with “my husband”?

Chris could think of no excuse to linger; she wasn’t much good at the kind of conversation that would allow her to do so, especially with this woman who was so smooth and so cool. Ash-blond hair architecturally cut, as if the face had been born with this hair framing it. But the gray eyes were as opaque as the pottery itself. They had no depth.

So Chris had left quickly and got in her car, parked thankfully out of range of the front door but not out of range of hearing. With the window rolled down, the music came as vividly as the sound of the waves. How could a person do that? How could a mere man split you open, rearrange everything, heart lungs flesh bone?

She had rested her forehead on her hands, crossed over the steering wheel. So she was (and it amused her to think this) a goner even before she’d met him. If he’d been the Red Dwarf she’d have followed him to hell. And Dan Bletchley was anything but the Red Dwarf. Was it because she’d romanticized him so completely that she was bound to find him physically beautiful? No. He simply was.

When she finally met him-by accident, thank God, and alone, thank God again-the same feeling came over her as when she’d heard him playing. She’d come apart again, everything got rearranged again.

A goner. Then, a double-goner.

Heart lungs flesh bone.

The face disappeared from the window-had he seen her?-and Chris looked down at the ground, crunching some gravel around with the toe of her shoe, one of the several habits she had that had made Dan smile and put his arms around her. Chrissie. No one had ever called her that but Charlie. Chrissie.

“Hey, Chris,” Johnny had said, “hey, Chris, you look weird, you look enthralled you look like you’re in the kingdom of thralldom.”

Johnny. She should have gone directly to the village, but she had felt compelled to stop here at this house that no one had lived in since the Decorators, an appellation that always made her smile. The house had been standing vacant, but Morris Bletchley didn’t have to sell it and, she suspected, really he couldn’t. He couldn’t turn over the place where his grandchildren had died. Keeping it might mean to him keeping hold of some part of them. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to Morris Bletchley.

It was what had ended them, of course, ended Chris and Dan. He’d been with her that night and she knew- though he’d never said it because it might seem he was blaming her for being there-that he believed, somehow, it had been his fault.

Up to then, they had been so buoyant; for that year they had known one another she had felt untethered, not bound to earth. They had been weightless and guiltless. Until the children.

A door opened and slammed shut in the wind.

Well, he had seen her.

Trespasser, she tried on a smile. After midnight; no wonder this man thought it odd somebody was out here, on his property (even if rented), staring at the sea, staring up at the music room.

Who was he? He, too, was handsome, another reason she might have confused him with Dan. But he was slightly taller, slightly thinner, and looked mad as a hatter.

55

He was downstairs and out the back door in a shot.

She was still standing there; the face that had been turned toward the sea (as if it had comforts to offer beyond the scope of what humans had to offer) was now turned toward him.

The wind blew her black hair across her pale skin, and he saw how much she looked like her nephew, the coloring a genetic trait, like the straight nose and narrow, squared chin.

He wondered as he came through the door why that look of happiness had flashed across her face as if light had struck warmth into marble; he wondered now, walking up to her, why the look was just as suddenly withdrawn and she stopped and took root where she stood.

His feelings were a total muddle. He was genuinely-even rapturously-glad that she was alive, but at the same time was only too aware that he had been, all along, daydreaming about this woman, or about some woman, from the moment he’d set foot in this house. And now it was as if a dream had thickened to flesh and blood, only to mock him.

His mounting anger surprised him, but he let it mount. Melrose was not a rash person, nor did he make rash judgments, but he was growing angrier by the second over this woman’s nonchalant reappearance and her failure to see she wreaked havoc in people’s lives. How could she simply turn up like this and stand gazing seaward?

He knew the anger showed in his clumsy attempt to grab her arm. That she was genuinely shocked and bewildered by his movement was plain. That she had not carelessly mislaid herself was equally plain. He knew that and knew at the same time that when she had seen him so briefly before he turned from the window above, the moonlight on his light hair, she had thought he was Daniel Bletchley. And this was intolerable, but why? It had been clear three days ago when Bletchley spoke of her where his sympathies lay-his heart, his music, his past, but not (the music said) his future. Chris Wells had been the woman Daniel had been with but had never named (despite the fact she would have provided him an alibi).

If she was anywhere, anywhere as charming as her young nephew-and she was certainly as handsome-Melrose could easily understand why Bletchley had wanted her, and just as easily understood why she had wanted him. All of this went through his mind in the seconds it took him to walk up to her and grab her arm.

“Where in the hell have you been?”

Her astonishment robbed her, for a moment, of speech. Then she laughed uncertainly and said, “Who are you?”