“Was your cook Chinese?” Holmes asked.
“I shouldn't have thought so,” I told him. As with most Western cities, the Chinese community in San Francisco was closely hemmed by judicial ordinance and societal expectations. They were allowed to run laundries, make deliveries, and perform menial labour, but a Chinese cook in a private home would have been unusual.
“You don't remember,” he said, not a question.
“I am sorry, Holmes,” I snapped. “I'm not being deliberately unco-operative, you know.”
But even as I said it, his question had woken a node of memory; the ghost stirred again, that ample-bodied figure moving from stove to scullery. A cook: But now that I thought about it, the woman had been wearing loose trousers, and soft shoes. And a tunic, but colourful, not a thing a menial worker would have worn for hard labour.
“Mah,” I breathed in wonder. “Her name was Mah. And Micah was her brother.”
“Who is Micah?”
“Our gardener. He rescued a bird from the neighbour's cat one time. He wore a sweaty soft hat, and he used to bow when he gave my mother a bouquet from the flower bed. And . . . and he used to make me laugh with the way he talked. He called me ‘missy.'”
“Did he wear a queue?” Holmes' voice was soft, as if not to disturb my attention.
“He . . .” I began to say no, he wore a hat, but again my hand knew the truth of the matter: my small fingers wrapping curiously around a smooth, glossy rope of plaited hair, hot from the sun. But the sensation seemed very distant, as if overlaid by something else. “Bless me, he did. His hair was once in a long plait all the length of his back, but that was a very long time ago. Later I just remember the Western hat, and that he dressed like anyone else.”
“No doubt after the emperor was overthrown in 1911, your gardener would have joined the rest of the world in cutting the queue and taking on the laws and customs of his adoptive land. Before that, his assuming Western dress would have been dangerous for his family in China.”
“That's why Chinatown seemed different,” I exclaimed.
“How is that?”
“The streets. I remember them as filled with people in strange dress—funny hats, the queues, foreign clothes. But yesterday most of them were dressed like the rest of the city.”
“And their children will now be going to public schools, and their laws will be those of America.”
“But how on earth did you know? That he was Chinese, I mean?”
“The mirror, the water, the pot-plant. There is a Chinese belief that the psychic energies within a room can be shaped by the judicious use of objects that embody the elements. Something to do with the dragons under the earth. Symbolic, of course, but a belief in patterns of electromagnetic energies across the face of the earth is common—one need only note the prehistoric hillside carvings in Peru, the song-lines among the aboriginals of Australia, and the ley-lines across England.”
I braced myself for a set piece on one of Holmes' many and invariably arcane interests, but that seemed to be the extent of his lecture for the time being. With a last glance around, he went out the swinging door, leaving it standing open. A moment later I heard his feet climbing the stairs.
Chapter Four
I did not follow him. Truth to tell, I was feeling just a little shaky.
I am a person to whom self-control is basic. Over the course of the past few years I had been shot, knifed, and forcibly drugged with a hypodermic needle; I'd had Holmes abducted from my side, been abducted myself, come within moments of being blown to a red mist, and recently faced down a tusked boar mad with rage, all the while eating peculiar foods, wearing impossible costumes, and sleeping in scores of highly uncomfortable situations. Yet I had never really deep-down doubted my ability to meet the peculiar demands of life with Holmes, because I had always trusted my body and mind to function smoothly together. Will and intellect, in easy harmony.
And suddenly, what I had imagined was control now seemed mere passivity, what appeared to be harmony was merely a facade. I felt as if I were standing with my back braced against the door of an overstuffed cupboard, struggling to keep the avalanche of clutter inside from sweeping out and overwhelming me. Coming to this house had opened that door, and memories had begun to trickle out: Mah the cook, Micah the gardener. My mother's fingers brushing the door frame, her hand cupping the back of my head.
How many childhood memories does the average person retain? I suspect not many, and those either a generalised composite of experiences or striking events that lodge in the mind like boulders in a stream. And if the average person were to be told that those memories were unreliable, that the utterly familiar home never existed, that the vividly remembered fall from the tree never took place outside of dreams, what then?
That person would begin to mistrust his or her mind.
And that person would be right to do so.
Instead of going to the stairs, I turned the other way and found the library, tugging back one of the sheets to uncover a leather chair. I sat down, dimly aware of creaking floorboards overhead, more immediately interested in the ghosts this room might have.
It was a man's room. So I sat, waiting for my father.
I had been lucky in my parents, blessed for fourteen years to live in the vicinity of two lively, intelligent individuals who loved me, and each other, unreservedly. My self-imposed amnesia, if that is what it was, no doubt had its roots, as Holmes had said, with the double trauma of the accident that took my family's life.
My father had been driving a difficult piece of road in the autumn of 1914, a last family week-end at the lake-house before he enlisted and the war engulfed our lives. He had been distracted, and the motorcar had swerved, hesitated, and then plunged down the cliff into the sea. With the swerve, I had been thrown free; father, mother, and brother had sailed off the world and into the resulting flames.
I spent the rest of the autumn in hospital, and still bore the scars and twinges from my injuries. Worse than the scars, however, was the guilt that started up as soon as consciousness returned—not just the grinding offence of having survived when they had not, but the burning agony of knowing that I, myself, had been the cause of the accident. That I had distracted my father, by starting a loud and petty argument with my younger brother. That I had killed them, and lived to bear the guilt.
Impossible to live with the memory, impossible to leave it alone; within weeks, my young mind had learnt to suppress it during the daylight hours, although my nights had been haunted for years by the Dream, nocturnal memories of the sights and sounds of the car going off of the cliff.
Easier by far just to shove all the past into the same crowded cupboard than to pick and choose what to keep out on display and what to hide away. And because my mind, and my will, are both very strong, the door stayed so firmly shut that I managed to forget it was even there, until the ship had sailed out of the Bombay harbour and turned towards California, its prow a wedge, prising at the edges of the cupboard door.
My father had used this library daily. He had sat at that shrouded desk, taken a cigar from that enamelled box and clipped it with the tool that lay waiting, sat to read the newspaper in that other canvas-wrapped chair before that cold and empty fireplace. And being the kind of person he was, he would have allowed me free access, and I would have been in and out of this room at all times, with questions, with specimens of natural history, with discoveries and complaints and proposals. But was it a composite of experiences that told me this? Or was it hypothetical reasoning, a theory given flesh?
I did not know. Still, I felt that he had been here, once long ago, and that I had been with him, and for the moment, it would have to be enough. Leaving the leather chair uncovered, I absently adjusted a crooked painting and pushed a couple of misplaced spines back into place as I went out of the library on my way upstairs.
