The second came, wryly, as, “And being the married matron here, I was supposed to act as chaperone.” I had no idea where Flo and Donny ended up, and frankly had no intention of looking into the matter.
Last was the thought that had me sitting up in bed and patting along the bed-side table for my spectacles:
I had searched every inch of the Pacific Heights house on Saturday and found nothing there that joined up with the third of my dreams, the dream of walking through a house and showing its rooms to my friends, all the while aware of the key in my pocket, the key to a hidden apartment. I had searched my family house both literally and figuratively, looking for an actual, physical concealed hideaway or even a place that possessed the same sensation of secret and personal knowledge, and found neither. My father's library had contained the closest facsimile of that sensation, but when I folded myself up beneath his desk (abashedly, checking first that the door was bolted) and curled my legs to my chest, it had not been the same.
But the casual expertise with which I had reached for, then worked, the hidden-door mechanism off the kitchen—even though I could not remember ever being allowed to work it myself as a child—had contained precisely that blend of the hidden and the known, the important buried within the everyday. I wanted to see that room again, now.
Once upright, I discovered that not only was I unsteady, but I was dressed in the same crumpled trousers and shirt I had worn from the city the day before. I cast the garments off and took my childish bath-robe from the wardrobe, thinking to slip out to the motor and retrieve my possessions, but one step outside my door and I nearly went sprawling over the valise. With a silent word of thanks to the hard-headed Donny, I carried it inside, scrubbed myself with a cold cloth in the bedroom's flowered basin, and dressed in warm trousers and a pull-over sweater. I picked up a pair of shoes and tip-toed down the stairs, where I became aware that Donny was behind the door to the first guest-room, the one with the largest bed. Demurely, I stepped into the main wing of the house before I could locate my other guest by her snores, shutting the connecting door behind me.
To my mother, one of the great blessings of the Lodge had always been the relative lack of servants. We ended up roughing it, yes, but we were also granted a degree of privacy we rarely found in the city. Not that Mother did all the work herself—just that my father before her had trained the Gordimers to slip in and out like the elves of a fairy-tale: Meals appeared as if by magic, dinner dishes she didn't feel like washing up were miraculously restored to their shelves by morning, clothing left in the hampers materialised a day or two later, freshly ironed.
The polite fiction of our independence here was maintained by the unspoken agreement as to the times of day we would be absent from kitchen and bedrooms. Mrs Gordimer and a changing regime of assistants let themselves in once in the afternoon, then in the evening, during which times the dishes were made clean, the cupboards and wood-box filled, and the oven stocked with an evening meal. The other times of day we fended for ourselves, leaving a note on the kitchen table if we had any request.
Thus without a maidservant's help, I laid a handful of kindling atop the stove's embers and put the kettle on, finding an unopened tin of MJB coffee in the cupboard beside a fresh packet of Lipton's tea, a jar of Mrs Gordimer's blackberry jam, and similar basics. While the water was heating, I stepped into my shoes and went onto the terrace.
The last stars were fading as the sky grew light; the lake was a sheet of black glass with a mist gentle over its surface. Everything was so completely still and utterly magical, merely drawing breath seemed a disturbance.
After a time, the sound of water boiling drew me back. With a regretful glance at the calm, I returned to the house, opening the noisy packet of tea and wincing at the clatter of the cup and the suck and snap of the ice-box door. Unearthing a thick travelling-rug in the cedar chest near the entrance, I carried it and my milky tea outside.
I must have spent an hour there on the tapestry lawn that flowed into the lake, sipping my tea, wrapped in the fragrant blanket, watching the morning come. The fish began to rise for insects, dotting the sheet-glass water with rings; a tall white bird stood in the reeds near the dock, perusing for frogs. The beauty of the moment made my bones ache with pleasure, and when at last the morning's ethereal perfection had faded and it had become just another lovely day, I felt complete and calm in a way I had not for many weeks.
I gathered up my cup, draped the now-damp rug over a bench where the sun would soon hit it, and went inside to look at my father's hidden room.
I worked inside the room for an hour before the sound of water in the pipes betrayed a guest's waking. I made haste to shut the secret door and went to wrestle with the tin-opener, and had the coffee finished by the time Flo came in, yawning and tousled and looking far more beautiful with her skin pink from sleep than she did with rouge and paint and immaculate hair. I poured her a cup of coffee; she mumbled something that wasn't quite words, drifting away into the sitting room. A suspiciously brief time later, Donny came through from the sleeping wing, dressed in a white 'Varsity sweater and plus-fours. He, too, accepted coffee, although he was somewhat more communicative than Flo, dropping into a kitchen chair and, after asking my leave, sticking a cigarette into its holder and lighting it.
“This is a peach of a place,” he said. “My parents have a summer house, but since every one of their friends has a house in the same square mile, it's just like being back in the city, only cooler.”
“Where is that?” I asked.
“In Chicago. They're still there, in spite of the winters. I've tried to get them out here, but they're sure the place'll shimmy down around their ears.”
“Yes,” I said with a grin. “Half my friends in England assume that San Francisco collapses on a yearly basis.”
“Flo said you're in London?”
“I do have a flat there, but we live on the south coast. I also spend a lot of time in Oxford.”
“That's right, she said you were a, whatchamacallit, bluestocking.”
“She probably said I spent my life with my nose in a book.”
“Something like that. Can't manage it, myself. Books, I mean. Ever since I graduated, anything but a novel brings me all out in hives.”
He had a nice laugh, pleasantly crooked white teeth, and—although he'd taken a minute to make the razor- sharp part down the middle of his hair and slick it into place—a nicely rakish blond stubble on his square cheekbones. He might not be much of a one for books, but in addition to being restful on the eyes, he was intelligent, thoughtful, and seemed to care a great deal for Flo. I was, theoretically, a member of the same “jazz generation” as the rest of Friday night's party, but in truth I hadn't known many of this sort of social animal with any intimacy, and hadn't expected to find a solid foundation beneath the self-consciously blase pleasure-seeker. Maybe it was because Donny was a little older; maybe he was just made of stronger stuff.
Hearing our voices, Flo re-appeared. “Morning,” she said, taking the chair between us. “Is there any more coffee?”
Donny reached for her cup and stood up; as he went past, he mussed her already on-end hair affectionately. “Not a morning girl, my Flossie.”
“Hell, I'm full of pep,” she protested, then yawned.
He poured her coffee, placed it in front of her, then started opening various cupboards and taking things out. “How do you like what my old man calls ‘cackle berries'?” He held up a pair of eggs.
I placed a half-hearted objection, saying that I really ought to be doing the cooking for them, but Flo said, “Donny loves to mess around in the kitchen. It's going to drive the cook bananas, when we're married.”
“I didn't know,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“Oh, we haven't set a date or got a ring or any of that hooey,” she told me. “When we do, Mummy will take over, and it'll be just another rotten bore. We'll probably elope, but right now we're having too much fun. Plenty of time to be respectable when our livers give out.”
I shot a quick glance at Donny; he was breaking the eggs into a bowl, but from the side of his face, I thought perhaps the wild boy of the Blue Tiger might be more ready for the ring than his girl-friend was.
“Well, in any case,” I said, “it's a good thing he likes to cook, because otherwise you'd be eating burnt food chipped from the pan. I am no chef.”
Donny scrambled the eggs with some herbs that I hadn't noticed growing along the outer wall of the cabin— at least I assumed they were herbs and not some poisonous weed. The eggs tasted good, whatever the herbs' Latin names, eaten with sausages from the ice-box and toast heaped with Mrs Gordimer's jam. We ate on the
