terrace, which gathered the morning sun nicely. When our plates were polished and the toast basket was empty (Flo having pressed the last pieces on me) I cleared the table and made more coffee, returning to find Flo stretched out on one of the deck-chairs with her face to the sun, eyes closed like a cat.
“I'm gonna bake in the sun all day,” she declared.
“You'll get horribly red and sore,” Donny warned her.
“Oh, don't be wet, Donny. I don't care. I think I'll just move down here to the sticks and turn into a turnip.”
“A red turnip,” he commented.
“There should be a couple of beach umbrellas in the boat shed,” I offered. “If they haven't fallen to pieces. And canoes, a badminton net, and lawn bowls, if you're interested.”
The umbrellas hadn't fallen to pieces, not quite, and when Donny came across the lawn with a pair of them across his shoulder, he said that the shed's other forms of entertainment seemed in decent shape as well. He drove the pole of the most promising umbrella into a place in the lawn chosen by Flo, raising its ribs gingerly. The fabric had a few holes in it, but it held, and Flo spread a rug underneath it and settled down with a sigh of satisfaction. He installed the other one nearby. We all lay down, and lethargy descended.
Thirty-five minutes later, the lack of stimulation drove all three of us into motion. I was the first to tire of watching the humming-birds in the fuchsias.
“I'm going to see if I can find something to read. Can I bring either of you anything from the house?”
Donny leapt up with an eagerness that betrayed his own growing need for action. “I'll take a stroll into the village and see if I can find a paper,” he declared.
“Mrs Gordimer will be happy to get you one,” I offered.
“Nope, I'll stretch my legs and then I can be a sloth the rest of the day. And I want to know how the baseball went.” But before I could comment on how unlikely and wholesome an interest in baseball was in a jazz-baby like him, he added, “I've got some money riding on it.”
Flo, too, was on her feet. “I'm going to put on my bathing suit.”
Donny left in the direction of the village, Flo disappeared into the house and came out in a skimpy bathing costume, settling onto her rug, and I returned to the hidden storage room. I searched every inch of its walls, examined every object on the shelves, pushed and manipulated every shelf and hook, but nothing gave way, no concealed entrance or trap door came to light, to lead me into the locked rooms of my dream.
There was nothing here.
When Donny came back, the bounce in his step proclaiming how the scores had gone, he too changed into his costume and persuaded Flo to bathe in the rather murky waters. After a while, I scrubbed my hands and went down to the umbrellas, where I found Donny had arranged three of the deck-chairs from the now sun-drenched terrace. He and Flo lay sleeping, hair damp from their swim, chairs three decorous feet apart, faces turned towards each other in slumber.
I smiled, and sat down in my own chair, remembering only as my backside hit the wood that I had neglected to bring a book from the house.
But I stayed where I was, effectively alone on the lawn, nothing to distract me but the sound of two men in indistinct conversation from the other side of the lake.
What had the hidden-room dream meant, if not an actual, physical place?
Dreams, I knew, were not some mythic message from Beyond. Dreams are speech from the unconscious mind, messages couched not in the logical terms of daylight consciousness, but in a twilight narrative of glimpsed images and impressions. Repeated dreams, worked over and over, generally had a purpose: In my case, the flying- objects image had taken me by the hand and eventually led me to the realisation that I had been in San Francisco during the earthquake, thus opening up an entire segment of my childhood that I had closed away. The second dream, that of the faceless man, was rooted in a specific incident that clearly had terrified my six-year-old self, an event that had rested unquiet over the intervening years until I could finally bring it to light and put it to rest—I felt certain, thanks to Holmes' discovery of the old woman's reminiscences, that that particular nocturnal visitor would trouble me no more.
Both dreams had their origin in frightening incidents, two events that had been wrapped about and reshaped by my unconscious mind to soften their sharp edges—until, triggered by the realisation that I was heading to the place where both had occurred, like bits of psychic shrapnel they worked their way to the surface.
But the third dream appeared to be without antecedent. I could find no concealed rooms, either here or in Pacific Heights; moreover, the dream had always been very specific: I knew about the rooms, and needed only to put the key to the door and step inside. Yet in both houses I had actively searched, and although memories awakened as I went along—freely and comprehensively in the Lodge, piecemeal and grudgingly in San Francisco—in neither place had I felt that throb of recognition that told me I was getting close to the door.
Perhaps Tom Long had been right. When I'd heard those precise Chinese accents telling me of Matteo Ricci's memory palace, I'd been frankly indignant, that this stranger might presume to see into my mind. But maybe I'd been too quick to dismiss his suggestion that the hidden rooms were not of stone and wood, but were located in the recesses of my mind.
Like an object so familiar to the eyes it goes unseen, I had habitually walked past my own history, freely displaying the rest of the house to all and sundry, knowing yet not knowing what lay behind its surfaces. My entire childhood had become a self-inflicted blind spot—I had complacently passed by the locked rooms of my past for so long, fingering the key in my pocket, that I no longer knew where to find the door.
I sat where I was for a long time, staring unseeing at the lake. The sun crept its way onto my toes and up my ankles. Eventually, Flo and Donny stirred, bantered, rose. They raced down the lawn and down the dock to dive into the lake, which looked so lovely and cool that I changed into my own very conservative bathing costume and joined them. Afterwards, we took some lunch, and when a breeze came up we experimented with the little boat, ending up using the oars more than the sail. Sunburnt and replete with the pleasures of childhood, we returned to a house that was fragrant with beef and onions, a rustic casserole left in the oven for us by Mrs Gordimer. We hurriedly rinsed the lake water from our skin and changed into our dinner wear, then threw ourselves on the food as if we had not eaten in days.
Later, when the dishes were virtuously dried and put away, we lit the citronella candles on the terrace and took our coffee out there.
Flo eventually broke the long silence, crossing the legs of her heavy silk lounging pyjamas and giving a sigh of contentment. “Golly, what a swell day this has been, Mary, just the tops. Thanks for letting us crash your party.”
“It's been a pleasure,” I told her in all honesty. An unexpected pleasure, I could have said, but did not. “Thank you both for coming with me.”
“You did look pretty down. On Friday, I mean. I don't know what was wrong, but you looked like a real flat tire before you got some bubbly into you.”
She was too polite to ask, but I could see no real reason not to tell her why I'd been troubled—after all, I'd told a relative stranger that same night. “I had some bad news, Friday morning. An old friend of the family died.”
“Criminy, Mary, why didn't you say—”
“Oh, she died a long time ago, it's just that I only found out on Friday.” Flo's expressions of distress faded to a more appropriate level—after all, how close a friend could this have been, if it took me so long to hear about it? A question, indeed, that I had been asking myself. “She was the doctor who helped me, after the accident. A, well, a psychiatrist. I was in pretty bad shape then, mentally as well as physically, and she helped a lot. I'd hoped to see her, but I discovered she actually died within a few weeks of the time I went back to England in the winter of 1914. She was murdered.”
“Murdered! How absolutely dire! What was her name?”
“Ginzberg. Leah Ginzberg.”
“But—wait a tick. That sounds familiar.”
“She was famous, wasn't she?” Donny asked. “That was just after I came out from Chicago, and I remember a buzz about it. She was killed in her office, wasn't she?”
“That's right,” I said. “I wouldn't have said she was famous, but your friend Jerry knew of her. Or was it Terry? Terry, right. He and I were talking while I was resting my feet at the dance, and it came up.”
