Locked rooms

“Easy for you to say. I had to have help getting through high school.”

“You did a magnificent job converting your house.”

“I did, didn't I?” she said proudly.

“What about that?”

“What, decorating? You mean as a job?”

“As a profession you love. You have the skills, and you have the social contacts necessary. Think about it.”

“Hm,” she said. “I will.”

The sound of splashing reached us, but before he got close enough to hear our voices, I hurried to ask, “But tell me, Flo, what happened to your father? If he didn't die in France, where is he?”

“Oh, I think he did die in France, just not the way Mummy says. You see, he wrote to tell her that he was going to join the French army, which by that time was taking pretty much anyone, even broken-down men in their late forties. He'd been living in Paris—he had a half-sister there, about fifteen years younger than him. His father had left his first wife and remarried—divorces seem to run in Daddy's family. Anyway, that was the last we heard from him. Rosa, his half-sister, wrote at Christmas, 1918, to say that he had gone missing in action in September, three months before. So I suppose in the end, he became a little more responsible after all.”

“It sounds like it.”

“Anyway, I'm sorry he's gone. He wasn't around a whole lot, but he was fun.”

We sat in silence for a moment of eulogy, then Flo jumped to her feet and picked her way down to the water. In a minute, the swimmer got close enough that she could speak with him, and the two joked and carried on like . . . well, like an old married couple.

Two hours before dawn on Wednesday morning, I sat bolt upright in my bed while the dream of the hidden apartment faded before my eyes, to be slowly replaced by the dim outlines of my childhood room in the Lodge. I'd only had the dream once or twice since arriving in California, and this time it took place in a house similar to that of the Greenfields', except that the vining Art Deco motifs were actual vines growing up the high stone walls, and the thin greyhound statues were living creatures, mincing about on their impossibly thin legs. It was as if some long- lost jungle temple, overgrown with creepers and saplings, had been chosen to host a party of the fashionable creme of Society.

I had, as usual, been walking through the rooms showing my unlikely house to half a dozen acquaintances, passing through the orangerie (where three quizzical black-and-white monkeys peered through the overhanging branches at us) before inviting them to admire the proportions of the great hall (whose corbels and beams, on closer examination, proved to be the mighty trunks and branches of some enormous clinging trees). We went past a fireplace, across whose twelve-foot-high mantel stretched a panther, and a billiards room where the game was being played with clear crystal balls, before turning towards the noble staircase leading to a long gallery. Then someone in the party said, “What's that?”

“That” was a half-opened door revealing a library of extraordinary richness. Walls twenty feet tall laden with leather-and-gilt spines; high, angled work-tables displaying precious Mediaeval manuscripts; racks of ancient scrolls and papyri; long gleaming tables calling out for scholars and behind them a glimpse of soft leather chairs inviting a more leisurely read before the fire.

In other words, Paradise.

But in the dream I merely shrugged, pulled the door shut, and said, “It's nothing important.” I then went on to show my companions the intricacies of the decorated stairwell.

Nothing important? How the hell could Paradise be unimportant? And why was this third dream still with me, lingering at my shoulder like some telegraph boy awaiting a reply? The other two dreams had politely faded away as soon as their messages had been delivered. If I had accepted the message of this one, that the hidden rooms represented the portions of my past that I had closed away from myself, then why hadn't it drifted away as its brothers had? Instead it had returned, with greater urgency and detail than ever—my dreaming mind could not have been more insistent had it grabbed my shoulder and shouted in my ear, but for the life of me, I could not decipher its meaning.

One thing was clear: I would have no more sleep that night. Putting on my glasses and dressing-gown, I padded downstairs to make myself a cup of tea.

I took it out onto the terrace and sat in the darkness, but the night air was uncomfortably cold and damp, and before the cup was halfway empty I retreated inside, at something of a loss.

I missed Holmes. The realisation surprised me somewhat, since it had only been three days, and we were often apart for far longer than that. Perhaps it was Flo's talk of marriage, perhaps my need to converse with someone who spoke my language, but at that moment, I'd have given a great deal to have him sitting across the kitchen table from me.

Leaving the tea on the table, I went upstairs to retrieve one of the books I had brought with me; halfway down the corridor I paused, and turned towards the stairway.

My parents' bedroom was at the rear of the addition's upper floor. I had not gone in the room on Sunday, merely glanced through the door-way, seen that Mrs Gordimer had not made up that bed, and shut the door. Now, before I could reconsider, I opened it and stepped inside.

The light from the hall-way showed me a slice of the room: floor-boards, carpet, bed, lamp-shade, wall. I made my way around the bed to the lamp on the night-table, and switched it on.

A simple room, considerably smaller than its counterpart in Pacific Heights. A single, built-in wardrobe for clothing, a small dressing-table for my mother, a private bath-room, and, on the opposite side of the room, French doors leading out onto a balcony wide enough for two chairs and a low table. And between the doors and furniture, bookshelves.

Those shelves, laden and much used, made this room more a boudoir than a chamber for sleeping. Books in the bedroom—serious books, and in great number—were considered an oddity; that I had known even as a child. However, I did not know, then or now, if my mother's intentions had been to bring the best of the outer world into her private chambers, or to keep her private life insulated from the world.

In either case, this room was where she spent what free hours we gave her. My father would take us swimming or out in the boat, and when we looked back at the house, Mother would be here reading, either on the balcony or just inside the glass doors. And it was not that she was shutting us out, for we were welcome to join her, with our own books or choosing one from her shelves. Other activities, board games or cards, were taken elsewhere; books from the shelves generally remained in the room, with cautious permission granted rarely for their removal. It was a room where my mother's worlds overlapped. A holy place, as it were.

Odd, I reflected: In Pacific Heights, I thought of books in association with my father and his library; here, it was my mother's books that dominated, while my father pursued more active forms of entertainment.

I went forward to the shelves, finding them as neat as they had always been: spines pulled evenly half an inch from the edge, a book-end at the right end of each row to allow for additions, every book, large or small, novel or theological treatise, English, Hebrew, or other, arranged by the author's last name. I had asked her once, when I was first reading—was I six? No, it must have been the previous year, if we had gone to England shortly after the 1906 fire—how she could order names when they were in different alphabets, and she had showed me how to transcribe Hebrew letters into their Roman equivalents. Thus, I saw stood easily between Hightower and Hindermann. I used the same system on my own shelves. When, that is, I could be bothered to shelve them properly.

The tight ranks of the books and my ingrained hesitation to borrow from those ordered shelves stayed my hand from reaching out and plucking one or another from its brothers. Instead, I wandered away to look over the rest of the room. The bath-room was bare and bright, its tiles clean and the usual detritus of such places—soap, bathtowels, and shaving equipment—tidied away, no doubt by Mrs Gordimer. Now that my attention was finally brought to the subject, it occurred to me how difficult it must have been for the woman to know just how to go about her cleaning duties. Regular dusting and the occasional scrub, yes, but what to do with the stubs of soap left by two dead people? Sliding open the top drawer of the chest beneath the wash-basin, I found Father's razor and soap-brush, and below it Mother's hair-brush and pins, but little of a more ephemeral nature.

On a sudden thought, I left the bright tiled room and walked over to the narrow door into the clothes closet. It smelt of cedar, but faintly, and although the clothes were still hanging there, they had all been pushed to the far