The Hellfire Club

'I'll never be able to get to sleep. I think I'll go down to the family room and put on some music.'

Nora waited to be invited into the family room, so that she could refuse. She heard him push back his chair and stand up.

He told her that she could try lying down. He advised aspirin.

Nora removed her hand from her face. Davey tilted the square brown bottle over his cup and poured out several inches of amber liquid that reeked of caraway seed.

'You said you had that manuscript you found in the conference room, the Clyde Morning book? Would you mind if I took a look at it?'

'You want to read Clyde Morning?'

'I want to see the first new Blackbird Book,' Nora said, but Davey acknowledged this conciliatory sally only with a frown and a shrug of his shoulders. 'Would you get it for me?'

Davey tilted his head and rolled his eyes. 'If that's what you want.' He went into his office.' Nora could hear him talking to himself as he worked the catches on his briefcase. He came back into the kitchen, awkwardly holding a surprisingly slim stack of typing paper held together with rubber bands. 'Here you are.' He set the typescript on the table. Tell me if you think it's any good.'

She said, 'You doubt the great Clyde Morning?'

Already at the kitchen door, Davey turned to give her a look that pretended to offer her sympathy for being left alone, and escaped.

She removed the rubber bands and tapped the bottom edge of the manuscript on the table. Then she folded over the last page and looked at the number in the top right-hand corner. Whatever miracles of the narrative art the hope of Blackbird Books had performed in Spectre, he had contained them within 183 pages.

From downstairs floated the eerie sound of Peter Pears singing words from a Britten opera Nora had heard many times but could not place. The voice seemed to come from an inhuman realm located between earth and heaven. Death in Venice, that was what Davey was listening to. She picked up the slim manuscript, carried it into the living room, switched on a lamp Sally Michaelman had sold her, and stretched out on a sofa to read.

BOOK III

AT THE DEEP OF NIGHT

At last the child lost all hope and admitted to himself that this dark land was death, from which no release could be had. For a time he lost all strength and reason, and wept in panic and despair.28

Early the next morning, Nora turned her back on Long Island Sound, ran over the arched wooden bridge at Trap Line Road, and came into the twelve acres of wooded marsh known as the Pierce A. Gordon Nature Conservancy. The air was cool and fresh, and behind her seagulls hopped along the long, seaweed-strewn beach. She had reached the midpoint of her run, and what lay before her were the pleasures of the 'Bird Shelter,' as Westerholm natives called the Conservancy, where for just under fifteen minutes she enjoyed the illusion of passing through a landscape like that of the Michigan wilds to which Matt Curlew had taken her on weekend fishing trips during her childhood. These fifteen minutes were the secret heart of her morning run, and on the morning after her first literally sleepless night in years, Nora wished no more than to stop thinking, or worrying, or whatever it was that she had been doing for the past four hours, and enjoy them. Familiar trees filled with cardinals and noisy jays surrounded her. She looked at her watch and saw that she was already nearly five minutes behind her usual time.

Davey's crazy story had affected her more than she liked to admit. In the past, Davey's embellishments, when not clearly self-serving, had been in the service of either color or humor. Though nothing if not highly colored, the tale of Paddi Mann had seemed to conceal more than it gave away. Even if he had been trying to emphasize the extent to which he had been seduced, he had overdone his effects.

Other things, too, had distressed her. Nora had read the first twenty-odd pages of Spectre in such a swirl of doubt and anger that the sentences had instantly disappeared from her memory.

What right did Davey have to demand that she be interested in a second-rate author? For his benefit, Nora had absorbed a lot of information about classical music. She knew the difference between Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, she could identify fifty operas from their opening bars, she could tell when it was Horowitz playing a Chopin nocturne and when it was Ashkenazy. Why did she have to bow down to Hugo Driver?

At this point, Nora's conscience forced her to acknowledge that she had, after all, lied to Davey about reading Driver's book. She had closed the manuscript, gone downstairs, and paused outside the family room door. Death in Venice poured from the speakers. She slowly pushed open the door, hoping to see Davey sitting up and making notes or staring at the wall or doing anything at all that would prove he was at least as awake as she was. Covered to the throat by a plaid throw rug, eyes closed and mouth fluttering, Davey was lying on the couch. Exactly as she had foreseen, Mr Sensitivity had loaded the two Britten CDs into the player, stretched out with the rug wrapped around him like a baby blanket, and trusted that she would be asleep before he was.

That was it, that did it. Nora took herself back to the living room and turned on the radio. She dialed until she reached a station pounding out James Cotton, blues with wheels, blues with guts, cranked up the volume, and sat down to start reading Spectre all over again.

Spectre was the second topic she wished to put out of her mind during the favorite part of her run. After about an hour's reading, a certain possibility concerning Clyde Morning had occurred to her. This possibility, if true, might mean something to herself and Davey, or it might not. Then there was a problem with the book itself. As she had feared. Spectre was a slight book. It read like a fictional skeleton barely fleshed out by a writer too tired or lazy to keep his characters' names straight. George Carmichael, the main character, had become George Carstairs by page 15, and by page 35 he had changed back to Carmichael. For the rest of the book, he switched back and forth, depending, Nora thought, on which name surfaced first in Clyde Morning's mind when he reported to his typewriter.

Even worse was the exhaustion which weighed down the writing. Three different characters said, 'Too true.' Far too many sentences began with the word 'Indeed' followed by a comma. George Carmichael/Carstairs's eyes were invariably a 'deep, soulful brown, and his shoes were always 'crosshatched with scuff marks.' Neither sense nor grammar was safe. As he ran down the stairs, the sun struck George in his eyes of deep, soulful brown. When he 'gazed longingly' at his beloved. Lily Clark, his eyes adhered to her dress. Or they flew across the room to meet her 'tigress' lips.' Half a dozen times, George and other people 'wore out shoe leather' by 'pounding the pavement' or 'double-jumping the stairs.' After she had begun to notice these repetitions, Nora got up, found a pencil, and made faint check marks in the margin whenever one of them appeared.

When she had finished reading, pale light came slanting in through the windows at the front of the house. She returned to the kitchen for more coffee and discovered that she had ground beans from the package of French Roast that was not decaffeinated. Her radio station had pumped out blues all during the night and switched over to jazz while she read the manuscript's last pages. A tenor saxophone was playing some ballad so tenderly that individual notes seemed to float through her skin. 'Scott Hamilton,' said the announcer, 'with 'Chelsea Bridge.''

Scott Hamilton… wasn't that the name of an ice skater?

Nora had looked up from the manuscript, dazed and uncertain. It was as if along with the sound of the saxophone, some secret thought, one not to be admitted during normal hours, had swum into her mind, taken form, and floated out. Carmichael/Carstairs and Paddi Mann had been part of this thought, but it was gone. The experience had made her feel oddly like a visitor in her own life. She stood up, put her hands on her hips, and