while, but quit to be a freelance writer.' He was paging through a fat directory. 'We have to make you a respectable citizen or Mark Foil won't give you the time of day. You published one book five years ago. It was about… hmm… Robert Frost? Was he ever at Shorelands?'
'Probably.'
'Published by, who? Chancel House, I guess.'
'And I was edited by Merle Maivell.'
'Who? Oh, I get it, he's the big gun there.'
The biggest,' said Nora, smiling.
'The whole point about lying is to be as specific as possible.' He flipped a page and ran his finger down a list of names. 'Here we go. Since this is Mark Foil we're talking about, he might be spending the summer on a Greek island, but let's give it a try. What was his boyfriend's name, Somebody Monk, like Thelonious?'
'Creeley,' she said.
Harwich dialed the number and held up crossed fingers while it rang.
'Hello, I wonder if I could speak to Mark, please… This is Dan Harwich… Yes, of course, hello, Andrew, how are you?… Oh, are you? Wonderful… Provincetown, how nice for you… Well, if you think you could… Thanks.'
He put his hand over the receiver. 'His boyfriend says they're going to Provincetown for the rest of the summer. Doesn't sound too good.' He attended to the telephone again. 'Mark, hello, this is Dan Harwich… An old friend of mine from Brown, a writer, showed up here in the course of doing research for a book, and it turns out that she wants to get in touch with you… That's right. Her name is Emily Eliot, and she's completely house-trained, Harvard Ph.D… A poet named Creeley Monk?… Yes, that's right. She's interested in the people who were at a place called Shorelands with him, and it seems she came across your name somewhere.
He looked at her. 'He wants to know where you saw his name.'
Dart had not explained how he had heard of Mark Foil. 'Doing research on Creeley Monk.'
He repeated the phrase into the telephone. 'No, she did a book before this. Robert Frost… Yes, she's right here.'
He held out the receiver. 'Emily? Dr Foil wants to talk to you.' When she took it from him, he pretended he was working a shovel.
A clipped, incisive voice nothing like Harwich's effeminate parody said, 'What is going on. Miss Eliot? Dan Harwich doesn't have any serious friends.'
'I was a youthful mistake,' Nora said.
'You can't be writing a book about Creeley Monk. Nobody remembers Creeley anymore.'
'As Dan said, I'm working on a book about what happened at Shorelands during the summer of 1938. I think Hugo Driver's success unfairly eclipsed the other writers who were there.'
'Do you have a publisher?'
'Chancel House.'
A long silence. 'Why don't you come over and let me take a look at you? We're going out of town this morning, but we still have some time.'
A slender, smiling young man in a lightweight gray suit and black silk shirt opened the door of the stone house amid the oak trees and greeted them. Harwich introduced his friend Emily Eliot to the young man, Andrew Manindale, who looked straight into Nora's eyes, widened his smile, and instantly changed from a diplomatic male model into a real person filled with curiosity, humor, and goodwill. 'It's wonderful that you're here,' he said to Nora. 'Mark is tremendously interested in your project. I wonder if you know what you're in for!'
Nora said, 'I'm just grateful that he's willing to talk to me.'
'Willing is hardly the word.' Martindale let them pass into the house and then stepped backwards onto a riotous Persian rug. A broad staircase with shining wooden treads stood at the end of a row of white columns. 'I'll take you into the library.'
At the end of the row of columns, he opened a door into a book-lined room twice the size of Alden Chancel's library. In a dazzle of sunlight streaming through a window, a white-haired man in a crisp dark suit who looked unexpectedly familiar to Nora was standing beside an open file box on a gleaming table. He grinned at them over the top of his black half-glasses and held up a fat volume bound in red cloth.
'Andrew, you said I'd find it, and I did!'
Martindale said, 'Nothing ever gets lost in this house, it just goes into hiding until you need it. And here, just in time to share your triumph, are Dan and Ms. Eliot. Would you like some coffee? Tea, maybe?'
This was addressed to Nora, who said, 'If you have coffee ready, I'd love some.'
The white-haired man tucked the red book under his arm, twinkled the half-glasses off his nose and folded them into his top pocket, and came loping across the room with his right hand extended. He was as smooth as mercury, and though he must have been in his mid-seventies, he looked as if he had undergone no essential physical changes since the age of fifty. He shook Harwich's hand, then turned, all alertness, interest, and curiosity, to Nora, who felt that with one probing glance Mark Foil instantly had comprehended all that was important within her, including a great deal of which she herself was unaware.
Harwich introduced them.
'Why don't we sit down so that you can tell me about yourself?' Foil indicated a plump sofa and two matching chairs near the bright window. A glass table with a neat stack of magazines stood within reach of the furniture. Nora took one end of the sofa, and Mark Foil slid into the other. As if he were cutting her loose, Harwich moved around the glass table, sat down in the chair beside the far end of the sofa, and lounged back.
'You haven't been sleeping very well, have you?' Foil asked.
'Not as much as I'd like,' she said, surprised by the question.
'And you've been under a good deal of stress. If you don't mind my asking, why is that?'
She looked across at Harwich, who looked blandly back.
The past few days have been kind of strange,' she said.
'In what way?'
Looking at the kind, intelligent face beneath the white hair, Nora came close to admitting she was here under false pretenses. Mark Foil took in her hesitation and leaned forward without altering his expression.
Nora looked up from Foil to Harwich, who was staring at her in unhappy alarm.
'To tell you the truth,' she said, 'I've just become menopausal, and my body seems to have turned against me.'
Foil leaned back, nodding, and behind him, unseen, Harwich flopped back into his chair. 'Apart from your looking much too young, it makes a lot of sense,' Foil said, 'You're seeing your gynecologist, keeping a watch on what's going on?'
'Yes, thanks.'
I'm sorry if I seemed to pry. I'm like an old firehorse. My reflexes are stronger than my common sense. You and Dan were friends at Brown?'
'That's right.'
'What was our eminent neurosurgeon like in those days?'
Nora looked across at our eminent neurosurgeon and tried to guess what he had been like at Brown. 'Ferocious and shy,' she said. 'Always angry. He improved once he got into medical school.'
Foil laughed. 'Wonderful thing, the memory of an old friend. Keeps us from forgetting the cocoons from which we emerged.'
'Some old friends remember more than you imagine possible,' Harwich said.
'When I was that age, I read Browning and Tennyson until they came out of my ears. Not very up to date, I'm afraid. I suppose part of what I liked about Creeley's work was that although he was much better than I ever would have been, he wasn't very up to date, either. In medicine you have to be up to the minute to be any good at all, but I don't think that's true in the arts, do you?'
Andrew Martindale backed through the door holding a wide silver tray with three cups and a silver coffeepot in time to hear Foil's last sentence. He turned around to carry the tray toward the glass table. 'Not again.'
'But this time we have a Harvard Ph.D. and professional writer to consult. Emily, what do you think? Andrew and I have an ongoing argument about tradition versus the avant-garde, and he's completely pig-headed.'
Martindale slid the tray onto the table, almost clipping the stack of magazines. Nora looked at them and knew she was lost, out of her depth, about to be exposed as a fraud.
