At around this time, the motive behind his collection of empty buildings came home to roost. When he learned that his son had been researching his own demise all along, he thought: how strange are these Trotter men. Each obsessed with death or the trappings thereof — for what was an empty building but a monument to the once-alive? Those were his monuments, Dodd’s cenotaphs and sepulchres, spread across the land. At escrow, he felt the same tidy relief one did upon inoculation against disease (the disease of death). In the past five years he had acquired nearly eighty companies, spinning off or turning over those that couldn’t be absorbed by the healthy corporate body. He despised himself when on weak or dismal days — and by a kind of accountant’s synaptic legerdemain — he took comfort in regarding Edward as a gloriously failed acquisition.
Lucille Rose generally suffered in silence, evincing the characteristics her grandfather had attributed to her some pages back. But the overarching one — his observation that she gleaned from the best of those whom she knew and loved — held fast and true, for in mourning she showed an uncommon valor: such a trait was Edward’s gift, and what he would have wished of her. It can be recalled that Mr. Trotter made note of his granddaughter’s big-heartedness and this too held true, even though that heart was like a river that had changed course so it would not flood her brother’s land — for there was a moment upon his death when she could not control the waters, which threatened to engulf both her and his memory. The trip to Iceland was the right cure for that, and to her aunt she would always be grateful. In time, the river would run near Edward again, as sure and strong as the Thames, and would never leave him.
So: in the Russian gazebo she told her cousin she would soon be living the expatriate’s life. A fleet of planes at the heiress’s disposal guaranteed that no one in the Trotter clan — or outside, for that matter, i.e., such indispensables as Boulder Langon — would ever be more than a half day away. Yet Lucille Rose (who would in a matter of weeks pluck out the thorny Lucille and become a mere Rose) still somehow managed to make Toulouse feel that prohibition and embargo were in the air and that he might not see her for years — or at least not until she was an older woman of eighteen or twenty.
“Would you come with me, Toulouse?” she asked demurely.
He thought she meant England.
Tea had cooled, and by the time Candelaria arrived with hot water, they were already heading toward Olde CityWalk. Lucille Rose clutched her new snakeskin Smythson — Amanda Hectare said python was the “rage”—while Pullman gambol’d about, and she slapped and kissed and fussed over the creature all the way to the Boar’s Head. “Oh oh oh!” she cried (very Liz Taylor in National Velvet). “You’re the one I’m really going to miss! Oh, Pullie, you’re the one! You’re the one!”
“What’s going to happen to your book?” asked Toulouse.
“I don’t know,” she said cavalierly. “I sort of lost interest … now I just mostly use it to jot down places I want to go and people I’d like to meet.” She shook the python pad like a tambourine. “I’m not sure I really want to be an actual writer anymore — unless it’s for a magazine, like British Vogue. Oh, bugger it all! I mean, I’m good and everything, but … I talked to Mr. Hookstratten, and he was very upset. He had brilliant plans for Blue Maze. But as Grandma Bluey has sung before: Que sera, sera! Besides, if I still want to, England will only make my writing better. I mean, all the brilliant writers are from England. The Brontës, the Austens, Emily Dickinson … and bloody Shakespeare!”
“Emily Dickinson is not from England.”
“Well, Dick-ens is, so bugger off!”
When she led them past the Boar’s Head and the Majestyk, Toulouse wondered what she was up to.
“Anyway,” she said, “I never did really ‘crack the case.’ ”
“Case? What do you mean?”
“The mystery. What was the ‘mystery’ of the Blue Maze?”
“Well maybe,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, “maybe the mystery was that there is no mystery.”
She stopped in her tracks, as if giving his suggestion the gravest consideration — for a moment, Toulouse thought he’d saved the day and handed her a reason to live again. Jumping for joy, she could at last go back to being plain old Bel-Air Lucy. They would ride together to school as they always had, and everything — well, most everything — would be just like it used to be.
“Too cliché,” she said.
He followed her to the hangar.
The 747 simulator was being picked up Monday and given to a charitable group. Lucille Rose climbed the stairs, turning midway to see if he had followed.
“Where shall we go?” asked the randy aviatrix, once they had settled in. It was dark; only the instruments were illuminated. “Oh my God — Heathrow, of course!”
She punched something in, and the cockpit began its subtle gyrations.
She reached over and kissed him. He unbuttoned her blouse and, for the first time ever, saw her breasts. She dropped his hand to her thigh, then moved it up. Her face was hot and tears sprang from her eyes. He watched her as they kissed like he always had, certain she was distressed by the same recollection: Edward surprising and embarrassing them as they groped in the plane. But that was far from her mind. She loved him so, yet he loved another — the orphan girl — and there wasn’t a thing in the world she could do. (Her brother was dead, and there was nothing she could do about that, either.) She was truly excited about leaving. England lit up before her, tactile and redolent: she had already dreamed herself there and could smell its trees, soot and chilled air. She was inordinately excited for her life … but she bloody loved Toulouse Trotter and always would, with every fiber and filament of her body, with every red hair she had and with the red blood that beat through her bloody, bleeding over — river-run heart — nothing to do about it, nothing to do …
Oh bugger! Oh bollocks! Oh brilliant! Oh, Toulouse—
But that wasn’t why she threw herself at him now … he would not want her for her little tits or for the pulse that shook her neck like explosives deep within a building being demolished; he would not want her for the thing she guided his fingers toward, and would not want her for her smile or kindnesses or funny girl-detective ways. He would not want her for any of that. No: he loved another, and she could not change what wasn’t meant to be. Just now she wanted what she wanted — merely to touch him, to breathe in his smell and his hair and feel his clumsy hands stumble-bum over her. Not, as her aunt might have put it, such a terrible way to say good-bye.
CHAPTER 49. Pied-à-Terre
Toulouse began his last year at Four Winds feeling very much older, and more philosophical, too. During one of Mr. Hookstratten’s lectures, he stared out a window and mused on the capriciousness of this life. The mature student played a mental parlor game, imagining he was eleven years old again, sitting cross-legged on a hill. Peering into a crystal ball, he saw himself just as he was now, in Mr. Hookstratten’s class during a lecture, musing through a window. The ball then showed him walking the campus alone. “But where,” he asked of a wizened old warlock, “are my cousins?”