“What if you wanted to forget a certain year?” he said. “Not remember it, but forget it. No help there, is there? No system for that, oh no.”
“Oh, I suppose there are methods,” she said, thinking of his bottle.
He seemed sunk in bitter reflection, eyes vacant, long neck bent like a sad bird’s, hands folded in his lap. She was casting about for words to form a new question about the cards when he said: “The last time she read those cards for me, she said I’d meet a dark and beautiful girl, of all cornball things.”
“Did you?”
“She said I’d win this girl’s love through no virtue I had, and lose her through no fault of my own.”
He said nothing else for a time, and (though not sure now that he heard or registered much of anything she said to him) she ventured softly: “That’s often the way, with love.” Then, when he didn’t respond: “I have a certain question that a certain deck of cards might answer. Does your aunt still…”
“She’s dead.”
“Oh.”
“My aunt, though. I mean she wasn’t my aunt, but my aunt. Sophie.” He made a gesture which seemed to mean This is complex and boring, but surely you catch my drift.
“The cards are still in your family,” she guessed.
“Oh, yeah. Never throw out anything.”
“Where exactly…”
He raised a hand to stop her question, suddenly wary. “I don’t want to go into family matters.”
She waited a moment and then said: “It was you who mentioned your great-great-grandfather, who built this park.” Why suddenly was she visted with a vision of Sleeping Beauty’s castle? A chateau. With a hedge of thorn, impassable.
“John Drinkwater,” he said, nodding.
Drinkwater. The architect… A mental snap of fingers. That hedge wasn’t thorn. “Was he married to a woman named Violet Bramble?”
He nodded.
“A mystic, a seer of sorts?”
“Who the hell knows what she was.”
Urgency suddenly compelled her to a gesture, rash perhaps, but there was no time to waste. She took from her pocket the key to the park and held it up before him by its chain, as old mesmerists used to do before their subjects. “It seems to me,” she said, seeing him take notice, “that you deserve free access here. This is my key.” He held out a hand, and she drew the key somewhat away. “What I require in exchange is an introduction to the woman who is or is not your aunt, and explicit directions as to how to find her. All right?”
As though in fact mesmerized, staring fixedly at the glinting bit of brass, he told her what she wanted to know. She placed the key in his filthy glove. “A deal,” she said.
Auberon clutched the key, his only possession now, though Hawksquill couldn’t know that, and, the spell broken, looked away, not sure he hadn’t betrayed something, but unwilling to feel guilt.
Hawksquill rose. “It’s been most illuminating,” she said. “Enjoy the park. As I said, it can be handy.”
A Year to Place Upon It
Auberon, after another scalding yet kindly draught, began, closing one eye, to measure out his new demesne. The regularity of it surprised him, since its tone was not regular but bosky and artless. Yet the benches, gates, obelisks, marten-houses on poles, and the intersections of paths had a symmetry easily adduced from where he sat. It all depended from or radiated outward from the little house of the seasons.
That was all hopeless guff she had instructed him in, of course. He did feel bad about inflicting such a lunatic on his family, not that they would notice probably, hopeless themselves; and the price had not been resistable. Odd how a man of wide sympathies like himself started such hares and harebrains wherever he went.
Outside the park, framed in sycamores from where he sat, was a small classical courthouse (Drinkwater’s too for all he knew), surmounted with statues of lawgivers at even intervals. Moses. Solon. Etc. A place to put a law-case, certainly. His own infuriating struggle with Petty, Smilodon & Ruth. Those coffered brass doors not yet open for business the locked entrance to his inheritance, the egg-and-dart molding the endless repetition of delay and hope, hope and delay.
Stupid. He looked away. What was the point? No matter how gracefully the building accepted his case in all its complexity (and as he glanced again sidelong at it he saw that it could and did) it was needless. How could he forget all that? The doles they eked out to him, enough to keep him from starvation, enough to keep him signing (with an increasingly furious scrawl) the instruments, waivers, pleas and powers they presented him with as those stony-eyed immortals there proffered tablets, books, codices: the last of the last had bought this gin he now drank of, and more than was left in the bottle would be necessary for him to forget the indignity of his pleading for it, the injustice of it all. Diocletian counted out wrinkled bills from petty cash.
Hell with that. He left the courthouse outside. In here there was no law.
A year to place upon it. She had said that the value of her system was how it would cast up, spontaneously, what you didn’t know out of the proper arrangement of what you did.
Welclass="underline" there was a thing he didn’t know.
If he could believe what the old woman had said, if he could, wouldn’t he then set to work here, commit every tulip-bed and arrowheaded fence-post, every whitewashed stone, every budding leaf to memory, so that he could distribute among them every tiny detail of lost Sylvie? Wouldn’t he then march furiously sniffing up and down the curving paths, like this mutt that had just entered with his master, searching, searching, going sunwise then antisunwise, searching until the one single simple answer arose, the astonishing lost truth, that would make him clutch his brow and cry I see?
No, he would not.
He had lost her; she was gone, and for good. That fact was all that excused and made reasonable, even proper, his present degradation. If her whereabouts were revealed to him now, though he had spent a year trying to learn them, he would avoid them of all places.
And yet. He didn’t want to find her, not any more; but he would like to know why. Would like to know (timidly, subjunctively) why she had left him never to return, without a word, without, apparently, a backward glance. Would like to know, well, what was up with her nowadays, if she was all right, whether she thought of him ever, and in what mode, kindly or otherwise. He recrossed his legs, tapping one broken shoe in the air. No: it was just as well, really; just as well that he knew the old woman’s batty and monstrous system to be useless. That Spring could never be the spring she had blossomed for him, nor that shoot their love, nor that trowel the tool by which his rageful and unhappy heart had been scored with joy.
In the First Place
He hadn’t at first found her disappearance all that alarming. She’d run off before, for a few nights or a weekend, where and for what reasons he never pressed her about, he was cool, he was a hands-off guy. She hadn’t ever before taken every stitch of clothes and every souvenir, but he didn’t put it beyond her, she could bring them all back in an hour, at any hour, having missed a fleeing bus or train or plane or been unable to bear whatever relative or friend or lover she had camped with. A mistake. The greatness of her desires, of her longing for life to come out right even in the impossible conditions under which hers was lived, led her into such mistakes. He rehearsed fatherly or avuncular speeches with which, unhurt and unalarmed and not angry, he would counsel her after he welcomed her back.