It was his damn house now, damn it, and he would have to keep it alive, that’s all. For if it lived, if it could, then the Tale couldn’t end, could it? No one would have to leave, maybe no one could leave (what did he know about it?) if the house held together, if there was some way to halt its decline, or reverse it. So he would have to do that. Strength alone wouldn’t be enough, not anyway his strength; cunning would be needed. Some huge thought would have to be thought (did he feel it, down deep, trying to be born, or was that just blind hope?) and nerve would be necessary, and application, and tenacity like grim death’s. But it was the way; the only way.
Access of energy and resolve spun him in the bed, the tassel of his nightcap flying. “Okay, Alice, okay,” he said again. He kissed her fiercely—his too!—and then again firmly; and she laughed, embracing him, not knowing (he thought) that he had just resolved to spend his substance subverting her; and she kissed him back.
How could it be, Daily Alice wondered as they kissed, that to say such things as she had said to the husband she loved, on this darkest night of the year, made her not sad but glad, filled in fact with happy expectation? The end: to have the Tale end meant to her to have it all forever, no part left out, complete and seamless at last—certainly Smoky couldn’t be left out, not as deeply woven into its stuff as he had become. It would be good, so good to have it all at last, start to finish, like some long, long piece of work that has been executed in dribs and dabs, in the hope and faith that the last nail, the last stitch, the last tug at the strings, will make it all suddenly make sense: what a relief! It didn’t, quite, not yet; but now in this winter Alice could at last believe, with no reservations, that it would: they were that close. “Or maybe,” she said to Smoky, who paused in his attentions to her, “maybe just beginning.” Smoky groaned, shaking his head, and she laughed and clasped him to her.
When there was no more talk from the bed, the girl who had for some time been watching the bedclothes heave and listening to their words turned to go. She had come in through the door (left open for the cats to go in and out) silently, on bare feet, and then stood in the shadows watching and listening, a small smile on her lips. Because a mountain-range of quilts and coverlets rose between their heads and the room, Smoky and Alice hadn’t seen her there, and the incurious cats, who had opened big eyes when she had entered, had returned to fitful sleep, only now and then regarding her through narrowed lids. She paused a moment now at the door, for the bed had begun to make noises again, but she couldn’t make anything of these, mere low sounds, not words, and she slipped through the door and into the hall.
There was no light there but a faint snowlight coming in through the casement at the haIl’s end, and slowly, like someone blind, she went with small silent steps, arms extended, past closed doors. She considered each dark blank door as she passed it, but shook her blond head at each in turn, thinking; until, rounding a corner, she came to an arched one, and smiled, and with her small hand turned its glass knob and pushed it open.
II.
To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.
Sophie too had gone to bed early and not to sleep.
In her old figured bed-jacket, and a cardigan over that, she lay huddled close to the candle which stood on the bedside table, two of her fingers only allowed out from the bedclothes to hold open the pages of the second volume of an ancient three-volume novel. When the candle began to gutter, she reached into the table’s drawer, took out another, lit it from the first, pressed it down into the candlestick, sighed, and turned the page. She was far, far from the final weddings; only now had the will been secreted in the old cabinet; the bishop’s daughter thought of the ball. The door of Sophie’s room opened, and a child came in.
What a Surprise
She wore only a blue dress, without sleeves or a belt. She came a step through the door, her hand still on its knob, smiling the smile of a child who has a terrific secret, a secret which she’s not sure will amuse or annoy the grown-up she stands before; and for a time she only stood in the doorway, glowing faintly in the candlelight, her chin lowered and her eyes raised to Sophie turned to stone on the bed.
Then she said: “Hello, Sophie.”
She looked just as Sophie had imagined she would, at the age she would have been when Sophie had been unable to imagine her further. The candle-flame shivered in the draft from the open door, which cast strange shadows over the child, and Sophie grew for a moment as afraid and struck with strangeness as she had ever in her life been, but this was no ghost. Sophie could tell that by the way the child, having come in, turned to push the heavy door closed behind her. No ghost would have done that.
She came slowly toward the bed, hands clasped behind her, with her secret in her smile. She said to Sophie: “Can you guess my name?”
That she spoke was for some reason harder for Sophie to take in than that she stood there, and Sophie for the first time knew what it was not to believe her ears: they told her that the child had spoken, but Sophie didn’t believe it, and couldn’t imagine answering. It would have been like speaking to some part of herself, some part that had suddenly and inexplicably become detached from her and then turned to face her, and question her.
The child laughed a small laugh; she was enjoying this. “You don’t,” she said. “Do you want me to give you a hint?”
A hint! Not a ghost, and not a dream, for Sophie was awake; not her daughter, certainly, for her daughter had been taken from her over twenty-five years ago, and this was a child: yet for sure Sophie knew her name. She had raised her hands to her face, and between them now she said or whispered: “Lilac.”
Lilac looked a little disappointed. “Yes,” she said. “How did you know?”
Sophie laughed, or sobbed, or both at once. “Lilac,” she said.
Lilac laughed, and made to climb up on the bed with her mother, and Sophie perforce had to help her up: she took Lilac’s arm, wondering, afraid that perhaps she would herself feel her own touch, and if she did, then—then what? But Lilac was flesh, cool flesh, it was a child’s wrist her fingers circled; she drew up Lilac’s real solid weight with her strength, and Lilac’s knee pressed the bed and made it jounce, and every sense Sophie had was certain now that Lilac was here before her.
“Well,” Lilac said, brushing the golden hair from before her eyes with a quick gesture. “Aren’t you surprised?” She watched Sophie’s stricken face. “Don’t you say hello or kiss me or anything?”
“Lilac,” Sophie only said again; for there had been for many, many years one thought forbidden to Sophie, one unimaginable scene, this one, and she was unrehearsed; the moment and the child were just as she would have imagined them to be if she had allowed herself to imagine them at all, but she had not, and now she was unready and undone.
“You say,” Lilac said, indicating Sophie—it hadn’t been easy memorizing all this, and it should come out right—“you say, ‘Hello, Lilac, what a surprise,’ because you haven’t seen me since I was a baby; and then I say, ‘I came a long way, to tell you this and this,’ and you listen, but first before that part you say how much you missed me since I was stolen, and we hug.” She flung open her arms, her face pretending to radiant, poignant joy to cue Sophie; and there was nothing then for Sophie to do but to open her arms too, no matter how slowly and tentatively (not fearful now but only deeply shy before the impossibility of it) and take Lilac in them.