“I assume you’re English,” she said, looking straight in front of her. Her hand groped along the coverlet and came in contact with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She lit one with only the briefest of hesitations.
“That’s right, yes,” he said, in the eager respectful tones he used to all cripples, deformed or socially disadvantaged people he met. His voice said: “You have been born with a handicap but I am not shocked or repelled. On the contrary, I respect and admire you for your efforts in overcoming it and will treat you exactly as if you were normal and entire.”
“I have an illogical but profound dislike of the English,” she said.
Henderson laughed. A come-on-you’re-joking chuckle.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. I—”
“Why did you laugh, then?”
Henderson looked about him as if calling on an invisible audience for support.
“Well, because I assumed you were joking, I suppose.”
“Why?”
“Well…” Good God! “I suppose because one just doesn’t say that sort of thing in all seriousness to someone one’s just met moments before.”
“Oh, doesn’t one? But I do. I hate the English.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.” He sensed a hot pelt of embarrassment cover his entire body. He backed off a couple of steps and waved his hands about.
“Perhaps if I, if we, were to get to know each other I might, um, be able to — ha ha — persuade you to, to, reconsider. Or at least exclude me from the general slur.” Somehow he had reached the door. He wished he hadn’t given that little laugh.
She puffed on her cigarette and made no reply.
“Well, I won’t disturb you further. Sorry to have—”
“Goodbye, Mr Dores.”
“Bye.”
He shut the door and walked slowly down the corridor. He understood what Shanda meant. What an astonishing woman, he thought. What a…bitch, there was no other word for it, blind or no. He shook his head in sagacious sorrow. He wondered what had brought it on. Had her blindness been caused by a crash in an English make of car, a Jaguar or Aston Martin, say? Or had she been a forceps delivery handled by a clumsy and strong-fingered English gynaecologist? He turned the corner realizing with some distaste that his armpits were moist and squelching. No, there was something deeper there: that sort of aberrant hate — if he was any judge of human nature — was to do with affairs of the heart turned sour. Unrequited love. Probably ditched by an Englishman for a girl who could see. Some right-thinking, sensible, sane, pragmatic Englishman. Turned her into a bitter, chainsmoking, reclusive anglophobe. He trotted down the stairs, feeling marginally reassured by his armchair psychology, and saw Freeborn come in the front door. He resisted the temptation to check his watch.
“You still fuckin’ here?” Freeborn said pointing at him. “You got about a hour and a half.”
Henderson slowly arrived at the foot of the stairs.
“Look, I might as well tell you,” he said nervously, “that I’m not leaving here until I have completed my business with your father.”
Freeborn, who had been heading across the hall in the direction of the kitchen, abruptly changed course and strode powerfully over. Henderson raised his hands to chest level, then tugged at the loose skin on his neck.
Freeborn put his huge face with its dense, neatly clipped beard very close to Henderson’s.
“Listen, you English fuck. You ain’t gonna do no business with my father. It’s been done, see? Those pictures are sold already. He’s a old man. He don’t know what he’s been talking about, so get yo’ shit out of here.”
“Your father has asked my company to do a valuation on his paintings and I don’t intend to leave until he tells me to.”
Freeborn looked at him. “You been warned, man.” He spread his hands reasonably, “I can’t say fairer than that. Just don’t fuck with me.”
“The last thing on earth I want to do is ‘fuck’ with you,” Henderson replied bravely. “I suggest you take the matter up with your father if you’re unhappy about my being here. I’m simply doing my job.”
“Yeah, and look, keep away from Shanda, heah? I catch you messin’ with her, boy and you—”
“I was only making a telephone call, for God’s sake.”
“That’s my fuckin’ phone, man. You keep yo’ chicken-shit hands off of it, no good English mofo.” With that he turned and marched off into the kitchen.
Henderson went slowly back upstairs to his room. This sudden hostility from all quarters left him feeling weak and thoughtful. He wondered, once again, if Beeby knew what he was talking about…And what, moreover, had Freeborn meant by the statement that the pictures had been sold already? Or was that all his clenched fist of a brain could come up with as a ruse? Like a lot of people, Freeborn could at times give the impression of being astonishingly stupid, but it was too risky an assumption to elevate into a truth. He resolved, for what seemed like the hundredth time, to quit the Gage mansion the minute his evaluation was done.
Feeling sorry for himself in this way made him think of Irene, his comforter. Perhaps he might just still manage to entice her south after all if he wrote to her. She might not answer the phone but surely she’d open a letter. After he had finished here — if all went well — he could justifiably claim a couple of days off. Irene might relent at the prospect of a weekend in Charleston or Savannah…
He took a writing pad and envelope from his case and sat down and wrote her a letter to this effect, well larded with apologies and excuses for his craven behaviour on the night of the ‘mugging’, and concluding with as overt a declaration of love and affection as he had yet allowed himself (“with absolutely all of my love, H.”). He was wary of sentiment. Or rather he was all in favour of sentiment but uncertain, not to say ignorant, of how best to express it.
As he sealed the envelope it prompted thoughts of the last letter he had written. He wondered vaguely whether lance-corporal Drew would be able to enlighten him about his father’s death…And what would his father have made of his son’s current predicament, he asked himself? Perhaps the saddest and most lasting consequences of Captain Arnold Dores’s death in the Burmese jungles in 1943, Henderson thought, was that he, his son, had no vision of the man, no personal private image to cherish or be consoled by aside from purely fanciful or wishful ones. Such photographs that the family possessed were almost counter-productive. In blurry black and white they showed a neat, thin man in baggy flannels with a small moustache and very short hair. Even the more professional shots were undermined by a forced and unnatural smile that exposed the rather wide — and to his son’s eyes, unsightly — gap between his father’s front teeth. These second-hand images were further disappointing in that they confirmed the distressing fact that Henderson drew most of his features — his square face, his rather small nose — from his mother. He didn’t look like his father at all.
If the only sort of immortality we are guaranteed, he thought, going to the window and looking out at the wilderness of the back garden, is the image of ourselves that lives on in the minds of those who survive us, then his father had been singularly unfortunate. He tapped the edge of the envelope against his thumbnail. Even his widow’s reminiscences were commonplace and uninspiring. “A charming sweet man,” was the last verdict his mother had passed, when questioned by her son; but she said that about everyone she didn’t actively dislike. Perhaps she’d forgotten, he thought. But that made him angry: people had a duty to remember. Friends and family ought to talk and gossip about the dead as if they were alive…