I stood in the dark room as if anchored to it, held fast by these dull speculations, the detective always sharp on the scene of the crime, who yet never knows the action, the shape, the real colour of the crime itself. And I would not have thrown off this mood of flatulent disengagement if the telephone hadn’t rung at that moment on one of the low tables in the main room.
She knelt on the floor beside it — pressed her knees together, thighs running in a smooth dark line to a small triangle of hair, her back rising upwards, arched slightly, the tummy rounded, pushing outwards, her waist narrowing dramatically, and then the abrupt conical breasts. She was like an art-deco design, a sculptured book-end, a copper-plated Diana from some suburban household between the wars.
‘Yes? Hello! Yes, fine — in an hour. Eight. No, there’s no need. As we arranged. I’ll meet you there. Fine. ’Bye.’
‘Who was that?’ The words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself. The inquiries, the doubts, were under way. She stood up and gripped my wrist sharply, gazing at me.
‘The man I’m going out with tonight.’
And then it was all right, when she came into my arms. I could feel her now for the first time — warm and electric. For she was not mine now, not my responsibility, my script. She was the object of someone else’s designs. And it was an easy thing then, playing the robber right under this man’s nose.
Her leg came up once more like the heron’s, and this time I wanted her without hesitation as she wrapped it round me, and we made love that way, standing like birds, almost motionless.
8
Belmont House lay at the foot of the Catskills in New York’s Ulster County, two hours’ drive up the Hudson Valley along the interstate parkway, then westwards along roads that became narrower and less frequented as they ran towards the hills.
The valley was a busy place with its six-lane highway running straight through to Chicago, and its supermarkets as big as villages on the outskirts of towns. But once off this main artery the countryside changed character gradually as it rose from the valley until an almost primeval America took over — a landscape of rugged woodlands, forested hills, high buffs, ravines, great boulders and torrents of water — inhabited only at the edges of the small roads, elderly people living in straggling villages with frame houses, all alike with mosquito-wired front porches and miniature lawns, and chickens wandering disconsolately in steep back patches.
Sometimes, in the middle of nowhere, there were stone farm houses back from the road, with apple orchards and cows and barns and thirty acres of cultivated land. But these settlements too soon ran out into wilderness — thick underbrush with outcrops of rock and the bleached white wood skeletons of huge fallen trees like whale bones. It was a hidden land, seemingly unexplored, untouched by anything except extremes of weather: glaciers and blinding sun — inhabited, one felt sure, only by Indians, a lost tribe whose braves were sharpening their knives behind the rocks even now, waiting to fly through the air like bats onto the shoulders of the unwary voyager.
Belmont House lay ten miles or so beneath the highest of the Catskill peaks, on a ridge of land, once an Indian trail, bordering what was now a thickly forested national park. There was a village which we passed through a mile from it, Stonestead, a single street with a pretty white clapboard church, a general store, a liquor store and the district headquarters of the American Legion, the neatest building in the place with a flagpost and a clean-cropped young man lowering the colours as we came through in the bright afternoon light. We turned off the main road here and followed what would have been no more than a lane if it hadn’t been tarmacked.
The house itself was lost among huge elms and chestnuts at the end of a long curved drive, so that one came on it suddenly in a clearing of spreading lawns, dotted with maple groves and flowering shrubs. It was a long two-storied yellow clapboard mansion with attics and a steep hipped roof over the central block and green louvred storm shutters on either side of all the tall windows: classic American colonial, a transplantation from the plantation south, with its huge white-columned portico, triangular pediment and towering chimneys. Its proportions were solid and dignified, without being heavy, the landscaping carefully premeditated yet the effects informal, the views of the Catskill and Shawangunk mountains precisely commanding: love and thought had had an outing here — and money too — an old-fashioned American capitalism still buoyantly evident, which didn’t surprise me, for Helen Jackson’s grandfather, she’d told me on the drive up, who had created the place in the 1890s, had been a New York broker, a friend of Carnegie and Rockefeller, a vital cog in that huge monopolistic machine that had come to control America by the turn of the century.
And indeed if one takes account of familial opposition, the sometimes violent reaction between successive generations, Helen Jackson’s Marxist apostasy, if such it was, was quite conceivable: she had found distress in all this unearned bounty, fled the rich hearth for the hovels of the poor, left the castle for the cabin as Princesses do in fairy stories. And I believed that for a moment, as we got out of the car by the porch, just as one believes in fairy tales: by turning logic upside down. Seeing her in front of the great house, confidently stepping into her heritage, the idea of her hidden nature, of revolution beneath the eye-shadow — this seemed so unlikely a thought, so bizarre, that one felt it must be true.
Harold Perkins laid aside a book he’d been reading and came running down the porch steps to greet us — a small compactly built, bubbling man with white hair cut en brosse, wearing a yachting pullover and plimsolls. He looked like a retired tennis coach and not the son of a millionaire broker. And it was obvious almost immediately that he had reacted against the influence of his father not just by taking up the academic career which Helen had told me about, but by retaining, as he did now in his mid-sixties, the dress, the air of a college freshman, running down the library steps, breathlessly anxious for a game before sunset.
Yet there was, just beneath his friendly ebullience, something else that I noticed in that first moment and was later to confirm in strength: a diffidence, an excuse in his approach to us all on the gravel surround, as if he were butting in on a party he’d not been invited to: the marks on his small face — a shriven quality — of something which had hurt all his life; a disappointment in the mild blue eyes: patience unrewarded, efforts unrecognised, the real personality unachieved: these failures, which one glimpsed in his face, were not evident for one moment as self-pity but as the marks of an expected fate, now fulfilled and patiently borne — character flaws which had worked themselves to the surface over the years in small downfalls on the hurdles of the world.
Inside the porch was a large, octagonally-shaped hall, darkly panelled, with a chandelier dropping from the high ceiling, which ran across the width of the house to a verandah looking westwards down a sloping lawn and beyond that a meadow which the sun was beginning to leave, the sky above now pale blue and pink with a cold haze above the grass.
The birthday tea had been laid out on a round table in the middle of the hall with red crackers piled up on the circle of white linen and balloons laid along a wide Carrara marble mantelpiece, the coloured skins gently expanding above a grate of smouldering logs.
A middle-aged woman, unsuitably dressed in a green trouser suit, was introduced to me — the housekeeper I understood — a woman called Anna with flushed, attractive, Italianate features in a face that was too small for her body, and some sort of deeply New England accent. ‘What a lovely surprise,’ she said, greeting the twins with an affectionate ease she did not show to the adult arrivals. And there were two other children already there, a boy and a girl from a neighbouring family who had come to make up the party. It was very much a family occasion and, of course, I felt outside it: there was the sense, all the more clear now, that I’d been asked up here too precipitately, for reasons that were not entirely to do with hospitality or friendship. I felt uncomfortably close to the fiction of The Man who knew Too Much.