Chapter the Thirty-second. Wednesday, July 2, 2003
ust what was Ruth Wolf ’s original commission? I wondered and pondered. Could it really be true that an Outlander had been working here in Dingley Dell without detection, performing acts of evil in her nurse’s habit and then repenting and atoning in an equally important way? My head was spinning as I accompanied Sir Dabber back to his manse.
The housemaid Arabella was gone. She was off buying a summer frock and bonnet and visiting with friends in Pedlar Place (a working class neighbourhood in Milltown) — things she would otherwise have been doing the previous Saturday afternoon had she not been drafted by Fips, the butler, to help him polish all the silverware and plate, which was growing tarnished from neglect. With the death of Lady Dabber, Dabber Hall had begun to lose its polish and lustre, and although it would never be mistaken for Miss Havisham’s decomposing Satis House (of Great Expectations reference), the mansion had its own repletion of dust and cobwebs, the equally present mould and mildew, no doubt, aggravating Dabber’s ongoing respiratory difficulties.
Upon our arrival late that afternoon Fips could not be found. Later he was discovered ensconced in his room upstairs on this, his alternate afternoon off, reading something borrowed, no doubt, from the Academic and Lending Library. More than likely he was perusing the transcribed Ensyke article devoted to France, because Fips believed himself to be of French stock.
“We may speak freely and in confidence in my sitting room,” said Dabber. “Fips will not descend those stairs unless there be a fire, and even then I should possibly have to haul him bodily from his interminable appointment with the Gauls.”
We drew chairs before the fireplace, though there was no fire therein, this being early July. A silence passed between us, as each of us communed with his own thoughts about all that we had witnessed on this most eventful Wednesday afternoon.
“My head is most muddled,” said Dabber, finally, taking out his snuffbox. “I have not the faintest sense as to whether this is all some sort of wild dream. Are we upon the brink of something of awesome consequence, my friend, or have I instead partaken of a large dose of opium unawares?”
“I’m no longer certain of anything myself at this moment,” was the only thing I could think to say in response.
“Is it really possible,” continued Dabber, “that the cavalcade of time has marched itself forward and left us all behind, just as my son has said? What then should be the reason that we have been kept here as antiquities? Is that what we are, Trimmers? Or are we more like curiosities in some scientific zoological park?”
I wanted to reply that perhaps our being kept here for so long in this secluded valley served to our benefit. Perhaps there was some grave and deadly pestilence on the outside, the avoidance of which had allowed us to survive, nay, even to thrive after a fashion. Perhaps Bevan could feign his rigoritis for a time, but such a thing as purportedly infested the brains of each of our Returnees — such a thing could not possibly be counterfeited. Or could it? I wanted to say that surely there were terrible, life-threatening illnesses beyond our border and that we had not yet the means to protect ourselves from them. Yet I said none of these things to Sir Dabber, for in the darkest recesses of my heart, I had come to feel that I could no longer trust any of those former theories for why we were here. To-day was the day that I began to view everything through a different prism, one refracting cynicism and grim doubt.
I settled back and tried to relax with my new friend Sir Dabber before his cold, boarded fireplace, attempting, as well, to clear my mind. But the gears and pistons of Dabber’s own mind were turning and chugging without respite. “So many questions, so many mysteries to be solved!”
“Conjecturing about such things will only bring us to the point of derangement, Sir Dabber. Let us have some port.”
“A capital idea! And you must call me Seth. Together we have peered into the darkness of the great unknown, and such an experience should remove all ceremony from our private society, don’t you think?”
I nodded and smiled. Sir Dabber sneezed, then wiped his nose with his handkerchief and rose from his chair. “We must drink ourselves into the cups of temporary oblivion, or — you are right — we should be made mad by evening’s end.”
Both of us in agreement as to the soundness of this course of action, we proceeded to drink ourselves into a most comfortable state of cloudy halfforgetfulness. The instrument of our necessary transformation into creatures that did not worry about the fate of Dingley Dell was first port, then Madeira, and then champagne, and lastly strong brandy. In the last hour of this lengthy, rather diversified indulgence in the grape, I had even begun to see things in a slightly positive light (A window of opportunty! A ripping challenge!) and did not mind in the least that my new best friend Seth had taken the liberty of reducing my name further in familiarity to Fred.
Gus woke and opened his eyes halfway. He looked all about him through thin, crusty slits. He was in a room that was dark and unfamiliar to him. There was an electrified lamp sitting on a table next to him, but it gave very little light. He was lying in a bed, but he didn’t know at first what bed it was. But then by little and little, his memory began to uncloud itself. Bits and pieces of the last eight days and nights began to come forward in his re-assembling recollections. Gus had drifted for quite a long season in and out of high fever, his mind swimming in a swamp of thick delirium. Other moments gave more lucidity. Gus touched his hand to his now cool forehead. The fever had broken for the last time, although he felt greatly weakened by the trial of his illness, as if a heavy weight continued to press itself down upon him. But it wasn’t long before my brother was fully cognisant of where he was and even of how he had got there.
Gus was conscious, as well, of the fact that he was not alone. Sitting in stiff-backed chairs against the opposite wall of the room, drinking from steaming coffee cups, were the two women who had spent the long week nursing him.
“Awake at last!” said the older of the two, Mrs. DeLove. “Do you feel better?”
“I do, yes,” said Gus.
“Your last fever broke a couple of hours ago. We’ve been giving you an antibiotic. The vet had prescribed it for a spaniel we used to have, but apparently it works on human pneumonia, too.”
“We thought you were going to die,” said the younger woman, Annette.
“And I didn’t know how in the world I was going to get you buried,” struck in Mrs. DeLove.
“There was no doctor to attend me?”
“Are you a comedian?” asked the older woman in a rhetorical fashion. “They’d haul you away and do something awful to you. Didn’t you tell him, Annette? Didn’t you tell him the things we’ve seen?”
Annette shrugged a little. “I tried to.”
“It was a decision we had to make,” explained Mrs. DeLove. “Would you like tea? Annette, go and make some tea for Mr. Trimmers.”
Annette rose from her chair, her braced legs clicking and clacking. She turned and addressed Gus. “Or would you like some coffee?”
Mrs. DeLove answered quickly on behalf of her patient: “Tea is easier on the stomach. And use the store brand. Mr. Trimmers has already cost us enough money.” Annette nodded and hobbled from the room.
“How long have I lain here?” asked Gus of Mrs. DeLove. “All the days and nights seem of one piece in my head.”
“Too long. Annette and I were to the point of ‘recover or die already, Alien.’ I’m not kidding you, Mr. Trimmers, you have been one super-sized headache for my daughter and me.”
Gus struggled to pull himself up a little upon his pillows to better see the woman who remained partly obscured by the shadows of the room. “Why didn’t you just let me die?”
“You think I wanted that on my conscience? You know, they let us live here — the ones who oversee your valley. They let us stay here because they think we’re a couple of loony tunes who aren’t going to get in their way. But aside from the fact that Annette goes off her rocker every now and then— case in point, this whole ridiculous handcuff episode — well, when it comes right down to it, we’re just as sane or insane as they are. I don’t know why they keep you there. I don’t know where you come from or much of what you’re about. I do know you have no idea what the real world is like, as if they’re keeping you all in the dark on purpose. And I also know this: you’re a human being and you don’t deserve to die from some germ you don’t have any immunity to, so that’s why Annette and I have been playing Florence Nightingale for the last several days. Because it wasn’t your fault your boy ran away. And it wasn’t your fault you got sick. And I’ll tell you something else, Mr. Trimmers: whatever Annette tried to tell you about the way they go after you people is true. We’ve seen it right here on my property: one of you funny-drest escapees, shot dead right in the back. We watched it from this very window, and then we spent the rest of the day hiding down in the basement to make them think there’d been no witnesses.”
“But they have to know, don’t they? — that you’ve been watching them all of these years?”
Mrs. DeLove shook her head. “Couple of loonies, like I say. And lucky for you we loonies decided to save your life in two different ways this week.”
“You mean keeping me here. And then nursing me when I was ill.”
Mrs. DeLove nodded. She took another sip from her cup.
“Then I thank you doubly.”
“You don’t have to thank me. You just have to get yourself well and then get yourself back home. There’s something going on — a lot more of those unmarked trucks and vans going in and out of the big fenced compound down the road. You should be back home in your valley where it’s safe.”
Gus nodded. He was quiet for a minute, and then he said, “Do you think my boy Newman is dead?”
Mrs. DeLove sighed and drew her shoulders up into a half-shrug. “If he’s still out here, then maybe his chances aren’t so good. But I want to believe that he’s made it back home by now. And you need to be thinking the same thing. Oh, the little painted picture you brought with you — I put it in a frame and set it on the table so you could look at him. Not the lamp table. The other one.”
“Thank you,” said Gus, picking up the miniature of his Newman to give it a closer look.
“Nobody takes pictures in Dingley Dell?”
“Takes pictures?”
“Photographs.”
Gus shook his head. “The tradesmen never brought us any cameras.”
Annette clomped back into the bedroom. “Your tea will be ready in a minute,” she said to Gus, moving to seat herself on the side of the bed. “I made you English breakfast tea. Because of how much you like England and Dickens and all that.”
“Thank you.”
“I wish I could come with you, Mr. Trimmers. I like all that you’ve told me about Dingley Dell.”
“It probably is a very nice place,” allowed Mrs. DeLove. “But Annette hasn’t left this house in fifteen years.”
Annette nodded and then cast down her eyes in sad regret. “Someday I will though, and I’ll climb that ridge over there and I’ll come and visit you.”
“You won’t climb the ridge, Annette, because of your legs. But Netty Girl, if you ever do someday find the courage to put your sorry ass outside this house, I will personally hire somebody to carry you piggyback all the way to the top of that mountain and then all the way down again, and baby, I’ll be shouting ‘hallelujah’ all the Goddamned while.”
Annette broke into a smile. There was a warm look between mother and daughter at that moment that wanted no words.
Gus now fixed his eyes upon his former captor: “Will you at least step out upon the porch to wave goodbye to me when I get strong enough to make my return trip?”
“I wish I could. I really want to.” And then Annette gave a hopeful smile and quitted the room to check on the tea.