Barbara Michaels: The Dark on the Other Side

MICHAEL CAME DOWN LATE THE NEXT MORNING TO find the breakfast room unoccupied. Gordon had explained that they followed English country-house habits in the morning; he considered it a tyranny to demand that his guests appear at a specified hour for a meal as trying as breakfast.

One of the servants, a well-stacked blonde with skirts so short they took Michael’s mind off coffee for several minutes, had shown him the way to the “small dining room.” It was a sunny, pleasant room with a table in a circular bay window and silver chafing dishes set out along a sideboard. Michael surveyed the effect approvingly. He wished he knew more about furniture, and all that sort of thing. This stuff was what they called Provincial, he supposed-light in design and color, with flowered drapes and blue-and-white delft pots filled with blooming branches standing around. It was very different from the somber large dining room, with its heavy dark furniture and velvet hangings and family portraits. He wondered how much Linda had had to do with the decoration of the house, and which, if either, of the two styles represented her taste.

He forgot Linda as he foraged happily among the chafing dishes. The butler, bringing fresh coffee and toast, informed him that Mr. Randolph and his secretary had already breakfasted and gone to work; Randolph had said that they would meet for lunch, and suggested that in the meantime Michael explore the grounds. Mrs. Randolph? The butler’s face was impassive. Mrs. Randolph always breakfasted in her room.

Along with one hell of a hangover, Michael thought. He finished his coffee and decided he might as well follow Gordon’s suggestion of a walk. The view from the window was beautiful; it reminded him of Devon, where he had spent a memorable month slogging through the mud and declaiming the inevitable lines of Browning with the ardor of an eighteen-year-old. Illumined by sunshine, the spring colors of flowers and new leaves were as bright as if they had been freshly painted.

He had to ask directions again to get out of the house. Finally he found his way onto the terrace, an immense flagstoned expanse with half a dozen low steps leading down to a lawn like apple-green velvet. Tulips, one of the few flowers Michael knew by name, made swatches of crimson and yellow along a graveled path. There were other flowers: pink ones and blue ones and spotted ones. The air effervesced like champagne when he breathed it in; he felt dizzy with it. Something smelled good. Must be the pink and blue flowers. As an expert on tulips, he recalled that they didn’t smell.

Breathing in and out with self-conscious virtue, he went down the steps, heading for a copse of trees that looked like a pale-pink, low-hanging cloud. Cherry trees, maybe. Or apple. There had been apple trees on his grandmother’s farm…how many years ago? He was just old enough to revel in nostalgia, instead of finding it hurtful, and his mood was pleasantly self-reproachful as he wandered along the path. Something wrong with people who gave up this kind of life for a foul den in a smoggy hive of sterile buildings and packed humanity. Maybe he would buy himself a cottage someplace. If this book was a success…

Midway along the path he turned for a backward look, and stopped short. The night before, he had got only the vaguest impression of the house, which was approached by a long drive through a grove of pines. It had been twilight when he arrived; he had seen a vast, dark bulk, which in the tricky dusk had loomed larger than it was. Or so he had thought. The place was big. Built of gray stone, it had three stories and a roof with dormers that might conceal attics or servants’ quarters. The wings stretched out on either side of the terrace and the garden. The tower…Something wrong with the tower. Michael studied it, frowning. The same gray stone, a handsome slate roof…The shape, that was what was wrong. It was too tall, too thin to harmonize with the bulk of the house. And the stairway that wound up, around the exterior, didn’t harmonize either. It looked like an afterthought.

Still, the overall effect was impressive. It was a good-looking house. But the impression foremost in his mind was not so much aesthetic as financial. Money. What a hunk of dough this place must have cost, even in the laissez-faire days of Randolph ’s grandfather. And what it must cost, now, to maintain.

He wandered on, while another long-forgotten memory worked its way to the surface. His mother, in an enormous floppy straw hat and a shapeless skirt-women didn’t wear slacks in those days, at least his mother didn’t-kneeling on the ground, wielding a busy trowel. She had been an enthusiastic gardener. Maybe, if she had lived longer, she might have been able to impart knowledge about some other plants than tulips. He had been eight when she died. He had hated her for dying. But still there was that undefined feeling of pleasure and content when he saw flowers pink and blue and sweet-smelling…

Rounding the end of the left wing, he saw a bank of flowering bushes and struck off at a tangent to investigate them. With the sunlight full upon them they blazed like fire-orange and purplish red and pink-a brighter shade of pink than the fat flowers in the beds. It was not until he got close that he saw the kneeling figure; and because of his odd mood of reminiscence and receptivity he was struck suddenly breathless. A familiar figure, in a big floppy straw hat, kneeling, the bright flash of a trowel twinkling in its gloved hands…

But the straw hat was circled by a strip of figured chiffon, and he had seen its like in shop windows along Fifth Avenue. The kneeling figure wore tight slacks, not a shapeless cotton skirt; and the face that looked up at him, shaded by the brim, had the wide tilted eyes of an Egyptian court lady.

It was reassuring to know that he was not facing a revenant, however fragrant her memory; but the girl who was digging in the dirt was almost as much unlike his hostess of the previous night as she was unlike his mother. If she had a hangover, it didn’t show. The lock of hair hanging down over one cheek shone in the sunlight like a black-bird’s wing; she brushed it back with a gloved hand and left a smudge of dirt along the exquisite cheekbone.

“Good morning,” she said coolly. “I hope Ha-worth gave you something decent for breakfast.”

“More than decent. How was yours?”

She dismissed the inanity with the shrug it deserved.

“Are you soaking up atmosphere or just taking a walk?”

“The latter,” Michael said shortly.

“Then allow me to be the perfect hostess. I’ll give you the guided tour.”

“Don’t let me interrupt you.”

“This is therapy, not productive labor. There are four gardeners, and they regard me as a necessary nuisance.”

She got to her feet, in a movement so smooth that Michael’s incipient offer of a helping hand was left dangling. In her flat shoes she came up to his chin. The brim of the hat brushed his nose, and she swept it off, tilting her head back and laughing.

She wore a yellow sweater over her white blouse, with dark-brown slacks. He had thought of her as thin, the night before; now he searched for other adjectives. Slim; wiry; slender…No, not slender, that suggested a delicacy, a yielding grace; and the alert tension of her pose was the reverse of graceful. Michael damned his incurable writer’s tendency to wallow in words, and smiled back at her.

“The place is beautiful. Are you the genius who planned all this?”

“Heavens, no. It’s been like this for a hundred years. Roughly.”

“But surely plants and flowers, even trees, need replacing from time to time.”

“Gordon does that.” There was a slight pause; he had a feeling that she was considering, not what she should say, but how to say it. “His taste is impeccable,” she went on. “In everything.”