Timothy Culver - Power Play

“I’ll tell you what it is a description of,” Robert said. “China.”

They walked in the garden, and Robert found himself thinking, She could be a good-looking woman if she tried.

There were only the two of them out here. Lunch had lasted well over an hour, mostly because of the conversation, and after it Bradford had excused himself, saying he really did have to spend some time with Howard and the galleys of his book. Sterling and Elizabeth had expressed a desire to spend some time with the little girl, Dinah, and that had left Robert with the girl’s mother, Mrs. Canby. Robert was prepared for the next hour or so to be extremely dull.

Mrs. Canby — she’d said he was to call her Evelyn, and he was trying to think of her that way — had suggested a tour of the house and its nearby grounds, and he’d agreed, mostly because it would have to be better than sitting with her in a room and trying to think of something to talk about. They’d done the house first, and it was surprisingly large and rambling, even more so than it had looked from outside. Robert didn’t say so, but the chief impression he got from the house was of age. The rooms looked comfortable and well-used, but somehow as though most of the usage was over and done with, as though the house had been empty for some time, though still cleaned and maintained. The nursery, a sun-bright toy-filled second floor room in which Elizabeth and Sterling were being an indulgent audience to a now-much-more-animated Dinah, was like an intrusion from some other house, almost from another era.

After the house, Mrs. Canby — Evelyn — took him around the outside, and here again the same impression persisted, of a place that had once been full of life and activity but which recently had declined to a merely neat museum.

Particularly the garden. The paths and beds had been laid out with obvious loving care, there were fresh plantings, new flowers, the spring beginnings of the lush beauty this spot would have by mid-summer, but somehow there was an aura of absence over it all, of meticulousness without warmth, and Robert wasn’t surprised when Evelyn told him the explanation:

“This was Dinah’s really. Not my Dinah, Bradford’s. My grandmother. She used to do most of this garden herself, she really loved it.” She stopped to look around at the neat spring plantings, the fat buds, the greenery, the first swatches of summer’s patchwork quilt of color. “Bradford has people to take care of it now,” she said. “For Dinah’s sake, not for his. He doesn’t particularly care about gardens and things like that.”

“I’m surprised he lives so far out in the country then.”

“Oh, he likes the orchards and the woods. He likes the feel of land around him. It’s a man kind of thing, you know.”

There was a tone of voice in that last remark oddly out of place in a young woman speaking of an old man, even if he was a relative. There’d been a time when he’d heard that kind of sound in Kit’s voice, when she was describing to some third party his football exploits or some feat of strength he might have done; a kind of delighted pride in the manifestations of masculinity in her man. Robert looked at her, thinking, Is that it? Does she have a crush on her grandfather?

It would be understandable, in a way; Bradford Lockridge was still an impressive man, with an impressive background, but there must be forty years between them. Did Lockridge understand why his granddaughter had buried herself here in the middle of nowhere with him, or had it all happened too gradually for any of the participants to notice?

They walked on, Evelyn pointing out items of interest, Robert making appropriate comments, and at a later stage he said, “Elizabeth told me your husband was killed in Asia. I’m sorry.”

They had left the garden by now, and had just entered the apple orchard, the short trees all elbows and stooping, like frozen contortionists in long swooping rows. Evelyn stopped and glanced back at him. “That was over a year ago,” she said. “Just before Christmas, the year before last.”

“If one time of the year is worse than another to lose someone you love, I suppose Christmas is the worst time of all,”

“I suppose so,” she said, almost indifferently. “I seem to lose them at all seasons.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m sorry, that was a stupid thing to say. Have you had enough of the great outdoors?”

“That depends,” he said, since he anticipated that indoors lay nothing but endless boredom. “What else is there to see out here?”

“Oh, God,” she said, and made a rueful smile that unexpectedly emphasized her good looks. “We have just about anything outdoorsy you could ask for, except a painted desert. There’s a branch of Conodoguinet Creek that runs through the property about a mile that way. Back up the road you came in there’s the stables. Off that way—”

“Stables? You have horses?”

“Didn’t you notice that on your way in? It was on your right, stables and exercise yards and all the rest of it.”

“I saw some buildings, but I didn’t pay any particular attention.”

“Do you ride?”

“Infrequently, but I like to.”

“What about your suit?”

Robert looked down at himself and said, “It doesn’t matter, it’s an old suit anyway.” He didn’t add that he had no new suits. He’d lacked much interest in clothing the last three years.

“I’ll change,” she offered, “and meet you around the other side of the house.”

“Done.”

She was faster than he’d expected, coming out in less than ten minutes, in tan jodhpurs and brown riding boots, a white blouse and a tan jacket. He’d spent the time strolling around the nearby area, looking at the cars in the eight-car garage to the left of the main house, poking his head into a storage shed full of motorized gardening equipment, trying to read a slightly tilting sundial in the grassy oval surrounded by the circular gravel drive. He looked up from the sundial — it seemed to be claiming it was ten o’clock, probably A.M. and certainly inaccurate — and saw her come out to the sunlight, cool and trim and impersonal, and he was instantly reminded of Kit in the last stages of their marriage. Except that this woman was a few years older than Kit had been. And where Kit had given an impression of a fire suppressed, Mrs. Evelyn Canby gave no impression of containing any fire at all.

She came over and said, “A delivery truck hit that once, don’t ask how. It hasn’t been too accurate since.”

“I noticed.”

“Come along,” she said. “I’ll show you our ghost town.”

Robert half-smiled, not sure if she was kidding or not.

“No, really,” she said. “I told you we had everything. Just wait and see.”

“I’m ready to be shown,” he said.

One thing they definitely had was an astonishing number of employees. He’d seen half a dozen servants at one time or another inside the house, and now when they reached the stables there were at least four more men working there, all of them looking to be at least in their fifties. Old family retainers, no doubt. There was something faintly feudal about the whole thing that made Robert uncomfortable.

But the stablemen were contemporary Americans, after all, without the good old-fashioned forelock-pulling manner. Robert might be a guest of the master of the house, but he had entered their domain and there was no ambivalence about who was in charge. Evelyn asked politely if they might have a pair of horses to ride, and the man she was talking to considered the question thoughtfully and decided that yes, it was possible. He then gave Robert a stern no-nonsense talk about how to treat the animal he would be loaned, and Robert found himself half-grinning and half-seriously promising to treat the horse like his own child. The man was reluctantly satisfied, and went away to select and saddle their mounts.