William Boyd - Stars and bars

He would have to start again, that was all, fill up the next three decades or so with new ploys and distractions. But he would lower his sights somewhat: no grandiose or pretentious notions about ‘change’ or ‘finding himself’. A return to England was the first priority: lowered sights were more at home there. He’d reclaim his Baron’s Court flat from his niece and her friends and, as for work, his pulse didn’t exactly quicken at the prospect, perhaps take up that promised commission on the Odilon Redon book…

Back at the Gage mansion he found Bryant packing her suitcases.

“Good girl,” Henderson said. “We’ll be off first thing tomorrow.”

“You will. We won’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m going away with Duane, to Kansas.”

“Kansas? Why Kansas?”

“Girls can get married at twelve there.”

“You’re joking!”

“No.”

“But that’s disgusting. Obscene .”

Bryant explained that now Loomis Gage was dead and Freeborn was the new head of the household, Duane didn’t think he could stay around much longer, as he and Freeborn hated each other. So they were going to Kansas, where they could get married without delay.

Henderson took in this new setback with the phlegmatic patience of the consistently thwarted. He reminded Bryant of her age and Duane’s, and the likely reaction of her mother.

“I’ll take care of Mom,” she said defiantly. “It’s not your responsibility. If I want to do something you can’t stop me and neither can she.”

Henderson looked at her. She had changed in the brief time they had spent together. No longer a wilful, spoilt adolescent, she had turned into a wilful, spoilt adult. He was suddenly convinced too that she and Duane had slept together. He found this very depressing.

“Bryant, seriously…Duane?”

“Do you know him?”

“No.”

“There you are.”

In actual fact, he was on the point of giving them his blessing; he felt terminal exhaustion loud at his back, hurrying near. Bryant took a soft-pack from her jeans pocket and lit a cigarette.

“If you knew Duane you’d feel different,” she said wistfully. “He’s a sweet lovely person. Very kind, very gentle.” She exhaled and looked dreamily at the smoke billow and disperse.

“Where is he, by the way?”

“He’s getting your car. And buying our tickets.”

“At last.”

He stood up. No, this was all wrong. This wasn’t going to happen. He felt a sudden urge and strong determination to thwart Bryant’s projected nuptials. Why? he wondered…To curry favour with Melissa? Possibly, although that seemed something of a lost cause. To prevent a young girl ruining her life? That sounded altruistic and noble enough but if he were honest he didn’t care that much about what Bryant did with her life. No, he reflected, he had to stop the rot, that was all — and soon. The answer had something to do with not bending, not succumbing to the endless massive flow of events and phenomena. He’d been powerless to resist the current that swept him along, however fiercely he battled.

Perhaps a passionless, disinterested attempt at deflecting someone else’s might have more success.

“Well,” he said, stirrings of an idea beginning to shift around in his brain. “It’s your life, and you can do what you want, as they say.”

Henderson packed his small case with his few possessions then went in search of Cora to tell her he would be leaving the next day. She was sitting in her room looking out over the wild garden. There were no lights on but a pink glow from the evening sun cast gauzy, kindly gleams over her room and its shabby furniture.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “that it’s been such a bad time for you. I hope you get your job back.”

“Who knows? Maybe it was the wrong job?” He smiled thinly. “I don’t think I’m really suited to this place.” He gave her a brief resume of his past fond ambitions, of his conviction that everything was going to change for the better once he arrived in America.

“How very sad for you,” she said without a trace of mockery. “Losing your hopes — that’s much worse than losing the paintings.”

He found her sincerity oddly disturbing. He didn’t know what to say. “What will you do?” he asked. “Go back to medical school?”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ve got plenty to do. But what about you?”

He sketched out, with flimsy enthusiasm, his return to London, the flat, the book on Odilon Redon, growing steadily more downcast as he did so.

“What about your Dr Dubrovnik?”

“I think those hopes foundered in the atrium lake.”

“Poor Henderson,” she said. “We haven’t treated you very kindly in this country, have we?”

“Could have gone better, I suppose.”

She took off her dark glasses and smiled ruefully at him. “I am sorry about the pictures. Daddy left everything to Freeborn — the pictures, the house, what’s left of the money — I don’t need to see the will. He was a firm believer in primogeniture — very English of him.”

Henderson shrugged. In the evening light her sallow skin had turned the colour of a tea rose. He wondered if he should try and kiss her again. But then he further wondered why, given his past record, he should still wish to unleash more troubles upon himself. But his reluctance wasn’t due to prudence, he realized: it was that famous reserve asserting itself again. Later, he’d regret not trying, he knew. That was the great feature about reserve: it walked hand in hand with regret; left you sadder but no wiser. You never knew what might have been.

He stood up. “I’ll be making an early start…” He held out his hand.

Cora shook it with facetious solemnity. “Jolly good luck and all that,” she said.

He smiled foolishly, looking a fool again. Perhaps he should have kissed her, after all…he felt a vast impotence, and tears of self-pity stung his eyeballs. He edged crab-like to the door, gave a resigned but reassuring grin and left her room.

♦

That evening Henderson and Bryant sat alone in the sitting room. Cora remained upstairs, Beckman was out somewhere and Duane had not returned. The absence of Duane — and necessarily the absence of his car — was something of a nuisance but otherwise the conditions suited his plan perfectly.

A red-eyed, sniffling Alma-May provided them with a supper of pulse stew and cinnamon pear bake and they watched an hour or two of TV.

“And where is Duane?” Henderson asked casually, about half past ten.

“He’ll be back,” Bryant said. “If not tonight, tomorrow morning. He said he had a few things to finish up before we left. Said they were important too — he might take some time.”

For an instant Henderson wondered if Duane himself were having second thoughts about a lifetime with Bryant, but she seemed unperturbed by his not returning. Still, he had to press on with his own scheme. He couldn’t assume Bryant would be conveniently abandoned.

Fifteen minutes later he announced he was going to make some coffee and would Bryant like some? A glass of milk, she said, and a cookie, not taking her eyes from the screen where angry hoodlums shot at each other from speeding cars.

In the kitchen, he prepared the drinks. From his pocket he removed his sleeping pills and poured the powder from three capsules into the milk.

“Henderson?”

He looked round with a guilty start. It was Shanda. She glanced over her shoulder and toppled into the centre of the kitchen on her high heels. She leant against the table and gave her belly a heave, like a man adjusting a heavy pack.