Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

They were all beautiful. Gabriel and Becky looked like Mamie, small with pretty faces, turned-up noses, and huge eyes. The others looked like their father, who was in the South of France with friends. (A separation that seemed to Gina, whose parents did everything together, both strange and significant: her mother had hinted, out of confidences accorded while she was crawling around a hemline with her mouth full of pins, that all was not well in Mamie's marriage. Still, Dickie's absence was a great relief. Gina had seen him only once or twice, when he came to pick up Mamie after a fitting, but it had been enough to know that he was terrifying, tall and tanned and savagely impatient.) Tom and Josh-Josh was the nearest boy to Gina in age-were tall, with slim long bodies, fine skin taut over light strong bones, sensitive-knuckled hands and feet. She had got used to their near-nakedness on the beach in swimming trunks, or bare-chested in cutoff jeans. It was 1974: they wore their sun-bleached hair long, and they walked barefoot everywhere.

The spare bedroom Gina was staying in was on the ground floor of the house, and it opened onto the hall, whose dark parquet was always dusted with a layer of fine sand blown in from the beach. She spent a lot of time in her room-“working,” she told them-and sometimes, when she peeped out of her door to see if the coast was clear to visit the bathroom, she saw the prints of the boys’ bare feet in the sand, crossing the hall to the kitchen or the stairs. For some reason, this moved her, and her heart clenched in an excitement more breathlessly sexual than if she’d seen the boys themselves.

The visit to Wing Lodge had been part of the pretext for Gina's coming to visit Mamie in the first place. It was the house where John Morrison, her favorite novelist, had lived, and she had desperately wanted to make a pil- grimage there; but she was beginning to wish that she could have come on her own. She was burdened by her sense of Mamies kindness: Mamie had clearly never read any of Morrison's books, and she could have no good reason, surely, to want to see his house. Gina worried over the things that Mamie would probably rather have done, and in more congenial company.

But when they arrived in the little town and found the house on one of its oldest streets, behind the church, a more complex unease began to dawn on Gina. Wing Lodge stood back behind a walled front garden, which even in the rain was very lovely: pale roses bowed and dripping with water, a crumbling sundial, a path of old paving stones set into the grass, leading to a bench under a gnarled apple tree.

Isn’t it just charming? Mamie exclaimed, pausing on the porch to shake off the umbrella she had gallantly insisted on sharing with Gina, so that they were now both rather wet. This is such a treat. Thank you so much for bringing me here. I can’t imagine why we’ve never been before.

Gina had thought that at last, at Wing Lodge, she would be on home ground. She knew so much about John Morrison, a friend of Conrad and Ford, given a complimentary mention by Henry James in “The New Novel.” She had written the long essay for her English A level on his use of complex time schemes. She loved the spare texture of his difficult, sad books, and felt that she was exceptionally equipped to understand them. Faced with his most obscure passages (he wasn’t elaborate like James but compressed and allusive), she trusted herself to intuit his meaning, even if she couldn’t quite disentangle it.

But as she followed Mamie through the front door into the low-ceilinged hall she realized that she had miscalculated. She was not entering one of Morrison's books, where she could feel confident; she was entering his house, where she might not. Two middle-aged women sat at a table on which leaflets and a cash box were arranged; wood paneling polished to a glow as deep and savory as horse chestnuts reflected the yellow light from a couple of table lamps; tall vases of flowers stood against the wall on the uneven flagstone floor. Gina stepped flinchingly around a Persian rug that opened like a well of color at her feet.

This is Gina, Mamie told the women as she got out her purse to pay. She's the daughter of a very gifted and creative friend of mine. We’re here today because she loves John Morrison's books so much and has written her A-level essay about him. She's very, very bright.

The women's smiles were coldly unenthusiastic. They advised the visitors to start in the room on the right and make their way around to the study, which was arranged as it had been in the writers lifetime. If they went upstairs at the end of the tour, they would find an exhibition of editions of the works. Which might interest you, one of them suggested skeptically.

The house was furnished-sparely, exquisitely-with a mixture of antiques and curiosities and modern things: a venerably worn Indian tapestry thrown across an old chaise longue, an elm Art Deco rocking chair, drawings by Wyndham Lewis and Gaudier-Brzeska. It was dark everywhere, and the lamps were on in the middle of the day: the low, deeply recessed casement windows were running with rain and plastered with wet leaves. Mamie moved through it all with a kind of hushed rapture, absorbing the aura of the great man, despite the fact that she had no idea what he was great for.

So sweet! she whispered emphatically. What a darling place. What treasures.

Gina thought perplexedly of the letters Morrison had written from Wing Lodge: full of damp walls and leaking roofs and smoking chimneys and penetrating cold, as well as self-deprecating confessions of untidiness and neglect. She hadn’t imagined that his house would be like this. How could he have afforded all these possessions? The rooms were like Mamie’s: glossy with value and distinction, a kind of patina of initiated good taste.

Do they live here? she asked. Those ladies?

Oh, I should think so, wouldn’t you? It feels very much like a home, not a museum. The widow stayed on here, apparently, until a few years ago. So I suppose they’ve just kept a few of the rooms as she left them. It's only open a couple of afternoons a week.

There was a photograph of Anne, the American wife and widow, on the plain writing table in the study: young, with a Katherine Mansfield fringe and bobbed hair and a necklace of beads the size of cherries. Morrison had been a world wanderer, with a Scottish father and a Norwegian mother. (You could feel the influence of a certain Scandinavian neurasthenia in his novels.) He had settled down at last, here in the South of England, written his best books here, and died here, in his fifties, in 1942.

Can’t you just imagine being able to write at this desk? Mamie said encouragingly.

Gina looked at her dumbly across the charming room, with its waxed floor slanting quaintly to the window, unable to say how unlikely it seemed to her at this moment that anyone could ever have written anything worth reading in a house like this. She thought of art as a sort of concealed ferocity, like the fox hidden under the Spartan boy's shirt. It seemed to her that any authentic utterance would be stifled by the loveliness, the serene self-completeness of this room. What could one do here but self-congratulate: write cookery books, perhaps, or nostalgic reminiscences?

At the same time, she was filled with doubt, in case she was deluded, in case it turned out that art was a closed club after all, one that she would never be able to enter, she who had never owned one thing as beautiful as the least object here.

Sometimes Gina emerged victorious from her struggle with Mamies pressing hospitalities, and succeeded in staying at home while everyone else went to the beach. (The sea was only a few minutes’ walk across the dunes from the front door, but the beach they liked best for swimming and surfing was a short drive away.) She heard and winced at the little crack of impatience in Mamie's voice-“I suppose it's awfully impressive, to want to have your head buried in a book all day”-but that was worth incurring in exchange for the delicious freedom of having the house to herself for hours on end.