Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

“Although, I do have to say, it was difficult to imagine him going that way,” Hobie said, in the abrupt silence that had fallen. “The flash of lightning. Falling over unawares. Had a sense, you do sometimes, that it wasn’t like they said, you know?”

“Sorry?” I said, glancing up, disoriented by the vicious new possibility I’d stumbled into.

“A goodbye at the gate,” said Hobie. He seemed to be talking partly to himself. “That’s what he would have wanted. The parting glimpse, the death haiku—he wouldn’t have liked to leave without stopping to speak to someone along the way. ‘A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death.’ ”

He had lost me. In the shadowy room, a single blade of sun pierced between the curtains and struck across the room, where it caught and blazed up in a tray of cut glass decanters, casting prisms that flickered and shifted this way and that and wavered high on the walls like paramecia under a microscope. Though there was a strong smell of wood smoke, the fireplace was burnt-out and black looking and the grate choked with ashes, as if the fires hadn’t been lit in a while.

“The girl,” I said timidly.

His glance came back to me.

“There was a girl too.”

For a moment, he did not seem to understand. Then he sat back in his chair and blinked rapidly as if water had been flicked in his face.

“What?” I said—startled. “Where is she? She’s okay?”

“No—” rubbing the bridge of his nose—“no.”

“But she’s alive?” I could hardly believe it.

He raised his eyebrows in a way that I understood to mean yes. “She was lucky.” But his voice, and his manner, seemed to say the opposite.

“Is she here?”

“Well—”

“Where is she? Can I see her?”

He sighed, with something that looked like exasperation. “She’s meant to be quiet and not have visitors,” he said, rummaging in his pockets. “She’s not herself—it’s hard to know how she’ll react.”

“But she’s going to be all right?”

“Well, let us hope so. But she’s not out of the woods yet. To employ the highly unclear phrase the doctors insist on using.” He’d taken cigarettes from the pocket of his bathrobe. With uncertain hands he lit one then with a flourish threw the pack on the painted Japanese table between us.

“What?” he said, waving the smoke from his face, when he caught me staring at the crumpled packet, French, like people smoked in old movies. “Don’t tell me you want one too.”

“No thank you,” I said, after an uneasy silence. I was pretty sure he was joking although I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure.

He, in return, was blinking at me sharply through the tobacco haze with a sort of worried look, as though he had just realized some crucial fact about me.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” he said unexpectedly.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re the boy, aren’t you? Whose mother died in there?”

I was too stunned to say anything for a moment.

“What,” I said, meaning how do you know, but I couldn’t quite get it out.

Uncomfortably, he rubbed an eye and sat back suddenly, with the fluster of a man who’s spilled a drink on the table. “Sorry. I don’t—I mean—that didn’t come out right. God. I’m—” vaguely he gestured as if to say I’m exhausted, not thinking straight.

Not very politely, I looked away—blindsided by a queasy, unwelcome swell of emotion. Since my mother’s death, I had cried hardly at all and certainly not in front of anyone—not even at her memorial service, where people who barely knew her (and one or two who had made her life Hell, such as Mathilde) were sobbing and blowing their noses all around me.

He saw I was upset; started to say something; reconsidered.

“Have you eaten?” he said unexpectedly.

I was too surprised to answer. Food was the last thing on my mind.

“Ah, I thought not,” he said, rising creakily to his big feet. “Let’s go rustle up something.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said, so rudely I was sorry. Since my mother’s death, all anyone seemed to think of was shovelling food down my throat.

“No, no, of course not.” With his free hand he fanned away a cloud of smoke. “But come along, please. Humor me. You’re not vegetarian, are you?”

“No!” I said, offended. “Why would you think that?”

He laughed—short, sharp. “Easy! Lots of her friends are veg, so is she.”

“Oh,” I said faintly, and he looked down at me with a sort of lively, unhurried amusement.

“Well, just so you know, I’m not a vegetarian either,” he said. “I’ll eat any old sort of ridiculous thing. So I suppose we’ll manage all right.”

He pushed open a door, and I followed him down a crowded hallway lined with tarnished mirrors and old pictures. Though he was walking ahead of me fast, I was anxious to linger and look: family groupings, white columns, verandahs and palm trees. A tennis court; a Persian carpet spread on a lawn. Male servants in white pyjamas, solemnly abreast. My eye landed on Mr. Blackwell—beaky and personable, dapperly dressed in white, back hunched even in youth. He was lounging by a seaside retaining wall in some palmy locale; beside him—atop the wall, hand on his shoulder and standing a head taller—smiled a kindergarten-aged Pippa. As tiny as she was, the resemblance sounded: her coloring, her eyes, her head cocked at the same angle and hair as red as his.

“That’s her, isn’t it?” I said—at the same instant I realized it couldn’t possibly be her. This photo, with its faded colors and outmoded clothes, had been taken long before I was born.

Hobie turned, came back to look. “No,” he said quietly, hands behind his back. “That’s Juliet. Pippa’s mother.”

“Where is she?”

“Juliet—? Dead. Cancer. Six years last May.” And then, seeming to realize he’d spoken too curtly: “Welty was Juliet’s big brother. Half brother, rather. Same father—different wives—thirty years apart. But he brought her up like his own child.”

I stepped in for a closer look. She was leaning against him, cheek inclined sweetly against the sleeve of his jacket.

Hobie cleared his throat. “She was born when their father was in his sixties,” he said quietly. “Far too old to interest himself in a small child, particularly since he’d had no weakness for children to start with.”

A door in the opposite side of the hallway stood ajar; he pushed it open and stood looking into darkness. On tiptoe, I craned behind, but almost immediately he backed away and clicked the door shut.

“Is that her?” Though it had been too dark to see very much, I had caught the unfriendly glow of animal eyes, an unnerving greenish sheen from across the room.

“Not now.” His voice was so low I could barely hear him.

“What’s that in there with her?” I whispered—lingering by the doorway, reluctant to move along. “A cat?”

“Dog. The nurse doesn’t approve, but she wants him in the bed with her and honestly, I can’t keep him out—he scratches at the door and whines—Here, this way.”

Moving slowly, creakily, with an old person’s forward-leaning quality, he pushed open a door into a crowded kitchen with a ceiling skylight and a curvaceous old stove: tomato red, with svelte lines like a 1950s spaceship. Books stacked on the floor—cookbooks, dictionaries, old novels, encyclopedias; shelves closely packed with antique china in half a dozen patterns. Near the window, by the fire escape, a faded wooden saint held up a palm in benediction; on the sideboard alongside a silver tea set, painted animals straggled two by two into a Noah’s Ark. But the sink was piled with dishes, and on the countertops and windowsills stood medicine bottles, dirty cups, alarming drifts of unopened mail, and plants from the florist’s dry and brown in their pots.