Eric McCormack - Cloud

“Just like a married couple, eh?” Frank said.

Laughing together, the way a father and son should, we went inside the store. There he showed me an ancient Egyptian cube he’d just bought. It was made of marble, about six inches tall, with hieroglyphs sculpted out on all four sides. Egyptologists had apparently been unable to decipher their meaning.

I speculated that, in time, someone would surely figure it out.

“I hope not,” said Frank. “There’s something very appealing about the idea of a mystery that never explains itself — just like our own minds.” He looked at me as though that might apply to us, and the fact that we didn’t really understand each other might not be such a bad thing.

HE HAD A GIRLFRIEND at that time who was a reporter for The Camberloo Record . By pulling some strings she arranged for an article on the store to appear in the newspaper’s weekend edition, together with a photo of Frank sitting at his big Georgian desk. The headline read: The Emperor in His Emporium .

For a few weeks, as a result of that publicity, quite a number of townspeople dropped by just to see what all the fuss was about. Naturally, the bulk of them found the pieces on display either too expensive or too odd for their tastes, or both.

It was hard to imagine, for instance, that many customers could envisage on their living-room tables one of Frank’s very latest acquisitions — a yellowing glass laboratory bottle found in the south of Tierra del Fuego. It contained the pickled genitals of a Russian explorer who’d participated in one of those doomed expeditions to Antarctica at the end of the nineteenth century. The card beside the bottle explained that the contents were all that was left of his body. Apparently the survivors of the expedition had cannibalized the rest of him.

At any rate, after the early interest roused by the newspaper article, the flow of visitors to the store began to dwindle. Frank clearly didn’t mind. As I’d already come to suspect, for the most part the Emporium was really his private collection, masquerading as a place of business.

Almost a year of relative tranquility followed the opening of the Emporium. I was in my office on a Friday afternoon in the fall discussing some business matter with Jonson, who was about to leave for home. He was putting on his raincoat and looking out the window over Camberloo Square at the big trees, already changing colour.

I couldn’t help remarking on how beautiful they were.

“That depends on your perspective,” said Jonson. “From a scientific standpoint, this changing of colour is a kind of strangulation. The mottling of the leaves is the effect of the deprivation of sunlight. To say it’s beautiful is like saying a man who’s being suffocated turns a beautiful colour.”

I didn’t make any comment. I was just thankful I was no scientist. Jonson had barely shut the door behind him when the phone rang.

It was Frank, and his voice was anxious.

“I dropped by the house for a cup of coffee with Mother,” he said. “She’s here, but something’s wrong. Please, come quickly.”

A VERY WORRIED-LOOKING Frank opened the front door for me when I arrived.

“She’s in the bathroom and she won’t answer,” he said. “I can’t get the door open and I didn’t know what to do.”

We were both aware that Alicia’s midday bath was one of her indispensable rituals. But it was after three o’clock now. She should have finished long ago.

We went upstairs to the main bathroom. The cat, Miss Sophie, was prowling outside the door. I knocked and called Alicia’s name. Just as Frank had, I tried the handle but it was locked on the inside. So I put my shoulder to the door, it burst open, and I went in.

Miss Sophie ran past me, jumped onto the ledge around the tub, and saw what I saw.

ALICIA WAS LYING on her back in the almost-full bathtub. The marble ledge held a half-dozen candles, two of them guttering, near burnt out, giving off an incense fragrance. The water was very clear, and she looked quite beautiful and peaceful, her breasts and her arms slightly afloat. Her eyes were open, looking up at me, her lips slightly apart, showing her teeth. You might have thought she was alive and well but for the fact that those eyes were under an inch or two of water. I bent over and touched her shoulder. It was cold and the water was cold.

Frank was still outside in the hallway.

“What’s wrong?” he called to me.

I told him his mother had drowned.

“Oh, no,” he said.

I thought it just as well that he shouldn’t see her dead and naked. So I told him to go downstairs and call the police. Meantime, I sat on the toilet seat. Miss Sophie, disappointed at Alicia’s lack of responsiveness, jumped on my knee to be petted.

There was something comforting about the whole scene: the candles still burning, the cat purring, Alicia half floating in her tub, quite relaxed looking, as if meditating. You might even have thought she had a little trace of a smile on her face, except that the water was cold, which I knew she wouldn’t have liked one bit.

THE POLICE QUICKLY ruled out foul play: the bathroom door and the window could only be locked from the inside. When the coroner arrived not long after and let the water out of the tub to examine her, he found a bad bruise on the back of her head. That enabled him to rule out suicide. In his view, she’d most likely slipped getting into the tub and been knocked unconscious when her head hit the marble or the faucet. Nor were her lungs full of water, so the combination of the blow to the head and the rapid blocking of the nasal passage probably caused her death.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said to Frank and me when he eventually came downstairs. He was an elderly man with a sad, lined face and had the air of someone who’d seen many awful things but retained his humanity. “It’s always distressing for the loved ones when the death’s so unexpected,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I can tell you the way she went was just about as pleasant as any of us could ever hope for.”

I thanked him. Then he and his assistants left with the body.

Frank sat on the living-room couch sobbing quietly. He was in the kind of shock I’d once experienced myself. This, his first real experience of death, was the death of the person who’d adored him.

FOR MYSELF, I was deeply affected by Alicia’s death, indeed much more than I’d ever have guessed. All these years, I’d convinced myself that whatever my relationship with her had been, it wasn’t a union of soul mates, the kind that ends with broken hearts— the kind I’d had with Miriam.

But now I was beginning to grasp that, while Miriam had become a ghost, receding more and more into the corners of my memory, Alicia had been my unfailing best friend and ally. She’d loved me totally in her own way. Without realizing it, little by little, I’d come to love her too.

I thought of what the coroner had said — that it wasn’t a bad way for her to go. The image of her sliding unconscious into the warm water, her last breaths scented with spices from her candles, was somehow consoling. If I’d died like that, she’d probably have felt much the same way.

THREE DAYS LATER, we cremated Alicia. An unexpected guest, Gordon’s doctor — twenty years older now, but still wearing a polka-dot bow tie — showed up for the occasion. I was taken aback to learn from him that both Alicia and Gordon had requested their carotids be slashed before being wheeled into the incinerator.

That reminded me of how, one night not long after Gordon’s death, I’d picked up the illustrated History of Scotland he often read. The corner of a page was turned down at a section on premature burial, which was relatively common right up to the nineteenth century. To avoid this unpleasant possibility, some of the dying would ask that after being pronounced dead, their carotid arteries be cut. They didn’t want to wake up and find themselves underground in a coffin — or even worse, in the hell of a crematorium furnace.