Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

But I’m not like that at all, says Inge. Why can’t I cast it off?

You just can’t, says Set. It clings to you. It makes you careless of the world.

She bristles, but she knows he’s right. She remembers when she was very small, and one of her father’s friends gave a magic lantern show for the children. This was a few years after her mother died, and her father seemed unlikely to ever pull himself out of his own sadness. And so his friends — back then he still had some — would bring entertainments for his children, puppets and picture books and candies and wooden toys. One particular friend possessed a magic lantern. He was an enormous old banker with a bushy red beard and a huge, booming voice. Inge had been quite afraid of him, until he transformed the walls of the nursery into the walls of the wide world instead. It was the first time Inge had seen such pictures of the sea. The hand-painted glass slides dramatized scenes from “The Wreck of the Hesperus”; there were brightly colored slides of dancing sailors singing sea chanteys, and there was a dramatic battle between French and English ships, complete with cannon fire and burning masts, stark orange in relief against the brilliant blue water. Inge fell in love on the spot, and she knew that someday she would seek these vast oceans, and the places beyond them.

But she thinks now of the feeling of watching the unreal from the safety of one’s sleeping quarters. This, she feels sure, is how the world has continued to strike her, through her entire adult life so far. This is a life of watching, observation. Even her camera creates distance. All the more reason she sees to love Set — he may be a ghost, but she’s never been more alive, more invested in the world, than when she’s with him. She loves him like the sea, and like the sea she’d let him sweep her anywhere.

Set, for his part, wonders if he could be thawing: Is Inge warming him up, or just wearing him down? He is feeling, again, that inevitable pull toward Pru, toward Cedric, toward home. What would happen if he brought Inge with him? Would there be a kind of combustion? Would his soul come crashing back like the end of a spell? He knows he has, at least, to try.

Cedric finally broke his long silence and wrote to Set that fall, a shattering sort of letter. Great men have passions , he wrote. Smaller men are frightened of them. The ruthless seeking of the single-minded — it frightens these small, petty men. They stifle us, smother us, take away our funds. They tell us to branch out, divest. Take up new interests. They call us obsessed. But I’ll tell you something: the world needs obsession. No one can blaze a new path in the world without it. All the great explorers had it: Scott, Amundsen, Livingstone, Burton. I should have followed in their footsteps sooner .

But it’s not too late. This find — it’s nothing less than the City of the Dead itself. It will be the find of the century — King Tutankhamen will be nothing beside it. And you too should leave that terrible place, with its seductions and illusions and fleeting promises of fame, and follow me north to find Hades.

Set was unsure what to make of the letter. He was torn. He owed everything, his life, to Cedric, and yet he frightened Set, seemed too sure he owned his brother’s soul. But this was Cedric, Cedric —so — should he go? Should he undo the life he’d made in service to his only living brother? What could the past continue to cost?

Back when the War had begun, Inge’s German aunt wrote to her of rallies in the street, of crowds spontaneously breaking out into “Die Wacht am Rhein.” Inge was disturbed; she loved the works of German playwrights, novelists, and composers. Her aunt sent her Wedekind’s Spring Awakening , and she read it in a breathless few hours, enthralled. The Germans, far more than her father’s people, represented culture for her — they were urbane, artistic, modern . And they were her mother’s — they were something of her mother’s she could hold. Her aunt wrote her that some women in Berlin — including her! — worked in shops, as secretaries, as nurses — in all sorts of professions. The bust of an ancient Egyptian queen named Nefertiti was in display at the Berlin Museum, and Asta Nielsen’s films made waves; a woman with a temperament and hair, her aunt said, as wild as Inge’s. Even Albert was passionate over German motorcars. Even her father, British to the core, adored Wagner and Strauss.

But then Albert died, and her father tore up the letters as they arrived, pronounced her aunt, and all Germans, spies and murderers. And then the letters eventually stopped coming. And then her aunt disappeared, fled, perhaps, to Switzerland, perhaps to France. Inge missed her voice-on-paper dreadfully.

When her father died, she was not surprised. She and her sisters felt sure, after the War, that he could not last long. He was a man of another era, an Edwardian, looking for fixity, certainty, reliant on tradition. He did not understand the turbulence of this new world — he could not feel safe in such unsteady times. He was too old to find his footing again, especially in a country he didn’t belong to, in an Ireland busy uprooting itself, hurling itself forward by violent and unstoppable force.

The men came to their house in the middle of the night. Inge thought it odd they were smashing windows; they could have crawled in through the missing ones in the south wing, or simply walked right in through the door in the kitchen that wouldn’t lock. But once her father came to the front door, they were quieter, almost polite. Inge recognized some of them — village boys, one of whom delivered groceries to the house every Wednesday. He kept his hat pulled down, but Inge knew him just the same. And one of them was the cook’s boy, who refused to meet her eyes.

The brashest boy shoved Inge aside and demanded the keys from her father. Her father stared, blankly. She wanted to tell the men it was no use, he was already gone. But he finally moved. He went to his office and took up the big ring of keys. He held it out, heavy and jangling, like some foreign body he’d longed to be rid of. They were allowed to pack a small bag, some clothing and a toothbrush and some favorite books, and then they were turned out of doors to watch the fire creeping along, licking the floors, consuming the drapes and the rugs, cracking and tipping the beams until the whole structure collapsed on itself and exploded in a great yellow whoosh.

Inge had never seen anything burn before. She could feel the high heat of the fire from where she stood on the lawn. More villagers had come and were carting away the furniture that hadn’t burned up. A small man walked past them with her father’s favorite chair slung over his back and called them dirty papists, which she didn’t understand at all, because she saw him at the village church each Sunday. She hated the house and had often wished it burnt, or bombed, or otherwise destroyed. And now that it was she didn’t feel sorry, exactly, although she was sad, and that was complicated, too. She wished she could have saved the library. That was the hardest hurt of all.

Hannah and Clara were crying — loudly enough that Inge could hear them over the fire. She was almost embarrassed to see them so frightened. It seemed obscene to watch someone’s naked fear, and so instead she turned her eyes toward the fire, waited for the last flames to fall, and flicker, and go out.

And in the end, all her father could do was try to save his daughters, to throw them to the mercy of the waters and bow quietly out of the chaos, duty done. He left a note on the blackened floor, next to his last glass of whisky. A quote, from Yeats: “There is no longer a virtuous nation, and the best of us live by candle light.” It fluttered away during the shotgun blast, and a gust of wind through the burned parts of roof blew it up and out to sea.