The Future Is Blue, Page 27

  Lingering in the Golden Gleam

  He sees her first in the corner of Butler Library at Columbia University. It is late afternoon and it is 1932 and it is so hot the books blaze like a great knobbled furnace. He just rounds the corner and there she stands among the nonfiction stacks, adrift between The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and The Golden Bough. She is wearing a long, unfashionably conservative blue dress and smart black boots. Her still-thick white hair huddles in a knot beneath a brown velvet hat. The skin beneath is pale and wrinkled as a crumpled page. He is also wearing blue, which he takes as a good omen. They match. They should match. Her dress is expensive, well-preserved, the sort of dress only brought out for occasions. Her hat is not. It is very shabby, with shabby silk violets clinging pessimistically to its shabby rolled brim. The soft, comforting sounds of idle chairs squeaking across polished floors and idle coughs squeaking out of polished lungs punctuate the long sentence of his silence, waiting behind her, waiting for her regard, waiting for her to notice him, as though he has not had his fill of being noticed in this life.

  But suddenly he has not had his fill of it. He longs for her to turn around. He wills it to happen now. All right, then now. No matter. NOW. He is desperate for her to see him, desperate as thirst. She will know him at a glance, of course, as he knows her. They will talk. They will talk wonderfully, magically, their words spangled and glittering, sodden with meaning, a conversation worthy of being recorded in perfect handwriting, printed lovingly in leather and vellum, preserved like that blue dress, down to the last quotation mark. Unless she is not as he wants her to be. She might be awful, awful and bitter and angry and stupid and a dreadful bore. Anyone worthy, anyone special or sensitive in the least, would know by now that he was standing here like a bloody fool, would have turned around minutes ago, would feel the shape of him behind her like a shadow. Shouldn’t she glow? Shouldn’t she burn with the light of who she is? But of course, he does not. He never has. He scolds himself for his own expectations. It does not happen the way he wants it to. Nothing ever does anymore.

  He clears his throat like a stage.

  Now, Peter!

  “Mrs. Hargreaves,” whispers the youngish man in the blue tie, “pardon the intrusion. My name is Peter. Peter Llewelyn Davies.”

  She turns her back on the books and meets his eyes with a cool, sharp expression. She’s rather shorter than he imagined. But her eyes are far, far bluer than his dreams, bluer than her dress, his tie, the June sky outside the tall library windows. She holds out her hand. He takes it.

  “You must call me Alice, Mr. Davies. Everyone does, whether I invite them to or not.”

  I Am not Myself, You See

  Olive dutifully kept up her soliloquy of despair during business hours, with short breaks for lunch and tea. But she didn’t mean more than an eighth of it on any given day. It was all a kind of avant-garde improvisational theatre staged for the benefit of Darling Mother.

  The unhygienically unchanging books were a real problem, but she knew very well that the village of Eglwysbach was pronounced egg-low-is-bach, which always made her imagine the German composer running around a chicken pen in a powdered wig and speckled wings, crowing for his lost babies. The house went by the name of Ffos Anoddun. As that was nearly too Welsh to bear, Olive assumed it was something to do with fairies or a hillock or a puddle or all three together, and fondly referred to it as Fuss Antonym, which sounded reasonably similar, and comforted her, for to her mind, the opposite of a big fuss was a small contentment. Olive loathed all her school friends and most other people, and couldn’t have given a toss where they went on holiday, even if they’d ever think to confide that sort of thing in her direction. She felt rather affectionate toward the quiet, as it meant hardly anyone came round insisting on being other people at them. Olive liked knitting, and shire horses, and electricity was rather a lot of bother, when you thought about it. It was 1948. People had gotten along well enough without lightbulbs for nearly the whole history of everything.

  And she especially loved the three capitals on Fuss Antonym’s parlour wall. She would sit beneath them of an afternoon in the big musty mustard-coloured wingback chair with silk horseradish-green cord whipping and whirling all over it and imagine the poor odd stone wolf and wild hare and raven heads in their curling pale ferns were holding the whole world up, and herself the only person ever to have guessed the truth.

  It was safe, you see, to complain around Olive’s sole remaining parent. It was the expected thing. Darling Mother was a complainer in good standing herself. Misery was, she always said, the natural resting state of the young. It was only the old who could not bear unhappiness. Only the old who buckled beneath the hundred million pound weight of it all. As long as Olive kept up her whitewater torrent of disinterest and disaffection and discontent, Darling Mother judged her a Normal Girl, and therefore safe to abandon, never once asking what she was really thinking, or feeling, or wanting, or doing with her time, which suited Olive like a good coat. Little George never complained a bit, even when a sheep ate all his paintbrushes, and Darling Mother practically murdered him with concern and attention.

  But she did guess at the shape of her child’s actual innards, occasionally. When some change in the weather troubled the meagre seams of maternal ore that ran deep within the mine of Darling Mother’s heart, she did grope after some connection. She changed the books once. She left a Welsh dictionary on Olive’s bedside table. And once, when she returned from one of her hungry scourings of antique dealers and auctions for more gloomy Victorian rubbish to weigh down the house, she paid a couple of the local boys to drag something silver and heavy and covered with a stained canvas into the parlour. She waved her thin, elegant hand and they left it leaning against the sooty mantel.

  “I snatched it up just for you, Daughter Mine. I know you love all this sort of crusty ancient knick-knackery deep down, don’t let’s pretend otherwise. It’s a looking glass. I found it down in Llandudno at an estate sale. Give the old dear a good seeing-to, won’t you?”

  Child of Pure unclouded Brow

  “Alice, then,” he says.

  The New York sun lights up his untidy brown hair, turns it into a golden cap, the opposite of Perseus, the opposite of himself.

  The old woman touches her hat self-consciously. “Alice then; Alice now. Alice always, I’m afraid.”

  “And I’m Peter.”

  He is repeating himself, and feels foolish. But repetition is a very respectable literary device. As old as dirt and debt and Homer. She will forgive him. Probably.

  “Aren’t you just?” laughs Alice. “Well, let’s have a look at you. One head, two shoulders, a couple of knees, rumpled suit, and half a day’s beard. Honestly, Peter, how could you come calling on me without a fetching green cap and pointed shoes? I think I deserve at least that, don’t you?”

  Peter looks stricken. His throat goes dry and in all his days he has never wanted whiskey so badly as in this awful moment, and in all his days he has wanted whiskey very badly and often indeed. She did know him, then.

  “Oh, I am sorry. I am sorry, Peter, that was unkind. Oh, I am a dreadful beast! It’s what comes of not mixing in company apart from cats and cups, you know. Don’t look quite so much like you’ve just been shot, dear, it doesn’t become. People have done it to me so many times, you see. I couldn’t pass up a chance to do it to somebody else, just the once! And who else in all this sorry world could I do it to but you? Allow an old woman her indulgences.”

  “It’s quite all right. I’m used to it.”

  Alice Pleasance Liddell-Hargreaves squares her shoulders, bracing as if for a solid punch to the chest. “You may pay me back, if you like.”

  “Please, Mrs. Har—Alice. I’ve quite forgotten.”

  “No, no, it was rotten of me. I won’t accept your forgiveness, not one bit, until you’ve done me a fair turn.”

  “If you insist on making it up to me, I should much prefer you allow me to take you to dinne
r tonight,” Peter demurs. He dries his palms on his tweed. “I know a place nearby that’s serving wine again already.”

  The sunlight streaming through the library windows thins and goes silvery with clouds, darkening Alice’s eyes. “And what do you imagine that will accomplish? That Peter and Alice, the Peter and the Alice, should share plates of oysters and glasses of champagne, quote each other’s famous namesake novels with tremendous wit and pathos, philosophize about innocence, and achieve a kind of graceful catharsis whilst we malign the rather tawdry men who wrote us down for posterity?”

  “Just that,” Peter said with a smile that looked like a memory of itself. He held out his arm. “To talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax—”

  Alice clutches her heart in mock agony and staggers. “Oh, there’s a clever lad! A palpable hit, Davies. I’ll be wincing for days. Now we’re quite even.”

  Peter sighs. This would be all, then. A library, a few sharp words, then nothing, a meal alone with his shadows.

  “I think I shall allow you to drag this dreadful beast to a respectable supper, so long as it’s not too far, and you pay for us both. I can’t bear much of a stroll, nor much expense, these days.”

  She puts her thin, bony hand on Peter’s elbow. When she leans against him, she seems to weigh no more than a pixie.

  Every Single thing’s crooked

  Olive sat in the parlour of the house she called Fuss Antonym with her knees tucked up under her chin, staring at the looking glass. It was raining, because it was Wales and it was winter, and the raindrops against the old lead windows sounded like millions of tiny crystal drums beaten by millions of tiny crystal soldiers. The marble wolf and raven and hare on the misplaced capitals stared down at her in turn. Olive had spent the better part of the morning on her hands and knees with a tube of silver polish and a bottle of vinegar, coaxing the muck of ages out of the great heavy mirror. It was quite a lovely design, once you got down past the geologic layers of black tarnish and dust. The glass was still good, except for a little spiderweb of cracks in the lower right corner that no one but actual spiders would ever notice. The silver frame bloomed with curling oak leaves and pert little acorns and shy half-open violets, a perfect specimen of the typical Victorian habit of taking anything wild and pretty and nailing it down, casting it in metal, freezing it forever. Olive thought the violets probably had little polleny agates or pearls in their centres at some point. The prongs were still there, bent out of shape, empty. She touched them with her fingers. Those prongs were quite the loneliest and saddest thing she’d ever seen, somehow. They looked like her mother. They looked like her.

  She and Little George had wrestled it up onto the mantel and snagged the thing on a couple of rusty nails. They hadn’t any kind of level or ruler, so the poor looking glass hung up there at an unhappy angle that Olive informed Darling Mother was “unbearable,” while privately thinking of it as “rakish.” Little George had wandered off to beg the sheep for his paintbrushes back, and Olive coiled herself into the mustard-coloured wingback chair for a good long stare. She could see just the barest top of her own head from here, her dark bobbed and fringed hair, her white scalp like a pale road through her own head. She could see the back of the little brass clock on the mantel, the woebegone door to the kitchen cracked open a wedge, the bland pastoral paintings hanging against vaguely mauve wallpaper, all turned backward, and therefore slightly more interesting. The shepherdess on the moor was holding her black lamb in her left arm now. The fox was running the opposite way from the hounds and the horses. She could see the rain beating out a marching rhythm on the windows, and the green hills beyond disappearing away into a fog like forgetting. And she could see the broken capitals glued to the wall in the looking glass just as they were glued to the wall in the parlour, their faces turned the wrong way round, too, like the shepherdess and the fox, which was certainly why their eyes looked so odd and canny, the way your own eyes look when you see a photograph of yourself. Very odd and very canny. Really, awfully so, actually.

  Olive stood up on the wingback chair. The upholstery springs groaned and complained. Now she could see her whole self in the looking glass: Olive, not much of anyone, in a shift dress the same colour as the wallpaper, with pearl earrings on. The earrings belonged to the Other One. She’d given them for Christmas, to curry favour. Olive wore them to vex and to vex alone.

  She leaned forward toward the looking glass. She blinked several times. She opened her mouth to call for Darling Mother, which was pure idiocy, so she shut it again with a quickness. She glanced over at the capitals in the parlour, then back to the capitals in the looking glass. Back and forth. Back and forth.

  “There you have it, Olive,” she told herself aloud. “You’ve gone mad. I expect it happens to everyone in Wales sooner or later, but you’ve certainly broken the local speed record. Well done, you.”

  Before now, when she’d considered the idea of insanity, chiefly when Darling Mother came home from meeting with Father Dear and the barrister and the Other One and started drinking gin out of a soup spoon, all night long, one spoonful after another, like sugar, she had imagined that going mad would feel different. Wilder, more savage, more lycanthropic, more like a carousel spinning too fast somewhere inside a person’s brain. But Olive felt perfectly Olive. She didn’t even think of the gin bottle in the cabinet. She only thought of the wolf. One thing was certain—she had nothing to do with it. It was the wolf’s fault entirely.

  The marble wolf in the parlour had a noble expression on his face. His muzzle was smooth and gentle and sorrowful. It looked almost soft enough to pet.

  The wolf in the looking glass had raised his stone muzzle into a fearsome snarl.

  Phantomwise

  Peter asks the man at the Stork Club for scotch on ice. Evening light turns the tablecloths pink and violet. The ice is his last bulwark against total, helpless nihilism. He rolls the oily ambrosia of the bog over the crystals.

  Alice orders a glass of beer. It arrives quickly, dark and thick and workmanlike. She smacks her lips and Peter nearly calls the whole thing off then and there. He had imagined her drinking…what? Delicate things. Tea. Champagne. Rain filtered through a garret roof. She is a lady of a certain era, and ladies of that certain era do not drink porter. After the beer come oysters from some presumably dreadful, mollusc-infested swamp called Maine, which would not pair at all with her black beer. Peter found himself in an apoplexy of flummoxed culinary propriety.

  Alice runs her fingertip around the rim of her glass and puts it between her lips, slicked with sepia foam.

  “One ‘drink me’ out of you and I’ll have your head,” she scolds him, but her eyes shine. “My husband loved his beer. The darker the better. None of this prancing blonde European stuff, he’ d say. Porter, stout, dubbel! I pretended that I had never met so curious a creature as a man who adores beer. That’s how a girl makes her way in this world, Mr. Davies. Pretending awe at the simplest habits of men. But beer has been the bitter tympani keeping time for the long parade of sad, strange, lonely men I’ve loved. My father and Charles called it ‘our most ancient indulgence’ and made a lot of noise about the pyramids while they poured their pints. Even our Leopold had barrels brought in from Belgium no matter where we were staying— imagine the expense! Nothing to a man of his station, of course. But to us? Impossible magic. Though he liked everything blonde, the rake.”

  “Prince Leopold?” It sounds absurd even as he says it, but he cannot think of any other fabulously wealthy Leopold she might mean.

  “The very one. Didn’t you know Alice had adventures in places not called Wonderland? Paris, Rome, Berlin, Vienna. All the lions and unicorns you could ever want. He never could decide between my sister and I, and in the end we were nothing but…well. Talking flowers, I suppose. He named his daughter Alice. That’s something, at least.” She strokes the silvery flesh of the oyster with a tiny pronged fork. “He died.”

  “The prince?”

&
nbsp; “My husband. In the war. My sons, as well. Everyone, as well. My sister is long gone, a ghost in Leopold’s locket. I’ve got one boy left and he doesn’t visit anymore. It’s too awful for him to face ruin in a blue dress. Oh, Peter, I live crumblingly in a crumbling body in a crumbling house and I burn my heating bills in the furnace for lack of coal and every so often I crawl out to tell a few people how wonderful it was to be a child in Oxford with a friend like Charles to teach me about all the sundry beauties of life so that I can buy another year’s worth of tinned beef. And how are you coming along in the world, Peter Pan? How are you crumbling?”

  Peter Llewelyn Davies flushes and eats in silence. The oysters taste like spent tears. His toast points stare back at him as if to say: what else did you expect?

  “I’m in publishing,” he offers finally.

  Alice laughs sharply. “How hungry a thing is a book! Devoured you whole straight from the womb, and still gnawing away at your poor bones. Oh, but it was different for you, wasn’t it? It was only ever that summer, really, with Charles and I and Edith and Lorina, punting on the river. But your James raised you, didn’t he? Adopted the whole lot of Davies orphans. I can’t tell if that would be better or worse. Tell me. Should I envy you?”

  The soup course arrives. He frowns into a wide circle of pink bisque. His brain is a surfeit of fathers—his own, a-bed, rotting cancerous jaw like a crocodile, all teeth and scaled death, his older brothers, always running, fighting, so far ahead, so untouched, and Barrie, always Barrie, Barrie always kind and generous and ever-present, ever watching, his eyes like starving cameras freezing Peter in place for a flash and a snap that never came.

  “He drank me,” Peter whispers finally. “And grew larger.”