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He
dressed in black for breakfast and when the boy came up the drive on his
bicycle with the telegram, Grandfather went to meet him. So I knew my number
was up and I stopped fighting. Lady Elaine was standing there in the howling
gale. She reached out her hand to me and I took it with the plane spinning
and tumbling and the wind screaming and flames licking everywhere and the
clouds and the earth flashing in turn across the hatch and, suddenly,
everything was still and calm. Everything was quiet and she pulled me clear.
“I don’t know how it happened. All I know is that I was
inside that wreck and then I was outside, falling through the sky, lines of
planes passing away into the distance, ink blots bursting all around them,
high above me, far away. Safe. I opened my chute. I didn’t die. Life went on.
“If you haven’t felt that way -- if you haven’t given up on
your own life -- you won’t understand the amazement of that, the sheer surprise
of being alive, the astonishment of it, the possibilities it opens up. I
lived to come back here. I had my own children and a wife, of course, Gladys.
Strange the way names go out of fashion. Hilda, Mabel, Gertrude. They were
little girls. Now only dead people are called Hilda.
“And Lady Elaine, was generous about it. Understood
perfectly. She knew how things stood but she and I still met from time to
time in the old way. It was always at very happy times. When I won the
bull-stock blue riband at the county show or when I pulled off some
particularly good deal in the city. Then, when I was feeling strongest and
most bullish myself, she would appear and offer herself. Or at the sad times,
like when Gladys died, she would heal me. It was never on dull days. Always
on days when the sun was streaming through those windows and the dust was
dancing, or when the fire was raging in the hearth and the snow had wrapped
the park and the deer were walking in a line under the cedars; never on dull
days, always at times of heightened emotion.
“I lay in her arms and she talked to me about all the
squires she’d had -- my ancestors, old pirates who sailed with Drake, riding
to hounds men and soldiers, and dry as dust old preachers. She had them all.
I wasn’t surprised. They couldn’t have resisted her. It’s the best I’ve ever
had and I’ve had it from professionals. It’s like nothing else. It’s like
dying in warm honey, like bathing in cold green flames. To be so perfectly
known and understood and wanted.’’
Ginger’s glass
was empty and he laid it down on the table at his elbow with a sad sigh. “But
that hasn’t happened for a while. Not for some time now. Haven’t been able to
rattle the windows or make the rafters groan for a long while. Not at my age.
“And she must be disappointed in my boy. David. Christ! It makes
me sick to think of him filling this place with his nancy boy hairdressers
and mincing decorators once I’m gone. But his sister’s boy…he’s the one.
He’ll get the place next time. A house like this thinks in generations, like
Elaine. Elaine still loves me. Even though I can’t. Not that way. She
waits. She talks to me at night, when I am wakeful. I have often asked her
why she saved me. Why me and not poor old Dad? She says it was because she
fell in love with me down at the Hunter’s Pool. She couldn’t bear to see me smashed to pieces and she loved me so much that
she decided to wait a little. Ten years, twenty, sixty. What’s that to her?
She says I am still the boy she saw naked at the pool. She’s promised me I
can be that boy again. She’s promised me I will be soon and then we’ll make
the windows rattle. By God, we’ll make the windows rattle. Soon.’’
When we said
goodnight, Ginger’s handshake was firm and strong. That’s how I want to
remember him. Not as I saw him today, pale and thin and naked when they
pulled him out of the Hunter’s Pool.
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