According to Heather, its decline dated back to the darkest years of World War II, while the Germans were steadily bombing England and Churchill vowed that the British would never surrender. The house belonged to a charmingly proper couple in their late middle years, distant royalty, almost assuredly, but still very far from the throne. One dark night during the Blitz, a stray bomb had taken out the end of the house, but it just so happened that one of the German planes crashed in the nearby woods. They heard it go down, and for hours they waited, until the break of dawn, when the gentleman donned his tweed hunting jacket and brought the shotgun he used for pheasants, and went looking for survivors. He found the pilot alive but injured, and marched him back to the damaged house. But instead of calling the Royal Air Force, the gentleman and his wife, quietly enraged over what was happening to their country, kept the pilot tied captive in their cellar, where they tortured him to death over the next week. Then buried him in the gardens. Shortly thereafter, they went mad with guilt and shame, and, hollow-eyed and searching for absolution, roamed the hallways of the estate until they died. The end.
Overwhelming silence; finally:
‘My god,’ said Vanessa. ‘I had no idea you could be so morbid.’
‘Still want to marry me?’
‘Yeah, more than ever.’ Fingers stroking Heather’s inner arm. ‘Only now I want to marry you so I can cure you.’
‘Does a plan like that ever work?’ I asked. ‘I mean, wouldn’t there be a lot fewer divorces if women would just forget about trying to change who it is they’re marrying and accept that it can’t be done?’
‘Well, we sure changed you, didn’t we?’ said Vanessa.
‘Did we ever.’ Heather, backing her up all the way. ‘You used to be this hypertensive workaholic I was perennially on the verge of leaving. And look at you now… unemployed and a permanent member of the leisure class.’
‘We made you what you are today Just admit it and adore us.’
‘Don’t you have a story to tell us or something?’ I asked Vanessa. ‘Because I’d sure like to hear it now.’
‘Stubborn bastard,’ she said to me, but stretched across to kiss me anyway.
And as Vanessa envisioned the history of this place, it wasn’t surprising that she would focus on the carved heads. Heather, I couldn’t help but notice, had ignored them entirely, but it was only natural that her idea of forces greater than herself should involve things plummeting from above.
In Vanessa’s firmament, the house belonged to a renowned sculptor whom the world has long since forgotten. This was during the ‘20s, in that more optimistic period after the Great War, the War to End All Wars, before the shadow of the next and even greater war began to fall across Europe. Suddenly the sculptor withdrew from his adoring public and the world at large, for reasons he would share with no one, not even his wife, because, well, men are like that. All she knew was that it seemed to follow some mysterious encounter he’d had while walking in the woods, about which he steadfastly refused to say a word. Over the years to come, he spent his days chiselling ancient faces into the garden wall, recreating carvings whose origins were shrouded in the mists of time. And even though he’d turned his back on greater fame and greater fortune, he was much happier now, and then one day he simply walked into the woods and was never seen again, although his wife said that during their final breakfast together he seemed to be holding onto a secret that brought him both joy and sorrow. And so for years and years afterwards, she simply couldn’t abide noise, in case she might hear him calling for her to reunite with him at last, at the edge of the trees, and together they would walk into the forest and slip into that much older England, where only a privileged few were now allowed to tread, and where they would join with the elder spirits of the land.
Overwhelming silence; finally:
‘But eventually she remarried, right?’ said Heather. ‘And then some Nazi asshole dropped a bomb on the house?’
‘No!’ cried Vanessa. ‘Just see if I tell you any more bedtime stories.’
Me, I was just glad I hadn’t been the one to say that.
‘Beautiful story, Vanessa,’ I said instead, and meant it, wondering if she really could hear voices; if ravens whispered in her ear after all; if, even though she’d made up the details, every word might nonetheless be true.
‘And you’re absolutely, positively sure you want to marry me?’ Heather asked her.
‘You know, I’m really not liking the way you keep steering the conversation around to that,’ Vanessa said. ‘Now what’s wrong?’
Heather, rolling onto her back: ‘Hasn’t the irony of the situation hit you yet? I mean, with the example I had set for me, way back when, I’ve always thought of matrimony as a kind of prison sentence.’ Hands laced behind her head now as she stared at the ceiling. ‘And what am I doing? I’m doubling the usual number of jailers.’
Until Vanessa, my idea of other worlds, other realms, had always tended to begin and end with cyberspace — nebulous enough to imbue with a reverential awe, yet ultimately the creation of a binary number system, and therefore not impossible to grasp.
Such arrogance. Such blinkered vision, no better than a horse allowed to see only what stands directly before its eyes.
And my idea of a power greater than myself tended to acknowledge death and only death. Veterans of wars talk of the bullet with their name on it, but since I had no wars to fight, I thought instead of that graveworm underfoot, the worm with my name on it, keeping pace with me through the soil, wherever I might go, patiently waiting for the twilight of my life so that it could begin its work at last.
In moments of insight, of honesty, I would wonder if Heather and I hadn’t sucked Vanessa into our lives because she made it easier, somehow, to believe in things we otherwise never would have. Like purpose. Like reassurance that we had not squandered our lives chasing articulated goals only to end up well-fed slaves. Like the existence of doorways to someplace, anyplace, better than those places that had shaped us as children and younger adults… a new and welcoming place that had withstood the test of time because time could not permeate it.
And while I was starting to believe in these, that didn’t mean I understood the keys that might unlock their doors. Was it faith? Longing? Or need? Was it the energies released before a blazing fire by the Saturnalian couplings of three people whose mouths and loins were so eager to violate the taboos of the only god others had tried to ram down their throats?
Or were the keys never ours to turn at all, those doors opening only for the ones who were most desired by those on the other side?
Fickle and capricious, maybe. Yet since when has life been anything but?
When Vanessa and I awoke, we woke up alone, Heather’s spot between us on the sleeping bags empty. At first we thought nothing of it. I’d last roused to tend the fire during the wee hours, while it was yet pitch black outside, and she’d still been there, curled onto her side. Vanessa recalled being awakened briefly sometime after dawn, Heather stepping over her and whispering that she had to go outside to pee.
Smouldering embers now, and chilly mists and morning dew.
We checked the house, calling down its hallways and into its forsaken rooms. Checked the garden, both sides of the wall. Perhaps she had strayed beyond, towards fields or treeline; gone for a walk with a craving for solitude or an impulse to watch border collies run sheep.
‘Or maybe it’s wedding day jitters,’ Vanessa said.
An hour, then two, and after packing and repacking our gear we had done as much as we could to kill time, unless we were to grab the broom and start sprucing up the house as a whole.