Craven took off his hunter’s cap and scratched the crown of his head, then abandoned the hat on the mantel. He left the room, returned with drinks.
He was glad Sindt had come, he wanted Sindt to know. Salud, he said, and touched his glass to Sindt’s own. He was pleased that they could let bygones be bygones and spend the next few weeks redeveloping their friendship. He admired Sindt’s candor, the audacity of sending such a postcard, and though at first he had been, he had to admit, enraged, he soon came to realize that it would have been a mistake for Sindt to write about his work if he honestly did not feel he could master the prose. Sindt apologized again, more profusely than he had managed to do on the back of a postcard, and they both sat down, sipped their drinks. From time to time Craven would smile at him, perhaps to reassure him that all was well, that he had been sincere about his genuine forgiveness of Sindt, which made Sindt increasingly nervous.
There was, Craven said, just he and his chef in the house, just the two of them, and now, he said, there was Sindt as well. The chef would keep entirely to the kitchen, according to Craven, at most darting into the dining room to serve dinner but retreating as quickly as possible back to the kitchen. In point of fact, the chef kept his bed in the pantry — not because Craven had forced him to do so (for Craven had offered him any of the seven beds in the house) but by choice. The chef wanted his bed in the pantry — it was not a case of a master giving his servant short shrift, and one preferred not to use words such as master and servant in times such as these. It also had to be said that in the case of the chef, bed was the wrong word, as what he slept on was more of a pallet. Craven would show Sindt the chef’s pallet as part of the tour, though it would not, Craven claimed, be the highlight of the tour. He too was not in the main body of the house often, for as you can see by my garb, he said, fondling the embroidered hem of his lederhosen, I tend toward communion with nature. It would not be too much, indeed, to call him an outdoorsman, for the majority of his waking hours he spent either in the remnants of the woods or out in the greenhouse. The greenhouse was admittedly not a greenhouse but rather a modified greenhouse, something he had converted into an enclosure for the growth of the word. In it, he had written not only his most recent book but several books prior to it. It paid to keep one’s writing out of the house, at a certain distance, else the house itself become infected with the imaginative process. The imaginative process could ruin a good house in a matter of days. “This house,” Craven said, gesturing around him, “consider it your own. Your home away from home.”
The tower was nearly as bare as the parlor had been. There was a bed in the center. On the floor beside it was what Sindt judged to be an imitation Persian rug, grown discolored from sunlight, threadbare in its center. Pushed against a wall, just beside a window, was a small writing desk, a place for an inkpot cut into it. A chair sat next to it, the back of it cracked down the middle.
“Satisfactory?” asked Craven, and, when Sindt nodded slightly, he left.
The room was roughly circular. He found, when he went to the leftmost of the three windows, that the tower was high enough for him to see out over the remains of the forest and catch a glimpse of the town below. The rightmost window revealed only the mountain rising beyond the house. The center window looked down on the roof of the modified greenhouse. Sindt ran his finger against the wall and it came away filthy with ash. There are ways, perhaps, he thought, to bow delicately out of this visit to Craven — perhaps by pleading a bleeding ulcer or some other dolorous yet difficult-to-verify condition. Down below, the sun glinted off the greenhouse panels. He could see Craven, even smaller than usual, walking past the greenhouse and then out toward the trees, ridiculous in his alpine costume. Then he lay down on the bed, slept.
He was awoken by a jangling sound, which, as he soon discovered, was coming from outside his door. It was Craven. He had shucked his alpine costume in favor of a pair of slacks and a blazer a decade out of style. In his hand he held a battery of sleigh bells that struck Sindt as vaguely sinister.
“Dinner?” Craven asked.
Sindt rubbed his eyes, buttoned his shirt back up, followed Craven down the stairs. The house had come to him almost by accident, Craven informed him. A train he had been taking had broken down a few miles shy of the town below. Instead of waiting for it to be repaired, he climbed out of the train’s window, hoping to travel on foot to the station. Once under way, however, he left the iron rails and quickly lost his sense of direction. Hoping that by climbing higher he might be able to see the station, he mounted the slope and stumbled onto the logging road—
“—timber road,” Sindt suggested.
“Timber road.” Craved nodded affably. “And here it was, unoccupied, but nearly in the condition you see it now.”
He ushered Sindt toward his seat. The table was already laid, medallions of pork bleeding on their plates, greens in bowls beside, wine decanted, chef nowhere to be seen. They ate quickly, both sitting clumped at one end of the rather large but remarkably crude table. When finished, they repaired to the parlor and sat facing each other, brandy glasses in their hands.
“You don’t mind living here alone?” Sindt asked.
“I’m not alone,” Craven said. “You’re here as well.”
“Just for a day or two,” Sindt said. “My back, the twenty-second vertebra, tremendous pain—”
“No,” said Craven. “I won’t hear of you leaving so soon.”
Not knowing what else to do, Sindt emptied his glass.
“In any case, there’s the cook,” Craven said. “Don’t forget the cook.”
He was oddly beaming as he said it. There was, Sindt realized, a certain resonance in the words. Sipping his brandy, staring into the cold fireplace grate, Sindt realized that somewhere in the middle of Craven’s novel Velvet Fury a variation of the same phrase had appeared, uttered by the parodic detective and protagonist as a kind of obscure joke:
There’s the crook. Don’t forget the crook.
For an instant Sindt held himself perfectly still. He could feel a pressure in his head. The alpine garb Craven had been wearing earlier, he now realized, recalled that of a minor character in Craven’s philosophical novel, Melly & Tate, a character mentioned briefly, passed over in the course of a paragraph. The meal they had had, bloody medallions of pork, greens without other vegetables or side dishes, had appeared, if he was not mistaken, as a dinner eaten by the wife of the protagonist in Knife Diet. Perhaps Craven’s simple outfit now, slacks and outdated sport coat, was an obscure reference to another of his texts. The house was apparently less a literal space than a literary space.