I peered in over heads and shoulders. The visitors were looking hard at the television set; there were only a few around. This one was fitted into a walnut cabinet, both doors of which stood wide. Upon the glassy screen shone a square of yellow light, the reflection of the west window. I had not made up my mind about television. Lily knew that, and wondered what she should think. Was it a legitimate household object? Should it be left naked, or concealed in some other piece of furniture, brought out when there was ballet dancing to watch? As there was a ballet program on television about once a year, and a short one at that, perhaps to have a set of one’s own was a selfish extravagance — especially now, when there was so much talk about sharing.
Lily made her way back to me, stretched to her top height — in new shoes, making an allowance for rope soles, five feet three — and pointed out that these people had not only a fish-canning monopoly and a suite of rooms in a rebuilt Saracen fortress but the walnut cabinet and all it contained. A reproach? I was a graduate student living on a grant and an allowance my Aunt Elspeth gave me. I should not have been married at all. My parents were Anglican medical missionaries in China. They were elderly and poor, had married at an age when they expected to be spared God’s gift of offspring. My mother, delivered of me (God’s last word on the subject), had gone straight back to Shanghai. The first face I remember is my aunt’s.
“This is the long gallery, where the conspirators were hanged.” Our guide spoke to no one but Lily. Her eyes were hazel with golden flecks. The sun shining in at the west window made them look transparent, pale gold. She did not ask about the conspiracy: her whole outlook was naturally conniving. Plots and quiet skirmishes had led to her present state of development. The guide continued to stare at her, helplessly, caught on the rapt, sunstruck way she looked back. The interlaced initials over the fireplace were the count’s tax collector’s, he told her. When the count confiscated the castle, out of greed and envy, he had the tax collector hanged in this room, facing north, so that his cipher, now ruined root and branch, was the last thing he saw before his blood turned dark. “As dark as the blood of a bedbug,” said the guide, as though he had been hanged and revived any number of times.
Carlotta said she could not understand one word our guide was saying. She knew French; she’d had straight A’s in French. But her French was an international, no-accent linguistic utensil. This fellow had an accent. To prove her point, she told me in no-accent French what she thought of four tapestries depicting Wisdom, Virtue, Sobriety, and King Solomon greeting the Queen of Sheba: the colors were like mud, and the whole thing needed to be dry-cleaned.
An English group now crowded into the room, jostling the French and bringing all movement to a stop. We heard, in a tinny kind of English, “The graffiti scraped into the walls are not for the eyes of every member of the family.” Carlotta giggled and covered her mouth with both hands. “However,” the voice went on, exceedingly careful, “the curtain can be drawn aside for a small extra fee.” Through spread fingers Carlotta said to me, “That thing on the bridge? They can see it for nothing.” For some reason the French guide thought that Carlotta was laughing at him. He held himself as straight as if he were on review, and spoke coldly: “In the bedroom of the countess, draperies and bed hangings are covered with plastic. Some visitors, in the past, came here with scissors and tried to cut off pieces of silk, for souvenirs.” Carlotta thought she had been criticized, and would not look. “Scissors,” she repeated, just to herself.
Lily had been fast to see that the arms embroidered on the valance belonged to the count’s mistress. “Showing what men can get away with,” she had said. She had marched over to a portrait of the mistress as Artemis, with a breast showing, then examined the countess looking like her everyday self — crabbed, deceived, forty. There should have been a mirror so that Lily could compare her face with the faces of those other two. Instead there was a glass case holding the count’s plans for rebuilding what he was soon, recklessly, to tear down. Unfortunately, he ran out of funds — hadn’t stopped to think that only his dead collector had known how to raise money.
“Who wants to know about these people?” Lily had said. She meant that my subject, history, was just the record of simple-minded careers. Her life, necessarily remote from public interest, would nonetheless be clear, rapid, strong.
Our tickets had allowed a climb to the top of the tower. From a windblown height we looked at a new village built out of the dark stone quarried in the region. The main street was as wide as a square, to allow for tourist cars and buses. Lily struggled to ask me something: The houses were all copies of old houses, weren’t they? Could people live good lives in a false setting?
I watched a truck carrying blocks of stone as it tried to back and turn on a dirt road. “I think most people are pleased just to have four walls and a roof.”
“I know that.”
I tried again. Did she mean that the bareness and coldness of a dead past had no power to comfort the present? This time, I had overshot. Still, I was paying attention, and she leaned against my arm, gratefully — a light, slight pressure. Then she turned and ran down the winding staircase with one motion, like a dancer.
At the bottom of the steps was a black-painted door. She waited for me to catch up before touching the handle. Behind us, a guide called that we were looking at the tomb of a local poet, not yet part of the tour. On the grave, a rose bloomed and shed. Askew on a heap of masonry — the rubble of a chapel — a sign read “Please do not stand on the main altar when taking photographs.” Roses and honeysuckle clung to the sign. Around this oasis a gardener moved, clipping box hedge. A lavender-edged walk led nowhere. A sprinkler turned lopsidedly on a blanket-size lawn.
“Do you remember ‘The Secret Garden’?” Lily said.
“My aunt tried to read it to me.”
“Could we have something like this? I don’t mean a whole castle. Just a garden.”
“It’s not for sale.”
“The whole of Europe is for sale.”
I wondered where she was getting this. Lapwing’s wife had gone sour on France. She was sick of cooking on a coal-and-wood stove and hauling ashes.
I didn’t want to own anything. It was my Aunt Elspeth who advanced the money for the house where I spent my honeymoon — the whole of my marriage, really. At first I went on renting it for holidays. The rent gradually rose from eight to twenty-four dollars a month. The owner decided to sell because he thought our part of the coast would never be developed, and my aunt came over to see what it was worth. There was no trace of Lily by then, apart from some damp, spotted books she had drawn from English libraries and blithely inscribed with her own name. I had kept meaning to take them back, but I was not often there. As the British colonies dwindled, the libraries closed. The libraries were often run by parish committees attached to churches in the diocese of Gibraltar. For some of my neighbors, the whole of the western Mediterranean was just a bishop’s district.
Five thousand dollars: not much of a buy — a seaside wreck with a view over another damaged roof. All the same, said my aunt, her hand shading her eyes, there was the sea. “When you start to earn money, Steve, you should buy that other place and tear it down.” She wanted me to have something. If it could not be Lily, let it be a tumbledown house.
Lily never needed to own an inch of Europe. She could make it up. She began to invent her own Europe from the time she learned to read. There were no mermaids in Canadian waters; no one rode to Canterbury. She had to invent something or perish from disappointment. She imagined a place where trees were enchanted, stones turned into frogs, frogs into princes. Later, she seemed to be inventing Bach and Mozart, then a host of people who lived with Bach and Mozart easily, so that she could keep good company in her mind. Sometimes I hear a dash of Lily’s music over a radio and I wish I were still young — twenty-four would do — and could find Lily’s inventions, and watch her trying to live in them again.