Beautiful or not, it was, for the moment, as forgotten as her umbrella.
“A deed,” she was saying now. She sounded like a woman talking in her sleep. She moved her hands slightly, so as to grip Mr.
Gaunt’s more tightly. He returned her grip, and a little smile of pleasure touched her face.
“Yes, that’s right. It’s really just a small matter. You know Mr.
Keeton, don’t you?”
“Oh yes,” Nettle said. “Ronald and his son, Danforth. I know them both. Which do you mean?”
“The younger,” Mr. Gaunt said, stroking her palms with his long thumbs. The nails were slightly yellow and quite long. “The Head Selectman.”
“They call him Buster behind his back,” Nettle said, and giggled.
It was a harsh sound, a little hysterical, but Leland Gaunt did not seem alarmed. On the contrary; the sound of Nettle’s not-quite-right laughter seemed to please him. “They have ever since he was a little boy.”
“I want you to finish paying for your lampshade by playing a trick on Buster.”
“Trick?” Nettle looked vaguely alarmed.
Gaunt smiled. “Just a harmless prank. And he’ll never know it was you. He’ll think it was someone else.”
“Oh.” Nettle looked past Gaunt at the carnival glass lampshade, and for a moment something sharpened her gaze-greed, perhaps, or just simple longing and Pleasure. “Well…
“It will be all right, Nettle. No one will ever know… and you’ll have the lampshade.”
Nettle spoke slowly and thoughtfully. “My husband used to play tricks on me a lot. It might be fun to play one on someone else.” She looked back at him, and now the thing sharpening her gaze was alarm.
“If it doesn’t hurt him. I don’t want to hurt him. I hurt my husband, you know.”
“It won’t hurt him,” Gaunt said softly, stroking Nettle’s hands.
“It won’t hurt him a bit. I just want you to put some things in his house.”
“How could I get in Buster’s-”
“Here.”
He put something into her hand. A key. She closed her hand over it.
“When?” Nettle asked. Her dreaming eyes had returned to the lampshade again.
“Soon.” He released her hands am stood up. “And now, Nettle,
I really ought to put that beautiful lampshade into a box for you.
Mrs. Martin is coming to look at some Lalique in-” He glanced at his watch. “Goodness, in fifteen minutes! But I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am that you decided to come in. Very few people appreciate the beauty of carnival glass these days-most people are just dealers, with cash registers for hearts.”
Nettle also stood, and looked at the lampshade with the soft eyes of a woman who is in love. The agonized nervousness with which she had approached the shop had entirely disappeared. “It is lovely, isn’t it?”
“Very lovely,” Mr. Gaunt agreed warmly. “And I can’t tell you… can’t even begin to express… how happy it makes me to know it will have a good home, a place where someone will do more than dust it on Wednesday afternoons and then, after years of that, break it in a careless moment and sweep the pieces up and then drop them into the trash without a second thought.”
“I’d never do that!” Nettle cried.
“I know you wouldn’t,” Mr. Gaunt said. “It’s one of your charms, Netitia.”
Nettle looked at him, amazed. “How did you know my name?”
“I have a flair for them. I never forget a name or a face.”
He went through the curtain at the back of his shop. When he returned, he held a flat sheet of white cardboard in one hand and a large fluff of tissue paper in the other. He set the tissue paper down beside the cake container (it began at once to expand, with secret little ticks and snaps, into something which looked like a giant corsage) and began to fold the cardboard into a box exactly the right size for the lampshade. “I know you’ll be a fine custodian of the item you have purchased. That’s why I sold it to you.”
“Really? I thought… Mr. Keeton… and the trick…”
“No, no, no!” Mr. Gaunt said, half-laughing and half-exasperated. “Anyone will play a trick! People love to play tricks! But to place objects with people who love them and need them… that is a different kettle of fish altogether. Sometimes, Netitia, I think that what I really sell is happiness… what do you think?”
“Well,” Nettle said earnestly, “I know you’ve made me happy, Mr.
Gaunt. Very happy.”
He exposed his crooked, Jostling teeth in a wide smile. “Good!
That’s good!” Mr. Gaunt pushed the tissue-paper corsage into the box, cradled the lampshade in its ticking whiteness, closed the box, and taped it shut with a flourish. “And here we are! Another satisfied customer has found her needful thing!”
He held the box out to her. Nettle took it. And as her fingers touched his she felt a shiver of revulsion, although she had gripped them with great strength-even ardor-a few moments ago. But that interlude had already begun to seem hazy and unreal. He put the Tupperware cake container on top of the white box. She saw something inside the former.
“What’s that?”
“A note for your employer,” Gaunt said.
Alarm rose to Nettle’s face at once. “Not about me?”
“Good heavens, no!” Gaunt said, laughing, and Nettle relaxed at once. When he was laughing, Mr. Gaunt was impossible to resist or distrust. “Take care of your lampshade, Netitia, and do come again.”
“I will,” Nettle said, and this could have been an answer to both admonitions, but she felt in her heart (that secret repository where needs and fears elbowed each other continuously like uncomfortable passengers in a crowded subway car) that, while she might come here again, the lampshade was the only thing she-would ever buy in Needful Things.
Yet what of that? It was a beautiful thing, the sort of thing she had always wanted, the only thing she needed to complete her modest collection. She considered telling Mr. Gaunt that her husband might still be alive if he had not smashed a carnival glass lampshade much like this one fourteen years ago, that it had been the last straw, the one which finally drove her over the edge. He had broken many of her bones during their years together, and she had let him live. Finally he had broken something she really needed, and she had taken his life.
She decided she did not have to tell Mr. Gaunt this.
He looked like the sort of man who might already know.
3
“Polly! Polly, she’s coming out!”
Polly left the dressmaker’s dummy where she had been slowly and carefully pinning up a hem, and hurried to the window. She and Rosalie stood side by side, watching as Nettle left Needful Things in a state which could only be described as heavily laden.
Her purse was under one arm, her umbrella was under the other, and in her hands she held Polly’s Tupperware cake container balanced atop a square white box.
“Maybe I better go help her,” Rosalie said.
“No.” Polly put out a hand and restrained her gently. “Better not. I think she’d only be embarrassed and fluttery.”
They watched Nettle walk up the street. She no longer scuttled, as if before the jaws of a storm; now she seemed almost to drift.
No, Polly thought. No, that isn’t right. It’s more like… floating.
Her mind suddenly made one of those odd connections which were almost like cross-references, and she burst out laughing.