“Oh, a little taste of the night before never hurt, Izzie.”
Ned pulled Isabel to him and turned her to face the deer. “Here’s to a happy. .,” he said just as a predator streaked over the fence and began to chase the small herd. They moved as a pack, one way, then another, but an outside doe was slower and slid, and the enormous dog, ugly as a jackal, cut her off.
Phoebe was calling out for a groundsman — was shouting to get a groundsman—somebody! And Ned was running toward the college, and Isabel? She watched, awash in the notion that this murder was somehow her fault. Ineffectual. All of them, ineffectual, even the groundsman, who ran toward them holding something like a weapon. By then the dog was at the doe’s throat. There was the doe’s rolling eye. The doe, still adorable, for all her terror.
This is hell — Isabel said. He could see how she fared and silently agreed: The savage dog had been an omen of worse to come. Ned knew she was thinking this then and later from the way she gripped her knife over brunch. What was it about this girl he had married?
“The cheese,” Phoebe said. “Try the gray cheese. Trust me, it’s delicious.” Isabel appeared wary but smeared some of the gray cheese on the rim of her plate. The minced pie looked gaunt, and she moved past it to the bowl of fruit and cut a stem of grapes, gone-by globes, the fattest of them split.
“That’s all you’re going to have for dessert?” Phoebe asked. “Aren’t you at least going to try Oliver’s flan?” she said. Phoebe turned away from the buffet and came up behind Oliver, who was seated at the head of the table, and she kissed the top of his head and then turned back to the buffet and said, “The gray cheese, Ned, you’ve got to try it.”
And Phoebe was right, the gray cheese — it looked like mold — was sweet, creamy. “Like brie but better,” Ned said.
Why, Ned wondered, had Isabel bothered to come to Oxford? An assassin’s face was sweeter than hers.
The yolk on the plates flaked off in the cleanup of the Boxing Day brunch, lunch — who cared when the food was so good? Not that Isabel had eaten much of it. Isabel was fading at the very moment everyone, and everyone at once, it seemed, had risen to help Oliver in the kitchen. Phoebe’s job was napkins.
“Just napkins?” Isabel asked.
“I break things,” Phoebe said and then to Straight, “and you’re not so careful either.”
When Ned next saw Isabel, she was kicking at the pebbled driveway and talking to Straight, a man she later described as in love with Phoebe.
“An old boyfriend,” Ned said.
“You’re an old boyfriend.”
“What is it you want to say, Isabel?”
“I want to go home.”
*
And then they were going home, the real one! Ned had his book, working title still a working title, Lime House Stories, and she had a guest book, a record of their guests at the real Lime House, the rental near Hampstead Heath. Its owners were in Israel. “Someday I want to go to Israel,” she said to Ned, then went back to the guest book.
I love you guys. Thanks for shelter. Jack Maas: Ned’s cousin, his father’s side.
“Aunt Charlotte,” Ned said.
“Yes,” she said. “The candlesticks.”
“Do you really remember what people have sent us?”
“Of course,” she said. “And if I’m not sure, I look it up.”
“You’ve got a list?”
There in the Lime House guest book she saw her mother’s adamant cursive: Mother/Beth. “Look at her signature, will you? Do you wonder I’ve got a list?”
She looked back at the signature. “From last October,” Isabel said, “disastrous month.”
“Let’s not revisit it,” Ned said.
Isabel read her roommate’s message about their college pact to live abroad. “Oh, Laura! She has this gift of seeming interested in a person’s life — she is interested! Laura is curious about people outside of herself. I don’t have this gift,” Isabel said. “I’m deeply incurious. Why are you smiling?”
Sam Solomon had signed her guest book. The weekend he spent with them he forgot he was running the tub — he was reading? — and he flooded their bathroom. And here was that friend of Ned’s from Brown with the have-it-all smile and the large trust fund. “How could I forget Porter,” she said, “but I did. Good artist, though,” and she showed Ned the sketch of a house they both loved on Church Street in Hampstead.
“That would make a good cover,” he said.
Isabel took back the guest book. Recipes exchanged. Phoebe’s Pâté. Cook in pan w/water. Don’t pour off oil. Can freeze. Easy, of course! Enjoy!! “Ick!” Isabel said. “I hated that liverwurst she made. You must have asked for this,” Isabel said. Then, “What is she doing with Straight when she’s marrying Ben Harris anyway?”
“Put the guest book away,” Ned said. “If you need room for anything,” he said, “I’ve got room in my bag.”
*
London had happened so fast. Good-bye to the heath and the horse guards, to the floridly decorated flat. They were in the bedroom in Golders Green, alone, alone and together in the intimate familiar that was marriage — wasn’t it? And she had nice clothes, too, didn’t she?
“Come here,” she said.
“Here?”
“Where else?”
“Isabel.”
“What?”
“Do we have time for this?”
The White Street Loft, New York, 2003
“Right on time,” a beige woman said, and, “I’m glad because it turns out I don’t have a lot of time.”
“Neither do I,” Ned said, which wasn’t true; the rest of his day, his week — his life! — was a blank, so he bucked up to make the most of it now with Carol, the woman in beige, who already knew the menu, though he asked for chili and a salad instead.
“Big mistake,” she said. “Call the waiter back. “
“Too late — I’ll live.”
The commonplace salad came in the middle of an anecdote about antidepressants—“Had she lived,” Ned was saying, “I don’t know what my mother would have done with her time. I emptied the house when she died. I remember finding tooth whitener in her medicine cabinet; it was packaged like narcotics. The vials didn’t have an expiration date. They were poisonous, I’m sure.”
The woman in beige slapped away his hand. “Do you want some of my frites?” she asked.
“I do want some of your freet,” Ned said, and she swept some onto his plate, saying, “All you have to do is ask.”
“That’s enough,” he said.
Carol got down to business then, talking and eating at the same time while he, uninterested in his insipid salad, ate her salty fries and watched the bracelet she wore slip up and down her arm as she cut into her skinny steak.
“Is that made out of coconut?” Ned pointed to the bracelet.
“Elk horn, thank you. Look—” She halted, ascertained. “Do you want to feel?” she asked as she slid the bracelet off her wrist.
He rubbed it with his thumb. “Neat.”
“Look,” she began again, “the stories are good, but a first collection of stories is a hard sell, think memoir.” The beige woman used her knife efficiently. “That story you just told about your mother wasn’t bad.”
“What the hell,” he said. The bangle didn’t fit, and he gave it back to her, to Carol Bane — big-deal deal maker, Carol Bane. She was Stahl’s agent, but the fat man was not off the mark when he described Carol Bane as deeply uninterested in books except to sell them, and this was true; she was a book-hating, hateful. .