Melrose laughed. “There, I disagree; he’s much too complicated to be plain. Though I do admit he works at it.”
Tom nodded and turned the tulip-shaped glass in his fingers. “Well, not plain, maybe, but generous. After a few years of this”-his hand swept over his body-“when I got too sick to do anything, he brought me here. Most of the people here are ones he knew before. The Hoopers owned a bookstore in South Ken he was always going to. Miss Livingston was once his son’s public school teacher.”
Afraid he’d gotten Tom off the subject of the grandchildren, Melrose said, “And what happened that night he flew down here?”
“Of course, by the time he got to the house, it’d all been done; I mean, police had come, and the ambulance had taken the bodies away. The cop in charge, at least I guessed he was in charge, talked to Mr. B for a long time. Then they all left.
“He told me it felt like the aftermath of battle, when you can’t do anything but look at the bloody battlefield. His son’s wife had gotten there first-I mean, after the cook, Mrs. Hayter. Daniel, his son, arrived later; they’d had a hard time locating him, so it was awhile after his wife got there. So Mr. Bletchley, he had to get information from his daughter-in-law. Karen, her name is. And that really frustrated him.”
“Why’s that?”
“Why? Because he doesn’t like her. He always said she married Daniel for money. I guess it wouldn’t be the first time. He was in a rage with both of them because they hadn’t been home when the kids got out of bed. I imagine Mrs. Hayter came in for some sharp words, too.” Tom sighed. “It was too painful for him to live in the house after Noah and Esmé died. But at the same time, he couldn’t stand to leave the village. It’s the reason he bought this place. He didn’t know exactly what he was going to do with it until he got the hospice idea-taking in only people who’ve been diagnosed as terminal. Strange thing for him to do, isn’t it?”
“Not if you want the illusion that you’re controlling death.” He’d said something like that to Karen Bletchley.
Tom moved the wheelchair closer to Melrose’s wing chair. He leaned forward, in the manner of someone with important things to impart who doesn’t want others to hear him. “It’s funny you’d put it that way, because not everyone leaves here in a coffin. Some of us actually get better. It hasn’t happened too often, but it has happened several times. Cancer of the esophagus, you can hardly ever win out over that. But a woman who had it went into remission and still keeps in touch. Then there’s Linus Vetch, who should have been dead a year ago. He’s still with us. There’ve been others-well, all of us are terminal; what a hell of a word-so when something like that happens it’s like a bloody miracle. Don’t think I’m talking about false hope. For me, it really would have to be a miracle.
“I don’t think the comfort of this place comes from not having to die alone. I think it’s because if you have to die, you want it to be in a place like this or someplace like a battlefield, where death’s a fact, not a fantasy. Outside of places like this and beyond wars and battlefields, death is more of a fantasy. People don’t really believe it; they deny it at every turn.”
“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” said Melrose.
“What do you mean?”
“Tolstoy’s story. Ivan Ilyich is ill for a long time; he knows he’s dying. But the doctors, his wife, and his children keep denying it.”
Tom said, “That’s what happens, isn’t it? Here’s the most terrifying experience you will ever have and you want to share how you feel and make others understand. But people won’t let you. ‘Oh, stop talking like that; don’t be morbid.’ Or ‘You’ll see; you’ll be up and around in no time.’ ” He stopped. Then he said, “A lot of people have ended their days here in a way they could never have hoped for without Bletchley Hall. Every once in a while children or parents come to visit. Not often. Not mine.”
There was a silence while they grasped their sherry glasses. Melrose didn’t know what to say that didn’t sound banal.
Tom went on. “Except for my sister, Honey. She’s only sixteen and just three months ago got her driving license-as she says, ‘to kill.’ The first drive she took was to come here from Dartmouth. That’s a long way. I assumed Dad would give her a hard time about visiting, but he doesn’t. I think maybe he and Mum are secretly glad Honey’s got the guts to do it. And she keeps me from really hating them; she keeps reminding me that this is how they are. They don’t know any other way to be. Honey. She’s only sixteen and yet she knows that. It’s something we don’t realize about people. We do what we do because we don’t know any other way to be.
“She takes me for rides. Sometimes Mr. B goes with us. And a few times we’ve gone to Seabourne. You know what we do? We look for clues.” Tom smiled. “He says something will turn up, that if we don’t find it, somebody will.”
Looking at Melrose, Tom added, “Maybe you’re the somebody.”
34
An inductionist who never got around to tallying bits of string or footprints in zinnia beds, Sergeant Wiggins had never subscribed to T. S. Eliot’s dictum about the rose and the typewriter, that if you could think of them in the same breath you might have the makings of a poet. Wiggins, who clearly hadn’t the makings, could still think of the rose and the typewriter together. Contraries didn’t bother him at all, nor did obverses, inverses, and converses. In Eliot’s book, the rose and the typewriter were headed for a third encompassing emblem. But Wiggins’s mind did not give birth; the rose and the typewriter remained discrete elements. They did not produce an objective correlative until a Macalvie or a Jury or (he gave himself credit for at least this much) a Plant. Jury would look at the typewriter and the rose and go Aha! Macalvie and Jury were intuitionists.
But Macalvie (who was to meet them in Lamorna, toward which they were now hurtling on a narrow coastal road) also wanted to know everything-every rose petal, every bent blade of grass, the precise length of every bit of string; he was famous for this attention to detail. It wasn’t easy to work with Macalvie if you believed (as most men surely do) that some little things are eminently forgettable.
Wiggins didn’t believe in forgetting. To him, everything was memorable. His mind operated like the four-race accumulator; you left the bet on the table and, through the next three races, “accumulated” winnings.
Right now, he was informing Melrose (who was doing the driving) that Kaposi’s sarcoma wasn’t a kind of cancer as originally supposed. “It’s caused by a herpes virus, HHV8, it’s called. Though I doubt,” he added, sympathetically, “it makes any difference to poor Tom Letts.”
Melrose marveled: Here was Wiggins, who often talked as if a walk through a field of dandelions could do him in, yet who could shake Tom’s hand, sit beside him, breathe a common air-all without blinking an eye.