She spoke with perfect pitilessness as if she were the knife’s advocate, its priestess, and Honora the apostate. So that was it; and what could he do? His time in the kitchen was running out. If he stayed any longer she would become suspicious. It was unthinkable that he would return and charge her with the fraudulence of the nurse and the empty whisky bottles. She would deny it all flatly and would, what’s more, be deeply wounded for he would have rudely broken the rules of that antic game in which their relationship was contained.
He went back through the pantry and the dining room, reminded by its disrepair of death, as a plain fact with which she seemed to be grappling boldly. He remembered walking down from the beach at Cascada with a bagful of black clams on his back. What does the sea sound like? Lions mostly, manifest destiny, the dealing of some final card hand, the aces as big as headstones. Boom, it says. And what did all his pious introspection on metamorphosis amount to? He thought he saw on the beach the change from one form of life to another. The sea grass dies, dries, flies like a swallow on the wind and that angry-looking tourist will make a lamp base out of the piece of driftwood he carries. The line of last night’s heavy sea is marked with malachite and amethyst, the beach is scored with the same lines as the sky; one seemed to stand in some fulcrum of change, here was the barrier, here as the wave fell was the line between one life and another, but would any of this keep him from squealing for mercy when his time came?
“Thank you, dear.” She drank thirstily and gave him a narrow look. “Is she
“I don’t think so,” Coverly said.
“She conceals it. I want you to promise me three things, Coverly.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to promise me that if I should lose consciousness you will not have me moved to the hospital. I wish to die in this house.”
“I promise.”
“I want you to promise that when I’m gone you won’t worry about me. My life is over and I know it. I’ve done everything I was meant to do and a great deal I was not meant to do. Everything will be confiscated, of course, but Mr. Johnson won’t do this until January. I’ve asked some nice people here for Christmas dinner and I want you to be here and make them welcome. Maggie will do the cooking. Promise.”
“I promise.”
“And then I want you to promise me, to promise me that . . . Oh, there was something else,” she said, “but I can’t remember what it was. Now I think I’ll lie down for a little while.”
“Can I help you?”
“Yes. You can help me over to the sofa and then you can read to me. I like to be read to these days. Oh, remember how I used to read to you when you were sick? I used to read you
The fullness of feeling in this recollection refreshed her voice and seemed to send it back through time until it sounded for a moment like the voice of a girl. He helped her out of the chair and led her over to the old horsehair sofa, where she lay down and let him cover her with a rug. “My book is on the table,” she said. “I’m reading
His recollection of her reading to him was not an image, it was a sensation. He could not recall her tears while she sat by his bed but he could recall the violent and confused emotions she left behind her when she went away. Now he read uneasily and he wondered why. She had read to him when he was a sick child; now he read to her as she lay dying. The cycle was obvious enough, but why should he feel that she, as she lay on the sofa, utterly helpless and infirm, had the power to weave spells that could ensnare him? He had never had anything from her but generosity and kindness, so why should he perform this simple service uneasily? He admired the book, he loved the old woman and no room on earth was so familiar as this, so why should he feel that he had stepped innocently into some snare involving a fraudulent nurse, a case of whisky and an old book? Halfway through the chapter she fell asleep and he stopped reading. A little later the nurse came to the door wearing a black hat and with a black coat over her uniform. “I have to go,” she whispered. “I have to cook supper for my family.” Coverly nodded and listened to her footsteps pass into the back of the house and then the closing of the door.
He went to the long and dirty window to see the snow. There was some yellow light at the horizon, not lemony, not confined to its color, the light of a lantern, a lanthorne, a longthorne, the shine of light on paper, something that reminded him of childhood and its garden parties, isolated now by the lateness of the hour and the season.
