Eclipse: A Novel Read Free Page B

sink, obscene, squashed brown things. A fire had been lit in the parlour, in the grate were the charred remains of books the intruder had pulled from the shelves and used for fuel. Some titles and parts of titles were still legible. I leaned down and tried to make them out, intent as a scryer: The Revenant, My Mother’s House —apt, that one—something called Heart’s Needle, and, most badly burned, The Necessary . . . with a final word obscured by a scorch mark that I thought might have been Angel. Not your run-of-the-mill book-burner, evidently. I sat back on my heels and sighed, then rose and picked my way from room to room, frowning at the grime, the faded furnishings, the sun-bleached curtains; how could I stay here? Lydia called to me. I went and found her standing in the lime-smelling lavatory under the stairs, a wrist on her hip, in the pose of Donatello’s David, pointing disgustedly into the bowl, where a gigantic turd was wedged. “Aren’t people lovely,” she said.
    We cleaned up as best we could, gathered the rubbish, opened windows, flung bucketfuls of water down the lavatory pan. I had not dared to venture upstairs yet.
    “I heard from Cass,” Lydia said without looking at me, wringing the neck of a bulging plastic bag.
    I felt the usual constriction in my chest. Cass is my daughter. She has been living abroad.
    “Oh, yes?” I said, cautiously.
    “She says she will be coming home.”
    “The harpies gather, eh?” I had intended it lightly, but Lydia’s brow grew red. “Harpazein,” I said hastily, “to seize. Greek, that is.” Playing the fussy old professor, remote but kindly; when in difficulty, act.
    “Of course, she’ll take your side,” she said.
    I followed her into the parlour. Large dark masses of furniture stood sullenly at attention in the dimness of the gaunt room like almost living things. Lydia walked to the window, lighting a cigarette. On her delicate pale long feet she wore a pair of crimson velvet slippers suggestive of Araby. I marvel to think there was a time when I would have fallen on my face before her in the sand and covered those Arabian feet with kisses, caresses, adoring helpless tears.
    “I didn’t know that there were sides,” I said, too innocently.
    She gave a full cold laugh.
    “Oh, no,” she said, “you know nothing.” She turned, her head swathed in a swirl of ash-blue cigarette smoke, the garden’s menacing greenery crowding in the window behind her, and, between the green, a patch of the sky’s delicate summer azure. In this light the shock of silver in her hair was stark, undulate, ashine. Once in one of our fights she called me a black-hearted bastard and I experienced a warm little thrill, as at a pretty piece of flattery—that is the kind of black-hearted bastard that I am. Now she gazed at me for a moment in silence, slowly shaking her head. “No,” she said again, with a bitter, weary sigh, “you know nothing.”
    The moment came, which I had been both impatient for and dreading, when there was nothing left for her to do but leave. We loitered on the pavement outside the front door in the milky light of late afternoon, together yet already apart. The day was without human sound, as if everyone else in the world had gone away (how can I stay here?). Then a motor car came fizzing across the square and passed us by, the driver glaring at us briefly, in angry surprise, so it seemed. The silence returned. I lifted a hand and touched the air by Lydia’s shoulder.
    “Yes, all right,” she said, “I’ll go.”
    Her eyes turned glossy and she ducked into the car and slammed the door. The tyres skidded as she drove away. The last I saw of her she was leaning forward over the wheel with a knuckle stuck into an eye. I turned back to the house. Cass, I was thinking. Cass, now.
    Things to do, things to do. Store the kitchen supplies, set out my books, my framed photographs, my lucky rabbit’s paw. Too soon it was all done. There was no avoiding