The Heirloom Page 3

  I also met Sara. She was tall, almost beautiful, and remote. She had long shiny blonde hair that blew around her in the California sunshine like the gold that the princess spun in Rumpelstiltskin, and hazel-coloured eyes. I’m being romantic now, but Sara was just about the one person who could make me feel that way. All soft focus and ’cellos, and Bach, and the shimmer of a tear on trembling lower lashes.

  Sara was majoring in Renaissance history, and that was why she occasionally joined my art classes. I used to wink at her across the lecture-hall – big, broad, suggestive winks, real construction-site stuff – and she used to stick her nose up in the air and ignore me. My best friend Carl Watkins said I was wasting my time. Sara Horton, he said, had been a classic case of frigid little rich girl ever since high school.

  Carl was right, sort of. But Sara’s diffidence was a result of shyness rather than snobbery. I suspected it the moment I first saw her, walking across campus with her books held against her breasts, her mouth pouting in a fashionably Brigitte Bardot moody expression, her long legs striding along in a pale blue mini-skirt. She told me later that she always used to have this fantasy that she was starring in a French movie, with subtitles.

  After two or three months, I grew impatient with the way she consistently ignored me and stuck her nose up at me. What did she think I was? Some kind of leper? So I took the steering-wheel in both hands and madly but deliberately rear-ended her shiny firetruck-red Ford Mustang convertible host outside of the campus gates. Crunch. She screamed at me for almost fifteen minutes. What a careless moron I was. How could you do it? Men like you should have their licences revoked and their things cut off. But after I’d told her I was sorry, not just ordinary sorry but abjectly and unconditionally sorry; and the only reason I’d rear-ended her was because I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off her beautiful hair; and in any case I’d pay for all of her body-shop expenses out of my student grant, well, she calmed down, and nearly smiled. And once she’d nearly smiled – once haughty Sara Horton had actually nearly smiled – it was all over except for two delirious sunny years of going steady, of Paul Masson wine and Bob Dylan concerts and smoking grass, and then a picture-postcard wedding at her parents’ house in Pasadena, with white cake and black Cadillacs and sobbing aunts and orchids, and a nice cheque from Pops to help me get started in the antique business. Pops, as it turned out, owned half of Seal Beach – the half where the oil is.

  I felt like I’d played at living, and won.

  We found Rancho Santa Fe one weekend in spring, when we were driving through North San Diego County. It’s a small, prim, hyper-respectable community nestling in the sandy-coloured hills about seven miles inland from the Pacific Shore at Solana Beach. It only has half a dozen streets – tidy, sunlit little thoroughfares with names like Paseo Delicias and La Flecha. It has two stores, a gas station, a post office, and an elegant restaurant where you can sit amidst expensive Mexican decor and eat salads and fish and gateaux and talk about the tiresome problems you’ve been having with your decorator. At the end of the main street, half-hidden amongst the eucalyptus trees, is The Inn, where elderly visitors roll bowls across the lawns, or cover their faces in the Los Angeles Sunday Times and sun their grey-haired bellies.

  In normal circumstances, Rancho Santa Fe would have been too quiet for us. Victor Mature had retired there, and you can’t get any quieter than that. But Sara was expecting our first baby by then, and the family doctor had cautioned her to take things real easy. What was more, there was an antique shop for sale halfway along main street, in a shady and attractive little mall, and if ever there was an ideal site to start up in the antiques retail business, this was it.

  Two months later, we moved into our two-storey oak-shingled house in a lemon grove just half a mile outside of town, with a pool and a verandah and bougainvillaea growing wildly all over the patio roof. Three months later, I opened the doors of Richard J. Delatolla, Antiquités et Objets d’Art. Four months later, Sara was driving home from seeing a friend in San Diego when a tyre burst on her estate wagon. The wagon skidded off the freeway, rolled down a twenty-foot embankment, and landed on its roof. She lost the baby, a girl, on her way to hospital.

  Now, in the waning light of a Sunday afternoon, we were sitting with Jonathan under the mock jungle thatch of the refreshment parlour at the wild-animal park. Jonathan, in spite of Sara’s protests, was munching his way through a hot dog that was more catsup than sausage, and I was sipping a large paper carton of cold beer. Sara was very quiet, and hadn’t touched her lemon tea.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked her, after a while.

  She looked up, and made a face that meant, I don’t know, nothing. The fringe of the jungle thatch cast a ragged, flickering shadow across her forehead.

  ‘You’re not still thinking about that chair, are you?’ I said.

  Jonathan said, ‘Why didn’t that man let me sit in it, Daddy?’

  I reached over and wiped the splotches of catsup off his chin with a paper napkin. ‘He was just being careful, that’s all.’

  ‘Careful about what?’ asked Sara, with a suddenness that was almost aggressive.

  ‘I don’t know. Careful. An antique is an antique.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  I raised my hands in surrender. ‘Nothing, as a matter of fact. I just didn’t know what to say. Listen – you’re upset about something, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course I’m not.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re not upset,’ I insisted. ‘I know when you’re upset. We’ve spent the whole afternoon staring at lions, and zebras, and performing elephants, and parrots, and you haven’t said a word. You haven’t even said how goddamned boring you think they all are.’

  ‘They’re not boring,’ Sara retorted. ‘I never said they were boring.’

  ‘You never said anything.’

  She leaned forward, her expression intent. ‘I don’t understand what could have happened to me,’ she said. ‘It was like – fainting. Blacking out. But I haven’t blacked out like that since I was in the third grade.’

  I sat back, and toyed with my carton of beer. ‘Maybe it was just some kind of auto-suggestion. Grant told you to look at the face, and somehow your subconscious mind thought it seemed hypnotic, so for a minute or two you were actually hypnotised. Self-hypnotised, not really hypnotised. You can’t believe that a wooden face on a chair can actually –’

  ‘Do you know what you’re saying?’ demanded Sara. ‘You’re saying that I was so dumbstruck by a piece of furniture that I stood there like the town idiot with my jaw hanging open while Grant walked off, climbed into his van, backed up, and drove away. That’s what you’re saying.’

  ‘Okay,’ I told her, ‘that’s what I’m saying.’

  ‘But it’s impossible, Ricky. Things like that just don’t happen.’

  ‘They must happen. I mean – well, it happened, didn’t it?’

  ‘Not the way you’re trying to suggest.’

  ‘Well, what way? He gave you a quick squirt of “Ignore Me” gas? He vanished in a puff of smoke?’

  Sara didn’t answer. I took a sip of beer and watched her. She kept twisting the ends of her hair around and around in her fingers.

  ‘Listen,’ I said gently, ‘what are you trying to tell me?’

  She hesitated, searching for the exact words to express what she felt. ‘I’m trying to tell you that it was the chair. It has a kind of charisma.’

  ‘A charisma?’

  ‘Don’t make fun of me, Ricky. I really and truly believe that there is something about that chair which made me lose consciousness while Grant drove out of the grounds.’

  ‘I see,’ I nodded. Somehow, Sara was making me feel depressed. I mean, however odd it was that Grant had managed to leave the house without her noticing him go, there had to be some rational explanation for it. Maybe Sara was starting to suffer from pre-menstrual tension again. Maybe Grant had worked some kind of stage conjuring trick on her – now y
ou see me, now you don’t. But the trouble was that Jonathan hadn’t seen him leave, either, and there was no way that Jonathan was suffering from PMT.

  ‘Jonathan,’ I asked him. ‘Did that man really go without you seeing him? Or did you get a little teentsy look at him?’

  Jonathan was gnawing at his breadroll like one of the rabbits in the children’s enclosure.

  ‘Jonathan,’ I repeated. ‘What happened when Mr Grant left? I want you to think what happened. Think.’

  He slowly put down his roll. Then he turned to stare at me with an expression that actually frightened me. Haughty, cold, and utterly severe, as if he were a ruthless old man whose cruelty and determination had somehow been brought into question. Almost immediately, though, his face softened, and tears started to trickle down his cheeks.

  Sara reached over and hugged him. ‘There, baby,’ she said, stroking his hair. ‘Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to think what happened if you don’t want to.’ Then she looked across at me and said, ‘Now see what you’ve done.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything,’ I protested. ‘All I did was ask him to think what happened in that moment when Grant left the house. What’s so terrible about that?’

  ‘He doesn’t want to think about it, that’s all.’

  I let out a long, exasperated breath. ‘Jesus Christ. A guy does a magic vanishing act in my driveway. My wife and my son are the only witnesses. And do you think either of them will tell me what the hell happened?’

  Jonathan raised his head from Sara’s arms. His eyes were blotted with tears. ‘I saw you, Daddy,’ he whispered.

  ‘What do you mean, you saw me? You couldn’t have seen me. I was in the house, making a telephone call.’

  ‘I saw you, Daddy.’

  ‘When?’ I wanted to know. ‘When did you see me?’

  Sara held Jonathan even more protectively. ‘Don’t say any more, darling,’ she told him. Her eyes were fixed on me so fiercely that I felt as if I was growing horns or something.

  ‘You were sitting on the chair,’ said Jonathan. ‘You were sitting on the chair but you looked funny.’

  ‘Funny? How?’

  ‘I could only see the top of you. Your legs were disappearing down the crack at the back of the chair. I tried to tell you not to go down the back of the chair, but you didn’t want to listen. You were smiling at me. I was frightened.’

  I stood up. Then I sat down again. I couldn’t think what to say. Jonathan stopped crying, and sat solemnly on his chair, staring at me with a pale face. Sara stroked his arm.

  ‘Listen, Jonathan,’ I said at last. ‘You know for a fact that I was inside the house, making a telephone call. So what you thought you saw was only imagination. It was only inside of your head.’

  Sara said, ‘Jonathan’s right, Ricky.’

  ‘Right? What do you mean he’s right? Don’t tell me you saw me sliding down the back of the chair, too?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. If I did see anything, I can’t remember what it was. But I do know that I had a terribly strong feeling when I blacked out.’

  She held her cheek as if she was remembering that someone had slapped her, and stared at me with watering eyes. These weren’t the tears of romance, either, or of ’cellos, or of too many carafes of Paul Masson wine. These were the tears of uncertainty, and fear.

  ‘Ricky,’ she told me. ‘I felt sure you were going to die.’

  2

  Witherings

  When we arrived back home, the furniture was still standing where we had left it on the driveway, although the wind had somehow blown the black velveteen rug across to the other side of the house, where it was tangled up in the bushes like a broken umbrella, or a snared bat.

  Sara climbed out of the car without a word, and reached into the back seat to wake Jonathan up. He had nodded off as we passed Lake Hodges on the way back through Escondido.

  It was dusk, and the insects had started chirruping. A warm breathy wind stirred the leaves of the eucalyptus trees overhead. I unlocked the front door, switched off the burglar alarm under the stairs, and then walked through to the den at the back of the house, where two wide sliding doors looked out over the pool patio. I switched on the lights around the pool, and then slid the doors open.

  ‘You want a drink?’ I asked Sara, as she helped a tousled Jonathan up the stairs to bed.

  ‘Aren’t you going to put away the rest of that furniture?’ she asked me.

  ‘I’ll have Miguel come up and do it tomorrow. I’m bushed.’

  ‘I thought you were a nocturnal.’

  ‘I am,’ I told her. ‘But that doesn’t mean I have to be an energetic nocturnal, does it? Besides, Miguel likes heaving furniture around. I wouldn’t like to deprive him of any fun.’

  ‘I’ll be down in a moment,’ said Sara.

  I went to our eighteenth-century inlaid comer cabinet where I kept the bottles of drink, and built us each a large Rum Collins. Then I stepped out on to the red brick patio, and stood for a while listening to the sounds of the evening, and watching the last crimson dust of the day stir itself slowly into the darkness of the woods.

  Sara came out after a few minutes in her blue silk kimono.

  ‘Jonathan sleeping?’ I asked her.

  She took her drink. ‘He says he wants to go see it all again next week. Especially the lions.’

  ‘He was lucky to see those lions. Usually, they’re fornicating behind the rocks.’

  Sara let out a short, strained laugh.

  ‘About this afternoon –’ she began.

  ‘Forget it,’ I told her. ‘It was all weird, and unpleasant, and right now we can’t think of any explanation for it. But that doesn’t mean we have to let it faze us, does it?’

  She leaned on my shoulder. ‘I guess not. It was just that the feeling I had was so powerful. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you at first.’

  ‘Sara, my darling,’ I said, with as much conviction as I could manage, ‘I am not going to die. Not in the immediate future, anyway. When I’m a hundred and eleven, maybe. But not yet.’

  She walked across to the other side of the patio. I stayed where I was, drinking my cocktail. I heard her rearranging the cooking utensils on top of the brick barbecue.

  ‘Maybe we should invite the Wertheims over next week,’ she said. ‘Dry martinis and burned steaks.’

  ‘I never burn the steaks,’ I retorted.

  ‘Oh, no? What about that time we had the Salingers over?’

  I shrugged. ‘That was an experiment.’

  ‘An experiment?’

  ‘Sure. I was trying to determine if it could ever be possible for human beings to thrive on carbon.’

  Sara said, ‘It’s cold tonight, don’t you think so?’

  ‘It’s summer. How can it be cold?’

  ‘I just feel cold,’ she insisted. ‘Don’t you think there’s a wind?’

  ‘You want to. go inside?’ I asked her. ‘I could light a fire if you really want me to.’

  ‘Unh-hunh. Maybe I’ll just take a swim. The water looks nice and warm.’

  Both of us liked the pool water at a steady 75 degrees, and as the evening air cooled off, the surface steamed like a Florida swamp. Sara dipped her toes in, and then peeled off her blue silk kimono and hung it over the back of one of the patio chairs. Underneath, she was naked – still as slim and tanned as ever, with those small tip-tilted breasts and narrow hips. She lowered herself slowly into the water, and ripples widened through the steam. I sat myself down on the side of the pool cross-legged, and watched her as she struck out for the other side.

  ‘You should come in,’ she called, her hair streaming all around her. ‘It’s really relaxing.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, lifting my glass to her. ‘Personally, I prefer to sit and watch you, sexy.’

  She swam a few side-strokes, and then trod water at the deep end. Her body was distorted and refracted by the ripples, and for a moment I had a curious feeling that I
was watching something out of a dream.

  ‘You know something,’ I called. ‘I think we both need a vacation.’

  ‘We would have taken a vacation by now if we could only agree on where to go,’ she called back.

  ‘So what’s wrong with marlin fishing in the Gulf Stream?’ I asked her.

  ‘For a six-year-old boy? Most of those marlin weigh more than he does.’

  ‘He could catch sardines.’

  Sara flippered around in a lazy circle. I was just about to ask her if she wanted another drink, when she shrieked out, ‘Ricky!’

  My heart clamped tight like a wrench. I leaped up, kicked off my shoes, and jumped into the shallow end of the pool with one almighty splash, wading out towards her as fast as I could.

  ‘It’s okay!’ I yelled. ‘I’m coming!’

  ‘No!’ she shouted. ‘It’s not me! – it’s not me! Look on the patio!’

  I didn’t understand at first, and I had already reached her by the time I realised that she wanted me to turn around. But when I did, I stared in complete disbelief at what I saw.

  Sara’s blue silk kimono, which she had draped over the back of one of the chairs, was on fire. Flames were licking up one of the sleeves, and part of the back was already charred.

  We watched in shocked silence as the kimono was gradually consumed. Thin fragments of burning silk rose into the evening sky, and then sank back to the patio again like the feathers of a shot raven.

  Gripping Sara’s hand, I waded to the side of the pool, and heaved myself out. Water clattered from my clothes on to the concrete edge. I reached down and helped Sara out, too; and still holding hands we approached the patio chair.

  ‘Did you see it?’ she asked me. ‘It just… caught fire.’

  I raised my eyes and scanned the evening sky. ‘Must have been a stray charcoal spark from somebody’s barbecue. That’s all I can think of.’