Hymn Read online

  At last Lloyd climbed out of the car, slammed the door, and walked up to the house with the terrible reluctance of true grief. The ocean gleamed knowingly through the ferns—that peek of the North Shore for which they had paid so much, and about which they had teased themselves so often. They had even considered renaming the house Peek House.

  He opened the front door and went inside. The house seemed so pillow-silent that he was almost tempted to call out, ‘Hello? Celia?’

  His shoes barked across the hallway, which was floored in bleached and polished oak; but were silent across the living-room, which was thickly carpeted in cream-coloured wool. He walked right to the middle of the living-room and looked around, as if he hadn’t been here for years. There was a strong smell of oak, and new rugs. I prefer boysenberry to any . . .

  The living-room was painted plain pottery white and furnished with tasteful sparseness. Celia had always preferred simple furniture, open spaces. If only Lloyd had known how complicated her mind was. There were two couches, upholstered in pink-and-blue glazed cotton; two French-style armchairs; and a coffee-table with a driftwood sculpture on it, as well as a neatly marshalled stack of Opera News and Musical America.

  On the walls hung vivid oil paintings by local artists. A view of the Presidio, domed, white-walled, in shimmering sunlight. Next to it, a portrait of a Mexican woman, standing by an open adobe, selling lemons from a basket. The portrait was entitled, Who’ll Buy My Lemons?

  But the centre of visual and emotional gravity in the living-room—in fact the centre of visual and emotional gravity in the whole house—was Celia’s ice-white Yamaha grand piano, which Lloyd had given her when they first moved in. That piano had meant commitment, and permanence. A house of their own, a relationship which was going to last. ‘After all,’ Lloyd had told her, ‘you can storm out of the door with an overnight bag, but you can’t storm out of the door with a grand piano.’

  Fatally burned.

  Lloyd went over to the piano and picked out two or three plaintive notes. All those years that Celia had practised. All those years that she had dedicated to Wagner and Verdi and Puccini. Fingers flying across the keys. Eyes closed, voice uplifted. Fatally burned. He played the first three bars of ‘Evergreen’ because he could never play opera: love, soft as an easy chair . . . then stopped, and closed the lid over the keyboard, turning the key. From now on, it was going to stay silent, unplayed. Nobody else was going to touch it.

  On top of the piano, meticulously arranged, was Celia’s collection of scrimshaw—whale-ivory carvings from Nantucket and Salem and the Barbary Coast. Some of them dated as far back as 1720, but her favourite had always been the fragment of twenty-thousand-year-old fossilized mammoth tusk, exquisitely carved by Bonnie Schulte, one of the most accomplished scrimshanders in America.

  Lloyd had promised Celia another Bonnie Schulte piece for her birthday. But the only carving she needed now was her headstone.

  It was so difficult for Lloyd to believe that their life together was all over, when it had scarcely started. Even worse, there was nobody that he could call. Celia’s parents were both dead, and although she had mentioned an older sister in Denver, Colorado, Lloyd had no idea of where her sister lived, or what her married name was, or how to get in touch with her.

  He poured himself a glassful of Wild Turkey from the heavy crystal decanter on the black-enamelled Spanish linen-chest which they had brought back from Baja. His hand was shaking, and the decanter clattered against the rim of the glass. He walked through to the bedroom with his drink in his hand and stared at the big oak bed. On the wall behind the headboard was a stylized painting of two California quail, touching beaks, and Celia had said that it was a painting of them, kissing, in another incarnation.

  ‘You want to come back as a quail?’ he had asked her.

  She had smiled. ‘Better to come back as a quail than not to come back at all.’

  On impulse, he called the Miyako Hotel, in San Francisco.

  ‘I want to speak to Ms Williams, please?’

  A pause, and then politely, ‘No Ms Williams registered here, sir.’

  ‘Maybe she checked out. Was she there yesterday, or the day before?’

  ‘No, sir. Nobody by the name of Williams.’

  ‘How about Denman? Anybody by the name of Denman?’

  ‘No, sir. Denbigh, but no Denman.’

  Lloyd hung up, frowning. Celia had told him on the phone last night that she was calling from the Miyako, he was quite sure of it. She had even mentioned the Japanese meal she had ordered from room service, the teriyaki shrimp. But unless she had registered under a totally different name altogether, she hadn’t been there at all.

  Plainly, she had been deceiving him. But why?

  He swallowed whisky, and thought to himself: maybe the grand piano hadn’t been enough to hold her back, after all. Maybe she had found herself a new lover.

  He paced around the living-room, his mind helter-skeltering. A lover? It didn’t make any sense. Celia had always told him the truth, even when it hurt. She wouldn’t have fallen for another man without telling him. She couldn’t. Besides, she had seemed to be deliriously happy. Come September, they were going to be married: they had even talked about how many children they wanted, and what they were going to call them. Joseph for a boy, Tershia for a girl.

  And, if she had fallen in love with another man—really fallen in love—why had she set herself alight?

  He leafed through the telephone book, and found the number of Sylvia Cuddy, Celia’s best friend from the San Diego Opera (designer glasses, sensual pink lips, wildly tangled hair). He jabbed the phone-buttons with his middle finger, then tucked the receiver under his chin and waited for Sylvia to answer.

  ‘Sylvia? It’s Lloyd.’

  ‘Well, hello! This is a surprise! How can I help you?’

  Lloyd found himself swallowing tightly. A throatful of burrs. ‘Sylvia . . . I’m afraid I have some really bad news.’

  He heard himself telling Sylvia in a clogged-up voice that Celia was dead. He heard Sylvia denying it. He heard himself say that it was true. He was desperately sorry, but it was true. He didn’t even know whether he believed it himself. Maybe he was making some kind of surrealistic mistake, like one of those films where you pick up the wrong suitcase and open it up and voila! no pyjamas, no dirty rolled-up socks, no shaver, only four million dollars’ worth of pure heroin, in plastic bags.

  ‘Sylvia . . . I’ve been trying to find out who might have seen Celia last . . . before she left San Francisco.’

  A hesitant pause. ‘San Francisco? What do you mean?’

  ‘She was lecturing for the opera in San Francisco, wasn’t she? A two-week engagement at the Performing Arts Center.’

  ‘Well, she may have been lecturing, Lloyd, but it wasn’t for us. She never told me anything about it.’

  ‘When did you last talk to her?’ asked Lloyd.

  ‘Why, just yesterday morning. She told me she was calling from home.’

  ‘You mean from here? From La Jolla? What did she say to you?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ Sylvia confessed. ‘Nothing much, really. She gave me her recipe for veal tarantino, the one I was always nagging her about. Then she said something about how excited she was, looking forward to the future. Then she hung up.’

  ‘She didn’t say anything unusual? Anything that struck you as weird?’

  Sylvia thought about it for a while. ‘I’m not sure. I suppose the whole phone call was weird, in a way—just suddenly calling me out of the blue to give me that recipe. And the way she said, at the end, “Well, goodbye, Sylvia. It was so final. I said, “You sound as if you’re going on a trip.” But she didn’t answer.’

  Lloyd slowly replaced the receiver. The more he discovered about Celia’s last moments, the more mysterious and unsettling they appeared to be. He had imagined that
he and Celia had shared everything. Their friendship, their passion, their ambitions, their most inconsequential thoughts. Now he felt that a mask was slipping, and that a different Celia was coming into view, a Celia who had kept herself secret. A Celia who had told him lies, and lied to her best friend, too.

  Through the open door to the bedroom, he could just see Celia’s photograph laughing at him, the photograph he had taken in the courtyard at the Rancho Santa Fe. What are you laughing at, my lady? he thought. What were you doing in that car-park today, dowsing yourself with petrol and setting yourself on fire?

  He walked through to the bedroom, picked up the photograph and stared at it closely, trying to see if her face gave anything away. Most of all, Celia, why didn’t you tell me what was worrying you? Why didn’t you ask me to help?

  Maybe she had, he thought, but maybe he hadn’t understood. The pain of that was almost more than he could bear, and he uttered a sob of grief that hurt his throat.

  He drained the last of the Wild Turkey, holding the decanter upside-down until the last drop had fallen into his glass. Plip, the last drop. Then he struggled awkwardly out of his trousers, and bundled the Danish duck-down quilt around himself, and huffed and puffed, and made a determined effort to sleep.

  She’s dead, she’s gone, but you have to sleep. If you don’t sleep, you won’t be able to cope with the restaurant, and Waldo, and everybody else who’s depending on you.

  Soon the quilt grew impossibly hot, so he untwisted himself, and lay spread-eagled across the bed, feeling drunker than he had ever felt in his life. The mattress tilted and swam as if it were adrift off Point Loma. His whole head seemed to be filled with potentially explosive whisky fumes.

  ‘Celia?’ he said, knowing that she wasn’t there, but drunk enough to defy reality. ‘Celia, I love you, for Chrissake! Don’t you know that? Celia!’

  Celia didn’t answer, Celia was gone, burned in a carpark on Rosecrans Avenue. Tomorrow he would see her body for himself, and then maybe he would be able to accept it. He slept, with his mouth hanging open, and dreamed that he was arguing with his realtors. You said there was a conversation pit. This isn’t a conversation pit, it’s a grave. Then he dreamed about the restaurant kitchens. Louis was stirring the fish stock, oblivious to the giant lobsters that crawled and heaved and clattered around the floor, blue-black and glistening, slowly waving their claws at him. The swing doors swung. Ee-urk-ee-urk! There was somebody behind him, running away from him. He pushed his way into the corridor. The restaurant was blazing. All around him, naked women were running screaming in all directions, with their hair alight. Eeeeeeeeeee!!!!

  He opened his eyes. He was still drunk, but he was conscious that he had heard a noise. He lay still, tense, listening. A creak, a rustle, a hollow-cheeked whisper like the draught of a door opened, and then closed. He listened even more intently.

  Something dropped with a thud, and rolled. Then a drumming, tumbling noise. Lloyd swung his legs out of bed, and made his way unsteadily out of the bedroom door, jarring his shoulder painfully on the doorframe.

  Shit, that hurts. He may have said it out loud. He stopped, swayed, almost lost his balance, listened.

  The house was silent. But he was sure that he could feel something, feel somebody moving. He was sure that he could sense somebody breathing. He was supposed to be alone, wasn’t he, now that Celia had gone, and yet he was sure that he wasn’t.

  His next-door neighbour, Hal Pinkerton, had always nagged him about buying himself a gun. Now he wished very much that he had listened. He could imagine a six-foot sixteen-stone black junkie with sweaty muscles and a Rambo knife waiting for him in the living-room, next to the conversation-pit that was more like a grave.

  He patted the wall, searching for the lightswitch. He found it, and switched it on. He stood blinking at an empty living-room. Nobody there. Only the painted face of the Mexican woman, with her unbought lemons. Only rugs and floors and furniture.

  When he looked over toward the grand piano, however, he realized that something was different. All of the scrimshaw had disappeared. Twenty or thirty pieces of carved whale-ivory, which Celia had carefully and artistically arranged on the piano-lid. Now the top of the piano was completely bare.

  Lloyd went up to the piano and laid his hands flat on the lid. Cool and shiny and white as death. The Chinese always said that death was white. He looked around, but nothing else seemed to be missing. Who the hell would risk breaking into a house for the sake of a couple of dozen pieces of scrimshaw?

  He went through to the kitchen. The back door was wide open, and the cool night air was flowing in. He could smell the sea. Cautiously, he edged open one of the kitchen drawers and took out his largest Sabatier butcher-knife. He stepped out on to the back porch, bricks under bare feet, and strained his eyes in the darkness.

  He thought he glimpsed something, out by the avocado trees beyond the patio. Something that flickered quick and pale.

  There was no logical reason for it, but he was suddenly gripped with a terrible sense of dread.

  Don’t be ridiculous. Whoever it was, they’ve gone. Some spaced-out kid, most likely, looking for crack money.

  He called out, ‘Who’s there?’ But he didn’t really expect a reply. What was a burglar going to say? ‘It’s me, don’t worry. Just been doing a bit of burgling.’

  He thought he heard a faint rustling in the undergrowth by the back fence, but he couldn’t be sure.

  ‘You get this straight!’ he shouted, harshly. ‘You’d better not try breaking into this house again! Not if you want your goddamn head to stay on your goddamn shoulders! I’ve got the biggest goddamn shotgun you ever saw, and I’m not afraid to use it!’

  He waited for almost a minute, but there were no further noises; no indication that anybody was hiding behind the avocado trees or crouching in the bushes. Be serious, they’re probably halfway to Leucadia by now.

  He stepped back into the kitchen and closed the door. He was shivering a little; but not from the cold alone. It was then, turning around, that he realized the intruder had entered the house without forcing the door. There were no broken panes of glass, no screwdriver marks. He opened the door again, and there, still in the lock, was the spare key.

  The spare key which they always kept concealed deep in the soil of the Sicilian terracotta planter, on the opposite corner of the patio.

  The spare key which only he and Celia had known about.

  Christ, this is ridiculous. Somebody must have watched us putting it there. The Pinkertons’ gardener, maybe. He was always up on his stepladder, pruning the creeper. The pool cleaner. Or anybody. Or maybe it was one of those hiding places that dumb innocent householders thought was totally unfindable, but which an expert thief could locate in a matter of minutes.

  Celia was dead. Celia was never coming back. And in the morning, oh God, he would have to identify her body. He would have to confront her burned remains, and say, yes, this was the woman I loved. He had no idea what a burned body would look like, and he was terrified.

  He closed the door and locked it, tugging at the handle to make doubly sure. Then he walked back into the living-room, feeling parched and hungover and nauseous. He went across to the Spanish bureau and splashed out a huge glass of club soda, half of which he swallowed in three breathless gulps.

  While he was drinking, he happened to glance down at the floor behind one of the sofas. To his surprise, all of Celia’s scrimshaw was lying scattered on the carpet. It had been hidden from sight when he had first crossed the living-room on his way to the kitchen. But here it was, all of it, twenty or thirty pieces. That must have been the tumbling noise he had heard. It looked exactly as if somebody had cleared the whole lot off the top of the piano with one impatient sweep of their arm.

  Lloyd knelt down on the carpet and examined the pieces of ivory carefully, turning them over and over. Schooners, harbours, mermai
ds, storms at sea, all engraved in meticulous spidery detail. Why should anyone have wanted to throw all of this scrimshaw on to the floor? It didn’t make any kind of sense. Not unless the intruder had been totally crazy, or out of his brain on crack, or angry because he hadn’t been able to find anything particularly valuable—or at least anything that could be fenced for the price of a score.

  Lloyd stood up again. This was nuts. This was completely nuts. Then he caught sight of Celia’s most valuable piece, her 20,000-year-old piece of fossilized mammoth ivory, laid with obvious care on the seat of the couch.

  He slowly picked it up. He couldn’t understand this at all. What kind of housebreaker would have known that this one piece was worth twenty times the price of all the whale ivory arranged around it? How had he managed to pick it out from twenty or thirty others, in the dark? Even more to the point—if he had been able to pick it out, then he must have known what it was worth. So why hadn’t he slipped it into his pocket and taken it with him?

  Lloyd couldn’t begin to think of a logical answer. He was too hungover, too shocked, and he really didn’t want to think that the answer might not be logical at all.

  He sipped the rest of his club soda. Then he switched off the lights and stood in the dark for what seemed like an hour. Exhausted, haunted, and hopeless. Celia, he thought, or whispered, or both.

  He heard the Italian clock in the hallway prissily chiming three. Uno, duo, très. He took a last reluctant look around him and then he made his way back to bed. He fell backwards on to the quilt as if he been shot. Celia had always hated the way he did that.

  In his head he heard the words that Allen Ginsberg had written. You’re out, Death let you out, Death had the Mercy, you’re done with your century, done with God, done with the path thru it—Done with yourself at last—Pure—Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all, before the world . . .