The New Republic. Lionel Shriver

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      Ninety-Nine Push-Ups and Cloudberry Shampoo

      At a pat on his shoulder, Edgar jolted upright. Nicola laughed. “You look like a vento head!” she teased. “Can I drive you home?”

      Unchivalrously, he accepted the lift. After Nicola went up to fetch her car keys, she met Edgar in the foyer with a significant glance. “Before I forget.” From the folds of her cloak, she withdrew an oversize brass skeleton key, its head cast with runes, as if it might open a chest of gold doubloons or a secret medieval torture chamber. The key was heavy, with a smaller, modern key attached, and so made quite a clatter when she dropped it on the flagstones. As she dived to scoop it up, Henry was walking up the stairs.

      “No, let me,” said Edgar, lunging for the set. “My keys,” he said to Henry, “from the Record. Dropped them. Clumsy of me. Must be tired.”

      Henry blinked. The key was distinctive. Something didn’t quite compute. Still Nicola looked, though whiter by a shade, relieved.

      “That was quick thinking, in the foyer,” said Nicola, as they pulled off in her Land Rover. “Thanks.”

      “You may be a dandy rug weaver,” said Edgar. “But when it comes to the art of deception, you suck.”

      She smiled, tightly. “I’m not sure if I should be offended by that, or not.”

      Edgar delivered a few slash-slash assessments of her other guests, but Nicola didn’t pick up, and Edgar feared that he’d just queered the goodwill of one of those if-you-can’t-say-anything-nice types.

      “I’m sorry that your new home won’t have been tidied,” she said. “It was left more or less au naturel. Not that Barrington was a slob—I mean, he was, but after these big, impromptu dos of his a few guests were always eager to stay and clear up. Some nights—mornings, rather—they actually fought over the Hoover. I dare say there were certain young ladies who’d have scoured his toilet bowl with their own toothbrushes.”

      “No, the real test,” Edgar mumbled, “is whether they’d use them after.”

      “Funny, some people go missing for weeks, and no one notices until a frightful smell starts leaking from their flats. But the alarm went out about Barrington in a matter of hours. He was meant to dine at Trudy’s that night. She’d made beef Wellington, of all things, an all-day-in-the-kitchen affair that Barrington had once mentioned in passing that he fancied. Foie gras, wild mushrooms, goodness knows what else. She insisted on making the puff pastry from scratch; the leaves came out a bit thick. Me, I find it’s often the simplest … Oh, never mind.

      “He was always late, of course, but he’d usually make an appearance. I’m afraid that Trudy’s having gone to so much bother would count for all too little, but there’s not that much to do here, and the rest of us were all at Trudy’s.”

      “More to the point, you were at Trudy’s.”

      Nicola ignored the insinuation. “By two a.m. she was hysterical. We all thought she was overreacting, upset about having made rather a hash of the beef (not to be unkind, but it came out a tad well-done, and there was no disguising that cutting the crust was hard work). We thought she was hurt that after all her talking up the dish he’d made other plans. The dear girl has made great capital since from her intuition that something ghastly was wrong. How she felt ‘a wash of cold air’ and ‘suddenly Cinzeiro felt empty.’ She claims she’ll never again eat beef Wellington—which she insists on calling ‘beef Barrington’ in tribute. Well. Not much danger, in Barba.

      “I’ve only been back to Barrington’s once,” she continued. “And please don’t mention it to Henry. But I simply couldn’t bear the idea of the police smashing that lovely cedar door with a battering ram. So when Barrington became an official missing person, I rang the chief inspector and arranged to let him in.

      “The detectives went through everything,” she explained. “All they found was some gibberish on Barrington’s computer disks. Nonsense, according to Lieutenant de Carvalho. There was only one part of the house I steered the police away from. A small tower; they never noticed the door. You’ve the key to its padlock. But Barrington told me not to go up there. So I haven’t.”

      “Even Bluebeard’s wives didn’t play along with that shit,” Edgar slurred. “You always so obedient?”

      “When I make a promise.”

      Including to your husband? “What do you think’s up there, then? Bodies?”

      “Maybe one. That’s the only place we haven’t checked for Barrington. But on the off chance … I guess I didn’t want to know.”

      She pulled up to a long dark hulk and sat, with the Land Rover idling, hands in her lap. Though the villa was virtually invisible, she closed her eyes, as if for good measure. “It does light up,” she said dismally, all but spelling out: Though only when a certain someone was inside.

      Edgar fumbled his good-byes and trundled with his bags to the dim front porch. The lock responded gladly to his skeleton key. Pushed by the Barban gale, the thick cedar door opened by itself, as if Edgar were expected.

      After groping for a light switch, he had a vague, cockeyed impression of having infiltrated a deserted sheikdom. He bumbled upstairs to a king-size four-poster. An ironing board would have sufficed. Having dragged off his clothes, he plunged into a small death.

      Edgar woke between royal blue satin sheets, under billows of goose-down duvets. Pillows buttressed his every side, as if he were packed for overseas shipping. Opposite, lemony late-day sunlight filtered between shifting drapes of crimson velvet, and upper panes of leaded stained glass dolloped red and green lollipops onto the bed. A sole reminder of where he was, a high hissing whistle sang through the window cracks. Panes rattled as if o vento insano were rapping to get in, and a faint, low-pitched moan groaned outside.

      According to his diving watch—in his freelance poverty so discordantly showy, yet in the context of his immediate surroundings a dime-store trinket—he’d slept fifteen hours.

      Edgar propped on the springy pillows, which puffed cool air onto his cheek at every readjustment. This was indeed a master bedroom. Laid with overlapping Oriental carpets, the floor was elevated a step under the bed. Raising the four-poster into a throne of repose, the dais made fifteen hours’ sleep seem his due. Edgar could easily see settling here for days at a time amid splayed half-read books, occasionally granting an audience or tinkling a clear brass bell for breakfast service. The image of broad trays (carved camphor wood, Edgar decided, with ivory handles) hovered over both tall side tables. Spread with embroidered cloths, they’d be littered with goblets of guava juice, crumbs of honeyed pastries, ornate cups of thick, sweet coffee, and filigreed silver spoons.

      Disquieted, Edgar disentangled himself. He disapproved of sloth, and had a positive horror of honeyed pastries. The bedding was contaminated with another man’s fantasy life.

      Edgar padded gingerly around the room, as if afraid to wake someone up—like himself. More crimson velvet canopied the bed, and velvet drapes hung on rings from the frame’s upper rail. The curtains could be pulled all the way around the mattress to make a private tent. The fragrant dark cherries and rosewoods of the massive furniture were carved into busty prows of women or tumbles of ripe fruit; the bureau shimmered with mother-of-pearl inlays. A mosaic of colored glass beads framing the mirror threw highlights on Edgar’s naked figure, СКАЧАТЬ