The Reader Who Found an Author

"The most frightening thing in a monster's house is the discovery that he is lonely."

Highgrove in the second week of November was the color of an old tooth.

The beeches had dropped their leaves. They lay in thick brown drifts across the lawn and the gravel and the steps of the glass house, and no one had raked them, and the long black windows, which in October had been merely dirty, had gone gray with a film of rain and neglect. The graffiti on the gate had been scrubbed away, and painted over, and written again, in a different hand. THE SMALLEST MAN IN THE ROOM. Beneath it, in fresh red, someone had added: WE KNOW NOW.

Ethan parked beside the garage and sat for a minute with the engine off.

It was a flat, white, windless morning, and the first snow of the year was hanging in the sky like a held breath. Lauren sat beside him in the passenger seat with a file on her knee. In the back, Marianne Cole and a Connecticut state's attorney named Ruiz were talking in low voices about venue, and a stenographer, a young man with a cowlick and a nervous cough, was checking his machine. There were two patrol cars at the gate. A man with a long lens stood across the road in a field, under a tree, stamping his feet.

"You don't have to come in," said Lauren.

"I do, though."

"He'll be, Ethan, he's not the man you met."

"No." He put his hand on the door. "I'm not either."

…

The smell of the house had changed.

He had expected that. In October there had been nothing, a clean cold odor of bleach and glass, the odor of a room that has been scrubbed of everything that makes a person. Now, in the white tiled hall, he caught it at once: stale bread, stale tea, an unwashed man, a sweetish rot at the back of the throat like a basket of fruit forgotten in a closet. It was a human smell. It was a lonely man's smell. He was oddly, brutally moved by it.

It was the first time in all the weeks that the Nose had told him something he could bear.

Nothing here, he thought. Not one thread. He is only a sick man in a big house.

Oliver Strand was not there. The housekeeper was a stout young woman from the village who said her name was Dolly and that she came in on Tuesdays and Fridays and had been told not to speak to the press. She took their coats. She led them through the long cold dining room, past the empty walnut table, to a glass door that gave on the terrace, and there, on a wrought-iron chair with a blanket across his knees, in a patch of watery sun, with his back to them and his face to the bare lawn, sat Desmond Hale.

He did not turn when they came out.

"I've been expecting you," he said.

…

He was thinner. That was the first thing, and the least. The straw-colored hair had been cut by someone in a hurry, and the beard had been shaved off, unevenly, leaving a little red crescent under the jaw where the razor had slipped. He wore a gray cardigan too large for him and a pair of corduroy trousers, and on his feet were a pair of old felt slippers. His hands lay on the blanket. They were long and white and trembling, and he looked down at them from time to time, with a mild distaste, like a man looking at a pair of gloves he has been lent.

"Mr. Vance," he said. "And the Captain. How good of you."

His mother was in the doorway.

She had not been announced. She stood in a camel coat, straight and white-haired and elegantly composed, with one gloved hand on the frame, and her tea-brown eyes moved over each of them in turn with a slow cold thoroughness, like a woman counting spoons. Behind her stood Clifford Ames, in a gray suit, holding a briefcase against his chest.

"I will say at the outset," said Eleanor Hale, "that my son is unwell."

"Yes, ma'am," said Lauren.

"He has been under a physician's care since July. He has not been fit to give evidence in any matter, and Mr. Ames has advised me that anything he says today will be inadmissible." Her voice was lovely, low, and perfectly dry. "I have agreed to this meeting on the understanding that it is informal, and that it is brief."

"Mother," said Desmond.

"Yes, darling."

"I'd like you to go away."

There was a pause. The wind lifted a drift of leaves across the terrace with a faint dry scratching.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I would like you to go away, and take Clifford." He did not look round. "I'd like to talk to these people alone. I've decided. I've been sitting here for two weeks working it out, and I decided this morning, after Dolly gave me the toast." The ghost of a smile. "It's the first decision I've made on my own account since Easter. I should like you not to spoil it."

"Desmond, you are not in a position..."

"I'm in exactly the position I've always been in, Mother. I'm in a chair." He lifted a white hand, vaguely, and let it fall. "The difference is that now I can see what it's made of."

Eleanor Hale looked at him for a long moment. Something moved across the smooth elegant face, a flicker, a crack, a tightening round the mouth, and then it was gone, and she turned and walked back into the house with her gloved hand trailing along the wall. Ames hesitated. Then he followed.

The glass door closed behind them with a small soft click.

…

"Sit," said Hale. "Please. There's tea. Dolly makes a very bad cup, but it is hot."

They sat. Marianne Cole took out her pad. The stenographer set up his machine on a wrought-iron table and ran his fingers over the keys in a small rattling arpeggio. Ruiz stood against the glass with his arms folded. The man with the long lens in the field across the road had moved to a better tree.

"I'd like to begin," said Hale, "by asking Mr. Vance a question."

Ethan inclined his head.

"Did she say my name?"

It was said in an offhand tone. He was looking at the lawn. But the long white fingers had closed on the blanket, and Ethan, who had spent six years of his life learning to read the hands, saw the knuckles go the color of candle wax.

"Which time?"

"At the end. When they took her. When you, when the policewoman put the, the cuffs." He stopped. "Did she say anything about me? I should like to know. I've heard what she said to the press, that she's, that it was all, that I made her. I'd just like to be certain it was said."

"She didn't speak about you, Mr. Hale."

"Not once?"

"She spoke about a lamp."

The thin shoulders moved. "A lamp."

"The one in the Paris file. Green. On a cord." Ethan kept his voice level. "She'd been trying to give it back for nine weeks. She wanted to put it where it belonged, in the room, with the man who signed the receipt. She said that she had improved your story, and she wanted to see if she could make it true again."

"And could she?"

"I don't think so."

Hale was silent. The wind turned over a page of the stenographer's tape. A crow landed on the lawn, and walked a few paces, and flew off. When he spoke again his voice had dropped to a murmur, and it was an odd, awed, almost pleasant sound, the voice of a man who has been told the end of a long joke.

"She did it," he said.

"Mr. Hale..."

"She did it all. She did the, the thing. She finished it." He gave a thin, trembling laugh. "I wrote it, I put it in the book, I did it in my head ten thousand times, and I never once, I couldn't. I couldn't even carry the, I'd stand in the kitchen with the knife and my arm would, it wouldn't. I told her it was a, I told her it was a masterpiece. And all along, all along she was the only one among us who could actually..." He covered his mouth with his hand. "I made her a gift of the whole country, and she took it, and she did what I couldn't."

"That isn't a thing to be proud of," said Lauren.

"No. No, I know." He took his hand away. His eyes were wet. "It's a thing to be ashamed of. I'm ashamed. I think it's the first honest feeling I've had in seven years. I've been looking at it all morning. I'm so ashamed that I can hardly breathe." He gave a small, bewildered nod. "It's very strange. It's a good deal worse than being afraid."

…

He told them everything.

It took three hours. It was done in a low, steady, curiously courteous voice, with long pauses for tea. The stenographer's hands never stopped. Marianne Cole filled seven pages of the yellow pad. Ruiz uncrossed his arms, and crossed them again, and at last sat down on the cold stone, quite forgetting his dignity.

Hale told them about the file. He gave them the date on which his father's chief of staff had come to the house, a Mr. Pruitt, a brisk bald man in a bow tie, and sat in the library with a legal pad and said, We need a clerk. He gave them the name of the embassy man who had been paid, in three installments, to take a certain envelope out of a certain pouch: Philip Dane, a cultural attaché, now living in Lisbon. He gave the name of the account. He gave the name of the lawyer who had typed the receipt in advance of the plane. He said all of them as one lists the guests at a wedding, in order of precedence, with a faint regret.

He told them about the letters. He told them about the girl in Phoenix who had named her cat, and the man in Ohio who had sent a recipe, and the twenty-three names on the list in the locked drawer of his desk, which he had never opened and which his mother's lawyers had burned in August. He said that he had wanted them to come. He said that he had lit a candle in the window and sat down to wait. And that in all that time not one of them had come to the gate with flowers except one woman, in a gray Honda, in December, in a long black coat.

"I thought she was a reader," said Hale. "I thought she'd come to be told. And she sat there with that pencil, and she wrote it all down, and I thought, Here at last is a person who is going to see me." He smiled at the lawn. "And she did. That was the dreadful thing. She saw me better than anyone has ever done. She saw the whole of it, the smallness, the hunger, the, and she wrote it down so beautifully that I couldn't bear it. And I thought, Now I shall have to do something."

"You drugged her."

"Yes."

"You strapped her to a chair."

"Yes."

"You told her that you'd like to taste what they are."

"I did." He closed his eyes. "I was not going to. I want to say that. I want it on the record, young man with the machine, if you would. I was not going to. I'd have sat and talked, and she'd have talked, and in the end I'd have, I'd have failed. I'd have put the knife down, as I did the last time." His mouth trembled. "It was the thing in her voice that decided me. At the end. When she said, take someone else. It was so beautifully said. It was so, so accurate. I looked at her, and I thought: She is exactly like me. I thought: She would do it. I thought: I have found the one person alive who is as frightened as I am, and I cannot hurt her."

Nobody on the terrace spoke.

"That's why I let her go," said Desmond Hale. "I'd like that written down. It wasn't mercy. It was, I couldn't. It was recognition." And then, with the childlike candor that was the most terrible thing about him: "I think it is the only reason she is not in the ground at Highgrove. I think I saved her life by being a coward. And I think that she has never forgiven me."

…

At a quarter to three the snow began.

It came out of the white sky without a sound, large, wet, lazy flakes, and lay on the leaves and the terrace and the long black table through the glass. The stenographer had stopped. Marianne Cole was looking at her pad. Hale sat with the blanket drawn up to his chin and watched it falling, with his mouth a little open, like a child at a window.

"Mr. Vance," he said. "May I ask one more thing?"

"Yes."

"She told the police that it tasted of nothing. That's what I read. It was in the paper." The pale eyes turned to him. "Is it true?"

Ethan looked at his sister. She was looking at the snow.

"Yes," he said. "That's what she said."

"Ah."

The hands lay still on the blanket. For a long time the man in the chair said nothing at all. His face had lost its color, and then its expression, and then every remaining trace of the beautiful ruined performing mask, and what was left behind it was only a thin, plain, middle-aged face, with a cut under the jaw, that looked a good deal like his mother's.

"I knew," said Hale.

"Knew what?"

"That it was nothing. I've always known." He said it very softly. "I told her it tasted of silence. It was the only thing I could think of that couldn't be tested. Do you see? If I'd said it tasted of chicken, or beef, or fear, she would have known. She'd have laughed. She'd have put it in a footnote." A faint, dreadful smile. "But silence! Silence is what you call a thing you cannot say you did not feel."

The snow went on. A flake touched the glass and slid.

"I told her the most beautiful lie I had," said Desmond Hale. "And she believed it. She believed it so entirely that she went and checked." He looked at his hands. "No one has ever before taken me so seriously."

He began, quietly, to laugh. Then to weep. And Ethan, who had come into that house in October with a speech prepared, a cold clean professional speech, in which every sentence ended in the word responsible, sat in the wrought-iron chair among the falling flakes with his hands between his knees and discovered, to his own dismay, that he had nothing at all to say.

He thought of a girl on a sofa, with a braid, typing, typing, in the light of a green lamp.

Nothing has been cut, she had written.

He took off his scarf, and, because the man was shivering, put it round his shoulders.