The Specialty of the House Read online

  For that single moment Miles understood everything. He had been here before. He had lived this hour a thousand times before, and would live it again and again for all eternity. The curtain was falling now, but when it rose again the stage would be set once more for the house party. Because he was in Hell, and the most terrible thing of all, the terror which submerged all others, was this moment of understanding given him so that he could know this, and could see himself crawling the infinite treadmill of his doom. Then the darkness closed in with a rush, blotting out all understanding – until next time …

  ‘He’s coming around,’ said the voice.

  He was falling. His hands were outflung …

  The Moment of Decision

  Hugh Lozier was the exception to the rule that people who are completely sure of themselves cannot be likeable. We have all met the sure ones, of course – those controlled but penetrating voices which cut through all others in a discussion, those hard forefingers jabbing home opinions on your chest, those living Final Words on all issues – and I imagine we all share the same amalgam of dislike and envy for them. Dislike, because no one likes to be shouted down or prodded in the chest, and envy, because everyone wishes he himself were so rich in self-assurance that he could do the shouting down and the prodding.

  For myself, since my work took me regularly to certain places in this atomic world where the only state was confusion and the only steady employment that of splitting political hairs, I found absolute judgments harder and harder to come by. Hugh once observed of this that it was a good thing my superiors in the Department were not cut of the same cloth, because God knows what would happen to the country then. I didn’t relish that, but – and there was my curse again – I had to grant him his right to say it.

  Despite this, and despite the fact that Hugh was my brother-in-law – a curious relationship, when you come to think of it – I liked him immensely, just as everyone else did who knew him. He was a big, good-looking man, with clear blue eyes in a ruddy face, and with a quick, outgoing nature eager to appreciate whatever you had to offer. He was overwhelmingly generous, and his generosity was of that rare and excellent kind which makes you feel as if you are doing the donor a favor by accepting it.

  I wouldn’t say he had any great sense of humor, but plain good humor can sometimes be an adequate substitute for that, and in Hugh’s case it was. His stormy side was largely reserved for those times when he thought you might have needed his help in something and failed to call on him for it. Which meant that ten minutes after Hugh had met you and liked you, you were expected to ask him for anything he might be able to offer. A month or so after he married my sister Elizabeth she mentioned to him my avid interest in a fine Copley he had hanging in his gallery at Hilltop, and I can still vividly recall my horror when it suddenly arrived, heavily crated and with his gift card attached, at my barren room-and-a-half. It took considerable effort, but I finally managed to return it to him by forgoing the argument that the picture was undoubtedly worth more than the entire building in which I lived and by complaining that it simply didn’t show to advantage on my wall. I think he suspected I was lying, but being Hugh he would never dream of charging me with that in so many words.

  Of course, Hilltop and the two hundred years of Lozier tradition that went into it did much to shape Hugh this way. The first Loziers had carved the estate from the heights overlooking the river, had worked hard and flourished exceedingly; its successive generations had invested their income so wisely that money and position eventually erected a towering wall between Hilltop and the world outside. Truth to tell, Hugh was very much a man of the eighteenth century who somehow found himself in the twentieth, and simply made the best of it.

  Hilltop itself was almost a replica of the celebrated, but long untenanted, Dane house nearby, and was striking enough to open anybody’s eyes at a glance. The house was weathered stone, graceful despite its bulk, and the vast lawns reaching to the river’s edge were tended with such fanatic devotion over the years that they had become carpets of purest green which magically changed luster under any breeze. Gardens ranged from the other side of the house down to the groves which half hid the stables and outbuildings, and past the far side of the groves ran the narrow road which led to town. The road was a courtesy road, each estate holder along it maintaining his share, and I think it safe to say that for all the crushed rock he laid in it Hugh made less use of it by far than any of his neighbors.

  Hugh’s life was bound up in Hilltop; he could be made to leave it only by dire necessity; and if you did meet him away from it you were made acutely aware that he was counting off the minutes until he could return. And if you weren’t wary you would more than likely find yourself going along with him when he did return, and totally unable to tear yourself away from the place while the precious weeks rolled by. I know. I believe I spent more time at Hilltop than at my own apartment after my sister brought Hugh into the family.

  At one time I wondered how Elizabeth took to this marriage, considering that before she met Hugh she had been as restless and flighty as she was pretty. When I put the question to her directly, she said, ‘It’s wonderful, darling. Just as wonderful as I knew it would be when I first met him.’

  It turned out that their first meeting had taken place at an art exhibition, a showing of some ultramodern stuff, and she had been intently studying one of the more bewildering concoctions on display when she became aware of this tall, good-looking man staring at her. And, as she put it, she had been about to set him properly in his place when he said abruptly, ‘Are you admiring that?’

  This was so unlike what she had expected that she was taken completely aback. ‘I don’t know,’ she said weakly. ‘Am I supposed to?’

  ‘No,’ said the stranger, ‘it’s damned nonsense. Come along now, and I’ll show you something which isn’t a waste of time.’

  ‘And,’ Elizabeth said to me, ‘I came along like a pup at his heels, while he marched up and down and told me what was good and what was bad, and in a good loud voice, so that we collected quite a crowd along the way. Can you picture it, darling?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can.’ By now I had shared similar occasions with Hugh, and learned at firsthand that nothing could dent his cast-iron assurance.

  ‘Well,’ Elizabeth went on, ‘I must admit that at first I was a little put off, but then I began to see that he knew exactly what he was talking about, and that he was terribly sincere. Not a bit self-conscious about anything, but just eager for me to understand things the way he did. It’s the same way with everything. Everybody else in the world is always fumbling and bumbling over deciding anything – what to order for dinner, or how to manage his job, or whom to vote for – but Hugh always knows. It’s not knowing that makes for all those nerves and complexes and things you hear about it, isn’t that so? Well, I’ll take Hugh, thank you, and leave everyone else to the psychiatrists.’

  So there it was. An Eden with flawless lawns and no awful nerves and complexes, and not even the glimmer of a serpent in the offing. That is, not a glimmer until the day Raymond made his entrance on the scene.

  We were out on the terrace that day, Hugh and Elizabeth and I, slowly being melted into a sort of liquid torpor by the August sunshine, and all of us too far gone to make even a pretence at talk. I lay there with a linen cap over my face, listening to the summer noises around me and being perfectly happy.

  There was the low, steady hiss of the breeze through the aspens nearby, the plash and drip of oars on the river below, and now and then the melancholy tink-tunk of a sheep bell from one of the flock on the lawn. The flock was a fancy of Hugh’s. He swore that nothing was better for a lawn than a few sheep grazing on it, and every summer five or six fat and sleepy ewes were turned out on the grass to serve this purpose and to add a pleasantly pastoral note to the view.

  My first warning of something amiss came from the sheep – from the sudden sound of their bells clanging wildly and then a baa-ing which suggest
ed an assault by a whole pack of wolves. I heard Hugh say, ‘Damn!’ loudly and angrily, and I opened my eyes to see something more incongruous than wolves. It was a large black poodle in the full glory of a clownish haircut, a bright red collar, and an ecstasy of high spirits as he chased the frightened sheep around the lawn. It was clear the poodle had no intention of hurting them – he probably found them the most wonderful playmates imaginable – but it was just as clear that the panicky ewes didn’t understand this, and would very likely end up in the river before the fun was over.

  In the bare second it took me to see all this, Hugh had already leaped the low terrace wall and was among the sheep, herding them away from the water’s edge, and shouting commands at the dog who had different ideas.

  ‘Down, boy!’ he yelled. ‘Down!’ And then as he would to one of his own hounds, he sternly commanded, ‘Heel!’

  He would have done better, I thought, to have picked up a stick or stone and made a threatening gesture, since the poodle paid no attention to Hugh’s words. Instead, continuing to bark happily, the poodle made for the sheep again, this time with Hugh in futile pursuit. An instant later the dog was frozen into immobility by a voice from among the aspens near the edge of the lawn.

  ‘Assieds!’ the voice called breathlessly. ‘Assieds-toi!’

  Then the man appeared, a small, dapper figure trotting across the grass. Hugh stood waiting, his face darkening as we watched.

  Elizabeth squeezed my arm. ‘Let’s get down there,’ she whispered. ‘Hugh doesn’t like being made a fool of.’

  We got there in time to hear Hugh open his big guns. ‘Any man,’ he was saying, ‘who doesn’t know how to train an animal to its place shouldn’t own one.’

  The man’s face was all polite attention. It was a good face, thin and intelligent, and webbed with tiny lines at the corners of the eyes. There was also something behind those eyes that couldn’t quite be masked. A gentle mockery. A glint of wry perception turned on the world like a camera lens. It was nothing anyone like Hugh would have noticed, but it was there all the same, and I found myself warming to it on the spot. There was also something tantalizingly familiar about the newcomer’s face, his high forehead, and his thinning grey hair, but much as I dug into my memory during Hugh’s long and solemn lecture I couldn’t come up with an answer. The lecture ended with a few remarks on the best methods of dog training, and by then it was clear that Hugh was working himself into a mood of forgiveness.

  ‘As long as there’s no harm done—’ he said.

  The man nodded soberly. ‘Still, to get off on the wrong foot with one’s new neighbors—’

  Hugh looked startled. ‘Neighbors?’ he said almost rudely. ‘You mean that you live around here?’

  The man waved toward the aspens. ‘On the other side of those woods.’

  ‘The Dane house?’ The Dane house was almost as sacred to Hugh as Hilltop, and he had once explained to me that if he were ever offered a chance to buy the place he would snap it up. His tone now was not so much wounded as incredulous. ‘I don’t believe it!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the man assured him, ‘the Dane house. I performed there at a party many years ago, and always hoped that some day I might own it.’

  It was the word performed which gave me my clue – that and the accent barely perceptible under the precise English. He had been born and raised in Marseilles – that would explain the accent – and long before my time he had already become a legend.

  ‘You’re Raymond, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘Charles Raymond.’

  ‘I prefer Raymond alone.’ He smiled in deprecation of his own small vanity. ‘And I am flattered that you recognize me.’

  I don’t believe he really was. Raymond the Magician, Raymond the Great, would, if anything, expect to be recognized wherever he went. As the master of sleight of hand who had paled Thurston’s star, as the escape artist who had almost outshone Houdini, Raymond would not be inclined to underestimate himself.

  He had started with the standard box of tricks which makes up the repertoire of most professional magicians; he had gone far beyond that to those feats of escape which, I suppose, are known to us all by now. The lead casket sealed under a foot of lake ice, the welded-steel strait jackets, the vaults of the Bank of England, the exquisite suicide knot which nooses throat and doubles legs together so that the motion of a leg draws the noose tighter and tighter around the throat – all these Raymond had known and escaped from. And then at the pinnacle of fame he had dropped from sight and his name had become relegated to the past.

  When I asked him why, he shrugged.

  ‘A man works for money or for the love of his work. If he has all the wealth he needs and has no more love for his work, why go on?’

  ‘But to give up a great career—’ I protested.

  ‘It was enough to know that the house was waiting here.’

  ‘You mean,’ Elizabeth said, ‘that you never intended to live any place but here?’

  ‘Never – not once in all these years.’ He laid a finger along his nose and winked broadly at us. ‘Of course, I made no secret of this to the Dane estate, and when the time came to sell I was the first and only one approached.’

  ‘You don’t give up an idea easily,’ Hugh said in an edged voice.

  Raymond laughed. ‘Idea? It became an obsession really. Over the years I traveled to many parts of the world, but no matter how fine the place, I knew it could not be as fine as that house on the edge of the woods there, with the river at its feet and the hills beyond. Someday, I would tell myself, when my travels are done I will come here, and, like Candide, cultivate my garden.’

  He ran his hand abstractedly over the poodle’s head and looked around with an air of great satisfaction. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘here I am.’

  Here he was, indeed, and it quickly became clear that his arrival was working a change on Hilltop. Or, since Hilltop was so completely a reflection of Hugh, it was clear that a change was being worked on Hugh. He became irritable and restless, and more aggressively sure of himself than ever. The warmth and good nature were still there – they were as much part of him as his arrogance – but he now had to work a little harder at them. He reminded me of a man who is bothered by a speck in the eye, but can’t find it, and must get along with it as best he can.

  Raymond, of course, was the speck, and I got the impression at times that he rather enjoyed the role. It would have been easy enough for him to stay close to his own house and cultivate his garden, or paste up his album, or whatever retired performers do, but he evidently found that impossible. He had a way of drifting over to Hilltop at odd times, just as Hugh was led to find his way to the Dane house and spend long and troublesome sessions there.

  Both of them must have known that they were so badly suited to each other that the easy and logical solution would have been to stay apart. But they had the affinity of negative and positive forces, and when they were in a room together the crackling of the antagonistic current between them was so strong you could almost see it in the air.

  Any subject became a point of contention for them, and they would duel over it bitterly: Hugh armored and weaponed with his massive assurance, Raymond flicking away with a rapier, trying to find a chink in the armor. I think that what annoyed Raymond most was the discovery that there was no chink in the armor. As someone with an obvious passion for searching out all sides to all questions and for going deep into motives and causes, he was continually being outraged by Hugh’s single-minded way of laying down the law.

  He didn’t hesitate to let Hugh know that. ‘You are positively medieval,’ he said. ‘And of all things men should have learned since that time, the biggest is that there are no easy answers, no solutions one can give with a snap of the fingers. I can only hope for you that some day you may be faced with the perfect dilemma, the unanswerable question. You would find that a revelation. You would learn more in that minute than you dreamed possible.’

  And Hugh did not
make matters any better when he coldly answered: ‘And I say, that for any man with a brain and the courage to use it there is no such thing as a perfect dilemma.’

  It may be that this was the sort of episode that led to the trouble that followed, or it may be that Raymond acted out of the most innocent and esthetic motives possible. But, whatever the motives, the results were inevitable and dangerous.

  They grew from the project Raymond outlined for us in great detail one afternoon. Now that he was living in the Dane house he had discovered that it was too big, too overwhelming. ‘Like a museum,’ he explained. ‘I find myself wandering through it like a lost soul through endless galleries.’

  The grounds also needed landscaping. The ancient trees were handsome, but, as Raymond put it, there were just too many of them. ‘Literally,’ he said, ‘I cannot see the river for the trees, and I am one devoted to the sight of running water.’

  Altogether there would be drastic changes. Two wings of the house would come down, the trees would be cleared away to make a broad aisle to the water, the whole place would be enlivened. It would no longer be a museum, but the perfect home he had envisioned over the years.

  At the start of the recitative Hugh was slouched comfortably in his chair. Then as Raymond drew the vivid picture of what was to be, Hugh sat up straighter and straighter until he was as rigid as a trooper in the saddle. His lips compressed. His face became blood-red. His hands clenched and unclenched in a slow, deadly rhythm. Only a miracle was restraining him from an open outburst, but it was not the kind of miracle to last. I saw from Elizabeth’s expression that she understood this, too, but was as helpless as I to do anything about it. And when Raymond, after painting the last glowing strokes of his description, said complacently, ‘Well, now, what do you think?’ there was no holding Hugh.

  He leaned forward with deliberation and said, ‘Do you really want to know what I think?’