I AM SORRY?
“You can come into the house, if you like. For the evening. Not for the night, of course, I mean, I don’t like to think of you all alone out here of an evening, when I’ve got a fire and everything.”
Bill Door was no good at reading faces. It was a
skill he’d never needed. He stared at Miss Flitworth’s frozen, worried, pleading smile like a baboon looking for meaning in the Rosetta Stone.
THANK YOU, he said.
She scuttled off.
When he arrived at the house she wasn’t in the kitchen. He followed a rustling, scraping noise out into a narrow hallway and through a low doorway. Miss Flitworth was down on her hands and knees in the little room beyond, feverishly lighting the fire.
She looked up, flustered, when he rapped politely on the open door.
“Hardly worth putting a match to it for one,” she mumbled, by way of embarrassed explanation. “Sit down. I’ll make us some tea.”
Bill Door folded himself into one of the narrow chairs by the fire, and looked around the room.
It was an unusual room. Whatever its functions were, being lived in wasn’t apparently one of them. Whereas the kitchen was a sort of roofed-over outside space and the hub of the farm’s activities, this room resembled nothing so much as a mausoleum.
Contrary to general belief, Bill Door wasn’t very familiar with funereal decor. Deaths didn’t normally take place in tombs, except in rare and unfortunate cases. The open air, the bottoms of rivers, halfway down sharks, any amount of bedrooms, yes—tombs, no.
His business was the separation of the wheat-germ of the soul from the chaff of the mortal body, and that was usually concluded long before any of the rites associated with, when you got right down to it, a reverential form of garbage disposal.
But this room looked like the tombs of those kings who wanted to take it all with them.
Bill Door sat with his hands on his knees, looking around.
First, there were the ornaments. More teapots than one might think possible. China dogs with staring eyes. Strange cake stands. Miscellaneous statues and painted plates with cheery little messages on them: A Present from Quirm, Long Life and Happiness. They covered every flat surface in a state of total democracy, so that a rather valuable antique silver candlestick was next to a bright colored china dog with a bone in its mouth and an expression of culpable idiocy.
Pictures hid the walls. Most of them were painted in shades of mud and showed depressed cattle standing on wet moorland in a fog.
In fact the ornaments almost concealed the furniture, but this was no loss. Apart from two chairs groaning under the weight of accumulated antimacassars, the rest of the furniture seemed to have no use whatsoever apart from supporting ornaments. There were spindly tables everywhere. The floor was layered in rag rugs. Someone had really liked making rag rugs. And, above all, and around all, and permeating all, was the smell.
It smelled of long, dull afternoons.
On a cloth-draped sideboard were two small wooden chests flanking a larger one. They must be the famous boxes full of treasure, he thought.
He became aware of ticking.
There was a clock on the wall. Someone had once had what they must have thought was the jolly idea of making a clock like an owl. When the pendulum swung, the owl’s eyes went backward and forward in what the seriously starved of entertainment probably imagined was a humorous way. After a while, your own eyes started to oscillate in sympathy.
Miss Flitworth bustled in with a loaded tray. There was a blur of activity as she performed the alchemical ceremony of making tea, buttering scones, arranging biscuits, hooking sugar tongs on the basin…
She sat back. Then, as if she had been in a state of repose for twenty minutes, she trilled slightly breathlessly: “Well…isn’t this nice.”
YES, MISS FLITWORTH.
“Don’t often have occasion to open up the parlor these days.”
NO.
“Not since I lost my dad.”
For a moment Bill Door wondered if she’d lost the late Mr. Flitworth in the parlor. Perhaps he’d taken a wrong turning among the ornaments. Then he recalled the funny little ways humans put things.
AH.