A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [52]
Footsteps – shy, suspicious, shying away from opening the door. And then the latch released.
“What the hell’s going on? Who –? Well, for Christ’s sake. Pardon my French. It’s you, Rachel.”
Hector squints around the edge of the door, and all I see of him is an anxious green eye and a pate like a pink stone, smoothly bare and vein-mottled. Then he opens the door and stands there in dubious welcome, a short rotund man in brown wrinkled trousers and shirt sleeves and indigo braces with brass adjusters.
“Can I help you?” he says, not meaning it, only unconsciously reverting to his coffin-side manner, a blend of dignity and joviality.
He’s wondering what I’m doing here, and now the notion occurs to me – maybe he thinks I’ve long admired him from afar and now at last have gone berserk enough to declare my burning spinster passion. I can hardly stop myself from laughing out loud. Hush, Rachel. Steady.
“It’s a crazy time of night to come down, Hector, but I’ve been so worried lately – about Mother – and I couldn’t sleep, and I saw your lights on, and –”
My voice ends, and I’m standing here, tall as a shadow, transparent, shivering. Then I don’t care. Only one thing matters. Let me come in.
“Let me come in.”
That was my voice? That pridelessness? It doesn’t matter. Suddenly it doesn’t matter at all to me.
Hector Jonas looks puzzled only for an instant. Then, with some decision to accept without question, some exercise of faith, he smiles as though everything were ordinary.
“Sure. I know just what you mean. I’ve had insomnia myself the odd time. It’s murder. Come on in. I don’t believe you’ve seen the Chapel since I did the last renovations, have you, Rachel?”
“No. I haven’t. I don’t think I’ve been in here since – oh, for a long time.”
“Show you later,” Hector says. “Come in here for right now. You look kind of peaky. I think you need a drink.”
The sign on the door says Private. The work-room. Now utterly changed since Niall Cameron’s day, when the green and blue glass bottles stood hunched together, unsorted and dis orderly on the long cabinet, when the dust furred the corners and windowsills, and when the book stood just there, among the cluttered paraphernalia and the cosmetics of death, a drab olive leather with the scarlet letter A, but in this case meaning Accounts, like the roll of Judgement. How can I remember? I couldn’t have been in here more than a couple of times in my entire life. He always said, when I hovered, “This is no place for you.” And I imagined then that it was the efficacy of the dead he feared for me, not knowing in what way they might grasp and hold me, and I wondered how he himself could stay among them, by what power, and I feared for him, too. For a long time, whenever she said “Your father’s not feeling well,” I thought that was why – because he’d caught something, a partial death, like a germ, from them.
Now the place looks like a portion of a hospital. Glassed-in cases where the neat potions rest, and cabinets with the dull clean glow of stainless steel. On the one wall, a jazzy coat-rack arrangement, black metal tipped with plastic bulbs of red and yellow and blue. Two white doctor-jackets are hanging there, so that Hector can perform this aspect of his duties in a sanitary way.
“Here –” he hands me the glass of rye and water, and beckons me to a chair, the only one.
“Where’ll you sit, though, Hector?”
“Oh, I’ll just perch here,” he says, going to the long high table, like an operating table, which stands in the middle of the room. He hops up like a dwarf, a kick of his short legs, and then he’s sitting there, his eyes owling down at me.
“What’s the trouble, Rachel? Anything I can do?”
“Oh no – it’s nothing, really. I suppose I’ve been under a kind of strain at school. And Mother’s health, you know –”
“Mm,” he says, as though he disbelieves every word I’ve said.
“Tell me about the business, Hector.