Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [120]
We drank rather a lot that evening, between the martinis, the wine Flo had brought for our picnic dinner, and a bottle of very old brandy from the hidden store-room. We drank and we laughed and we listened to the music of another generation, Flo and I taking turns dancing with Donny on the uneven stones of the terrace. When it was dark, we placed candles in the three tarnished candelabras and ate our picnic on the lawn. The night was so still that the candle flames scarcely moved, and the occasional moth drawn by the light was soon extinguished. Afterwards, we returned to the terrace, where Flo and Donny danced in and out of the light. They found a tango, a dance that had been new and racy during my family's last two summers here, and set about it with great seriousness that soon gave way to laughter. I realised that I was rather drunk and very tired, and that before too long I would become maudlin; to top it off, we hadn't made up the beds.
With a sigh, I put down my glass and went to see about sheets and things, only to find that the ever-efficient Mrs Gordimer had made up every bed in the place except that of my parents' room. I took my own childhood room, not even seeing the walls or tables, simply divesting myself of spectacles and shoes and tumbling in between the sheets, there to weave gently to and fro on a sinking ship into the depths of unconsciousness.
And struggled up from the dark comfort of sleep at the sound of a voice.
“Huh?” I asked sensibly.
“I said,” came Flo's voice, “do you want a sleeping draught?”
“No, thanks,” I told her, and put my head down again.
I came awake again in the quiet hour before dawn, when a faint light brought shape to the undrawn curtains. As my mind returned to me through the fog of the previous night's drink and the deepest night's sleep I'd had in ages, three thoughts came with it.
The first was that the years spanning the ages of fourteen and twenty-four were long indeed. In my case, they had been longer than for most people: Very little remained of the girl whose hair-brush lay on the table, whose books inhabited the shelves.
The second came, wryly, as, “And being the married matron here, I was supposed to act as chaperone.” I had no idea where Flo and Donny ended up, and frankly had no intention of looking into the matter.
Last was the thought that had me sitting up in bed and patting along the bed-side table for my spectacles: hidden room.
I had searched every inch of the Pacific Heights house on Saturday and found nothing there that joined up with the third of my dreams, the dream of walking through a house and showing its rooms to my friends, all the while aware of the key in my pocket, the key to a hidden apartment. I had searched my family house both literally and figuratively, looking for an actual, physical concealed hideaway or even a place that possessed the same sensation of secret and personal knowledge, and found neither. My father's library had contained the closest facsimile of that sensation, but when I folded myself up beneath his desk (abashedly, checking first that the door was bolted) and curled my legs to my chest, it had not been the same.
But the casual expertise with which I had reached for, then worked, the hidden-door mechanism off the kitchen—even though I could not remember ever being allowed to work it myself as a child—had contained precisely that blend of the hidden and the known, the important buried within the everyday. I wanted to see that room again, now.
Once upright, I discovered that not only was I unsteady, but I was dressed in the same crumpled trousers and shirt I had worn from the city the day before. I cast the garments off and took my childish bath-robe from the wardrobe, thinking to slip out to the motor and retrieve my possessions, but one step outside my door and I nearly went sprawling over the valise. With a silent word of thanks to the hard-headed Donny, I carried it inside, scrubbed myself with a cold cloth in the bedroom's flowered basin, and dressed in warm