Cody was small. With my big hands I was easily able to pinch his windpipe between finger and thumb, the means by which I pushed him back against the table. When I had him there, I held him by the throat as I tied him to the slanting wood and I didn’t care if the cords cut him. He cared, though, squealing like a puppy.
“What are you doing?”
“You mean you don’t know?” I asked. “Be patient, Ray, be patient.”
Am I that cruel? I must be, mustn’t I? Or was it simply that thirteen years of pain and loss and worry came flowing out of me like molten fire? Either way, I can’t be proud of it—and I’m not. I hope you find some comfort in that.
When I had him tied, I ripped open his shirt. I’d allowed him to keep on his coat for no particular reason; I didn’t care, provided I could get to some expanse of bare flesh, and now I had his chest exposed to me.
On the floor, I spread my tools—pliers, bradawl, wrench. He started to weep.
“Ben, don’t. Ben, don’t hurt me, Jesus’ sake, Ben, don’t. Ben, please.”
Pliers in hand, I stood in front of him and inspected his chest—so scrawny that finding loose flesh might prove difficult. I found a patch, above his left nipple, took it between the jaws of the pliers, and twisted. He almost lifted the table off the ground, so hard did he squirm. And he almost blew my left eardrum, so loud did he shriek. I twisted the flesh above the right nipple much harder. Then I stopped and stood back.
“I will now do the same to every loose piece of flesh, tissue, or muscle in your body,” I said.
“Why, why?” He could scarcely get the words out.
“If you ask me why again, I’ll start on your eyes earlier than I intended.”
“I didn’t touch her, I didn’t touch her.”
“So you do know why you’re here?”
“Two fellas came in a truck. We all had to hurry, people nearly saw us.”
I said, “How did you do it?”
“They had a shotgun. Old Kelly’s shotgun.”
I said, “King Kelly’s gun?”—meaning Venetia’s grandfather.
“Yes, I had to take it back to him.”
“Where did you bury her?”
“What? What d’you mean?”
This time I caught the flesh where it wrinkled next to his armpit and I twisted very hard and very fast.
“Don’t ask stupid questions.”
“She was never buried.”
So I moved to the other armpit; he shrieked again. By now he was losing control of his body—and I had scarcely begun.
“She never died, Ben. We didn’t harm her. We didn’t, we didn’t.”
I stopped. It hit me like a blow. For all my hopes, I had believed her dead. In all the searching, and the digging in forests, and the endless questions, and the resisted mournings, and the volatile hopes—I had lived in the belief that they’d killed her, even though I fought it and fought it.
“What happened?”
“We took her to Galway. There was a ship.”
When I heard this, why didn’t my steady, controlled rage that I had been building so carefully to get me through this exercise, why didn’t it begin to subside? I didn’t feel it slipping one jot; I had no difficulty keeping it going. If anything, it mounted.
“A ship to where?” I reached for my bradawl and began to polish it on my sleeve.
“Ben. To America. She’s in America, Ben.”
“Where in America?”
“She’s in Florida, Ben, Jesus, Ben, my skin, Ben, it’s burning me.”
“Big place, Florida. Where in Florida?” I could hear my own voice as though it came from a distant metallic source.
“A beach, Ben, an Atlantic beach.”
“Florida is lined with Atlantic beaches.”
He twisted and turned. I saw that his face was turning blue—with shock, I supposed, and a pool of urine had gathered at his feet.
“Tell me how to find her,” I said.
So now you know. How many men of your acquaintance—indeed of your own blood—have killed and gone on to torture?
I made Cody write it down. Freeing him from the cords, I gave him a pen and made him write the name and the address in my notebook. He talked as he did so, and told me how, at the orders of King Kelly, Cody had paid certain people to tell me stories that would lead me to believe Venetia had died—or was still living. King Kelly knew that I was traveling the country, asking everywhere, and he chose a number of people who would plant false and conflicting information on me. When Cody told me, I saw the pattern, and recalled how many had done so—here, there, and everywhere.
My head began to hurt. I’d always been more right than wrong; I’d often had the suspicion that I was being manipulated. Now Cody was giving me the proof.
I asked him a series of questions: Venetia’s health; her mother; how she lived. And I stopped, disgusted that I was receiving such intimate news from the man who had taken her away from me.
Suddenly the air in that old room smelled foul. I wrestled back the ancient shutters and let the breeze blow through the broken windowpanes.
Fool! He was gone—gone like a bat out of hell. I hadn’t finished with him, so I took off after him. He vanished. I heard him clatter down the old staircase and then silence, as though his feet had hit the long grasses outside.
Racing down the stairs, I tried to see a path in the grass, but found no trace. Had he turned and run into the old ruin itself? Where he could hide for years and nobody would find him?
I could sit him out—which would stop him getting away from me and going to the police. But if I sat him out, would I kill him? And then hide his body? Probably drop it into one of the deep ice-pits below the mansion kitchen floors? He might never be found—or be a skeleton if a rambler or a hunter or a nosy child eventually found him?
How fortunate that I’d had such experience of war, where decisions of massive emotional import were forced on me minute by minute. There I stood, wrestling with, on one hand, a decision whether to kill somebody—whom I’d just been torturing; and on the other hand to go and reclaim my lost and deeply beloved wife who was alive and well.
Note, by the way, that I didn’t ask Cody how Venetia’s pregnancy had borne fruit. Some things are just too much to bear.
At that moment, something good occurred—my inner voice began to return. It had been absent through most of Europe and the war. I’d scarcely heard it when we were shelled in France; hardly a cheep did it make in the forests of Belgium. Now it came back, in full voice and sharp as ever, my conscience, my sardonic adviser, my only means of control over myself. Its first words? Well now, Venetia found, eh? Don’t you know the old saying? Be careful what you wish for.
128
June 1946
I admit to a poetic turn of mind. That explains the mode of travel I chose to cross the Atlantic—a freighter, a tramp steamer, and, I joked with myself, I had such heavy freight, and I had picked it up in many a port—Charleville, Saint-Omer, Germany, Belgium. She took fourteen days, had fifteen passengers, forty crew, and a captain so depressed that he had tears in his eyes every time I saw him. Perfect.
As was the main cargo—peat, from the bogs of Ireland, being taken to a manufacturer of grass and meadow fertilizer in the United States. See the connection? My country’s memory lay in those bogs—villages, bodies, and even now and then somebody found a box of ancient butter, preserved by the bogs’ natural chemicals. As I had preserved Venetia in the mire and mud of my own past ramblings and despairs.
And when I’d worked that set of ideas through, my inner voice said, You’re not exactly losing your taste for the ludicrous, are you? The inner gentleman also preferred some of the other cargo—a dozen pianos, five thousand “foundation garments” going to a lingerie store in New York, and two thousand pairs of children’s shoes. Six tractors pleased him too.
On the voyage, I spoke little, and to few. Instead I tried to pick my steps through the minefield of my own emotions. What would I
feel when I saw Venetia? Did I have any idea what words might come out of my mouth? Was there a child?
Remember—I had spent every day of my life, and sometimes every minute of every hour of every day, thinking of little else but recovering the idyllic life that she and I once had. All the fears, all the anxieties, the pains, the sense of loss, the loneliness, the erotic remembrances, the sheer hurt—now what would become of them?
As I say, if I hadn’t had the experiences of war so recently behind me, I might well have collapsed. Let me give you a measure of how absorbed I was on that ocean journey: Not for a moment did I have a flash of remorse over my appalling treatment of Cody. I’ve had many since, but none then.
Indeed, only one other issue found its way into my considerations—Kate Begley. How was she? Still in New York? Still waiting on the dockside every morning? Still arranging her working day so that she could be on hand whenever a likely ship came into port? And when would she give up? And what would she do then? Would I ever see her again?
After the huff between us, I’d stopped by our local bar and given the barman, Les Neenan, twenty dollars; he was to use it for a telegram to me if anything changed in Kate’s life; it’s what I’d have done back home. No telegram had arrived. She’s fine, said the inner gentleman, and at the moment she isn’t your business. Focus, Ben, focus on Venetia. Remember what James said about the circumstances you anticipate. Be alert, because this might not play out as you expect.
129
Sometimes it may not have appeared so, but I am, at core, a careful man, especially when doing something of importance. In such circumstances, I prepare with diligence and caution. For instance, if I know that I’m about to visit a house that has a significant content of old stories, traditions, or music, I sit down the night before, prepare all my pens, notebooks, and questions, check the map to make sure I know where I’m going—sometimes I even find the house the day before I’m expected.
In Jacksonville I did likewise. There’s more than one Jacksonville in Florida—or, more accurately, the place they call Jacksonville stretches for a long way down the coast. First of all I visited the town hall and began to search the electoral roll for the name “Kelly”; I found “Kelly, Sarah,” and she had owned this property since 1933.
Easy enough to trace the development; Sarah and her long-term beau, Mr. Anderson, had been in the habit of wintering in Florida. When Venetia disappeared in 1932, they took her there to a rented property—this was my surmise and I later found it true—and then bought a house. To which Sarah eventually retired, and in which she would die.
Not trusting Cody, I reestablished the address—between Third Street South and Ocean Drive—not in Jacksonville, but Jacksonville Beach, a different place altogether, way south of the main conurbation (such as it was in those days), on a narrow, tree-lined street a few hundred yards from the longest beach I had ever seen.
Now what was I to do? Walk to the front door and ring the bell? No, said my inner voice. Wait. Too much water has been flowing under all those bridges. Wait and watch. So I waited and I watched. I had rented a convertible, and in glorious, unhumid weather, I parked down the street at ten o’clock in the morning.
At a quarter past the hour, a car drew up. The man who climbed out and went into the house using a front-door key stood about an inch taller than I, but thin as a rake—with a pencil line of jet-black mustache. He wore a white shirt and black pants, and he walked like a dancer. In none of my imaginings had I considered a man in Venetia’s life; perhaps I’d come to the wrong address?
No. Minutes later, the door opened again and there Venetia stood, half-turned backward, speaking to somebody within—the mustache man, I presumed.
The choke of my breath, the sudden twist I made in the car seat—involuntary reaction, call it shock if you like, at this moment I’d so long and so desperately wanted. She hadn’t changed at all—still the silver-blond hair, brighter if anything, still the long, loose walk that only angels have, still the serene air. All my systems, my metabolisms, physical, mental, spiritual—all seized. She turned left—not toward where I sat—and loped toward the Atlantic.
My mind began to compute the days we’d been apart. There was a time when I’d known the number of hours, but the war had shut down that daily calculation. And then I stopped, halted by my inner voice asking, What are you going to do now? Dive into yet another pool of self-pity?
I’d parked to keep the house between me and the beach, and therefore Venetia didn’t walk past the car. My view of her remained clear, as I ran through my options: Follow her. Or keep watching and ring the doorbell later if I’ve seen that Mr. Mustache has gone out? Or go away and never come back?
I could still see her, though the distance between us had widened. Down the street, she turned right; she wore a light, airy shift and it wafted around her legs. She disappeared from view and then moments later, as I was about to start the engine, she reappeared, on a path that led to the beach.
I drove down, keeping her in my vision to my right. At the same moment as I parked, she emerged from the low dunes and began to walk across the wide, wide sands toward the ocean. You can’t see where those beaches begin and end—they come from nothingness, and they drift on into nothingness, and that morning, nobody but Venetia walked there. Literally and metaphorically.
At the steady walking pace I knew so well, she reached the waves, and without a hesitation walked into the water. She was now perhaps a quarter of a mile away, and she kept walking until waist-high, and then began to swim, the shift flowing behind her like a shoal of colored fish; I guessed that she’d chosen it because the cloth was so light and dried so quickly.
I stood by the car and watched. A strong breeze whipped the waves; relentless small breakers trooped ashore and collapsed. She didn’t look in my direction as she swam across and back, and across again, parallel to the shore, in waters of comfortable depth for such long legs. Venetia and I—I and she; an ocean, a sunny day of warm and strong-ish winds, and nobody else in the world.
And still I didn’t know what to do. Soon, she rose from the waves and walked back in from the sea, as lovely a shape as the world has ever made. Holding the flimsy gown out from her, she headed south, in the opposite direction from me, showing no sign of returning to the lane by which she had reached this spot. I divined her purpose—she would walk until the sun and the wind had dried her, and then walk home: very Venetia, very like the woman I knew, practical but with style. By now, I dreaded seeing her face.
When she had walked so far that she seemed little more than a vertical dot, I drifted down toward the water. I peeled off shoes and socks and trod in the hissing shallows. At last, I too turned right and set off in the same direction. If I had a calculation in mind, it must have been that I imagined coming face-to-face with her when she came back. By then, her gown would have dried and become opaque again.
An hour she walked, before she turned. I recalled the sands at Le Crotoy, but this time no horse and rider came galloping by, no secret message fell at my feet—although, as I thought of it, I wondered whether kidnapping might arise. I could scarcely look out to sea in the strong glare; when I looked ahead, Venetia shimmered.
And my inner voice said, Are you going to turn the whole bloody day into one long metaphor?
She walked back; I walked on. Nobody I had ever known walked like Venetia did—that steady lope with her hands clasped behind her back, and her head sometimes down, gazing at the ground as if in thought, and that morning her face tilted up, looking for the sun.
When we were perhaps a hundred and fifty yards apart, she looked ahead, and she recognized me before I had prepared to greet her. Peering again, she slowed down, stopped, and brought her hands up to her mouth. She stayed like that until I got to within ten feet of her and halted.
“I knew,” she said. “I knew I would see you today.”
Here’s the most bizarre thing: Neither of us moved to the other. We didn’t rush into each other’s arms. S
he didn’t extend her two hands to me as she used to, and I didn’t move to pick her up and swing her around as I used to do.
“How did you know?” I asked, because my inner voice was asking, Did that bastard Cody tell somebody?
She said. “There were other days when I hoped and prayed you were coming for me. But today—I just knew.”
130
It’s only fair that I report how she looked and how I felt. My first thought said, The great actress in her is still alive. She holds herself the same way. Her eyes have much the same light. My next thought said, If you’re to learn anything from this—learn the uselessness of self-pity.
“I thought you were dead, Venetia.”
“Oh, Ben, wasn’t it awful what they did to us?”
Moving as one person, we squatted, hunkered down, looking at the ribbed sand beneath us and the white food-stains of the ocean’s salt.
“How are you?” I said; that was about all I could manage.
She replied, “I—you—we—there were, are, twins.”
“I think we joked about that possibility,” I said.
“I think we did. Do you want to know their names?”
When I nodded, she said, “Louise and Ben.”
Mother’s name and mine. Oh, Jesus.
——
Only one question existed in the world at that moment. Despite my self-absorption, it wasn’t, How have you been? Or, Do you still love me? Or, Did you miss me? Or, Why didn’t you come and look for me? It was, What do we do now?
“They told me that if I ever tried to see you again, they’d kill you. That’s what happened to me, Ben. They told me I had to stay here.”
“Did you ever go back?”
“I want to live there, I want the children to have their own country.”
“Can we go now?” I stood up and held out my arms; she stayed hunkered. And she began to cry.