“They play cricket everywhere, don’t they?”
“Not in Yzordderrex they don’t.”
“You’d go there forever?”
“Why not? Nobody would find me, because nobody would ever guess where I’d gone.”
“I’d know.”
“Then maybe I’d have to take you with me,” he said tentatively, almost as though he were making the proposal in all seriousness and was afraid of being refused. “Could you bear that thought?” he said. “Of leaving the Fifth, I mean.”
“I could bear it.”
He paused. Then: “I think it’s about time I showed you some of my treasures,” he said, rising from his chair. “Come on.”
She’d known from oblique remarks of Dowd’s that the locked room on the second floor contained some kind of collection, but its nature, when he finally unlocked the door and ushered her in, astonished her.
“All this was collected in the Dominions,” Oscar explained, “and brought back by hand.”
He escorted her around the room, giving her a capsule summary of what some of the stranger objects were and bringing from hiding tiny items she might otherwise have overlooked. Into the former category, among others, went the Boston Bowl and Gaud Maybellome’s Encyclopedia of Heavenly Signs; into the latter a bracelet of beetles caught by the killing jar in their daisy chain coupling—fourteen generations, he explained, male entering female, and female in turn devouring the male in front, the circle joined by the youngest female and the oldest male, who, by dint of the latter’s suicidal acrobatics, were face to face.
She had many questions, of course, and he was pleased to play the teacher. But there were several inquiries he had no answers to. Like the empire looters from whom he was descended, he’d assembled the collection with commitment, taste, and ignorance in equal measure. Yet when he spoke qf the artifacts, even those whose function he had no clue to, there was a touching fervor in his tone, familiar as he was with the tiniest detail of the tiniest piece.
“You gave some objects to Charlie, didn’t you?” she said.
“Once in a while. Did you see them?”
“Yes, indeed,” she said, the brandy tempting her tongue to confess the dream of the blue eye, her brain resisting it.
“If things had been different,” Oscar said, “Charlie might have been the one wandering the Dominions. I owe him a glimpse.”
” ‘A piece of the miracle,’ “ she quoted.
“That’s right. But I’m sure he felt ambivalent about them.”
“That was Charlie.”
“True, true. He was too English for his own good. He never had the courage of his feelings, except where you were concerned. And who could blame him?”
She looked up from the trinket she was studying to find that she too was a subject of study, the look on his face unequivocal.
“It’s a family problem,” he said. “When it comes to . . . matters of the heart.”
This confession made, a look of discomfort crossed his face, and his hand went to his ribs. “I’ll leave you to look around if you like,” he said. “There’s nothing in here that’s really volatile.”
“Thank you.”
“Will you lock up after yourself?”
“Of course.”
She watched him go, unable to think of anything to detain him, but feeling forsaken once he’d gone. She heard him go to his bedroom, which was down the hall on the same floor, and close the door behind him. Then she turned her attention back to the treasures on the shelves. It wouldn’t stay there, however. She wanted to touch, and be touched by, something warmer than these relics. After a few moments of hesitation she left them in the dark, locking the door behind her. She would take the key back to him, she’d decided. If his words of admiration were not simply flattery—if he had bed on his mind—she’d know it soon enough. And if he rejected her, at least there’d be an end to this trial by doubt.
She knocked on the bedroom door. There was no reply. There was light seeping from under the door, however, so she knocked again and then turned the handle and, saying his name softly, entered. The lamp beside the bed was burning, illuminating an ancestral portrait that hung over it. Through its gilded window a severe and sallow individual gazed down on the empty sheets. Hearing the sound of running water from the adjacent bathroom, Jude crossed the bedroom, taking in a dozen details of this, his most private chamber, as she did so: the plushness of the pillows and the linen; the spirit decanter and glass beside the bed; the cigarettes and ashtray on a small heap of well-thumbed paperbacks- Without declaring herself, she pushed the door open. Oscar was sitting on the edge of the bath in his undershorts, dabbing a washcloth to a partially healed wound in his side. Reddened water ran over the furry swell of his belly. Hearing her, he looked up. There was pain on his face.