“Well . . . shall I fetch Strauss, Joe? Do you want to see him or not?” The words took an age to cross the room in the thickening darkness. For several heartbeats Toy wasn’t even certain that Whitehead had heard him.
Then the oracle spoke. Not a prophecy, but a question.
“Will we survive, Bill?”
The words were spoken so quietly they only just carried, hooked on motes of dust and wafted from his lips. Toy’s heart sank. It was the old theme again: the same paranoid song.
“I hear more and more rumors, Bill. They can’t all be groundless.”
He was still looking out the window. Rooks circled above the wood half a mile or so across the lawn. Was he watching them? Toy doubted it. He’d seen Whitehead like this often of late, sunk down into himself, scanning the past with his mind’s eye. It wasn’t a vision Toy had access to, but he could guess at Joe’s present fears-he’d been there, after all, in the early days-and he knew too that however much he loved the old man there were some burdens he would never be capable, or willing, to share. He wasn’t strong enough; he was at heart still the boxer Whitehead had employed as a bodyguard three decades before. Now, of course, he wore a four-hundred-pound suit, and his nails were as immaculately kept as his manners. But his mind was the same as ever, superstitious and fragile. The dreams the great dreamed were not for him. Nor were their nightmares.
Again, Whitehead posed the haunted question:
“Will we survive?”
This time Toy felt obliged to reply.
“Everything’s fine, Joe. You know it is. Profits up in most sectors . . .”
But evasion wasn’t what the old man wanted and Toy knew it. He let the words falter, leaving a silence, after the faltering, more wretched than ever. Toy’s stare, now fixed on Whitehead again, was unblinking, and at the corners of his eyes the murk that had taken over the room began to flicker and crawl. He dropped his lids: they almost grated across his eyeballs. Patterns danced in his head (wheels, stars and windows) and when he opened his eyes again the night finally had a stranglehold on the interior.
The bronze head remained unmoved. But it spoke, and the words seemed to come from Whitehead’s bowels, dirtied with fear.
“I’m afraid, Willy,” he said. “All my life I’ve never been as frightened as I am now.”
He spoke slowly, without the least emphasis, as if he despised the melodrama of his words and was refusing to magnify it further.
“All these years, living without fear; I’d forgotten what it was like. How crippling it is. How it drains your willpower. I just sit here, day in, day out. Locked up in this place, with the alarms, the fences, the dogs. I watch the lawn and the trees-”
He was watching.
“-and sooner or later, the light begins to fade.”
He paused: a long, deep hush, except for the distant crows.
“I can bear the night itself. It’s not pleasant, but it’s unambiguous. It’s twilight I can’t deal with. That’s when the bad sweats come over me. When the light’s going, and nothing’s quite real anymore, quite solid. Just forms. Things that once had shapes . . .”
It had been a winter of such evenings: colorless drizzles that eroded distance and killed sound; weeks on end of uncertain light, when troubled dawn became troubled dusk with no day intervening. There had been too few hard-frosted days like today; just one discouraging month upon another.
“I sit here every evening now,” the old man was saying. “It’s a test I set myself. Just to sit and watch everything eroded. Defying it all.”
Toy could taste the profundity of Papa’s despair. He hadn’t been like this ever before; not even after Evangeline’s death.
It was almost completely dark outside and in; without the lawn lights on, the grounds were pitch. But Whitehead still sat, facing the black window, watching.
“It’s all there, of course,” he said.
“What is?”
“The trees, the lawn. When dawn comes tomorrow they’ll be waiting.”
“Yes, of course.”
“You know, as a child I thought somebody came and took the world away in the night and then came back and unrolled it all again the following morning.”