He walks the perimeter, taking in watercolor landscapes, a small collection of American Indian baskets and pots, and, on the mantel, pots of a rather different spirit: children’s lumpen representations of Lear’s fictional characters, mostly Ivo and the panther. Then he arrives at the built-in glass-front case of very old books, leatherbound, nearly all of them by or about Charles Dickens. Tomasina opened it when she showed him around last week, pulling out a couple of her favorites. Is he allowed to handle the volumes on his own? The case isn’t locked.
If he had the money and the time—and, of course, the inclination and the focus—what would Nick collect? He doesn’t have that urge. Nor does he own anything he would consider an heirloom. When Grandfather’s house was finally sold, Nick told Nigel and Annabelle to take the lot of it. He was still too heartbroken after Mum’s death, too angry at the injustice.
In the front hall, walls are colonized with framed sketches by Lear’s fellow illustrators. Several are scribbled with fond, jaunty notes. In one ink drawing, Nick recognizes Lear’s house, a moon overhead, a scrum of animals beside a glowing window. Typed across the bottom,
A light in the dark.
Woodland creatures gather close.
Hark: the genius snores!
There is also a beaky caricature of Lear himself; it might have appeared in some literary journal. A platoon of tiny children frolic in his grizzled hair.
Many of the pictures are hung along the large triangle of wall flanking the staircase leading upward. Nick leans over the banister and glances toward the top, where another wall displays yet more pictures, the odd photograph or letter.
Pictures everywhere. Each one a window onto its own whimsical world. Was Lear a romantic? Did he love children or simply see them as his source of bread and butter? As a gay man, he was too old, as he admitted to Nick, to contemplate seriously the possibility of becoming a father. But what if he had?
Nick opens the front door and steps out under the trellised weave of roses, the sharp glossy leaves brimming with spearlike buds, some revealing a wink of crimson. (Rose Red: that was the fairy tale with the bear who comes in from the cold.) He walks out a few meters and turns to look back at the house. After browsing the gallery of sketches, so many made in a childlike spirit, the house reminds him of a cottage drawn by Beatrix Potter. Annabelle took the few Beatrix Potter books that Mum had saved all those years; they’re Fiona’s now.
Nick can’t help feeling ashamed that he has let the ties with his siblings fray so badly. Someone might say, Well, it takes two…, but he knows that now, after all his good fortune, it’s entirely up to him if they’re to remain connected. When he finishes shooting this film, should he invite Fiona to spend a weekend with him in London? Is she too young for that?
“Leaving so soon?”
Tomasina stands in the open door to the house.
“Oh! Of course not. You won’t be rid of me so easily!”
“Your phone’s making disgruntled noises in the den.”
“Bollocks.”
“Do you still want a tour upstairs?”
“I do! And now is perfect—if it’s good for you, Tomasina.”
He reenters the house. She shuts the door behind him.
They stand awkwardly in the front hall.
“You had a look at all these pictures, I assume.”
“Yes. They’re brilliant,” he says. “I imagine lots of these artists are quite famous.”
“In Little Reader Land,” she says. “But that is not the world at large.”
He sees her repressing a smile. She is thinking that of course he, Nick, is famous in the world at large.
He says, “I think I’d rather be quietly, lastingly famous—I mean, deservedly so—in Little Reader Land than famous for a minute in the world at large.”
“I’m very happy with all-around obscurity,” she says as she starts up the stairs.
Was that a rebuke? Nick wonders.
At the top, the stairs split into a T, three steps leading left, three right.
“My room’s at the end, up there.” She points right and heads in that direction, but she stops at a closed door near the entrance to her room. “This is a room we hardly ever used. Barely big enough for a bed. It’s mostly full of books now, all Morty’s, in unopened boxes. We called it the nursery. As if one day we might have had a child.”
Had she been in love with the man, possibly wished they could have had a child? Nick resists the fretful urge to make a joke.
She returns toward him, ignoring a set of narrow ladderlike stairs that must end in an attic. She stops at the door beside him. “Morty’s bathroom.” She opens it briefly, giving a glimpse of a claw-foot tub, a toilet, a sink. Closing it again, she passes Nick and takes the three steps leading up to his left. She opens the final door. “Morty.”
The first surprise is that the room is fairly small. The one solid interior wall is covered by a built-in bookcase, flush against it a wooden bed with a plain headboard. The coverlet is powder-blue chenille. Two side tables flank the bed, on each a tall reading lamp and a precariously towering stack of books. On the near stack lie three pairs of reading specs tangled together.
A pine dressing table, a rectangular wood-framed wall mirror, a weary upholstered armchair backed into a corner.
“Mine’s the master bedroom, the one with its own bathroom,” says Tommy. “He claimed he felt safer in a small room, but I think it was his way of giving me the best room. He would let his studio go to bedlam, especially when he was finishing a book, but this place he kept shipshape. Made his bed every day. Put his clothes away or in the hamper.” She points to a wicker basket. “I still haven’t done his last laundry.”
Nick is quiet, hoping she’ll say more. When she doesn’t, he says, “It’s very, very hard, figuring out what to do with the things that were closest but that nobody has any use for.”
“You and I both know about that,” she says.
He nods toward the closed door across the room. “His cupboard?”
Now she’s tearing up. “Would you mind awfully,” he says quickly, “if I just stayed in here on my own? I feel as if I’m subjecting you to torture.”
“No, no. I just realized I’ve hardly set foot in here since…I need to crack the windows, pull down the screens. At least that.”
“Can I help?”
The windows are stubbornly shut, swollen from disuse and heat, and it’s Nick who forces them up from the sill. Tomasina jiggers the screens into place.
“Thank you,” she says. “All right. All yours. Look at whatever you like in here. I’ll be downstairs. I eat around seven these days. I’m making a big salad. The lettuce in the garden is, as Morty liked to say, legion.”
“Lo, the lettuce is legion,” Nick declaims in a theatrical baritone.
She laughs. “Anyway, I’m happy to have you join me—or not. Whatever you prefer. Obviously.”
Should he say yes? This is all more awkward than he had imagined.
“You can interrogate me then if you like.”
“Then yes,” he says. “But let me do the washing-up. And I bought plenty of veggies, so please nab anything useful.”