“What’s new, Allstock?” he asked, straightening up and walking toward me as he shoved his hands in his pockets. I told him how two people in town have the Spanish flu but are recovering, and that I’d been to the cinema twice, but only with Hubert and Gordon.
“Mostly anything anyone talks about is the Fair of Lights,” I added.
“Are you going?” he asked.
“Everyone’s going.” I picked up one of the sticks he’d sawed and rubbed my fingers over its rough edges carelessly. “One has to go.”
“Why does one have to go?” he repeated.
“Well, I don’t know.” We were being playful, and it felt nice. The sun was sparkling and the air was soft and it felt good to be smiling with someone. “To see what there is to see. You know, ride the rides. See the magnificent inventions. Witness the miracle of industry,” I repeated an advert I’d seen in the newspaper in a booming voice.
“Industry made the war,” he said with a shrug. “Industry is the world’s great evil.”
“How ridiculous,” I retorted. “People made the war.”
“You need to read your newspapers, Allstock. It’s all about inventing better ways to destroy things. It’s about money. Welcome to the violent industrial age, Lenore. You don’t even know you’re in it.”
“It is miraculous,” I said finally. “And I don’t care if you agree.”
James was still silent and unconvinced, and because I didn’t want to argue on such a beautiful day with the only person I really wanted to see, I nodded to the rocks he’d lined up on the windowsill of the cottage.
“If you’re interested in finding some real treasures, I know where the Holy Grail is buried,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows.
“Well,” I offered, “at least I know a really good cave.”
All along the way, James collected things—rocks of course, pieces of moss, a mushroom, a snail shell. Some things he pocketed, and some things he threw back. He held out a shell to me.
“Some snail didn’t think it was worth keeping, so why should you?” I said.
He looked down at the shell, disappointed. “No reason,” he said, and chucked it.
This time, because I was determined and had an extra scout at my disposal, I found the entrance that last time I couldn’t find. It was grown over, just as I’d thought, but nothing that a little bush-beating didn’t reveal.
Inside, the cavern is just as you’d remember it. Narrow at the opening, then widening into a big, jagged circle. We hadn’t brought a candle so we just had to go by the dim light filtering into the entrance.
We sat down on a boulder at one side, next to each other, listening to the drip, drip of the water running somewhere nearby. James broke a stalactite off the stone ceiling sloping above us.
“Every inch takes about two hundred years to grow,” he said. “Here.” He handed it to me, and I turned it over in my hands. “These are more miraculous than any Grail,” he went on. “They’re truly ancient.” I began to break it apart, piece by piece in my hands.
“Beth said she’d already found the Grail,” I mused, “and put it back in here somewhere. She was always telling me things like that—that she’d run into a celebrity on the train, or found ten pounds on the street—silly things I was so jealous of. She said she couldn’t remember exactly where inside the cave she’d buried it. I was surprised because Beth was scared of the dark. She was timid.”
I pointed toward the small crevice shaped like a skull high in the back, above a particularly treacherous ledge. “That’s where she said she thought she’d hidden it. We kept coming back, and I kept climbing up to look for it. Beth was never a climber.” I leaned back against the spiny wall behind me. I ran my hands through my hair. For some reason, being in the cave reminded me of what it felt like to be in my body when I was younger, everything closer and more vivid. (Since Teddy died, I barely notice my senses at all. It’s like my body is far away from the rest of me.)
“Jesus’s cup . . . right here in Forest Row. How did it all end up?”
I smiled. “Badly. I broke my arm falling off the ledge. We weren’t allowed back here after that.”
“Must have smarted a bit.”
I thought back. I remember it so clearly, Beth. I wonder if you do too.
“I wanted to cry. But I couldn’t. Beth often said I did things for attention, and I think she was right. So I kept pretending to laugh. I wanted to prove her wrong. I told her it tickled.
“Anyway, the following summer the war was on. And she left. It was awful. We both cried our eyes out when we found out she was leaving. And I promised that if she stayed in America, I’d follow her. And that’s what I’m planning on. That’s what I’m building my life around now.”
“She sounds . . .” He trailed off. “Like a character.”
“Well, not around most people. She’s very quiet and shy. But much kinder than I am. We both always knew that.”
We sat for a while longer.
I studied him, now more seriously. “Can I ask you something?”
“Oh God. I don’t know, Lenore. It’s going to do with my hideous deformity, isn’t it?” He dropped his face into his hands, with a sort of laugh/cry expression.
“Sort of,” I admitted. Since he seemed to be willing, I faltered on. “What did your fiancée say when she saw you the first time, after . . . ?”
He looked over at me for a long moment. “How can you possibly be comfortable asking that?” He was wry but his hands shook a little, and I felt guilty.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He shook his head, put both hands on the ceiling of the cave as if he might pull himself into a chin-up, and then let go. “I was scared, you know, to see her. I almost preferred never seeing her again to having her see me like this.” He tapped his hands together. “I made her wait months, till I was out of the hospital. I wanted to be on my own two feet when we met again, not in some bed, in a hospital gown. I didn’t want to look like I was completely helpless, just mostly helpless. I went to her house. We picked a time. I stood on the front porch and knocked and waited, and it was the most frightening moment of my life.”
“And?”
He looked up at me, then far away. “She opened the door. She looked at me for a long while. She took my face in her hands and kissed my cheek, right on one of the scars. She told me, ‘You’re a beautiful sight.’”
Beth, is that not the most romantic thing you’ve ever heard? Though I’m sure your husband’s proposal was so stunningly romantic that it tops even that. Please tell me the details.
Love, Lenore
P.S. I wasn’t going to write this. But I’ve been sitting here for almost twenty minutes now and I’ve decided I have to.
I need to ask if you have left me behind, Beth? Is that why you haven’t written?
Maybe James the Giant is right, and you’ve changed more than I know.
I’m glad for you that you’re going forward in life. I just hope that wherever you’re going, I’m going too. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Fifty-two pounds saved (I need seventy plus money to live on once I get there), and I’m still planning to come unless I hear otherwise. I hope that I’m still invited.
Love, Lenore
MAY 15, 1919