Nora looked at the house.

"The night I telephoned you, I lay in bed at two in the morning, I heard the front door drift open. I knew that the whole house had simply leaned itself ajar to let the latch free and glide the door wide. I went to the top of the stairs. And looking down, I saw the creek of moonlight laid out fresh in the hall. And the house so much as said, Here is the way you go, tread the cream, walk the milky new path out of this and away, go, old one, go with your darkness. You are with child. The sour-gum ghost is in your stomach. It will never be born. And because you cannot drop it, one day it will be your death. What are you waiting for?

"Well, Willie, I was afraid to go down and shut that door. And I knew it was true, I would never sleep again. So I went down and out.

"I have a dark old sinful place in Geneva. I'll go there to live. But you are younger and fresher, Will, so I want this place to be yours."

"Not so young."

"Younger than I."

"Not so fresh. It wants me to go too, Nora. The door to my room just now. It opened too."

"Oh, William," breathed Nora, and touched my cheek. "Oh, Willie," and then, softly, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. We'll go together."

Nora opened her car door.

"I'll drive. I must drive now, very fast, all the way to Dublin.

Do you mind?"

"No. But what about your luggage?"

"What's in there, the house can have. Where are you going?"

I stopped. "I must shut the front door."

"No," said Nora. "Leave it open."

"But . . . people will come in."

Nora laughed quietly. "Yes. But only good people. So that's all right, isn't it?"

I finally nodded. "Yes. That's all right."

I came back to stand by the car, reluctant to leave. Clouds were gathering. It was beginning to rain. Great gentle soft flurries fell down out of the moonlit sky as harmlessly soft as the gossip of angels. We got in and slammed the car doors. Nora gunned the motor.

"Ready?" she said.

"Ready."

"William?" said Nora. "When we get to Dublin, will you sleep with me, I mean sleep, the next few days? I shall need someone for a few nights. Will you?"

"Of course."

"I wish," she said, and tears filled her eyes, "oh, G.o.d, how I wish I could burn myself down and start over. Burn myself down so I could go up to the house now and go in and live forever like a dairy maid full of berries and cream who might walk by tomorrow and see the open door and the house will let her in and let her stay. Oh, but h.e.l.l. What's the use of talk like that?"

"Drive, Nora," I said gently.

And she drummed the motor and we ran out of the valley, along the lake, with gravel buckshotting out behind, and up the hills and through the deep forest, and by the time we reached the last rise, Nora's tears were shaken away, she did not look back, and we drove fast through the dense, falling and thicker night toward a darker horizon and a cold stone city, and all the way, never once letting go, in silence I held one of her hands.

The next morning I woke and the bed was a fall of snow with dents in it. I arose feeling, inside my mildewed suit, that I had just taken a four-day, four-night trip across country in a Greyhound bus.

There was a note pinned to the other pillow: "Gone to Venice or h.e.l.l, whichever comes first. Thanks for the snugfest. If your wife ever leaves, come find: Nora of the long rains and the terrible fires."

"Nora," I said, looking out the window at the storm. "Goodbye."

16.

Finn had an eye in the midst of the white hair over his medulla oblongata. The hair stirred. Finn's back stiffened.

"Do I hear a Yank's tread half in the door?" he said, peering into a goblet he was wiping dry, as if it were a crystal ball. "Is my walk familiar?" I asked. "Fingerprints and the way men walk; no two alike." Finn turned to consider my face, hovering in gloom above the aforementioned tread.

"Are you fleeing himself?" "Does it show?" "He does not let up, does he?"

Finn looked around at his grand organ-console display of stouts and ales, but decided on a cognac and waited for me to come fetch. "That will take the hinges off the hatch," he observed. "They're gone." I wiped my mouth.

"Is it that you work seven days a week, seven to ten hours a day, with no time off? Does he let you go to the cinema?" "Only by permission." "To the Gents'?" "I must beg to be excused."

"Forgive the intrusion, lad, but since you been here all this while, have you shadowed the path of any of our nice spring onion colleens, or the rutabaga and bag-of-potatoes mothers or aunts of the like? Excuse."

"I have a wife married to me at home," I said, "who may soon be here. She'll find no lipstick on my collar or long hairs on my coat."

"Pity, and you look as if you had the strength of nine."

"Illusion," I said. "Women knock me down and carry me out."

"There's all sorts of ways to travel," admitted Finn. "But now, this day, you are in need of a brief rest before going back to hand-wrestle the two Beasts, one in the sea, one on a horse."

I sighed, and Finn replenished my brandy.

"Has he got you to take riding lessons yet?" guessed Finn. "He's great for that. A dozen pals have run through here, hired the horse, followed the hunt, and broken their selves, collarbone over a.s.s, in the years before you limped in."

"It's these riding boots I bought."

"Which makes you halfway to the stable or the hospital or both, as of this hour. But here comes the boyos. Say not a word about himself. They would look down on you if they knew what you were hiding from here."

"Don't they look down on me already?"

"As a yank? Sure. But as a fellow drinker? No. Hush."

And the young men and the old of Kilc.o.c.k blundered in for the stuff that cleans mirrors and makes headlights shine.

I retreated to the philosopher's cubby to think.

17.

I walked straight into the back workroom of Courtown House, where John was going over and answering some mail, and I did not hand him my usual six pages of screenplay. Instead, holding the pages in my hand, I took my tweed cap off my head, looked at it, looked down at my hacking coat and twill pants and jodhpur half boots and said, "John, I'm getting rid of at least half of these clothes." John looked up and gave me that lazy, half-lidded iguana stare.

"Now, why would you do that, kid?" he said. "No more riding lessons, John."

"Oh?"

"No more lessons and no more even trying around the edges to ride to hounds."

"Why do you say that, kid?"

"John." I took a deep breath. "What's more important, riding to hounds or killing the Whale?"

John mused it over behind his eyelids for a moment.

"What counts?" I said. "Me alive and the Whale dead or me six feet under and the screenplay not finished?"

"Let me get this clear-"

"No, John, let me get this clear. I almost fell three times this morning at the riding academy. It's a long way down from a horse, John, and I'm not going to go there."

"Jesus, kid, you sound upset."

"Do I?" I listened to myself. "Yeah, I am. Is it a deal, John? From here on, no black horses, just white whales?"

"Jesus Christ," said John, "if that's the way you feel about it-"

18.

Someone's born, and it may take the best part of a day for the news to ferment, percolate, or circ.u.mnavigate the Irish meadows to the nearest town, and the dearest pub, which is Heeber Finn's. But let someone die, and a whole symphonic band lifts in the fields and hills. The grand ta-ta slams across country to ricochet off the pub slates and shake the drinkers to calamitous cries for More! .

So it was this long day with suddenly no rain and-look there!-the sun returned in fraudulent simulation of some lost summer. The pub was no sooner opened, aired, and mobbed than Finn, at the door, saw a dust flurry up the road.

"That's Doone," muttered Finn. "Swift at bringing news. And the news is bad, it's that fast he's running!"

"Ha!" cried Doone, as he leapt across the sill. "It's done, and he's dead!"

The mob at the bar turned, as did I.

Doone enjoyed his moment of triumph, making us wait.

"Ah, G.o.d, here's a drink. Maybe that'll make you talk!"

Finn shoved a gla.s.s in Doone's waiting paw. Doone wet his whistle and arranged the facts.

"Himself," he gasped at last. "Lord Kilgotten. Dead. And not an hour past!"

"Ah, G.o.d," said one and all, quietly. "Bless the old man. A sweet nature. A dear chap."

For Lord Kilgotten had wandered their fields, pastures, barns, and this bar all the years of their lives, they agreed. His departure was like the Normans' rowing back to France or the d.a.m.ned Brits pulling out of Bombay.

"A fine man," said Finn, drinking to the memory, "even though he did spend two weeks a year in London."

"How old was he?" asked Brannigan. "Eighty-five? Eighty-eight? We thought we might have buried him long since."

"Men like that," said Doone, "G.o.d has to hit with an ax to scare them off. Paris, now, we thought that might have slain him, years past; but no. Drink, that should have drowned him, but he swam for the sh.o.r.e; no, no. It was that teeny bolt of lightning in the field's midst an hour ago, and him under the tree picking strawberries with his nineteen-year-old secretary lady."

"Jesus," said Finn. "There's no strawberries this time of year. It was her hit him with a bolt of fever. Burned to a crisp!"

They fired off a twenty-one-gun salute of laughs that hushed itself down when they considered the subject, and more townsfolk arrived to breathe the air and bless himself.

"I wonder," mused Heeber Finn at last, in a voice that would make the Valhalla G.o.ds sit still at table and not scratch. "I wonder. What's to become of all that wine? The wine, that is, which Lord Kilgotten has stashed in barrels and bins, by the quarts and the tons, by the scores and precious thousands, in his cellars and attics and, who knows, under his bed?"

"Aye," said everyone, stunned, suddenly remembering. "Aye. Sure. What?"

"It has been left, no doubt, to some d.a.m.n Yank drift-about cousin or nephew, corrupted by Rome, driven mad by Paris, who'll jet in tomorrow, who'll seize and drink, grab and run, and Kilc.o.c.k and us left beggared and b.u.g.g.e.red on the road behind!" said Doone, all in one breath. "Forgive my going on, Yank." He turned to see me exiting the cubby. "I meant only half what I said."

"Aye." Their voices, like m.u.f.fled dark velvet drums, marched toward the night. "Aye."

"There are no relatives!" said Finn. "No dumb Yank nephews or dimwit nieces falling out of gondolas in Venice but swimming this way. I have made it my business to know."

Finn waited. It was his moment now. All stared. All leaned to hear his mighty proclamation.

"Why not, I been thinking, if Kilgotten, by G.o.d, left all ten thousand bottles of Burgundy and Bordeaux to the citizens of the loveliest town in Eire? To MS!"

There was an antic uproar of comment on this, cut across when the front doorflaps burst wide and Finn's wife, who rarely visited the sty, stepped in, glared around, and snapped: "Funeral's in an hour!"

"An hour?" cried Finn. "Why, he's only just cold-" "Noon's the time," said the wife, growing taller the more she looked at this dreadful tribe. "The Doc and the priest have just come from the place. Quick funeral was His Lordship's will. 'Uncivilized,' said Father Kelly, 'and no hole dug."But there is!' said the Doc. 'Hanrahan was supposed to die yesterday but took on a fit of mean and survived the night. I treated and treated him, but the man persists! Meanwhile, there's his hole, unfilled. Kilgotten can have it, dirt and headstone.' All's invited. Move your b.u.ms!"

The double-wing doors whiffled shut. The mystic woman was gone.

"A funeral!" cried Doone, prepared to sprint.