Canarino

Gordon said, ‘I’m sick of this place. How do we get out?’

Norma wiped the perspiration from her face with the backs of her hands. The maze seemed suffocating now; Gordon was right. But she didn’t let on. ‘Well, let’s rest just a bit and then we’ll find it. We’ve got in; we’ll surely get out.’

‘You lead us, Norma. You’ll find it first,’ said Gordon.

So Norma heaved herself onto her feet.

‘All right then,’ she said. She saw shiny purple-black spots swimming along at the corners of her vision. Her head felt empty, floating, as she reached for Hope’s hand.

‘Stick with me, young lady,’ she told Hope.

And she started blindly back along the path, steadily brushing the box with one shoulder without even noticing it, until Gordon said, ‘Norma, why are you doing that? You’re ripping all the leaves off!’

Norma turned to look, swiveling her head this way and that way, down toward Gordon, back at the hedge, clutching Hope’s hand. She heard the cicadas sing louder and louder, like a rushing noise in her ears. Her stomach turned over inside her, and she thought she’d be sick, but instead she just keeled over backwards, toppling heavily like a felled tree into the brittle old bushes. The bushes stretched and sprang and held her in the air for a brief moment, then snapped and cracked, slowly at first, then faster, popping and exploding as she went down, down—right through the hedge to the next pathway on the opposite side with a thwack of her skull on the hard brick path that impressed Gordon and Hope more than anything else which had happened that day. They simply stood and stared.

Hope rubbed her hand a little, where Norma had been gripping it with a death grip which had nearly pulled Hope down with her. She said, ‘Owee, Norma. Owee.’

Then Gordon said, ‘Hopie! Poor Norma. Hers is much worse. Don’t cry, Hopie.’ And they went on looking at Norma, waiting for her to say something.

But Norma didn’t say anything and she didn’t move.

So naturally Hope asked, ‘Is Norma dead?’

And Gordon said, ‘How do I know?’ Then, thinking it over, he said, ‘But we need to find Mummy.’

Hope never liked this particular solution, but instinctively she knew Gordon was right. She nodded sadly.

Next Gordon said, ‘If we call her loudly, Mummy will hear us and she’ll come and find us, even though we’re in this—this maze.’

Hope nodded again. So they shouted as loudly as they could for a while, trying out both ‘Mummy!’ and ‘Help!’ They both shouted ‘Help!’ much more loudly because it felt more exciting.

‘Help! Help!’ Hope giggled with fear, jumping up and down. Then she smiled.

No one came.

Finally, Hope yelled, ‘Daddy!’ A long wailing cry.

‘He’s not even here, Hopie. Silly.’

Again she yelled, ‘Daddy!’ in defiance, her lips pouting with anger when she stopped.

Gordon felt very unhappy and very tired, but he also felt that this was a chance for something—it was a chance to get grown-ups to notice that you could do things they admired, like apologizing first in a fight or telling on yourself when you were naughty but hadn’t been caught. He felt that somehow it might be his fault that Norma had fallen over and wasn’t getting up.

Hopie didn’t think it was her fault, but she thought they might both get in really bad trouble, and she couldn’t see how Norma was going to protect her from that.

‘I know the way out of the maze.’ Hope sounded confident, boastful.

‘You do not!’ said Gordon.

‘Well, we can find it. Norma said we got in and we can get out.’ She reached for Gordon’s hand. ‘Come on.’

‘Okay, Hope. Okay.’ He was trying to sound like their mother. He lorded it over Hope with a point of reason. ‘We should go through that way, where Norma fell. It’s already closer to the outside you know.’

So they crawled through the broken bushes, right over the mountain of Norma, in her brown uniform and her black tights and black shoes. And they left her lying there as they walked tentatively along the path on the other side.

Gordon tilted his head backwards to look up at the sky. He couldn’t see the house or anything at all.

‘I’m hungry,’ said Hope.

‘So am I,’ said Gordon.

Elizabeth was in the library talking to the interior decorator on the telephone when Mr Richards came in to tell her that he had found the children in the stream and brought them back to the house.

She was hunched over in a small chair at the great, leathertopped desk, and as Mr Richards started to speak, she waved a hand in the air and turned away from him, squeezing the receiver tightly against her ear and pressing two fingertips of her other hand against her other ear to shut him out.

Mr Richards stopped dead in his tracks. He was a big man, suntanned, vigorous, crisply turned-out, used to making an impression on women. He quelled his sense of insult with difficulty. It must be long-distance, he decided. An emergency in London. And he made himself wait, staring angrily at the cream linen stretched tightly across Elizabeth’s thin, square shoulders.

‘And I’ve had to rearrange a number of the objets,’ she was saying in a caustic tone. Then there was a pause.

Mr Richards didn’t like telephones. And he didn’t like fax machines and e-mail. And especially cell phones. What he liked was working outdoors at his own pace and making a perfect job of it. He knew how to get things done and how to manage workmen and he didn’t like interruptions or, he was discovering, being bossed around.

This woman, he thought, has too many gizmos at her fingertips. She is fussing at the speed of sound. Or maybe the speed of light; Mr Richards wasn’t sure about the technology. Everyone has to know all about it the minute she isn’t happy. Her beauty is—wasted. It’s a lot to waste, too, he thought. He had been simply amazed at the airport: Easily the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, he had concluded.

He looked around the room at the shelves loaded with old leather-bound volumes. It had a sort of eighteenth-century look, he was thinking, sort of Thomas Jefferson. Serious study, high ideals, Virginia gentleman. It had what people called an aura. An aura which ought to suit such a woman. She has certain qualities. If she had been born in an earlier time, she might have had to practice a little patience, Mr Richards mused, she might even have been forced to place herself in the hands of someone a little stronger and trust him to look after her. That’s what her sort of beauty is really meant for, he thought, to give her half a chance in tough circumstances. Nowadays looking like that is completely unnecessary. It just throws everything off, skews the balance; women do everything they want for themselves anyway. It’s not a fair fight, not with all her extra pulling power. But maybe it’s just because I think like that that I’m the farm manager and she owns the goddam farm.

She knew what she was up to, pulling all this together. And unbelievable amounts of money.

But her kids! They need supervising on a farm. Neither one of these London women has a clue.

Elizabeth said into the phone, very patiently, ‘The maid should have been given all the diagrams for the shelves. You have to teach new staff everything. And she shouldn’t be moving figurines from one part of the room to another, anyway.’

Something has been smashed, Mr Richards was thinking. Could it possibly matter more than the kids? He cleared his throat. Then he said, boldly, ‘Mrs Judd!’

She started and sat up, still with her back to him, saying very quietly into the phone, ‘Hang on a second, Joshua. There’s someone here.’ She put one hand over the mouthpiece and slowly, carefully turned, looking serious, attentive. She bent all her concern onto Mr Richards, narrowing her gemlike, unnerving blue eyes in concentration. Gravely, politely, she said, ‘Yes?’

Mr Richards refused to be cowed. ‘Something has happened to the children’s nanny, Mrs Judd. I found them—Gordon and Hope, isn’t it?—in the stream. They were calling for help. They’re pretty upset.’

Elizabeth’s face was still.

Mr Richards was thinking,This woman doesn’t like to be rushed.

Then she put the receiver back to her ear and said in her languid, melancholy way, ‘Josh, I’ll have to call you back.’

She put the phone down and stood up, brushing herself off, as if she were covered with crumbs, though Mr Richards couldn’t see any.

‘What were the children doing in the stream?’ Her voice was calm, detached, a little sad; her eyes wistful, burdened.

He sensed that she felt painfully disappointed in the children. Suddenly she looked very solitary, very slight. Was she going to cry? he wondered. He felt confused by her sorrow, the heavy feeling of it between them. Without realizing it, he took a step toward her. Though he couldn’t have said why, he found himself wanting to cheer her up, to reassure her.