I was; the robe, the gray hair loose gave him the look of a crownless king in a costume play for children.
“I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head again. “This is all so new.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, you see, it’s just—” he leaned forward and blinked, quick and agitated—“It’s all very different from what I was told, you see. They said he died instantly. Very, very emphatic on that point.”
“But—” I stared, astonished. Did he think I was making it up?
“No, no,” he said hastily, putting a hand up to reassure me. “It’s just—I’m sure it’s what they say to everyone. ‘Died instantly’?” he said bleakly, when still I stared at him. “ ‘Perfectly painless’? ‘Never knew what hit him’?”
Then—all at once—I did see, the implications slithering in on me with a chill. My mother too had “died instantly.” Her death had been “perfectly painless.” The social workers had harped on it so insistently that I’d never thought to wonder how they could be quite so sure.
“Although, I do have to say, it was difficult to imagine him going that way,” Hobie said, in the abrupt silence that had fallen. “The flash of lightning. Falling over unawares. Had a sense, you do sometimes, that it wasn’t like they said, you know?”
“Sorry?” I said, glancing up, disoriented by the vicious new possibility I’d stumbled into.
“A goodbye at the gate,” said Hobie. He seemed to be talking partly to himself. “That’s what he would have wanted. The parting glimpse, the death haiku—he wouldn’t have liked to leave without stopping to speak to someone along the way. ‘A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death.’ ”
He had lost me. In the shadowy room, a single blade of sun pierced between the curtains and struck across the room, where it caught and blazed up in a tray of cut glass decanters, casting prisms that flickered and shifted this way and that and wavered high on the walls like paramecia under a microscope. Though there was a strong smell of wood smoke, the fireplace was burnt-out and black looking and the grate choked with ashes, as if the fires hadn’t been lit in a while.
“The girl,” I said timidly.
His glance came back to me.
“There was a girl too.”
For a moment, he did not seem to understand. Then he sat back in his chair and blinked rapidly as if water had been flicked in his face.
“What?” I said—startled. “Where is she? She’s okay?”
“No—” rubbing the bridge of his nose—“no.”
“But she’s alive?” I could hardly believe it.
He raised his eyebrows in a way that I understood to mean yes. “She was lucky.” But his voice, and his manner, seemed to say the opposite.
“Is she here?”
“Well—”
“Where is she? Can I see her?”
He sighed, with something that looked like exasperation. “She’s meant to be quiet and not have visitors,” he said, rummaging in his pockets. “She’s not herself—it’s hard to know how she’ll react.”
“But she’s going to be all right?”
“Well, let us hope so. But she’s not out of the woods yet. To employ the highly unclear phrase the doctors insist on using.” He’d taken cigarettes from the pocket of his bathrobe. With uncertain hands he lit one then with a flourish threw the pack on the painted Japanese table between us.
“What?” he said, waving the smoke from his face, when he caught me staring at the crumpled packet, French, like people smoked in old movies. “Don’t tell me you want one too.”
“No thank you,” I said, after an uneasy silence. I was pretty sure he was joking although I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure.
He, in return, was blinking at me sharply through the tobacco haze with a sort of worried look, as though he had just realized some crucial fact about me.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” he said unexpectedly.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re the boy, aren’t you? Whose mother died in there?”
I was too stunned to say anything for a moment.
“What,” I said, meaning how do you know, but I couldn’t quite get it out.
Uncomfortably, he rubbed an eye and sat back suddenly, with the fluster of a man who’s spilled a drink on the table. “Sorry. I don’t—I mean—that didn’t come out right. God. I’m—” vaguely he gestured as if to say I’m exhausted, not thinking straight.
Not very politely, I looked away—blindsided by a queasy, unwelcome swell of emotion. Since my mother’s death, I had cried hardly at all and certainly not in front of anyone—not even at her memorial service, where people who barely knew her (and one