The Custodian of Paradise Read online

  Horses pulling carriages and passengers went by, and the drivers, without fail, tipped their hats, mistaking me for a grown woman out to take the air in that interval between last light and evening. The twilight that in everyone else inspired comradeship seemed to me as if it would never end. And, still looking at that melancholy house, I pictured the old man in his study on the second floor, his grandson in the front room by the fire as though keeping watch, waiting for the judge to call his name. I thought of my own house to which my father might not return until after midnight when he ran out of rounds to make, when the last family made it clear that, grateful though they were, it was time for him to leave and he had no choice but to climb into his carriage and, falling asleep, trust his horse to take him home. I looked at the sky before entering the judge’s house, the last light showing in the gaps between the clouds and above the ridge beyond the lake that I could just see through the trees. Breathing deeply I smelled the chill of a season soon to change, woodsmoke in the air. The grass was yellow and the trees had lost their leaves.

  My hands red with cold I knocked on the door and Prowse let me in and brought me upstairs, returning to the fire almost instantly. I felt like a nurse come to pay my customary visit to the judge. I paused on the landing of the second floor, wondering if I would find the judge asleep and, if so, if I should wake him. Prowse told me I should never let him sleep or else, as though he were a baby, he would not sleep at night.

  An old man in irreversible decline, but he always brightened at the sight of me. When I shook him gently, he woke up in bewilderment until he saw my face, at which he smiled and sat up slowly, turning on his swivel chair to face me. Who he mistook me for each day I didn’t know. All he ever called me after that first day was “my dear,” because of which I had no idea what to call him, what delusion of his I ought to be indulging. I may, each day, have been someone different, or every day the same young woman whose previous visit, however recent, was beyond recall. I pulled my chair up close to his and took his hands.

  “How good it is to see you after all this time,” he said one day when I found him writing in a frenzy.

  “I would have come sooner,” I said. “But it seems there is always some unavoidable delay.”

  “Of course, of course. It is much the same with me. My family and friends are forever telling me that I should consult the calendar more often. Or even my watch.”

  “Is your work going well?” I said.

  He smiled and, as though in amazement, shook his head. “I have never seen more clearly how it should be done. How I should proceed. Should have been proceeding all along. I have thrown it all aside and begun again. Everything. All of it. Everything was wrong. I would feel a great discouragement if, along with this realization, it had not dawned on me how the whole thing might be fixed.”

  I had never seen him so animated. “That’s wonderful,” I said. “I’m so happy for you.”

  He dismissed me with a casual wave. “I do not labour in service of myself, my dear.”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “Wonderful,” he said. “Yes, it is wonderful to see so clearly after all these years. After so much doubt, so much discouragement and disappointment.”

  Abruptly, covering his face with his hands, he began to cry. I could think of nothing to say. I stood up and kissed him on his forehead. He lowered his hands, tears streaming down his face. I had never seen a grown-up cry before. I extended him my handkerchief, but he slapped my hand away.

  “Tell me, Miss Fielding,” he said, “is it your belief that I have lost my mind?”

  To hear him say my name again so startled me I gasped.

  “No. Of course not,” I said. “You had a stroke some years ago, but your mind is—”

  “And what have I accomplished since that stroke? What have I been doing?”

  “You’ve—you’ve been revising your book,” I said.

  “NO,” he shouted, thumping the desk with his fist. “What have I been doing, Miss Fielding?”

  I heard Prowse running up the stairs.

  “WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “YOU DO KNOW. I HAVE BEEN DOING NOTHING. Scribbling like a child aping its elders. Not one intelligible word in thousands of pages. And you, you and that boy and all the others, you let me go on thinking I am sane. Indulging me as if I were an infant.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “I thought that, as long as you were happy—”

  I felt Prowse’s hand on my arm.

  “GET OUT,” the judge said, standing, the first time I had ever seen him do so. “GET OUT, THE BOTH OF YOU.”

  Prowse all but dragged me from the room. I was sobbing.

  “All this time,” I said, “he knew—”

  “No,” Prowse said, “he didn’t know. In a few hours, even less, he’ll have forgotten what he said to you.”

  “He said my name—”

  “And will probably never remember it again. This is not the first time this has happened. Sometimes, the worst times, he is almost himself. But it doesn’t last.”

  I let Prowse lead me down the stairs. He guided me to the sofa and sat beside me. I was no longer sobbing, but I covered my face with my hands just as the judge had done. “I didn’t mean to upset him,” I said. “I think he suddenly remembered everything. Understood everything. What he is now compared to what he used to be. It must have been awful. To wake up like that from a foolish dream you’ve been having for years.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Prowse said. “You’ve done him a great deal of good, you really have.”

  “Sometimes, when I sit there, listening to him, I think of my father. In some ways they’re alike. So self-absorbed. Your grandfather because of an illness. My father—I could say because of my mother. But other men have lost their wives. Other girls have been abandoned by their mothers.”

  Prowse drew me close to him and kissed my forehead. “You’re upset,” he said. “I can feel your heartbeat through your back.”

  But I was no longer upset. I was enjoying the feel, the warmth of his arms around me. The embrace of another person. When I had last been more than perfunctorily embraced I could not remember. Prowse, with the back of his forefinger, tipped my chin up and kissed me on the lips. He touched one of my breasts with his free hand. I gasped as though it hurt, suddenly inhaling because the pleasure of it took me by surprise. We kissed longer; his hand moved down. He worked it up beneath my dress until I felt it warm between my legs, touching me where no one ever had. He tipped me back until he was lying on top of me on the sofa. He suddenly seemed frantic as if he feared that I would change my mind.

  “I want to,” I said, but he didn’t hear me. He didn’t speak or look at me. I wrapped my arms around his back. He breathed as though he could not catch his breath, as though in the wake of a race in which he had run well past exhaustion. I felt him push inside me. At no time did it hurt. At no time did he have to force himself. His mouth, wide open, wet, pressed against my neck. He didn’t move once he was inside except to shudder several times as though from fright.

  He so quickly moved away from me that the cold raised goose-bumps on my skin. The fire had burned down to mere coals. In what little light there was, I could see my breath. I sat up, rearranged my dress. He was sitting too, but when I reached out and touched his neck, he stood up abruptly and, facing away from me, adjusted his clothing. He cleared his throat, smoothed his hair back with both hands.

  “I think it would be wise for you to leave,” he said. “In case the judge—”

  “Yes. Of course,” I said. I did not consider the implications of his words. What words or actions were appropriate or usual I didn’t know.

  “You must not feel ashamed,” I said, and he seemed to laugh or cough. I thought of telling him I loved him, had loved him since we had first fenced on the playground. Telling him I admired him for spending so much time with his grandfather whom so many others had disow
ned, ignored for years. Better not to say so, now, I thought, while he stands there with his back to me and I cannot guess what is going through his mind, what this mannish boy’s heart feels. I left hurriedly, pausing only to say goodbye and smile, though in the darkness I could not see his face.

  “Goodbye,” he said, tenderly I thought.

  I stepped outside and closed the door. It was night now, cold and calm. In the row of houses along the street only a few lights still burned on the upper floors. The sky was clear. It seemed there had never been so many stars. Never before. How strange. The touch of his hand between my thighs. How wonderful. My legs were quivering. How wonderfully unlike what I had expected. It seemed that, after that, the rest of it had been for him. I had done even less than he had. Perhaps there were things I should have done but didn’t. How abashed he seemed after we had pulled apart. What will happen, I wondered, now that this has taken place? But I didn’t feel afraid.

  The next day, I searched from the Spencer side of the playing field for Prowse but could not find him among the other boys. The day after it was the same. But on the third day, there he was, standing in that manner of his, hands behind his back and feet spread wide apart. A military man surveying the leisure activities of soldiers he would soon lead into battle. I almost shouted “PROWSE.”

  I followed the fence to Bond Street, then crossed over to the Feild. He addressed me long before I reached him.

  “Hello, Fielding,” he said loudly. Something in his voice made even the boys who never took part in the Fielding/Feild summits to stop what they were doing and look at us.

  “Hello, Prowse,” I said, taking his loud greeting to be cautionary, a coded reminder to me that I should act the same as always, lest the other boys detect something and become suspicious. Yet that, it seemed, was precisely what the volume of his voice had done.

  “I was beginning to think you had gone off to war,” I said. “But then, if you had, our side would have won by now, wouldn’t it?”

  “I have better things to do, Fielding, than to spar with Spencer girls.”

  “Such as?” I said, thinking this to be an invitation to spar with him as usual.

  “Such as anything, Fielding. Absolutely anything is better than being bored to death by you.”

  I hesitated. There was nothing in his voice but animosity. The boys, as if he were at long last treating me in the manner I deserved, pressed in around us, grinning, whispering. Hemmed in by sky-blue blazers as I had been many times before, I felt a spurt of fear. Not fear of the boys, exactly, or even of Prowse—but fear that everyone but me had somehow known from the day of my first visit how all of it would end. I looked Prowse in the eye, searching for some acknowledgement of what had happened at the judge’s house, some hint that only by speaking to me this way could he mask his affection, some sign that we would meet again that day after school. But I saw nothing. Anyone who knew what they were searching for in my eyes would have found it. How difficult it was to remain composed, not to plead with him to tell me what was wrong.

  “Well, Captain Prowse,” I said. “It seems—”

  “That it is time for you to leave,” said Prowse. “We have had our fun with you. Giving a girl from Spencer the freedom of the Feild. What was I thinking?”

  “That you were afraid of me, perhaps?” I said. “That it was safer to be civil with me than to have me as an enemy.”

  “Do I sound as though I am afraid of you?” said Prowse.

  “As afraid of me as you are of everything.”

  “Go, Fielding,” he said. “Or you will soon see how afraid of you I am.” The boys laughed and several of them took up Prowse’s warning tone, shouting, “GO.”

  I looked about at them.

  They started chanting. “GO, FIELDING, GO.”

  Tears I had been holding back came pouring from me, stinging my eyes, cooling quickly on my face. Through a blur I saw them dropping from my chin and falling like the bright beads of a broken necklace to the ground.

  Wielding my cane like a sword I slashed my way through all those boys who lunged at me like dogs. I did not return that day to Bishop Spencer, nor for several days afterwards.

  “Dear Father,” I wrote about six weeks later on a note that I left for him on the kitchen table before I went upstairs to bed. “I believe that I am pregnant.”

  I managed to sleep, knowing he would not find the note until morning. I got up very early, dressed, made my bed and sat, waiting, on the edge of it. In the event that he didn’t see the note, I planned to remove it from the table before the housekeeper came. He had slept downstairs as usual. When I heard him stir about, I stood up and began to pace the floor.

  “GALOOT OF A GIRL,” I heard him roar.

  As if this was his customary way of letting me know that he was up, I walked slowly down the stairs.

  “GALOOT OF A GIRL,” he roared again.

  I went to the kitchen, where I found him standing with his closed fists on the table, on either side of the note, staring at the paper, fully dressed in his overcoat and hat, the hat, I suspected, being the only thing he had removed before falling asleep on the sofa the night before. He looked up when he heard me.

  “What in God’s name have you done?” he said, clutching the note and shaking it at me, as if my crime was the note itself and not the information it contained.

  “It should be obvious to you what I have done,” I said.

  “Are you certain of this?” he said.

  “It is my belief that I am pregnant. I was hoping you could tell me how I might be certain.”

  “This can be made right,” he said. “If you are—what you say you are—it is not too late. You are not showing yet. I assume that he is at least the sort of young man who will take responsibility.”

  “By asking me to marry him, you mean?”

  “By doing what I tell him to,” he said.

  “I would say that he is not that sort of boy.”

  “A boy, a boy. My God. You stupid galoot of a girl. I don’t have much except my name. I will not have it ruined by that woman’s daughter.”

  “I am your daughter too.”

  “I have only that woman’s word for that. All a man ever has is a woman’s word. You are no child of mine. My name, my name—”

  “Will still be Fielding after mine has changed.”

  “To what? Who is the boy?”

  I said nothing.

  “Tell me,” he said. “I will find out somehow. There must be someone else who knows.”

  “And how do you plan to go about investigating his identity? Will you stop people in the street and say, ‘Excuse me, but I wonder, could you tell me who it is who has made my daughter pregnant?’”

  “Galoot of a girl. I have friends in whom I can confide. If there are rumours, and there are bound to be, I will hear about them.”

  “And on the basis of a rumour, you would—what? Confront the boy?”

  “The father of the boy first. Then the boy.”

  “How sure of his guilt would you have to be before you gave away our secret?”

  “Do not try to sidetrack me with words. She was always doing that.”

  “But then she gave up on words and sidetracked you with divorce.”

  “Who is the boy? Tell me his name—”

  “You are preoccupied with names—”

  “His name!”

  I had deliberated for days about how to answer this question. I knew that if I gave him no answer, there was a good chance that he would act foolishly, ask what he thought were subtle questions and give himself, and me, away. Or confide in someone, make inquiries of someone he imagined was his friend. There was even a chance, however small, that he would guess that it was Prowse. He would only have to be told by the neighbours or someone they had gossiped to of my visits to the judge’s house. It would be proof of nothing, not for anyone but him, but I could well imagine him confronting Prowse’s father. I did not want to marry Prowse or anyone else. I wanted to keep
my pregnancy a secret. I would therefore have to supply my father with a name.

  “Joe Smallwood,” I said.

  “Smallwood,” he said. “Smallwood. The son of the man who owns the shoe store and factory. The ‘boot man,’ they call him. A merchant. He has money and a name. So his son is the father. Well, it could be worse.”

  “You are thinking of Fred Smallwood,” I said. “The boy’s father is Charlie Smallwood. Fred’s brother. Fred is the uncle who paid for Joe to go to Bishop Feild. No, the boy’s father is Charlie. I believe that you have heard of him.”

  “My God. He is one of my charity patients. Charity Charlie they call him. He is indigent. A drunkard. He hasn’t a penny to his name. He is laughed at on the waterfront by stevedores. He has, I think, ten children. Why in God’s name would you consort with the son of such a man?”

  “Do you mean that I should, following your example, have consorted with my social equal?”

  “This must not get out. It mustn’t. You pregnant by the son of Charlie Smallwood. My good name would be destroyed. All that remains of my reputation would be lost.”

  “Whereas I would go on to a life of prosperity and happiness.”

  “Why would?—Smallwood. What would possess you?”

  “He did.”

  “Mockery. Mockery. And this is what it leads to. This is what, all these years, I have been warning you against. Mockery.”

  “Lechery. His and mine.”

  “Not another word like that. The size of you. You could fight off any boy, any man—”

  “If I wanted to.”

  “Not another word. You will have nothing more to do with him. You may think you are in love with him.”

  “I was. But not now.”

  “I wish to hear nothing of love, or elopements, or marriage.”

  “I could just go away for good. Easier for you if I simply disappeared. I could pass for a woman of thirty, change my name.”

  “You will do as I say. I can’t have you trying to run off and making a mess of things.”