Before she left, Vivian took me aside. “Well done, Owen. You’ve done everything I asked, beautifully. You’ve kept the faith. It hasn’t been easy, I know, but”—here she actually winked—“God rewards the faithful.”
I tried to believe her. But when I thought of God, all that came to mind was a wide smile with a chipped, graying tooth.
The first edition of my translation was published in a matter of months, with a level of fanfare even I found vaguely disquieting. Surely it wasn’t usual for every academic review and newspaper column to adopt the sameawed, idolatrous tone; surely someone had doubts about the provenance of the original book or the quality of the translation. But if anyone asked questions, they asked them quietly, from the corners of their mouths.
Chancellor Rolfe had, after all, declared the book a national treasure. She read long passages aloud on the radio, drawing lessons and parallels from them as priests did from scripture. She had cheap pocket editions printed for the troops, and there were rumors that she slept with the original text on her bedside table.
Satford & Gills shipped me off on an extensive lecture tour following the publication. This, I thought, they would soon regret; I had a fine, strong speaking voice, but I was uneasy on the stage, inclined to fidget and stutter. I doubted whether anyone would come.
But they did. At first in the twenties, then the hundreds, packing every hall and forum. Each event might have been plucked from my most ambitious, unlikely fantasies: shaking hands with leading scholars and critics, fielding invitations to clubs and societies I’d never even known existed, standing behind tall oaken lecterns, looking down upon a sea of eager pink faces.
I supposed in my fantasies Professor Sawbridge might have been among the crowd, or even my father. But Sawbridge was still busy with her tomb, apparently, and my father must have still been angry with me. Admittedly, I’d called him a liar and a traitor when last we spoke, and expressed the hope that he would never again darken my doorstep, but it struck me as rather shabby of him to respect my wishes after thirty years of ignoring them.
But what did I care? I had the adulation of thousands, now. I was a respected scholar, a war hero—a knight of the nation, even. The Chancellor had taken my oath in a somewhat hurried ceremony just before the first edition went to print; Satford & Gills had been very eager to putSiron the cover.
The people of Dominion—who had laughed and spat at me, who had scorned and doubted and reviled me—now loved me as one of their own. I had been born outside of Dominion, which I imagined as a grand house with shuttered windows and locked doors.The Death of Una Everlasting,it appeared, was the key.
But then a woman had lingered after one of my lectures to pat my hand and tell me she only wished the rest of “my type” would devote themselves to their new country. Later, a photographer had asked if I would be willing to pose in my “native costume.” Then I’d overheard a pair of scholars who’dinvited me to join their society:Oh, come now,one of them said, laughing,you’re always saying we need a mascot.
And I understood finally that a nation is a house with no windows or doors at all. That no matter what I did—no matter how much blood I spilled in its defense or ink I spent in its praise—it would never, ever be my home.
But if Dominion was not my home, where was it? Not the fetid flat above the butcher shop. Not my father’s narrow gray row house in Queenswald, and surely not my mother’s country, which I had known only as an infant and, later, as an invader. I would only be a different kind of stranger there, anyway: Instead of being surprised when I spoke their language, people would be surprised when I didn’t.
No. The wordhomeevoked only the sweet green smell of the woods, long gone, and sometimes another word:Yew,I thought, or perhapsyou.
16
WHEN I RETURNEDto campus the following summer, I found my office had reverted to its natural state as a storage closet. I wandered, adrift, until a smiling secretary guided me to a palatial room on the fourth floor. In the middle of the room there was a desk that must have taken ten men and a crane to move, and on top of the desk there was a brass nameplate:Sir Owen Mallory.
I had settled behind the desk, feeling like a child trying on grown-up clothes, when Harrison finally found me.
I hadn’t seen him since the day the book arrived in the post, and the past year hadn’t been kind to him. There was a pouchy, droopy quality to his features, as if the air had been let out of his face, and his skin had gone the color of chewed nails.
He made a circuit of the office, wearing an arch expression that suggested he found it all rather gauche. “My, haven’t you done well for yourself,” he drawled.
I had. In the past month, I had received two honorary degrees, a handful of prestigious job offers, and a prize which I suspected the Cantford Board of Fellows had invented and bestowed purely to get me to stay. I had the fawning, if somewhat false, admiration of my colleagues; I had an embarrassingly large office with mullioned windows and thick carpeting; I had more money than I knew how to spend, a knighthood, and the endowed faculty position in Middle Dominion Studies.
I stared at Harrison, willing myself to feel even a flicker of pride or accomplishment, or at least petty delight at having won our inane little war. But all I felt was the impotent regret that follows a bad trade. I knew I had lost something in exchange for all of this, and I knew it had been precious to me, though I could no longer quite recall what it was.
“Thank you,” I said, in that steady, smooth voice that never sounded like it belonged to me. And then, surprising myself: “I’m not sure it was worth it.”
Harrison wheeled on me. “Of course it’s—any of us would—” I watched as the last tatters of his composure slipped from his hands. He stepped forward and leaned over the desk until his face was so close, I could see the cobwebs of blood in his eyes and the tremor in his jaw. I wondered if he’d had trouble sleeping, too, and if the doctors had prescribed him the same chalky white pills.
“It should have been me.” The hate in his voice was bare now, unadorned by false manners or good breeding. “It wassupposedto be me. I remember—I can remember—” He broke off abruptly. He was looking down at his own hands with an expression I knew well: a weary, mad dread, as if he knew there was nothing there, but still expected to see a knife between his knuckles.
Our eyes met, very briefly. I wondered, with an irrational rush of jealousy, if Harrison had read your stories when he was a boy, as I had. If he, too, knew your eyes were not blue, and did not know how he knew it.
He left without saying anything more.
At my appointment later that day, my hands shook too badly to sign the receipt. The doctor prescribed a long visit to the seaside. The sunlight and the sound of the waves would calm my nerves, he said.
So I was looking out at the Slant Sea, quietly despising the sunlight and the sound of the waves, when I first heard the news. Someone had a wireless playing in the back of the café, and the Sunday sermon had just been interrupted by a breathless announcer.
“The cup and crown,” he panted, and even through the static I could hear the awe running under his voice, as if he knew already that people would tell each other, years later, where they’d been when they first heard the news, “they’ve been—well, they’ve been found.”
By noon the following day I was back on campus, sweating outside Professor Sawbridge’s office door. It was slightly ajar, as it hadn’t been in months, and light shone around the frame. I could hear someone moving on the other side.
I walked in without knocking, the way I used to.
