Chapter Twenty-seven

ALTHOUGH I MET Ben and Marcie for dinner the following night, I said nothing to Ben about my newly minted theory – I wanted to keep turning it over in my mind like some complex architectural model to see if it held together.

In return for Marcie’s home-cooked meals I had invited them to Nobu and, somewhere between the shrimp tempura and the yellowtail, I did, however, mention that I had changed my mind – I would be happy to take part in the seminar.

They both stared at me. It was Marcie who spoke first. ‘Let me guess, you’ve found Jesus too? ’

I smiled, but – men being men – there was no way I was going to embarrass either myself or Bradley by talking about the shrine I had seen at Ground Zero and the emotions I had experienced when I read about his bravery.

‘Maybe it’s being home again, ’ I said. ‘But I think it’s time to give something back to the community. ’

Bradley almost choked on his sake. He and Marcie exchanged a glance. ‘That’s wonderful, ’ Bradley said. ‘Why not join Neighbourhood Watch too? Just out of curiosity – any chance of telling us the real reason? ’

‘Not really, ’ I replied, smiling back, thinking quietly about the sixty-seven floors and the fact that the man in the wheelchair, to judge by his photo, was a heavy-set guy.

The silence stretched on, and at last Marcie realized I had no intention of explaining any more and she launched into a new subject. ‘Have you thought about going back to your childhood home? ’ she asked.

Surprise changed sides. I stared at her like she was crazy. ‘Greenwich, you mean? What – press the intercom and ask the corporate raider if I could take a look around? ’

‘You can try that if you like, but having met him, I don’t think it’ll work, ’ she said. ‘I just thought you might have seen the bit in New York magazine. ’

I lowered my glass of water and looked a question at her.

‘A local garden society is showing the grounds to raise money for charity, ’ she explained. ‘If you’re interested, Ben and I would be happy to go with you. ’

My mind was spinning – go back to Greenwich? – but I didn’t pause. ‘No, but thanks. It’s just a house, Marcie – it doesn’t mean anything to me. It was all a long time ago. ’

Naturally, as soon as we had separated after dinner, I bought a copy of the magazine and, the next day, I called the Connecticut Horticultural Society and purchased a ticket.

Bill would have loved it. ‘Two hundred dollars to see a few trees? What’s wrong with Central Park? ’

It was a glorious Saturday morning, the sun climbing in a cloudless sky, as I wound through Connecticut’s leafy avenues. I could have told the cab to take me up the drive to the front of the house, but I wanted to walk – I figured it would be best to give the memories a chance to breathe. The huge wrought-iron gates were open and I gave my ticket to an old lady with a rosette and stepped into the past.

It was amazing how little had changed in twenty years. The sycamores still formed a canopy over the pea-gravel drive, the European beeches continued to add depth to the hillsides and in their cool glades the rhododendrons were as beautiful as ever. Halfway up the drive there was a break in the foliage, designed to give visitors their first view of the house. If it was meant to shock, it never failed.

I paused and looked again at Avalon. It stood in the distance, its facade reflected in the broad waters of the ornamental lake. Bill’s grandfather had gone to England in the 1920s and stayed with the Astors at Cliveden, their stunning Italianate pile on the Thames. He returned with dozens of photos, showed them to his architect, and told him to ‘build something like that, only more beautiful’.

The house was finished six months before the Crash. Along with Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, it was the last of the great American mansions of the twentieth century.

My eye tracked along its walls of Indiana limestone, aglow in the morning light, and found the three tall windows at the northern end. It was my bedroom and maybe you can imagine how a room like that felt to a kid from my part of Detroit. The memory of those frightening days carried my eyes down to the lake where I had spent so much time walking alone.

Under a row of pin oaks I saw the grass promontory from which, years later, Bill taught me to sail. As a child he had spent his summers in Newport and fell in love with the twelve-metre yachts which competed for the America’s Cup. One day he came home with scale models of two of the greatest boats ever to have had keels laid down. Australia II and Stars and Stripes were over five feet long, their sails and rudders remote-controlled, driven only by the wind and the skill of the operator. God knows how much they cost.

I can still see the madman now, sprinting down the lake, trimming his sails, trying to cover my wind and beat me around every buoy. Only when I had defeated him three times in a row did he take me out on Long Island Sound and teach me the real thing in a two-man dinghy.

I don’t think I’m a boastful person, so maybe you will trust me when I say that sailing was the one thing for which I had a natural gift. Apart from deceit, of course. So much so that one Saturday, sitting on the upturned hull, Bill told me he thought I had a chance of going to the Olympics.

Knowing I always kept myself apart from others, he had the good sense to suggest one of the solo classes – a Laser – and worked hard with me every weekend. It didn’t matter in the end – when I was about sixteen, lost and angry about life, having nothing else to rebel against, I gave it up. I told him I wasn’t going to sail again, and I thought in my naivety and cruelty that the look of disappointment on his face was some form of victory. A hundred times I must have thought of ways to take it back, but I wasn’t smart enough to understand that an apology is a sign of strength, not weakness, and the opportunity vanished with the summer.

As I stood on the drive after so many years and looked at the lake again, I realized why I had come back. He was dead but I wanted to talk to him.

I made my way up to the old house. Marquees for the silver-service lunch stood on the lawns and the doors into the house were roped off – only committee members and VIP guests with passes were making it past the security guards. Getting inside might have presented a problem for even a highly trained agent, but not to someone who had spent their childhood in the house.

At the back of the service buildings I found the door into a gardeners’ change room had been left unlocked, moved through it quickly and entered the cavernous garage.

On the wall on the far side, I reached above a set of workshop shelves and hit a button hidden under a row of power sockets. A section of the shelves creaked open – an underground passage led into the house. Built by Bill’s father, ostensibly to access the garage in icy weather, its real purpose was far different.

According to the old housekeeper, the colonel – having conquered Europe with the Sixth Army – came home and launched a similar campaign with the maids. He established his headquarters on the daybed in his study, a room which offered a long view of the drive and gave that week’s subject plenty of time to get herself dressed, head down the passage and into the garage before the colonel’s wife reached the front door. The housekeeper always said the plan was so good her boss should have made General.

I paused in the passage and listened for any sound from the study. Nothing, so I turned the handle and stepped through the door concealed in the room’s antique panelling.

Grace would have had a coronary. Gone were her priceless English antiques and the Versailles parquetry, replaced by plaid couches and a tartan carpet. Over the old fireplace, acquired from some chateau, where her finest Canaletto had once hung, was a portrait of the owner and his family, staring at some far-off point as if they had just discovered the New World. The only possible improvement would have been if it were painted on black velvet.

Ignoring their heroic gaze, I crossed the room and opened the door into the entrance hall. I heard voices – all the good and the great were congregating in the formal living rooms – but the two gorillas at the front door had their backs to the interior, so they didn’t see me head up the stairs. At the top, it was one of those moments.

The raider hadn’t turned his decorator loose on the first floor, so the years promptly fell away and my childhood was all around me. I walked down the beautiful corridor – I think I said it was the quietest house I had ever known – and opened the door at the north end.

The layout of the rooms was unchanged, the weight of the past almost palpable – a large sitting room, a bathroom, walk-in closets and a bedroom overlooking the woodland. There were a dozen other similar suites in the house, and it was obvious the raider’s family had never used this one.

I stood silently for minutes without end, just remembering, until at last I perched on the bed and looked at a seat built into a bay window. Whenever Bill came to talk, he always sat there, his face framed against the copper-beech trees in the woods behind. Slowly I let the focus of my vision blur, and I swear it was as if I could see him again.

In my heart, I told him all the things I had never been able to say in life. I said he had cared for me when he’d had no obligation of blood or friendship to do so and I told him that, to my mind, if there was a heaven, there would always be a place for someone who did that for a child. I confessed that whatever good was in me came from him but the acres of darkness were all my own, and I told him that he was forever in my thoughts and there wasn’t a day went by when I didn’t wish I could go sailing again to make him proud. I asked for his forgiveness for not being the son he had so desperately wanted and, after that, I sat in stillness.

If anybody had walked in and seen me with my head bowed they would have thought I was praying, and I must have stayed like that for a long time because the thing that stirred me was the sound of a violin. The two hundred dollars had bought not only the silver service lunch but an accompaniment by a chamber ensemble, and I guessed everybody was starting to head into the tents. I stood up, took one last look at my past and headed for the door.