Free The O'Briens by Peter Behrens Page A

most of the time. Look, why don’t you nose around a bit by yourself, get a feel for the place. You don’t want me looking over your shoulder. I’ll wait outside.”
    She thought about his wife: busy, pretty, young. More ambitious than Grattan, perhaps, and getting a little impatient.
    â€œThank you. I won’t be long,” she said.
    â€œTake your time, Miss Wilkins.”
    He went out, closing the door behind him. She stood still and heard him strike a match. And the gondolier was still crooning, singing for no one but himself.
    Alone this time, Iseult took herself once more through the bright, bare rooms. The layout was very simple. It was a nothing little house, the bedroom half the size of her bedroom in Pasadena. Still, it was bright. Hard to imagine someone dying in these rooms. The spare room that could be her library, studio, thinking room.
    What sort of passion might spill in this house? The houses she’d known had all spoken her family’s dark language. Venice, California, was awfully far from everyone and everything, but did that matter? She had enough income to live modestly. She was prepared to be lonely for a while. In a bare little house of her own she might find clarity and calm, she might find her own purpose.
    ~
    As they were gliding back along the Grand Canal, Grattan didn’t ask what she thought of the Linnie cottage. He didn’t say anything. Something in him seemed to have turned off, or turned inward.
    They disembarked and he insisted on walking her to the electric car stop, where a three-car train was boarding passengers.
    â€œI hope it hasn’t been an utter waste of your time,” he said.
    â€œI hope it hasn’t been an utter waste of yours.”
    â€œCertainly not.” He smiled and they shook hands, then she boarded the last car. The floor was gritty with beach sand. She found a window seat and looked out. Grattan O’Brien was still standing there, hat in hand. There was something unfinished about him; some protective carapace was missing. She would want someone tougher. Stubborn, forceful. A man to take her places she couldn’t get to on her own.
    The train started with a jolt and she turned away from the window. The car was packed with sunburnt mothers and infants, beach umbrellas and picnic baskets, fathers and uncles already nodding asleep, older children fussing. She seemed to be the only person travelling alone.
    The day before her mother’s death, the son of one of her mother’s friends, home from his junior year at Yale, had telephoned Iseult and invited her to a tennis and tea party at the Pasadena Club. “Tomorrow afternoon at, say, three o’clock?”
    That was when she broke for the first, the only time. Holding the telephone receiver to her ear, feeling the oxygen being squeezed from her lungs and not having the strength to pull it back in.
    The telephone was on a wall in a dark panelled hallway that reeked of cleaning fluid. For weeks her mother’s housekeeper, Cordelia, displaced by shifts of hired nurses, had had little to do but dust the barren rooms of that mostly unlived-in house. She was a tall, stringy coloured woman from Oklahoma and it was hard to guess her age. She was slender and long-waisted and there was something mannish about her, a sense of power and fluid strength. Determined to earn her keep, she had been scouring, buffing, and waxing so ferociously that the Pasadena house shone with a kind of cruelty, everything glossy, ugly, and perfectly arranged, so that the house itself seemed like a kind of funeral.
    Hearing the Yale boy’s treble over the telephone wires, Iseult felt her lungs deflate, withering as grief closed in. Unable to withstand the pressure, she dropped the receiver. As it dangled on its wire, she got slowly down on hands and knees, touched her forehead to the Tabriz carpet, then rolled over and lay on her side on the mottled wool, gasping and wheezing, until