“Yes, yes, whoever is it?” came Mrs. Harrington's voice over the intercom. Her voice was troubled, constricted.
“It's Phil—”
“What? Didn't the agency ring you to tell you we canceled?”
“No, sorry. I didn't call in this morning”
The Burghers of Calais, by Rodin, in the gardens near the Parliament Buildings, London. A modern Sisyphean image of freedom wrested out of bondage and beauty out of struggle.
“Oh, my, my.” The intercom went dead, then her voice came back on.“I suppose you might as well come up, since you came across town. But you mustn't stay long.”
The door buzzed and I stepped inside to the vestibule of the apartment building, but rather than wait for the open-cage lift to descend, I bounded up the three flights of stairs to their apartment, passing a neighbor in her dressing gown, who muttered to me as I passed, “The woman is an absolute angel to put up with that man. The way he carries on. It's just not done!”
Mrs. Harrington was waiting for me, adjusting her headband, and the brown corduroy overalls she always wore on Sunday when we cleaned. She took my jacket and hung it for me on their antique coat rack.
“There's something you must know,” she began.
I tried to wave her off, as if to say Don't worry, but it was too late.
Her face was carved in agony; tears misted her eyes. In her trembling hand was a glass of sherry.
“Mr. Harrington doesn't know you're coming—”
“Emma, Emma, love. Where are you, my dear?” cried Mr. Harrington in a scotch-slushed voice from the library. His footsteps shuffled across the well-worn wooden floor. “Who goes there, love?”
He appeared, drunk as a fiddler. Up went his arms in a wassailing greeting, spilling his whiskey all over the floor.
“Phil, Phil, my lad,” he slurred. “How good of you to come. I was afraid you would forget to come around to our commodious abode on your final day in London before your peregrinations around the Mediterranean. Bienvenu, mon vieux.”
I was stunned. Mr. Harrington had always been the paragon of reserve and genteel behavior, as far as I knew.
Mrs. Harrington seized me by the arm and dragged me inside and past her husband. She whispered to me, “Just an hour, then away with you. Please.” She was humiliated, and just this side of terrified. She pulled her black woolen sweater tightly around her, and I had the startling image of her as the uncertain Persephone accompanying Hades down into the underworld.
“No work for you today, lad—” Mr. Harrington cried out. Underneath the jolly facade, though, I detected a strain of grief I'd never seen before.
“Desmond, please, love, I can use the help, even if you can't.”
She dragged me away from him and into the kitchen and began to talk uneasily as she loaded me up with her well-burnished wooden box of cleaning equipment. “Since you're here, I want you to understand because I know you are fond of each other. Tomorrow he will be positively shattered that you saw him like this, but he will have to deal with it.” She led me into their bedroom and began picking up his scattered clothes. “Meantime, you should know our arrangement.”
I began making their bed, and my ears reddened as I heard her stress the word arrangement, which struck me as doubly odd because this morning I could still feel the heat of their bodies on the bedsheets and pillows, smell the Glenlivet in the open bottle on the bedside stand, hear the dripping of the shower in the nearby bathroom.
“I told him donkey's years ago that I would leave him if he did. But he insisted on a compromise.” Her voice caught. “So during the school year,” she said, as she hung up their clothes, “he swears to me that he will not touch a single drop of alcohol. But during the school holidays—like Easter this week—he can drink, if he must.”
She pulled her hair back with her hand and sighed, then took a furtive drink from a flask. I tried to appear busy by brushing the velour curtains with a Victorian lint brush.
“We usually hole up here in the apartment all alone until the holidays are over,” she continued, “hermetically sealed away from the world, as it were, for these binges of his. It is just too difficult to explain his struggle to people if we go out. No one would understand. Everyone would misinterpret—”
“What about you, Mrs. Harrington?” I interjected.
“Oh, my word. Not to worry,” she sighed. “I drink to keep the poor man company. Although I detest the whole business.” Years later, I thought of her when I came across Nietzsche's line that “a labyrinthine man never seeks truth, only his Ariadne.”
Suddenly we heard the professor's stumbling steps, then the crash of a vase, followed by a hiss of curses, and moments later, the long slow burble of liquor over ice cubes.
“Are you mad at him?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.
“No, don't be daft,” she snapped. “Look, I'm terribly sorry. I'm not angry with him for drinking himself silly,” she said. “I actually admire him for not drinking the rest of the time. You must understand what prodigious self-control he displays for months on end, and what courage it must take to keep his demons at bay all that time, all the while eyeing the liquor cabinet.”
We moved down the hallway, dusting the family photographs on the wall, and I asked whether he'd ever broken down while university was in session.
“Once. Twelve years ago. He was to teach a class on the War. A lecture on Rommel's campaign with Montgomery in North Africa, I believe. He got dreadfully pissed before the class and tried in vain to lecture. They tell me it was frightful. He could hardly speak a word. The students were mortified, really, for they adored him. The poor dear was warned by the university, which promptly put the fear of God into him.”
Again, there was an ominous silence and worry about what would happen next.
“Anything else I can do for you? Mrs. Harrington?” I asked, anxious to leave.
We began to put the cleaning equipment away into storage.
“Actually, it's not the drinking that bothers me as much as what he's still hiding from me after forty-four years of marriage. Whatever it was that he experienced during the war—well, he refuses to talk about the whole ghastly business. All he ever says is, ‘It's all quite hush-hush, love.’”
She spun away from me in tears, leaving me alone in the shadowy hallway. I stepped tentatively into the library to say good-bye to Mr. Harrington. He looked up from the piano bench, where he was slumped over trying to find some sheet music. Shakily, he got up and approached me and surprised me by handing me a crisp five-pound note, a half-day's wages for me in those days.
“Here, here, take this, lad,” he said, warmly. “Have a drink on me in Cairo, will you? Then keep going. See the world now while you can. You have the right idea. The girlfriend at home can wait. See the world, but see it smart. Careful of the con artists along the road and all the louche travelers, especially the Germans. They're the ones to worry about, the lost souls who pretend to be sophisticated. And read, read, read, lad, as you go. Don't be ignorant. You've been blessed with strapping good health and time—so here, take this and this and this,” he said, piling a number of travel books onto the table next to me. I fingered the leather bindings of his first editions of Lawrence Durrell, Freya Stark, and T. E. Lawrence.
“Oh, and one last thing before you go,” he added.
“Whatever you like, sir.”
“I would like you to polish the