So this is how my father met my grandfather: by sketching his ichthyosaur. The drawings, amazingly exact and to scale, accompanied Felix Girard’s paper on the find, and were published, along with it, in the Proceedings of that year. My father was very young then, just a boy. That is why, now, the drawings look familiar to Harry Owen, a man of science himself. He saw them in the Proceedings. But he doesn’t remember that he did.
My father received no credit for this work, nor any money either.
Nor did the cliff Black Cap receive any money, though it very conveniently collapsed, exposing the ichthyosaur to my grandfather’s opportunity-seeking eye.
Which just goes to show that success really does consist, first and foremost, in being there.
• • •
Why, says Harry Owen, evidently surprised, these are very good! You have an amazing quality of—of—tact—with your living creatures especially—they really look alive—
This is excruciating to my father, this praise. He never could accept a compliment. He blushes painfully, begins rubbing his left wrist rapidly against the heel of his right hand, cannot look Harry Owen in the eye. Unbearable, unbearable. Now he has to run off—run off!—with his sketch pad, back into the warren, and disappear. Gone to ground. Leaving Harry Owen alone.
Or not exactly alone.
Many eyes, in that place.
• • •
I don’t know where my father’s gone. Some parts of the burrow lie too deep even for me to excavate. Nor do I desire to dig there. I’ll remain with Harry Owen instead.
Here he is, left alone in the hallway with my grandfather’s jars of pickled fish and a number of those grinning Mayan heads Felix Girard trades to Petrook in lieu of rent. Clearly, he’s as taken aback by my father’s abrupt departure as he was by his unexpected appearance. At a loss, he stands in his tweeds (it isn’t just my father: they all wear too many clothes in this August heat, sweat trickling down behind the very proper collar and cuffs, soaking the starched shirtfront beneath the tightly buttoned waistcoat, dampening the worsted trousers, pooling around the garters at the stocking tops, such a way to live, so very, for lack of a better word, Victorian); he flashes his spectacles this way and that, intelligently pointing his spade of a beard, patting down his smooth, fine hairs, looking around, looking around, looking around at all the stuffed, pickled, and preserved. Then, finally and suddenly giving up on my father (now classified: Homo enigmaticus, form juvenilis), retreating back into the study, removing a stack of books from one of those poor groaning easy chairs, sitting down, and lighting a cigar.
• • •
I can see the red spark of cigar ash wavering in there, in the semidark.
It is very rude of my grandfather, is it not, to leave his guests sitting around like this?
Poor Harry Owen, sitting around in the semidark with his cigar in that oppressive room. I can see now that he’s noticed the smell, the sour-sweet smell of death, not quite disguised by the pungency of the cigar. He’s running his finger around inside his collar, shifting uncomfortably on his hams. There’s a large, poorly stuffed, mottle-coated, buck-toothed South American rodent on the low table by his elbow, this for company, such lousy conversation. Mrs. S—, is that you? No. No. Though it looks quite like her, it flirts less well. All communication is by other means, other channels. Harry Owen sniffing slightly, there, in the dark.
• • •
Honestly, I don’t know why he waits. He lacks my father’s aptitude for snooping, he’s far too proper, this is all just tedium to him. And he doesn’t even know my grandfather. When the summons came to him at the house on Half Moon Street, he hesitated, even, over whether he ought to come. Debated, pro and contra.