The Tethered Rope:
A Graham Greene-style comedy of manners
Fiction fragment by Clark Humphrey
10-23-96
We open in a darkened house on an island off the Atlantic coast. Which Atlantic coast, it’s not yet revealed; possibly Maine.A late-20s man arrives in the main room of the house and lights oil-fueled lamps. As light invades the room in installments, we see a room that might look like it was designed after 1930 by a regional architect under instructions to make it as coldly Victorian as possible. The walls are impracticably tall for a cold climate, not to mention for the room’s other, somewhat small, dimensions.
The man removes his thick sweater to reveal an old yet still handsome dress shirt on a nearly sympathy-eliciting thin frame. He leaves via a swinging door toward the kitchen when a knock is heard on the heavy oaken front door.
It is his date, a comely lass who isn’t from the island and doesn’t know his whole story.
Not that he’s that willing to tell much of it.
He serves her a meal involving Cornish game hens smothered in some sort of sauce, but she does not dig in right away. He plays a haunting melody for her on a 78 record on a classic wind-up Victrola. When she asks if he could play something a bit more contemporary, he apologizes for not having electricity. He carefully removes the needle from the record, lifts the record off, and writes LADY DOESN’T LIKE on the inner groove with a felt-tip marker, using a lamp for writing light.
The girl takes this opportunity to inspect the kitchen (coal-fired stove, ice box) when she opens a cabinet (heavy, oaken) and a small but finely honed carving knife flies at her from a trajectory above and behind her, missing her shoulder by inches. She panics and flees. The boy enters the kitchen and, realizing what happened by the shiny ENSO brand knife lying on the countertop (heavy, oaken), mutters something to himself. He carefully puts the uneaten meals (his and hers) in a restaurant-kitchen metal tray, which he deposits inside the ice box.
A narrator informs us that this is the opening chapter in a miniseries based upon a novel. The novel was set on an English Channel Island and was annotated with maps, “aside” stories, postcards, flyers for island businesses, board-game cards, and other ephemera.
The following scene is in a room similar to the young man’s house, but larger. It is a mansion redone as an inn. The attempts at providing comfy furnishings and light-motif wall art clash with the heavy, oaken walls and the heavily leaded glass in the small window panes. From the co-ed group of five travelers (Boston Brahmin scholars in this version, proper Londoners in the original) we learn a few things.
This island was a fishing village, pop. 300, before the eccentric sole heir to the ENSO knife fortune bought it (houses and boats and everything) for his own combination resort, retreat, and experimental community.
The young man we saw earlier was his illegitimate son via the descendant of a local fisherman’s family who stayed on to be servants. He was “provided for” in the old man’s will with a “small” guest house on the estate but no cash. He’s lived there alone since age 12, some 15 years ago. (The old man bought the island in 1932 at Depression prices, impregnated the maid in 1960 when he was old and she was young; she died before the old man, of a work-borne illness of some sort. That puts the “boy” as 28 in 1988, when our story is set.)
The son, we are told, lives by himself in that house to this day, unelectrified, phoneless, and speaking only to the inn’s staff, sometimes bringing home food from the inn’s kitchen. It is implied that over the course of the miniseries we will slowly learn what befell the poor mother, what hideous “games” were played in the knife man’s experimental community, and what locked-up passions might be simmering within the soft-spoken son.
But before that, we must suffer through the pent-up emotions of the scholars: a stuffy old man and two middle-aged couples. There’s sexual tension and the implication of marital betrayal, either ongoing or previously committed or presently desired. One of the younger couples finds two leftover cornish game hens in unknown sauce in the inn’s kitchen (otherwise closed for the night) and decides to microwave them for a late-night snack. Upon opening a cupboard in search of plates and utensils, a miniature Enso pocket knife flies through the air and, missing the couple widely, lands harmlessly on the tile floor.
A narrator promises us more mysteries will be introduced, but not resolved, in the next chapter.
