Excessive Joy Injures the Heart by Elisabeth Harvor

little remote from the life of the town, up on a knoll at the end of a very long driveway, a handsome old fieldstone house with a fanlight over its wide white front door. And in the field next to it there waseven a black-faced white sheep standing under a tree as if it had been permanently tethered there.
    When she got out of the car at the foot of the front steps she did a quick count of the bathing suits spread out to dry on the formal swell of green lawn below the verandah. There were two women’s, both bikinis: one red, one white. Two men’s: one red, one grey and patterned with slim silver fishes. Nine children’s: three for boys, six for girls. But she was already late. She quickly walked up the steps, preparing her face to meet Declan or one of the wives, rang the bell.
    But there was no sound and no one came.
    She tried the bell again.
    Another wait.
    She decided to knock.
    Then to knock more loudly.
    Once more, with feeling.
    But when still no one came she let herself in, stepping cautiously into a hallway that smelled like the vestry of a very old church. To her right there was a large room with a low sofa and chairs and there were also several tall old oak doors (all closed) leading off to the other rooms. She wondered which door led to Declan’s office. She closed the outside door firmly behind herself, then stood, expecting a receptionist or Declan to come out. But there was only a deep spring-morning quiet. Barefoot, her sandals swinging from one hand, she walked carefully into the big room and sat down on the sofa. The coffee table was a square of glass resting on a bed of chrome tubing. There were stacks of magazines on it, but she was much more curious about the books, in a tall built-in bookcase behind leaded glass panels.After a moment’s hesitation, she got up and went over to it and soundlessly opened one of its doors, then stood reading the titles:
The Function of the Orgasm, The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
. There was also a green and black paperback titled
Sexuality, Self and Survival
, a slim little book whose title was set against a background of outsized neon-green blades of grass and a black post-nuclear sky. She carried it back to the sofa with her, then leafed quickly through it, promising herself she would ask Declan if she could borrow it, but not till some future time when she wasn’t feeling so anxious.
    But where
was
he? And was this even the right house? The right town? Only one thing was certain, the books were the right books. But now a new fear presented itself: he would open one of these doors to discover her with this particular book in her hands. A mad worry, but apparently a real one, to judge from the way she’d gone so shaky and damp. She slipped back to the bookcase, not making a sound, and fitted the green and black book into its slot. She was also aware of the fact that she was by now very much more anxious than curious; she had, after all, made the trip out here with a certain elation and hope, and to find no one here was not only weird, it was a bizarre disappointment. And so she stood, wondering for a moment which door to try, then went over to the nearest door and knocked, and when there was no response, pulled it open.
    A long table suitable for one of the grand halls of Versailles was crammed into a small sunlit box of a room with a bay window, and the chairs were tall-backed and ornately carved from a dark foreign wood. So much pomp, and way out here in the country. But it was a cheerful pomp, the only dark note in the room a floor-to-ceiling wall rug, its red eye glowing outof a field of black yarn. She edged past it warily, its primeval eye watching her to see what she planned to do next.
    What she did next was open the door to what she guessed must be the kitchen. And
it
turned out to be more spacious, human-looking. A woman’s puckered navy-blue bathing suit was hanging over the back of a chair, and in the tall windows,