‘Why did you give in like that?’ she demanded. ‘Did that little pipsqueak scare you?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘He looked just the kind of jerk-off who’s happy to kill someone because he’s decided he’s been “dissed”. And nobody else there was about to intervene if he did.’
‘You were absolutely hopeless,’ she declared, and then said, only half-joking. ‘It’s not even as if he were bigger than you. My knight in shining armour.’
‘I never said I was brave; I’m careful. In this country it’s not really intelligent to pick fights with strangers – not when about eighty per cent of this local population likes to carry a concealed weapon.’
‘Didn’t they teach you how to defend yourself in the army?’
He shrugged and she continued. ‘Didn’t you say you were an instructor? Well, what exactly did you teach?’
She’s going to love this, he thought. He said with the faintest of grins, ‘Unarmed combat.’ He remembered the rigours of Hand-to-Hand Fighting – An Introduction. He’d had the skills for it, but not the disposition. He remembered how he had only been interested in its practical, unaesthetic aspects – the shortcuts to getting people to leave you alone. That was the point, he had felt – not to excel at it, as if it were some sort of physical art form; not to develop an unhealthy interest in actively hurting other people; but simply being able, ruthlessly, efficiently and with no fuss (an expression he had already picked up from Kate) to deal with people trying to hurt you.
‘How long did you teach it for?’
‘Six days,’ he said defiantly, as if the figure were twelve years.
Kate laughed. ‘So what happened after six days?’
‘I told you, I joined Army Intelligence.’
‘I forgot. I’d had you pegged as the muscle. Someone who kills men with his bare hands.’
‘Not in the army,’ he said without thinking, then found Kate staring at him. He tried to concentrate on his driving, and since it was not a neighbourhood he knew well, he had plenty of reason not to glance over at Kate.
‘Renoir, did something bad happen to you when you were little?’
He pretended to think about this. ‘Well, I told you it got a little hairy with my mom before Gram took me away. But it wasn’t that bad – I mean, she never really hurt me.’ Except towards the end when she lost it a couple of times a week.
‘I don’t mean that. I mean something awful.’ She was eying him in her unique forensic way. ‘Something you’ve never told me.’
He turned his head to look her straight in the eye, trying not to speak either too deliberately or too slowly. ‘No,’ he said calmly. ‘What makes you think it did?’
She shrugged one shoulder. ‘You had another nightmare the other night. You talked a lot; most of it was babble, but you sounded very scared. What was it about?’
‘How would I know? First I’ve heard about it was right now. You know,’ he said, adopting as light a tone as he could and ostentatiously looking around as they drove to the end of a cul-de-sac, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea where we are.’
In late summer she came twice in four weeks. He had missed her so much that the shortness of the time they would have together cast a pall on her stay before she had even landed. They had been in almost daily contact, through phone or email or – how teenage it made him feel – text messaging, and he almost preferred the distant communication, since there was no reason for it to end, whereas with her visit he could only think of when she would be flying out.
They were growing intimate with no prospect of that intimacy sticking. Years before, when he was first transferred back to San Francisco, he managed to retain a San Diego girlfriend for all of six weeks and two tiring weekend visits there (she had refused to visit him, the accommodation of the base at Presidio proving untempting). So when he thought about it, he couldn’t see sustaining a transatlantic relationship more effectively, which was why he tried not to think about it.
Kate seemed to share this sense of fleeting time, as he discovered when he woke in the middle of the night to find the bed empty. She was in the living room, lying on the sofa, reading the New Yorker, or pretending to, since, as he pointed out to her, she was holding that week’s issue upside down. She didn’t laugh, and managed only half a smile.
He looked at her face closely. ‘Sweetheart, have you been crying?’
She shook her head so vigorously that it made it clear she had been, since two tears promptly popped out of her eyes. He sat down and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Come on, what is it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said and her voice broke. She spoke again but in a cracked teary-sounding voice. ‘It’s just been so nice being here with you.’
‘Why does that make you cry?’
‘Because I hate going away from you, Renoir, I hate it. But it’s so hard buying time to come here. Seymour’s trying to be understanding, but he’s not young any more, and then there’s Emily.’
‘Have you thought at all about coming here for longer?’ He was a little startled to find himself saying this.
‘What do you mean? I was just saying how hard it was to come here as much as I have.’
He figured he might as well keep going. ‘I don’t know, like coming to live here?’ He hesitated. ‘For a while anyway.’
She wiped her cheeks dry and sniffled. ‘Oh Renoir, I’d love to. But how can I? Emily means everything to me.’
‘Bring Emily. Not all the schools here are as bad as mine was.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Angus would never have it. It’s part of the settlement, Renoir. He didn’t contest custody provided I promised to keep Emily in the country. Not that I ever thought I’d want to live anywhere else.’ She looked at him dry eyed. ‘Until I met you.’
She had never talked that much about the past, though over the weeks then months of their relationship he could fill in most of the bigger blanks to her life history, as he presumed she could fill in his – well, most of his. But the emphasis was on the immediate – Ticky wants to meet up at the farmers’ market; Renoir, I bought crabs at the Wharf, so I hope you know how to cook them – or on the future, that long-term dream landscape she had first set out for them in the cabin. One night as they walked home from pizza at a local Italian place, she said, ‘Renoir, if you had your druthers . . .’
And he said, ‘Druthers?’
She blushed and said, ‘Isn’t that the word? I heard it in Alaska. But you know – the fantasy game we played at the cabin. Could you imagine living somewhere else?’
‘Who knows? I’m here because I never managed to leave. Not that I don’t like it – everybody likes their home town, at least they do if they’re still there when they’re forty.’
‘You didn’t answer my question. Could you easily, happily, live somewhere else?’
‘I don’t know. I’m pretty settled in my ways.’ He looked hard at her at this point. She was wearing a white cotton short-sleeved shirt, and trousers that stopped halfway down her calves. Stylish but not affected. He added, trying to take his eyes off her, ‘I’d like to live in the country, as you know. But it’s not very realistic.’
*
She may have shared his fatalism, but she did not show it. On her next visit she brought a small watercolour painting of trees on the slopes rising from a smallish valley. It looked like early spring; the painter had stippled in small green buds and a light tinge to the grass beneath the trees. ‘It’s so green,’ he said. ‘It must be England. Who’s the artist?’
‘My sister,’ she said.
‘Really? It’s very good.’
‘Runs in the family,’ said Kate, ‘though I had an artistic bypass. That’s the view from the lake by the way. They call it Treefall Down. Most of the trees you see were planted after a great storm in the nineteenth century.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ he said, and he felt it, but it seemed so strange to see this painting of Kate’s family place. She h
ad never shown him any photographs.
‘You’d like it there,’ she said, and he nodded politely. ‘I mean, living there,’ she continued, and he was startled. Their relationship lay so much in California that he had trouble envisaging himself being with her anywhere else. Live at Belfield? Or in London? That seemed no more real now to Renoir than had his fantasy of farming.
Yet the possibility of his upping sticks wouldn’t go away, because Kate wouldn’t let it. And the night before she was due to fly out to London, as they lay in bed, she stopped him when he tried to kiss her. ‘I want to talk to you.’
Her voice was firm but also friendly, but he sensed what was coming and was irritated that she wouldn’t leave it alone, even on her last night. He said tersely, ‘It wouldn’t work.’
She did not pretend there were any grounds for misunderstanding, saying, ‘Why not?’
‘I just wouldn’t fit in. I’m totally American – you know that, you’re always telling me so. And besides, what would I do?’
‘Farm.’
‘Kate,’ he said, ‘let’s be serious. I don’t have the money to start farming, not to mention the knowledge or the experience. And anyway, land costs three or four thousand dollars an acre.’
‘That’s in California.’
‘No, that’s in the South of England.’
‘How do you know?’ she asked.
‘I looked it up with Google.’
She was happily surprised. ‘Ah, you were thinking of it. But don’t you see, we already have the land. Belfield’s eight hundred acres; there’s an orchard there already, and the Gatehouse.’
‘It’s not mine, it’s yours.’
‘No,’ she said firmly, ‘it’s not. It’s Roddy’s, and I’m sure he’d sell us what we need – the Gatehouse, the Old Orchard (most of the trees are caput, I admit) and Burdick’s Field – Burdick always said apples would grow well there.’
She was growing excited, thought Renoir. ‘What’s the Gatehouse?’ he asked in spite of himself. The idea was insane, but it was their last night; humour her, he decided.
‘What it sounds like. A gatehouse from the old days when the estate was a lot bigger. In Queen Victoria’s time it was over three thousand acres. No one’s been living in it, so there’s no sitting tenant to evict, and we could fix it up how we liked. It’s listed, but it’s only the outside we couldn’t touch. It’s almost a mile from the Hall. You’d never have to see the family if you didn’t want to.’
‘I’m sure your family’s fine, Kate,’ he added, though from what she’d told him he wasn’t sure at all. ‘But I’d be living off you. And I couldn’t do that, sweetheart.’
‘I’m not asking you to. But why can’t I help? At least to start with.’
‘I’d just feel funny about it.’
She stood up, gesticulating with her hands. ‘You’d rather stay in a job you can’t stand any more – don’t pretend, it’s obvious – than do what you’ve always wanted to do because of pride? Necessity I could understand, but it’s not that – it’s stupid, silly, ridiculous pride.’
He looked at her, and his sense of vulnerability during her outburst gave way to the impersonal feeling of detachment he had felt throughout his adult life. He didn’t like it any more, but it was there, the same ice that had made him so unaffected by Jenny’s declaration of departure; the same steel that had made his visits to his brain-addled mother entirely a bore, incapable of eliciting the smallest sense of sadness, the tiniest tear.
‘That’s not all,’ he said shortly. ‘Say I do go over there, okay? Say I cash in my pension and withdraw all my savings, say goodbye to the Golden Gate and come over. And three months later, while I’m struggling trying to figure out if apples pay – shit, I don’t even know if you’ve got the right soil in your place – you get tired of me. All the simple unaffected habits of your regular Joe named Jack Renoir suddenly seem . . . simple. The accent’s not so cute when you have to hear it day after day and the fact he doesn’t really like the opera starts to tell. Your daughter thinks he’s a jerk, your mother’s not impressed by the vulgar cut to his jib, and your friends make it clear they think you’re crazy.
‘So then what? You’re okay, with a well-paying job and a daughter and family behind you, not to mention the private lake. And me? I’ve given up the security I’ve worked my ass for – let’s face it, I wasn’t exactly born into bluegrass, blueblood breeding country. I’ll be six thousand miles from home without a helping hand in sight, much less a job, and a rapidly declining bank balance that was never too robust to begin with.’
And after this outburst of his own, Kate began to cry, and the iciness within him melted at once. He suddenly couldn’t bear her distress – it made him feel the way he did looking at war photographs where children had been hurt. He would have done anything to stop Kate crying, and to stop her pain, but when he went to comfort her she shook him off, almost extravagantly, with anger, and what she said surprised him with its ferocious clearness. ‘I was about to say,’ she said, shaking off her tears as vehemently as she had rejected his comforting arm, ‘that I know our differences, thank you very much, I’ve known them since the day I missed your tour.’ She had stopped sniffling by now and was looking at him with rapidly clearing eyes and transparent anger. ‘But they didn’t matter – not to me, and I thought not to you either. And I was sure we could do this crazy thing knowing that we simply couldn’t fail because we were mad about each other. That was what counted; that was what mattered. But that’s where I was wrong.’ And she got up out of the bed and walked into the living room, and he thought it best if he didn’t even try to follow her. Let her calm down, he thought, wait until she comes back to bed. But she didn’t come back, and after giving it forty-five minutes he went out to check and found her fast asleep on the sofa.
And though she was due to come out two weeks after this, Renoir was not surprised when at the last minute she cancelled – and not even personally, as the secretary from Carlisle’s rang him to say Kate had gone to Indonesia but would be in touch. I don’t care if she has to go to the moon, she could tell me herself. Her mobile phone stayed resolutely switched off; his text messages – he felt like a kid, jabbing away with his thumb – went unanswered. His hurt was soon displaced by worry when after five days he still had no word of any kind from her, but when he called London the secretary assured him she had called in that very morning and was absolutely fine. So his worry was then displaced by anger, and inevitably in Renoir that led to a shutdown altogether. Minimise.
He told himself that he should never have got involved with this woman in the first place. Too much geography, too many differences – of money and education and status and nationality. Given time, Renoir knew he would find more reasons, but these would do for now.
Yet the hatches, once opened, proved hard to batten down again. Renoir started to find his work life very dull and repetitive. It sounded clichéd, but he found little there that stretched him, and even the interest in simple human variety no longer sustained him through what was so predominantly predictable. The dreams of farming, which had always been pleasant but remote – like a dream of becoming a world-famous opera singer – now nagged at him.
He couldn’t understand either why Kate figured so much in his thoughts. He’d gone out with Jenny for three years but had managed to get over her in a matter of days. Days? Hours – he’d lined up a date with a receptionist at the Marriott within forty-eight hours of their final not-so-fraught exchange. But with Kate gone he didn’t want to pick up the phone to call another woman. He’d never understood the phrase ‘meaningless sex’ – not when sex had been a staple of fun for him for so many years – but now he recognised that to sleep with other women would only fill him with greater regret than that already swelling inside him.
For he could see, however dimly, that he had done this to himself. Why did I let her go? he asked himself. But he knew why. The only way ahead for them meant he would have to move – not just physically
to a new place, a new culture, a new life, but shift emotionally and metaphorically out of the cocooned life he had so successfully created for himself. It scared him, scared him greatly, but as the days and then the weeks passed, the simple fact of missing Kate Palmer began to compete with his fear, started to vie with it in an increasingly fraught race which, one night deep in his cups, Renoir reckoned was a race for his soul.
And he didn’t know what to do, as the mobile phone back in England stayed on voicemail, and he stopped trying to reach the number. Until one day he walked out of work near Union Square – he didn’t want the company in on this in any way – and bought a box of stationery from a boutique store on Maiden Lane. He checked the postage at the post office and carefully wrote out the London address, W8 code and all, and his letter had no salutation and no farewell and consisted of four words. I miss you so.
And seven days later the ticket came via Federal Express, with a note that read, Renoir, you said you had holiday in November so I hope I got the date right. And no, you can’t pay me back – I got these through air miles and the only payment acceptable to me is a red-blooded American one. I think you’ll like it over here. Trust me. K
Belfield
THE CARD WAS postmarked London but featured a photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge, luminously orange, with the Pacific Ocean a rich aquamarine. The overall effect was ’50s retro, as if the postcard had been bought in a store specialising in kitsch. The message was written in a swirl of copperplate italics: Renoir, Don’t You Think It’s Time to Head Home?
Its arrival was the only reason he was glad Kate was away, since its message – breezily anonymous – would have upset her. As it was, he took it in his stride, though he would have admitted that the postcard did not exactly improve his mood, which had been bad even before he’d picked up the post.
For a start, he didn’t like fact that Kate was in Dubai, at a producers meeting which the head of the consultancy hadn’t wanted to attend; he didn’t like going to stay with Kate’s family; and he dreaded the prospect of Friday traffic leaving town. What Renoir really wanted instead was to stay home in the London flat with a bottle of whisky for company. But someone had to check that the builders weren’t using winter as an excuse – they had promised to be done rebuilding the Gatehouse by now but they weren’t.
Keeping Secrets Page 9
