Elizabeth encouraged Lily to walk around the grounds. It was the end of what had been a very wet summer, and the estate had become a wilderness of tall grass with trees sweeping down into it. The trees themselves had survived their centuries with hollowed trunks; some of them had split apart and had been kept from falling by iron chains that had grown rusty and appeared to be part of the trunks they were meant to hold. Besides age, storms had ransacked the land, and every winter one of the great trees – copper beech or red maple – had given way and crashed to the ground, to be cut up into firewood to feed the giant fireplaces inside the house and warm the chill bones of its inhabitants.
Although Lily traversed city streets in complete confidence, here she tramped through the grass with misgiving of what might be lurking there – poison ivy, or a snake she knew would not be harmless to herself. Passing two blighted apple trees – the remains of what had once been an orchard cultivated for profit – she picked up one of the apples that lay half-hidden in the grass; soft and rotten, it split apart in her hand and maggots crawled out of it. She miserably counted the minutes until she could say she had had enough fresh air and return to the house to be near the telephone on which Gavin called her regularly, at the same time every day.
Celia, also calling every day, asked her, ‘When are you coming home?’ Lily was evasive – for Celia, this was something completely new in her. Lily said she needed the home-cooked meals Gavin’s mother provided instead of the gourmet takeout Celia usually sent for. ‘I thought you liked it,’ Celia said, and Lily replied yes she did, when she had only herself to think of.
Celia told Fay: ‘She’s lying to us. They’re both lying to us.’
‘What if they’re not?’
‘I’ll find out. We’ll go there this weekend. She’ll tell me the truth. She always does. Don’t you want to know the truth?’
‘Not always,’ Fay said. ‘Will Gavin be there with her, do you think?’
‘Is Gavin ever with her,’ Celia said in exasperation.
Suddenly Fay said with more energy than she usually produced, ‘Whatever’s happened has happened. So let it rest, Celia.’
But, ‘No,’ Celia said. ‘No.’
On the weekend, challenged about her husband’s absence, Lily remained calm. ‘He’s trying to get away, but there’s always something.’ Her shy-violet eyes were large and solemn with truthfulness. ‘Gavin knows a lot of interesting people. Everyone wants to meet him.’ She sounded as proud and pleased as Gavin did when he spoke of her. ‘He’s so wonderful – different from everyone in the world. More wonderful,’ she explained.
Celia said, ‘That’s what I’m saying: he is different; all right, more wonderful, if that’s how you want it . . . You don’t have to go through with this,’ she continued. ‘It’s a very easy thing to do nowadays, almost legal, certainly with someone as small as you . . . ’ She tried to span her hands round Lily’s waist not only to demonstrate its smallness but to touch her in affection.
Lily disengaged herself. She said, ‘If you don’t believe me, you don’t love me. People don’t love people they think are liars.’
She went out and took the only action she knew – she called Gavin, and from her voice he realized he could not delay any longer. He told her he would be there on Sunday morning and, confident that he would, she got up early and accompanied her mother-in-law to church.
So when Gavin drove up to the house, he met only Fay, unsuccessfully trying to make coffee for herself in the stone-age kitchen. He did it for her, and she thanked him, and then she said she was glad he had come, to help intervene in the situation that had arisen between her two daughters. The difficulty was, she told him frankly, that Celia couldn’t stand the competition, always having had Lily completely to herself.
‘And now you’re here,’ he said.
‘Not for long. I’m going away. But you’re not. And the baby is not, I presume.’
‘Yes, he and I are here to stay.’
‘Isn’t it exciting? I’m excited.’ She stroked his arm, lingering over the sleeve of his summer jacket; she had always appreciated good-looking men. She said, ‘It was so kind of you to have married my little Lily.’
‘No no, not at all; quite the contrary. It’s Lily who is kind. Mother adores her. For her sweet temperament,’ he explained, ‘and for being so much part of the family. I hope when they’ve finished praying together, Mother will show her around the churchyard. It’s full of us, going back two hundred years. Of course there’ve been ups and downs – two hundred years is no joke! – but that’s how it goes. Kingdoms like the orchard flit russetly away, and all the rest of it.’
‘But the name is still there,’ Fay said. ‘And you’re carrying it on. You and my Lily. That’s so mysterious and lovely.’ She pressed his shoulder, massaging it a bit in affection.
The Sunday lunch Elizabeth served on her return was the same Fay and Celia remembered from their previous visit. So were the family anecdotes told around the table, and they seemed endless to Celia, leaving her tense with frustration. But afterwards she managed to manoeuvre herself and Fay to be alone with their hostess in the parlour. Elizabeth was embroidering a little muslin shirt, and she explained that the pattern – of birds, daisies, violets – was copied from a framed sampler with a faded signature and the date 1871. Beside it hung some watercolours of local scenes – a waterfall, a horse and cart in a field – painted years ago but still there, Elizabeth said, to be rendered by anyone with artistic talent. She herself had no such talent – which made her all the more thankful to have Lily in the family. Fay confirmed that Lily had always loved sketching and had gone to art school.
‘She lasted a week,’ Celia said. ‘Lily is really too frail – physically and otherwise – to see anything through. That’s why we’re worried about her present condition: if she’s strong enough to carry it full term.’
‘Our Dr Williams said everything was perfectly normal,’ Elizabeth said with satisfaction.
‘Perfectly normal,’ Celia repeated. She threw a swift glance at her mother, but despairing of help from there, rushed in on her own to tell Gavin’s mother: ‘We hardly see him. We have no idea where he is, with whom. All we know is he’s not where he should be. At home, Lily never knew if her husband was on the sofa where he had chosen to sleep, or if he’d been out all night.’
Snipping off a thread, Elizabeth smiled in reply. ‘Gavin has always been a nightbird. I suppose poets usually are, that’s when they get their inspiration. Luckily dear Lily is an artist herself, she understands him perfectly. A perfectly matched couple.’ She smiled again.
‘A poet and his muse.’ Fay smiled back.
Two slender figures in light clothes, Gavin and Lily wandered among trees and bushes in the grounds. When he lifted a branch to let her slip through, they appeared to vanish – tenuous as shadows, insubstantial. But for each other they were substantially there. They hardly touched; only sometimes he held her hand, or guided her by her elbow. The grounds were different for Lily when he was there. Now she saw that here and there the ancient and broken trees had sprouted new branches with leaves on them. He led her to where there was a fishpond with water lilies unfolded and goldfish swimming beneath them. They sat on a pile of stones forming a bank, and he lightly laid his arm across her shoulders while she traced his features with her finger, in silence and contentment.
It did not last very long; he looked at his watch. He had to go back to the city, an appointment.
She said, ‘Let me come with you.’
He smiled and kissed her hair. ‘Mother so loves having you here, and she can look after you better and cook you all those dishes. I know you don’t like them, neither do I, but you need them. The baby needs them.’
‘And afterwards? Do we have to live with Celia? Can’t I come live with you?’
From his sad smile she realized how impossible this was. She knew he had a place where he needed to do things of his own, write his po
etry and meet poets and other friends.
‘Celia lives near the park. You can take the baby there.’
‘I don’t like the park.’
‘Then walk in the street with the pram – I’ll meet you every day and I’ll push the pram. I’ll love to do that.’
‘Really?’ She laughed out loud with pleasure.
‘Oh yes. Yes. It’ll be fun. Our own baby . . . I’m so much looking forward to it. We all are. Mother can hardly wait.’
They were silent. After a while he said, ‘Mother will stay with you while he’s being born. She did it for all my sisters. She’ll be the first to see him.’
A leaf dropped from an overhanging tree; a frog croaked. Gavin said, ‘Tell me about him again.’
She waved her hand before her face as though waving away something she did not want to see; but on the contrary, it was a gesture of conjuring up a vision that was imprinted on her mind. ‘He was small, very small and skinny. Like those pictures you see of children starving in Africa? Only it was the way he was built, he wasn’t exactly starving, though he was hungry. I could tell from the way he ate my pretzel and then asked for another and two hot dogs. It may be because teenagers can never get enough to eat. His hair was very curly and it sat on him like a cap, and his ears stuck out from his head like two handles. His eyes were the biggest thing about him, they were huge, huge, and they shone in the rest of his face – I mean his face being so dark and it was also dark under the bridge.’
‘Yes,’ Gavin said. ‘I think I can see him. In fact, quite clearly.’
‘I see him all the time and I’m scared.’
‘Why should you be? I’m here. It’s my son.’
‘Scared that he may have gotten sick from being in the rain and having nowhere to dry his shirt. I don’t think he had another one, and it was very thin cloth so you could see his shoulder blades sticking out.’
‘I thought you trusted me,’ Gavin said, sounding so sad that she gave a little cry of reassurance and for a brief moment laid her hand on the shoulder of his jacket.
‘If you trust me, you have to believe me.’
‘I do believe you, and last week I went around to all the Ethiopian restaurants I could find in New York, but he wasn’t there. But maybe he wasn’t Ethiopian.’
‘No, maybe he was Nigerian, but you wouldn’t want to go around to all the Nigerian restaurants. He’s working and saving his tips for the restaurant. You have to believe me without proof. That’s what faith is – believing without proof.’
They got up from the bank of stones. It was getting late, the shadows lay cool and lengthened on the grass and the tops of the trees had the stillness around them that means the end of the day and its liquidation in the setting sun. They retraced their steps back to the house where his car was parked, and when they passed through the blighted orchard, he picked up an apple for her and she ate it. She didn’t even have to look; she knew it would be whole, without worms or decay.
Nevertheless, some of the things he had promised her did not happen. The baby was born and, as Gavin had predicted, Elizabeth was the first to see him emerge with his little cap of black hair. Gavin chose the name Scipio for him (after the Roman general Scipio Africanus, he explained to Lily). But Lily did not often push Scipio in his pram. Instead she pushed Gavin in his wheelchair through the streets they both loved. Poets traditionally die young – in the past often from consumption, but Gavin was an early victim of a new disease. He had been moved to Celia’s apartment and stayed in the bedroom that he now shared with Lily, he alone in the bed and she on a folding cot placed at the foot of it. She cared for him entirely by herself, refusing to engage a nurse and only sometimes grudgingly accepting Celia’s help. It was easy for her to carry him; he had become as light as a child, and he looked up at her with perfect trust in her ability to hold him.
A week after he died, she climbed up to the roof of an office building that Gavin had pointed out to her as a typical example of post-war commercial architecture. He had told her it was architecturally very boring, but it suited her purpose after she discovered that the fire escape stairway leading to the roof was kept open during office hours. So it was by day that she took the long climb to arrive at the top. From here she gazed down over the city: the churches and the bridges and the ribbons of river, and the streets with their shoals of cars and glittering towers of museums and stores and theatres and restaurants and dreams of restaurants – dreams of glory and gold pouring down from the sky that, now she was so close to it, turned out to be much larger and brighter than she had anticipated.
While he was growing up, the orphaned Scipio mostly lived in the country in the family house permeated by the family history that his paternal grandmother transmitted to him day by day. He didn’t listen to her stories very carefully; at this time his principal interest was in horses and he often accompanied his two great-uncles to the races at Saratoga. His ambition was to become a jockey, for which he was small and wiry enough, and even slightly bow-legged. But after spending a vacation with his grandmother Fay in Monte Carlo, where she had settled for tax reasons, he grew enthusiastic about motorcar racing. This led to his subsequent career as a racing-car driver. He became famous and was photographed for magazines, leaning against his car with his crash helmet under his arm, his radiant smile stretching up to his ears where they stuck out like two handles.
This photograph, and many others of him, stood in Celia’s living-room. She looked at him with pleasure, but as the years passed she began to be puzzled by these pictures of Scipio. She wondered what he was doing there among all the others, especially next to the photograph of Gavin and Lily on their wedding day. But after some more time she also couldn’t remember who this couple was – she wiped the dust off the glass, but failed to make them or her memory any clearer. No one heard her mutter to herself; if she muttered some names, she had no faces to put to them, even though they were smiling all around her. There was a film over her eyes, and a film over her mind. Only sometimes there was a glimmer – a shimmer of two figures in light-coloured clothes on the verge of disappearing from sight, between trees or around a street corner, or simply fading into the ether. The ether! Even that – a poetic idea but a false hypothesis – has ceased to exist.
The Judge’s Will
After his second heart attack, the judge knew that he could no longer put off informing his wife about the contents of his will. He did this for the sake of the woman he had been keeping for twenty-five years, who, ever since his first attack, had been agitating about provisions for her future. These had long been in place in his will, known only to the lawyer who had drawn it up, but it was intolerable to the judge to think that their execution would be in the hands of his family; that is, his wife and son. Not because he expected them to make trouble but because they were both too impractical, too light-minded to carry out his wishes once he was not there to enforce them.
This suspicion was confirmed for him by the way Binny received his secret. Any normal wife, he thought, would have been aghast to learn of her husband’s long-standing adultery. But Binny reacted as though she had just heard some spicy piece of gossip. She was pouring his tea and, quivering with excitement, spilled some in the saucer. He turned his face from her. ‘Go away,’ he told her, and then became more exasperated by the eagerness with which she hurried off to reveal the secret to their son.
Yasi was the only person in the world with whom she could share it. As a girl growing up in Bombay, Binny had had many friends. But her marriage to the judge had shipwrecked her in Delhi, a stiffly official place that didn’t suit her at all. If it hadn’t been for Yasi! He was born in Delhi and in this house – a gloomy, inward-looking family property, built in the 1920s and crowded with heavy Indo-Victorian furniture inherited from earlier generations. Binny’s high spirits had managed to survive the sombre atmosphere; and, when Yasi was a child, she had shared the tastes and pleasures of her Bombay days with him, teaching him dance steps and
playing him the songs of Hollywood crooners on her gramophone. They lived alone there with the judge. Shortly after Yasi was born, the judge’s mother had died of some form of cancer, which had also accounted for several other members of the family. It seemed to Binny that all of the family diseases – both physical and mental – were bred in the very roots of the house, and she feared that they might one day seep into Yasi’s bright temperament. The fear was confirmed by the onset of his dark moods. Before his first breakdown, Yasi had been a brilliant student at the university, and although he was over thirty now, he was expected shortly to resume his studies.
More like a brother than like a son, he had always enjoyed teasing her. When she told him the news of his father’s secret, he pretended to be in no way affected by it but went on stolidly eating his breakfast.
She said, ‘Who is she? Where does he keep her? I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Yasi. Why can’t you see how important this is for us? Why are you asking me why? Because of the will. His will.’
‘And if he’s left it all to her?’ Yasi asked.
‘He’d never do that. Oh, no.’ Better than anyone, she knew the pride the judge took in himself and his ancestral possessions. ‘I’m sure she’s a you-know-what. He must have taken her out of one of those houses – he owns half of them, anyway,’ she said, stifling her usual wry amusement at that sector of her husband’s substantial family properties.
At the End of the Century Page 39
