‘Seems strange,’ Henry said in the same extremely friendly voice that he had used since Gillon came in, and which she had hardly heard from him before, ‘to live in a country stuffed with landscape, and go to Umbria?’
‘Well said,’ Boone said.
‘I supposed the light’s different,’ Gillon said.
Martha and Ashley exchanged glances.
Martha said, ‘Tomorrow’s a big day for all the children in Charleston. It’s Hallowe’en.’
‘You saw all the pumpkins in the porches—’
Henry smiled, a little awkwardly.
‘Yes—’
Gillon looked up at him. Then she looked down at her plate again. Martha stood up. She held her hand out to Boone for his empty plate.
‘I’m going to run Ashley home,’ she said. ‘We’ll have dessert and coffee later.’ She looked down at Gillon. ‘It’s so warm, dear. Why don’t you take Henry down on to the Battery and show him the view across the harbour.’
‘It’s dark, Mama,’ Gillon said.
‘But still beautiful—’
Boone opened his mouth.
Henry said quickly, ‘I’d like it. I’d really like it. If you wouldn’t mind.’
Gillon pushed back her chair.
‘Of course—’
Henry rose to his feet. He looked directly at Ashley across the table.
‘Thank you again.’
‘My pleasure.’
‘Will I see you tomorrow?’
‘Oh,’ Ashley said, lightly shaking her hair. ‘You’ll most likely see me every day.’
Henry smiled. Gillon moved towards the door to the piazza.
‘We’ll be half an hour, Mama,’ she said.
The air outside was warm and silky. The soft lamplight along the pretty streets showed graceful long-windowed houses and tree-punctuated sidewalks and shadowy gardens behind intricate wrought-iron gates.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Henry said politely. ‘I didn’t realize how beautiful it would be.’
‘It’s the third most popular tourist destination in the US,’ Gillon said. She was wearing the buff cotton jacket familiar to Henry from London and her hands were jammed in the pockets. He could see, as they passed under streetlights, the outline of her knuckles, clenched under the cotton.
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘No.’
‘I really look forward to seeing it by daylight.’
‘Sure.’
They came out at the end of a street and a wide dark space, glimmering with scattered lamps, yawned in front of them.
‘White Point Gardens.’
‘Yes,’ Henry said.
Gillon gestured in the dark.
‘The East Battery’s over there. Looks towards the harbour and Fort Sumter. My grandmother was born there, right on the Battery.’
‘Gillon,’ Henry said, ‘are you angry with me?’
‘No.’
‘Well, it feels like it to me—’
‘I’m angry with myself,’ Gillon said. ‘I shouldn’t have come home and I shouldn’t have invited you and I shouldn’t have upset Tilly.’
Henry said, ‘It wasn’t you.’
‘Wasn’t me? Of course it was me.’
‘No,’ Henry said. ‘All the upset was there before Tilly met you, before you came to live with us.’
‘And then I made it worse.’
‘No,’ Henry said, ‘if anyone did that, it was me.’
Gillon said nothing. She began to walk rapidly, slightly ahead of him. He followed her along the gravel paths under the tall dark trees and out on to the wide sidewalk by a low sea wall. Beyond it the dark water glittered and shivered.
‘Gillon—’
‘Up here,’ she said.
She ran up a flight of steps on to the top of the sea wall. Dark bushes – oleander, Henry wondered-rustled slightly below them on the landward side.
‘Look. Fort Sumter. Out there. It’s where the Civil War began.’
‘Gillon,’ Henry said, ‘look, I don’t want to talk about Tilly and me except to say that you are absolutely and completely in no way to blame for anything that has or hasn’t happened.’
‘OK,’ Gillon said. She gestured out into the harbour. ‘It was bombarded for more than two years. We never surrendered. Even when we abandoned Fort Sumter, we didn’t surrender.’
‘We?’
‘The Confederates,’ Gillon said.
Henry moved closer to her. What with the time change from England and the balmy night and the glamour and the strangeness of his immediate surroundings, he was beginning to feel light-headed.
‘I can always go straight back, you know—’
Gillon didn’t look at him.
‘Don’t do that.’
‘I seem,’ Henry said, ‘to have to keep asking girls to explain themselves to me, just now.’
‘It’s easier, sometimes, in the dark, isn’t it—’
‘What is?’
‘Explaining.’
Henry waited. Two runners came padding steadily past them along the sea wall and descended the steps to ground level.
‘You got a taste of it tonight,’ Gillon said.
‘I … ?’
‘You saw my family. You saw the good daughter and the bad daughter.’
Henry said cautiously, ‘Your parents seemed charming to me—’
‘They are,’ Gillon said. ‘They are wonderful, lovable people.’
Henry put his hands in his pockets. He said, slowly, carefully, ‘So—?’ and paused.
‘You shouldn’t have come,’ Gillon said.
‘But you asked me!’
‘I shouldn’t have,’ Gillon said. ‘I should have just left you and Tilly alone and come back myself.’
‘I wanted to come,’ Henry said quietly.
‘I wanted you to see—’ She stopped.
‘See what?’
‘I wanted you to see what it was like. I wanted you to see where I came from, how I belong and how I don’t belong.’ She paused and then she said with energy, ‘I don’t want to be the good daughter of the patriarchy.’
‘Gillon,’ Henry said. ‘You never talked like this in London.’
‘No.’
‘In London I assumed – my mistake again, no doubt-that you were a cool, tough, focused American girl.’
‘Wrong.’
‘Maybe—’
‘I might be those things if I were a Yankee. But I’m not. I’m Southern. The past may be another country, but so is the South. And the South is the past, too. Wait until you meet my grandmother.’
‘Why,’ Henry said, ‘didn’t you say some of this in London?’
Gillon shrugged. The soft salty air was wiring her hair up into an airy halo.
‘I was having a kind of vacation from it all, I guess—’
‘But you’ve come back to it—’
‘It gets you in the end. It always gets you. I seem to keep having to come back to see if I’ve gotten over it.’
‘And?’
She turned to him. She said, ‘Oh come on, do I look as if I’ve gotten over it? What about tonight? What about family dinner tonight and my father?’
‘I’d think quite a lot of fathers go on treating their adult children as if they were still kids.’
‘It’s different here,’ Gillon said. ‘It’s men and women as well as parents and children. And it’s God.’
‘God—’ Henry said, thinking of the man with the Bible on the plane.
‘Don’t let’s get even started on God.’
‘He’s alive and well down here, then—’
‘Sure is.’
Henry looked out to sea. An enormous tanker, romantically strung with lights, was slipping through the harbour towards the port.
‘Does my being here make things worse for you?’
‘I can’t tell yet. It was just that tonight, with Mama and Daddy and Ashley, I felt that everything had reared up in my face again—’
‘And
that I wouldn’t see what was going on?’
‘Maybe—’
‘I didn’t,’ Henry said.
Gillon turned away from the sea.
‘We should go back.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll get sucked in,’ Gillon said. Her voice was quite even. ‘You won’t be able to help it.’
She stopped and gave him a quick glance.
‘Just remember me sometimes,’ she said, and ran down the steps ahead of him to the level of the sea.
Chapter Nine
The gallery where Gillon had found temporary work was in a good situation on Broad Street. It was a long white room at street-level, well windowed, with a circular table at the centre on which the owner displayed themed collections of table sculpture. The theme, this late fall, was the sacred feminine. The pale waxed surface of the table bore a collection of squat stone and wood and clay figures from, largely, Greenland and Africa and Easter Island. The gallery’s owner had had a series of leaflets printed, too, explaining the ancient fusion of fecundity and spirituality. Gillon watched the affluent citizens of Charleston step circumspectly round the central table, eyeing the sculptures with deference while at the same time failing to visualize them on a side table in the family room while their sons and husbands watched TV golf from Pebble Beach on adjacent sofas.
‘Wonderful,’ they would sometimes say to Gillon, or to one another.
Gillon would smile. She liked the sculptures herself; she liked their easy earthiness. But she could, at the same time, divert herself by thinking of what her grandmother might say, if confronted with a six-inch squatting woman whose genitalia were portrayed as infinitely larger than her head.
In a job that required patience with inactivity, the sculptures were a small relief to Gillon. The days in the gallery, watching the sun move across the golden wooden floor, were long, very long. Even after she had dusted every picture – she grew to feel affection or indifference or detestation for every one, as if they were a row of faces – added fresh water to the flowers in the window, swept and waxed the floor, the day still loomed ahead, the stretches of time only relieved by the quiet, lingering presence of people deciding not, in the end, to buy a painting of an olive grove near Cortona or a forgotten corner of Spoleto. There were times when she felt a sharp longing for her table facing the wall in North London. At least, there, work was happening intensely all around her, work in which people were deeply absorbed, work which gave a focus not only to the labouring hours, but to the leisure hours that followed them. Even taking books to the gallery-Ashley would have taken needlepoint, and turned out a pillow cover a week – did not seem to beguile the time. The trouble is, Gillon thought, moving the companion pieces of the sacred feminine into sociable groups, that England has changed me in a way. Only a few months, but I’ve got used to a candour in things, I’ve got used to appearances being suspected rather than admired. I’ve got used to something else.
The gallery door to the street opened.
‘Dear,’ Sarah Cutworth said.
‘Grandmama!’
‘Your mother said you were working here—’ Sarah paused and looked round. She wore a powder-blue linen two-piece and pearls. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘this is just precious.’
Gillon came forward to kiss her cheek.
‘I just waxed the floor.’
Sarah looked down.
‘You did?’
Gillon nodded. ‘Cleaned every picture.’ She backed herself up against the table, shielding the sculptures.
‘I call this,’ Sarah said, ‘a lovely place to work. You get to meet people here.’
‘Mostly people who don’t quite buy a picture. And tourists.’
Sarah made a dismissive gesture. She had seldom herself been west of Virginia, and no further north than New York City, where she stayed, firmly, at the Waldorf Astoria because of its welcoming Junior League floor.
‘Tourists. They are ruining this city.’
Gillon pointed.
‘Do you like that landscape, Grandmama?’
Sarah looked.
‘No, dear.’
She took a few neat steps sideways and peered at the table.
‘What are those? Hallowe’en goblins?’
‘Sculptures, Grandmama. Figures of female deities.’
Sarah put out a trimly manicured small hand and picked up a soapstone goddess. She inspected it in silence. Then she returned it to the table.
‘Nice people,’ she said, ‘don’t need to see such things.’
‘It’s art—’
‘Art,’ Sarah said firmly, ‘is not a licence for obscenity.’
Gillon put a reassuring finger on the soapstone goddess.
‘It isn’t obscenity to many people, Grandmama. It’s truth and beauty.’
‘Don’t argue with me, Gillon,’ Sarah said. She straightened and looked about her. ‘It’s a charming place.’
‘Yes.’
‘More,’ Sarah said, ‘than I gather your present residence is?’
‘It’s not too bad—’
‘Society Street,’ Sarah said. ‘What are you thinking of? It’s quite bohemian.’
Gillon bit her lip.
‘It’s cheap.’
‘And what is the matter with your home? Or my home?’
‘I need my independence—’
‘You won’t have one shred of independence, my girl, until you marry.’
Gillon turned the goddess round so that her solid little back was towards Sarah.
‘Is that why you came to see me, Grandmama? Did you come to find me here to tell me what you’ve told me at least one hundred times before?’
‘No,’ Sarah said, ‘I came to invite you to dinner.’
‘Oh—’
‘I have met your perfectly charming English friend.’ She gave Gillon a coquettish look. ‘He is coming. He is delighted to come.’
‘Henry—’
‘What a fine young man,’ Sarah said.
‘Grandmama,’ Gillon said, ‘Henry is not here as-as a kind of family play thing. Henry is here to work. Henry is here to take pictures of the lowcountry.’
‘Your mother and father are very taken with him.’
‘He’s a nice guy—’
‘Miss Minda is making chicken enchiladas. And a German chocolate cheesecake for dessert. Or maybe sweetpotato-stuffed apples. What do you think?’
‘Either,’ Gillon said. ‘Anything—’
Sarah leaned forward and brushed her cheek against her granddaughter’s.
‘Find a dress, dear,’ she said. ‘Or a skirt at least. Just to please me.’
The late-afternoon sunlight lay on the still water like a sheet of copper. Beyond it, at the edges of the view – the edges of the world as it seemed to Henry in his present state of mild ecstasy – were cushiony stretches of glasswort and golden patches of what he now knew to be cinnamon fern and behind and beyond that the trees, the bald cypress and the Chinese tallow and the sweet gum. Earlier that day, he’d seen the stooped, distinctive silhouette of a wood stork in a bald cypress tree. In spring, Boone said, the cypresses would host the wood storks’ families, great messy twiggy nests full of gaunt white chicks with orange beaks and grey-eye masks like carnival-goers.
‘You should come in spring,’ Boone said. ‘You should come see the cardinal spear in flower. And the loggerheads hatching.’
‘I’ll come any time,’ Henry said with fervour.
He stretched his legs out their full length among the litter of camera equipment and Jax beer cans in the bottom of the boat. He squinted up at the sky and grinned. He’d been grinning all day. He’d shot six rolls of film and he felt on a complete high, full of air and beer and companionship and wonder. In front of him, Boone and Cooper, perched on high fixed stools at the controls of the boat, beer in hand, were talking comfortably below the quiet idle of the boat’s engine. The drowsy air was like silk. They puttered past a shrimp boat moored in the deep channel, its silhouette as hars
h and romantic against the rosy sky as a pirate ship. Cooper stooped towards the portable icebox at his feet.
‘Atta boy!’ he called, and lobbed Henry another beer.
They’d been drinking all day. Henry couldn’t remember a day when he had drunk so steadily and easily and had felt, at the end of it – oh, how reluctant he was for it to end – so relatively sober. They’d set out early from Boone’s enviably masculine little wooden cabin with its thrillingly empty view of tidal marshes and bluffs into a morning of such clarity that reality and reflection had confused one another into an extraordinary kaleidoscope. By eight, he’d seen dunlins and bitterns and an amazing blurred flight of white ibis. By nine, he’d had his first beer and a breakfast of processed cheese and crackers and passed through a grove of live oaks festooned with the ghostly, dreamy plumes of Spanish moss. By noon, he felt that if another world existed, he hardly cared to know about it.
Boone had brought squares of deep-pan pizza for lunch sealed in Saran Wrap. They all three lay in the bottom of the boat, shoulders propped against the sides, with beer cans balanced beside them, and the boat rocked gently in the almost imperceptible swell of the water.
‘Six feet up,’ Boone said, ‘six feet down. That’s our tides. That’s the tides of the marshlands.’ He took a long pull of beer. ‘That shapes our life here. That, and a few other things. Like one small seed from Madagascar.’
‘Seed?’ Henry said stupidly.
‘Rice,’ Boone said. ‘Rice made the plantation economy. The towns only arose to service the needs of that economy. There was more than one hundred and fifty thousand acres, once, planted with rice.’
‘By slaves—’
‘Sure,’ Boone said, ‘slave labour. No wonder they were all so wealthy.’ He squinted at Henry from under the peak of his baseball cap. ‘You going to lecture me, like Gillon does, on the social evils of the past?’
‘No, sir,’ Henry said. ‘Not while I’m drinking your beer.’
Cooper guffawed.
Boone said easily, ‘Good man.’ He held out another huge square of pizza. Henry shook his head.
‘No, thanks.’
‘You’ve been good to Gillon,’ Boone said.
‘Actually, it was—’
Boone gestured.
‘Aw, I know. It was the women. It’s always the women.’
Girl From the South (v5) Page 12
