Girl From the South (v5)

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Amen to that,’ Cooper said.

  ‘She doesn’t find it easy to conform,’ Boone said. ‘Not Gillon. She never has. Born different, stays different. We sent her to Ashley Hall, like her mother before her. That didn’t do. They didn’t entirely ask her to leave but that’s only because her mother just whipped her out in time. Then we sent her to Porter Gaud. That wasn’t much better. When it came to college, she wanted to go to New York City, like her mother had, but I couldn’t hear of that. I couldn’t have her loose in New York City. I couldn’t have her out of the South before she’d learned to think straight. We did a kind of deal. She could choose her major. We’d choose the school.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘UNC Chapel Hill.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘University of North Carolina.’

  ‘Say, Daddy,’ Cooper said suddenly. ‘Remember Patty Riley?’

  Boone gave a low whistle.

  ‘Do I. Now if ever there was a sweet-looking girl—’

  ‘Best piece of ass in three states,’ Cooper said. ‘Recall she came back with that black guy from UNC Chapel Hill?’

  ‘Eligible guy, lawyer—’

  ‘Now she wants to marry him.’

  Boone shook his head.

  ‘No ways.’

  ‘She’s fixed on it. Her mama and daddy – well, boy, does she have real problems.’

  ‘Because he’s black,’ Henry said.

  ‘Sure,’ Cooper said.

  Henry sat up a fraction.

  ‘I don’t believe you—’

  Boone leaned over and gave Henry’s shoulder a fatherly pat.

  ‘It’s different over in Europe. It is a whole other ball game for you guys.’

  ‘No,’ Henry said, ‘the question of race—’

  Boone’s hand grew heavier on Henry’s shoulder.

  ‘Do you want to get into this?’ he said. ‘Especially’ – he did a smiling imitation of Henry’s voice – ‘while drinking my beer?’

  ‘OK,’ Henry said. ‘But I’m shocked.’

  Boone and Cooper both laughed.

  ‘You concentrate on the egrets,’ Boone said. ‘You concentrate on what you know about and you leave what we know about to us.’ He held out another beer. ‘You tell us about your family. You tell us where you’re from.’

  Henry shrugged.

  ‘It’s dull.’

  ‘Nothing to do with folks is dull.’

  ‘I have a younger sister who works as a midwife in the north. My mother lives on her own in the West Country. My father lives in Australia with his second wife and three children I’ve never seen. He left us when my sister was a baby.’

  ‘That’s too bad.’

  ‘It’s odd,’ Henry said, ‘but you get used to things. I don’t spend my life wishing I had a father. I did when I was younger but now it mostly seems academic.’

  Cooper said, ‘But you need to know where you come from—’

  ‘I don’t know about need!’

  ‘Round here,’ Boone said, ‘we all know where we come from. It’s not just we like to, it’s we aim to. Coming up here isn’t like coming up anywhere else.’

  Henry pulled the tab on another beer.

  ‘I can see the charm—’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Henry said. He sat up and bent his head so that his face was averted. Of course he could. He might have schooled himself not to care – or at least to say that he didn’t care – but of course he felt the lack, the insecurity, the envy of people who can step out of landscape they know, even if they hate it, because at least they know what they hate.

  Boone and Cooper waited easily. The water slapped softly against the side of the boat.

  ‘You can get very tired,’ Henry said, looking down at the top of his beer can, ‘of making all of your life for yourself. All the time.’

  Boone jerked down the peak of his cap.

  ‘You’ve lost us there, buddy,’ he said. He was grinning. ‘Way over our heads. As a rule you’ll find we Southerners don’t go much on philosophical conversations.’ He got to his feet. ‘Say we go find you a basking ’gator or two?’

  ‘That chest-on-chest,’ Sarah said, ‘is by Thomas Elfe. And my Chippendale table is Elfe also. Do you know about Chippendale?’

  ‘Only what most inattentive schoolboys know—’

  ‘His style was much copied in Charleston. Thomas Elfe was possibly our premier cabinet maker. He worked in mahogany, as they all did, because mahogany is resistant to termites.’

  Henry looked round the room. It was panelled in pale-green-painted wood, and slatted louvres were lowered against the afternoon sun. Elegant, fragile furniture of the kind he associated with compulsory school visits to stately houses in England stood about on a flowered rug that seemed to be made of some kind of tapestry. There were glass-fronted cupboards with pieces of china inside, displayed against panels of green moiré silk. ‘Sèvres,’ Sarah said, ‘Limoges.’ She laid a hand on Henry’s arm. ‘It all belonged to my parents. And to my grandparents before that. Of course I prize it all but I prize the objects that were Charleston-made most of all.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Sarah moved towards the fireplace. Henry watched her. She was, he thought in surprise, amazingly pretty for someone so – well, old. She was really pretty. She was pretty in such a way that made you bypass somehow the lines in her face, the faint spots on the backs of her hands. She had a pastel, gauzy, polished air about her and she seemed to know exactly what to do with him.

  ‘Come here,’ Sarah said.

  He moved towards her. She smelled of something delicate and citrusy. She gestured upwards.

  ‘My grandmother. My Alton grandmother.’

  A grave woman in elaborate late-Victorian clothes looked down sternly at Henry from a gilt frame.

  ‘Not a beauty,’ Sarah said, ‘but she made up for it in principle.’

  ‘Hardly the same thing?’

  ‘In 1865,’ Sarah said, ‘she took enormous pleasure in making sure that all the dresses worn by Charleston ladies to the Governor’s Ball in Columbia were made merely of cotton, to help the war effort.’

  ‘Did she succeed?’

  ‘My great-aunt Sarah Ann, for whom I am named, was found with a silk petticoat.’

  ‘Would you have done the same?’

  Sarah smiled up at him.

  ‘I surely would.’ She touched his arm again. ‘Could I persuade you to a little cocktail?’

  Henry grinned.

  ‘Easily.’

  Miss Minda appeared in the doorway. She wore a black dress and spectacles and her hair was obscured by a turban. When she opened the door to Henry, she had looked him up and down and said, ‘I was unaware they built ’em so big in Britain.’

  ‘I think,’ Henry said, ‘I’m quite big for anywhere.’

  She gave him a fleeting second of a smile. Then she pointed to an open door across the hallway. Sarah had been waiting for him, waiting in the half-light of her graceful, shuttered room, wearing the kind of clothes that Henry had always supposed exclusive to the Queen, for being seen in, in a landau, at Ascot.

  Miss Minda said now, ‘You want cocktails?’

  Sarah turned to Henry.

  ‘A little bourbon? A daiquiri?’

  ‘Bourbon, please.’

  ‘It’ll be bourbon, then,’ Miss Minda said. ‘For two.’ She turned her huge spectacles on Henry. ‘She makes out she don’t drink ’cept when there’s company. If that were the case, how come we get liquor-store bills?’

  ‘I can’t imagine not drinking,’ Henry said gallantly.

  The bell to the street door sounded.

  ‘That’ll be Gillon,’ Miss Minda said.

  Sarah patted her hair.

  ‘Late.’

  ‘Not by English standards.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Sarah said, not intending any real concession, ‘Charleston standards are different.’

  Gillon came in quickly. She wore a black shift dres
s and her legs were bare. On her feet were the kind of backless shoes that made him think, with an unhappy little spasm of the heart and conscience, of Tilly.

  ‘Grandmama,’ Gillon said. She was holding a small white package. ‘I brought you some benne wafers.’

  ‘Sweet of you, dear,’ Sarah said. She took the packet without enthusiasm. She regarded Gillon’s dress.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late—’

  ‘I was early,’ Henry said. He thought about kissing Gillon and decided against it. ‘I now know a very great deal about eighteenth-century furniture.’

  ‘One day,’ Sarah said, her voice tinged with something that might have been regret, ‘some of these pieces will be yours, dear.’

  ‘I’d rather not think about it.’

  Miss Minda came in with a silver tray. Henry moved forward to take it from her. She shook her head.

  ‘Oh!’ Sarah said, her hand lightly at her throat. ‘You’ll find her very independent!’

  Miss Minda set the tray down.

  She said conversationally to Henry, ‘She don’ know the meaning of that word.’

  Sarah looked at Gillon again.

  She said, sotto voce, ‘Black, dear, is for funerals.’

  ‘I don’t suit pink, Grandmama.’

  Henry took a tumbler off the tray and offered it to Sarah. It was cut crystal.

  He said, with more force than he intended, ‘She looks great.’

  ‘She certainly looks neat,’ Sarah said. ‘But I like to see a girl in colours.’ She turned to Henry. ‘Martha tells me you have a sister. Tell me about your sister. Is she married?’

  Henry thought, rather wildly, about Paula. The notion of Paula in this setting, in this society – Paula with her blunt haircut, her blunt way of speaking – was extremely unhinging. He glanced at Gillon. She was smiling at him, almost daring him.

  ‘No,’ Henry said, ‘she isn’t married. She’s a little younger than me. She’s – well, she’s a midwife.’

  Sarah looked at him. Her finely pencilled eyebrows said everything.

  ‘My dear,’ she said, lowering her voice, ‘how very, very useful.’

  In the street outside, Gillon said, ‘You did very, very well.’

  ‘I liked it.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Couldn’t believe it. All that silver and cut glass. All that formality. It was – well, it was sort of peaceful.’

  ‘It’s called decorum down here.’

  Henry shook his head.

  ‘I’m having such a time. I can’t believe what’s happening to me—’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘And I’ve gone and drunk from the enchanted cup, haven’t I?’

  Gillon stooped down to fumble in the bag she was carrying. Henry saw that she was exchanging her backless shoes for sneakers.

  She said, her voice muffled by being bent double, ‘Did you call Tilly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is she OK?’

  Henry paused and then he said, ‘No.’

  Gillon began to tie her sneaker laces.

  ‘I’d like to call her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I need to say some things. I need her to know—’

  ‘No,’ Henry said. ‘I told you. Nothing you did or said made any difference, for better or worse, to how we were in the first place.’

  Gillon stood up.

  She said reasonably, ‘She’s a friend of mine.’

  ‘Of course. But this isn’t the moment to remind her of that.’

  ‘Is she mad at me?’

  ‘No.’

  Gillon picked up her bag.

  ‘I’m calling her anyway.’

  ‘Please don’t—’

  ‘Do I dictate to you?’ Gillon said. ‘Do I tell you which of my family you can see and which you can’t? Am I standing in your way in pursuing whatever it is you think you’re pursuing down here?’

  Henry said nothing. He looked up into the black trees and the blacker night. Gillon gripped her bag.

  ‘Are you afraid,’ Gillon said, ‘that I’ll tell her how happy you are?’

  Tilly stood in her bathroom, wrapped in a post-shower towel, peering minutely at her face in the mirror above the basin. Skin, close up, was not encouraging stuff. It was, it seemed, a mass of unevennesses in texture and colour and full of, already, signs of impending decay. Perhaps only babies, Tilly reflected, running a wet forefinger along her eyebrows, could stand this kind of close scrutiny, being so new to life and weather that neither had even started to get going on them. Yet it seemed so ironic, in an age when people were destined to live far longer than they ever had before, or probably ever wished to, that signs of ageing were so neurotically looked for, so hysterically combated.

  Tilly sighed. Music had started in Susie’s room, the loud, insistent music that Susie said she needed to get her going in the mornings. Susie had moved into the flat after Gillon and Henry had gone, and despite all promises to the contrary had managed to spread her possessions through every room with the exception, some of the time, of Tilly’s bedroom. Susie’s life was a matter, largely, of adornment and diversion, so every surface was strewn with make-up and single earrings and CDs and magazines and adhesive tattoos and half-used packs of leg-wax strips. At the beginning, Tilly had made a fuss but after a while it hardly seemed worth it. Not only had she brought this on herself by inviting Susie to move in, in the first place, but she had to admit that Susie’s presence in the bathroom, if irritating, had none of the grossness of William’s. The only thing Tilly had maintained her insistence on was that Susie and William shouldn’t sleep together if she, Tilly, was in the flat.

  ‘I really couldn’t stand you two shagging through the wall.’

  William looked shocked.

  ‘I wouldn’t think of it.’

  The telephone was ringing. Tilly tore out of the bathroom. Seven o’clock in the morning would be two in the morning to Henry in South Carolina, two in the morning, after an evening’s boozing with Gillon’s oafish-sounding brother. She snatched up the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Tilly,’ Gillon said.

  Tilly subsided on to the floor beside the telephone.

  ‘Oh. Hi.’

  ‘Did I wake you?’

  ‘No,’ Tilly said, ‘I was just getting out of the shower.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to speak to you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you – how are you?’

  ‘Working,’ Tilly said. ‘Going to work and working. Having my hair cut. Buying sandwiches at lunchtime. You know.’

  ‘Tilly, about Henry, I didn’t mean—’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It wasn’t a specific invitation, you see, it was just the kind of thing you say—’

  ‘I know. You said. Gillon, I believe you. He was looking for a straw to clutch and inadvertently you gave him one.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Tilly pulled a foot towards her and inspected her toes.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s great,’ Gillon said quietly.

  ‘D’you see much of him?’

  ‘No. But my family do. My family has sort of adopted him.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He’s got work, Tilly.’

  ‘Work! But he hasn’t got a green card—’

  ‘My father is helping him out with that. And he’s getting him introductions. There’s one with a magazine in Atlanta. They’ve commissioned pictures. And the Nature Conservancy wants to see him. To discuss something. Didn’t he tell you?’

  ‘No,’ Tilly said.

  ‘He seems focused,’ Gillon said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Tilly,’ Gillon said, ‘nobody here is trying to fix things. Nobody is trying to do anything deliberate—’

  Susie appeared, yawning, in the doorway. She wore an orange camisole and a pair of minute zebra-print knickers.

  ‘I know that,’ Tilly said. ‘But it’s hard to hear, all the same.’ />
  ‘That he’s doing well?’

  Susie made elaborate mug-lifting gestures. Tilly shook her head.

  ‘Not exactly. Just that things are, well, going better there than here.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Gillon said.

  Susie went into the kitchen and ran the taps full blast.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I don’t forget,’ Gillon said, ‘that it was you who was so good to me.’

  ‘Don’t let’s talk about it.’

  Radio One exploded, suddenly, out of the kitchen.

  ‘Susie!’ Tilly yelled.

  ‘You better go,’ Gillon said, from Charleston at two in the morning.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  ‘You too,’ Tilly said pointlessly, and put the telephone down.

  Chapter Ten

  Henry found a narrow third-floor room in a quiet house on Smith Street, for fifty dollars a night, a rate which would drop, the lady innkeeper assured him, when the peak tourist season declined after Christmas. In fact, if he was going to be a long-term guest, she could probably, she said, arrange him a special rate. A full breakfast would be offered each morning with – she smiled at Henry – her famous shrimp and grits or French toast with hazelnut-peach syrup. If he used the whirlpool in the tub, could he please be careful not to have the waterlevel too high? And out of courtesy to other guests, could he keep the TV volume low? She tapped the wall by Henry’s queen-size bed with its pink-and-lilac-flowered comforter.

  ‘These old houses don’t have such thick walls.’

  Henry pushed the door shut behind her. The room had a high ceiling with a huge fan suspended from it, and long windows which opened on to a balcony large enough to accommodate a couple of cats, above a strip of tired garden. Beyond the garden were the nondescript back lots of various businesses and a single tree which he could now identify as a live oak. It was a shabby view, but it suited Henry. It suited his revived vision of himself as someone with a purpose, someone with work to do, someone whose outlook had come back into focus. This room, with its wicker chairs and arch little ornaments and pictures, was impersonal enough to suit Henry very well, for the moment.

  Cooper had offered a room in his apartment to Henry. Cooper’s apartment was extremely appealing, furnished solely with beds, sturdy tables, a vast icebox and a couple of La-Z-Boy armchairs facing a TV screen the size of a picture window. Cooper’s last room-mate had gone off to get married to a girl in Mobile, Alabama, and his room – almost empty but for a bed with a TV at the foot of it – looked to Henry like the fulfilment of a fantasy. Cooper needed help with his mortgage payment.