‘You’ve been avoiding me,’ Paul Landers said.
Gillon looked straight at him.
‘Yes.’
‘I saw you weeks ago. I saw you on East Bay Street. I saw you coming out of the post office. I saw you in that gallery among all those terrible pictures.’
‘Not terrible—’
‘Mostly terrible,’ Paul Landers said. ‘Why are you avoiding me?’
Gillon put her hands in her pockets.
‘You know perfectly well.’
‘I’m going to make you tell me, all the same. I’m going to buy you a drink and make you tell me.’
Gillon sighed.
‘I’m not very proud of myself—’
He put a hand in the crook of her elbow. He glanced along Market Street.
‘We’ll go to the Wild Wing. There’s a girl serves in there with a peach of an ass.’
‘I bet you don’t talk like that at home.’
‘I don’t even think like that at home. As you well know.’
Gillon said, ‘I’m really pleased to see you—’
‘I could be forgiven’, Paul said, steering her through the café doorway and towards the bar, ‘for missing your enthusiasm entirely. Six weeks home and not one message from you. What are you drinking?’
‘Diet Coca-Cola—’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘A beer then, maybe—’
He pushed her firmly into a seat.
‘That’s better.’
‘I should be buying you a drink.’
‘You should,’ Paul said, ‘but you can’t afford it.’
He went away to the bar to order. Gillon watched him, noticing that the back hem of his jacket still rode up at the centre and that his pants – by her new-found English standards – were still too short. Seeing him made her feel abruptly homesick for a way of thinking she had set aside since she came back from England. She looked down at her lap. No confessions, she told herself. Just because it’s Paul and he thinks he knows you inside out, no weakening.
Paul put two glasses of ice and two cans of Lone Star on the table.
‘No doubt you learned to drink designer beer in London.’
‘Nope,’ Gillon said.
‘What did you learn in London?’
‘That I’m a good researcher.’
Paul pushed a can and a glass towards her.
‘You knew that already.’
‘I could be a good conservator, too.’
Paul sucked his teeth.
‘Needs application.’
‘I have application.’
‘You do?’
Gillon said, pouring her beer, ‘This is guy’s beer.’
‘Drink it. You are back here after four months only with the Hopkirk Partnership and you tell me you have application?’
Gillon said, staring at her glass, ‘I had to test the jinx.’
‘What jinx?’
‘I had to come back here to see if I could do it.’
‘Is this a life plan?’
‘I told you I wasn’t proud of myself,’ Gillon said. ‘I don’t need you to make me feel worse. I got in a mix some, in London. I got stuck in with a couple who were splitting up. I felt guilty. I felt I had to get out.’
‘You hooked the guy?’ Paul said, lifting his glass.
‘No!’
‘The big guy who’s in town right now?’
Gillon stared.
‘How do you—’
Paul grinned. He took a long pull at his beer.
‘This is Charleston, sugar pie. Everybody knows everything in Charleston.’
‘Except,’ Gillon said furiously, ‘that they know it all wrong.’
Paul tilted his head.
‘He takes a good picture, they say.’
‘My friend,’ Gillon said, ‘is – was – his girlfriend.’
‘OK.’
‘I’ve got nothing more to say about it.’
Paul looked up at the ceiling.
‘Stephen Hopkirk thought you were good.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I e-mailed him.’
‘You did not!’
‘Sure I did. He was sorry to lose you. He said you could have picked up a lot of work. He mentioned English Heritage.’
Gillon hunched over her beer.
‘Don’t feed me this stuff—’
‘You need it,’ Paul said. He tipped his head back down to look at her. ‘You need to hear it.’
Gillon said nothing.
‘I got the impression,’ Paul said, ‘that Stephen would have you back. That he’d help you to go freelance.’
Gillon shook her head. Paul pointed at her glass.
‘You going to drink that?’
She shook her head again. He drew the glass towards him. ‘Drives me nuts,’ he said, ‘seeing you keep shooting yourself in the foot.’
‘I don’t—’
‘Both feet,’ Paul said. He took a swallow of Gillon’s beer. ‘You kids. You have it all so you can’t decide what you want.’
‘Untrue!’ Gillon hissed at him.
He regarded her.
‘In your case,’ he said, ‘maybe it isn’t true. Maybe you do know what you want. And you aren’t giving yourself permission to have it.’ He leaned across the table. ‘Remember me asking you if you were dating?’
Gillon waited.
‘If you wanted to date?’
‘I didn’t,’ she said.
He smiled. He picked up her beer glass again.
‘Not then,’ he said, ‘not when I asked you. That was then. This – well, this is now. Isn’t it?’
The house was very quiet. The cat was asleep in its winter nest of a chequered pillow in a basket under the breakfast bar, and Boone was away for the night at a Christmas convention in Atlanta for realtors who dealt in historic properties in the South-Eastern States. Boone loved these conventions. The older he got, the more he loved these get-together guy things that he had – to Martha’s delight – so abhorred as a young man. As a young man, of course, he’d been going to be a lawyer. Martha remembered conversations during those secret New York weekends about the possibility of Boone being a human rights lawyer. She’d seen him then, stretched on the narrow bed in her student rooming house, filled with an almost crusading zeal, a young white activist lawyer from the old Confederate South planning on building himself a particular platform from which to address the manifold injustices of the legal system, ancient injustices of colour and creed. He’d been very inspiring, lying on that bed, with his shoes off, punching the air in his vehemence. Looking back, Martha was sure that it was these manifestations of desire for social and legal change that caused her to overlook the fact that he had been born on Tradd Street, that their parents had come up together, that the emerald he was offering her did not come new to her from a store on Fifth Avenue, but from the jewellery collection of his Clayborne grandmother. It had occurred to her more than once that, from the moment she said yes to him, the moment she had accepted the emerald, the edge of his active enthusiasm for change began to blur and dull. He’d begun, instead, to talk more traditionally, more uxoriously, to dwell upon how they would live, where they would school their children, where they might vacation. The night after Gillon was born, Boone went out with a bunch of guys he’d known all his life and didn’t come home until four in the morning. He said he was celebrating. He said only other guys with children would understand how he felt. He said there were some things only guys could do together. Martha had felt a degree of pain and rage that she had never even approached in all her life before. She’d felt betrayed. Utterly and completely betrayed.
Now, almost thirty years on, standing in her stockinged feet in her quiet kitchen with only the sleeping cat for company, she felt more relief than betrayal. Whatever Boone got up to in two days in Atlanta was somehow not her concern any longer. In any case, Boone might – and did – inspire affection, but he also inspired exhaustion. People, Martha decided, wh
o were very active either mentally or physically were very, very tiring, largely because both states required a participatory audience. When Boone left a room, the atmosphere took a while to settle back to being neutral. If he were in the house now, she would be conscious of a busy hum of energy somehow, like the perpetually turning engine room deep in the bowels of a huge ship. Without him, the house lay tranquil, almost inert, perfectly acquiescent to the notion that she of all people wasn’t going to stir it up.
She considered, slowly, as to whether she was hungry. Not really. Coffee would be good and maybe later some cheese and crackers or a piece of the banana cake Sarah had brought on Sunday in reproachful knowledge that Martha would not have baked a dessert. Martha thought about calling Sarah. Perhaps later. Maybe, after some coffee, she would sit down and call Sarah and Ashley and Gillon, and thereby, she reminded herself, stir up all the hornets’ nests of her anxieties again. She went across to the icebox to get the pack of coffee.
The glass door to the piazza opened. Martha spun round.
‘Mother—’
‘Oh,’ Martha said. ‘Gillon dear—’
‘I startled you?’
‘Daddy’s away. I wasn’t expecting anyone.’
Gillon came forward into the room.
‘It’s only me.’
Martha kissed her.
‘I don’t know,’ she said ruefully, ‘about “only”.’
Gillon looked at the coffee pack in her mother’s hand.
‘Shall I do that?’
‘Sure,’ Martha said.
Gillon said, her back to her mother while she spooned coffee into the coffee maker, ‘You were going to have a quiet night?’
‘Well—’
‘I won’t stay long. I’ll have coffee with you, then I’ll go.’
‘Dear—’
‘I’ve had a strange day. All kinds of things going round in my head.’ She turned to look at her mother. ‘Did you know Henry had been to see Ashley?’
‘Yes,’ Martha said.
‘Did Ashley ask him to go?’
‘I believe so—’
‘Mama, is Ashley—’
‘No,’ Martha said. ‘No. No talk like that. Ashley’s a little sick right now.’
Gillon bit her lip.
‘Sorry.’ She paused a moment and then she said, ‘That’s not what I came for.’
Martha held a plastic pitcher under the cold faucet and then carried the water across to the coffee machine.
‘What did you come for?’
‘I wanted,’ Gillon said, ‘to ask you about a conversation I remember. Years ago. Years and years. Maybe I was about fourteen, so Ashley would have been eleven? Ten?’
Martha poured water into the machine.
‘What conversation—’
‘You asked us what we worried about.’
Martha turned.
‘Did I?’
‘Yes. You asked Ashley and me – not Cooper – what worried us. We were in the Pontiac, going out to the Isle of Palms. We were going to the beach.’
Martha said, ‘What did you say?’
‘I said – I’m not quite sure what I meant now – that I worried about not being successful. And Ashley said she worried about not being beautiful. And you said what about love? I said I couldn’t imagine love and Ashley said it would be terrible if nobody loved her, if – well, if a man didn’t love her. I just wondered, I’ve been wondering all day, what we’d say if you asked us the same question again.’
The water in the machine began to pulse and gurgle. Martha looked at Gillon.
‘Well?’
‘I guess – well, I guess we’d say pretty much the same thing.’
‘Would you?’
‘I’ve got more cause to worry about success at twenty-nine than I did at fourteen.’ She opened a cabinet for mugs. ‘And Ashley’s beautiful. And Merrill loves her.’
‘This isn’t about Ashley. Is it?’
‘No.’
‘It’s about love.’
‘Mama—’
‘At fourteen, you couldn’t imagine love.’
‘No.’
‘And now you can.’
‘Is it that obvious?’
‘What’s obvious,’ Martha said, ‘is that it isn’t how you thought it would be.’
Gillon leaned her hands on the breakfast bar and bent her head.
She said, ‘I don’t feel too good about it.’
‘That doesn’t diminish its reality.’
‘I don’t want to take something that isn’t mine. Or even something that someone else badly wants. Or thinks they want.’
Martha took a carton of half-and-half out of the icebox.
‘Why these scruples?’
‘Mama,’ Gillon cried, raising her head, ‘don’t I even get credit for having scruples?’
‘Only if they’re justified.’
‘What?’
‘Ask him,’ Martha said. She switched the machine off and lifted the glass pot from the hotplate. ‘Talk to him about it. Tell him what you’re thinking, feeling.’ She gave Gillon a tired smile. ‘Don’t tell me.’
Chapter Twelve
In a men’s washroom at Atlanta airport, Boone swallowed two Advil and drank half a litre of Evian water. He always drank Evian when he had a hangover. It was something to do with the purity of water associated with the Alps – those blue peaks on the pink bottle label – that he felt was appropriate to honour his body with, when he’d abused it. He and Martha had been skiing once in the Alps, long ago. Ashley had only been a baby and they had left all three children in the care of Sarah and Miss Minda and flown to Europe, to Geneva. Boone could still remember – looking at his Evian bottle and all the cleansing properties it surely contained – the effect of those sharp white slopes under exotically French blue skies upon him. He’d had better actual skiing since, in Vail and Aspen, but he’d never had such glamorous skiing, he’d never been in a landscape where the union of snow and sky and forest and man and speed seemed so peculiarly intense. He’d never been anywhere else skiing that felt at once so natural and so sophisticated.
He looked at the second half of his litre bottle. If he drank it now, he’d be out of his seat ten times even on the hop to Charleston. His head was bad, sure, but not as bad as it had been when he awoke at six – his normal time – to find he was in bed but still in last night’s shirt and undershorts. To his relief, it appeared that he had managed to take his socks off. To have still been wearing his socks would have been a deep mortification. He could remember quite a lot about the previous evening except the last hour or so when he had been persuaded into someone else’s hotel room with a bottle of rum Chuck Carlyle had brought back from the Caribbean. Boone never drank rum, didn’t like rum, didn’t even, in summer, think a daiquiri a better option than a gin and tonic. But last night, he’d shared a bottle of rum with three other guys at one in the morning and found himself in bed with only the dimmest recollection of getting himself there. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe it was Chuck Carlyle – famous for the hardness of his head – who had thoughtfully removed Boone’s jacket and pants and shoes and socks before tucking him up in bed. Boone hadn’t seen Chuck that morning. He hadn’t seen anybody. It wasn’t so much a deliberate avoidance of the others as a feeling that even the faintest smell of breakfast would prove fatal. Pity. Boone liked breakfast, as a meal. Always had.
Boone strapped the Evian bottle on to the side of his Travelpro roller bag and went out on to the concourse. He had twenty minutes before his flight. He took his cellphone out of his pocket and called Martha’s number. Her home voice mail was on. He tried her car. Voice mail. He tried her office at the Medical University on Ashley Avenue. A flat female voice told Boone that the office wasn’t open yet. Boone swore and dropped his phone back in his pocket. He had a sudden flash of extraordinary fury. Why wasn’t Martha available? Why didn’t she ever call him? Why was she so hedged about with professional and technical barriers that nobody-not even her goddamn hu
sband – could gain access? And to think of last night, to think of his restraint last night. They’d all ended up, after dinner, at the sort of establishment Boone’s father would have known as a gentlemen’s club, with some babe gyrating round a pole right in Boone’s face, her luscious little butt right in his face. He’d thought about it, course he had, especially when Chuck Carlyle had leaned across to him and said, in that slow, easy way of his, ‘Wanna buy in a little pussy, man?’ But he hadn’t. He’d grinned and shrugged and tucked a fifty-dollar bill – too much-into the girl’s garter and gone to have what his father had referred to as a private moment, in the men’s room. Cooper called it something much cruder. All that, and now Martha wasn’t even there to speak to. She hadn’t called last night, and she hadn’t called this morning. She probably hadn’t called because she hadn’t thought to call. Boone took a breath. What did she think about then? No goddamn prizes for guessing. Why not make a list instead of the things she didn’t think about, the things that were – was it too much to ask, even in this liberated day and age? – her place and obligation and duty to think about? Boone stopped at a news-stand and bought a copy of The New York Times. He shook it out angrily and glared at the front page. Greenspan gloomy, Florida furious at apparently being elector-ally discounted, white Christmas likely in the northeast. Christmas! Last he’d heard, Martha wasn’t even doing Christmas. She’d done half a Thanksgiving and now she wasn’t even doing Christmas. Her mother was. Her seventy-six-year-old mother was doing family Christmas for three generations because her daughter was too professionally preoccupied to do it herself. Boone seized the tow handle of his bag and began to walk rapidly with it towards the departure gate for Charleston.
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