Girl From the South (v5)

by Joanna Trollope

  Martha’s office at the Medical University was in a corner of an open-plan room known as the Psychiatry Center Research Department. There were five people in the room, one an administrator, two qualified medical doctors and two psychiatrists. Martha’s fellow psychiatrist, a gaunt man from a small town outside Milwaukee, specialized in schizophrenia. He never expressed openly his opinion that Martha’s field was comparatively lightweight but everything in his manner made his feelings very plain. In her turn, Martha had observed her colleague’s preference for the theoretical over the practical. He ran no regular clinic, he only saw patients in extremis, as referrals. She spoke of him respectfully as an academic and allowed the implications of that label to do their own work. They shared an armed truce which suited both sides very well.

  ‘After all,’ Martha confided to her assistant, Ellen, out at the Mount Pleasant practice, ‘it saves me the fatigue and complexity of a deep relationship.’

  Martha worked by a window, a shield fixed to the top of her computer screen to limit the light. There was no view from her window, only the adjacent wall of the Transplant Center, but in summer the sun dropped right into the canyon between the buildings, curiously hard and bright and distant, seen through a cold wall of air-conditioning. Martha had worked in this space for fifteen years, producing her quiet papers on the gradually altering dynamics between the genders in the last half of the twentieth century, papers which never hit the headlines – no sex appeal in common sense, after all – but which found their way on to an uncommon number of fellow professionals’ desks. Martha had the correspondence to prove it. She never showed these plaudits to anyone – indeed, had never even told anyone she had received them – but they now occupied, as letters or faxes or printed-up e-mails, almost three old-fashioned box files on the grey metal shelving that divided her section of the office from that belonging to the man from Milwaukee.

  Her habit, on arrival, was to collect coffee and water from the machines in the central hallway and to take both directly to her desk. While her computer warmed up she would go through any correspondence that had arrived since her last visit, sip her coffee and begin to think herself slowly and steadily back into her work. Then she would sit down in front of the computer, put on the defunct earphones that Cooper had once purloined from a high-school vacation job on a local radio station and which served admirably as ear mufflers, and open her files. It was rare for anyone – other than in an emergency – to trouble her. Occasionally, she was summoned across to the hospital and once a week she attended two departmental meetings. Otherwise, her days at the Medical University were something of a luxury to her because she could give them such extraordinary singleness of purpose.

  When Boone put his hand on her shoulder, she hardly felt him at first, so rare was it for anyone in this place to touch her, beyond a handshake. Then she whipped round, appalled.

  ‘What’s happened? Who’s—?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Boone mouthed. He leaned down and removed her headphones. He smelled of toothpaste and shampoo and stale alcohol.

  ‘Nobody’s hurt. Everything’s fine. The kids are fine.’

  ‘You never come here—’

  Boone put one hand on the back of her chair and one on the desk beside her computer. He bent over her.

  ‘Today I do.’

  Martha leaned away from him.

  ‘You’re drunk.’

  ‘I was,’ Boone said. ‘I am now sober if hungover.’

  ‘Why aren’t you at your office?’

  ‘Because I have more important things to do. Like talk to you.’

  ‘We can talk tonight.’

  ‘But we won’t.’

  ‘Boone, I—’

  ‘You’ll get distracted,’ Boone said. ‘You’ll go drifting off to your damned office. The kids’ll call. I’m taking you out to talk to you now.’

  Martha pushed her chair back and stood up.

  ‘We could go to the refectory—’

  ‘We could not. I am not going to talk to you in a place crammed with all your damn colleagues. We’ll find some coffee place.’

  ‘You could have called me first,’ Martha said.

  Boone looked at her. He drew a huge breath.

  ‘Don’t provoke me, honey,’ he said.

  ‘Did Atlanta bring this on?’ Martha said. She had her spectacles on and had pushed her cappuccino slightly to one side as if to indicate how much she hadn’t wanted it in the first place.

  ‘Maybe it was the catalyst—’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For things’, Boone said, ‘that have been building up a long while.’

  He looked down at the red-plastic-covered diner table. He had ordered pancakes and orange juice and a coffee and was now wondering why he had ordered any such thing.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘The kids,’ Boone said. ‘Us. Priorities.’

  Martha pushed a spoon into the foam on her coffee.

  ‘Are we talking about my work?’

  ‘Not per se,’ Boone said. ‘Only your attitude to it.’

  ‘When we met,’ Martha said, ‘you knew what I wanted to do. You know why I wanted to do it.’

  Boone moved the relish stand to and fro a little.

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Do I really have to?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You know,’ Martha said, her voice less neutral, ‘you know I couldn’t identify with the kind of Southern feminine my mother exemplifies. You know I believed – still believe – that that’s either weak or crazy. You know I identified with my father and my grandfather, that I deliberately chose this—’ She stopped abruptly and looked down at the table.

  ‘Sure,’ Boone said.

  ‘What d’you mean, “Sure”?’

  ‘Then you had kids,’ Boone said. ‘Three kids. Even leaving a husband aside.’

  A waitress in a red gingham acrylic uniform put plates and cups down near Boone’s elbow. ‘One order blueberry pancakes, peach syrup on the side, one OJ, one coffee.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Boone said. He didn’t look at her, or at the food. He leaned towards Martha.

  ‘All that’s fine!’

  She looked at him for a moment.

  ‘Doesn’t seem so—’

  ‘Honey, nobody wants you back in your box. I knew you weren’t a Junior League girl the moment I set eyes on you. But things have gone too far the other way.’ He raised his voice a little. ‘The wrong way.’

  She pulled her coffee cup closer.

  ‘Don’t use that language,’ she said. ‘Don’t use such words.’

  He put a hand out and held her wrist.

  ‘I will if that’s how things seem to me. If they seem wrong, I’ll call ’em wrong. It seems to me wrong that it’s easier for you to love work, to love all these patients, who, after all, pay you for your time and expertise, than to love your family.’

  Martha whipped her wrist out of his grasp.

  ‘How dare you!’

  He leaned back. He grinned.

  ‘Bull’s eye,’ he said.

  ‘What!’

  ‘Got a reaction. Broke that famous composure.’

  ‘It’s not true. It’s not even remotely, faintly true.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘No!’ Martha said. She almost shouted it.

  ‘So you can let Ashley go through severe post-natal depression while you sit in your clinic, in your office, calling her and telling her all that stuff you’d tell someone paying you a hundred bucks an hour? You can let Cooper run wild as long as you don’t have to know about it? You can let Gillon – oh my God, don’t let’s even start to go there. And your mother? And me? What about me? Have I just relapsed so far back into being a regular, unreconstructed ole Southern guy such as you wouldn’t give the time of day to that I occupy about as much space in your consciousness as the goddamn cat does? We don’t have conversations, we don’t do stuff together, we don’t even do sex. Sex! Huh!’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Could someone out th
ere come right over here and remind me, in words of one syllable, exactly what sex is?’

  ‘Please,’ Martha said, her voice lowered.

  ‘And now Christmas,’ Boone said. ‘Now you can’t even do goddamn Christmas. Your first grandchild, Ashley’s first baby, and you can’t even do Christmas for your daughter and her child.’

  ‘Mother offered, she insisted—’

  ‘Only because she was so disappointed in Thanksgiving.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Martha said, putting her clenched fists either side of her forehead and closing her eyes, ‘are we just talking Martha Stewart here? No linen napkins, no half-olive forks—’

  ‘No,’ Boone said, ‘we are talking love. Caring. Honouring tradition.’

  ‘Spare me,’ Martha said. She opened her eyes. ‘I love my kids. In all my life, I love my kids the most.’

  ‘Thanks—’

  ‘But they don’t belong to me. Nor to you. They are lent to us. I don’t want to watch them goof up any more than you do. I get crucified watching. But how else do they learn if I don’t let them do it their way?’

  Boone stood up. Martha looked at the pancakes.

  ‘Aren’t you going to eat your breakfast?’

  ‘No,’ he said. He pushed himself sideways out of the diner booth and looked down at Martha.

  ‘With an example like you ahead of her,’ Boone said, ‘no wonder Gillon doesn’t know her ass from her elbow.’

  Gillon held her arms out. ‘Why don’t I feed her?’

  Ashley, still in a bathrobe at eleven-thirty in the morning, looked down at the baby in her arms.

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Sure I would. I’d love to.’

  Ashley said, ‘It just seems to be all I do, feeding her. She wants feeding all the time.’

  Gillon slid her arms under the baby and lifted her.

  ‘Growing girl,’ she said to Robyn.

  ‘Maybe if I’d fed her myself, maybe if I’d persevered—’

  ‘Don’t go there, Ash.’

  ‘I feel so bad I didn’t want to. It’s so wrong not to want to feed your baby.’

  ‘Who says?’

  Ashley took a half-full feeding bottle out of the microwave.

  ‘That’s what Henry says.’

  Gillon took the bottle and carried the baby across Ashley’s kitchen to the sofa by the TV. She settled herself against the pillows. Robyn began to stir and fidget and squeak, her little determined face questing for milk.

  ‘It’s coming, it’s coming,’ Gillon said to her. ‘When is it ever not coming? Haven’t you figured out yet that we’re not going to let you starve?’

  The baby latched fiercely on to the teat, her feet rigid with the importance of the moment.

  ‘Has Mama been?’

  ‘Not this week,’ Ashley said. ‘She’s given me the name of a doctor to go to.’ She tightened the sash of the bathrobe round her waist. ‘She was so great when I was pregnant. She was so great at the birth. I’m not sure I wouldn’t have gone stir crazy at the birth, without Mama. But she’s—’ Ashley stopped.

  Gillon looked up from the baby’s steadily sucking face.

  ‘She’s what?’

  ‘She’s finding this as – as hard as I am. She can’t seem to handle me when I can’t handle myself.’

  Gillon looked down at the baby again.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s – like I’m disappointing her?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Like I’ve broken some unspoken rule.’

  ‘If it comforts you at all,’ Gillon said, ‘it’s been like that for me most of my life. And you know what? I still go running to her to get her to tell me I’m a good girl. I still need her to tell me she approves of me. I gave up hoping she’d be proud of me years ago but I sneak in a hope now and then that she’ll say, “That’s the right way to think about this, Gillon, you’ve got it right this time.”’

  Ashley began to cry. She leaned against the kitchen counter and cried openly, messily, into her hands.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, smearing the back of her hand across her eyes. ‘I’m sorry—’

  ‘It’s not your fault. It’s not Mama’s fault. It’s not my fault. It’s the tension, the tension between being an individual and being part of a collective. You’ve been so great at the collective up to now. You will be again. You get such approval for that.’

  Ashley blew her nose fiercely into a tissue.

  ‘I hate this alienation—’

  ‘Sure you do,’ Gillon said. ‘It’s scary. But it won’t be for ever.’

  Ashley came and sat down on the sofa and held her daughter’s feet.

  ‘Thanks for coming.’

  Gillon didn’t look up.

  ‘I wanted to.’

  ‘If it was Mama here, I’d be ashamed not to have gotten myself dressed.’

  ‘I went round there the other night,’ Gillon said. ‘Daddy was in Atlanta. Mother was on her own. Very – very decidedly on her own. She didn’t want me there long. It made me think’ – Gillon glanced quickly at her sister – ‘it made me wonder how Mama has coped all these years, between Daddy and Grandmama. I kind of had a little fantasy on the way home, a little scenario of how things might have been if Mother had stayed in New York and married a Yankee?’

  ‘Wow,’ Ashley said. She sniffed. Then she said, ‘But there’d still have been Grandmama.’

  ‘Not ten minutes’ walk away. And there wouldn’t have been Charleston.’

  ‘I can’t picture that,’ Ashley said.

  ‘Maybe she’d have escaped some of the pressure—’

  ‘Pressure?’

  ‘The pressure of Grandmama wanting to hand down all this domestic power and see her hand it down.’

  Ashley looked round her kitchen.

  ‘I – I used to like domestic power.’

  ‘You will again. You’re a Southern girl, through and through.’

  ‘Henry said that,’ Ashley said.

  Gillon drew the teat slowly out of the baby’s mouth and propped her up against her shoulder.

  ‘Did he?’

  Ashley nodded.

  ‘He said, “Try not to be perfect.”’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He said people aren’t perfect. We’re all flawed, we’re all just stumbling along making it up as we go.’

  Gillon turned her face into the baby’s small white-clad side.

  ‘You believe him?’

  ‘I believe most things he says,’ Ashley said.

  ‘Ash—’

  ‘It’s not that he’s wise,’ Ashley said, quickly. ‘Although maybe he is, in his way. It’s more that he doesn’t judge, that he’s kind of tolerant, that – that he doesn’t think it’s as easy as I do, to fall from grace.’

  ‘Grace,’ Gillon said, her cheek against the baby. ‘The grace of going to church and eating catfish and minding your manners—’

  ‘More than that,’ Ashley said.

  ‘I know.’

  The baby burped softly. Gillon laid her back down in the crook of her arm and inserted the teat once more.

  Ashley said, ‘He’s going to Kansas City.’

  Gillon nodded.

  ‘I’m taking him to the airport.’

  ‘You are!’

  ‘As I failed to meet him when he arrived, Daddy said the least I could do was drive him out there now.’

  ‘Daddy told you to?’

  ‘Not quite. But I took the hint.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes,’ Gillon said, looking hard at the baby.

  ‘Can I come along?’ Ashley said. ‘Can Robyn and I come along for the ride?’

  Gillon looked sideways at her sister. Ashley’s cheeks were pink and her eyes had a wild shine to them.

  ‘Sorry,’ Gillon whispered.

  Normally Henry’s luggage consisted of his camera case, changes of shirts, socks and underwear and a washbag. For Kansas City, however, he’d had to take more trouble. He’d bought two Oxford-cl
oth shirts with button-down collars, a dark-blue jacket of a bulky but comfortable American cut and had his chinos dry-cleaned and pressed and returned to him in a polythene slip cover with a pink-edged card with ‘Honoured to be of service to your wardrobe!’ printed on it. He’d also bought an Italian silk tie on sale from 319 Men, on King Street, to be on the safe side. Everything, except his portfolio, was packed in a newly acquired bag that he’d learned to call a garment bag, and with his recent Charleston haircut he thought, not without a degree of satisfaction, that he would probably now pass in a crowd as yet another unremarkably dressed young American businessman on his way to clinch a deal. Or to attempt to.

  ‘I don’t quite know how to thank you,’ he’d said to Boone the night before at the bar of the Yacht Club.

  Boone raised his glass.

  ‘By, as you Brits say, bringing home the bacon.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Just so lucky I knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy at Occasion Cards. The Southern network spreads all over. Is Gillon taking you to the airport?’