Girl From the South (v5)

by Joanna Trollope

  Henry looked down into his drink.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I told her,’ Boone said.

  ‘You did?’

  Boone leaned forward.

  ‘She owes you that courtesy.’

  Well, Henry thought now, sitting waiting for her in the overfurnished reception area of his inn, a courtesy would at least be easy to handle. She’d arrive, they’d load in the bag, they’d set off, she’d remark on the traffic, he’d tell her how shocked he’d been at the almost nonchalant reporting in The Post and Courier that morning of the execution by lethal injection of a black man in the prison in Columbia.

  ‘They even listed what he’d requested for his last meal,’ Henry would say. ‘He wanted steak and fried fish with tartare sauce and a tossed salad and a baked potato and something called red velvet pie and a grape soda. Can you picture that? Can you picture someone taking that order and the prisoner eating it and a reporter writing it all in a notebook even down to the bread sticks?’

  Gillon would say, her eyes on the road ahead, ‘It’s awful. Awful.’

  And then they’d talk a bit about capital punishment maybe, in so far as you can have such a discussion on a half-hour car ride, and then the talk would drift off to Kansas City and Henry’s prospects (totally unknown) and the Christmas show at the gallery where Gillon worked and then they’d be at the airport and she’d drop him by the domestic departures check-in, and wave and drive away and leave him standing there with his bag and his portfolio and the deep feeling of painful dissatisfaction he seemed to have every time she left him …

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ Gillon said.

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I always say that,’ Gillon said, ‘to be on the safe side.’

  She was wearing a narrow schoolgirlish grey coat and black pants. Her clothes looked, Henry thought, oddly English, oddly London.

  He stood up.

  ‘This is good of you.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Three-line whip, I gather.’

  She looked up at him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘English expression meaning you had no option. Your father told you to.’

  She said, looking away, ‘Well, I might not have dared, otherwise.’

  Henry said nothing. He looked at her averted face, at the line of her brow where her hair sprang upwards.

  He said lamely, ‘I only have the one bag.’

  ‘No camera?’

  ‘No camera. I go naked, without a camera.’

  Martha’s Camry was parked outside in the street.

  Henry would have liked to have been driving; he would have liked something to do. He didn’t want, he discovered, to sit passively beside Gillon while she drove. But he had no option. The Camry was Gillon’s mother’s car and he was lucky to be getting a ride to the airport in any case. He climbed into the passenger seat and fastened his seat belt and looked ahead and not at Gillon’s hands on the steering wheel.

  She drove fast. Henry and Tilly had only owned a car for eighteen months of their relationship because, living in London, they hardly needed one. Tilly didn’t like driving much; she preferred to leave driving to Henry. On the occasions when she had driven him, he had teased her about how careful she was, how considerate to other drivers. Gillon didn’t seem particularly considerate. The Camry swung off the I-26 west towards the airport without, as far as Henry could see, over-much glancing in mirrors on Gillon’s part.

  ‘I’m safe,’ Gillon said, as if reading his mind.

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I could do this route in my sleep.’

  ‘Irrespective of who else is on the road—’

  She gave him a quick glance.

  ‘You nervous?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, not meaning the driving.

  ‘I’ve never even scratched a car. Cooper has smashed two and even Ashley dented a wing. But me, nothing. Like my mother.’

  Henry looked straight ahead through the windshield.

  ‘Are you like your mother?’

  There was a pause. Gillon’s gaze flicked up to the driver’s mirror.

  Then she said, ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I don’t think so either,’ Henry said. ‘I don’t think you’re like anybody.’

  Gillon said nothing. Henry glanced at her. Her face gave nothing away. He looked boldly at her hands on the wheel and the way her coat fell open over her black-clad legs and her sneakered right foot on the gas pedal. Then he looked out of the window.

  To the racing view of the airport approach he said, ‘I don’t think – no, start again – I am very sure that I have never felt like this in my life before.’ He paused and raised his eyes to the pale-grey December sky and then he said, ‘It wasn’t sudden, it wasn’t a thunderbolt, it’s just come on me, inch by inch, minute by minute, so that I’ve got to a point where I absolutely have to tell you how I’m feeling even if it’s the last thing you want to hear. Is it?’

  He turned to look at her. She was staring ahead and she was so suddenly pale that the freckles across her nose and cheeks stood out like copper-coloured smudges.

  ‘Is it? The last thing you want to hear? Is it?’

  Almost imperceptibly, Gillon shook her head. The car was slowing. The domestic departures check-in was fifty feet ahead.

  ‘When I get back from Kansas City,’ Henry said, leaning towards her, his hand above her right arm but not touching it, ‘will you see me? Will you talk to me?’

  Gillon slid the car up against the kerb and stopped it. Then she put her arms on the steering wheel and laid her forehead on them.

  ‘I want to talk to you so badly,’ Henry said. ‘Will you let me? Will you?’

  She raised her head enough to turn it sideways so that she could see him. He waited, his left hand still in the air, his breath momentarily stopped.

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  London

  Winter

  Chapter Thirteen

  The last messenger boy in before Susie closed down her reception desk for the night told her it was sleeting outside. She pulled a face. The boy, who had flicked up the visor of his bike helmet, gave what he could see of her above the waist an appraising glance and said, grinning, ‘Well, at least you’re dressed for it.’

  Susie pouted, and pulled the edges of her tight little cardigan across the tight little vest top she wore underneath.

  ‘Stick to your bike,’ she said.

  The boy pushed the padded envelope he had brought across the desk top towards her. She signed the delivery slip without looking at him and pushed it back.

  ‘Wrap up warm,’ the boy said. ‘See ya later.’

  Susie said nothing. It wasn’t worth wasting even an ‘In your dreams’ on a boy like that. She waited until he had clomped out of the building and the swing doors had swirled shut behind him before she looked up to see if it actually was sleeting outside. It looked black, of course, and wet. It had looked black and wet for most of the time for weeks, months. She and Tilly had left the flat every morning for ever in the black and wet and come home in it every night, too. It reminded Susie of all those months she had spent as an adolescent lying on her bed in winter or on her parents’ scruffy little lawn in the Midlands smothered in Hawaiian Tropic sun oil in summer, waiting, just waiting, for something to happen. Her father – senior mechanic at a local garage – said nothing ever bloody happened unless you got off your bloody backside and made it happen. Her mother – who ran three parttime jobs and never noticed when they’d run out of tea bags – said that it was only dreams that kept you going. She never minded seeing Susie lying on the lawn gleaming with Hawaiian Tropic. She said it was the only free time in her life Susie was ever likely to have and she might as well enjoy it. The trouble was, Susie didn’t enjoy it. The waiting was terrible. She’d lain there, week after week, seeing her life just sliding past her on its way to making sure she was going to be just like her mother, exhausted at thirty-seven with no time or energy to get her r
oots retouched and saddled with Susie’s greasemonkey father. There’d been a lot of near-despair in Susie’s adolescence, a lot of fearful wondering if she was really as doomed as she felt she was. It was only when she left school and realized that, not only was she free to take decisions, but that she was expected to take them, that she began – though she’d have died rather than tell him so – to think that her father might have been right, all along. She enrolled for an IT course and a secretarial course and, after them, abandoned the Midlands for London and life conducted loosely on the premise that, if you bored yourself stupid working all week, you thereby gave yourself permission to cut loose at weekends. Saturday Night Fever was one of Susie’s favourite movies.

  Living with Tilly all these winter months, however, had given Susie a slightly different perspective. Before Henry went away, Susie had seen Henry and Tilly as almost part of a different, older generation in which personal commitment and steady, if quiet, ambition and domestic routine combined to make a distinct and settled life structure. Seeing Tilly on her own was another matter altogether. Tilly – whose looks and brains Susie recognized as belonging to quite a class act – was abruptly at sea. All the patterns and habits of living with and partly for someone else evidently became pointless, even pathetic, when persisted with on one’s own. Susie couldn’t help but notice, even from the depths of her own considerable self-absorption, that Tilly was bewildered, that the accepted focus of her life outside work was not, quite simply, as it had been. Susie could supply mess and noise and another physical presence in the flat, but she couldn’t supply anything more essential. She watched Tilly constantly recollecting that Henry, and all that came with him, simply wasn’t there any more. She watched the shock that recollection was to Tilly, over and over, day after day. It made her feel sorry for Tilly, of course it did; especially as Tilly didn’t want to bore the pants off her, talking about it. But more than that, it scared her. She’d watch Tilly remembering not to remember something about, or for, Henry, and felt something close to panic about ever feeling that way about anybody. She could think of nothing more terrifying – not even years of boredom – than wanting someone so much that you couldn’t see the point of life without them.

  Which brought her, as it always did, to thinking about William. She felt better, at once, when she thought about William. William did not – she was very certain about that – inspire feelings of intense, possessive, longing passion in Susie. She liked him, sure. She fancied him. Some days, William just looked dead gorgeous. Some days, she had little fantasies, sitting at her reception desk, about what she’d do to him when they met after work. Some days, however, she hardly thought about him at all and when she saw another man – at work, in the street – that she fancied, she never compared him, in her mind’s eye, with William. She was safe in her feelings for William, safe in the certainty of being at once free enough and interested enough to be comfortable. She was very sure of that. Sometimes, looking at Tilly, she managed to be almost thankful for it, too. But all the same, living with Tilly and Tilly’s loss, for four months, had made Susie nervous. It had made her afraid that if she went on too long like this, living with Tilly, sleeping with William, helping William look after Tilly, she might start to get used to that kind of thing, to expect it, to depend upon it. Instead of breezily assuming that she was in control of everything, especially William, she might find that she was beginning to need and want things that were not at all conducive to a carefree mind.

  Holding the edges of her cardigan wrapped round her, Susie got up from her desk and went across to the plate-glass windows of the foyer that fronted the street. She peered out. The world was as she expected, wet and black and full of huddled, hurrying people with umbrellas and the depressing, sagging carrier bags designed to hold groceries. Susie shivered a little. She looked down at her reflection in the glass, at her fringed suede skirt and the platform-soled boots she’d bought with her friend Vivi one Saturday when they’d got wasted at lunchtime at a new place which had given them a free bottle of wine for being the thousandth customers since the opening. They’d laughed so much they could hardly buy the boots and then Susie had insisted on wearing them out of the shop and kept falling off them. It had been brilliant. Being with Vivi usually was brilliant. Vivi didn’t let anything or anyone touch her, she just blazed ahead. She’d just split from her fiancé and was going to Spain for a few months until all the fuss had died down and the mothers had got over their grievance at not having a spring wedding to look forward to. Vivi had asked Susie to go with her. Vivi had a friend in Marbella with a flat they could doss down in until they found something of their own. Susie had said no.

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘What’s daft?’ Vivi said. ‘Staying in frigging London, or what?’

  Susie looked from the toes of her boots out into the sodden, shining streets. She thought about Vivi, and Spain. She thought about Tilly and William and the fact that William hadn’t rung her all day. It wasn’t the fact that he hadn’t rung her that bothered her, but the fact that she’d noticed. She went back to the desk, switched off the office telephone system and switched on the night answering message. Behind her, the lift doors opened and two women from the accounts department came out, already unfurling their umbrellas. One of them had a son in customer services who had asked Susie out on a date and been abruptly rejected. The mother had not forgiven Susie.

  ‘Night,’ they both said, hurrying past Susie and not looking at her. Susie opened her cardigan and stuck her chest out.

  ‘Night,’ she said, in a parody of their voices, and flicked open her mobile phone to dial Vivi’s number.

  Tilly was job hunting. Each week, she bought all the newspapers in which jobs in the media were advertised, and went through them minutely, dividing them into those she thought she would like and those for which she was probably qualified, while trying not to realize how seldom the two categories coincided. She wrote letters and e-mails of application and waited, without very much hope, for any kind of response. There would, she told herself, be something out there, something unexpected, something in the end. Fortune, after all, favours the prepared mind, even if the mind in question, because of what has happened to it recently, isn’t at all certain what it is prepared for.

  Action, occupation, Tilly had decided, was the only answer. One of the troubles with misery was the inertia it induced, the feeling of helplessness and powerless-ness, the awareness that nothing much had any point to it, any longer. She supposed that this misery was grief. After all, the death of a relationship must be a death like any other, since a relationship was – once upon a time, anyway – a living thing? She tried not to remember if she had felt like this when her parents had told her that they were parting, three weeks before her eleventh birthday. Her mother was leaving her father for another man and her father made it very plain to her that he was to be regarded as the injured party. She couldn’t see him that way. She couldn’t see her mother as injured by having to live with him, with all his faults, either. All she could see was that she was gravely injured herself by what they were doing and that, as what they were doing was so awful and so final, it was probably somehow her fault. She was plainly not enough to hold them together, so she had failed. She was injured because she had, even if inadvertently, caused injury. She had not been – well, enough. It always came back to that, to not being able to keep people with you because you weren’t, in the end, sufficient for them to stay.

  Tilly disliked these thoughts intensely. Alone with them in bed, on the Underground, at unaware moments buying a newspaper or washing powder, she battled not to think them, not to give in to them. They were, she knew, not reasonable fears, but that didn’t stop them having a horrible and unreasonable persistence. The only solution to them that she could see, apart from abruptly trying to switch them off when they tiptoed remorselessly into her mind, was to be busy, even if only to demonstrate a kind of assumed carelessness about their tyranny. She stayed long hours at work,
she filled in job-application forms meticulously, she accepted all invitations except those themed on romantic attachment, she polished the taps in the bathroom.

  ‘Why?’ Susie said, pausing in the doorway, her wet hair turbaned up in a cerise bath towel.

  ‘Because it’s something I can control, something I can do.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘When there are whole areas of my life I can’t control, I get some kind of comfort out of exerting control over the details.’

  ‘Sounds a bit freaky.’

  ‘It probably is.’

  ‘I bet you know how much you’ve got in your current account—’

  ‘Yes.’

  Susie leaned into the bathroom. She pointed to the hot tap on the bath.

  ‘You’ve missed that one.’

  Tilly was grateful to Susie, thankful even. She was grateful for Susie’s disorder and carelessness, for the fact that Susie, though not exactly callous, was self-centred enough not to be sorry for Tilly except in brief moments. It made Tilly dare to believe – sometimes – that her own life would one day return to the kind of nonchalant normality that Susie’s had. If Susie had been deeply sympathetic, deeply concerned, Tilly knew she would have felt like an invalid, like someone who has to be spoken to in a special tone, treated in a special way. William was inclined to do that. He was apt to look at her as one might look at someone who was dying but who was, by all the rightful laws of nature, too young and too lovely to die. Tilly appreciated this kind of tenderness – or at least, she’d appreciated the thought behind it – but for daily life she preferred Susie’s approach, even if it entailed nail varnish blobbed on the carpet after a toenail-painting session, or her last pair of fine black tights taken without being either returned or replaced. The essence was that Susie’s behaviour gave Tilly the smallest hope that she’d recover one day, that there’d be a time when her thoughts were companionable rather than harassing. Susie’s attitude indicated that the illness wasn’t terminal.