Gillon looked down at her lap.
‘Love—’
‘Is that what you came to tell me?’
‘No,’ Gillon said. She stopped and coloured suddenly. Then she said, ‘Yes. I came because we were talking about the family …’
‘Well, I am truly flattered—’
‘You would be if I told you what Henry thinks of you.’
Sarah put up a hand and touched her hair lightly.
‘Well, now. He’s a charming boy.’
‘Yes.’
Sarah looked at her. She picked up the basket of wools and set it down beside her chair. Gillon was gazing away from her, down the garden, down towards the jasmine hedge and Job’s rhythmically sweeping figure.
‘Charming enough,’ Sarah said in a voice without any of its usual decisiveness, ‘to be serious about.’
There was a pause and then Gillon, still looking at Job, nodded.
‘Has he,’ Sarah said, ‘asked you to marry him?’
Gillon turned her head slowly.
‘In a way.’
‘Your grandfather went down on one knee. After a foxtrot. I wouldn’t expect even the best-raised boy nowadays to go down on one knee, but I would expect him to make himself plain.’
‘He made himself plain enough,’ Gillon said.
‘And what have you said?’
Gillon gave a quick smile.
‘You won’t like this—’
‘I won’t?’
‘I said maybe, probably, one day, perhaps.’
There was a silence. Sarah put a hand up to her pearls. In the quiet, Gillon could hear the faint clicking of the pearls as they moved against one another.
Then Sarah said, in a low voice, ‘I should have done that.’
Gillon was startled.
‘Grandmama.’
‘I should,’ Sarah said. She nodded. ‘I should have listened to my heart, to my instincts. Not to my manners.’
Gillon leaned forward.
‘Didn’t you love him?’
‘Oh yes. I was very fond of him. Everyone was fond of Teddy Cutworth, just as everyone was fond of my brothers. They were regular boys. We knew them. We all knew boys like that. We knew what to expect of them. They knew what they expected of us.’
‘Like Cooper,’ Gillon said.
Sarah looked at her.
‘Very like Cooper.’
‘So,’ Gillon said, still leaning forward, her eyes fixed on Sarah’s face, ‘you said yes, and you should have said maybe?’
‘I should have waited—’
‘To see how you felt?’
‘To see how I would feel about somebody else.’
‘Somebody else—’
‘Yes.’
‘Was there’, Gillon said, ‘somebody else?’
Sarah put her hands in her lap.
‘When your mother was only a little girl, I met a surgeon here, an orthopaedic surgeon. He’d come from Richmond, Virginia. He performed surgery on my youngest brother’s foot, after a sports injury.’ She stopped and took a little breath. ‘I have never felt anything like that. Never.’
Gillon whispered, ‘Did you – have an affair?’
‘I wanted to,’ Sarah said, ‘I wanted to more than anything in the world. I even asked him. I abandoned everything I’d ever been taught, ever learned, and asked him.’
‘And?’
‘He turned me down.’
‘Oh—’ Gillon said, on a long breath.
‘He told me he was married. He reminded me that I was married. But I think, in truth, he didn’t feel the way I did.’ Sarah gave a little sigh. ‘It took the light out of everything for a long, long while.’
Gillon said, ‘Does Mama know this?’
‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘Nobody alive now knows, but you.’
‘Why’d you tell me?’
‘Because,’ Sarah said unexpectedly, ‘you’re trying not to live by the rules.’
‘But you hate that! You’re so hard on me—’
Sarah made a little gesture.
‘Think about it.’
Gillon waited.
‘I was in disgrace,’ Sarah said. ‘I’d got to make my way back into society. I’d got to find a way of living with the backstabbing, the sabotage, particularly from other women. There was no one to support me. Except-your grandfather.’
‘That was good of him?’
‘There’s always a price to pay,’ Sarah said, ‘for a debt like that. I picked up the rule book, learned it by heart, and I’ve never put it down again.’
‘So when you give me a hard time, it’s to stop me doing what you did?’
Sarah sighed.
‘I don’t like to be reminded, dear.’
‘But it was long ago, so long ago—’
‘Only in time,’ Sarah said. She gave Gillon a little smile. ‘So why did you come to tell me about Henry?’
Gillon leaned back a little. She swung her legs out in front of her and regarded her flowered shoes.
‘He was talking about you. He thinks you are extraordinary. He says grandparents, on the whole, aren’t given stature in Britain any more. He hasn’t any of his own. He made me, well, think about you.’
‘Ah,’ Sarah said. She looked up at the ceiling of the piazza where a wrought-iron lantern hung, a lantern Sarah had had copied, in Charleston, from an original in Venice.
Gillon stood up. ‘I should go.’
‘Tell him to come see me,’ Sarah said, still gazing upwards.
‘Henry?’
‘Yes. I’d like to see him. I like to have a fine man about.’ She moved her head and looked at Gillon. ‘Good luck, dear.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t idealize the past,’ Sarah said. ‘Don’t idealize how it was for women. Don’t idealize – anything.’
Ashley lay on the daybed in her newly christened family room. Previous to Robyn’s arrival, the room had just been an extension to the kitchen, divided from the cooking area with its remodelled maple cabinetry by an island unit, but Merrill had said that, now that they were a family, they should have a family room. Ashley did not feel she was a family; she felt that they were still a couple, who now had a baby. A baby did not somehow automatically make you a family, it just made you a couple whose dynamics had radically altered. She looked at the telephone. She should be on that telephone. She had promised Martha, Merrill, her doctor that, while Robyn took her daytime naps, she, Ashley, would make calls about organizing the christening party, calls about taking up her old job again, calls about getting a weekly professional maid service in, to clean up the house. Ashley looked round her. The house looked clean, as anything tidy usually does, but Merrill, since Robyn’s birth, had taken to running his finger along sills and rims, to squinting at the glass shower screen against the light, to picking up threads and specks from rugs with elaborate precision. The implication, Ashley felt, was that he was obliged to maintain domestic standards because she was, for the moment, unwilling or unable to sustain them herself.
She looked down the length of her body. She’d lost almost all the weight she had gained with Robyn and if not her customary size 6, was at least a small size 8. All her clothes were clean. All her clothes were ironed. Her hair was clean, too, as was her baby and her baby’s clothes and surroundings. Three clean bottles of formula stood ready in the clean icebox waiting to be heated, at intervals, in the clean microwave oven. She had even disinfected the telephone. She had, in fact, done everything that was required of her, everything that should, by rights, have earned her the approval of those she sought to please. She was wearing French underwear for Merrill, make-up for her grandmother and had swallowed two anti-depressant tablets for her mother. Her father only required her to smile. That was the one thing she couldn’t manage, the one thing that was, in fact, too much to ask.
The telephone rang. Ashley reached out a hand.
‘Hi there—’
‘Ash,’ Gillon said, ‘it’s me.’
‘Where are you?’<
br />
‘I’m on Meeting Street. I’ve just been with Grandmama.’
‘Can you come over?’
‘Are you OK?’
‘No,’ Ashley said. ‘Not at all.’
‘Give me fifteen minutes,’ Gillon said.
‘Twelve—’
Ashley put the telephone down. She sat up slowly and swung her feet to the floor, feeling about blindly for her shoes. She slipped them on and stood up. The lights on the baby alarm which stood on the island unit showed quiet, steady green. Robyn was sleeping. If Ashley put her ear to the alarm, she could hear Robyn’s peaceful, quick baby breaths, evidence of that enviable sleep she slept, sleep that was about resting and growing, not about escaping and recovering. Ashley went past the alarm and out through the kitchen door into the integral garage Merrill had installed complete with swing-out, carriage-style doors, that connected with the tidy space of yard that separated the house from the street. There was a low wall at the very edge, a wall Merrill had painted white to complement the Spanish style of the house, and which needed, periodically, to be scrubbed free of bird droppings. Ashley sat down, on the section of the wall closest to the house, to wait for Gillon.
‘You want coffee?’ Ashley said.
Gillon shook her head. Ashley began to fidget with things in the icebox.
‘I ought to start fixing dinner. Merrill will be home early tonight. Before his meeting. A golf-club meeting.’
‘Leave it,’ Gillon said.
‘But—’
‘Can’t he even fix himself a sandwich, if he wants one?’
Ashley closed the icebox door.
‘I feel I should—’
‘Well, don’t,’ Gillon said. She came across the kitchen and took Ashley’s wrist. ‘Come sit down.’
‘The baby—’
‘We’ll hear the baby.’
She pulled her sister past the island unit back towards the daybed and the easy chairs.
‘I have had the most amazing afternoon. I have been talking to Grandmama.’
‘She called this morning,’ Ashley said. ‘She always asks how I am. I can’t tell her. I can’t tell anybody.’
Gillon pushed Ashley down into a chair.
‘Cross your heart, hope to die, promise never tell anyone what I’m about to tell you?’
Ashley gazed up at her.
‘Promise—’
‘Grandmama wanted to have an affair. When Mother was just tiny. She was completely crazy about this guy, and he turned her down. And all Charleston shunned her, she had the most terrible time. She said the only way back was never to break the rules again, never. Never again.’
‘Wow,’ Ashley said faintly.
‘That’s why she freaks when I step out of line.’
‘This guy,’ Ashley said. ‘What about this guy?’
‘He was a surgeon. He did hands and feet and stuff. He did surgery on Uncle Tommy.’
‘Was he handsome?’
‘Oh, Ashley—’
‘Sorry,’ Ashley said. She spread her hands out. ‘What a story. Grandmama. Wow.’
‘I know,’ Gillon said. ‘She was lovely. She was different. It was like, well, like talking to a friend.’
Ashley said, ‘You’re my friend.’
‘I sure am.’
‘I don’t want you to go away again.’
‘I might have to—’
‘Things have changed,’ Ashley said. ‘I don’t feel like I used to. I used to feel I was a princess, I could have what I wanted, I knew what I wanted. But all that’s blown away. I don’t feel proud of being what a guy wants, what Daddy wants, what Merrill wants, any longer.’ She threw her hands up, covering her face. From behind them she said, ‘I hate this, I hate this need I have for reassurance, I hate needing what I don’t feel sure of any more. And when you’re here, I feel better. I look at you, and I feel better.’ She took her hands away and glanced at Gillon. ‘I’m so ashamed of how I used to be.’
Gillon shook her head.
‘Forget it.’
‘And you’ve got Henry—’
Gillon leaned forward.
She said gently, ‘I don’t possess him. He isn’t obliged to me.’
‘But he wants to be with you—’
‘He seems to, sure.’
Ashley bit her lip.
‘I thought he—’ She stopped. ‘I know.’
‘He’s so sweet to me.’
‘Yes.’
‘I wanted him to fall in love with me.’
Gillon looked down.
‘You’ll tell me,’ Ashley said, ‘that that wouldn’t have helped.’
‘Yes.’
‘But it’s the only way I know. To feel better. To get better.’
‘No,’ Gillon said. ‘He’s an exotic, for us. He’s British. He wasn’t raised to think like Daddy, like Cooper, he doesn’t see love as a gift that the man bestows and the woman waits to receive. But—’ She paused.
‘What?’
‘He doesn’t know about family, either. He’s learning, but he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that suffering’s part of it, he doesn’t know about accepted responsibility, he doesn’t know about knowing where you come from. He’s had liberty but he hasn’t known what to do with it.’
Ashley was very still. Gillon came and knelt by her chair.
‘He’s in love with it all, now,’ Gillon said. ‘He’s in love with everything. But maybe, one day, all this family will choke him.’
Ashley put out a hand.
‘Does it choke you?’
Gillon took her hand.
‘Sometimes. A little.’
‘But you’ll always come back?’
Gillon nodded.
‘Promise,’ Ashley said. ‘Your turn to promise.’
‘Promise,’ Gillon said.
Chapter Nineteen
The recipe on the back of the package of French vanilla cake mix promised Martha that she could have cinnamon rolls, hot, for breakfast the next day. All she had to do was to add flour and dry yeast and warm water to the mix and leave it to rise for an hour, somewhere warm, somewhere out of a draught. Then she was to roll out the resulting dough, brush it with melted butter, sprinkle it with sugar and cinnamon and chopped pecans and raisins, roll it up again, slice it, shape it, set it in a pan to rise in the icebox overnight, and then bake it in order to fill the house, said the package, ‘with an aroma to awake sleepy eyes to morning treasures’. Martha thought about it. She thought about the sleepy eyes-hers, Boone’s, the cat’s. She considered Boone’s usual breakfast, the juice, the coffee and, like as not, the bowl of grits he favoured still from those pre-school breakfasts nearly fifty years ago, grits with sausage, or syrup, or apple butter. Boone had had an aunt in Kentucky – in Johnson County, Kentucky – who made prize-winning butter for the Apple Festival every October. She used apples called Wolf River and sent a crate of the butter, in labelled jars, to Boone’s family every fall. Aunt Cynthia Ann, Boone told Martha, ate her apple butter with eggs and fried potatoes. Martha closed her eyes and pushed away the cake-mix package. Having never baked a hot breakfast roll in her life, nothing was going to change, Martha reflected, by starting now.
She went across the kitchen and through the glass doors to the piazza. Boone was at the far end, sitting in one of the wicker chairs with his cellphone and a beer. There were papers on the table in front of him, and he had his reading glasses on. The cat, who had spent most of the day in the chair Boone was now occupying, sat lightly on the floor beside him, plainly speculating the wisdom of springing into his lap and thereby attempting to reclaim territory. Boone was wearing a baseball cap from the Country Club at Edisto, where he liked to play golf early on Saturday mornings when there was a good chance of catching an old bull alligator sunning himself on the edge of a waterhole. He was also wearing a dark-green cashmere sweater Martha had bought for him a good ten years before, on a trip to Edinburgh, in an attempt to dissuade him from ordering made-to-measure tartan pants. He’d bough
t the pants anyhow, later, at the Scotch House, in London, and the alligators at the Country Club had had many subsequent chances to get used to them. Martha was used to them, too, used almost to a point of fondness, as you seem to get with anything that has walked enough of the path with you; been there, while you’ve been there. That was the thing about anything inanimate: it didn’t have to participate, it didn’t have to empathize or support or defy or challenge, it just had to be there, sharing the same space and time as you were living in, being part of your setting. Martha sighed. If she concentrated, she could imagine how that cashmere jersey would feel under her fingers, warm and solid across Boone’s solid shoulders. She cleared her throat.
‘Another beer?’ she called.
Boone did not stop talking into his phone. He raised one arm in the air with the thumb up. Martha went back into the kitchen and took another beer out of the icebox and poured herself a glass of iced tea from the pitcher she’d made earlier when Ashley came round, with the baby. The baby was thriving. She was gaining weight, sleeping through the night, smiling. She looked exactly like her father.
Martha went down the piazza and set the beer and the tea glass down on the table. Boone had finished speaking on his phone and had put it down, on his papers. He had another sheaf of papers in his hands, too, and he was looking at them, through his spectacles, the ankle of one foot balanced across the knee of his other leg. He was wearing Argyle socks. He loved Argyle socks.
‘Hey there,’ Boone said. He did not look up at her.
Martha took the chair next to him. She looked out into the garden, at the way the sharp spring light fell on the crepe myrtle, the flowering quince, the fever tree, all these things surging into life again, budding and bursting, filling the air with scents so strong, sometimes, that you’d have to close the windows against them.
‘Do you feel’, she said to Boone, her gaze on the fever tree, ‘like going to a movie?’
‘No, thanks,’ Boone said.
‘Or out to dinner?’
‘No, thanks,’ Boone said. He yawned. ‘I’ve been up since five.’
‘For a moment back there,’ Martha said, ‘I thought I’d do some baking.’
Boone sighed. He picked up his fresh beer, and put his papers down.
‘Oh, sure,’ he said, absently.
Girl From the South (v5) Page 26
