‘How can you turn your back on Henry?’
‘I’m not.’
‘Just when, at last, you might have found happiness—’
‘Mother,’ Gillon said with mock severity, ‘you sound remarkably like Grandmama.’
Martha gave a shaky smile.
‘Now, wouldn’t that be a fate?’
The street door opened, and a man and a woman dressed in matching jeans and sweatshirts and holding a map of Charleston came in. Gillon gave Martha’s hand a brief pat, and got to her feet.
‘I should go—’
Gillon touched her shoulder.
‘No. Give me a moment.’
She went quickly forward down the gallery. Martha stayed where she was, her back to the gallery, her gaze on the floor which Gillon had been waxing. She heard Gillon ask if she could help and then the woman say decidedly, as if she were afraid of being persuaded to buy something that she did not in truth want, that they would just prefer to look at the exhibition alone. Gillon came back to Martha’s side.
‘They won’t buy.’
‘Won’t they?’
‘Only if there’s a painting which just happens to completely resemble the photographs they already have of their cabin on a lake somewhere.’
Martha looked up at Gillon.
She said, uncertainly, ‘I am pleased for you about the Getty.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And – and I am pleased for Cooper.’
‘Yes.’
‘It—’ She stopped.
‘Mama?’
‘It is – just strange, to be so shaken.’
Gillon gave a long sigh. She glanced down the gallery. The couple were looking doubtfully at the huge grey painting. Maybe she could persuade them towards the small sculpture table. There were some charming fish among the fossils, and a seahorse or two, which might be used as paperweights. Perhaps. The cheapest were only thirty-five dollars after all. She saw the woman glance away from the painting and look around her. Gillon put a hand on Martha’s shoulder.
‘It’s only change, Mother,’ she said. Martha’s shoulder under her hand felt curiously frail and small. She held it, a little more firmly. ‘It’s just change. It happens all the time. It isn’t the end, it isn’t the end of anything.’
Chapter Twenty
The apartment had a strange crepuscular light. For some reason, Cooper had left the shades pulled down, but pulled down haphazardly, some halfway, some a quarter-way, several crooked. Henry remembered admiring the shades when he first saw the apartment all those months ago. They were made of black-painted slatted wood, very cool, very minimalist, except that now they were furred with dust, as were the floors and the top of the icebox and the screen of the giant TV that Cooper had deemed too big to take to Cleveland. Henry was far from houseproud, but even he was quite surprised to see the way Cooper’s randomness, heedlessness, had translated itself into the soap-scummed shower, the bed half stripped of bedding, as if Cooper had had to leave in the middle of the night, pursued by creditors.
He hadn’t, of course. He’d left on a late-morning flight to Atlanta with his hair brushed and his father and younger sister there to say goodbye to him. He said he wanted no big send-off, so Martha and Gillon went to work as usual and Henry left a text message on his cellphone. Cooper had two bags and his computer; he left behind closets full of stuff, closets of sports gear and discarded electronic equipment and girlie magazines and clothes and trophies he’d won at high school, at college. He also left Henry a half-gallon jar of Jack Daniel’s, two sets of keys and the telephone number, scrawled in the dust on the TV console, of somebody called Dolores who might be persuaded to come in and clean up the apartment. Cooper had talked a good deal about getting Dolores in to clean up before he left, but he had never done more than talk, and Henry hadn’t expected him to, either. Henry thought about calling Dolores and then he thought, surveying these rooms, that they were his space, the first space that had been his alone in all his life, that he not only might clean it himself, but that he might quite like to clean it. It was odd, thinking, realizing, that this place was not – unless he chose to – for sharing, nor was it for compromise or accommodation; it was not somewhere that he was allowed in on someone else’s terms, someone who decided about routines and habits and number of pillows. It was his.
He went into Cooper’s bedroom and began to pull off the sheets. It had crossed his mind that Gillon might suggest coming round to help him sort things out, but she hadn’t. The deal, she implied, was between him and Cooper, and the fact that Cooper was her brother in no way involved her in the state in which he had left his apartment. Henry dropped the dirty linen on the floor and went in search of clean sheets. He rather admired that quality in Gillon, although it still surprised him. It surprised him that she didn’t seem to want to alter him – or Cooper-she didn’t seem to feel the need to improve them, tidy up their messy male ways, point out to them that truly responsible adult citizens acted in such a manner, made certain decisions about the present, or certain provisions for the future. It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested in him-in fact, Henry felt, he was sure that nobody in his life had been so supremely interested in him just as he was, before – but that her interest didn’t then lead on to a desire to mould and modify. It was as if the conformities required by her culture, by her upbringing, had led her to react against them, not by outright rebellion, but by quietly detaching herself to create the space in which to make up her own mind. And because she herself had required that distance, she was prepared to grant it to other people, to allow them to come to their own conclusions by their own routes, down their own pathways. The South had moulded her, but not in the least in the way it had intended.
And now she was going to California. Henry snapped a clean sheet out of its laundered folds across the bed. Before she went, she would probably occupy this very bed with him several times; many times, if he could persuade her. He didn’t feel in the least threatened by her leaving because he had been involved in it, because he understood her reasons for going, understood that, far from being part of the reason, he himself had very nearly been the cause of her refusing the offer.
‘Go,’ he’d said. He’d been holding her hands across a café table.
She said, ‘It’s so strange, now. It isn’t just you, it’s the way the whole dynamic is, the whole family thing, Mama and Daddy so vulnerable somehow, Ashley saying she needs me, Cooper needing reassurance he can come home if he wants to—’
‘That’s why you must go.’
She looked at him.
‘Or you’ll get sucked in,’ Henry said. ‘They’ll all fall on you.’
She smiled.
‘Promise to fall on me.’
He picked her hands up and held them. He smiled back.
‘Try and stop me.’
He’d go to California a lot of weekends. He’d develop this easy American habit of thinking that Los Angeles was just a trip away, not thousands of difficult separating miles. He’d see Gillon regularly and he’d be the bearer – he couldn’t quite visualize this in detail but the general idea appealed to him – of packages of information and communication between Gillon and her family, he’d act as a kind of benevolent, interested (but not committed) carrier pigeon. He would, in some obscure, attractive way, be in charge of the smooth running of these connections, responsible for how this family – one of whom he loved and the others of whom he was very fond – made the transition from the old assumptions to the new possibilities. It made him feel quietly proud, thinking of how things might work out, how he could gently help them to work out, how he might, at last, begin to see himself as someone who had another human role than merely that of being the focus of someone else’s emotional ambitions.
He threw the pillows back on the bed and arranged the comforter. He considered getting new pillows and maybe some white bedlinen instead of Cooper’s navy blue. He pictured himself somewhere like Bed, Bath and Beyond at the Towne Centre, shopp
ing solemnly for items that had not seemed his business before, that had held no charm for him because they did not represent a life that he either wanted or needed.
He went back into the sitting room. Cooper’s La-Z-Boy stood in the centre of the room, five feet from the TV. The remote control and two empty beer cans were on the rug beside it. Henry lowered himself into the chair and put his head back. It was astonishingly comfortable, amazingly, excitingly comfortable. He looked round the room. There was plenty of wall-space, plenty of invitingly empty surface on which to put up pinboards, to put up his own better pictures, to revel in this extraordinary new sense of not being someone mildly to be despaired over, someone who was always – just – getting things wrong, someone who seemed to lack the language and capacity to respond and satisfy. He thought about Paula. He thought of the way she withdrew from relationships rather than mess them up by not handling them right; he remembered her shuttered childhood face when their mother began, again, on the litany of her own disappointments, her own betrayals. Henry felt, abruptly, a little surge of affection for Paula, a gratitude for her being there so that he was not entirely devoid of family possession, he was not excluded wholly from the club, he was not left alone to carry all the discarded baggage left behind by their parents’ broken lives.
Like Tilly. Henry put his hands behind his head. He closed his eyes. William had told him that Tilly was giving up the flat in Parson’s Green and moving down to Oxford. William was quite excited about this. He was going to take over the flat and was installing, in his own old bedroom, a Japanese girl called Tomoko whom he had met at a Van Morrison concert. There was something about the way William described Tomoko that made Henry feel that she might not stay alone in William’s old bedroom very long. She was five foot two, William said, and her hair was so black and so unbelievably straight that William had found it necessary to mention the fact three times. Henry pictured Tomoko and William together and came up with a caricature of Miss Saigon.
‘You’re a cliché,’ he e-mailed William. ‘You’re a joke.’
Tomoko was doing a film course. She was taking William to see serious cult movies. She was also, William announced in a way Henry still found admonishing, making friends with Tilly. Tomoko had been down to Oxford to see Tilly, who was living, temporarily, in what sounded like a sort of tower, attached to her mother’s house. Tomoko reported that Tilly and her mother were like sisters together, happy families, mother and daughter.
Henry opened his eyes. The late-afternoon sun was coming in through the crooked blinds and sliding along the dusty surface of the cabinet where Henry planned to put his computer. Tilly had not told him any of these things herself, of course, had not told him, either, that William had proposed to her and that she had turned him down. Henry would not really have expected either Tilly or William to divulge this curiously interesting information, but he was grateful to Susie for telling him, even if her motives in doing so were angry and resentful. He was relieved, obscurely, that Tilly had not accepted William, not because he would have been in any way jealous now, but because he would somehow have thought less of her and he wanted to remember her as admirable, as someone who merited more than he, or William, could give her. He wanted to remember Tilly as someone complete, someone whose personality had not been at fault in itself, but only in conjunction with the then unformed state of his own.
But perhaps – Henry looked up at the ceiling where Cooper had installed a chic plantation-style fan – Tilly’s completeness had been illusory. Perhaps she was like someone trying to cross a river using a bridge that isn’t there, telling herself that as long as she moved forward, the past would somehow fall into obedient line behind her. If she had now gone home to her mother – after all these years, all this life – maybe it was because she realized she had to go back and try and build that bridge after all. Not everybody would have to do that – there must be legions of people just crashing on regardless-but perhaps Tilly did. The combination of vulnerability and meticulousness in Tilly’s nature might, in the end, have persuaded her that you can limp on, walking wounded, if you insist, but if there’s a chance, you can also go back to base and try to get yourself fixed.
Henry sighed. He ought, really, to get out of this chair and go round the apartment opening closets, making decisions, setting his stamp upon things. Martha had told him just to dump the stuff that was in his way; Cooper wouldn’t remember what he’d owned anyway, Cooper was far more interested in what was about to happen than in what had happened. It struck Henry, when Martha told him that, that you’d have to be very, very certain of where you came from to feel like that, you’d have to have been born, in the words of the sentimental Celtic poem that Tilly had mistakenly put inside his twenty-first birthday card, knowing that the wind would always be at your back and the sun reliably upon your face. Well, maybe, at last, the wind and the sun were coming round to his point of view. Maybe, in a few years from now, he’d know, with some sense of certainty, what Cooper and Ashley and even Gillon, in her arbitrary way, had always taken for granted.
He climbed out of the La-Z-Boy and wandered over to the window. Through the blind he could see back lots and gardens and a small boy performing a strange, swooping ballet all by himself with a baseball bat. The telephone began to ring. Henry turned. His telephone, his apartment, someone calling to speak to him. He ran across the room towards it, smiling.
‘Hello,’ he said, still smiling, ‘Henry Atkins here.’
Joanna Trollope has been writing for over thirty years. Her enormously successful contemporary works of fiction, several of which have been televised, include: The Choir; A Village Affair; A Passionate Man; and The Rector’s Wife, which was her first #1 bestseller, and made her into a household name. Since then she has written The Men and the Girls; A Spanish Lover; The Best of Friends; Next of Kin; Other People’s Children; Marrying the Mistress; Girl from the South; Brother & Sister; and Second Honeymoon. Her latest novel is Friday Nights. Trollope has also written Britannia’s Daughters, a non-fiction study of women in the British Empire, as well as a number of historical novels now published under the name Caroline Harvey. Joanna was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1996 for services to literature.
Visit her website at: www.joannatrollope.com.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2010
Copyright © 2002 Joanna Trollope
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2010. First published in Canada in 2003 by McArthur & Company, Toronto. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada with colophon is a registered trademark.
www.randomhouse.ca
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Trollope, Joanna
Girl from the South / Joanna Trollope.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37385-4
I. Title.
PR6070.R57G57 2010 823′.914 C2009-905294-6
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Part 1 - Charleston South Carolina: Late Spring
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Part 2 - London: Summer
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part 3 - Charleston South Carolina: Fall<
br />
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part 4 - London: Winter
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Part 5 - Charleston South Carolina: Spring
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
About the Author
Copyright
Girl From the South (v5) Page 28
