A New England Affair

by Steven Carroll

  More than this refusal to be denied, she radiates the distinct impression that she might do anything. And at this very moment, she just might. With one hand she clutches the railing, with the other the satchel. Then she pushes herself off the railing and walks back barefoot to the middle of the deck, now wet from sea spray and the occasional wave, and looks directly ahead at the rocks. And taking her hand off the satchel, she raises her arm as if greeting them, the way you would greet someone in the street. I’m here. I’ve come. At last!

  The thunder dies. The dark clouds roll in over the green hills. They leave the small stone bridge behind them and amble out into the fields. But it is more of a studied amble than a natural one. For no matter how much they may choose to ignore the sky, they know it is only a matter of time (and not much at that) before it falls on them.

  He smooths the rug in a patch of sun, and they lounge, the hamper basket open, as if posing for a portrait on a perfect summer’s day. But it is, if anything, a studied portrait in ignoring the inevitable. Within minutes, the first drops of rain fall. Big drops. They don’t so much fall as thud into the rug, onto the basket and onto them. Lightning spears the sky, thunder fills the air. The drops, falling like molten lead, are gathering and the sky is minutes from opening. They rise quickly, collect everything, the basket only half fastened, and make a dash for the stone bridge they ambled over only a short time before, the inn beckoning on the other side of the stream. The sun is gone from the sky, black swirling clouds have claimed it entirely, and night is falling in mid-afternoon.

  When they reach the bridge they both see, with bleak resignation, that the car (a borrowed one) is uncovered. They throw the basket into the back and draw the cover over the car. By the time they secure it, the rain is heavy, and when, seconds later, they reach the inn, it is a deluge. Tom looks at her, a pleased smile on his face as though everything, the whole day, has gone perfectly to plan.

  ‘Heavens,’ he says, ‘we’ll need an ark.’

  They are wet, but not drenched. Seconds later and they would have been. It is that kind of downpour. And rather than go straight inside, they stand in the shelter of the doorway, mesmerised by the spectacle, for it is magnificent. The landscape is transformed. The heavens have fallen on them. Emphatically. A demonstration of what they can do. Look upon my works … And to Emily (and she can see the same sentiment in Tom’s face as he looks upon heaven’s works), there is something wonderfully cleansing about the whole thing. As though all the tired make-believe of a make-believe summer, the dead traditions and the shame and humiliation of all the grubby deals of a grubby age were being washed away, and something mighty were revealing itself and reminding them that they are one with rocks, trees and birds, and that like the birds, wheeling in the sky for the safety of boughs and branches, they are only here for a short while.

  But as they stand in silent awe, they see, and with increasing disquiet, that the deep lane they drove on into the village is already going under. That the deluge, if anything, is intensifying, and that the lane and the road through the village will soon be flooded. The stream too is rising, and the ducks have evacuated to its diminishing banks. The rain is not so much falling any more as pouring down upon them. And the afternoon sky, midnight black, shows no sign of becoming lighter. No, this is no summer downpour that will dump on them, quickly exhaust itself, then roll away, leaving the sun to re-emerge and summer to reassert itself after being rudely interrupted. No, the clouds, thick and black, stretch out to the very horizon.

  Inside, they order drinks and food, having been denied their picnic. And as they look out the window over the next hour or so, their elation begins to fade. When a middle-aged woman comes to clear the plates, she notes the covered car at the front of the inn.

  ‘Is that yours?’

  Emily looks up and nods.

  ‘It won’t do you much good today.’

  Emily smiles. ‘We were just saying we’ll need an ark out there.’

  Without looking up, the woman says, ‘We don’t run to arks. Mind you, I wouldn’t take one out in that even if we did. You’ll be needing a room.’

  Tom and Emily look at each other, neither, clearly, having thought of this.

  The woman continues. ‘And you’re in luck. We’ve one left. But only one; you’re not the only couple stranded here.’

  ‘It’s got to ease sometime, surely,’ Emily says.

  ‘Just look, missus. It’s not going to ease, and the roads are flooded. You’re stuck. And I’d take that room before someone else does.’

  But Emily only hears part of this. Missus. She called her missus. So naturally, as if there were no doubt in the world that they really were the middle-aged couple that the town takes them for. As though, over the years, they have become what they seem.

  She looks at Tom, an expression on her face that says: what shall we do, what can we do? In tandem they turn and look out the window, then turn back to each other. He raises his eyebrows, surrendering to the inevitable. She nods and looks up at the woman. ‘We’ll take it.’

  Within minutes they are standing at the desk.

  ‘What name?’ the woman says.

  ‘Eliot,’ Emily says. One l.’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Eliot, then,’ the woman says, looking up and smiling. ‘Room three.’

  The woman leads them up the stairs, and opens the door onto a room that on another day would be bright with sunshine. For the window looks out onto the stream and the bridge and the fields beyond. But it’s not the view that Tom and Emily are struck by. It is the bed. For there it is, the first thing you see upon entering the room. A large, imposing double bed that seems to take up half the space. And neither Tom nor Emily can take their eyes off it.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ the woman asks. ‘It’s our best room, I think. And besides, all the others are taken.’

  They turn from the bed that sits there like some smug rake, leering at them as if to say, oh, come on, I’m just a bed. A big, bouncy bed, and I’m all yours, Mr and Mrs Eliot.

  Emily is the first to recover.

  ‘No, there’s no problem. It’s a nice room.’

  ‘Good,’ the woman says. ‘There’s a basin there. And the necessary is just down the hall. There’s an umbrella downstairs, to get your things from the car when there’s a chance.’ And here she turns to Tom, smiling. ‘I suspect that might be a job for Mr Eliot.’

  She then holds up the key and says, ‘Now, who shall I give this to?’

  And as the question is directed at Emily, she reaches for it. ‘I’ll take that.’

  The woman excuses herself, closes the door behind her, and suddenly, dramatically, with the click of the door, Tom and Emily are alone. Mr and Mrs Eliot. In the one room. Their room. And the prospect of the whole night before them.

  When they have inspected the room and drawn the curtains back fully to catch the most of what light there is, she drops onto the bed and he into an armchair. The puzzle of how to go about this thing still hanging unspoken in the air.

  Later, after wandering around the inn — and there’s not much of it, except for a small reading room with out-of-date newspapers and antique magazines — and after a meal of cold meat and beer (Emily has discovered that, like Tom, she has found a taste for the local beer), and exchanging short greetings with the other guests — a young couple and a traveller — they return to their room and the unresolved question of how to go about this.

  Emily looks out the window, and the rain pouring down the glass.

  ‘Who’d have thought it?’ she laughs. ‘The flood.’

  Then, in a no-nonsense manner, as if to suggest this is all very simple, she places his pillow at the foot of the bed. There. Emily at one end of the bed, Tom at the other. Simple. Yes? Tom nods, smiles with a slight, consenting lift of the shoulders, and is tempted, no doubt, to add in midwestern tones that Miss Hale sure knows how to organise a man, but resists. And while Emily feels a little like the sergeant major that she’s sure Mrs Woolf thinks she
is, there is also a certain approval in Tom’s look. She has done well.

  She turns back to the window, shaking her head. ‘Have you ever seen such rain? That little stream will be a river now.’

  ‘A river?’ And this time he does drop into his midwestern accent. ‘I’ve swum in the Mississippi, Miss Hale. Now, that’s a river. And we don’t just have storms, we have cyclones. You’re thankful if your roof doesn’t blow away in the night.’

  She passes up the invitation to join the game and smiles. ‘We, you just said we.’

  He smiles back, raises his eyebrows in agreement and sits on the bed; she joins him. ‘So I did,’ he says, with a kind of puzzled wonder, as if to say, where did that come from? ‘So I did.’

  She studies him: serious Tom, middle-aged Tom, contemplative Tom. More like those portraits of him that you sometimes see in bookshops and inside the books themselves than ever before. ‘It catches me by surprise, every time. Heaven only knows what sparks it. But I can be standing in Russell Square, and suddenly I’m in the boat, my old catboat, in Gloucester. Happy. Impossibly so. I can smell the air and the sea. Feel the gentle rocking of the waves. See the wide blue sky — and it’s always blue. And wide. Then I’m back in Russell Square again. I’ve got a pile of manuscripts to read, letters of polite rejection to write and a meeting to prepare for in a smoky room. And I ask myself how I ended up here, when all the time I know.’

  He looks down at the floor, pausing between thoughts, and she lets him be. ‘And sometimes when I see myself back there …’

  ‘Home?’

  He shrugs. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘What do you see?’

  He pauses for a moment, the puzzled look still on his face, as if gazing into the heart of an enigma. ‘Another life, altogether. A university lecturer who dabbles in poetry in his spare time. Writes poems that he keeps in a drawer. And never shows anyone. But happy. Perhaps, even, Professor Eliot. It’s what my mother and father wanted. Instead,’ he says, shaking his head, seemingly mystified by the form his life has taken, ‘I chose the mug’s game.’

  And it is then that the Tom who became T.S. Eliot — the T.S. Eliot who looks down from bookshop walls, the famous public figure, god-like and all-knowing, infinitely patient, as if about to begin a lecture on some complex matter in a manner that suggests: this is difficult, but I’ll explain it in a way that you will understand — it is then that he says to her, with utter conviction and no pretence (for there can be none in this room, sitting on this bed with the incessant rain beating on the window), that he can’t help but feel he has made a complete mess of his life. That he has, over the years, come to look upon his life the way his father did. Or would have. A mess, a shambles. All of it, everything, a waste. Of time, of energy. Of a life! All of it — the thing that people call fame, the applause of strangers, the approval of fools, the stories reported to him of college students casually throwing lines from his poems into conversations as if their remembering the lines in itself were wit — all of it is a mug’s game. He glances at her, a faraway look in his eyes. ‘When I imagine myself back in Gloucester, I remember exactly how it was. Untying the moorings and setting out. Especially that feeling of setting out. The sun just up. The air fresh. And nobody about. Everything new. And exciting. The air sharp. The crack of the sail in the wind, the smell of the paint. But what I remember, above all, is being happy. I remember how happiness came easily then. So easily, I took it for granted. Then I’m back in Russell Square: manuscripts and meetings and stale rooms.’

  There is much that she could say, for he is silent now. All the usual things, all the usual consolations you could say. All the talk of achievements, of having done something with your life. Which is both true and not true. And which matters and doesn’t matter, depending on the moment. But she gauges the moment for such talk is wrong. He doesn’t want to hear it. She’s not sure he wants to hear anything. Besides, there is a strong part of her that agrees with everything he’s been saying. That he has made a mess of his life, that he has paid too dearly for it, and that her suspicion, formed all those years ago in his cousin’s garden, has been confirmed by the years: that there was something erratic and ungrounded in Tom Eliot, a hairline crack in the golden bowl, a flaw in the crystal; that for all his Boston manners, his properness, punctiliousness and considered air, Tom Eliot did not come with a guarantee. None of which she could possibly say. Just as he rarely mentions the impulsive, the reckless marriage that was at the heart of the mess of his life and still is. But then, he doesn’t have to. Everybody knows. And yet, for all that, for some years now she’s told herself that everyone is allowed to make a mistake once, and has resolved to do all she can to rescue Tom Eliot from the wreckage.

  And so, deciding to leave all of the things she could say for another time, she simply takes his hand, the hint of a smile in her eyes. ‘Don’t ever forget, Mr Eliot, like the man says: you’ve come a long way from St Louis.’

  ‘But baby,’ he intones solemnly, as if reciting Dante, ‘I still got a long way to go.’

  She returns the solemn look, but with the hint of a smile. The Boston Tom, she thinks. He’s still there, if you wave the right wand.

  ‘Did you really swim in the Mississippi?’

  He leans his head back and laughs, a laugh, she notes, that has a bit of a boom in it. And she’d like to think she put the boom there.

  ‘Of course not,’ he says, his laughter dying down. ‘Some fools do. Not me. Have you ever seen the Mississippi?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘It’s brown, it’s a mile wide. Currents swirl like snakes. In another age, people would have worshipped it as you worship a god and bathed on its banks.’

  The light is back in his eyes. His laugh is back. He might even be happy. It is dark. She stands and kisses his forehead, a blessing before bed. She walks round to her side of the bed. He takes his shoes off. He loosens his tie as his head sinks into his pillow. She removes her earrings, places them on the bedside table and leans back, his feet beside her, hers beside him. And as she reaches out for the bedside lamp, she pauses, then quietly intones the words she’s waited all her life to say. ‘Goodnight, Tom.’

  And, as he replies, she switches the lamp off and the room falls into darkness. The rain still beating on the window.

  At some point, and she’s not sure what time it is, she wakes. And she’s not sure why she has woken. Then she realises that it is the silence, and the moonlight coming in through the window. For the rain has stopped, and out there in the night the clouds have parted. And on the other side of the bed she can hear the regular breathing of Tom in a deep sleep, and see his chest rising and falling with every breath. The heavy breathing of a lifetime smoker. All those French cigarettes. Breath, in and out. Tom’s. He is there. Close enough to touch.

  The young of this young world. The young … the young … The salty sea air blows on Emily’s face. The boat rises and falls with the swell and the waves. Oh, the young today have no idea what it was like. To lie there, close enough to touch and not touch. To watch lips part and breathe and close and not kiss. To observe the folded hands that would touch and not hold them. But it was exquisite. Sublime. A communion you can’t even conceive of, for the sensibility that made it possible has gone. One age feels differently from another age. No, you will never understand what it was like to lie there, in stillness, and for that stillness to be all. A rapture. A way of being you will never know. An extinct order of feeling altogether.

  It walked the world, this extinct order, and then left it. The sea spray fades, the room returns. He is there. They are still, apart from the rise and fall of their breathing. And in that stillness every sound that the night throws up: the dove in the eaves, the stream in full flow, the squeak of the inn’s sign in the wind — all have a purity, as if she’s only just learnt to hear.

  There they were; there they are. Just like any couple. Ordinary. And there is a kind of union in this night that legitimises the ring on her finger
and carries with it the solemnity of a kind of marriage. One that will do, she tells herself, until nights like this will come with the close of every day. He rolls over. She watches. The mind of Europe is rolling over in bed. The mind of Europe is asleep. Become what it always was: the child rocking in its nursery to the rhythms of the Mississippi; to the tolling sea bell heard from the summer house on Eastern Point; to the low groan of waves breaking on granite rocks.

  As much as she is determined to stay awake, she feels herself drifting off. And as she watches the sleeping Tom, her breathing falls into rhythm with his. The purr of the dove the last thing she hears.

  When she wakes again it is to an animal whimper, and for a moment she is convinced there is an animal in the room. He is twitching: arms, body and legs. A fit? Some sort of condition he has kept from everyone? Suddenly, she is awake and alert. Then she realises he’s dreaming. A bad dream. And the animal whimperings are the whimpers that come to us in nightmares.

  Instinctively, she rises from her end of the bed, and, on her knees beside him, watches, unsure what to do. Her instinct is to give comfort. To soothe the twitching figure. But she is unsure. Does she have the right? And what if he should wake? He whimpers again, and impulse takes over. She leans over him and places comforting arms around him while resting her cheek on his chest. And for the first time in her forty-eight-year-old life, Emily Hale lies down with another human being. For that short time (less than a minute, for the nightmare does not last long), her body and his become one, and she knows what it is to be joined to someone else. And not be alone. There is more bliss in that moment than she has known all her life. For it occurs to her, a thought that only clarifies itself later, that the state of being alone is something that we might become numb to. And that one’s loneliness can be large, like one’s pain, until we cease to notice it at all. It is simply our way. Until a moment such as this. And though short-lived, it is the kind of moment from which she draws strength, the kind of moment that will make whatever follows more bearable.