“What a pain in the neck this is for you.”
“Let’s make a deal. I’ll stop apologizing if you will.”
Love means never having to say you’re sorry, she thought; that dumb movie. She almost said it, a joke, but she couldn’t say love. She wondered if he thought it, too, and kept it back. “Okay,” she said, kissed his cheek, and got out.
At the main desk they gave her a pass, and she went upstairs in the elevator with a woman about her age in a wheelchair pushed by a man in a light blue suit—dressed up for the occasion. The woman smiled and smiled, as still as if she was sitting for her portrait, her hands limp in her lap. No one spoke.
On the fifth floor Peter was waiting in a chair by the elevators. He hugged her tight. “Am I glad to see you,” he said. He looked dapper and fresh except for brown circles under his eyes. “I’ve read all their Time magazines and drunk their wretched coffee and talked to their bloody psychiatrists all night. One of them keeps asking me about her childhood, and the other one thinks she might be allergic to dairy products. Dairy products! Jesus! She decided to shoot herself because she had a milkshake and a grilled cheese for lunch.”
“How is she, Peter?”
“Sleeping like a baby. She’s fine—physically, I mean. It really did scarcely any damage, considering.” His buoyance drained away as he talked, and when they reached the door of Rosie’s room, down a corridor where the chemical stink of medicine was strong, he stopped and looked at her with his mournful eyes. “But I’ll tell you, Susannah—I don’t look forward to her waking up. I mean—” He waved a hand. “Not that I don’t want her to wake up, I just—”
“I know what you mean. I dread it, too. And I don’t know what she wants from me.” But I do, she thought as they went in: absolution, as if she were a priest. “You won’t leave, will you, Peter?” she asked. “I know you’re tired, but I don’t want to be alone with her. I don’t even know her.”
He looked amused. “I’ll stay, Sister Sue. Curiosity would keep me here if nothing else. And the chance to be in on a no-holds-barred emotional scene.” He rubbed his hands expectantly, yawning through a grin.
“Oh, Peter,” she said, glad he, at least, was his usual self. She felt exhausted already; it wasn’t even eight o’clock in the morning, and she seemed to have gone through days and days of scenes and tears and sorriness.
And there in the room was Rosie, the woman at the Café, her arm in a sling resting outside the white blanket, her short unbrushed hair in snarls on the white pillow. She looked dead, unless you went close and saw the faint rise and fall of her chest, the blanket over it, the brown hand at the end of the cast draped over it as if for a left-handed pledge of allegiance.
Susannah shrugged and sat down in a chair by the bed. “I guess we can’t do anything but wait.” She looked at Rosie. At that instant her eyes opened and she and Susannah stared at each other. Susannah wondered if she should speak, and what. She had forgotten her mother’s eyes were so brown, like dark bitter chocolate. Up close, her face free of makeup, she looked strangely young, she looked like Peter. “I’m here,” Susannah said, almost involuntarily, and the heavy lids dropped over Rosie’s eyes again, and she lay still.
Susannah glanced at Peter, who gazed back at her expressionless, then at her mother again. Was she still asleep, the brief awakening a false one? Or had she closed her eyes again as a sign—all she could manage in her weakened state—of rejection? Susannah felt a stab of panic just as she had the night she drove to Rosie’s in the van. Maybe it wasn’t forgiveness Rosie wanted. I’m always wrong, Susannah thought. Maybe it was more curses she wanted, more hate. Her right arm wasn’t in a sling: maybe she would raise it, and slap her, hard, and disown her again, pour out the venom saved up all these years, Mount St. Helens; it would all come out, and it would kill not Rosie who had tried to die but Susannah who was trying to find a way to live. Good-bye, good-bye, this is the end. If she couldn’t kill herself she would kill her daughter.
Peter spoke softly in her ear. “I’m going down to get some more coffee.”
“No!” she burst out, too loud, and looked fearfully at the silent figure on the bed. “Don’t you dare leave, Peter. You promised.”
He sat back down, looking unhappy. A fat nurse looked in, brought a tray from a trolley, and left it without a word. Peter lifted the metal cover over a plate, grimaced, and put it back with a small clank. “No coffee,” he said. Time passed. After a while, he whispered, “Where’s Ivan?”
“Duke brought me,” she whispered back. Later she would tell him.
They were silent again, and then Peter asked, “Where’s Duke, then?”
“Parking the car. Then he’ll be up.”
Peter rolled his eyes, acknowledging the parking problem, and after a while whispered, “I think they only give out two passes at a time.”
“What do you mean?”
“For visitors. Duke’s probably down in the waiting room.”
“Oh hell.”
“Shall I go see?”
“No! Peter—” Rosie’s eyes were shut, her eyelashes two thick even lines on her cheeks, her mouth slack. She breathed evenly. Susannah didn’t trust her. “Please stay here.”
Peter was already up. “I’ll be right back.” He spoke with the exaggerated gestures and lip-movements people use when they whisper. “I’ll just see if he’s there and I’ll tell him to get some coffee or something and then later he can use my pass and come up.” He pointed—down, then up.
“Oh, hell.” She thought of Duke forlorn in the waiting room. “All right. But please hurry back.” She put her palms together in a prayer. “Please.”
He nodded and left, then stuck his head in the door. “Did you tell him what happened?” he asked in a stage whisper.
Susannah nodded, Peter disappeared, and immediately Rosie’s eyes opened again. “Susannah,” she said in a clear voice; Susannah, startled, said nothing; how strange it sounded, and familiar—her mother saying her name. “You don’t need to be afraid of me,” said Rosie. Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m your mother.”
Susannah leaned forward, instinctively, and took Rosie’s good hand. The tears spilled over and made a track down her cheeks, one on either side. Susannah thought of Edwin. “Don’t cry,” she said, and wiped first one side, then the other, with her finger. “It’s all right.”
“I went into the store and bought a gun. He asked me what I wanted it for.” Her voice got weaker. “I said I wanted it to shoot myself with. He laughed.”
“Ssh,” Susannah said, and clasped her mother’s hands tight. “It’s all over now.”
Rosie closed her eyes; tears seeped neatly out the corners, and her mouth tightened over a sob. Susannah stroked her hand. She could think of nothing to say. If it were Edwin, she could tell him she was pregnant; she didn’t think that was what Rosie wanted to hear.
“They keep asking me questions,” Rosie said finally. “They make me so tired. But I wanted to see you.”
“I came right away. But we can talk later. They’ve given you something to make you sleep.”
Rosie nodded, the tears still running without interruption down their tracks. Susannah took a tissue and wiped them again. Rosie kept her eyes closed, and before long Susannah could see she was sleeping, with a half-smile on her lips. Susannah took away her hand, and Peter returned.
“I was wrong,” he whispered. “You can have as many passes as you want for a private room, but Duke thought he’d better not come up. He said this should be for relatives only. I left him in the cafeteria eating a cheese Danish.” He looked at Rosie. “She moved.”
“She woke up for a minute.” Susannah put Duke out of her mind. She felt sick to her stomach: morning sickness? The medicinal smell didn’t help, and the faint smell of egg from the breakfast tray. “She said she was tired.”
“Is that all?”
“She told me not to be afraid of her.”
Peter waggled his head and widened his eyes, an
Eddie Cantor face. “Just what I’ve been telling you all along.”
Chapter Seven
The Door in the Hedge
The first thing Rosie said, when they had parked the car and proceeded up the puddled slope to the house, was, “It’s all wrong.”
“What is?” Susannah asked her.
“Everything.” She looked around at a flat plane ringed with hills; behind her were the sparse, wet woods the road had wound through. There were leathery yellow leaves among the green on the trees; they fell to the car and stuck. There was a rank smell of pond, of not enough sun. An unfamiliar bird cried skreek and flew up black against the concrete sky. “Everything is,” said Rosie.
What she wanted to do at that moment was get back in the car and drive off, stop at a pub and have an early lunch with a couple of pints of the thick, sweet ale she was getting used to. Forget the whole thing. They could go to Knole, or Penshurst, or to the castle at Goudhurst. It had been a mistake to come to Silvergate.
“It’s the rain,” said Susannah. “It’s your shoulder hurting.”
“No, it isn’t,” Rosie snapped. “It’s everything. It looks so bleak and desolate.” She regretted her tone of voice, and she altered it. “There used to be hops growing over there,” she said, taking Susannah’s arm. “It was part of the farm, where they grew hops. And then the sheep were—” She paused, confused, and looked around. Was that where the farm had been? This part of the grounds, in fact, didn’t look familiar at all, at least not in this drizzle. It had been raining since they stepped off the plane at Heathrow. Of course, it must have rained when she was a child, but she couldn’t remember it doing so; not, at least, like this—a relentless onslaught of chilly rain and fog. And the damp did make her shoulder throb, though she wouldn’t admit it to Susannah. Susannah liked the rain, she said. She had gone out in it their first day, in Guildford, while Rosie collapsed into sleep at the inn. Susannah, armed with guidebooks, wanted to see the famous clock and the ruined castle. Jet lag didn’t seem to affect her. Youth, Rosie thought, not without resentment, but Susannah attributed it to her pregnancy. “I’ve never felt better,” she said. “I swear it’s given me some kind of extra strength. And then,” she added, teasing, “I did sleep on the plane, while you flirted with your fellow passengers.”
True enough, or partly. Susannah had dropped off soon after they left Kennedy. She had awakened, obligingly, each time the stewardess had brought sustenance—drinks, then dinner, then more drinks, then breakfast—too quickly, time out of joint, dawn outside the plane windows almost before the movie was over. But Susannah had dropped rapidly back to sleep between distractions, leaving Rosie to the movie—Kramer vs. Kramer, which she had already seen, with Peter—and to the attentions of the man in the third seat, a Nepalese economist from the International Monetary Fund who was going to a conference on Third World debt at the London School of Economics. “And to do a little swinging without my wife,” he confessed to Rosie in a thick but not impenetrable accent. He smiled blandly at her and asked where she was staying in London.
“I’m not going to London.”
“Not going to London! Your first trip to England, and you’re not going to London? Then where are you going?”—as if the land sloped away from London, on all sides, into empty sea.
“I’m touring the countryside with my daughter,” she said, indicating Susannah, who slept sweetly on.
“Ah—that’s your daughter,” he said, rising in his seat a little to look at Susannah’s legs. “Yes—but why the countryside? Excuse me for my nosiness, but I see that you, like me, can’t abide movies and also find it difficult to sleep. So tell me—why in the world the countryside and not the joys of London?”
Rosie sighed, and chatted with him, let him buy her a drink but not put his hand on her knee, and watched Dustin Hoffman silently make French toast for his little boy, argue with his ex-wife, race through the streets of New York to the hospital with his son in his arms. She was tired, but she knew she couldn’t sleep if she tried, and she was even grateful for the company of the economist. While he explained Britain’s economic problems to her, she kept wondering why she wasn’t thrilled to be on this plane, after all this time, heading for the land of her birth; why all she felt was fatigue, dejection, and the faint, tamed, but never wholly absent throb of pain in her left arm. When he asked, she told the economist she had broken her arm in an automobile accident.
She felt wiped out when they arrived at Heathrow. The economist disappeared, hustled through Customs, no doubt, by international officialdom. Rosie leaned on Susannah’s arm as they waited in lines, and she was glad to sit on a bench while her daughter picked up their rental car. The crowds, the strangeness, tired her further—and the weather. It was ten in the morning, but England looked gray and dismal; it could have been dusk. Rosie watched an emotional reunion between a man in a UCLA sweatshirt and a woman wearing a paper pinned to her coat that read “égaré”. They stood locked in a long embrace, and the woman uttered heedless sharp little moans at intervals, like a puppy. Then Susannah returned and left Rosie on another bench—outside, under a shelter, where she watched a group of students negotiate endless satchels and backpacks into a tiny car, joking in a language she didn’t understand: Swedish? When Susannah finally brought the car around, Rosie didn’t recognize her—a blonde woman with a wide, thin smile, driving a little red automobile.
“This is such fun,” she said, holding the door and an umbrella for Rosie. “Everyone has the most wonderful accents. The rental-car lady actually called me love, and I am about to stow our luggage in the boot!” She did so, and drove through the airport maze to the main road, adapting with apparent ease to the wrong side of it. “I’ve never been such a great driver on the right side of the road,” she said cheerfully. “So it’s not that hard for me to switch.”
Rosie struggled to stay awake, only vaguely aware that the gray dismalness of the airport had given way to lush, wet green. She fell quickly into the position of dependent, knew she was doing so, and decided not to care. She had been nearly a month with Susannah, almost since leaving the psychiatric ward. Susannah had come to stay with her, replacing Miss Poole, the nurse who had been hired to care for her at first. Rosie’s house had been a refuge for Susannah, whose ambiguous life with Duke the chef had gone, somehow, mysteriously askew. Susannah had, to Rosie’s grateful relief, substituted her own kind of comfortable, sloppy efficiency for Miss Poole’s condescending and antiseptic vigilance—getting the meals, tending the gardens, washing Rosie’s hair for her, tracking in grass clippings, keeping the house filled with slapdash arrangements of the flowers she cut every few mornings, and finishing her story upstairs in her old bedroom. Rosie had come to rely on her—this placid, messy, gifted, resurrected daughter—as she had never relied on anyone: not parents, husband, lovers, son. She didn’t resist; it was, she figured, part of her recuperation, a treat she was entitled to because her arm hurt, and because she had just spent two indignant weeks being grilled by a psychiatrist with the brain of a turnip. And it was a gift she could give Susannah, who seemed to need someone to care for.
At the inn she went immediately to sleep, and awoke at teatime to find her shoulder hurting and Susannah combing out her wet hair in front of the mirror.
“England is the most beautiful place in the world,” Susannah said. “It’s all true, what everybody says. And those pictures in the guidebooks. It really looks like that. You should see the gardens—the flowers!”
“Oh, I know—I know,” Rosie said, hoisting herself up in her bed, and, in spite of her aching shoulder and the rain blurring the window, the exhilaration she had anticipated took her over in a rush; she felt invigorated, and ready. The gardens of England, in all their autumn glory, were hers to see after all these years. And Silvergate, the loveliest of them all. She swung her feet over the side of the bed and went to the window. It looked out on the inn courtyard where, even in the rain, and with the daylight nearly gone, a border of coreopsis a
nd purple loosestrife glowed with its own radiance. “Just look at those flowers,” she said to Susannah. “I’ve spent my whole life in gardens, and I still can’t get over them, how beautiful they are.” Looking out, with Susannah at her side—was it something about the light? or the scent of the air coming through the crack of open window?—she was back for one brief trick of memory in the cottage with her parents and her grandparents, surrounded by flowers.
And now here she was at Silvergate, disoriented, peering through the drizzle at an alien landscape. Had she lost it, then? Her entire childhood? Would nothing come back to her? And how could memory be so fickle? “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said vaguely, looking around. Far beyond the wide flat stretch of patchy lawn, the low Kentish hills, yellow bordered with deep green and topped with a black fringe of trees, edged the gray horizon. In the distance she could just see a brick structure like a tower, with a cone-shaped roof: an oast house. The word came to her as if from underwater, and she clutched Susannah’s arm, and pointed. “They dry the hops in those,” she said excitedly. “Oast houses. That thing on the top is for ventilation—it turns in the wind. I haven’t thought of them in years.” It was a vision from her childhood, intact; it was like coming upon a photograph of an old, lost friend.
Susannah said, “That one seems to have been converted into a people-house. See? You can just make out curtains in the windows, and two cars.”
“Oh, Lord, yes,” Rosie said, and felt depressed again. It was all wrong, that the oast house, that eccentric-looking edifice, should be inhabited. She tried to remember the farm that used to be part of the estate. She should be able to recall the farmer, his family, there must have been children. But she could retrieve nothing, not even, for sure, where the fields had been—over there, surely, and stretching over toward the desecrated oast house? The right photograph refused to reveal itself.
“It must be fun to live in a place like that,” Susannah was saying. “I’d love to have the room up in that tall tower part, to write in. It would be perfectly round, and the ceiling would slope up to a point—like living in an ice-cream cone. And I would make up mysterious, circular plots for my stories—but with a point to them.” She laughed, and Rosie laughed with her, halfheartedly. Maybe it was Susannah’s enthusiasm that was wearing her out. “And what a view!” Susannah swung around, in the rain, to look at the rest of the scene. Her hair hung down in a wet braid over the back of her yellow slicker. She refused to wear a hat. She’s such a child, Rosie thought—though she was impressed with the way the child negotiated car rentals and maps and the perverse and narrow English roads. And she was pretty, too, Rosie thought, with her hair neatly braided and her eyes bright, and the damp weather obviously good for her complexion; her cheeks were pink, for once. She never would have predicted this fragile prettiness from her plain, whiny daughter—not to mention such relentless high spirits. What had happened to the sullen, grasping hippie whose arrival from California she had dreaded? And the deserted wife? The two of them had still, after all these weeks, not spoken Ivan’s name.
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