American Stranger

by David Plante

  Married to Tim, she would become British, and that would make her different. She would learn something about irony, irony about the British, who took delight in irony, and, too, irony about the United States, an un-ironical country.

  And this was what was wrong with Yvon, she thought; he had no sense of irony, none.

  Napkins falling to the floor from laps, everyone rose when the Royals, the duchess at one table and the duke at another, got up. The duchess, her eyes wide and staring apparently at nothing, walked through the standing guests, and, still apparently without seeing anything as she stared, stopped for a second before a woman and smiled a smile that seemed to float out from her face and have nothing to do with her. The woman curtsied. Then, as soon as the Royals had left, the guests dispersed, as if in a hurry to get away.

  Nancy on his arm, Tim left when Toby did, and all together they walked for a while in the cool outside air after the stifling inside.

  Toby said, “I was a long way from being seated at the best table.”

  Tim said, “I would put our table at, say, fifth best.”

  “Not too bad.”

  Nancy laughed. She could not, before she married, have imagined herself in so totally different a world, a world that, for all its being foreign, did not seem so much strange as it was merely peculiar. She was in a world in which she could come to terms with the manners, could find out what carriages at ten thirty meant, find out that men shouldn’t wear clip-on bow ties, could learn, maybe, how to curtsy.

  She’d married Tim, and maybe—or to use the English word, perhaps—she wondered why she had, but as much as Tim insisted he was not English, would never be English, he did, and now she did, live in an English world. With Tim, she thought, she would be free of fantasies she only now realized she had to grow out of—free, oh, of longings, a word she had to be free of. With Tim she was free to act in a world where he allowed her to act for him, who was bad at acting but admired her ability, and free to help him. And, as remarkable as this seemed to her when she first thought it, there was nothing, finally, unknowable about him.

  Nancy sat close to Tim in the back seat of the taxi. He reached out to put an arm around her. “You were splendid,” he said.

  “Was I?”

  “You were,” he said. “Thank you, darling. You were truly splendid.”

  She did what she felt was still out of character: she put her head on his shoulder, and she thought she would show him some feeling for his dependence on her, though he didn’t seem to have noticed that his wife had made a little bit of a fool of herself. She had done it for him, and it had pleased him.

  She gave way to his wanting to make love that night, holding his head as if to steady him, and she wished, for him, that she would become pregnant again. His lovemaking had more consideration for her than she had known, and she thought he was now considering her as his wife, the wife who would bear a family for him, and she responded as his wife, a response that made her feel, perhaps, loving, if she allowed herself to use the word “loving” even to herself.

  Before turning away from her, he said, “I’m sorry, darling, for my fit of anger earlier. I honestly don’t know where the anger comes from. I can’t imagine my father ever treating my mother in that way, so it must be something that has come to me living in England.”

  “Well,” she said, “I guess you have to think yourself back into being Jewish, because Jews never get angry.”

  He laughed and kissed her and turned over and switched off the lamp on his side of the bed.

  He fell asleep, but she seemed to be seeing at a distance, far beyond the room, and out there snow began to fall, and she saw Yvon walking towards her through the deepening snow, Yvon from a long way away—she had no idea from how far away; and he stopped when he saw her.

  Surprised, he said, Nancy.

  She asked, Where have you been?

  He smiled and said, Oh, lots of places.

  In America, she asked?

  All over America, he said, all over this country.

  What were you doing all over?

  Collecting specimens of rocks.

  And are you happy now?

  No, not really, but that doesn’t matter. He smiled a wider smile and said, I won’t ever be happy, because, you see, I was born unhappy.

  Ah, she said, Yvon, and, as if pleading, called out to him to come closer, Yvon.

  But as he was walking away in the falling snow, he asked, And you, are you happy?

  No, she answered, no, I’m not.

  He disappeared in the snow, and she was left with an overwhelming sense of longing.

  She was in her bedroom brushing her hair in front of the full-length mirror. She had not redecorated the room as she once thought she would. Reflected in the mirror she could see behind her part of the bedroom wall, a curtain, and half a window, and outside the window a plane tree in sunlight, its leaves going faintly brown-yellow. She focused on the tree in the mirror, not herself, when she noticed a blue pigeon perched on a branch; the sense came to her that someone was standing behind her, just where the mirror didn’t reflect, and the moment she thought this she felt that this person was about to grab her and pull her backward. Startled, her brush raised and her hair flying, she turned. No one was there. As soon as she finished brushing her hair, she went downstairs to find Tim.

  She came into the sitting room while Tim was on the telephone, the telephone receiver in the crook of his neck and a tiny agenda, soft leather with gilt-edged paper and a silk page keeper, in his hands. He said, over the receiver, “Let me see,” and turned the pages of the agenda. Nancy was uncertain if he wanted her in the room while he was on the telephone, and the way he looked at her gave no indication whether he wanted her to stay or go. He said, “No, no, next week won’t do.” Maybe (“maybe,” Nancy thought, or “perhaps”) he was speaking to one of his friends from his Oxford days. Tim had been at Christ Church at Oxford, and a lot of his friends were also from Oxford, and he saw them on his own. But Nancy heard Tim say, “Yes, the week after will do for Nancy and me, that will do, but let me check.” He turned the pages of his little agenda and said, “No, no, wait, it won’t do, I see I’ve penciled in dinner, and we’re waiting to hear if it’s on or not. But the weekend after that, I see, is perfectly free.” As Nancy was turning to leave the sitting room, leaving it up to Tim to make whatever plans he wanted, excluding or including her, he waved his agenda at her to stay. He spoke a little more over the telephone, smiling broadly, and when he hung up he said, “We’re going to the Kesses in Scotland.”

  “Who are the Kesses?” Nancy asked.

  “Hilary and James Kess, old friends I’ve wanted you to meet. They’ll like you, you’ll see,” he said, but he spoke as if he wasn’t sure they would, as if their liking her or not was not up to them, but up to her. He said, “I’m counting on you,” and she tried to imagine these people who meant something to Tim that she didn’t understand, and whom Tim insisted she must like. She had no choice. James Kess was a retired judge.

  They took the train to Scotland first class, and changed at Keswick for a local to Dumfries in the Lowlands. They arrived by taxi over the narrow, dark country roads at the Kesses’ Victorian brick castle with a neo-Gothic porch, a crenellated tower, and narrow, pointed, leaded windows. James and Hilary met their guests in the hall, which had a high coffered wooden ceiling and uneven stone flagging.

  Hilary Kess said immediately that there was cold salmon in the kitchen, and led the way. She stopped at two long grooves worn into the flagging of the passage and said, “These were caused by the wheels of the tea trolley being pushed into the drawing room and back into the kitchen for years and years.”

  Nancy admired the grooves in the stone.

  She was never really introduced to the Kesses by Tim, but she supposed that didn’t matter, because they knew who she was and she knew who they were, an
d perhaps in England it wasn’t done to introduce people one already knew by name.

  In the kitchen, at a long deal table set with china plates on the bare wood and blue napkins printed with tiny white flowers and crystal wine and water glasses and silver and, at the center, the cold, skinned salmon surrounded by slices of cucumber, they sat to eat. Nancy saw how pleased Hilary and James were to have Tim with them, and, if they paid less attention to her than to him, she understood they were closer to him and that there were reasons for their closeness that had to do with James’ past profession and Tim’s present profession, and even if they didn’t talk about this, they were both in a world that was as complicated as the making of dates, and she, who had never found making a date complicated, was still outside of that world, a world of names that Hilary recognized. James Kess kept filling their glasses with white wine.

  Distracted from the talk, Nancy noted that in the kitchen was a large range with many ovens, and an overstuffed sofa was set before the range.

  Addressing Nancy for the first time since she and Tim had arrived, Hilary said to her, “It was noble of you to come all this way to meet us.”

  Nancy laughed a little. “Oh,” she said, not sure how to deal with the extravagance, “I don’t know how noble I am.”

  “No, no,” Hilary said, “I mean just how noble you are for coming, far, far beyond the call of duty. I’m sure we’re going to have the grandest time all together, however catch as catch can it will be, because, I must tell you, we haven’t planned to account for each and every one of your minutes here with entertainments. We rather let our guests do what they want. Isn’t that why you like coming, Tim, because you can do here just exactly as you want?”

  Tim said to her, “My reasons for coming here are multiple.”

  It could be, Nancy thought, that one of Tim’s reasons for coming was that he wanted to become a judge.

  Hilary said to Nancy, “We leave you, shamelessly, to your devices, while we, without you, get on with all the boring bits we have to get on with. You won’t mind getting your own breakfast on Sunday morning when we skip off to church? We go because, really, we’re not native to the place, and we think it helps us, in a hokey-pokey way, with the locals if they see us in church.”

  Hokey-pokey? Nancy wondered, staring at Hilary, who seemed to be waiting for her to speak. It occurred to Nancy to offer to go to church with the Kesses, but then she thought maybe, or perhaps, not.

  Nancy asked, “Where are you from, then?”

  “London,” James said. “And we thought we’d move as far away as possible from the Old Bailey and the London world of law when I retired.”

  “And here we are,” Hilary said, “trying to fit in, higgledy-piggledy, with the locals, and, of course, always, but always, getting things wrong.”

  “But not as wrong as our recent American guest who offended everyone by wearing a plaid tie when we went to dine at a neighbor’s house,” James said. He laughed, a shrugging laugh. “I was wicked. I didn’t tell him, when I saw his bright tartan tie, just how much he would offend. I am wicked.”

  “Oh, but they weren’t really offended, not really. I didn’t think so,” Hilary said. “Really, they took it all in good humor after all, and even promised our American friend they’d set him up with his own tartan.”

  “Of course they never would,” James said.

  As they walked from the kitchen into the hall, Hilary said, “Whenever I wear tartan, I make sure it’s the Royal Stewart, which is the Queen’s, and which all her subjects are entitled to wear.”

  “I see,” Nancy said.

  They sat before the neo-Gothic stone fireplace in big, dark leather armchairs and a big, dark leather sofa in the hall. A suit of armor, rusty about the edges, stood against a frayed, hanging tapestry. James offered to light the fire, but Tim said it wasn’t really necessary: it wasn’t cold and he and Nancy would go to bed soon. Hilary told James to offer brandy if he wasn’t going to light the fire.

  James said to Nancy, “The armor has nothing to do with ancestry, not Hilary’s or mine, at any rate.”

  “Nor the castle, not that it is anything like an ancestral castle,” Hilary said. “Goodness, I don’t have any ancestry to brag about, I want to make that perfectly clear; nor, really, does James. James wanted to leave London, so we looked through Country Lifefor places, and took a liking to this from a photograph. It wasn’t expensive and didn’t need much work. We moved in during the summer, and what we didn’t know was how bitterly cold and rainy it would be for most of the rest of the year.”

  James said, “And even in the summer it’s often cold and rainy.”

  “It was sunny today,” Nancy said.

  “Freakish,” Hilary said. “Most of the year we live in the kitchen, where it’s cozy. We sit on the lovely, chintzy sofa in front of the Aga and doze.”

  “In fact,” James said. “It’s terrible here, terrible. It’s rainy and cold all the time.”

  Hilary said she had invited George and Constance Plummerton the next day, Sunday, for lunch. They, too, had moved to Scotland from London, but, Hilary said, like herself and James, there wasn’t anything Scottish in them. George was English, and Constance was mostly Welsh.

  Nancy thought she was beginning to hear different accents, and it occurred to her that Hilary’s accent was not English—not, anyway, of a class that Tim had learned at school, or so Nancy assumed. But she wouldn’t ask Hilary where she was from originally.

  Holding a snifter of brandy by the base and swirling the brandy in it, Tim said to Nancy, “He’s Sir George.”

  She said, “I’ll remember that.”

  Hilary said, “He was knighted, but, you know, he was an Hon., born an Hon.—really more distinguished than to be knighted.”

  “What was George knighted for?” Tim asked.

  So, Nancy noted, Tim didn’t call him Sir George, as he told her to; he said George.

  “You don’t know? I’m surprised. For his English bicycles,” James said.

  Tim jerked his head back and said, “Of course, of course,” then repeated, “of course,” so Nancy realized that he hadn’t known.

  Nancy, who felt that they were all playing a game they didn’t take seriously, said, “I had an English three-speed bicycle when I was growing up in America. Everyone I knew had to have an English three-speed bicycle.”

  James said, “George was knighted for exporting them to America, where, just as you say, you and everyone you knew had to have one, which meant that lots of American dollars came in exchange to the United Kingdom. He made the United Kingdom richer, and he became very rich, and he became Sir George.”

  Tim said, “George once told me that at a fancy do such as an embassy dinner he knows, just by looking around at the others present during drinks beforehand, where, by protocol, he will be seated. He said he’s never wrong.”

  Hilary suggested to Nancy that the ladies retire and leave the men to talk, given how much James liked to talk with Tim. James smiled at Nancy and said quietly, “Tim’s a clever young man.”

  Tim said, “I hope the recognition of that is one of the reasons my wife had for marrying me.”

  Nancy said, “Of course it was.”

  “His cleverness won’t disappoint you,” Hilary said to Nancy.

  All Nancy could think of to say, meekly and in appreciation of being so lucky to be married to a man whose cleverness supposedly wouldn’t disappoint her, was, “Thank you.”

  Taking Nancy’s hand as though to reassure her, Hilary said to Tim, “I’m not at all sure I should introduce George and Constance to Nancy as Sir George and Lady Plummerton. I don’t have a butler, but open the door myself. We’re really quite informal, in a rather tinkerty-tonk way. It would be awkward, in the midst of our informality, to be so formal. And how would I introduce Nancy, if all the rest of us go by first names, as Mrs. Arbib?” She
let go of Nancy’s hand.

  “I see the difficulty,” Tim said.

  “Then don’t call anyone anything,” James said.

  “There is that,” Hilary said.

  In their bedroom alone, while Tim was using the bath down the passage, Nancy held a drawn curtain aside to look out a leaded window to black pine trees against the deep gray sky, and she felt the pull to look behind her, and she glanced back into the room, at the bed with high posts and a large wardrobe.

  And this came over her: grief, the word itself a revelation, as she had never before thought it applied to her so deeply, especially now, here in this large, cold house with people she didn’t want to know, with a husband she was suddenly afraid to know.

  She asked herself how she would act as Tim would expect her the next day, and she got into bed, under the heavy blankets. When Tim, in pajamas and a towel over an arm, came into the room, she turned away.

  He said, “I really would have expected Hilary to know how to introduce you to Constance Plummerton. Constance, may I introduce Nancy. And Nancy Arbib, Lady Plummerton. But it would be as vulgar of me to tell her as it would to correct her idiotic usage of idiotic expressions. It never occurred to me quite as much before that she’s Australian, and childish, rather.”

  When he was in bed next to her, she said, “Please switch off the light.”

  In the morning, while James and Hilary were at church, Tim and Nancy took a walk wearing gum boots. The autumn day was sunny. The sharp, flinty hills were dark green, and on them, isolated, were one-story stone houses painted white, the stone doorways and window frames bright blue or red or green.

  They walked along a river. A rotting sheep stood upright in the current, the clear water swirling around its exposed skull.