My American

by Stella Gibbons

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Stella Gibbons

  Title Page

  Part I

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Part II

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter the Last

  Copyright

  About the Book

  My American follows the lives and loves of Amy Lee and Robert Vorst: from a chance childhood meeting to the comic, tragic and romantic trysts that follow. A baker’s daughter, Amy has dreams of becoming a writer, whilst Robert is destined to be a doctor. Later, embarking on a lecture tour, Amy is reminded of ‘her American’ and endeavours to find him amidst Depression-era America.

  About the Author

  Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She then spent ten years working for various newspapers, including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories and four volumes of poetry. Her first publication was a book of poems, The Mountain Beast (1930), and her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize in 1933. Amongst her works are Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1959) and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.

  ALSO BY STELLA GIBBONS

  Cold Comfort Farm

  Bassett

  Enbury Heath

  Nightingale Wood

  Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm

  The Rich House

  Ticky

  The Bachelor

  Westwood

  The Matchmaker

  Conference at Cold Comfort Farm

  Here Be Dragons

  White Sand and Grey Sand

  The Charmers

  Starlight

  STELLA GIBBONS

  My American

  PART I

  CHAPTER I

  IT WAS AUTUMN. Kenwood House, the eighteenth-century mansion on the edge of Hampstead Heath, had been recently opened to the public by King George the Fifth and its beauties were still sufficiently unfamiliar to attract crowds of Londoners, as well as foreign visitors, to stare at them and admire the collection of pictures inside the building.

  But on this Saturday afternoon it was so cold that all but a few people had gone home. Showers of leaves drifted from the gigantic copper beech below the terrace in a slight icy wind, and the grass bank was alive with their dark running shapes. The sky was covered with a low pack of violet-grey clouds, moving slowly. Soon it would be dusk, but there was still a yellow gap in the west, looking wonderfully far away and peaceful.

  The paved yard in front of the mansion was lighter than the terrace because it caught some of the glow from the west, and the chauffeur of a big car waiting there could see comfortably to read his newspaper. The soft noise of his leather gloves slapping together as he struck his cold hands to shake the blood into them was the only sound in the courtyard. When he stopped, all he could hear was the rustling of leaves over the stone. A black kitten was pouncing and darting after them. Suddenly it ran behind one of the four high columns in front of the house and did not come out again.

  The front of the house had some domestic details to break its bleak elegance; two old lampstands of wrought iron, painted cream, and two flights of area steps, one on each side of the lofty columns. Against the railing of the steps on the left a boy of about thirteen was leaning, hands in the pockets of a loose fawn overcoat, one heel tapping softly, boredly, against the railing. A big fawn cap pulled over his eyes showed only high cheek-bones, fair-skinned cheeks, a childish mouth and firm chin, but his clothes were so un-English and his pose so assured that two late visitors hurrying out through the door under the columns five minutes since had turned to stare curiously at him. He kept looking towards the door as if waiting for someone to come out, and whistling softly through his teeth.

  The courtyard was lonely, under the late afternoon sky. It looked across a lawn to a high barrier of beech trees, almost bare of leaves, moving slowly to and fro with a sighing sound, the yellow light showing through them. The chauffeur began to slap his hands again, bending closer over his paper.

  Suddenly, from behind one of the columns, a little girl slowly walked out and advanced on the boy. She looked about twelve years old, and was dressed in a shabby brown coat with a white beret and black shoes and stockings, and in her arms she clasped the kitten, struggling and mewing thinly, pulling its claws down the front of her coat. She held it firmly with her little hands, hidden in rather dirty white woollen gloves. Her face was small and pale and pointed and seemed to have no features but large light brown eyes. The boy took no notice of her until she was at his side, then he looked up, surprised.

  “Excuse me,” she said very quietly in a thin, faintly cockney voice, “but please could you lend me sixpence?”

  He stared at her. She returned the stare with a steady, polite look while her hands stroked the struggling kitten.

  “What for?” he inquired at last, in a fresh charming drawl.

  “To get home with.”

  “Haven’t you got any money?”

  She shook her head. The kitten made a violent movement, and suddenly scratched her thin wrist where glove and coat sleeve met and drew blood, then wriggled down and darted off sideways over the courtyard, tail on end. Both children turned their heads slightly to watch it go.

  “Mean to say,” he demanded incredulously, “you came out without a dime in your pocket?”

  “Oh, no,” she explained eagerly, coming a little nearer and sucking her scratched wrist while her light brown eyes looked at him across her glove. “I did have a shilling for my birthday but I spent it.” She held up a packet of the postcards sold inside the mansion. “I got these. I’ve only got a penny left now, and I live at Highbury and it costs twopence to get there and I thought I’d get some hot chestnuts on the way back, as I’m rather hungry. I didn’t have any tea. Or any dinner.”

  “Gosh!” he interrupted, admiration and pity in his voice. “You must be hungry, I guess.”

  “Yes, I am,” she said. She added proudly, “I feel sick, I’m so hungry.”

  He looked impressed at this but also rather embarrassed. The chauffeur had put down his paper and was staring idly across at them.

  “Haven’t your folks any money?” muttered the boy, diving into his pocket and not looking at her.

  “I’ve only got Dad. My father, I mean. He gave me the shilling. I haven’t got any mother.”

  She said the last words in the quietest possible voice, looking down at the ground

  “Gee, I’m sorry. That’s bad. Say, you’d better have a shilling so’s you can buy something to eat as well. Oh, go on …” (as she shook her head, murmuring: “Sixpence’ll do, truly”) … “do have it!” And he held out a coin to her between the forefinger and thumb of his thick fur-lined glove.

  She took it, and peeled back her own glove and carefully fitt
ed the coin into her palm and pulled the glove over it once more, but all the time she kept her eyes fixed on his face.

  “Thanks very much. I’ll send it back to you. You give me your name and address, and I promise honour bright I’ll send it back, you see’f I don’t.”

  “I don’t want you to do that, honest I don’t. You must be a crazy kid spending your birthday money on a lot of old postcards. I’ll give it to you, that’s what. For a birthday present.”

  “Thanks. I’m most awfully bucked,” she said carefully, as though repeating something she had heard someone else say. They stared at one another for a second or two in silence. Then she said:

  “I say, what’s your name? And where d’you live?”

  “Robert Vorst. And I live in America and I’m going back home there to-morrow, and am I glad! Oh, boy!” He did a quick little double-shuffle, expertly neat and pleasing to watch.

  “What part of America?” she persisted.

  “Vine Falls. That’s in Paul County, New Leicester. Say, I must go. There’s my mother. Hope you get home safe. G’d-bye.”

  He was running off to join two ladies who came out through the doors of the mansion at that moment, and who were looking round the courtyard as if in search of him, when he turned back. The little girl, who had half-retreated behind the column again, saw the last of the daylight on his fair face as he called to her:

  “What’s your name, Limey?”

  “Amy Lee,” she called softly, putting her own little face round the column so that it caught in its turn the last of the yellow light. A plait of dark hair slipped slowly over her shoulder and hung there, swinging, as she leant forward.

  “Bob!” called one of the ladies, in a slow sweet drawl, getting into the car with a display of apricot silk stockings above the knee, “How many times have I told you not to use that word? Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you all over. Come right along now, this minute.” But she did not sound cross.

  Amy Lee heard the boy protesting something that sounded like: “Dan says it,” and then he followed the two ladies into the car, and the chauffeur shut the door and reseated himself. The car began slowly to move.

  The boy sat opposite to the two ladies. He was looking across at Amy where she stood with one arm round the column and her plait swinging over her shoulder, and as she watched him, he pulled off his cap and waved it to her and for the first time he smiled. His hair was thick and fair and longer than an English boy’s and one lock fell over his forehead, but at that distance she could not see the colour of his eyes.

  The car turned the corner, and was gone.

  At once the courtyard was twice as lonely and quiet. The kitten was over in a far corner by one of the grey brick wings of the house, chasing a leaf, and Amy went over and made one or two attempts to catch it, but it easily avoided her. She stood and watched it for a little while, the leaves whirling round her feet with their dry sound. A man came out of the house and locked the door, glancing indifferently over at her as he did so, then went away towards the old stables that had been turned into tea rooms.

  The yellow gleam in the west had gone, and it was beginning to get dusk. She carefully turned up the collar of her coat round her thin little neck, murmuring something, then put her hands in her pockets and walked quickly away.

  She went round to the right of the house, past the garden with dead brown roses on the bushes, and through a tunnel covered with ivy. At the end of this tunnel, in the valley, the lake gleamed dully. One swan glided slowly over the water, hardly seeming to move. She stopped in the twilight of the tunnel, where the wind blew coldly, to stare for a while at the swan, then walked on.

  Along the empty terrace she went, where the beech leaves were blowing. The long windows of the house were shuttered now, and against the white wood it could be seen that some of them had pale purple glass. That was pretty; she stopped to admire it, then went on. She was not exactly hurrying, but she was such a light-stepping child that it was difficult to imagine her walking slowly or dawdling; her movement was like that of the running leaves themselves. Sometimes she stared at the wall of beeches beyond the lake, where flocks of pigeons, dark against the sky and pale against the trees, were settling down for the night. There were two people walking along the path by the lake, but that was all. The scene was as lonely as it was beautiful; it might have been in any romantic, faraway place rather than on the edge of London slums. Amy stared at the swan again, then at the low, slow-moving clouds, then suddenly drove both hands into her pockets, shook her plait over her shoulder, gave an excited little prance, and began to run. She held the coin the boy had given her tightly in her palm, and as she ran she whistled very softly in time to her running, a tune she had heard at the pictures and named to herself, “The Cowboy’s Rescue.” Down the terrace she flew, feeling her feet pushing the ground away behind her. She was the cowboy, riding to rescue someone, and behind her rode the enemy on fiery mustangs! She glanced sideways at the grass, temptingly green in the low evening light, but shook her head, muttering again.

  When she came out of the grounds of Kenwood House she turned away from the Heath, which now lay spread beneath her. The valleys and hillocks were blue-green and the trees were dark brown on this dull yet clear evening, above the lights of London already sparkling in the valley far below. She went on until she came out into a quiet road where big houses stood back in large gardens, and then up a steep hill, skipping as she went along under the darkening sky with the shilling and the penny safe in the palm of her glove.

  It had been a nice day to-day, and the nicest thing that had happened had been speaking to that boy from America. Now I’ve spoken to an American, she thought. I know how they talk. She tried to imitate the way he had spoken, repeating Robert (Somebody; the unfamiliar name in the unusual accent had defeated her), Vine Falls, Paul County, New Leicester, but found the intonation too difficult. When I get home, she thought, I’ll have my supper, and read The Gold Bug, and look up Vine Falls on the atlas … oh! It’s Saturday. Father’ll be home. I can’t. The disappointment made her stop dead for a moment. Then she murmured a few words, as though reassuring an invisible companion, and went slowly on, past the playing fields of Highgate School, up to Highgate Village.

  She had been fascinated by the unfamiliar American voices as the party got out of the car, and had followed the two ladies and the boy as they toured the mansion. There were some other people going round as well, and no one took any notice of Amy, who was not a pretty or attractive child. Unnoticed in the little group, she had been able to stare at the Americans as much as she liked. The ladies were not a bit English-looking. Their feet were so small and pretty, and their clothes were different, somehow, from English clothes, and they asked so many questions and seemed more interested than anyone else. They were quite old, but the one the little boy called Aunt Carol was awfully pretty, with the biggest blue eyes Amy had ever seen. The boy’s mother was not so pretty, but she looked very kind. She called him “son,” and once she put her little hand on his shoulder when she wanted him to look at one of the pictures.

  But he soon got tired of going round, and loitered behind. Once he had poked a bed with one finger, and said “Gee!” Amy waited until he had dawdled into the next room, then she emerged from an alcove where she had been lurking and poked the bed in her turn, but could not see why he had said “Gee!” She would have liked to ask him, but was afraid to.

  They all three seemed so happy and rich-looking (the Aunt-Carol-one had a lovely diamond brooch on her blouse) that Amy could not stop looking at them, and when the boy at last slipped away and out into the yard, she had followed him. His queer clothes and handsome untroubled young face had attracted her so strongly that she felt she must speak to him. He looked so happy! I’m sure he has a lovely time, thought Amy, watching him from behind the pillar. He’s looking cross now, because he didn’t like the pictures, but he has a happy look, really. I expect he goes coasting, and lives in one of those old brownston
e houses they have in my American books at home.

  Then she began to imagine herself asking him to lend her sixpence to get home with, and before she knew that she meant to … moving forward as if in a dream … she really was asking him.

  She often imagined herself doing things, and then did them, like that.

  Here was Highgate Village, with all the little old shops lit up. It stood on the highest hilltop for miles. Amy was always glad when the Number 11 tram got to the bottom of Highgate Hill in case it ran away faster and faster, and fell at last into the twinkling, sparkling mass of lights at the bottom.

  There was a Number 11 waiting now. She ran, and climbed hastily up to the top; and then of course it did not go for quite a long time. She was the only passenger, and she was content to sit there staring out of the window, now dashed with big rain drops, in a dream. Her head felt funny, but that was only because she was hungry, and it was all right, there was a cold fried herring at home, and some milk and four uncooked sausages. I shall fry up the herring and buy a bottle of Ka-Ola, she decided, with my shilling. He did say I was to buy something to eat. I should like to keep it, really, as it was a present from the only American I’ve ever spoken to, but I did ask him to lend it me so’s I could get home and buy some chestnuts, so it wouldn’t be fair to keep it. But Ka-Ola would count as chestnuts, really, because it’s a sort of food. She rolled down her glove to make sure the shilling was still there.

  It was there, but it was not a shilling. Instead of the King’s Head, an utterly unfamiliar one confronted her … the savage profile of a Red Indian, his plaited hair dressed with feathers, and above his arched nose the tiny word LIBERTY. Bewildered, she turned the coin over and stared at the humped shoulders of a bison with horned and bearded head, bent towards the words Five Cents. And over the bison’s back, in a curve, the words UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

  Amy’s first feeling was bitterest disappointment, but not because she would now have to walk half-way home and go without her Ka-Ola.