The View from Here Page 17

  I looked at him, feeling like I was weeping, but in fact I was not.

  “I need to make sense of it too,” I said.

  “I’m so sorry—”

  “Look,” I cut him off, “I can’t explain very clearly how I feel about this. I just know it’s different from the way I felt a while ago. There are other things now that seem much more important.” Briefly, in that confessional air I did consider telling him what these things were, but I did not. “I think I want to feel that I have some sort of control over the future. Chloe’s future, really.”

  He looked stung at the mention of Chloe’s name, as if it had never occurred to him before that she might be affected by all of this, and I was angry with him for that.

  “If you and Josee are going to be a couple, Phillip, I want to meet her again.” He made no denials at this point, but looked, simply, crushed. “I want to have a party, and I want Josee to come.”

  “I’ll ask her,” he said, resigned, but with no promise in his voice.

  • • •

  No one was eating breakfast when I came down, though the table was laid, and next to it Hudson, in a wooden playpen, was squealing with a toy in each hand. I had slept badly and woken grumpy, and there was no sign of Mason. I had a headache.

  “Leave him,” I said to Christina as she went to take Hudson away.

  She righted herself slowly. It was not my place to instruct her, and especially not in so brusque a manner. We both knew it. I regretted the exchange immediately.

  “As you like,” she replied as a small metal train engine flew from the playpen and crashed at my feet. I winced, bending to pick it up.

  “Sorry,” Patsy said, appearing suddenly. “Is he being a pest?” She looked at the child and sighed.

  I was relieved to see her. “No. It’s not him. I just have a headache.”

  “Hold on,” she said.

  She was back a few minutes later with two red and white caplets.

  “Thanks.”

  “That’s okay. I never leave home without a well-rounded supply of the miracles of modern pharmacology.”

  I swallowed the pills.

  She raised her eyebrows cheerfully over the coffee Christina had brought. “After all, if you’ve got to leave your shrink behind…”

  She was talking about a life I didn’t know. Her life. She laughed. Then, abruptly, sobered.

  “Did you say you hadn’t seen what happened? Last night.”

  “You mean the accident?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No. We were behind you. We didn’t see anything. The first I knew was when Mason braked.”

  She lifted her cup again. There was a faint trace of pink on the rim of it. “You don’t drive, do you?”

  “No,” I answered, dropping my voice a little. I couldn’t drive then and it was something I was embarrassed about. Especially around people like Patsy, who could do everything.

  “Still,” she said, contemplating, “if something ran in front of you—imagine you’re driving.” She put her cup back down without drinking from it and lifted both hands, as if to a steering wheel. “Something runs in front of you. What do you do?”

  “Brake, I suppose. I don’t know. Swerve. Isn’t that what happened?”

  “Maybe,” she said. She looked like someone who hasn’t completely figured out an equation, but is working on it.

  The trip to the hospital was Mason’s idea. Sally’sarm, he said, had swollen in the night and looked rather bruised in daylight. He was concerned. Patsy and I, quitting our talk, stared at him for a moment over the remains of our coffee. Mason did not seem to notice the abrupt cut in our conversation.

  “Would you come with us, Frankie?”

  “Well, yes, but I could call Arturo if you like. He could certainly arrange for a doctor to come here, to the house.”

  “I think we may as well go to the hospital. She’s going to need an X-ray, and it will save time to go straight there.” A deep, sincere crease distorted his brow.

  “All right.”

  The hospital was a low whitewashed building with a flat roof just out of town. It was less than a year old and had been opened, officially, by Maria. I had watched the ceremony, standing with the doctor’s wives and a small assembly of other town dignitaries on the gray pavement while Maria cut the blue ribbon with a pair of plastic-handled scissors. The scattery applause, as the severed ends fluttered, had been swallowed quickly by the cloudless morning. I had only been back once since then, not long afterward, with Adam. He had dislocated a finger tugging out a chest of drawers to get at a pen that had fallen behind. I noticed that the bougainvillea in the front had grown since then.

  The hospital was always busy, and that day it was bedlam. People were sitting on the floor. Babies were crying. A receptionist peered at us from behind a sliding glass panel before opening it tentatively and passing over a form on a clipboard. She indicated, with a beleaguered look, that we would have to wait. Like everybody else. We waited for an hour before Ned and Bee Bee, who had come with us on Ned’s insistence that Bee Bee ought to get looked over too, decided to give up.

  “A body could keel over just sitting in this place,” Ned said. They took the car into town, fixing a time to come back for us.

  Mason was fidgety, pacing. “Find out how much longer, would you?”

  It was a bark, and I stared, shocked.

  “Please,” he said, softening.

  I got up, sighed, and glanced at Sally, sitting serenely on the orange plastic chair that a smiling man in a farmer’s hat had graciously given up for her. A child had been whisked from the one next to it for me. Sally had sat ever since, calm and uncomplaining, with her hurt wrist nestled tenderly against her breasts. I wanted to slap her.

  “Please,” Mason said again.

  The receptionist slid her protective screen back again reluctantly at my tap. We both knew what I was going to ask, and we both knew what she was going to answer.

  “Dios sabe,” I said a moment later, repeating her reply verbatim, with a slight edge of spite, to Mason.

  He looked at me. Lost, I thought, like a child separated from its mother.

  “God knows,” I translated wearily.

  A sad-looking woman, with a baby on her lap and a toddler at her knee, had taken my chair.

  “I’m going outside for a bit. They’ll call you.”

  The automatic doors slid back on their trundling mechanism and released me to the sunshine. I went down the steps and wandered vaguely left, glad to be outside, away. Away from Sally and Mason and their disturbing double act. I had become convinced during the course of the morning that Sally’s wrist was not at all seriously injured, and yet Mason had persisted with his panicky reaction. I couldn’t understand it. I closed my eyes for a moment and breathed in and out, slowly. When I opened them again, he was standing beside me.

  “Don’t be cross. I just feel bad, about Sally.” He reached out a hand and held the side of my neck.

  I saw, in his tired eyes, love and guilt. Love for me, and guilt for Sally. It was guilt, I rationalized, that was motivating this unusual behavior of his.

  “Go on back,” I said, smiling at him. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  He lifted my fingers and kissed them swiftly, reassuringly, before taking the steps two at a time.

  I waited for a moment, plucking a leaf from a bush, before turning to follow him. At the curb Bee Bee was leaning against the car, while Ned, still inside, bent over, putting something in the glove box. I had not, through the stream of people arriving and leaving, heard them pull up. Bee Bee looked in my direction but offered no greeting. She seemed to stare for a moment before twisting toward Ned, who had spoken to her as he pushed his door open, getting out too. I assumed that she had not seen me.

  A man in a doctor’s white coat was bent over Sally. He turned and shook my hand. I knew him a little. His son had been a student of Adam’s. I asked after the boy. Then, sensing Mason’s impatience rising again,
I explained about the arm without going into too much detail about the accident. A bump, I said, a bang, in the car. The doctor, though, was not interested in the car. He motioned for Sally to follow him and for me to come too. Mason he discouraged.

  “It’s a small hospital,” I explained. “They try to keep the working areas quiet.”

  Sally’s arm was delicately turned and lifted and inspected, then X-rayed, laid tender and disembodied on the cold metal plate. There was no break. Just some swelling and a few bruises. This news, delivered by the doctor as if it were the miraculous and unexpected outcome of an arduous procedure, cheered me enormously. The guilt that Mason and I had just discussed, without discussing it, could subside. Things would get back to normal.

  “Just a little rest,” the doctor instructed. And then, in English, “Take it easy.”

  I laughed, and Sally said thank you with a ladylike nod of her head.

  As we made our way along the corridor that led back to the reception area, I said, “Well, that is good news,” with inappropriate enthusiasm.

  Sally, her shoes clicking softly on the yellow linoleum, turned her head to me without breaking her stride and gave me a look of pure and absolute disdain.

  “I did tell you,” Sally teased Mason a moment later, “that there was no need for so much fuss. It’s just a sprain.”

  “Great,” he said with a grin. “Let’s get a drink to celebrate.”

  We went to the Blue Moon for beers and fried chicken. Sally had Mason slice hers into neat triangles, so that she could manage not too awkwardly with her left hand.

  “I saw you all here,” I said in response to a flashed smile of Mason’s as he passed Sally’s plate back to her, “one night just before I met you.”

  “I know.” Sally indicated the corner table with a nod over her glass. “You were just over there.”

  I felt deflated. It had seemed till then that I had a secret, something of my own, over them. I’d thought, telling it, that I was letting them in on something. Happily, Mason, surprised, asked, “Did you?”

  But it was just then that I remembered I should have been at a lesson with Letty. “What time is it?” I asked, pointlessly, knowing it made no difference now. “I should have been teaching this morning,” I explained. “I forgot.”

  “Aah,” said Mason sweetly. “And there we were, dragging you to the hospital. Sorry.”

  I smiled. “Don’t worry,” I said, speaking only to him. “I’ll walk over now and explain. I’ll meet you back here. In twenty-five minutes or so.”

  As I stood to go, Sally asked smoothly, “You have an apartment nearby, don’t you, Frankie? So you wouldn’t be stuck if we left.”

  I was shocked. I held motionless for a second, too unnerved to reply. Was Sally throwing me out? It struck me, suddenly and thunderously, that she could. My eyes twitched to Mason, but he didn’t catch them.

  “No need for that,” Ned said pleasantly. “You guys have another drink, and I’ll drive Frankie. We’ll be back in a shake.”

  I looked at him, and my heart fluttered with a rush of gratitude.

  Letty came to the door and I explained about the American lady who had hurt her wrist and needed to go to hospital.

  “Poor American lady,” she said.

  I felt uncomfortable, standing there while she held the screen door back, her face all sympathy, the porch wood spongy under my feet. I cut her off, declining her offer of a cold drink and quickly rescheduling the lesson, inclining my head to indicate Ned waiting for me in the car.

  “All hunky-dory?” he asked when I got back in beside him.

  “Yes, thanks.”

  He started the engine and then he looked at me as if he might begin one of his fatherly chats.

  “Home, James,” I said jokily, avoiding it.

  At the Blue Moon Sally stood as soon as she saw us, though Bee Bee’s glass was still half full.

  “I’m really very tired,” she said. “Let’s go back to what’s left of the day.”

  I felt, inexplicably, as if all the disruption so far had been my fault. In the car I was quiet. Everybody was. When we passed Cactus Roy, Bee Bee said, “Somebody ought to buy that guy a decent hat.” That, at least, got a laugh.

  • • •

  I think I have already said that the house that Phillip and I live in now is quite big, rambling even. We bought from a fellow who had made a lot of money in bonds. I had no idea what that meant at the time. I still don’t really. Anyway, the bond-money man had invested in country life, but it hadn’t suited him, and he was keen to feel pavement under his feet again, so we’d got a better deal than we’d hoped. I remember having the feeling when we first saw it, that feeling people often say they get when they look at a house, that it would be ours, even though the original price, before the negotiation, had been out of our reach.

  We both wanted it. I knew that before we’d even been upstairs, before we’d met the bond-money man’s children, who came rushing down them just as we were about to go up, a cheerful gaggle of tumble-haired blondes. Passing us, they shouted hello, one after the other, as if they knew us, as if they knew everyone in the world. I realize now that those children reminded me of other children, but the past was too recent then for me to want to recognize that.

  The bond-money man’s wife had sat in the kitchen while we looked around, smoking cigarettes and talking to another woman who looked just like her, same clothes, same hair. A sister, perhaps, although women friends are like that sometimes too. They grow similar. Sonia and I, after all, own the same shoes, and Catherine’s green cast iron cookware matches mine exactly, and we all like the same films. It’s part of how we learn, how we become what we become, that mimicry of other women. We are not like men, who so often leave school and preserve their hairstyles and nicknames intact for life. Instead we dart from fad to fad. I tried to dress like Sonia, to lay a table the way Catherine did; I copied hairstyles from magazines. All foolishness, all innocence. I long for that now.

  Before we lived here, before I owned any green cast iron cookware, we lived in Phillip’s first house, nearer to his parents. Before that he’d lived in a flat on a busy road in London, where Chloe had been born. This house, though, is the one that marked her childhood. This is the house where the brown felt owl she made at Saturday Club is still stuck on the inside of the pantry door; this is the house with her paddling pool in the shed; this is the house where we buried the spaniel and she planted the cross on the spot, “Beezle” painted across it in wobbly blue letters. Josee will not want to live here. I wonder, will Phillip sell?

  The fact of the house’s size and the comfortable spread of the downstairs rooms meant that I was not limited in terms of numbers for my party. It sounds rather childish, doesn’t it? My party. But that is what it was. I cannot think of a more sophisticated term, or a more appropriate one. It wasn’t a celebration really, and it was more than a gathering. A lot more. It became—and this will sound melodramatic, but it is no less true for that—my reason for living. It gave me a point on the horizon to head for, and I did so with all the strength I could muster. Which, it turned out, was a good deal.

  When you are ill, everything is taken from you. I don’t just mean the full stop that inevitably halts this kind of illness, my kind. I am referring to the control over day-to-day life that slips from your grasp as the illness progresses. I had not cooked a meal in my own home for months; the party gave me something to take charge of. Something that was mine again.

  Carla, Phillip’s P.A., helped me a lot with things like getting the invitations printed, and I liked her friendly but impersonal way of dealing with me. She was helpful, but businesslike, rather than desperate to please me, which was the tone that had begun to characterize some of my interactions with people who are closer to me. It was Carla who found the jazz band. She had a friend, she said, a saxophonist who played with some other musicians quite regularly. Would I like them for our party? I would, I said, very much.

  I suggested
to Phillip that we ought to send Carla flowers or something for all the extra work she was doing, a thank you. I was conscious that her duties had probably expanded with Phillip not in the office anyway, and now here I was on the telephone with her every day, more than once usually. He laughed.

  “I pay her enough to take three foreign holidays a year as it is,” he said. “She lives like a duchess; she can take on a bit of extra work without a standing ovation.”

  I laughed too. “Let’s send something anyway.”

  We did. We made one of those joint phone calls where one person dials while the other calls out the number, and then the caller consults constantly with the second person over his shoulder so that the conversation becomes threeway and immensely irritating for the stranger on the line, but amusing, unifying, for the conspiring pair. You have those light moments no matter what, don’t you? It’s how you recognize the dark ones.

  “Roses?” Phillip asked me, mouthpiece at his chin.

  I agreed. “ White,” I said, thinking that they would be from a hothouse at that time of year and have no scent.

  Carla was very pleased with the roses and called to say so as soon as they were delivered. She was the envy of the office, she assured us, and then she told me that they would do to stir her boyfriend up a bit too if she didn’t tell him who they were from. He needed a bit of a nudge now and then, she claimed, a bit of a kick in the behind. And I thought, rather sadly, that women, young women especially, will go to all sorts of lengths to complicate their relationships with men, as if life will not hand them enough complications all by itself in time.

  With Carla’s help I planned that party with the kind of precision that some women, particularly nowadays, reserve for their weddings. I had not had a wedding that required the hiring of caterers. Phillip and I had been married at the Register Office in Grantham and had lunch in the private room at the Carpenter’s Arms afterward with ten of our friends. I’d invited all of those friends to the party, even Mandy and Todd, who had gotten divorced five years later and with whom we’d lost touch soon after that. I’d invited them both.