The View from Here Read online

  Phillip is an attractive man, but his looks are quiet—long legs and a sprinkle of gray at the temples—so the smile takes you by surprise because there is so much self-confidence in it. Just then, aware of its attractiveness and the effect that that surprising smile could have, even on me, even after all these years, I felt a bit sick. All the more sick because I wanted to ask, and yet desperately did not want to, whether this news about the books was based on some fresh information gleaned during a hushed and passionately vital telephone call to his editor. That’s who Josee was, is—Phillip’s editor. Well, Phillip’s and Tom Creel’s.

  Phillip and Tom are partners in a small, but very successful, advertising agency—Creel & Grace. There are two other partners now, but their names only feature on the letterhead. Phillip and Tom, on the back of some ideas that were boozily sketched out over a long Sunday lunch at the Creels’ house at which I was present along with Tom’s wife, Alice, have written two books about marketing together. The reviewer for the Times’ Weekend Supplement called these books the “rare sort that change the way you think” and a lot of other people said similar things. Phillip and Tom have been on the radio and on the television and are quoted now in all sorts of places. They have had their photographs in the papers.

  Josee has one of those photographs in a frame on the bookcase behind her desk. I saw it there when, joining Phillip for lunch once, I met him at his publisher. I have wondered since whether it was already happening then. Whether they stood in the same room as me, a pair, smiling. Knowing.

  “So I thought I might do another one,” Phillip went on, “only without Tom. I’ve spoken to him and he agrees. In fact, it would work out well because then he’d be in the office while I was at home.” Another smile was awarded here. “What I mean is that I could stay at home for the next few months, with you.”

  I had too many conflicting thoughts to reply straightaway. Phillip lifted his soup spoon again from the side plate where he had rested it while he spoke and held it in midair for a moment, waiting.

  “In case you needed me,” he explained, unnecessarily.

  Phillip and Tom had, for several years now, shared a two-bedroom, two-bathroom flat at the less expensive end of one of the more expensive areas of London. Alice and I never went there, preferring to stay in hotels, or with friends, when we were in town. We spoke of “the flat” as if it were “the dorm”; it had that sort of association for us, studenty. But Phillip and Tom each spent about three nights a week there, more or less happily, not making the journey in from home on the other days, their seniority having afforded them this luxury, and a bevy of keen young assistants. Reflecting on this arrangement I thought, surprisingly for the first time, that Phillip might have confided in Tom about Josee. If he had, would Tom have told Alice? The idea appalled me. The humiliation. Strange, isn’t it, the sense of shame that someone else’s misdeeds can engender?

  But now here was Phillip suggesting that he should give that up, the weekly trip to London, to the office. To his lover. He would be with me all the time, and even if I’d miss the small freedoms that I had come to enjoy in his absences—the mistimed meals, the unstructured days, the long evening conversations with friends—I took this suggestion as a sign that I might have misread the airport telephone call, that the well of warm feeling that had been refilled during the past few days had not been poisoned after all.

  “I’d like that,” I said as the waiter reappeared at the door. He had forgotten our water.

  The next morning we met Chloe at the station. It was Friday, and she had taken the day off work so as to spend a long weekend with us. It was her third trip home since my news, which is what people called it—I was so sorry to hear your news—and she had spoken to me every day. She greeted us on the busy concourse with a young person’s shout and flagrant affection. Chloe is twenty-five years old and very pretty. She looks just like her mother.

  “Let’s see,” I said, peering at her feet.

  She twisted a slim leg toward me to show off a new kneelength black boot and said, “Maggie gave them to me,” a little shyly, as if this gift were illicit rather than something naturally passed between blood-tied people, between a woman and her daughter.

  She still feels, I think, a need to protect me, not from Maggie in particular, but from her relationship with her. She wants to stress that I am “mother.” It is what she introduces me as. She calls me “Ma” these days, while reserving an unadorned “Maggie” for the woman who gave birth to her. I need her reassurance much less than she thinks, but I appreciate her efforts anyway. And, it’s true, I was once much thinner-skinned on the subject. The day when Chloe was ten, when Maggie made contact again for the first time, the first time since she had disappeared just after Chloe’s first birthday, is still vivid for me.

  Looking at Chloe then, especially tall in her new boots, I thought about all the anxiety that call of Maggie’s had engendered, and the much-negotiated, much-monitored eventual reunion. It had all come to this, all that turmoil, mellowed to so much casual conversation on a railway platform.

  “How is she?” I asked

  “Oh, she’s fine. She sent a book for you.”

  It would be a book about healing, about the cyclical nature of things and the danger of burying emotions, a book about the mind’s effect on illness. I didn’t need a book to learn about things like that.

  I smiled and looped my arm through Chloe’s, and at the announcement of our train, we walked together, trailing Phillip, luggage-laden again, down the platform to our carriage. Chloe’s overnight bag was threatening to topple from its perch on top of our two larger, matching suitcases, and Phillip had to stretch his hand awkwardly to prevent the fall. He jerked his head to indicate where our seats were, and Chloe and I sat and compared magazines while he attended to the unloading. What a happy family we must have looked. A seamless happy family.

  The weekend was like so many weekends before it. We fell quickly into the easy patterns of our history together, even in the shadows of those thunderclouds, even with my fresh hospital admission looming. Chloe lay about and looked lovely and leaned on things and picked at food and tossed her hair and talked. About her friends, about her job, about her boyfriend, Ed, about the decorating she was planning for her flat. Phillip and I, from old habit, caught conspiratorial eyes over her head, united as always by our adoration for her. Things like that don’t change so readily.

  I was feeling well and considered the fact that I had never really felt ill. I felt no more ill knowing that the tentacles of something sinister lurked in the deep recesses of my abdomen than I had before I had known it, and that other concern, that anxiety that had set the fear really clanging, was beginning to seem less real too. If Phillip was willing to give up his London time and stay at home with me, then perhaps after all I had exaggerated the thing in my own mind. I knew that I did not believe this, but I also knew that I needed to accept it to some extent, to convince myself of it, in order to avoid the damage that dwelling on the possibilities would do. I was just managing to haul myself up onto this high, level plain of reasonableness when Phillip made the announcement that sent me scrabbling for a foothold again.

  Chloe was stretched on the sofa, half reading, half sleeping, absently stroking Hobo, who is rather a cross old cat these days, though he still succumbs to her charms.

  “Weren’t you going to see Emma?” I asked her.

  She looked over at me and rolled her eyes and grinned. “Don’t worry,” she said, drawling a little for affect, “I won’t miss my train.”

  I laughed, because that was exactly what I was worried about. Chloe always leaves things until the last minute and, as it was, she was planning on taking the late train after she’d been up to the village to catch up with Emma. Chloe and Emma were at school together, and Brownies, and swimming club, and ballet. It was that kind of friendship. The kind that dims and flares again all through life.

  “Put your things in your bag at least, and put the bag by the d
oor. That way I’ll feel more secure,” I said

  “You needn’t display so much unseemly desire to be rid of me.”

  She got up though, dislodging Hobo, who looked displeased, but soon managed to settle himself smoothly into the warm spot she had vacated with that absolute indolence that only cats can manage. Crossing to my chair, she bent and kissed me.

  “People get fired,” I told her, “even little hotshot magazine writer cookies like you. They get fired, they starve, they end up on the streets, they turn to crime. I worry.”

  “She worries,” Phillip said, joining the game. We all knew our parts.

  “Oh, I’ll do fine on the streets,” Chloe cooed, twisting herself into a cartoon hooker’s swivel.

  Her father hit her rump with a roll of Sunday newspaper.

  “I’ll take the train to London with you,” he said. Then he offered to make tea with no change of tone.

  I don’t know why I had assumed that his permanence in the house would be immediate. He had never said so much, though it had been implied, I was sure, that he would stick with me now, until we knew that I was entirely well again. I still thought that way then, that I would be entirely well again. In fact, I had begun to think that the illness, like the other thing, was some sort of aberration, a brief, nasty interlude, soon to be swept away by a cleansing wave of normality. But I wanted Phillip with me in the meantime. Phillip’s physical presence was part of the confirmation of this.

  When he came back with the tea, pulling a footstool toward my chair to put mine on, I said, “I had in my mind that you would be here this week.”

  He sat, balancing his own cup at chest height.

  “There are a few loose ends, sweet. I need to get everything tidied up at the office, make sure Carla can cope and Tom’s up to speed on everything. That way I’ll be able to manage things from here from now on.”

  I nodded because, on the face of it, this was perfectly sensible. There was no logical reason why the acid should have begun creeping in my stomach.

  “Anyway,” he went on, putting his cup on the floor at his side, leaning back, casual now, “you’re seeing Sonia tomorrow. I’m sure she’d stay”—his tone softened then—“if you don’t want to be on your own. It’s only two nights, though,” he added. “I’ll be back on Tuesday.”

  I reassured him, I would be fine. Sonia would certainly stay if I asked her and perhaps I would, but there were things I wanted to get done before next week, the hospital week, so a day or two to myself would be useful.

  Chloe had gone off by then, to get her jacket and comb her hair I suppose, and Phillip and I slipped effortlessly into the kind of conversation—about packing, and train times, and what’s for supper—that people have in marriages. I cannot remember a word of it, though only a few months separate me from that afternoon and now, and yet I do recall, with sunlit clarity, every detail of every moment that I spent with another man twenty-three years ago.

  • • •

  It was Richard Luke who collected me that long-ago Sunday after Maria’s party in a big navy Buick with ivory leather seats. He patted the dashboard affectionately. Good cars, he told me, Buicks. His father had sworn by them.

  The car cruised along smoothly till the buildings began to thin out and huddle together. There was a rubbish dump at the edge of town, a gaudy tangle of trash, bordered at the back by a billboard advertising cigarettes. Children, boys mostly, played on the road nearby—improvised games with stones and cans. Richard slowed and gave the horn a mild slap with the flat of his hand. A woman, scavenging, looked up briefly and the children scattered then chased after the car, laughing and shouting, as we pulled off again. Richard glanced in the rearview mirror. He had two boys of his own, he said. He gave me a look that implied he knew an awful lot about boys.

  Soon, the macadam ended and we were on the long straight of the dirt part of the road. Red brown earth, peppered with scrubby trees and cactus, stretched endless on either side.

  I pointed. “One of my students asked me once ‘How do you call this in English?’”

  Richard turned his head. “You mean cactus?” he asked.

  “Yes. That’s what I told him, ‘cactus.’ But then he said, ‘And what about this and this?’” I made little stabs with my index finger at the windows.

  “More cactus,” Richard said flatly.

  “They distinguish between them, people who live here.”

  Richard’s softly freckled face was uncomprehending.

  “They don’t just call them all cactus,” I explained. “ It’s like Eskimos, you know, having dozens of words for snow.”

  “Aaah,” he replied vaguely.

  The car sent up a thin cloud of orange dust. Sealed inside, strangers, a light unease divided us.

  Eventually, Richard bridged the chasm with chitchat about his children, Hudson and Howie. Howie was eight and Hudson was some number of months that meant nothing to me. Richard said that he’d been giving Howie tennis lessons this vacation and that the kid was getting along just great.

  We saw the tennis court as soon as we passed through the high arched gate that broke the wall surrounding the house. Two teenage girls were standing near the net. One, taller with a rope of blonde hair, was flipping a ball idly up and down, up and down on her racquet. I was conscious of her watching us as we got out of the car.

  Up close the great creamy sprawl of the house was too much to take in. I stuck close behind Richard, who ignored the vast, double-fronted door we had parked beneath, and headed instead for the sharp right angle of a corner to the left. Rounding it we were greeted by the perfect blue of an oblong swimming pool, and beyond that, over a wall that dipped with the contours of the cliff, the boundless azure of the glittering Pacific.

  Mason was in the pool, swimming. Intent on lengths, he didn’t react to our appearance. I followed Richard through some open glass doors where, in a big, airy room that looked onto the patio, Ned Newson grinned his slim grin.

  “Hello, Frankie,” he said.

  “Hello,” I smiled.

  “Good. Now that Frankie’s here it’s a party,” Mason said, suddenly behind me, wrapped in a towel. He bent and began to pull glasses out from a cupboard under a sideboard, the skin on his back still sheeny with damp. “Go sit out by the pool. Swim.” He gestured with an empty tumbler toward the bright outdoors.

  “I’ll take you.”

  I looked down to see a small girl with light, tousled hair falling almost to her waist. She was all curves, like a peanut.

  “This is my daughter Jenny,” Mason said.

  “And this is Jessica,” said Jenny. There was another Severance child, thinner, but in other respects matching, standing in the doorway, worrying at the edges of her swimsuit. “We’re twins.”

  The little girls tugged at my hands leading me back out to the pool. Then they swam while I sat on the mosaic edge, swinging my legs in the water.

  “Frankie’s a good name,” Jenny said, kicking her feet near my knees.

  “Thank you. Ned gave it to me.”

  “You’re welcome,” Ned said with a bow, appearing beside me.

  Jenny arced off, swam to the other side of the pool, and looped back. She was a dolphin.

  “We’re nine,” she said, “nearly ten. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Damn you,” a woman’s voice said from the doorway, though without vehemence. It was Bee Bee in owlish sunglasses and a tangerine ensemble that bared her midriff. “It’s bad enough having Patsy down here parading her pert little rear.” Despite the confidence of her appearance her movements were tentative. She stretched herself gingerly onto a white lounge chair. Once she was horizontal she gave the saltrimmed glass she was holding a deft upward toss. “Cheers.”

  Mason handed me a drink. “To twenty-two.”

  “To tequila,” Ned said.

  “To temperatures in the high eighties,” Richard added, with a small, stiff flick of a toast. His words, though, were drowned s
lightly by Howie’s arrival at the pool. He joined Jenny in the water with a shrieking yahoo and a lot of splashing.

  Patsy Luke came out onto the deck then, holding Hudson, hands around his chubby chest, at a forearm’s length from her body. Both mother and child looked rather detached from the process. She set him on the ground next to Jessica, who was seated near the edge of the pool.

  “Watch Huddy for a minute, honey,” she said, “while I get a drink.”

  Jessica, water beaded on her narrow shoulders, seemed too slight a child for such a robust responsibility. She watched nervously as the baby creased his dumpling face and began to whine.

  Howie yelled, “Put some soda on your finger.”

  Jessica dipped her littlest finger into her Coca-Cola and offered it timidly to Hudson, who clasped her hand and began to suck happily.

  “That always shuts him up,” Howie said. Despite his rambunctiousness he was a boy with a resigned look about him.

  “Hi,” a new female voice said.

  I looked up. It was the taller girl, the blonde, from the tennis court. Her greeting had been directed at Richard. She was staring at him now, fixedly.

  “That’s Paige,” said Jessica, “our sister. She’s fourteen.”

  “And she luurves Richard,” Jenny added.

  I watched as Paige Severance, her eyes hard on Patsy’s husband, settled herself in an upright chair, draped an elbow over its slatted back, and crossed her bare legs. If Richard was aware of the shock of sensuality revealed in the faint trace of blue at her wrists and the exposed milky cleft of her elbow, he made no response to it.

  Paige was followed by Lesley Newson. She was younger, thirteen, Jenny informed me, and coltish with springy auburn hair. She was like her mother, I thought, glancing at Bee Bee. Their faces were similar, handsome rather than pretty, although Bee Bee’s, even then slackened by prone slavishness to the sun, hinted at something that Lesley’s didn’t. Something almost hard.