Home Truths (12 page)

“One can’t accuse her of oversmartness,” said Mrs. Reeve.

Roy, whose low voice had carrying qualities, said, “No, Meg. Sarah’s jeans are as faded, as baggy, as those brown corduroys of yours. However, owing to Sarah’s splendid and enviable shape, hers are not nearly so large across the beam end.” This provoked two laughs – a cackle from Jack Sprat and a long three-note moo from his wife.

“Well, Roy,” said Tim Reeve, “all I can say is, you amaze me. How do you bring it off?”

“What about me?” said Sarah to herself. “How do
I
bring it off?”

“At least she’s had sense enough not to come tramping around in high-heeled shoes, like some of our visitors,” said Mrs. Reeve – her last word for the moment.

R
oy warned Sarah what lunch – the good old fry-up – would be. A large black pan the Reeves had brought to France from
England when they emigrated because of taxes and Labour would be dragged out of the oven; its partner, a jam jar of bacon fat, stratified in a wide extent of suety whites, had its permanent place on top of the stove. The lowest, or Ur, line of fat marked the very first fry-up in France. A few spoonfuls of this grease, releasing blue smoke, received tomatoes, more bacon, eggs, sausages, cold boiled potatoes. To get the proper sausages they had to go to a shop that imported them, in Monte Carlo. This was no distance, but the Reeves’ car had been paid for by Tim, and he was mean about it. He belonged to a generation that had been in awe of batteries: each time the ignition was turned on, he thought the car’s lifeblood was seeping away. When he became too stingy with the car, then Meg would not let him look at television: the set was hers. She would push it on its wheeled table over bumpy rugs into their bedroom and put a chair against the door.

Roy was a sharp mimic and he took a slightly feminine pleasure in mocking his closest friends. Sarah lay on her elbow on the bed as she had lain on the beach and thought that if he was disloyal to the Reeves then he was all the more loyal to her. They had been told to come back for lunch around three; this long day was in itself like a whole summer. She said, “It sounds like a movie. Are they happy?”

“Oh, blissful,” he answered, surprised, and perhaps with a trace of reproval. It was as if he were very young and she had asked an intimate question about his father and mother.

The lunch Roy had described was exactly the meal they were given. She watched him stolidly eating eggs fried to a kind of plastic lace, and covering everything with mustard to damp out the taste of grease. When Meg opened the door to the kitchen she was followed by a blue haze. Tim noticed
Sarah’s look – she had wondered if something was burning – and said, “Next time you’re here that’s where we’ll eat. It’s what we like. We like our kitchen.”

“Today we are honoring Sarah,” said Meg Reeve, as though baiting Roy.

“So you should,” he said. It was the only attempt at sparring; they were all much too fed and comfortable. Tim, who had been to Monte Carlo, had brought back another symbol of their roots, the Hovis loaf. They talked about his shopping, and the things they liked doing – gambling a little, smuggling from Italy for sport. One thing they never did was look at the Mediterranean. It was not an interesting sea. It had no tides. “I do hope you aren’t going to bother with it,” said Tim to Sarah. It seemed to be their private measure for a guest – that and coming round in the wrong clothes.

The temperature in full sun outside the sitting-room window was thirty-three degrees centigrade. “What does it mean?” said Sarah. Nobody knew. Tim said that 16°C was the same thing as 61°F but that nothing else corresponded. For instance, 33°C could not possibly be 33°F – No, it felt like a lot more.

A
fter the trial weekend Sarah wrote to her father, “I am in this interesting old one-room guesthouse that belongs to an elderly couple here. It is in their garden. They only let reliable people stay in it.” She added, “Don’t worry, I’m working.” If she concealed information she did not exactly lie: she thought she
was
working. Instead of French civilization taught in airless classrooms she would study expatriates at first hand. She decided to record the trivia first – how visitors of any sort
were a catastrophe, how a message from old friends staying at Nice brought Tim back from the telephone wearing the look of someone whose deepest feelings have been raked over.

“Come on, Tim, what was it?” his wife would call. “The who? What did they want? An invitation to their hotel? Damned cheek. More likely a lot of free drinks here, that’s what they want.” They lived next to gas fires with all the windows shut, yelling from room to room. Their kitchen was comfortable providing one imagined it was the depth of January in England and that sleet was battering at the garden. She wanted to record that Mr. Reeve said “heith” and “strenth” and that they used a baby language with each other – walkies, tummy, spend-a-penny. When Sarah said “cookie” it made them laugh: a minute later, feeding the dogs a chocolate cookie, Meg said, “Here, have a chockie bicky.” If Tim tried to explain anything, his wife interrupted with “Come on, get to Friday.” Nobody could remember the origin of the phrase; it served merely to rattle him.

Sarah meant to record this, but Professor Downcast’s useful language had left her. The only words in her head were so homespun and plain she was ashamed to set them down. The heat must have flattened her brain, she thought. The Reeves, who never lowered their voices for anyone, bawled one night that “old Roy was doting and indulgent” and “the wretched girl is in love.” That was the answer. She had already discovered that she could live twenty-four hours on end just with the idea that she was in love; she also knew that a man could think about love for a while but then he would start to think about something else. What if Roy never did? Sarah Cooper didn’t sound bad; Mrs. R. Cooper was better. But Sarah was not that foolish. She was looking ahead only because she and Roy had
no past. She did say to him, “What do you do when you aren’t having a vacation?”

“You mean in winter? I go to Marbella. Sometimes Kenya. Where my friends are.”

“Don’t you work?”

“I did work. They retired me.”

“You’re too young to be retired. My father isn’t even retired. You should write your memoirs – all that colonial stuff.”

He laughed at her. She was never more endearing to him than when she was most serious; that was not her fault. She abandoned the future and rearranged their short history to suit herself. Every word was recollected later in primrose light. Did it rain every Sunday? Was there an invasion of red ants? She refused the memory. The Reeves’ garden incinerator, which was never cleaned out, set oily smoke to sit at their table like a third person. She drank her coffee unaware of this guest, seeing nothing but butterflies dancing over the lavender hedge. Sarah, who would not make her own bed at home, insisted now on washing everything by hand, though there was a laundry in the village. Love compelled her to buy enough food for a family of seven. The refrigerator was a wheezy old thing, and sometimes Roy got up and turned it off in the night because he could not sleep for its sighing. In the morning Sarah piled the incinerator with spoiled meat, cheese, and peaches, and went out at six o’clock to buy more and more. She was never so bathed in love as when she stood among a little crowd of villagers at a bus stop – the point of creation, it seemed – with her empty baskets; she desperately hoped to be taken for what the Reeves called “part of the local populace.” The market she liked was two villages over; the buses were tumbrils. She could easily have driven Roy’s car or had everything sent from shops, but she was
inventing fidelities. Once, she saw Meg Reeve, wearing a floral cotton that compressed her figure and gave her a stylized dolphin shape, like an ornament on a fountain. On her head was a straw hat with a polka-dot ribbon. She found a place one down and across the aisle from Sarah, who shrank from her notice for fear of that deep voice letting the world know Sarah was not a peasant. Meg unfolded a paper that looked like a prescription; slid her glasses along her nose; held them with one finger. She always sat with her knees spread largely. In order not to have Meg’s thigh crushing his, her neighbor, a priest in a dirty cassock, had to squeeze against the window.

“She doesn’t care,” Sarah said to herself. “She hasn’t even looked to see who is there.” When she got down at the next village Meg was still rereading the scrap of paper, and the bus rattled on to Nice.

Sarah never mentioned having seen her; Meg was such a cranky, unpredictable old lady. One night she remarked, “Sarah’s going to have trouble landing Roy,” there, in front of him, on his own terrace. “He’ll never marry.” Roy was a bachelor owing to the fact he had too many rich friends, and because men were selfish.… Here Meg paused, conceding that this might sound wrong. No, it sounded right; Roy was a bachelor because of the selfishness of men, and the looseness and availability of young women.

“True enough, they’ll do it for a ham sandwich,” said Tim, as if a supply of sandwiches had given him the pick of a beach any day.

His wife stared at him but changed her mind. She plucked at her fork and said, “When Tim’s gone – bless him – I shall have all my meals out. Why bother cooking?” She then looked at her plate as if she had seen a mouse on it.

“It’s all right, Meg,” said Roy. “Sarah favors the cooking of the underdeveloped countries. All our meals are raw and drowned in yogurt.” He said it so kindly Sarah had to laugh. For a time she had tried to make them all eat out of her aunt’s bowls, but the untreated wood became stained and Roy found it disgusting. The sight of Sarah scouring them out with ashes did not make him less squeamish. He was, in fact, surprisingly finicky for someone who had spent a lifetime around colonial prisons. A dead mosquito made him sick – even the mention of one.

“I
t is true that Roy has never lacked for pretty girls,” said Tim. “We should know, eh, Roy?” Roy and the Reeves talked quite a lot about his personal affairs, as if a barrier of discretion had long ago been breached. They were uncomfortable stories, a little harsh sometimes for Sarah’s taste. Roy now suddenly chose to tell about how he had met his own future brother-in-law in a brothel in Hong Kong – by accident, of course. They became the best of friends and remained so, even after Roy’s engagement was broken off.

“Why’d she dump you?” Sarah said. “She found out?”

Her way of asking plain questions froze the others. They looked as if winter had swept over the little terrace and caught them. Then Roy took Sarah’s hand and said, “I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t gallant – I dumped the lady.”

“Old Roy probably thought, um, matrimony,” said Tim. “Eh, Meg?” This was because marriage was supposed to be splendid for Tim but somehow confining for his wife.

“She said I was venomous,” said Roy, looking at Sarah, who knew he was not.

“She surely didn’t mean venomous,” said Tim. “She meant something more like, moody.” Here he lapsed into a mood of his own, staring at the candles on the table, and Sarah remembered her shared vision of his unassuming gravestone; she said to Roy in an undertone, “Is anything wrong with him?”

“Wrong with him? Wrong with old Tim? Tim!” Roy called, as if he were out of sight instead of across the table. “When was the last time you ever had a day’s illness?”

“I was sick on a Channel crossing – I might have been ten,” said Tim.

“Nothing’s the matter with Tim, I can promise you that,” said his wife. “Never a headache, never a cold, no flu, no rheumatism, no gout, nothing.”

“Doesn’t feel the amount he drinks,” said Roy.

“Are you ever sick, Mrs. Reeve?” Sarah asked.

“Oh, poor Meg,” said Tim immediately. “You won’t get a word out of her. Never speaks of herself.”

“The ailments of old parties can’t possibly interest Sarah,” said Meg. “Here, Roy, give Sarah something to drink,” meaning that her own glass was empty. “My niece Lisbet will be here for a weekend. Now,
that’s
an interesting girl. She interviews people for jobs. She can see straight through them, mentally speaking. She had stiff training – had to see a trick cyclist for a year.”

“I abhor that subject,” said Roy. “No sensible prison governor ever allowed a trick cyclist anywhere near. The good were good and the bad were bad and everyone knew it.”

“Psycho-whatnot does not harm if the person is sound,” said Meg. “Lisbet just went week after week and had a jolly old giggle with the chap. The firm was paying.”

“A didactic analysis is a waste of time,” said Sarah, chilling them all once more.

“I didn’t say that or anything like it,” said Meg. “I said the firm was paying. But you’re a bit out of it, Roy,” turning to him and heaving her vast garments so Sarah was cut out. “Lisbet said it did help her. You wouldn’t believe the number of people she turns away, whatever their education. She can tell if they are likely to have asthma. She saves the firm thousands of pounds every year.”

“Lisbet can see when they’re queer,” said Tim.

“What the hell do you mean?” said Roy.

“What did she tell you?” said Meg, now extremely annoyed. “Come on, Tim, get to Friday.”

But Tim had gone back to contemplating his life on the Other Side, and they could obtain nothing further.

Sarah forgot all about Mrs. Reeve’s niece until Lisbet turned up, wearing a poncho, black pants, and bracelets. She was about Roy’s age. All over her head was a froth of kinky yellow hair – a sort of Little Orphan Annie wig. She stared with small blue eyes and gave Sarah a boy’s handshake. She said, “So you’re the famous one!”

Sarah had come back from the market to find them all drinking beer in The Tunnel. Her shirt stuck to her back. She pulled it away and said, “Famous one what?” From the way Lisbet laughed she guessed she had been described as a famous comic turn. Roy handed Sarah a glass without looking at her. Roy and Tim were talking about how to keep Lisbet amused for the weekend. Everything was displayed – the night racing at Cagnes, the gambling, the smuggling from Italy, which bored Sarah but which even Roy did for amusement. “A
picnic,” Sarah said, getting in something she liked. Also, it sounded cool. The Hayeses, those anxious tourists at her hotel in Nice, suddenly rose up in her mind offering advice. “There’s this chapel,” she said, feeling a spiky nostalgia, as if she were describing something from home. “Remember, Roy, I mentioned it? Nobody goes there … you have to get the keys from a café in the village. You can picnic in the churchyard; it has a gate and a wall. There’s a river where we washed our hands. The book said it used to be a pagan place. It has these paintings now, of the Last Judgment, and Jesus, naturally, and one of Judas after he hung himself.”