I Cannot Get You Close Enough (2 page)

I arrived in London on a Monday afternoon, wandered around, made phone calls, slept off my jet lag. On Tuesday morning I went out in a taxi to find the place where Sheila lived. It was a ground-floor flat with a walled garden. A note attached to the door instructed delivery people to leave packages with the landlady. I descended the four steps to the yard, walked primly around a hedge and ascended four steps to a red door with a pot of pansies beside an exotic-looking doormat. I knocked, and a woman my mother's age opened the door. “I'm looking for Mrs. Rothschild,” I said. “She may be calling herself MacNiece now. She's my sister-in-law. She didn't know I was coming. I just got here.”

“She's off on holiday,” the woman said. “Would you care to leave a message then?”

“Do you know where she's gone? How long she's gone for? It's important that I find her. I won't be here long, in London. I need to talk to her.”

“She wouldn't want me telling her whereabouts, you know.”

“I will pay you.” I paused, watched her, went on. “I have to find her. I'll pay whatever you think it's worth to tell me where she's gone.”

The woman opened the door wider, straightened up, looked me in the eye. “I'll take a note,” she said. “You can leave word for her.”

“I'm sorry. That was the wrong thing to say. I didn't mean to bribe you. I have to find her, that's all. It's the welfare of a child. I'm the child's aunt. She deserted the child and now she wants it back and I'm over here to spy on her. If you'll let me come in and talk to you I could make you understand. I'm an American writer. My British publishers are Faber and Faber. I'm very respectable, as writers go. If you could tell me where she's gone. I really am her sister-in-law. What name is she using now, by the way? Both were in the directory.”

“She calls herself MacNiece. You come on in. I'll see what I can do.” She opened the door wider. A face came out from the soft gray hair. She had black button eyes, a wide brow, the sort of pale lustrous skin the British are famous for.

“I appreciate this,” I said. “I guess you can see I'm frantic.”

“You come on in. I'll hear you out.” She led the way into a small cozy room with red upholstered sofas and Indian shawls draped over tables. I told her the story and she listened without interrupting. Then she opened a drawer in a desk and took out a package of American cigarettes and held them out. Viceroys, cigarette of my squandered youth. I hadn't smoked in years but I took the cigarette and the light she offered. She lit mine and then her own and sat down opposite me on a sofa. “I'm Mrs. Archer,” she began. “My friends call me Amalie. I'll tell you what I know. She's no favorite of mine, your sister-in-law, that's for certain. Hardly has a word for anyone except to complain about something. Never stops for a soul. She sent a boy packing a while ago who came to wash the windows. Devil's time I had getting him to come back.” Amalie inhaled and blew the smoke up into a shaft of light. “I wouldn't want her getting hold of a child of mine. I've seen her kind before, women who go all cold, dry up and hate the world.”

“She didn't go cold.” I inhaled and added my stream of smoke to Amalie's. They mingled in midair, a microcosm, the birth of clouds. “Sheila was born cold, came out cold from the womb. Well, she's done all the damage she's going to do to my family. It's going to stop.”

“Would you care for sherry then? I've got a bottle of amontilado my brother picked up. I've been saving it. No good to drink alone.”

“Sure,” I said. “I'd love it. That would be fine.” So we opened the sherry and poured it into small red glasses and began to talk. Then we went next door to Sheila's flat to look around. There was not much there. It was musty, depressing, bare. It was impossible to imagine Sheila in such a place. “She went off a fortnight ago,” Amalie explained. “Had a party one night and the next day they all left. I've cleaned it up since then. She hires a cleaning lady when she's here but she won't trust her with a key.”

“I can't imagine why not. There's nothing here.”

“There were more things a while back. They were taken off. She's not here as often as she was, back last summer.”

I got up and walked around the rooms again. Whatever else this flat meant, it meant Sheila was broke. If she was broke, that explained why she needed Jessie. If she had Jessie, her father would have to give her money. He would never let Jessie live like this. Suddenly I wanted to be outside. I wanted to protect Sheila from this flat. If Sheila lived in a place like this, then we might all be in danger. Danger? How had I come to perceive the world as full of danger? The world is full of beauty and possibility and crazy dazzling people. I stopped at the back door and turned to Amalie. “Let's sit in the garden and finish the sherry,” I said. “I never get to talk to real Londoners. I always end up talking to reporters.”

“Well, we can't drink it all,” she said. “We'd be in hospital if we drank the bottle.”

So I spent the afternoon in a walled garden drinking sherry with Amalie Archer, who had been in the Royal British Air Force during the war and received medals from the Queen. The medals were duly produced and duly marveled over, along with pictures of her dead husband, who was killed in North Africa in the same war, and snapshots of her last trip to Bath. She had friends, Amalie assured me, and a brother in Oxford who came down for holidays. “Have to have your friends,” she concluded. “Take your sister-in-law. She stays alone for weeks sometimes. Barely leaves her door.”

“What does she do inside?”

“I wouldn't know, love. Sends out for groceries or the papers. Then suddenly will leave like this and not come back for a fortnight.”

“Does she have another house somewhere? In the country perhaps.”

“Not that I know of. There, there's a jack — that redbird has been in this garden for twenty years. Him or his progeny. See that post, that's his post. Never fails to cheer me up to see him take his seat.”

“Do you put out seed for him, for the birds around here?”

“Sometimes I do. She didn't like them being here. Said they stained the yard with their droppings. So I quit since she asked me to. They can come and get it at my place. Still, he likes to sit there.”

“That's our Sheila. She always has hated animals. She hates fish. Imagine hating fish.”

Amalie shook her head. “I wouldn't be worrying about a court giving a little girl to her. You can't get her to look you in the eye. If you look at her she looks away.”

“She can be charming when she wants something. I've seen her get her way from people you thought would never fall for her, and yet they do. When she wants somebody she goes after them. Pity, flattery, charm, whatever it takes. She can fake it when she needs to.”

“Well good luck to you.” Amalie raised her glass. “I'll keep my eye out here for anything that might help you.”

“You're helping now. You're helping by trusting me.”

“Don't forget to have them send the books around. The ones you wrote. I'll tell you what I think of them when I get through.”

“Oh, don't do that,” I answered. Then I laughed out loud. “Oh, please don't do that to me.” The sun was moving down the sky behind a bank of scattered clouds. The redbird deserted his post for a tree. Amalie and I carried the glasses inside and closed up the flat and walked out onto the street. I was slightly drunk and reasonably amazed to have had such a good time. Good old universe. I squeezed Amalie's hand and walked off down the street in the direction of Queen's Square, where I hoped to find a taxi. I knew she was watching me and I sauntered as lightly as possible, wanting to give her every last bit of whatever it was she had found in me to like.

I flew to Stockholm the next day to see my Swedish publisher. When I returned to London I went back to Sheila's flat and found it vacated. “She came three days ago, with a man from Germany I've seen before,” Amalie informed me. “She got it out of me you'd been here and she said she was going to the States. She said to tell you hello.”

“Was she angry with you for letting me in?”

“No. I think not. She was showing off for the man, if you want my opinion. Being very cordial to me, she was. I helped her pack up her things and she paid me very well. Also, she left the rent for the rest of the month. You aren't looking for a place, are you?”

I considered it. “Is the phone still connected, in her name?”

“No, they came and took that out the day she left.”

“I have a place, thank you. Let's have tea,” I added. “Sometime soon. It was nice talking with you last week. A good memory.”

“We'll do that then.” She smiled and I saw the girl she must have been, in a war with Germany, with hair that wasn't gray and those eyes.

“Did you wear a cap?” I asked. “A hat. With your uniform in the war?”

“Oh, did I ever,” she laughed. She squeezed my hand. “Did I ever wear my brave chapeau.”

So I had found Sheila's lair but no Sheila. Sheila had flown the coop, gone home to start her court proceedings. Still, I had that afternoon in a walled garden with a British heroine and I remembered it. Every time I have seen a bird sitting on a post I have thought of Amalie, her brave life and her eye on the redbird in the garden. Maybe that's why Daniel fell in love with Sheila, to watch her. Because she seemed a different species. A beplumed helpless starving little bird. Skinny little bones and thin white skin covered with dimity and lace and figured silk, rings on her fingers, Capezio sandals on her toes, sashes and Peter Pan collars and cashmere and tweed and in the summer off-the-shoulder blouses and that red-and-yellow sundress with the tie on one shoulder and the other shoulder bare. Perhaps it was the plumage that fascinated him. That a human being was willing to devote her entire life to getting dressed. Perhaps that was her fascination. Or perhaps it was the face that stared out from underneath the hairdos and rose on its neck above the finery. That face in the middle of that perfection. That unsmiling unhappy pleasureless little perfection of a face. (Which later became beautiful in Jessie.)

Maybe Sheila was the last victim of the Victorians. Their very last devotee and victim.

 

Anyway, my brother Daniel loved her. “She's got him,” I told Phelan, one summer when he was visiting. “She's got him just where she wants him.”

We were sitting on the porch watching them. Daniel was shooting baskets. Sheila was sitting in a wicker chair in that red-and-yellow dress, watching him shoot. She never said, that's wonderful, never clapped, never applauded. She just sat there in that sundress with a tie on one shoulder and the other shoulder bare and watched. He had been shooting for half an hour without pausing or seeming to come up for breath, only glancing her way if a shot went in or one went seriously awry.

“How could she have anyone?” Phelan said. “I can smell her from here. There's a smell they have, the real bitches. Like the smell of something about to die or give you leprosy. Pussy smell. Uncle Dudley said he smelled it once on a whore in Memphis and that once you smell it you can never forget it.”

I guess I blushed. Phelan Manning was the only boy in the world who would talk like that to a girl from Charlotte. He pretended not to notice my blushes and went right on. Got up and put his foot on the porch rail. Phelan and I were in college. I guess Daniel and Sheila were about fourteen. Maybe it was the summer I ran away and married Walker.

Phelan went on. “Uncle Dudley was sucking a whore's cunt on the table in Matamoros while we watched. Then he gave her a hundred dollars for letting him do it. He said it was to teach us not to be afraid of anything. He said the thing to fear is not doing anything you want to do before you die.”

“I don't want to hear about it,” I said. “I've heard all I can stand about that trip to Mexico. That's all you've talked about all summer.” It was true. His Uncle Dudley and his cousin Charles Dunbar had taken them parrot hunting. A Mexican general who owns orange groves had them down to shoot the parrots that eat the oranges. The parrots come in flocks up out of the swamps and eat all the oranges and ruin the harvest and they shoot them from the roll-back top of Mercedes touring cars. Driving around in groups of three. One to drive, one to shoot, one to load. Driving around in between the orange trees shooting parrots as fast as they can shoot. On the way to the orange groves they had stopped in Matamoros to fuck whores, and Phelan's uncle had been bitten by a dog in the street and wouldn't even get the rabies shots. “He's still alive,” Phelan kept saying, when he told the Mexican stories that summer. “I guess he just can't die.”

“Anyway,” Phelan concluded. “That's who this little girl reminds me of.”

“Of what? The whore or your Uncle Dudley?”

“Of the way that smelled. Maybe it's for sale, maybe that's what I'm smelling. We ought to get Daniel away from that before he gets any older. They get their hooks in you and every time you see them you want to lay them down. You can't forget the first one.”

I sighed. This was going to go on all summer. If I hung out with Phelan, I had to hear about his sexual conquests. Phelan was ahead of his time in the sexual revolution. He had leaped over his pale generation in the South. “Okay, Phelan,” I said. “Who got their hooks in you? Who was the first girl you did it to?”

“I guess I can tell.” He leaned down across his propped-up knee, seemed to contemplate a pressing moral dilemma. “She doesn't live here anymore so you will never meet her.”

“You aren't supposed to tell even if they live in Alaska,” I answered. I got up from my chair, moved closer to him. He turned and faced me, that wonderful soft look on his face. It was before I ran away and married Walker or I would have known what all that meant. I didn't know. We didn't know anything back then. We talked about it but we didn't know. Anyway, I never fell in love with Phelan. We were too right for each other, distant cousins, such good friends. It would have been too easy and neither of us wanted anything to be easy.