The View from Here (9 page)

The next day Phillip bought me a ham salad in the coffee shop downstairs, and the story of Chloe's difficult infancy, her mother's disappearance, the valiant efforts of his parents and various friends to help, came tumbling out.

“She really took to you, though,” he said eventually.

“I took to her,” I replied.

Ten months later we were married.

Recently Helen, sitting with me one afternoon while Phillip worked upstairs, interrupted some rambling narrative about a book she had just finished and said to me, “Did you never want children of your own, Frances?”

The directness was not typical of her. I was surprised and must have looked it, but she did not pull back, just gazed at me with those gray green eyes, the same ones Phillip has, and an expression of sincere interest.

“Once, maybe. But Chloe was like a child of my own. At least I don't think I would have loved a child of my own any more than I loved her.”

Helen nodded and smiled a smile full of gratitude and acceptance and kindness, a smile that she had smiled at me many times before.

The real question, though, is whether a good deed cancels a bad one, whether evil is undone by penance. Some people believe that, don't they? My friend Catherine is deeply forgiving; I think she would believe it. Do I? Do I think these kinds of processes, addition and subtraction, will figure in the final reckoning?

I devoted myself to Chloe, devoured her. Spent all my energy on activities that calmed her and food that pleased her and making for her a whole safe little bubble of life that allowed her to be a bright, adorable child. Helen and Andrew had a granddaughter to spoil, and Phillip had a little girl to delight in. And I had my own private Jericho. Because mothering can provide a vast wall of protection from the outside world if that is what you are looking for.

Children's needs are so constant and so urgent that I daresay my attentions to my husband came second at times, but I was doing something right, wasn't I? Something important and decent and worthy. Phillip had a home and a lovely child; he seemed happy. Both of us wore Chloe's progress like a badge, like a confirmation of the meant-to-be aspect of our union. So when did that stop being enough for him? And if it was only fairly recently, is he still a good husband by virtue of his previous behavior? Does his erstwhile virtue cancel the lies I know he presents me with now?

What would Catherine think, with her compassionate soul, if I told her of the indecent haste with which Phillip had left the table, that night of the whiskeys and sodas, in order to fetch the telephone for me so that I could call her and ask her to leave her own husband and children and spend a week with me while he escaped to London? Would she think that twenty years of fidelity, if indeed it had even been that, canceled the debt of the past year? The debt I was sure he was about to redouble.

• • •

We were just two, Mason and I, at a poolside breakfast. Even the children slept late that day. I had woken early, and lain listening for the sound of him swimming as he did every morning. He had a routine. I got up when I heard the water disturbed and watched him from my window till he pulled himself out of the water, leaning heavily for a moment on his forearms on the ledge at the deep end of the pool. He wrapped a towel around his waist before going inside.

Over round pieces of hard bread, I told him I was supposed to teach that day.

“I'll drive you into town,” he said.

I nodded and smiled. I felt weightless.

In the car, driving, he extended his arm without looking at me and rested his hand near my knee. I looked at it and then away, staring instead, intently, at the featureless view from the passenger window. We were on the long straight part of the road.

Suddenly he braked. I turned to him, surprised.

“Darling,” he said, “you are an adorable girl, and I adore you. Don't spoil that by trying to understand everything.”

I knew that he meant about Sally. I knew it because, feeling his hand through the fine cotton of my skirt, I had been thinking about Sally. I met his glance, a little dopey in the clutch of the endearment. Darling.

“Don't try to understand everything,” he repeated. He leaned over then and kissed me very quickly and very hard, as if it mattered, before putting the car back into gear and continuing on. “It's all much simpler than you think,” he said, lifting my arm and touching his lips to the hollow of my palm.

Letty had been my student for almost nine months, but that day was the first day that I noticed how starkly her immaculate neatness conveyed her poverty. Dressed, as always, in her navy pleated school skirt and white blouse, she lay her precise hands on her notepad and looked up at me from her seat at her mother's kitchen table, waiting for the lesson to begin. She was a sweet-faced, studious girl, whose family scrimped for the pittance I charged them. They wanted a future for her, a future that would probably take her north of the border and far away, to a country where she would in turn scrimp for her own children's education. Her English was miraculous.

“What are the interests of the American girls?” she asked.

“‘Hobbies' is another way of saying ‘interests,' Letty.”

“Hobbies,” she repeated, trying the word for feel, sealing it in her head. “What are the hobbies of the American girls?”

I thought for a moment, trying to fit a hobby on Paige or Lesley. It was difficult, matching them to such an organized concept. They were lazy, those girls, appealing, but lazy. It was all the maids, and the money, cleaning up after them.

“They like to play tennis,” I said.

Letty nodded, but her forehead pinched momentarily. She had hoped, I think, for more common ground. “Perhaps,” she suggested brightly, “they have a collection.”

Letty had a collection of plaster figurines, dressed in the national costumes of different countries. Nine countries were represented so far.

“Perhaps,” I answered. Then, “I had a collection when I was your age.”

Letty was fourteen, like Paige.

“Of what your collection?” she asked, pleased.

“What did you collect?” I corrected. “Shells.”

“Shells? Las conchas?”

“Yes. My mother used to say that they made my bedroom smell like fish.”

She hesitated, processing, and then she laughed.

Later, before I left, she wrote
Hobby
and
What Did You Collect?
in her notepad, between faint lines the color of swimming pool water.

I stopped on the corner of Letty's street to comb my hair. I was glad that I had; he was standing already where we had arranged to meet.

“Hello,” he said, smiling.

“Hello.”

We bought gum for the children and papers for Richard. Waiting to pay, just for a second he took my hips in his hands with a deft possessiveness that blurred my ability to think. We crossed the square after that, him leading me by the hand, just as if we were any other couple. Any simple sort of couple, in love. We went to buy, just for the sake of it, avocados at the market, then we sat at a café for a while drinking coffee, looking silently out at the square with our chairs on the same side of the table and our thighs almost touching.

Driving back, he said, “Is it left here?”

I knew that he was asking for directions to my apartment.

He crossed the courtyard behind me, closed the apartment door purposefully at my back, and pulled me to him. I was neither completely naive nor terribly experienced those days, and I felt for a moment the way that they say swimmers can feel like when they're drowning. As if a conscious instruction to resist were battling a more seductive sensation. For a few thrashing seconds, in a pointless negation of my part in the rituals that had brought us there, I stiffened to him, but he persisted determinedly, with no new lover's tentativeness, and any will I might have had to stay afloat weakened. And was gone.

Later, on the blue cotton bedspread, when he began to snake his hands with intention over my breasts and thighs for the second time, I asked him to take off his watch.

“Why?” he said, his weight across me.

“It reminds me that we have to remember the time.”

“Where's your watch?”

I felt a small thump of shock when Jenny asked, but Mason just said, “I dunno. Around.”

“We bought him that watch, didn't we, Jessica? For his birthday.”

Jessica nodded.

“We did, didn't we, Dad?” Jenny coaxed.

“Sure.” Mason winked and lifted his daughter to swing her out over the pool. She squealed and clung to his neck. When he put her down, her swimsuit had ridden up over the peachy curve of her bottom.

Mason sat, and the twins settled either side of him, Jessica stroking the bleached hair on his arms. From the shade of the bougainvillea Paige, too grown up for her father's knee, watched.

Sally lifted the avocados from the chair next to her husband and said, “Wasn't it clever of them, Patsy, to think of avocados? I'll have Christina make a vinaigrette.” She turned carrying the bag in front of her, one hand poised delicately underneath, as if it contained something unpleasant that might scatter at any minute across the terrace, and Patsy, without reply, turned a masked gaze to me for a second.

“Avocados are a perfect food,” Skipper declared. She had the full bikini on today, stars and stripes, looped at the sides with stringy bows. “Like some nuts. You could probably live on them.”

“Believe me, honey,” Ned said, hoisting his glass, “you can't live on anything that you don't get a little buzz from.”

“You don't need chemicals, though, to get a buzz, do you?”

“She means,” Bee Bee suggested, “that you can always puff on a little weed when you need an escape from your careworn Californian existence.”

“Well that,” Skipper replied smoothly, “and, you know, natural highs, like love.”

“Amen to that.” Carl's ponytail bobbed when he bounced his head.

“I think Skipper's got a point about this eating thing,” Richard said.

Patsy turned slightly, shifting her attention to her husband.

“It's like what I was saying about the kids,” he went on earnestly. “They never eat anything with any nutrition in it. When I was a kid, we ate proper food.”

“Good wholesome vittles. All served up on silver platters by three Irish maids.” Bee Bee was hitting her morning high.

Carl, missing the wit, and the acid in it, stood and patted his stomach. “Your body is a temple.”

Bee Bee sitting forward sharply, snapped, “For Christ's sake, Carl. You used to be a normal person.”

“I'm still a normal person,” Carl said, flustered. “I'm just a normal person who's expanded his horizons a bit, that's all.” It was feeble. He sat heavily. There was a beat, the air left his lungs, and his shoulders dipped at the deflation.

In the silence Patsy began to pull her lounger ineptly into the sunshine. The legs scraped. She bent forward over the head end, accentuating the shadowy canyon of her cleavage, and her sunglasses slipped down her nose. She took them off.

“Give me a hand, would you?” she said, smiling at Mason.

“Of course.” He leaped up and took the foot end, and she maneuvered the other. Once in position, she adjusted the backrest with his help and settled, one leg bent mannequin gorgeous.

“Thanks.” She put her sunglasses back on, raising her eyebrows over the broad arches of the lenses.

Mason replied with a smile. Watching him, I felt my stomach contract. I was in love.

FOUR

T
OM KISSED ME ONCE
, in the kitchen in the middle of a party. How pedestrian that sounds now. How suburban. But it was something then, because I wanted it to be. I kissed him back. Tom was single at the time—he had divorced his first wife and had not yet met Alice, who is his second—but I was not. But, just for a moment, at that nightlit draining board, Ella Fitzgerald and Sonia's laughter in the background, I wanted to be, wanted to give in to the feel of unfamiliar lips on mine, unfamiliar hands at my waist.

It had not been long since Phillip had hurt me, betrayed me, I half believed, with Anthea, and compounded that betrayal by clinging pointedly to his injured attitude. Rethinking the whole business, after the row had dwindled to a bicker and then to a silence that had refilled again, drip by drip, with life's undramatic business, I realized that his protests had focused predominantly on detail. He had been like a child accused of stealing biscuits when in fact he has stolen cake. Phillip had clung to the flotsam of my mistakes, the pinpoints I had got wrong, in stating his case, and left the dark undertow that had buoyed them intact.

Anyway, the whole thing had left me feeling adrift, insecure, which is a dangerous way for a married person to feel. But then—as Phillip perhaps had—I reflected later, after drink and sentimentality had turned Tom's departure sloppy, and Phillip and I had crept in together to check on Chloe, angelic in sleep, that the price of clinging to the wrong rock in order to escape such a feeling would be high. I remembered that I knew exactly how high the price could be.

That little kiss, though, turned out not to be so fluffy, because Tom and I have been better friends for it. For having got it out of the way, I suppose. It was Tom who showed my drawings to Stella Crewkherne, who then asked me to illustrate some of her books. They were children's books, and I made a bit of money of my own from them. The little red-haired people I painted for her, all cute outfits and exaggerated roundness, paid for the oil by one of the modern Americans that hangs in what is now my dayroom.

It turns out to be worth a great deal these days, that picture, but that's not what I think of when I look at it, musing often for hours, as I must now that physical capacity is so much taken from me. I think about that kiss in the kitchen with Tom, and others. Others that preceded it.

• • •

The proximity of my lover's wife should have deflated the moony bubble of my desire for him. I am aware of that, was aware of it even then, but it did not. There were things that contributed to this, things that are somewhat hard to convey. The times, for instance. It seems feeble now, but there was then, and especially in that detaching, sensual heat, an atmosphere of general disregard, for practicality, for convention. And I was as convinced as the rest of the youthful world of the unquestionable rights of love, of passion, and of impulse. It seemed to me, anyhow, that Mason and Sally's relationship was on a rather mechanical, flat foundation, no deeper than habit. So once he was in my life in the way that he was I gave no time at all to searching for reasons to resist him.

He shifted the smooth curve of his shoulders toward me in the afternoon sun and asked, “Frankie, do you think we could get a couple of boats, maybe, and all go off somewhere for a day?”

I felt a flush rise in me at the mere sound of my name in his voice. He had kissed me only once, swift soft lips on the back of my neck, since we had arrived back from our tryst. We had eaten lunch with the others just as if there were no more sweetness between us than mere cordiality demanded.

“It's not usually hard to find boats,” I said.

Richard broke in to this gauzy communication enthusiastically, “We could probably find those fishing guys again.”

“I am
not
fishing.” Patsy held up the flat of her palm for emphasis.

“We don't have to fish. We could go to one of those coves we saw…or something.”

“It's a wonderful idea,” Sally interrupted, her subtle authority sealing the plan instantly. She brought both her hands together, fingers meeting near her mouth. Her rings sparkled. “Frankie, would you mind being a sweetheart and going back into town to find out about the boats? These sorts of negotiations tend to go better if you speak the language. I'd come with you, but I've got a date to whip Patsy at tennis.” I thought Patsy looked mildly surprised at this, but I didn't think about it for long. Mason and I would have two more hours alone together before drinks.

At six Ned emerged from the kitchen with a pitcher of martinis and a triumphant expression. I was the only person in the room.

“Where'd everybody go?” he asked.

“Showers, mostly.”

“I reckon hygiene's an overrated notion,” he said, putting the pitcher down.

I laughed.

He sat next to me on a boxy chair with a flower-patterned cushion, tiny birds poking pretty heads from hand-painted foliage. For a long moment we didn't speak, watching, instead, the children playing with Tallulah out by the pool.

“You enjoying yourself, Frankie?” he asked, without turning to face me.

“Yes,” I said, “very much.” I was aware, though, of a deeper level of interrogation that the lightness of the question implied. I didn't like it.

“They can be a bit overwhelming,” he went on, running a finger idly along the armrest of his chair.

I didn't reply.

He stood then and, opening one of the sideboard cupboards, took out a small dish and filled it from a jar of olives. When he had finished, he turned to me. “I married into it, so I know what this kind of life looks like to an outsider. But you gotta remember, Frankie, they don't.” Behind him condensation was forming on the martini pitcher. “This is it for them. How they've always lived. How they always will live. They sorta write their own rules,” he finished, sighing a little.

I nodded uneasily.

“It's the kind of life that can make people…casual,” he said, choosing the word, “about all kinds of things.”

I looked down and saw, not my hands, but the abyss that was opening up before me. I was headed for it. I knew. Willingly deaf to the increasingly distant voices of my own intelligence, conscience, and upbringing, I set myself, determinedly, against Ned's tethering tone. What could he know, anyway, about me, or Mason?

I stood up.

“Yes,” I said, ending the conversation. “Actually, I think I'll change now too, before drinks.” And then, so as to soften my abrupt exit, I went over and kissed his cheek.

He clasped my arms for a moment and looked into my eyes as if about to say something more. Perhaps he saw from their bright deflection that I didn't want to hear it.

“Better put this in the icebox,” he said, dropping his hands and turning to take the martini pitcher back to the kitchen.

It wasn't hard to put what Ned had said out of my mind. Standing in a corner later, momentarily alone with the now familiar-feeling shape of a martini glass in my fingers, I thought about my own futurelessness. In the face of it, a love affair with Mason didn't seem casual at all. It seemed concrete, solid, something to hang on to.

This conviction was soon rewarded. Mason joined me, turned his wandering eyes from the scarlet ridges of an enormous painting on the opposite wall, and whispered, “Hello, sweetheart,” in a voice that was as laden as I could possibly wish for, with promise.

• • •

I was sleeping when Catherine arrived and awoke to hear her voice in the next room, and Phillip's. I thought that they were probably talking about me; people do that a lot now, and I marvel at it because I cannot guess what it is that they think they know. What does the surface of me give away? I cannot imagine. The hidden parts are so deeply hidden.

“Hello.”

Catherine, sensing my waking, had come in. She kissed me. Phillip, following, kissed me too. And then he said that perhaps he ought to be going, but, so as not to depart too abruptly and also to show manly usefulness, he spent a few seconds doctoring the fire, poking at it ineffectually. Catherine and I, recognizing this small maleness, this need to prod at something, looked at each other with no expression and absolute knowing, and I was filled with a rush of gratitude for her presence. And a desire too to be alone with her, for Phillip to be gone, no matter where it was that he was going.

“Thank Chloe for the bath oil,” I said, relieving him of further duty. It was a cue he seemed pleased to grasp.

“I will,” he said decisively, propping the poker back against its brass stand, and I knew that he would forget.

Chloe had sent the bath oil by messenger. It had arrived that morning encased in an elegant black box lined with lavender tissue paper. I had put the box on the sideboard, next to a photograph that had been taken in Singapore when we went to visit my parents. I wanted to show it to Catherine.

“I'll see her tomorrow,” Phillip said. Of course I knew this already. Chloe had invited Phillip to supper at her flat. Ed would be there too no doubt, and Chloe planned to cook. It is a new trick with her, cooking. She plays at it rather, adds ready-made sauces to pasta, that sort of thing. But we indulge her in it, as we do in everything.

Catherine, who is a real cook, began unloading the stocks she'd brought with her, holding packages and jars up for my approval: ginger biscuits, cheese biscuits, olives, plum jam, all stacked together in a basket we had bought together in Barnham market when Chloe was about nine, before Catherine's youngest, Ness, was born. Phillip went upstairs to get his things. While he was there, the telephone rang. Inside me something caught.

It was only Dan, though, Catherine's husband, with some spousely inquiry, some need which Catherine easily dispatched. They didn't talk for long, and by the time she had hung up and passed Dan's greetings on to me, Phillip had reappeared, garment bag in hand. He said goodbye again, and in the still evening we heard his car skim the gravel, signaling his absolute departure.

The September day had been warm, but it had given way to a surprisingly cold evening, and so Catherine got up and stoked the fire to a roar. Then she went into the kitchen to fetch herself and me a glass of wine. It was all so companionable. I was delighted with the dull domesticity of it and wondered if, despite my concerns about Phillip, there weren't just bigger things, more important things to be concerned with now. A lot in life had begun to seem small.

The boats for the day-trip had been secured easily enough by a run into town and a few American dollars, and the next morning we were aroused early by maids and children and greeted by the smell of pancakes.

Skipper, in a loose puff-sleeved top that slipped constantly from one narrow shoulder, licked maple syrup from her fingers.

“It's a completely natural substance,” she said.

“Like opium,” Bee Bee offered, still gravel-voiced from sleep.

Christina came to the head of the table and leaned toward Mason's ear. “Madam says go without her.”

“Without her?”

“Yes, sir. She will sleep some more.”

I finished my coffee, listening, of course, with keen attention, but wanting to appear distanced from this exchange.

Bee Bee, at Mason's side, stood. “Hey. If
I
can get up, Lady Severance can get up too.” Then, catching Christina's glance, she sat down again.

“She says you should go without her,” Christina repeated to Mason.

“She told you this just now?”

Christina, her hands clasped neatly in front of the white half apron she wore over her black uniform, bent from the waist to lean in closer to him. Lowering her voice, she said, “No sir, last night.”

“
Last night?”

“Yes, sir. She asked me not to wake her this morning, just to tell you that you should go without her.” She stood upright, duty done.

Mason tapped his glass with a butter knife and announced, “Madam sends her regrets.”

Howie quit his pancake for a second and glanced quizzically at Jenny, who had listened, from her seat near her father's, to the entire exchange with Christina.

“Our mother,” she explained, with a small sigh and deliberate patience, “is going to stay home instead of coming on the boat with us.”

“Oh.” Howie picked up the maple syrup with two hands and poured some clumsily onto his plate. “Good. She can watch Hudson.”

Bee Bee tipped her head back and hooted.

Bee Bee demanded a sedan chair for the wade through the water to the boats, which were moored, canopies fluttering, in the bay. She had to make do with a hoisting hand each from Ned and Richard. She clutched her backside protectively as it was released. “Hold the smart remarks,” she said, lifting a warning finger to Ned.

Ned blew her a kiss and then saluted before wading back to shore to help with picnic things.

“Keep up the b.s., sailor,” she called after him. “It's part of your charm.”

Skipper rose effortlessly from the sea next to Bee Bee and, standing sure-footed in the boat, turned and put her arms out. Children and baskets of food and beach things were passed to her. Mason and Patsy and Richard and I got in one of the other boats with Howie.

“Give me Tallulah,” he shouted.

But Lesley, who was holding the dog, pretended not to hear. Tallulah, head poking from Lesley's clutch as Ned ferried them both through the glassy water, looked as she always did: petrified.

“It's okay, Tallulah,” Jenny called from her perch next to Bee Bee. “It's just a boat ride.” Then she squealed as the outboards started to cough and grabbed excitedly at Jessica.

“Keep still,” I called, but they didn't hear me. Their hair was already beginning to whip back from their faces.

When we rounded the bay and passed the wineglass rock, Mason leaned toward me, put an arm across my shoulders, and pointed to it. I nodded, as if acknowledging a minor pleasantry, and we exchanged a smile. When he took his arm away, I turned and lowered my hand into the froth of soft, salt spray.