You Are Not A Stranger Here Page 7

  "Funny, I miss him in the most peculiar ways," Mrs. Giles said. "We'd always kept the chutney over the stove, and as we only ever had it in the evenings, he'd be there to fetch it. Ridiculous to use a stepladder for the chutney, if you think about it. Does just as well on the counter."

  "Yes," Owen said.

  They stared together into the blue flowers.

  "I expect it won't be long before I join him," she said.

  "No, you're in fine shape, surely."

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  "Doesn't upset me--the idea. It used to, but not anymore. I've been very lucky. He was a good person."

  Owen could hear the telephone ringing in the house.

  "Could you get that?" Hillary called from the kitchen.

  "I apologize, I--"

  "No, please, carry on," Mrs. Giles said.

  He left her there and passing through the dining room, crossed the hall to the phone.

  "Owen, it's Ben Hansen."

  "Ben."

  "Look, I feel terrible about this, but I'm not going to be able to make it out there tonight."

  "Oh."

  "Yeah, the meetings are running late here and I'm supposed to give this talk, it's all been pushed back. Horrible timing, I'm afraid."

  Owen could hear his sister closing the oven door, the water coming on in the sink.

  "I'm sorry about that. It's a great pity. I know Hillary was looking forward to seeing you. We both were."

  "I was looking forward to it myself, I really was," he said.

  "Have you been well?"

  Owen laughed. "Me? Yes. I've been fine. Everything's very much the same on this end . . . It does seem awfully long ago you were here."

  For a moment, neither of them spoke.

  Standing there in the hall, Owen felt a sudden longing. He imagined Ben as he often saw him in his mind's eye, tall and thin, half a step ahead on the Battersea Bridge, hands scrunched 79

  into his pockets. And he pictured the men he sometimes saw holding hands in Soho or Piccadilly. In June, perhaps on this very Sunday, thousands marched. He wanted to tell Ben what it felt like to pass two men on the street like that, how he had always in a sense been afraid.

  "You're still with the firm?"

  "Yes," Owen said. "That's right." And he wanted to say how frightened he'd been watching his friend Saul's ravaged body die, how the specter of disease had made him timid. How he, Ben, had seemed a refuge.

  "And with you, things have been well?"

  He listened as Ben described his life--columnist now for the paper, the children beginning school; he heard the easy, slightly weary tone in his voice--a parent's fatigue. And he wondered how Ben remembered them. Were Hillary and Owen Simpson just two people he'd met on a year abroad ages ago? Had he been coming here for answers, or did he just have a free evening and a curiosity about what had become of them? What did it matter now? There would be no revelation tonight. He was safe again.

  "Might you be back over at some point?" he asked. He sensed their conversation about to end and felt on the edge of panic.

  "Definitely. It's one of the things I wanted to ask you about. Judy and I were thinking of bringing the kids--maybe next summer--and I remembered you rented that place up north. Is there a person to call about getting one of those?"

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  "The cottages? . . . Yes, of course."

  "Yeah, that would be great. I'll try to give you a call when we're ready to firm up some plans."

  "And Judy? She's well?"

  "Sure, she's heard all about you, wants to meet you both sometime."

  "That would be terrific," Owen said, the longing there again.

  "Ben?"

  "Yes?"

  "Who is it?" Hillary asked, stepping into the hall, drying her hands with a dishcloth. A red amulet their mother had worn hung round her neck, resting against the front of her linen dress.

  "Ben," he mouthed.

  Her face stiffened slightly.

  "Hillary's just here," he said into the phone. "Why don't you have a word?" He held the receiver out to her.

  "He can't make it."

  "Is that right?" she said, staring straight through him. She took the phone. Owen walked back into the dining room; by the sideboard, he paused.

  "No, no, don't be silly," he heard his sister say. "It's quite all right."

  " A B E A U T I F U L E V E N I N G , isn't it?" Mrs. Giles said as he stepped back onto the terrace. The air was mild now, the sun 81

  beginning to shade into the trees. Clouds like distant mountains had appeared on the horizon.

  "Yes," he said, imagining the evening view of the lake from the garden of their cottage, the way they checked the progress of the days by which dip in the hills the sun disappeared behind. Mrs. Giles stood from the bench. "I should be getting along."

  He walked her down the side of the house and out the gate. Though the sky was still bright, the streetlamps had begun to flicker on. Farther up the street a neighbor watered her lawn.

  "Thank you for the tea."

  "Not at all," he said.

  "It wasn't bad news just now, I hope."

  "No, no," he said. "Just a friend calling."

  "That's good, then." She hesitated by the low brick wall that separated their front gardens. "Owen, there was just one thing I wanted to mention. In my sitting room, the desk over in the corner, in the top drawer there. I've put a letter in. You understand. I wanted to make sure someone would know where to look. Nothing to worry about, of course, nothing dramatic . . . but in the event . . . you see?"

  He nodded, and she smiled back at him, her eyes beginning to water. Owen watched her small figure as she turned and passed through her gate, up the steps, and into her house. He stayed awhile on the sidewalk, gazing onto the common: the expanse of lawn, white goalposts on the football pitch set against the trees. A long shadow, cast by their house 82

  and the others along this bit of street, fell over the playing field. He watched it stretching slowly to the chestnut trees, the darkness slowly climbing their trunks, beginning to shade the leaves of the lower branches.

  In the house, he found Hillary at the kitchen table, hands folded in her lap. She sat perfectly still, staring into the garden. For a few minutes they remained like that, Owen at the counter, neither of them saying a word. Then his sister got up and passing him as though he weren't there, opened the oven door.

  "Right," she said. "It's done."

  They ate in the dining room, in the fading light, with the silver and the crystal. Roses, pink and white, stood in a vase at the center of the table. As the plates were already out, Hillary served her chicken marsala on their mother's china. The candles remained unlit in the silver candlesticks.

  "He'll be over again," Owen said. Hillary nodded. They finished their dinner in silence. Afterward, neither had the appetite for the strawberries set out on the polished tray.

  "I'll do these," he said when they'd stacked the dishes on the counter. He squeezed the green liquid detergent into the baking dish and watched it fill with water. "I could pour you a brandy if you like," he said over his shoulder. But when he turned he saw his sister had left the room.

  He rinsed the bowls and plates and arranged them neatly in the rows of the dishwasher. Under the warm running water, he sponged the wineglasses clean and set them to dry on the rack. When he'd finished, he turned the taps off, and then the kitchen was quiet.

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  He poured himself a scotch and took a seat at the table. The door to the garden had been left open and in the shadows he could make out the azalea bush and the cluster of rhododendron. Up the lane from where they'd lived as children, there was a manor with elaborate gardens and a moat around the house. An old woman they called Mrs. Montague lived there and she let them play on the rolling lawns and in the labyrinth of the topiary hedge. They would play for hours in the summer, chasing each other along the embankments, pretending to fish in the moat with a stick and string. He won their games of hide-and-go-seek because
he never closed his eyes completely, and could see which way she ran. He could still remember the peculiar anger and frustration he used to feel after he followed her to her hiding place and tapped her on the head. He imagined that garden now, the blossoms of its flowers drinking in the cooler night air, the branches of its trees rejuvenating in the darkness.

  From the front room, he heard a small sound--a moan let out in little breaths--and realized it was the sound of his sister crying. He had ruined her life. He knew that now in a way he'd always tried not to know it--with certainty. For years he'd allowed himself to imagine she had forgotten Ben, or at least stopped remembering. He stood up from the table and crossed the room but stopped at the entrance to the hall. What consolation could he give her now?

  Standing there, listening to her tears, he remembered the last time he'd heard them, so long ago it seemed like the 84

  memory of a former life: a summer morning when she'd returned from university, and they'd walked together over the fields in a brilliant sunshine and come to the oak trees, their green leaves shining, their branches heavy with acorns. She'd wept then for the first time in all the years since their mother had taken herself away. And Owen had been there to comfort her--his turn at last, after all she had done to protect him. At the sound of his footsteps entering the hall, Hillary went quiet. He stopped again by the door to the front room. Sitting at the breakfast table, reading those letters from America, it wasn't only Ben's affection he'd envied. Being replaced. That was the fear. The one he'd been too weak to master.

  Holding on to the banister, he slowly climbed the stairs, his feet pressing against the worn patches of the carpet. They might live in this silence the rest of their lives, he thought. In his room, he walked to the window and looked again over the common.

  When they were little they'd gone to the village on Sundays to hear the minister talk. Of charity and sacrifice. A Norman church with hollows worked into the stones of the floor by centuries of parishioners. He could still hear the congregation singing, Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Their mother had sung with them. Plaintive voices rising. And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green? Owen could remember wanting to believe something about it all, if not the words of the Book perhaps the sorrow he heard in the music, the longing of peo85 ple's song. He hadn't been in a church since his mother's funeral. Over the years, views from the train or the sight of this common in evening had become his religion, absorbing the impulse to imagine larger things.

  Looking over it now, he wondered at the neutrality of the grass and the trees and the houses beyond, how in their stillness they neither judged nor forgave. He stared across the playing field a moment longer. And then, calmly, he crossed to the wardrobe and took down the box.

  S I T T I N G I N T H E front room, Hillary heard her brother's footsteps overhead and then the sound of his door closing. Her tears had dried and she felt a stony kind of calm, gazing into the wing chair opposite--an old piece of their parents' furniture. Threads showed at the armrests, and along the front edge the ticking had come loose. At first they'd meant to get rid of so many things, the faded rugs, the heavy felt curtains, but their parents' possessions had settled in the house, and then there seemed no point.

  In the supermarket checkout line, she sometimes glanced at the cover of a decor magazine, a sunny room with blond wood floors, bright solid colors, a white sheet on a white bed. The longing for it usually lasted only a moment. She knew she'd be a foreigner in such a room.

  She sipped the last of her wine and put the glass down on the coffee table. Darkness had fallen now and in the window she saw the reflection of the lamp and the mantel and the bookcase.

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  "Funny, isn't it? How it happens." That's all her friend Miriam Franks would ever say if the conversation turned onto the topic of why neither of them had married. Hillary would nod and recall one of the evenings she'd spent with Ben up at the cottage, sitting in the garden, talking of Owen, thinking to herself she could only ever be with someone who understood her brother as well as Ben did.

  She switched off the light in the front room and walked to the kitchen. Owen had wiped down the counters, set everything back in its place. For a moment, she thought she might cry again. Her brother had led such a cramped life, losing his friends, scared of what people might know. She'd loved him so fiercely all these years, the fears and hindrances had felt like her own. What good, then, had her love been? she wondered as she pulled the French doors shut. Upstairs, Owen's light was still on, but she didn't knock or say good night as she usually did. Across the hall in her own room, she closed the door behind her. The little stack of letters lay on her bed. Years ago she had read them, after rummaging for a box at Christmastime. Ben was married by then, as she'd found out when she called. Her anger had lasted a season or two but she had held her tongue, remembering the chances Owen had to leave her and how he never had.

  Standing over the bed now, looking down at the pale blue envelopes, she was glad her brother had let go of them at last. Tomorrow they would have supper in the kitchen. He would offer to leave this house, and she would tell him that was the last thing she wanted.

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  Putting the letters aside, she undressed. When she'd climbed into bed, she reached up and turned the switch of her bedside lamp. For an instant, lying in the sudden darkness, she felt herself there again in the woods, covering her brother's eyes as she gazed up into the giant oak. 88

  W A R ' S E N D

  2

  H E H A S S E E N these cliffs before, in picture books. He has seen the wide beaches and the ruined cathedral. Ellen, his wife, she has shown him. In the taxi from the station, Paul looks over the golf course, and there is Saint Andrews: the bell tower, rows of huddled stone houses, the town set out on a promontory, out over the blue-black sea. Farther, in the distance, a low bank of rain cloud stretches over the water; 89

  waves emerge from the mist. He follows them into shore, watching them swell and crest, churning against the rocks. Ellen reaches across the back seat and takes his hand. They have come here for her to use a library at the university. They have paid for their trip with the last of her grant money and a credit card. Paul's latest psychiatrist, the one they can't really afford, has said a change of scenery might help, a break in the routine of empty days. He's been gone from work a year now, low as he's ever been and tired. In their apartment, in a college town in Pennsylvania, he has lain in bed in the early morning hours as Ellen slept beside him, and known that her life would be easier if he were gone. He's been too fatigued to plan.

  Until now.

  Staring at the dark face of the cliffs, his mind quickens enough to see how it might happen, and for a moment, sitting there in the taxi, holding his wife's hand, he feels relief.

  A F T E R C H E C K I N G I N T O

  the hotel and unpacking their

  things, they go looking for a restaurant. The main street is cobbled, lined with two-story stone buildings, dirty beige or gray. A drizzle has begun to fall, dotting the plate glass windows of the shops closed for the night. The pubs have stopped serving food. They wander further and come to a restaurant on the town square, a mock American diner lit with traffic signals, the walls hung with road signs for San Diego and Gary, Indiana.

  "Charming," Ellen says, opening the front door. 90

  Paul hangs back, stilled by a dread of the immediate future, the dispiriting imitations he sees through the windows, a fear of what it will feel like to be in there, a sense that commitment to it could be a mistake, that perhaps they should keep going. Though he doesn't want that either, having already sensed an abandoned quality to this town: the students gone for their Easter break, the pubs nearly empty, the dirty right angle where the sidewalk meets the foundation stones of a darkened bank, the crumpled flyer that lies there, all of it gaining on him now, this scene, these objects, their malignancy. He tries to recall the relief of just an hour ago: that soon this will en
d, the accusatory glare of the inanimate world. But there on the pavement in halogen streetlight is a scattering of sand that appears to him as if in the tight focus of a camera's lens, sharper than his eyes can bear. He takes a steadying breath, as the doctor told him to when the world of objects becomes so lucid he feels he is being crushed by their presence.

  "You sure about this?" he asks.

  "It's late--we might as well," Ellen says. "We can find something better tomorrow."

  He could stop her, try to explain, but as she looks back at him from the doorway he can see her nascent concern in the slight tilt of her head. She will be looking for signs of improvement in him, indications the trip was a good idea. He will want time alone in the days ahead. If she worries too much now, she may hesitate to go by herself to the library. It's the first time in months he's been capable of an instrumental thought, a weighing of needs.

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  "All right," he says, and follows her through the door. At their table, the coffee stains and salt crystals on the redand-white checkered oilcloth press him back in his chair; escaping them, he looks across the room to see a broad-faced old woman, her skin the color of a whitish moon. She sits at a table by the kitchen sipping a mug of tea. Their eyes meet for a moment, neither of them looking away. They stare straight at each other, expressionless, oddly intimate, like spies acknowledging each other's presence in a room of strangers. She nods, smiles weakly, turns away.

  When the waitress arrives, Ellen orders her food. Then there is silence. Paul reads the description of the chicken sandwich again. From the speakers, he hears the smooth, crooning voices of the Doobie Brothers.

  Time barely moves.

  "Paul, you know what you want?"

  He looks into Ellen's face, the slight rise of her eyebrow, a sign of apprehension, so familiar from the days she first saw him depressed, a year before they married, when for no apparent reason his basic faith in the world, the faith that there is a purpose in working or eating, dissolved, and she came to his apartment day after day with her books, conversation, news--patient and loving. Many times he's wondered why, after seeing him that way, she still married him. She was wrong to do it, he knows now, seeing her strained eyes and pursed lips, the way the old sympathy must fight against frustration. He is the chain and the weight. No matter how she struggles, he will pull her under eventually. Getting out of the 92