The Loved Ones

by Mary-Beth Hughes

  They pulled out onto the highway, and Nick said not to worry, he’d tied a string on his wrist to remind him which side to drive on. He waved a bracelet of twine.

  She lost her son, said Jean. Did you know?

  Who?

  Anna Percy-Flint, she had a son who died in a car accident. I think his name was Digby, but it might be the other one who died. I couldn’t be sure. And I couldn’t ask.

  Oh good lord, Nick said. God, I don’t know if I can drive. He started to laugh. I’m going to stop.

  Why?

  I’m too stoned.

  I’ll drive. Pull over.

  You need the bracelet. He started plucking at the twine.

  Pull over, then you can give it to me.

  Nick stopped the car; it was a quiet village road, and late. He got out of the car and stretched his arms up over his head. It’s nicer here; there are some stars. Can’t see the stars in London. Maybe we should get a little place out here. Don’t you miss that?

  Jean slid into the driver’s seat; the warm leather felt good, reassuring. Get in! She was suddenly afraid someone could come out of nowhere and hurt him. Get in! she cried.

  He opened the back door of the Bentley. You can be Jack for a night. You can’t be any worse a driver than he is. Nick slammed the door shut and lay down. Jean locked the doors. I’m not sure I know the whole trip.

  You’ll be great. It’s easy. Don’t worry.

  Jean sat looking out at the darkened houses along the road, all very sweet and safe-looking.

  Did you know about her son. Had she told you about him?

  Whose son?

  Anna Percy-Flint, her son was killed.

  Oh, bullshit.

  Jean turned around and looked at him over the top of the front seat. Nick.

  Nothing—that’s the rule of thumb—nothing that Anna Percy-Flint ever says is true. It’s just fun. Improvisation. Believe me if Anna has a son at all he’s tucked into Cambridge with a nice boyfriend, just like his papa.

  But she told me.

  Sweetheart, she told you something she thought would interest you.

  Jean turned forward, her hand to her mouth; she could feel her hard breath on her fingertips.

  Are we going? asked Nick. It’s all a game, that’s all. Jean read the gilt letters on the pub sign across the way, the George and Dragon: a green beast curled a heavy tail under a dim light. As soon as her hands stopped shaking she’d start the car; in the meantime Nick’s breath slowed to a quiet snore. She looked at the deep curl of the dragon’s tail and wished she could lick it. Maybe she was just stoned, too.

  14

  The short wide curved stair made every arrival an entrance. Lily felt her legs go heavy. She forced her feet to shamble down each step until she could squish into a cluster of older kids who ignored her. From there she searched out Peter Healy’s location. He was yawning by the one open window to oxygenate his muscles; slowly he stretched one calf then the other, his long green eyes dull with boredom. By the end of the month, right after Thanksgiving, he’d be at Concord Academy in Massachusetts where he could really train properly. He told Lily he was making a disciplined departure from the American School. He’d just skip but that might put his academic record in jeopardy. Lily watched him with so much sadness and he did not watch back. She’d told Margaret later over the phone that his ambivalence was that intense. Maybe.

  Yeah, maybe, said Margaret.

  There were too many American high schoolers to fit comfortably into the tearoom of the Working Men’s College. It was half belowground and smelled vaguely of coal fumes. The pebbled glass windows, close to the ceiling, were sealed. Only one, Peter’s, actually opened onto the sidewalk. All the others held animated leg shadows rushing by at head level. A feature wall depicted a faded bare-chested swimmer clutching a trident standing on a wave of pistachio ice cream. He’d been defaced and repaired many times in the short months the American School had camped out here, renters until the new school building was completed in St. John’s Wood.

  Now, rolling blackboards with chalked lists were wheeled into position and the headmaster, Norman Phipps, announced the location of their classes for that day. This daily morning assembly was a crucial organizing strategy for the school. He cleared his throat and a shush went through the room. Ladies, he began, and this caused a rupture of dissent. Gentlemen, buffoons, and laggards, your kind attention, please. It was widely known, the only attendance taken all day, was done right then by his secretary. The speech reminding them of the merits of a progressive education ended when she gave the nod: All accounted for, sir. Then the students siphoned out, some to the newly assigned classrooms, some right back out the front doors.

  The problem was a disagreement about the use of coal. The workingmen liked to burn a tiny bit of coal now and then, completely illegal, and it left a hollow stink on everything. So the Americans were stiffing them for part of the rent, and every night the workingmen locked different classrooms. The American teachers complained about the soot settling into the weave of their new cashmere sweaters, but the workingmen didn’t care and as far as Lily could tell the students didn’t either.

  Lily was the youngest in her class, the youngest in the school. At St. Tom’s there’d been a handful of Christmas babies in her class, but at the American School Lily seemed shockingly immature next to her classmates. At least her mother thought so. She’d said this once or twice, but then she contradicted herself, saying that Lily had changed dramatically between twelve and thirteen. She wished she’d just please, please, pause for a moment, just stop. Lily was difficult now. Lily wouldn’t listen. But she did listen to her mother. All the time, she thought. Especially in the middle of night, when she’d find her mother up and thinking again.

  If anything, Lily felt more mature than ever. Soon she would catapult beyond these older freshmen. She’d enrolled in an open Russian literature class with mostly upper classmen and then fell behind almost immediately, too sleepy to make sense of Prince Myshkin’s misconceptions. He liked everyone, and that was a mistake; that much Lily understood. When she began to sense the depth of her failure—how lost she was, and so fast!—she too wandered back out the front door once Mr. Phipps’s secretary waved the all clear.

  Anyone could do whatever they pleased in this school. That was the responsibility part of the system, said Mr. Phipps, with shining eyes. He was passionate about the open assertive vibrant minds being created even in the less than optimum conditions of the Working Men’s College.

  Lily hadn’t slept very well the night before, and by late morning she was already hungry for lunch. Long after the house had gone quiet, she’d awakened in the blue-green light of the army’s security lights next door. The long end of the apartment and all the bedrooms looked out on the courtyard shared and guarded by the neighboring United States Army headquarters. She’d listened to the buzz of an emergency generator, always kept on low alert. Beneath the buzz, Lily heard a tiny cry like a cat or a baby. It was hard to know at first and she listened hard, moving out of the covers to the bars on her windows as if to push them open wider. A tiny sound, but when she listened too closely it went away. She lay back down on her flat pillow and waited. This kind of waiting would have reminded her of her brother if any reminding were necessary. It was like an idea of what someone else might be thinking about Lily in this moment. Maybe Peter Healy. If he came into her bedroom and found her listening for a kitten in the blue-green light. He’d think: She’s lost her brother. It hasn’t been so long, really. He’d sit down, maybe not beside her that would be too strange, but on the other bed, maybe he’d sit cross-legged and tell her jokes to distract her. It was a nice idea, but she knew it didn’t have much to do with her brother.

  For the first weeks at school, Lily had tried the tearoom for lunch, but now not even the teachers could be forced to stick around for the boiled sausages with bits of hard fat like rubber knobs and thin grainy mash potato mix. Everyone except the Christians went to the pubs.


  The only bad thing about the pubs was the deep embarrassment of going into them at all. The little pockets of friends seemed more conspicuously together than they did at the scarred tables of the tearoom. The Blue Pumpkin wasn’t the closest pub. It was up on the High Street, near the tube stop. But Camden Town was mainly working class, the skinheads in heavy boots and workingmen in thick jackets looked unhappy to see the temporary tenants arrive at lunchtime. Only the Blue Pumpkin welcomed the Americans, so they crowded in for thick cheese and chutney sandwiches and sausage rolls.

  By eleven the Blue Pumpkin was already crammed. In a far corner a clutch of ninth graders toward the back looked like sophisticates with legs crossed and heads tilted back, smoking. The girls in Lily’s class were beautiful in a way her father would approve of. They had long hair cut in wings around cheekbones that even in the masked light of the pub looked gleaming. There was something about their fringed boots, velvet chokers, and sequined bodices, something potent and meaningful. They were much more than what they had to say about who they liked or hated that day. And they understood, these beautiful girls, that it was better if they didn’t talk so much. That talking wasn’t so important.

  Lily, balancing her sausage roll and a slopping half pint of shandy, edged through the crowd and asked to join them and they were very polite. Very polite. She found a spare low stool without spilling. Twice before she’d done this and they were always courteous, which should have been good. Smiling such smiles they could all be models, easily, why bother with school? But her father was saying lately that being beautiful wasn’t necessarily enough. The really interesting women, he said, had brains, too. He thought her mother should try to do something with her life. He’d mentioned this now several times to her mother’s incredulity. Her mother had made him a home, had, well, the list went on and on and to articulate it was infuriating. Then her mother would say that perhaps Lily’s father was in the middle of an adjustment phase.

  Lily’s mother in her velvet chair and her silky velvet robe smoking long slender cigarettes her eyes dark and forlorn, her hair long and blond, was certainly as beautiful as the dramatic girls in Lily’s class. And her mother’s drama—her adjusting husband, her lost son, and now Poppa, too—was more important to Lily than anything she heard at school, or just louder.

  Today Lawrence Weatherfield was eating lunch with the girls, too. His strange sun-bleached eyebrows looked even whiter and his dark curly hair was pulled back in a ponytail, showing off brown eyes, heavy lids half closed as if ready for another nap, but he was laughing about something, about his family. They’d come from Riyadh and Lawrence was staying at a hotel with his mother. His father, tying up loose ends in the Middle East, was expected by Christmas.

  To Lily, Lawrence looked nothing like a boy who’d lived all over the world. He wore a navy blue L.L.Bean sweater and baggy light brown corduroys like every boy she knew in New Jersey. But to the listening girls, his head bowed over a double portion of sausage and mash, he listed the countries: Indonesia, China (only for a few months), Thailand, Tunisia, Rhodesia, Japan, and finally Saudi Arabia. London was a big compromise made for his mother, Lawrence said. The mental health posting. When he looked up at them his eyes were long and ungiving and full of laughter. He asked to bum a cigarette, wiping his mouth with his hand, and three of the girls threw their packs at his chest.

  All this was very funny. Lily ate her pastry roll and watched the changing brown eyes of Lawrence Weatherfield. Every once in a while they swept her face and she felt a quick alert to freeze. She’d hold tight and wait and then the sweep settled on the girls cuddled on the banquette, passing cigarettes, sharing drags. Lily thought about Russell in New Jersey. Something about Lawrence, even in such a different place reminded her of him, how they were like two fat plants with big foamy leaves drawing all the moisture. There was something very tiring about how charming and deep Lawrence was. He had Sartre tucked into his back pocket; he talked about Naked Lunch, which sent a jolt through the table, while his eyes narrowed and smiled and slid.

  Okay, Lily said, standing up from the low stool, nearly knocking it over. She picked up her plate and mug, saying, See you all later, with a dopey little finger wave. Stop waving, she thought, but it didn’t matter. Lawrence had begun to whisper something to Mirabel Kendrick and everyone else leaned forward hoping to hear what made her usually tranquil face turn red, eyes blinking, laughing tears.

  Lily brought her things to the bar. Even though she’d only walked a few feet, looking back at the laughing girls, it felt like she’d rocketed miles away. She left ten shillings in a teacup for tips and pushed out into the cold overcast day. The winter air was penetrating here—because of the damp, that’s what her father said—and Lily could feel that. She stood for a while not knowing what to do. It was too miserable out to go back to the Working Men’s College. She picked up three chocolate flakes and a pack of Rothmans at the red news kiosk and considered, then went down into the underground train station, where it was still cold, but at least she was out of the skin-coating drizzle.

  It was exactly this cold in December when Cubbie died; that was true. And New Jersey could be damp like London, though her father said London was worse. But her grandmother had driven her up the Garden State Parkway to the turnpike in a terrible rain, past the oil refineries with their blistering smell to the high double bridge with all the water down below, over the state line, which her feet passed first, then straight up the avenues to the cross street and into the half-moon entry drive.

  Lily’s father waited for her under the awning at the hospital, his blue coat flying in the wind. He opened her door and waved to Doris behind the wheel. Then her grandmother was pulling away, which surprised her, and her father hugged her close then sent her through the revolving glass door. The hallways are long at the children’s hospital as if walking through them you might find yourself in a different city if you went outside. The colors changed and when they arrived at the green corridors, Lily and her father took the elevator. Cubbie was in his regular room and lights were bright and the television was on. Her mother was talking to a doctor, but it must not have been important because she stopped and kissed Lily, and the doctor stepped out.

  Cubbie looked very tired. Like he was sleeping with his eyes partway open. Which was something he could actually do. Lily said hi, but Cubbie was too tired to say much. He smiled a tiny bit and his eyes were swollen like he’d been crying, and bloodshot. Lily asked him, Are you crying? And he moved his head on his pillow such a tiny bit no. Cubbie’s blood vessels were very close to the skin, and his skin was a pale yellow like a tan had faded and not been replaced with new tan. He hadn’t been outside for a long time. Lily put her hand on the bump of his feet and both her parents followed the doctor out of the room. Lily listened, but Cubbie wasn’t going to talk. She put her face down on the bed and her shoulders, too, next to his legs, just the way they did at home, sleeping in the bed under the blue shelf with all his models, even when his bones were very brittle and she had to be so careful, but now she kept all her weight off the bed, so nothing at all could hurt him. She put her face against the weave of the blanket, lightly, and the rest of her she suspended just above the bed but close to his tired self like always. And she held still this way and watched the television like in the den at home. Cubbie was very quiet. His body didn’t move, just a small tremble close to her face like a butterfly might make. So when her parents took her to dinner later at a big table all to themselves and told her that Cubbie wouldn’t be living much longer Lily did know that. Then Momo arrived in Poppa’s new Eldorado to drive her back to New Jersey. Two days later, Lily woke up at her grandmother’s house and she didn’t have to go to school.

  15

  Thanksgiving was a downer for everyone. All the pressing, unanswered phone messages from Lionel. The baby would have to wait to be baptized it seemed, until Nick could come to his senses. And Jean had pleaded for the long holiday weekend in New York. We don’t need to even touch
New Jersey! Lily wept as if the world hinged on the slight chance—if she can—that Margaret Foley would get on a train and meet her in Grand Central Station. No, everyone had been unhappy. Even Vivienne Vimcreste told Nick she really fancied a holiday. I’ll bunk at the Sherry, too. Different floor, of course. Jean refused to cook and they ended up, last minute, at the Europa, just the three of them staring at the overdone steaks and potted shrimp. Nick decided to cheer things up, at least at the office.

  As executive director Sheldon Walpole had kept a modest suite on the second floor with gray-flocked wallpaper and an oak desk he’d brought with him from the States. Now a big rectangular dent in the beige carpet marked his departure. The desk installed for Nick floated in the imprint. Not enough light, Nick said. And Tania agreed and had a funny idea. Have you seen the library?

  On the third floor, tall leaded windows and handsome bookcases filled with old volumes. A gorgeous hush to the room. They left everything, said Tania. It’s a crime really. Can’t imagine why the children wouldn’t at least take an atlas or two. But the mansion that housed Billy Byron’s London interests was purchased with fixtures and fittings intact. Nick’s new office would be suitable for a lord said Tania. I mean truly, sir.

  Nick settled in. The old velvet piles had just been carried out and the new Italian leather sofas brought in, arranged and rearranged to his satisfaction, when Tania came in one morning to say that a Mr. Freeball Krill was shifting and squirming in the general waiting room. He’s a starer. I’ll say that much for him. Good concentration. Asked me my age!

  What did you tell him?

  Don’t make me laugh, sir. Think the gentleman slept in the pub by the smell of him, said Tania, giving Nick a postcard. Handwritten in black ballpoint was a name he knew. Should I send him on to the embassy, or try one of the help services?