Simon & Schuster
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Alison Larkin
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Larkin, Alison.
The English American: a novel/by Alison Larkin.
p. cm.
1. Adoptees—Fiction. 2. Birthmothers—Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 4. British—United States—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6112.A745E65 2008
823'.92—dc22 2007025431
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6566-6
ISBN-10: 1-4165-6566-3
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
For my husband
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
—T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
Contents
SPRING
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
SUMMER
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
FALL
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-six
WINTER
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
SPRING
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
SUMMER
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Chapter Fifty-five
Chapter Fifty-six
Chapter Fifty-seven
Chapter Fifty-eight
Chapter Fifty-nine
Acknowledgments
About the Author
SPRING
Chapter One
ITHINK EVERYONE SHOULD BE ADOPTED.That way, you can meet your birth parents when you’re old enough to cope with them. Of course it’s all a bit of a lottery. You never know who you’re going to get as parents. I got lucky. Then again, if I’d been adopted by Mia Farrow, rather than Mum and Dad, today I could be married to Woody Allen.
As far as the side effects are concerned, I discovered early on that the key to dealing with a fear of abandonment is to date people you don’t like, so if they do leave you, it doesn’t matter. Either that, or guarantee fidelity by dating people no one else wants.
Which is why, at the age of twenty-eight, while my friends are getting married to men who look like Hugh Grant, I’m still living with my sister.
Charlotte and I are sharing part of what used to be a Georgian house, before it was turned into flats, in West London, opposite Kew Gardens. The Kew famously referred to by Alexander Pope, on the collar of Prince Frederick’s new puppy:
I am his Highness dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
On the morning of the day everything will change, but I don’t yet know it, I jump out of bed half an hour after the alarm goes off, wolf down a bowl of cornflakes, and scrabble about in the bottom of the broom cupboard for an umbrella. It’s raining, of course.
“Charlotte, have you seen my brush?”
“Try your sock drawer,” she says.
My sister is a buyer for Harrods. She’s looked the part since she was three. She emerges from her room, impeccably dressed, blond bob perfectly in place, handbag over her shoulder, car keys already in hand.
“Pippa,” Charlotte says, “you’re a gorgeous woman. Positively Titian. I wish I looked like you, but—how can I put this? Today you look like a plumber.”
I’m wearing overalls, which I enjoy very much. Put a different colored T-shirt under them and it looks like you’re wearing an entirely new outfit.
“I suppose you want a lift to the tube too?”
“Thanks,” I say. God knows how I’m going to get to work on time when Charlotte moves in with Rupert.
We’re almost out of our front door, which has been opened and shut by Londoners for nearly two hundred years, when Charlotte spots a tiny piece of cornflake on my shirt. She takes her hanky out of her pocket and starts jabbing at it with the precision of a woodpecker.
Ever since I can remember, my sister, friends, parents, and occasionally even complete strangers have taken it upon themselves to wipe spills off my clothes. Without asking. They simply assume I feel the same way as they do about food stains. I don’t. I think it’s absurd that anyone thinks they matter.
But I also don’t like to hurt anyone’s feelings. So when people start wiping food stains off my clothing, I act surprised that the stain is there and thank them profusely.
It’s all about what interests you. If I spend a whole day with you, and someone asks me afterward how you are, I’ll know what you’re feeling, i.e., sad, happy, preoccupied, pissed-off—whatever it might be. I’ve always been able to tune in to people in that way. But ask me what you were wearing, and I’ll draw a blank.
Charlotte will not only be able to report on exactly what you were wearing, down to the color of your socks, she’ll somehow know about the hole on the inside of your shirt, even if you’ve tucked it into your trousers. She’ll know the name of your hairstyle, the brand of your lipstick, and the make of your car.
Charlotte was born a year after me. I was adopted. She wasn’t. It happens a lot, I gather. People think they can’t have children, adopt one, and then,bam , a few months later, the mother gets pregnant with a child of her own.
Like Mum, Charlotte thinks before she speaks, makes pros and cons lists, and is content with her life the way it is. She’s practical, grounded, solid, sure.
I, on the other hand, interrupt people because my thoughts fly out of my mouth. My handbag’s full of rubbish. And I want to do something that matters with my life. Right now I’d like to write plays, sing in musi
cals, and/or rid the world of poverty, violence, cruelty, and right-wing conservative politics.
I’ve tried to be happy leading the kind of life that makes Mum and Charlotte happy, really I have. But pretending to be interested in things I am not is becoming more and more difficult. Take Scottish dancing.
If you’ve ever been to any kind of Scottish dancing evening in the south of England, you’ve probably met my dad. He’s the Scot at the microphone, with the shock of thick white hair, barking out orders. He’s never happier than when he’s marching up and down a drafty church hall in his tartan kilt and sporran, teaching the English a new Scottish dance.
There are more than three thousand of them. To date he’s checked off two hundred and fifty-two. He keeps his dance list in the right-hand cubbyhole of his desk, next to his spare golf balls and his paper clips.
“Set to the left!” he shouts. Dad’s lived in England so long his Scottish accent is barely detectable most of the time. Except when he’s trying to teach the English to Scottish dance. Then his Scottish burr becomes much more pronounced.
“Now set to the right! Turn your partners. Very good, Charlotte. No, Pippa! Wrong way! This isn’t the Dashing White Sergeant!”
I’ve always felt restricted by Scottish dancing. You can’t do your own thing. If you twirl to the left and jump in the air when everyone else is turning right during the Eightsome Reel, for example, you’ll spoil the dance for everyone else.
I think it’s one of the saddest things in the world—don’t you?—when people are upset because the direction they’re going in feels all wrong for you—and you know you just have to go the opposite way.
Chapter Two
CHARLOTTE’S SPENDING THE WEEKENDwith Rupert in Paris. She’s hurrying toward her light blue Saab because she doesn’t want to get her suitcase wet.
“He’s going to ask you to marry him, you know,” I tell her.
It really is bucketing down with rain now.
“Get in!” Charlotte says.
Her car is clean and dry and smells of leather and lavender.
I know that Charlotte will accept Rupert’s proposal, because he’s perfect for her. He loves going to dinner parties with his fellow commodity brokers in the City as much as Charlotte does. They’ll get married after a long engagement. Then she’ll give up her job, and they’ll move to somewhere like Bath. They’ll have at least two children, and go on annual skiing holidays to Verbier and Val d’Isere in the winter, and somewhere hot in the summer—as long as it has all-day child care and inexhaustible supplies of wine.
“So here’s to you, Mrs. Darrington!” I lift up an imaginary glass of champagne.
Charlotte laughs again. Her blue eyes light up just like Mum’s when she’s utterly happy.
From what I’ve told you so far, you’re probably thinking that Charlotte’s the grown-up in our relationship. The one who looks after me. But it also works the other way around. I’ve protected Charlotte for years. Without her knowing it. By not telling her what’s really going on with me.
Charlotte and I share the same parents, but we don’t share secrets. I actually don’t think Charlotte has any, and I hate to burden people. Which is why Charlotte doesn’t know the truth about Miles. She thinks I broke up with him because I’m being fickle, wanting to play the field, because that’s what I want her to think. She doesn’t know that, for me, falling in love is terrifying.
And I haven’t told her about the dream that’s started haunting me at night. The one about the mother who gave me birth. If I let anyone in my family know how much I’ve been wondering about my other mother, they might feel displaced. As if I don’t love them anymore. As if I don’t need them anymore. And I do.
Charlotte drops me off at the tube and kisses me on the cheek. “Don’t get into too much trouble while I’m gone, Pip!”
I always feel a tug when I say good-bye to people I care about. Even if it’s just for the weekend. Especially this time. Perhaps a part of me already knows that everything is about to change.
Half an hour later, I get off the tube at Embankment, stop at the newsstand to buy a packet of Maltesers, a box of Ribena, and some prawn cocktail crisps, and walk down the Strand to work. I work for Drury Lane Publications, selling advertising space on the telephone inInternational CEO magazine.
The setting isn’t exactly salubrious. Thirty salespeople sit in cubicles in a large room in a white building opposite the back wall of the Theatre Royal. But I don’t mind. It gives me flexibility, and I can dress however I want.
It’s probably a combination of what Charlotte calls my “absurdly un-English enthusiasm”—and the fact that I have a posh accent—that makes me the top salesperson in the company. The rest are men.
I call Europe in the morning and America in the afternoon: “Hallo. My name’s Pippa Dunn. I’m working with Tony Blair.”
This isn’t strictly true. Someone from Tony Blair’s office told our editor that of course we could reprint one of his speeches in the magazine, because it was already in the public domain. But it gets me through to the right person.
“Our current goal is to help American companies break into the European market.”
This isn’t true either. Our current goal is to make as much money in commissions as possible. But I get caught up in my own pitch and,ping: I’ve sold another double-page spread for nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine pounds.
Ever since I started calling America, I’ve wondered if I’m speaking to someone who knows the parents who gave me birth. Maybe my real father is the governor of Virginia? Or doing something to help the poor people in New Orleans? Or doing what he can to bring the soldiers back from Iraq? He’s a Democrat, of course. He must be. We share the same genes.
And my real mother? What about her? Maybe she’s a senator? Unlikely. There are more women in the Iranian parliament than there are in the U.S. Senate—but you never know.
In London, in 2007, people in their twenties are supposed to hate everything. Especially America. And American foreign policy. And British foreign policy. And optimistic, successful people, like Richard Branson, who I swear the British only tolerate because he consistently fails to get round the world in his hot-air balloon. But I love America. I always have done. And not just because, despite my British accent and upbringing, I am, myself, really an American. I’ve always known I was adopted. But I didn’t find out my birth parents were Americans until I was fifteen years old.
Charlotte and I were home on summer holidays from our separate boarding schools. Charlotte went to Pelsham Abbey, because she was good at sports. I went to St. Margaret’s, because I was good at music.
While sending your children off to boarding school is considered barbaric by every American I’ve ever met, in England it’s still considered a privilege. It’s especially common if your parents live abroad, as mine had ever since Dad joined the Foreign Office. Important to give the children a solid base in England while one’s moving from post to post, and all that.
Anyway, I’d gone upstairs to Dad’s office to try to find what the British call Sellotape and the Americans call Scotch tape. It wasn’t where Mum said it would be, so I started rummaging about in the drawers of Dad’s desk to look for it. In the lower right-hand drawer, I noticed a file with my name on it.
I took the file out, and, inside it, found my old school reports—the ones I used to take on the plane with me, when I traveled from England to Kenya, or Hong Kong, or wherever Mum and Dad were stationed at the end of each term.
ART 11
Instead of drawing the fruit bowl still life everyone else drew in art class this year, Phillippa drew a rain forest. This rain forest, which comprised little more than an untidy mess of orange and green flowers, has now appeared in exercise books, on note pads, and, I am sorry to say, on the inside cover ofArt History Explained.Phillippa will not be permitted to borrow any more books until she has replaced the one she defaced.
Valerie Eason, Art teacher
MUSIC
Pippa rose to the position of head of Junior Choir because she has an unusually beautiful voice and clearly has a gift for performance. When she asked if she could teach the choir a song from a musical, as a surprise addition to the end-of-term concert, I agreed, assuming we would be treated to a song from one of the musicals Pippa is so fond of singing. “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” perhaps. Or “How Are Things in Glochamorra,” which she sings quite beautifully.
Fortunately I attended the dress rehearsal and was able to stop the theme tune from the television programShaftfrom being performed on Parents Day. These are not suitable lyrics for twelve-year-old girls, even if the song is performed in six-part harmony, and with perfect pitch.
Miss Dunk, Music teacher
LATIN
Phillippa’s essay on “My Family Tree, How I Came to Be Me” was not supposed to be a work of fiction. Even if it were true that Pippa is adopted—a popular fantasy amongst girls in the Lower Fourth—her real father could not possibly be King Lear. Even if King Lear were not a fictional character, he only had three daughters. And Phillippa was not one of them.
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