The English American

by Alison Larkin

  I could tell you were quick-witted, full of life, and utterly charming. But there was something else there too. Something I recognized. Your eyes gave you away. Even at twenty-one. There was a depth there. A sorrow that I knew you weren’t aware of yet. An understanding. An empathy. I knew, the moment I met you, that you were one of the few.

  And I knew, from the moment I saw you, that I wanted you. And when you walked away from me, the first time you walked away from me, I felt ripped apart, my love.

  Me too, my love.

  A month or so later we met by accident outside my building in the City. It was bucketing down with rain, and I was standing with the suits and the umbrellas, waiting for the rain to stop. And there you were, standing outside on the pavement, your head turned toward the rain, completely unselfconscious, without a waterproof, I might add. Whether you knew it or not, you were rebelling against England in general by being completely yourself.

  You clearly loved the rain and refused to wear protective clothing just because everybody else was. It made me feel rather stuffy for a moment, watching you standing there, a genuine free spirit, simply not caring about getting wet.

  When you saw me you grinned at me.

  “Hallo,” you said. “Let’s have lunch.”

  “I haven’t got any money on me,” I said.

  “I have,” you said.

  Then, irresistibly, you took me by the arm and led me to the third floor of the Wong Kei restaurant in Gerrard Street. We were the only non-Chinese in the place. You were a child, but you lit up the room. And even the usually unspeakably rude Wong Kei waiters smiled as you came in.

  You took your jacket off, and your shirt was damp with the rain. You were very wet. Your nipples were erect, my love. And so was I. We shared a bowl of roast duck noodle soup and a plate of shrimp lo mein. You paid the bill with great panache, producing a crumpled ten-pound note from your very wet pocket.

  Two weeks later, I invited you out, to reciprocate. I treated you to lunch at Boulestin. You made it clear you’d have much preferred to dine at the African restaurant next door—but you tolerated the fifty-pounds-a-dish menu in sumptuous settings as best you could.

  That’s when we exchanged histories.

  “Avoid safe places,” I said to you. “They are so very hard to escape from.” You seem to be following my advice to the letter.

  The next time I saw you, you asked me to bring you some of my paintings, and I did. You were wonderfully encouraging about them and you told me to paint all night if I didn’t have time in the day, but paint. I adored you for it. And then you said that, in the unlikely event that you ever came across an art agent, you would make sure to put them in touch with me.

  It’s true. I had. And I’d meant it. I’ve always been good at putting people together. I hooked Sally Pearse up with the photographer’s rep I met on a plane. She’s just had her first exhibition in Paris. And I hooked the president of the Sharton Shipping Company up with an actor friend of Neville’s who was fed up with being broke. He made his first million two years ago. With Billie’s help, I will try to do the same for Nick. I can’t wait to introduce him to Billie. Once you’ve seen a Nick Devang painting you don’t ever forget it.

  The next time I met you was in a lovely outdoor pub restaurant near Arundel, I can’t remember its name. It was a perfect summer’s afternoon. Everybody else had gone, and we were the only people left in the garden. Our table was discreetly placed behind a willow tree. You were wearing a short white skirt, which showed off your irresistible legs beautifully. Your hair was down, this time, and catching the light and—God, I wanted you.

  You were holding an ice cream in one hand and a cigarette in the other. There was a small piece of ice cream trickling down your neck that I wanted to lick off, before burying my face in your gorgeous bosom. I am not above suggesting such an operation to just about any other woman. But not you. I didn’t want to flirt with you. I wanted to kiss you on the mouth again, and so, when you’d finished the ice cream, I did. Gently. Carefully. A brush, no more. So you wouldn’t pull away.

  Our table settings were close together. There was a large white linen tablecloth over a tiny table, with pink roses in the center of it. I wanted to touch you. I needed to touch you. Unable to bear the tension any longer, sensing you couldn’t either, I reached under the tablecloth and put my hand on your leg.

  Below the table you were absolutely still.

  Above the table, your hands were tearing the tops off packet after packet of artificial sugar and pouring the contents into the ashtray. Then you stopped tearing off the tops of those silly packets of sugar and turned your hauntingly lovely face toward me. I moved my hand farther up your thigh, which was cool and soft and I kissed you again.

  Then you opened your eyes and for half a second you let down your guard. And in that half second I saw what you’d been hiding ever since I first kissed you in the woods. A longing, a passion, the like of which I’ve not sensed in a woman before or since.

  I had you in that moment. You. Naked, without camouflage. I knew I did.

  “What are we going to do, my love?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” you said.

  You knew precisely what I meant. You knew. But you were terrified. And I knew why. And so I watched you reach the part of you that wasn’t you. And in a voice that wasn’t really yours you said, “Nick, you’ve read me wrong.”

  I’d have felt rejected. I do easily, you know. But I knew you were lying. And I knew why. It would have been schizophrenic of me not to empathize. We shared the same pain, you and I. Only you were still too young to know that old wounds, however painful, can have no real power unless you give it to them.

  And then I let you go by saying, “I’d like to meet you again when you’re thirty.” I saw the relief cross your face as I knew it would. We’re frighteningly similar, you and I.

  Later, after I’d left London for Singapore, you sent me a letter telling me that you were going to challenge government corruption by writing political plays. It was so student-ish of you, so predictable.

  I told you I was going into the Year of the Dragon. You then wrote me a note saying “The rest of the world goes with you into the Year of the Dragon.” It was delightfully done, for a twenty-two-year-old. I hadn’t the heart to spoil things by replying.

  And now, here you are again, on the brink of the greatest adventure of your life, writing to me once more. I am honored, my lady.

  There aren’t many of us around you know. Those of us who were abandoned and have the courage to go back to our source to face whatever we find there. I wish you luck in your adventure. You did the right thing finding me again.

  What do I remember about you? Everything.

  Love, Nick

  P.S. I’ve started painting again. Not sure if they’re any good. Perhaps your mother would know?

  P.P.S. I’d like to leave you with some lines by Pound which he wrote just before he moved to Europe.

  I am homesick after mine own kind,

  Oh, I know that there are folk about me, friendly faces,

  But I am homesick after mine own kind…

  Nick remembered everything.

  And so do I.

  Our time is coming. I can feel it. Our kind’s time.

  FALL

  Chapter Twenty-three

  WHILEIWAIT FOR WALT,I show up at work, because there I can call Billie and my grandfather courtesy of Drury Lane Publications. But I haven’t sold an ad since I got back from America, and my bank balance is getting dangerously low.

  I tell my friends and family that the reason I can’t see anybody is because I am the sole emotional support for an Australian girl I met traveling, who just returned from Rajasthan with a mysterious, debilitating disease.

  But each night, as soon as work is over, I head for the bedroom in my flat as fast as I can and sit, smoking, with the curtains drawn, waiting for Walt’s calls.

  Walt says e-mail’s not safe and that he can only cal
l at certain times. His calls from Afghanistan usually come in the middle of the night.

  “This place is a wild, double-dealing, malevolent, ungovernable cesspool,” he says. “It’s run by a bizarre conglomeration of unimaginably ruthless warlords, tribal chiefs, and religious fanatics. Few Westerners have lived here long enough to fully understand it.”

  “Are you sure you’re safe?” I ask for the umpteenth time.

  Walt laughs, as he has every time I’ve asked that question. I know his laughter is meant to reassure me. And it does. Sort of.

  “I’m safer here than I would be crossing the street in Washington, D.C.,” Walt says. “I’m surrounded by the U.S. Army.”

  I picture the huge Americans dressed in heavy combat gear that I’ve seen on the news surrounding my father, who for some reason, in my mind’s eye, is wearing a linen suit and yellow bow tie.

  He tells me the battle he’s in the middle of fighting has something to do with winning a contract to help rebuild the country. Walt has devoted the last eight months of his life to the project and has invested every penny he has.

  “The game’s over, kid. You have to pay baksheesh to operate effectively in Afghanistan. But I’m working for a governmental organization, and the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prohibits paying bribes. It’s a catch-22.”

  I don’t fully understand what he’s talking about, but I don’t want him to think I’m stupid, so I say, “Oh yes,” a lot and hope whatever he’s doing allows him to come to London soon.

  On November 6, Neville rings my doorbell over and over again.

  “Pip? Are you in?” he says.

  The kitchen is buried in dirty dishes, cereal packets and empty boxes of Jaffa cakes. If I let him in he’ll know something’s up.

  “No!” I say.

  Neville rings the doorbell again.

  “Allright ! I’m coming!”

  Neville looks unusually dapper tonight, and I’m surprised by how glad I am to see him. So the outside worldis still there.

  “This is bad, even by your standards, Pip,” he says, wrinkling his nose at the debris.

  “I know.”

  “Where’s the Rajasthani?”

  “She’s not a Rajasthani! She’s an Australian girl just back from Rajasthan.”

  Great. Now I’m insisting on accuracy regarding the ethnicity of a girl I’ve completely made up.

  “Well, where is she? Under the table? Nope. Under the chair? Nope.”

  “She’s not here!” I say, laughing.

  “Good. Then you can come out with me.”

  Neville can be bossier than Charlotte on a bossy day, and there’s no point in arguing with him, so I jump into the first shower I’ve had in days, throw on my velvet trousers and the only clean blouse I can find, and head out the door.

  Looking across the tube at the cousin I love most, I wish I could tell him what’s going on inside me. But even if I understood it myself—I don’t—I certainly have no idea how to articulate it.

  We are headed for Dial a Date, a new bar in the city. Every table has a telephone on it and a number above it. You sit at a table, buying expensive drinks, and telephone people at other tables if you fancy them. We’ve been there two minutes when the phone at our table rings.

  “You’ve got—let me count here—one call and four people on hold,” I say to Neville.

  “They’re not calling me, you idiot.”

  I look around me. It’s not that the men are bad looking. I just have zero interest in being picked up by anyone at a bar. So I pretend to go to the loo, invite the blonde at table nine to take my place opposite Neville, and spring for a taxi home. So I can lie, curled up by the fire, as I have done every night for the past three weeks, waiting for a call from my father.

  That night I get home to Walt’s booming American voice on my Ansafone: “Hi there, kid, it’s me. I’ll be arriving at Heathrow from Kabul at three fifty p.m. tomorrow on Indian Airlines flight twelve fifty-four. Can you be there to meet my plane?”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  IWEAR MY GREENMARKS ANDSPENCERcardigan with a leotard under it, a knee-length skirt, and a pair of sneakers. I wait at the rail, with the taxi drivers holding up signs for businessmen coming off the flight, which is two hours late. I keep peering at the people coming out at arrivals, adrenaline running wildly. I tell the minicab driver on my left that I’m meeting my father, but I’m not sure that I’ll recognize him.

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “When I was five days old.”

  “That’s different,” he says. Then he tells me that he’s “mightily pissed off” because the plane is late and he wants to get home to his tea.

  I’m looking at the entrance when, amidst a stream of chattering Afghanis in long white robes, pushing heavily laden baggage carts, I see a tall man in a dark blue suit headed in my direction. He’s pulling a large suitcase. He has a strong, confident presence, and, like Dad, he has a full head of hair. Only Walt’s hair isn’t white. It’s the same color as mine. And he looks like me. I mean, he really looks like me!

  He stops and looks at me.

  Is it you? I mouth. He nods. Then he stops.

  I climb under the rail and run into his outstretched arms, in the middle of the arrivals lane, surrounded by streams of people speaking Arabic. I hug him tight. Here he is, at last.

  Instead of the numbness I’ve felt ever since I met Billie, I suddenly feel very much alive. I know—in my knower—that this is the parent I have been waiting for. Finally. He is here.

  His breath smells of whiskey. I pull back.

  “You’re not an alcoholic, too, are you?” I say.

  “Good God no!” he says, laughing. “I had a bourbon on the plane to help me sleep. Haven’t had a drink since I got to Kabul. Whiskey’s hard to come by there. So I ate a lot of ice cream instead.”

  “Do they make good ice cream in Kabul?”

  “Not as good as Ben and Jerry’s.” He’s smiling broadly, staring at me. “You look exactly as I thought you would,” he says.

  We laugh. I babble. We get into Typhoo, which has never looked so clean, and I start driving. I can’t remember much of what we talk about. I know that we both keep taking deep breaths. I know that I feel wholly comfortable, and relieved. I know that there is something that feels undeniably right about his being there.

  He keeps looking at me, laughing and saying, “Oh…my…God.” I ask about his children. He tells me that his daughter, Ashley, “does good” working with people with special needs, and that his son Edwin sells advertising space on the telephone.

  “But that’s what I do!” I say.

  He looks at me again. “Oh…my…God.”

  Ashley and Edwin are definitely not names you’d call a Brit. Any more than you’d call an American Phillippa. Or Nicola. Or Hamish. Or Fiona. Or Tarquin.

  “My family all disapprove of me,” he says. “They want me to settle down and get a nine-to-five job. They spend all their time praying for me.”

  “Oh dear,” I say. “I mean, I believe in God and everything, but—”

  “But what?” Walt looks like he really wants to know.

  “Well, whenever I meet a religious person, it makes me want to say ‘fuck.’”

  Walt roars with the kind of laughter that keeps coming back once it’s died down.

  Somehow I drive him safely to the hotel I booked for him to stay in—the Cone Court in Holland Park—very pink, cozy, and full of eccentric antiques and prints on the walls.

  “This is my father,” I say to the hotel receptionist. Walt laughs and says, “Nobody’s going to believe that with our accents being so different.”

  I say I’ll wait in the lobby while he has a shower and changes. He says, “No, come up with me, I don’t want you out of my sight for a second.”

  We go to his room. It’s tiny and as pink as the lobby, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

  “Should I change my shirt?” he asks.

  “No
need,” I say. “I mean, you don’t smell or anything.” He starts laughing again.

  “But if you want to…,” I say.

  While he’s unpacking he takes a baseball cap out of his suitcase. “Have it,” he says. “I’ve had it for years. It’s something that is truly mine. It’s my Orioles hat.” I look at him blankly.

  “That’s the baseball team we support,” he says.

  “Oh,” I say, putting it on. It’s slightly too big, so I pull my hair through the back and tighten the clasp. “Thank you.”

  I give him the cricket sweater I bought him, and also the thermal underwear from Damart, which I reckon he might need, London in November being particularly chilly this year.

  “I’m not that old and frail you know.” He’s laughing again, putting the sweater around his shoulders.

  We walk downstairs to the lobby, looking at each other every few seconds, sometimes catching each other in the act. The autumn leaves are swirling in the wind as I walk him toward Holland Park where we find a pub that, to Walt’s delight, is called the Frog and Firkin. He buys me a gin and tonic and buys himself a beer. We sit opposite each other, in a little wooden alcove, on benches with maroon cushion covers on them.

  We talk and talk. I tell him how strongly I needed to find him—that I knew, as soon as I met Billie, that it was terribly important. We talk—and then stop—and then look at each other with recognition.

  “You’re beautiful,” he says.

  “No, I’m not,” I say.

  “You are,” he says.

  I want to cry. I do cry. He looks at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “This is completely out of character. I’m usually pretty sensible.”

  “Sensible!” he says. “God, I hope you’re not!” I roar with laughter this time.

  “Well—I try to be. Sometimes,” I say. “But it’s not all that much fun.” We’re both holding our glasses at the same angle, smiling, like children.