The English American

by Alison Larkin

  “Oh, Mum!”

  “It’s all right, darling. Really. It was fine. Then Billie told me how much you love each other. And then she became quite fixated on the puffin.”

  Granny Dunn found a puffin dead on a beach somewhere in 1936, brought it home, and had it stuffed. It’s been sitting on the dark brown armoire in the dining room ever since.

  “‘Oh how sad!’ Billie said. ‘To stuff a bird and leave it in a glass case like that!’ Do you know, I’d never thought of it as sad before. But she was so convincing, suddenly I felt quite sorry for the puffin. Almost guilty—as if I’d killed the puffin myself. Even though I knew perfectly well the puffin was dead as a doornail before Granny Dunn found him.”

  Mum puts her teacup back into the saucer with a satisfying click and continues with her tale.

  “Billie’s mind was darting around from topic to topic, just like yours does, darling. She said she thought our garden had a ‘wonderful contained beauty’—I think those were the words she used. Perfect for people of our nature. She compared it with her garden in Georgia, and told me how much you both loved the wildness of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  “I was particularly intrigued by her curly hair, which is a lovely color and bounced rather charmingly as she spoke. She’s very animated, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, and guess what she did with the bourbon biscuit I offered her?”

  Mum is actually giggling.

  “She scraped off the choccy cream in the center with her teeth—just like you do! Amazing!”

  I hadn’t thought about this part of it. That Mum and Dad might have wondered, too. I look for signs of upset in Mum’s eyes. There’s nothing there but curiosity and—yes—glee, glee, glee.

  “Then Billie thanked us for being wonderful parents to you. And then she said it was time for us to let you go. She said we were adult women. She said there was no point in sugarcoating things, and she was going to get straight to the point. And then, after meandering quite charmingly around several subjects for a minute or so, she told me I didn’t understand you like she understood you, because I’m not your real mother.”

  My heart is beating fast. She did hurt Mum. Oh God.

  “And then she asked where you were. That’s when I realized she wasn’t being truthful about how inseparable you were. I imagined that you probably needed some time and were therefore avoiding her. But it was quite clear she didn’t want to give you any time and was trying to find out where you were. With everything you’ve had to absorb during the past year, I thought she was being unspeakably selfish.”

  “Oh, Mum.”

  “But I thanked her for coming to see us and told her how grateful we are to her. And we are! Oh darling, if it weren’t for Billie…”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyway, I assured her that we only wanted what was best for you and that if you wanted to spend time with her, of course that would be fine with us.

  “And then she said, ‘So you won’t be pressuring her to come back to England?’

  “I told her that, in my experience, putting any sort of pressure on you to do something you don’t want to do only causes you to do the opposite. And that you probably just needed a little time to sort yourself out. She looked relieved for a moment. And then, as suddenly as she appeared, she left.”

  The story is over. I look across the porch at the mother I’ve known and loved since I was a child.

  “Mum,” I say, with a lump in my throat, “you are my real mother. And nothing could ever change that. If…if I could have designed you myself, I couldn’t have done a better job.”

  Mum’s smiling at me, with a twinkle in her eye. “Well, that’s lovely, darling, and thank you for saying it. But the last part’s not strictly true, is it, Pip?”

  “Well—well, if I could have designed you myself you might have been playwrights—but, but—no, Mum! No! If I could change a thing I wouldn’t. I love you so much, Mum.”

  “I know that, darling. But I also know that love doesn’t come in amounts. I know that you loving Billie doesn’t mean you’d love us any less.”

  “But I don’t love her,” I say, appalled at myself for saying it aloud. “I know Ishould. And I feel dreadfully guilty about it, but I just don’t. I’ve tried to. And I thought I did for a while. I’ve told her I do. And maybe I do in a way. But—well, the truth is being near her is confusing and—well, immobilizing. And I can’t live a happy life if I can’t move, Mum.”

  A furious fly is buzzing around the chrysanthemum pot.

  “It’s awful, Mum. I’m awful. But when I’m near her I—well, I just can’t feel for Billie the way she wants me to feel.”

  The fly has found its way out of the porch window now and is headed off toward the swimming pool.

  “And I know how terrible it must have been for Billie to have to give up her baby,” I say. Saying this, thinking this, has become a sort of mantra.

  “Yes,” Mum says. Her tone is firm now. “And being given away by your mother must have been terrible for you, darling. You were tiny. A babe. You’d only just been born.”

  Now Mum has tears in her eyes too. “We were so happy to have you darling. And we believed that adopting a baby would be exactly the same as having one of our own. But that wasn’t true, was it? Especially for you.”

  “No.”

  “Darling Pip, you’ve spent all this time thinking about Billie’s feelings and no time at all thinking about your own. Billie was a grown-up. She made a choice. You were a tiny little baby. You had no choice. It must have been far, far worse for you.”

  Perhaps.

  We sit for a moment saying nothing. The garden stretches out behind us in the afternoon sun.

  I sit hopelessly, looking at Mum.

  “I wish…”

  “You wish what, darling?”

  “I wish I could find a way to give her some of what she wants from me.”

  Dad has been standing by the door. In a tone that’s as gentle as it is gruff, he says, “It’s not your burden to carry, Pip. It never has been.”

  I catch my breath and stay very still. I’ve never heard Dad speak in this way before. Ever. Mum is equally still and, I am certain, as surprised to hear Dad’s words as I am.

  “You’re not Superwoman, you know,” Dad says.

  I smile inwardly at the expression, knowing he’d never have used it if he hadn’t been forced to watchSuperman II when Marjory’s grandson came to tea.

  “You’ve had a huge amount to deal with, Pippadee,” Dad continues. “You wafted off to another country, into a very complicated situation, with no support whatsoever, an ocean away from everyone you knew. Good God, it was like throwing yourself off the high trapeze without a net! Meeting Billie and Whatshisname as a grown-up meant you’ve had to completely reassess who you are. While dealing with what must have been overwhelming emotions. That would be difficult enough for anybody.”

  I dare not move. Dad’s voice sounds reassuringly Scottish as it comes to me through the afternoon air. His hand rests steady on my shoulder.

  “Add to it this, this—how can I put it? This hole Billie has inside her, that she’s been asking you to fill. Well, it’s not fair of her to expect you to do that, Pippadee. It’s not your responsibility. It’s hers.”

  The knot inside me loosens a little.

  “The years we’re granted to live on this earth are few and precious,” Dad says. “You have a right to live them happily. You don’t have to carry Billie’s burden, darling. It’s not your burden to carry. Put it down, Pippadee. Just put it down.”

  With that, the father I thought didn’t understand me at all pats me awkwardly on the shoulder and goes back into the house. Mum doesn’t move. But I detect a little extra light in her clear blue eyes.

  And then something happens. Inside me. There’s another shift. The thoughtful words—spoken by the father who fed me, loved me, and nurtured me when my other father could not—open the doors to the sense of peace I�
��ve been aching for all my life, which floods into the heart of my being. With my father’s words, the thick, ugly knot of guilt inside me finally comes untied.

  And everything I’ve been holding in for so long, in order to protect people who did not need to be protected, finally has permission to come out. And I start to cry. Mum sits next to me and hands me Kleenex after Kleenex from the yellow tissue box, which Dad has brought into the porch from the top of the downstairs loo. Dad appears at the porch door every so often, checks to see if I am still crying, and then disappears back into the house.

  And then, as the afternoon turns into the evening, I tell Mum everything I’ve told you, about Billie and Walt and my life in New York. When I tell her about Jack, her expression changes slightly.

  The early September sun is setting over the wheatfield behind the house now, and it’s getting a little chilly. It’ll soon be time to go in.

  “Do you remember, when I was little, when I used to be frightened of monsters under the bed?”

  “Yes,” Mum says, laughing. “Until we turned the light on and your monster turned out to be the pile of clothes you’d inevitably left on the floor.”

  “Well, finding out the truth about Billie and Walt has been a bit like that, I think.”

  Mum smiles. “Then it’s been a good thing, darling.”

  “Oh yes, Mum. Yes! If I hadn’t found them, I’d never have known what to do with the parts of me that are so different from you, Dad, and Charlotte. Now I know the people I’ve come from—well, now I can be wholly me, instead of just half me, if you see what I mean.”

  “Yes,” Mum says. “I think I do.”

  Through the glass I can see Boris trotting through the sitting room toward us. When he gets to the porch door he whines once, thumps his tail, turns around and lies down on the mat, with his head on his paws, waiting.

  “And Jack’s been there all along, hasn’t he, Pippa?” Mum says. “The one steady thing in the midst of the chaos.”

  “Yes.”

  “He sounds even tidier than I am!”

  “Yes,” I say, almost laughing. “I think he is. And he seems to like tidying up after me!”

  Mum laughs. “He sounds perfect for you!”

  “He is Mum. He was. And not just because of that. He’s—he’s the kindest man I know—and wise too. I feel at home with him. Rather, I did. But I’ve ruined everything, Mum. I’m anidiot .”

  I start crying again as I tell her everything that’s just happened with Jack. Well, almost everything. She is my mother after all.

  Finally we go inside and have supper. While I was bawling on the porch, Dad, who never cooks, had made chicken with parsnips, peas, and roast potatoes. And for pudding he’s made a chocolate cake—with extra icing—from an old World War II recipe he found in thePeaseminster Post .

  After supper, I go upstairs to bed. I don’t wake up again until eleven o’clock the following morning.

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  IT’S A RAINY AFTERNOON,and Dad’s got his old slide projector out. We’re in the sitting room watching slides of Mum and Dad’s first trip across America in a red Chevrolet, a year before I “arrived.” Mum’s serene and graceful and beautifully dressed, with her straight blond hair pushed back in a light blue hair band. Dad’s hair is blond too. He looks young and handsome. He’s wearing a green tartan beret and smoking a pipe. And looks—well, extremely Scottish.

  Both of them are three years younger than I am now. They assume that conceiving a child of their own will be easy. They don’t know, yet, that they will have to go through the agony of discovering they can’t have children of their own. They don’t know, yet, that they will be adopting me.

  In the next set of slides, I’m a bawling infant.

  “That’s you, Pip. Outside the adoption agency,” Dad says.

  “No, it’s not, it’s the foster home,” Mum says.

  In the next picture, I’m looking up at my new mother with a peaceful expression on my face. I do not look pained, or unhappy. I look cozy in Mum’s arms. Safe.

  Mum is beautifully dressed, in an elegant blue and white dress this time. Her hair has been styled in a pretty blond flip, and she’s wearing red lipstick. Dad’s wearing a tie and an elegant suit. His hand is reaching out for mine.

  Mum chuckles. “The first thing Granny H. said was, ‘Look at her red hair, all spiky, sticking up like a little bird.’”

  “That’s exactly what Billie wrote in the letter, just after she had me,” I say, “the very same phrase.” It’s a huge relief not to have to censor myself anymore.

  “You looked just like Woodstock! From the Peanuts cartoon!” They giggle.

  I look at the pictures I’ve seen many times before. Only this time, I know who the baby Pip looks like. She looks like Walt and Edwin and Ashley, and a bit like Billie too. She still looks nothing at all like the parents who adopted her.

  In the following picture, I see a little red-haired girl, impeccably dressed, holding her ice cream cone reluctantly out to her father, who’s taking a big lick of it. In the next picture, she’s in a paddling pool with her little sister. In the next, she’s running naked around an English garden, in and out of croquet hoops, surrounded by doting relatives drinking tea.

  In the next, she’s eight years old, camping in the Serengeti game park. There she is surrounded by other half-naked children, building the dam in the river where the hippos bathe, down the hill from where Charlotte and I got charged by the elephant.

  Then there’s a picture of Charlotte and me sitting on the roof of the Land Rover as it drives bumpily along miles and miles of narrow, dusty African roads.

  “Couldn’t do that now,” Dad says. “Much too dangerous. Probably get killed. By people,” he adds, to clarify.

  I look at my parents, holding hands in the dark of their sitting room in the south of England. They have never kept secrets from anybody. They have never made promises they did not keep.

  “Do you think you’ll move back?” Mum’s not pressuring me one way or the other. She just wants to know.

  I smile. “I don’t think ‘Rock-and-Roll Redneck’ would go down all that well in England,” I say.

  Then Mum says, “And your lovely Jack lives over there, doesn’t he?”

  At the mention of his name my heart flips up, around, and back down again with a thud.

  “He’s not ‘my Jack’ Mum. Besides…”

  “Besides what?” Mum and Dad are both looking in my direction.

  “Well, even if I hadn’t blown it completely, he’s in love with somebody else. And—and we’re from completely different worlds. He’d rather stay home and eat Fig Newtons than go camping!” I say, waiting for a reaffirming “Good God!” from my father. It doesn’t come.

  Mum looks perplexed. Finally she says, “What’s a Fig Newton?”

  “Squashed figs surrounded by squashy biscuit,” I say, missing Fig Newtons, too. Wishing I could go back to the first time Jack and I ate Fig Newtons together, knowing everything I know now, about Nick, about Jack, about myself. And start again from there.

  But I can’t. It’s too late. And even if, somehow, our night together put him off this other woman…well, I behaved appallingly. He’ll certainly prefer the other woman now. I hate her almost as much as I hate myself for pretending, to both Jack and myself, that our night together wasn’t perfect. I feel like I’m going to cry again.

  Dad looks at me across the light from the projector, which beams from the back of the sitting room to the screen he’s erected at the front. Dust particles swim in the light. All’s quiet, apart from the whirring of the projector and the sound of the sitting room curtain moving slightly in the breeze.

  “Do you know what I think?” Dad says, adjusting the focus on a slide of Mum and Charlotte playing Snap and drinking mango juice with the Morton-Pecks.

  “What do you think, Dad?”

  “I think that the greatest adventures are the subtlest.”

  Charlotte and Rupert hurt
le down to Peaseminster the moment they learn that I’m back.

  Over the next few days, we settle back into our old familiar rhythms. Charlotte and Mum take me shopping for a bridesmaid’s dress and ask my opinion on the seating plan for Charlotte and Rupert’s wedding. They’ll be getting married a year from now, so according to Charlotte there isn’t a whole lot of time.

  As I try to express interest in the dresses she wants me to try on, Charlotte keeps asking me if I’m all right and I keep telling her I’m fine—old habits are never entirely broken. The main difference, perhaps, is that during the past year I appear to have lost the art of hiding what I’m really feeling from both myself and the people I love. And I no longer feel that it matters.

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  ONSATURDAY NIGHT,Mum, Dad, Charlotte, Rupert, Neville, and I are invited to go Scottish dancing at the village hall. For the first time since I can remember, I am actually looking forward to it. Dad wears his kilt and a sporran. Mum lends me her spare tartan skirt. The average age of the Scottish dancers is about seventy-five. There are about forty of them. Thirty-four women and six men. Dad is one of them.

  “Come along, Pip, set to the left then to the right.” We’re dancing the Hamilton House. I am out of time, but loving being here.

  “I’ll tell you the secret to Scottish dancing,” says an earnest, moon-faced woman with dark hair and a soft voice. Her face is right up against mine. “You need to count, you see. I still count, even though I’m an expert.”

  I count throughout the next dance and do slightly better.

  A tiny woman with a platform shoe on what I later learn is a wooden leg comes up to me.

  “How lovely for Gemma and Alasdair to have you home. What is it that you do in America?” she asks.

  “I sing songs to drunk people in nightclubs,” I say, smiling.

  “How interesting!” Mary says, clapping her hands together in delight. “What sort of songs do you sing?”