Tilly put a hand out now and laid it flat against Henry’s spine.
‘Hi,’ he said, his voice muffled.
‘I have to tell you something.’
He rolled slowly towards her.
He said cautiously, ‘Is that a version of “We need to talk”?’
‘No,’ Tilly said. ‘This isn’t a discussion. It’s something I’m going to tell you.’
Henry was lying facing her. She turned on her back and looked at the ceiling where she couldn’t see his eyes and his mouth and his thick hair.
‘Well?’
Tilly took a breath.
‘I’m going away,’ she said.
He raised himself on one elbow.
‘What?’
‘I’m going away. I’m going to try and find another job, maybe out of London. I’m going to find another flat. Perhaps I’ll go abroad.’
He gave a little groan.
‘I’ve said all this to you before,’ Tilly said, clenching her fists under the duvet. ‘And this is the last time I’m going to say it again. I can’t go on like this. I can’t go on wondering what’s going to happen to us, what you really feel about me. I can’t go on hoping that something is going to make a difference, that something is going to change. I can’t go on feeling that I might be at fault somehow.’
‘You’re not at fault,’ Henry said. His voice was so low that she could hardly hear him. ‘Nobody’s at fault. It’s just hard – accepting things as they are rather than as they might be.’
She couldn’t look at him.
‘I don’t want to talk about that.’
‘Nor me.’
She hesitated. She took a deep breath. This was no moment to burst into tears.
‘So, because I can’t bear any more, even if you can, I’m going away. As soon as I can make some arrangements.’
Henry said quietly, ‘You don’t have to.’
She whipped her head round to look at him. A tiny hope flared in her like a match flame.
‘I don’t have to?’
‘No.’
‘But—’
‘You stay here,’ Henry said. ‘You stay in this flat and your job. You love both of them after all. It’s me who’s going away.’
She stared at him. Her breath was coming in little gasps.
‘I’m going to America,’ Henry said. ‘Soon.’
‘You’ll hate it,’ Tilly said.
Henry stirred his coffee.
‘Will I?’
‘Yes,’ she said. Her back was turned towards him. She was slicing something vehemently.
‘What will I hate?’
‘The food,’ Tilly said. Her back was eloquent of furious emotion. Henry remembered reading something somewhere that Henry Moore had once said about human backs: that the fronts of people are inevitably full of more incident but it is their backs that have the true eloquence.
‘They fry everything,’ Tilly said, slicing. ‘And then they douse it in sugar.’
‘Oh?’
‘All that phoney Southern antebellum carry-on. And the women have yard-long nails and use hair lacquer. Lacquer. And there’s swamps and alligators. And,’ she said, her voice rising a little, ‘there’s the racism. They all vote Republican. However awful the candidate.’
He looked into his coffee.
‘Really,’ he said.
She spun round. The knife she had been using clattered to the floor.
She said, with a kind of gasp, ‘Henry, please don’t go, please—’
He didn’t raise his head.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
Charleston
South Carolina
Fall
Chapter Eight
The late-afternoon sky above Charleston was as blue as a delphinium. Wedged in his aisle seat, Henry craned discreetly across the two passengers to his left to try and glimpse the land below as the plane dipped downward. The person immediately next to him, an elderly black man who, during the last hop from New York, had steadily read from a small copy of the Bible, bound in imitation leather, wore an Atlanta Braves baseball cap and a white T-shirt. Across the chest of the T-shirt was the phrase, printed in capital letters: ‘LORD I THIRST FOR YOU’.
The man glanced at Henry. Then he glanced out of the window. He said, in a deep, slow voice, ‘Your first visit?’
‘To Charleston? Yes—’
‘The Holy City.’
Henry looked faintly embarrassed.
‘Oh—’
‘The name refers,’ the man said gravely, ‘to a tradition of religious freedom.’
Henry smiled.
The man said, ‘I’m a Baptist myself.’ He paused. ‘Southern Baptist.’ He looked at Henry enquiringly.
‘I’m British,’ Henry said lamely, as if that explained everything.
The man laid his cool dark hand briefly on Henry’s arm.
‘In Charleston,’ he said, ‘you will find almost ten pages of church listings in the Yellow Pages directory. I urge you to search your heart.’
Henry looked down at his lap.
‘I’ll try,’ he said.
Gillon had said she would be waiting in the arrivals hall. She could, she said, get an hour or so away from the job she had found in an art gallery and borrow her mother’s car and come out to North Charleston, to the airport, and take Henry back to her parents’ house. Her parents would, she assured him, be more than happy to have him stay for a few days until he got his bearings. Then there were a hundred bed-and-breakfast inns to choose from; he’d have no trouble at all finding accommodation. Her e-mails had sounded welcoming, but only politely so, as if, Henry thought, she was in truth regretting the impulse that had made her ask him to Charleston in the first place.
It would have been hard, after all, for her not to have regretted it. Even though Tilly promised she understood that there had been no thought of interference or divisiveness in Gillon’s invitation, it had made for difficulty all the same. Tilly’s unhappiness, Henry’s uncomfortableness, the general awareness of having been instrumental in aggravating both, had driven Gillon from the flat earlier than she had intended. She had spent her last three weeks in London in the so-called guest room of the Hopkirks’ house, sleeping on a futon wedged between stacks of temporarily unused furniture and bulging black bags of discarded baby and toddler clothes. The room also contained, in a thinly walled cupboard, the house’s water tank which gulped intestinally every time anyone ran a tap or pulled a plug. Gillon lay on the futon in the canyon between a pine sideboard and a set of Victorian dining chairs and counted the days until her release from, it seemed to her, yet another painful muddle of her own making.
She was not now in the arrivals hall. Henry retrieved his bag from the carousel and studied the people waiting. No young women, as far as he could see, and certainly no small young woman with wild hair who was looking for him. Henry paused. She certainly knew the time of the plane, had, indeed, confirmed that she knew it only two days before. Tilly had seen the message.
‘Give her my love,’ Tilly said.
‘I will.’
‘I mean it. I know none of this is her fault.’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell her that, will you? Tell her I know she didn’t mean this.’
‘Yes.’
He’d wanted to say that it was no good always wanting to find someone to blame, or excuse from blame. Look, he wanted to say, some things just happen. Not everything’s choice. Not everything’s deliberate. It’s not so simple. But all he’d said, in fact, was ‘Yes’ and kissed her, sadly, clumsily, just beside her mouth, before he cried too and she had believed him to be crying for the same reason as she was.
He began to tow his bag towards the exit and the taxi line. Gillon would have been unable to get away. Maybe her mother – a person Henry could in no way visualize-had needed her car herself. Maybe there was no one to man the gallery but Gillon. Maybe she was in fact on her way but had been caught up in traffic. Maybe …
‘E
xcuse me,’ someone said.
Henry turned.
An excessively pretty, heavily pregnant girl was walking alongside him.
She said, smiling, ‘Are you Henry?’
He stopped walking.
‘Yes—’
‘I’m Ashley,’ the girl said. Her eyes and teeth and hair shone with a kind of lustre. ‘I’m Gillon’s sister.’ She put out her hand. ‘She just got held up. I came instead.’
Henry took her hand.
‘You’re so kind—’
She shook her head. ‘I had to come out this way anyway. I had Dinner Series tickets to pick up from Park Circle. I’m happy to meet you.’
‘I feel a bit of an imposition,’ Henry said. Her face and feet looked strangely tiny above and below the mound of her belly. ‘I’m not sure I should be here at all—’
Ashley smiled again.
‘My parents are happy to have you.’
Henry bowed his head a little.
‘You’ve been so good to Gillon.’
‘Not really—’
‘It’s not easy being good to Gillon,’ Ashley said. ‘I should know. I’m her sister.’
‘Sibling rivalry,’ Henry said, smiling too, ‘is supposed to be formative.’
Ashley laughed. She gestured towards the glass entrance doors to the airport building.
‘My car’s just over there.’
Henry picked up the tow handle of his bag. He had an obscure desire to pick up this lovely girl in her interestingly vulnerable state and carry her too. He felt his colour rise a little.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘Mama will be home,’ Ashley said. ‘She’ll be home early. To welcome you to Charleston.’
Martha stood in Gillon’s bedroom and looked about her. It was a smaller room than the designated guest room, but Gillon had indicated that her English photographer friend would not like to be treated as a formal guest, and, in any case, the view from the window in Gillon’s room gave on to the garden with its clipped hedges and giant magnolia and, just below, the tea olive tree whose tiny white flowers were giving off a fragrance remarkably powerful from something so small. Gillon had said Henry would like the garden. He liked, she said, natural things. She spoke about him, Martha thought, in the offhand way that one speaks about a person whom one is constrained about speaking of freely. He had not been, Gillon emphasized, Gillon’s friend in England but merely the boyfriend of Gillon’s friend, and when he had said that he wished to come to Charleston, Gillon declared that she had been disconcerted, that that was not what she had intended. It was, Martha thought, possible that Gillon had intended to come back to Charleston partly because of this boyfriend of Gillon’s friend. And that she had not planned on his following her.
‘Why is Gillon home?’ Boone had said to Martha. It was late at night and Martha was still at her computer, by the screened open window against which, occasionally, palmetto bugs flung themselves like a thrown handful of nuts.
‘For the baby.’
‘But she said she wasn’t coming home for the baby. She said this trip to England was in order not to be here for the baby—’
‘I guess,’ Martha said, her eyes never leaving the screen, ‘I guess she found she needed to.’
‘Needed to?’
‘For herself,’ Martha said. ‘Not to be – involved in something she couldn’t handle. Not to be running away, either.’
‘Then she comes back and she won’t even stay here!’
‘No.’
‘Some little hole on Society Street now—’
‘Yes.’
‘Martha,’ Boone said, ‘I cannot figure Gillon out.’
‘Maybe,’ Martha said, ‘that’s her problem too.’
She looked now at Gillon’s bed. She’d removed all the pillows save for the functional ones and replaced the cream wool throw with a Navajo blanket, but it still looked like a bed more appropriate to a girl than to a man. When Gillon moved away the first time – it smote Martha to think how earnestly Gillon had believed it was the first and final time too, the grand exit into adult independence – she had been unable to take with her all her childhood books, the collections of shells and Indian beads and china frogs and decoy birds. All these things were still here, ten years later, as were garments in her closet, fringed jeans and a prom dress and ski-pants and a Disneyland T-shirt. It didn’t trouble Martha from a housewifely point of view that an adult child’s possessions still filled the shelves and closets of her adolescent bedroom, but it did trouble her that these possessions signified still, at some unacknowledged level of Gillon’s conscience, a reluctant tie to the past, symbolic of a failure, so far, to find anything satisfactory enough with which to replace it.
‘You should just box it all up and store it in the basement,’ Sarah would say to Martha. Ashley and Cooper had both, after all, removed their belongings entirely into their new adult lives. ‘You should not tolerate this.’
Martha looked at the T-shirt. Gillon had hated most of Disneyland, hated the noise and the crowds and the exaggerated size of everything. When Mickey Mouse, at Boone’s instigation, had stopped to speak to them, she had almost fainted with horror. ‘He’s supposed to be a mouse,’ she’d said to Martha in distress.
‘I don’t feel,’ Martha said vaguely to Sarah, ‘that these things incommode me at all. Nor do I feel that they are mine to box up, anyway.’
She opened the closet now, and pushed Gillon’s clothes to one side, to make space for anything this young man might want to hang up.
‘He’s pretty English,’ Gillon said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Well, you won’t always be able to figure him out. Not like Cooper.’
There were sounds from below. Martha went out of Gillon’s bedroom and looked down the white-painted stairwell. She saw a flash of Ashley’s blue dress and heard a man’s voice, a voice which, even from two floors up, had a different timbre to it from Boone’s or Cooper’s. She leaned over the rail.
‘Hey there!’
‘Hey, Mama,’ Ashley called back. ‘We’re home!’
Martha went down the staircase holding the rail lightly as she went. At the foot of the stairs a large young man was standing looking up. Martha heard Sarah’s voice in her head. ‘Why,’ Sarah would say, ‘he looks perfectly darling.’
Martha held out her hand.
‘We are so pleased to see you,’ she said.
Gillon stood on the piazza, holding her shoes. She had let herself in through the street door and then taken her shoes off and padded silently down the piazza past her father’s office, past the living room, to the closed screen door that opened into the kitchen. There were lamps on in all the rooms, lamps that shed soft oblongs of light on to the black-and-white tiles of the piazza floor. The tiles were cool under Gillon’s feet, as they had always reliably been during all those long hot summers of Gillon’s childhood. Bare feet and marble floors, Grandmama always said, that’s a true Charleston childhood. Gillon stood a foot away from the kitchen’s screen door and looked in. There were four people at the kitchen table, her mother, her father, her sister and Henry. Henry had his back to her. He wore a faded green cotton shirt – a shirt she recognized, a shirt she remembered seeing Tilly ironing – and it was so strange to see him there, eating meatloaf and salad with her family, that her first impulse was to tiptoe back down the piazza and let herself silently out into the street once more. Her father was talking, gesturing with the hand not occupied in holding his fork, and Henry was listening and nodding. It occurred to Gillon that she had never seen Henry in the company of an older man, a man of his father’s generation. He looked – from behind at least – not exactly deferential, but respectful certainly. At first glance, out of his London context, without the status of being Gillon’s landlord, Henry looked oddly both more manageable and more disconcerting. He also looked very foreign.
She pulled the screen door open.
‘Hey, everybody.’
> They turned. Boone rose to his feet, followed a few seconds later by Henry.
‘You were expected for six-thirty,’ Boone said.
‘I’m so sorry, I got held up—’
‘Never mind,’ Martha said. She rose and laid a light hand on Gillon’s shoulder. ‘You’re here now.’
‘Ashley goes to the airport for you,’ Boone said. ‘Ashley helps Mama fix dinner—’
‘Hush,’ Martha said.
‘I liked it,’ Ashley said. She smiled up at Henry from her becoming billow of blue cotton. ‘I liked going to the airport.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Gillon said to Henry.
He bent awkwardly to kiss her. She moved her head very slightly at the last moment and the kiss grazed her cheek.
‘Nothing to be sorry for,’ Henry said. ‘I could easily have got a taxi.’
‘We couldn’t let you do that,’ Martha said.
‘There was nobody to cover for me,’ Gillon said. ‘And I’d forgotten to charge my cellphone – so I couldn’t call anybody.’
Boone made a small sound of exasperation and put his hand on Henry’s shoulder.
‘Meanwhile this young man—’
‘Didn’t mind at all,’ Henry said hastily. ‘Anyway’ – he turned to smile across the table – ‘I had Ashley.’
‘Sure you did,’ Gillon said tiredly.
She slipped past Henry and her father and sat down beside her mother.
‘I sold two paintings today.’
‘Are you not,’ Boone said deliberately, ‘even going to ask your guest how his journey was?’ He gave Henry’s shoulder a pat before he took his hand away. ‘Don’t spare her. Tell her every boring detail.’
Henry smiled at Gillon. She looked down at the plate of meatloaf Martha had set before her.
Henry said, ‘It was fine. Very dull but very uneventful. No crazies and no babies. What paintings did you sell?’
‘Two landscapes.’
‘What kind of landscapes?’
‘European landscapes. Italian. The painter spent all spring and summer in Umbria.’
Girl From the South (v5) Page 11