Girl From the South (v5)

by Joanna Trollope

  Gillon put her glasses back on. Then she fished in her jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled dollar bill. She held it out over the railing to the black man.

  ‘It’s too late,’ Gillon said.

  Martha’s Camry was parked half a block down the street from the house. When Gillon was a child, there were almost no cars on the street at all and it would have been unthinkable not to find a parking space right outside one’s own front door. But now every family had two or three cars, and the children got driven everywhere, even the tiny ones attending the First Baptist Church School on Church Street which was, as Grandmama pointed out constantly, not above an eight-minute walk away. They’d be bundled into a four-wheel drive, whole little chattering crowds of them, and be driven two minutes to school, their pretty, groomed, impatient mothers cursing the carriage tourists and the construction workers’ pickup trucks that congested every corner. Gillon looked intently at those mothers. Some of them weren’t much older than she was but they inhabited a world she didn’t know and spoke a language she didn’t share, the language of a strong and acclaimed domestic life.

  She put her key into the lock of the street door, and turned it. It was always a moment, this, always had been, all her life, of opening the street door and feeling the afternoon sun lying golden and still all down the length of the piazza floor and feeling the quiet strength of the garden, the great magnolia tree, wrapping the house up in its embrace, like a guardian. She closed the door behind her and leaned against it, pushing the heels of her sneakers against the toes to get them off, and spreading her bare soles and toes gratefully on the warm tiles. There was nobody on the piazza, not even the family cat curled up in one of the wicker armchairs, its bird-warning bell buried in the plushy fur of its neck. Gillon padded slowly down the length of the piazza and opened the screen door to the kitchen.

  Martha’s black pocket book and a bunch of keys lay on the kitchen’s central unit. Beside them was a copy of The Post and Courier and a pair of Variomatic driving glasses. Gillon went through the kitchen and the old family room to Martha’s office. Martha was at her computer, her back to Gillon.

  ‘Mother.’

  Martha didn’t turn round.

  ‘Hello, dear.’

  ‘It’s been such a beautiful day.’

  ‘I know. I’ve hardly seen it. Have you been to the hospital?’

  ‘No—’

  ‘She’s having problems feeding. I want her just to try for these first two weeks, then she can stop.’

  Gillon crossed the room and stood behind her mother. She stooped a little, to read the screen.

  ‘Is that a report?’

  ‘No,’ Martha said, ‘I’m doing a study.’ She clicked the screen blank and turned to look at Gillon.

  ‘Well, dear.’

  ‘I’ve been rude to Henry,’ Gillon said. ‘Again.’

  ‘Surely not—’

  ‘I try to level with him, Mama, and I get it all wrong. I accused him today of trying to steal my family.’

  Martha smiled.

  ‘Hardly true.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What are you jealous of—’

  Gillon looked away.

  ‘Don’t know—’

  ‘We love him,’ Martha said. ‘He’s a lovely person.’

  ‘And Ashley?’

  Martha rose and pushed her swivel chair in under her desk.

  ‘It’s nice for Ashley to see a man not driven by an agenda.’

  ‘Doesn’t Ashley have an agenda?’

  ‘Did you come here,’ Martha said gently, ‘to ask me that?’

  ‘No. I came because I was mad at myself.’ Gillon looked at the computer screen. ‘What is your study?’

  Martha said, moving towards the door, ‘I’ll get us some iced tea.’

  Gillon followed her.

  ‘Mama?’

  ‘It’s on the little prince syndrome,’ Martha said, over her shoulder. ‘Or maybe I should call it the syndrome of Baby Jesus.’

  ‘Can you tell me?’

  ‘I noticed,’ Martha said, opening the door of the icebox, ‘how many of my patients – the women – were born, as you were, before the first son. They all seem to have problems, problems of a kind that don’t affect girls born after a male child.’

  ‘Ashley,’ Gillon said.

  Martha put a pitcher of iced tea on the centre unit.

  ‘Men in the South have such a huge sense of entitlement. So women seem to take one of two tacks. Either they collude with men and try and outpace them. Or they embrace the old traditions.’

  Gillon ran a finger down the pitcher’s smooth frosted side.

  ‘Or carry a briefcase and be Daddy’s girl—’

  ‘A lot of women do that.’

  Gillon looked at her mother.

  ‘What’s your opinion?’

  ‘I don’t have opinions, dear,’ Martha said. She set two highball glasses beside the pitcher. ‘I make analyses.’

  ‘So we can’t talk about Daddy and Ashley and me?’

  ‘Gillon,’ Martha said, pouring, ‘why do you think, fundamentally, that I am interested in such a project if it isn’t because of Daddy and Ashley and you?’

  ‘But you said it was your patients—’

  ‘They have merely focused me.’

  Gillon made fists of her hands and thumped them down on the counter.

  ‘I want you to mind, Mother. I want you to care. I want you to get angry and emotional and make judgements—’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me about Henry?’

  Gillon stared at her.

  ‘What about Henry?’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me why you get so mad at Henry?’

  Gillon sighed.

  ‘He treats his girlfriend badly.’

  ‘In your opinion—’

  ‘In anybody’s opinion. He neglects her. He’s insensitive to her feelings. He is indifferent to his good fortune in having her, in the first place.’

  ‘You can’t,’ Martha said calmly, ‘make someone love you.’

  Gillon picked up a glass of iced tea.

  ‘She’s beautiful. She’s lovable.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  ‘She was so good to me—’

  Martha waited. She took a slow swallow of tea.

  ‘I get mad at Henry—’ Gillon said, and stopped.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Instead of getting mad at myself.’

  Martha nodded. Gillon put her glass down. Then, for a second, she covered her face with her hands.

  ‘It isn’t Henry that’s behaving badly towards Tilly. At least, no more than men do when they feel bad and don’t know what to do about it. It isn’t Henry.’ She paused and took a breath and then she said, as lightly as she could, ‘Because it’s me.’

  Chapter Eleven

  The Internet café and coffee shop that Henry used was in the back part of a nail parlour. The whole enterprise was run with unsmiling briskness by a Korean family who seemed to make no distinction in discourtesy between a one-time drop-in customer and a customer like himself who came in most days, always bought a bagel and a latte, and never failed to obey the rules taped on to the partitions above each computer in laminated panels. The father ran the café at the back: the mother the cash desk and the appointments book at the front, and a row of sleek-headed daughters and nieces sat at the manicure stations in between and talked to each other, past the customers, in their own staccato language. Henry said ‘Good morning’ to each of them, every time he went down the length of the room towards the café. The mother gave him the smallest of nods. The daughters and nieces took no notice of him whatsoever.

  When he first arrived in Charleston, he had checked his e-mails every day, feeling a small surge of guilt when Tilly’s little unopened envelopes appeared on the screen. She was very careful in her e-mails: admirably careful. She didn’t tell him too much, or ask him too much. She signed them ‘Best love, Tilly’, a phrase which suggested slight formality an
d distance as well as paying him the complicated compliment of not sending him second-rate stuff. For the first few weeks, she wrote every day. Then, every other day. Now, with Christmas not far off and even Charleston cooling into winter, she wrote perhaps twice a week, and ‘Best love’ had dwindled to ‘Love’. Henry always wrote back on ‘Reply to Sender’. It did not occur to him how this might seem to Tilly – a mere response to something she had instigated rather than something he had instigated himself. He signed off with ‘Love, H’ and sometimes with a row of capital X kisses. When the e-mail was sent, he felt as he used to feel when a set childhood task was either done, or its not being done had escaped notice. In between, Tilly waited at the back of his mind, not moving, just waiting as if she were about to enter a room or descend a staircase. He was filled with sorrow every time he caught sight of her.

  E-mails from William were another matter altogether. They came fairly regularly and they were terse and rude. William said Tilly wasn’t coping very well, had lost weight. He said that he and Susie were looking after her as best they could, taking her out with them, planning weekends. William’s e-mails did not fill Henry with sorrow; they filled him with fury instead. Who was William, with his idle, casual personal life, to preach to Henry about the consequences of inadvertently breaking someone’s heart? And Susie. If you made a list, Henry thought, of the ten most unsuitable people for looking after someone in a state of distress, Susie might well occupy the top nine places. He couldn’t, of course, prevent William and Susie presenting themselves as sanctimonious tickers-off of Hard-Hearted Henry, but he could decline to let them know he’d either heard them or taken any notice. He could achieve that by the small and satisfactory action of clicking ‘Delete’ on William’s e-mails after only one quick reading. He could achieve it further by declining to reply. He wondered how long it would be before William registered his silence, how long before William, who knew him, after all, better than anyone except for Tilly, managed to extricate himself from the thickets of temporary moral superiority and imagine – yes imagine-how Henry’s feelings were for Henry to cope with; what kind of pain Henry had endured and endured without support because it was – his decision, after all, to light out to America – self-induced.

  ‘Sulking?’ William wrote, after five weeks.

  ‘No,’ Henry replied.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Busy,’ Henry wrote back. ‘Working. Occupied.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.’

  ‘EARNING,’ Henry wrote in capitals.

  There was two days’ silence.

  ‘Don’t believe you,’ William wrote.

  Henry put the latte he had just bought, in its tall white china mug, down beside the computer. The proprietor of the café, from whom he had just ordered a bagel, would not let him eat beside the screen and was grudging about drinking there too. Henry looked at William’s message. ‘Don’t believe you.’

  He clicked on ‘Reply to Sender’. He typed, ‘Two possible commissions. One for eight thousand dollars, one for three. Magazine commission from Atlanta publishers to be syndicated across the States. Greetings-card company from Kansas City with royalty attached. Taking my portfolio to them next week. All true.’

  He sat back and looked at the screen. All true.

  ‘I’ve never bought anything for a baby before,’ Henry said.

  Ashley looked at the ball in her hands. It was small, and squashy and made of soft velour, sectioned in pink and blue and white. There was a bell hidden inside.

  ‘It’s darling.’

  ‘I thought she couldn’t hurt herself on it,’ Henry said. ‘No edges or corners. And maybe, because it’s squashy, she can sort of grip it.’

  Ashley looked up at him.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’re so thoughtful.’

  ‘You must be the first person in the history of the universe to think that of me.’

  Ashley said, ‘Can I get you a beer?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Can I get you something else?’ She laid the ball carefully down on the kitchen counter.

  Henry said hesitantly, ‘Maybe just some water—’

  Ashley moved away from him across the kitchen and held a highball glass under the iced-water dispenser in the icebox door. She was wearing a pale-grey tunic-shaped sweater and narrow grey pants. Her hair fell down her back in a single, glossy plait.

  She said with her back to him, ‘You are thoughtful. You’re one of the few people round here who doesn’t expect me to cope any better than I’m able.’

  Henry gave a little laugh.

  ‘I am an expert at not coping.’

  Ashley turned round and held out the water glass. Her hand was shaking slightly.

  ‘I’ve always coped up to now. This – this baby’s just shot my capacity—’ She stopped and put her free hand to her mouth.

  Henry crossed the kitchen, gently took hold of the wrist that held the glass and lifted the glass out of her fingers. He went on holding her wrist.

  ‘I just want to cry all the time,’ Ashley whispered.

  ‘What I know about having babies,’ Henry said, ‘you could write on the back of a dime. But I think that feeling like this is quite common. Heavens, your whole life, your whole body is just turned upside down. Nothing will ever be the same again. What kind of a shock is that?’

  Ashley looked down at Henry’s hand holding her wrist.

  She said, ‘Merrill doesn’t see it that way.’

  ‘Maybe he’s just too thrilled with Robyn. Too excited to see.’

  Ashley took a little step closer to Henry. Without moving her hands, she laid her cheek against his chest.

  ‘I’m going to fail her,’ Ashley said, ‘I’m going to let her down. I know I am.’

  Henry set the water glass down on the nearest counter and put his free arm round her shoulders. She leaned against him. He could smell the clean smell of her hair and clothes.

  ‘It’ll pass. It’s only been a few weeks. I bet more people get baby blues than don’t.’

  ‘Help me,’ Ashley said.

  Henry freed her wrist to put his hand on her shoulder. He pushed her gradually upright.

  ‘I’m not the right person.’

  Ashley shook her head mutely, staring at the floor.

  ‘What about your mother? Gillon?’

  Ashley said simply, ‘It’s so good to have a man.’

  ‘But not just any old man. The man who’s the father of your baby, sure.’

  Ashley gave a little shiver.

  ‘He’s all over me. He’s like he’s so fired up at being able to make this baby he wants to make another straightaway.’

  ‘I don’t think,’ Henry said, ‘that you should be saying this kind of thing to me.’

  ‘Because you’re a man?’

  ‘Because I’m not family.’

  ‘I thought,’ Ashley said, ‘that you didn’t know about family.’

  ‘I’m learning.’

  Ashley picked up the water glass and held it out to him.

  She said, in a much steadier voice, ‘We’d sure like to adopt you into our family. We’re all crazy about you. Even Grandmama.’

  Henry took a swallow of water.

  ‘But not Gillon.’

  ‘You don’t want to pay any attention to Gillon.’

  Henry smiled into his glass.

  ‘Maybe we’re too alike. Two square pegs endlessly looking for square holes.’

  ‘Gillon says,’ Ashley said slowly, ‘that she’s always out of step.’

  Henry looked up.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Mama says that’s OK. She says it’s perfectly OK to be out of step because that way you get the bits other people miss.’

  ‘I’ll remember that,’ Henry said. He put the water glass down on the counter. ‘You should too. Especially right now. Assuming, that is, that there is a way to be in step after having your first baby.’ He looked at Ashley. ‘I have to go.’

  She nodded.
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br />   He said, ‘I’ll be away for a while, working. No birds of course, just winter habitat and acclimatizing myself. And Kansas City.’

  ‘Daddy told me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have any of this, without him.’

  ‘He’s glad to help. He’s glad to do anything he can.’ She took a little breath. ‘We’ll miss you.’

  Henry took a step towards her. He bent to kiss her cheek and saw her eyes flare fractionally as his face came nearer.

  ‘Bye,’ Henry said.

  While Miss Minda was out at her Wednesday Prayer and Praise meeting, Sarah took the stepstool kept for cleaning ceiling mouldings and chandeliers to reach the top closets in the guest bedroom. This was strictly forbidden. Two years ago, she had climbed on the stepstool to straighten a crooked picture and fallen and badly cracked her ankle. Miss Minda had been out then, too, at her church quilting group, and Sarah had lain in considerable pain and misery for an hour and a half until her return. She had then spent six weeks in the Queen Anne chair – Charleston made – in the sitting room with her plastered ankle resting on a cushioned stool, waited on disapprovingly by Miss Minda. When the plaster finally came off, Sarah had been horrified. Her lower leg was thin and wasted and completely, unacceptably, hairy. The memory of that hideous and shameful ankle, a grotesque travesty of what had always been trimly and proudly hers, kept Sarah further away from the stepstool than any memory of pain could ever have done. All the same, with her mind now turned towards and fixed upon her next goal, she carried the stool stealthily up to the guest bedroom and extracted from the high closets, which only otherwise held her hats from long-ago glory days, three boxes of Christmas decorations assiduously wrapped in tissue paper.

  Christmas, Sarah had decided, was going to be her affair. She had allowed Martha to organize Thanksgiving and had naturally regretted it. Martha had left everything to the last minute, had made no specific table decorations and had only permitted Sarah to contribute a pumpkin pie. The result was, to Sarah’s mind, something of a disaster. No cream sauce for the peas, no special cornbread, no cranberry relish, inadequately glazed sweet potatoes. Martha had found candles for the table, certainly, and polished her silverware, but the napkins were paper and there was a lack of precision and grace in the table setting – no finger bowls, no shrimp forks for the appetiser – that set Sarah’s teeth on edge. No wonder, she thought, pinning her hair up under its chiffon sleeping turban the night of Thanksgiving, that the family seemed so on edge too. Boone and Cooper and that charming English boy had all exhibited the sense of occasion expected at Thanksgiving, but Merrill had been too boisterous – this was not, Sarah had quietly reminded him, a fraternity reunion dinner. Martha had looked exhausted, Ashley unhappy, and Gillon – well, Gillon had been so silent that, if she had also failed to eat her dinner, Sarah would have believed her to be sick. It was no good expecting a family to behave like a family, without leadership; domestic leadership of that peculiarly sweet and determined kind that lay in the power of women. If Martha insisted on giving the cream of her energy to her research and her patients, Sarah was not going to chastise her about it. At least, not openly. What she was going to do instead – ostensibly in honour of the presence of Henry Atkins – was provide a full-on, no-detail-forgotten English family Christmas with Southern touches, Charleston touches. She had on her bureau a leaflet from the store where Ashley had worked before the baby arrived. The leaflet was entitled ‘Give a Little Charleston Charm This Christmas’. Sarah was undecided. Maybe she would give Henry a reproduction rice spoon. Or perhaps a brass pineapple letter-opener. Or even a Rainbow Row doorstop. She lifted down the last of the boxes of decorations and set it beside the others on the guest bed. Then she looked at the stepstool. She thought about moving it and decided not to. Miss Minda could find it when she next dusted the bedroom and realize that a little defiance had been successfully accomplished behind her back. Sarah piled the boxes into a small tower, and carried them down to her sitting room.