‘Or not,’ William said, looking at the table.
Tilly waited. She regarded her black table mat on the pale-wood table and William’s hands just beyond it, resting there. She did not feel entirely calm, looking at his hands.
‘Do you remember,’ William said, ‘that when you got in a rage because Henry wouldn’t propose, I’d say I’d marry you?’
Tilly took her eyes off William’s hands.
She said, with a small effort, ‘That was so kind of you, sweet of you—’
‘Suppose I – meant it.’
‘Meant it?’ Tilly said.
‘Yes.’
‘But you didn’t. It was a game. It was all part of a ritual, me being upset, having one more glass of wine than I should have, Henry being out, you being in, you needing to appease me for leaving the bathroom so revolting—’
‘Perhaps,’ William said, ‘perhaps it was a sort of game. But games aren’t always all make-believe, are they? Don’t we play games, talk in games-talk, because we haven’t quite summoned up the courage to say it all out straight?’
Tilly picked her wineglass up in both hands, and held it. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I think I do,’ William said. ‘To quote your mother, I now see what’s now. Henry’s gone, Susie’s really gone this time. It’s you and me now. Isn’t it?’
‘Well,’ Tilly said cautiously, ‘we’re certainly all that’s left.’
‘That’s looking at the glass being half empty,’ William said. He leaned forward and put his hands gently round Tilly’s wrists. ‘How about seeing it as half full?’
Tilly waited. The wine in her glass began to shiver slightly.
‘If I told you it wasn’t a game,’ William said. ‘If I told you that, at some level of myself, I’d always meant it. If I told you that I’d been in love with you all along and that I’d really like to marry you, what would you say?’
Tilly’s hands began to shake in earnest. William took the glass out of her grasp and set it on the table. She glanced across at him, suddenly glowing.
‘Tilly?’
‘I – I couldn’t.’
‘Couldn’t—’
‘I’m thrilled to be asked, thrilled, touched, overcome, amazed, but—’
‘But?’
‘I can’t marry you.’
‘Can’t—’
‘I love you,’ Tilly said, ‘but not enough for that, not enough for always and ever and all that.’
William put his hands to his head.
‘Sod it.’
‘I can’t pretend,’ Tilly said, leaning forward.
‘Course not.’
‘Will—’
‘It’s all been such a mess,’ William said. ‘We’ve all been stumbling about in the dark for so long. I could just see us, you and me, getting out of the mess, walking away from it, walking into the sunlight—’ He stopped. He looked at her. ‘Will you answer one question?’
She looked as if she might cry. She nodded unsteadily.
‘Of course.’
‘Henry,’ William said, ‘if he came back, if he asked you now, would you marry Henry?’
Tilly sat up straighter. She put her hands in her lap. She looked directly at William.
‘No,’ she said.
Charleston
South Carolina
Spring
Chapter Eighteen
There was a kindergarten class piled into the swing seats on the pier of Waterfront Park. Gillon could see them as she walked towards the pier, see all their excited, chattering little heads bobbing and bouncing under the great white roofs, between the lines of white columns, silhouetted against the blue water of the harbour beyond, against the cloudless blue of the sky. Their teachers had somehow piled them in, like puppies in a basket, and the great chains that held the seats to the roofs above them were groaning faintly as the seats creaked to and fro and the little kids scrambled and pushed and shouted. When they’d had their allotted time – there was a courteous notice asking people not to monopolize the seats for more than twenty minutes at a time-the teachers would haul them all off to the pineapple fountain in the gardens and tell them they weren’t to get wet in it, or in the spray from the other fountain, the circular one. They’d take no notice, of course. Why should they? Gillon had never taken any notice of those kinds of adult instructions when she was their age, those instructions that related to the pointless grown-up requirement to stay clean or dry or upright. The only person she’d ever obeyed, she thought, during walks in Waterfront Park when she was small, was Miss Minda. Miss Minda had a dignity that had made Gillon feel that obeying her might be a good thing to do, an almost satisfactory thing to do. Staying clean and dry for Miss Minda earned her brief approval, and her approval had always been a rewarding thing to have. When you had it, you had it. It wasn’t conditional, it wasn’t up for negotiation, it wasn’t subject to whim or mood. Gillon looked at the dozen or so little black children piled into the mêlée on the swing seats and wondered if they had grandmothers at home, like Miss Minda. She’d heard someone say, quite recently, that, if he had his way, he’d put a black grandmother into every unruly class in the public-school system, and watch the accepted reigning lawlessness slink out of the door like a whipped dog.
Gillon went down the pier, past the swing seats, and leaned against the great mastlike flagpole. The flags were slapping and whipping up there in the wind, the national flag, the civic flag, the blue palmetto tree and sickle moon flag that she’d been taught, when she was the age of all those little kindergarten kids, was her flag, Charleston’s flag, the flag that spelled home and history. Away to the left she could see the delicate ironwork span of the Cooper River bridge, the bridge Martha drove over three mornings a week on her way to the clinic in Mount Pleasant, a journey Gillon visualized as a way of Martha’s slipping from one life to another, from one kind of demand to another. Martha had been making that journey for thirteen years now, ever since she set up her clinic, ever since Gillon was seventeen, coming to the end of high school, beginning on all those rows about college, about courses, about attitude, about obligation and conformity. She glanced back over her shoulder, down the length of the pier. The little kids were being prised off the seats and herded towards the park and the fountains. If they’d been little London kids, Gillon thought, they’d have been in a double line, hands behind their backs to stop them touching one another, probably in dark-wool blazers, certainly in collapsing socks and scuffed black shoes. Behind these children, behind their multicoloured, brightly dressed, jigging group, she could see Henry coming. He was walking with the gait she would now recognize anywhere, loose, easy, almost loping. He was wearing a denim shirt with a sweater tied over his shoulders and when he saw her, by the flagpole, he shot a blue arm straight up in the air and held it there, like a signal to her. She put her own arm up, briefly, in reply.
He didn’t speak, when he reached her. He put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her away from the flagpole, and then slid his arms around her and held her, his cheek resting lightly on the top of her springy head. She took a deep breath of him, and held it. When he’d first held her, on their first tentative date, they’d been out at Magnolia Plantation standing silently together in the old slave graveyard, under the trees. Gillon remembered looking at the grave of Adam Bennett, the head slave who’d been strung up in a tree by Union soldiers, and had still refused to reveal to them where his owners, the Drayton family, were. She’d been about to tell Henry Adam Bennett’s story, how he’d lived until 1910, lived to become supervisor of the whole plantation, when Henry had put his arms round her and held her, as he was now, and she’d been tense with every kind of feeling and had stood there, rigid in his embrace, wondering what she should say, what she should do next. Now, there was, she knew, nothing to be done, nothing that needed to be done. All she had to do was stand there, in his arms, and be.
‘Come and sit down,’ Henry said.
He slid his hands down her arms and took the hand
that wasn’t holding her bag, and led her to the swing seat nearest the sea.
‘Did you see all those little kids here?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I liked that. I like the way the children here talk to you.’
‘Call you “sir”—’
‘No,’ Henry said, ‘not that. Just how easy they are, open.’
He leaned towards Gillon and kissed her mouth.
‘I’ve missed you.’
‘Yes.’
‘I miss you most of the time. I keep needing to tell you things, ask you things. I want you to know me better. I keep wanting you to know me.’
She smiled at him.
He said, ‘Do you feel like that?’
‘Maybe,’ she said slowly, ‘I’m not too crazy on what I think you might discover—’
‘You’re not going to put me off.’
‘No,’ she said, still smiling, ‘I don’t think I am.’
He took her hand and held it between his.
‘How’ve you been?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘happy and sad and happy and anxious and happy.’
‘Tilly—’
‘She didn’t e-mail back,’ Gillon said. ‘I sent it again and no reply.’
‘D’you want me—’
‘No,’ Gillon said, ‘it’s her absolute right to blank me. If she wants. Why should she reply just to make me feel better? Why did I write at all except to try and make me feel better?’
‘I think,’ Henry said, ‘that we’ve had this conversation.’
‘About twenty times. We should not have it again. We have to just kind of bear what we’ve done, not keep taking it out to look at all over.’
‘Right,’ Henry said. He looked past her, out to the shining water, the clean sky. ‘I love it here.’
‘I know.’
‘All my twenties,’ Henry said, ‘most of my twenties, I kept waiting for something to happen, I kept waiting to be as fired up as I was when I left university to be a photographer, I kept waiting for the feeling that things were opening up in front of me, that I was building something, going somewhere.’ He took his gaze from the blue distance and transferred it to Gillon. ‘You can’t imagine how dissatisfied with myself I was.’
‘Oh, I can.’
‘I’d think, Come on, what’s the matter with you? You’ve got work, you’ve got a place to live, you’ve got a lovely girlfriend, and I couldn’t somehow see any of it. I got trapped inside myself, I didn’t somehow have any relationships with anyone who wasn’t in the same situation as myself, I couldn’t see where any of us were going.’
Gillon slid her hand out from between his and laid it on top of his upper hand, holding it.
She said, her eyes on their hands, ‘D’you think I’m so different?’
‘Yes,’ Henry said.
‘I was born in the wrong place in the family,’ Gillon said, ‘for my own good, that is. When Cooper came along – the boy – he was what my mother would call the little prince, Baby Jesus. I had to be like him, a boy, or Daddy’s girl, and I couldn’t manage either. You’ve heard my daddy. He calls Ashley “Doll” and me “Gill”. Like a nickname. A boy’s nickname.’
‘But’, Henry said, leaning forward, ‘you’ve identified the problem. And you’ve got a hierarchy. You’ve got a family network—’
She raised her head.
‘Is this what it’s all about? For you?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘You sure?’
‘Utterly,’ he said, ‘completely. I only want it in so far as it has made you who you are.’
‘And the South?’
‘What about the South?’
‘Your big old love affair with the South—’
‘Don’t you believe in it?’
‘It doesn’t really matter,’ Gillon said, ‘if I believe in it for you, or not. It’s what I believe in for myself that you have to understand, in the long run.’
Henry took her hand and laid it on his thigh, covering it with his own.
‘OK.’
‘I don’t know if I can stay here,’ Gillon said. ‘I don’t know if I’ll have to go away again. But I’ll always come back.’
Henry waited.
‘There’s nowhere else, you see, that I feel so vulnerable. And because of that, so alive. I don’t mean kind of vital, I mean being in touch, in touch with other people. Human. Part of humanity.’
‘Belonging,’ Henry said.
‘Yes. In a way.’
He stroked her hand.
He said slowly, ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever felt even the possibility of that before. I’ve felt, well, obliged to people rather than places, I suppose. But that’s not the same as belonging.’
She looked right at him.
‘It most surely isn’t.’ Then she looked away again. ‘But I can’t belong for you.’
‘I wouldn’t ask you—’
‘You mightn’t be able to help yourself.’
‘Look,’ Henry said, pushing his face close to hers, ‘I’m trying to tell you that I’ve never felt like this before. I’ve never felt about a person or a place or work like this before. I’ve never known where I was going before, let alone wanted to go, so badly. Are you telling me I’m just dreaming?’
She shook her head.
‘No.’
‘Well, then.’
‘I can’t carry you,’ Gillon said. ‘I can’t smooth the way.’
‘I’m not asking you to,’ Henry said. He put his hands up and held her face, making her look at him. ‘I’m just asking you to let me in.’
‘I’m on a journey,’ Gillon said. ‘I don’t know how long it will take.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘It might take my whole life. I might drive you nuts while I keep thinking just this or just that will do the trick—’
‘Gillon,’ Henry said, ‘shut up, will you, just shut up a moment. I’m not going to use the word love, we’ve worn it out, all of us, using it so much. But do you care for me? Do I matter to you?’
There was a pause and then, partly confined by his hands, she nodded.
‘Say it,’ Henry said.
She shut her eyes for a moment and then she opened them again.
‘Oh yes,’ she said.
Sarah was on her back piazza in a rocking chair with a basket of tapestry wools on her lap. She still wore a cashmere twinset – it was only late March after all – but her feet, shod in high-heeled pumps even for an afternoon at home, lay gratefully in a pool of promising sunlight. Sarah would never expose any part of her skin to the sun, never had, could never see the revelation of skin-apart from long-ago shoulders, appropriately, in a ball dress – as anything other than cheap, devaluing. There’d been such battles with Martha, in the 1960s, about sunbathing, about bikinis, about miniskirts, battles that Martha had mostly won with the result that her skin, Sarah could not but acknowledge, was going to age far, far faster than her mother’s. She picked up a hank of old rose tapestry wool and held it briefly to her face. It was sad, sometimes, to reflect that nobody but herself touched that cheek much nowadays, nobody acknowledged what a fine job she’d done in preserving it, in preserving herself, all cashmere and pearls and Italian pumps alone on a fine spring afternoon sorting wools for a pillow, or a footstool cover, that she’d probably never stitch.
She sighed and looked down the garden. Job, Miss Minda’s nephew, clad in tidy buff overalls, was raking dead leaves out from under the jasmine hedge. The camellias were out – cream, raspberry, pink – the gardenias looked a little sick for some reason, the magnolia was beginning to drop its huge, pale, waxy petals. Once upon a time, Sarah would have tied on a straw hat with a chiffon scarf, and donned green drill gardening gloves with perforated suede backs, and gone down the garden to perform a few delicate little tasks alongside Job. She liked Job. Although he was only in his forties, he still spoke in the rich biblical rhythms familiar to Sarah from her childhood, and, in any case, she’d known his father all his life, and
his mother since she married his father, and all his brothers and sisters and their families. At Christmas time, huge numbers of Miss Minda’s family came to Sarah’s house and ate cinnamon cake and pinwheel cookies and sang carols round the piano that had stood in Mama’s boudoir, in the East Battery house. It gave Sarah, every Christmas, a strong sense of rightness that her own family, her own blood family, seemed so often entirely unable to provide.
‘Grandmama,’ someone said.
Sarah turned in her rocking chair. Gillon stood in the open doorway to the house. She was holding a bunch of extravagantly shaped pink tulips.
‘Well now,’ Sarah said, ‘what brings you here, dear?’
‘I hadn’t seen you in a while,’ Gillon said. She came forward and laid the tulips across the basket of wools. ‘These are for you.’
‘Lovely,’ Sarah said. She touched a smooth petal. ‘Parrot tulips.’ She raised her face for a kiss. ‘What made you think of me?’
‘I’ll tell you in a minute,’ Gillon said. She lifted the tulips off Sarah’s lap. ‘Maybe I should put these in water—’
‘No,’ Sarah said, ‘not straightaway. Miss Minda will do that later. Put them in the cool there, in the shadow.’
She watched Gillon crouch to lay the flowers against the back wall of the piazza. She was in jeans again, of course, but her sweater was of a blue that Sarah particularly liked, and on her feet were little flowered pumps like ballet slippers.
‘Pretty shoes, dear,’ Sarah said.
Gillon straightened.
‘Glad you noticed. They were put on especially for you.’
‘Am I,’ Sarah demanded, ‘such a terrible taskmaster?’
Gillon smiled at her.
‘Yes.’
Sarah pointed to a second rocking chair.
‘Pull that up. Would you like some iced tea?’
‘No, thank you. I don’t want anything, I just ate lunch, late lunch—’
‘With Henry,’ Sarah said.
Gillon began to laugh.
‘How do you know?’
‘You have that look. Girls always get that look. Love and first pregnancies give a girl that glow.’
Girl From the South (v5) Page 25