Girl From the South (v5)

by Joanna Trollope

  Martha said, almost dreamily, ‘I had a patient in, this week, who is a lesbian.’

  Boone gave a sharp intake of breath and raised his head to stare at the piazza ceiling.

  ‘She said to me,’ Martha said, ‘“It’s pretty hard to proclaim yourself a lesbian round here.”’

  ‘I should think so,’ Boone said.

  ‘There’s so little support,’ Martha said quietly, ‘for women’s lives.’

  Boone dropped his head down.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Boone said wearily, ‘That I am no support to you.’

  ‘The wonder is,’ Martha said, ‘that there isn’t more aggression. Between men and women. Between white and black. This lesbian patient told me that the black men on her church vestry were just adamant that a woman minister shouldn’t be elected. She said they were adamant but that in no way could they explain themselves.’

  Boone put his beer down. He picked up his cellphone and switched it off. He said, looking at the phone in his hand, ‘I can’t explain myself either.’

  ‘Describe, then.’

  ‘I have,’ Boone said, ‘I’ve told you over and over. I feel you’ve let the family go, too easy. I feel you’ve sacrificed us all to what you need to do. I feel you haven’t done your duty.’

  ‘And your duty?’

  ‘I do that,’ Boone said. ‘I house you, I support you, I’m faithful to you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘What’s oh?’ he said, whipping round to look at her.

  ‘Is that all,’ Martha said.

  He made a gesture with both hands.

  ‘I miss you.’

  ‘Miss me?’

  ‘I want you to think about me,’ Boone said. ‘I want to matter to you. I want – I want to signify to you.’

  Martha glanced at him. His face was red, incipiently tearful. Ashley had been tearful, earlier. She’d told them that Gillon had told her what Henry had said. ‘Do you care about me?’ Henry had said to Gillon. ‘Do I matter to you?’

  ‘I feel the same,’ Martha said.

  Boone brushed one cashmere-sleeved arm across his eyes.

  ‘I want to matter to you,’ Martha said. ‘I want you to care about my feelings, my state of mind. I want you to stop all this absurd talk and thought about duty and give me some of the understanding you want for yourself.’

  Boone gave a little grimace.

  ‘I’m easier,’ he said. ‘I’m a simpler mechanism.’

  ‘But,’ Martha said, ‘I don’t want as much as you do.’ She leaned forward and picked up her tea glass. ‘Women don’t, on the whole. It takes so little, so very little, to make a woman happy.’

  Boone took off his baseball cap and laid it over his phone.

  ‘Do you want to leave?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it,’ Martha said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’d rather be here. I’d rather be where you and the children are, where my work is. As long – as long as you are on my side.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘Are you afraid of going away?’

  She took a mouthful of tea. She nodded.

  ‘Oh boy,’ Boone said.

  She said, ‘I need these constancies. I need these confirmations.’ She put her glass down. ‘I am not as brave as Gillon.’

  ‘Gill? Brave?’

  ‘Sure,’ Martha said. ‘If candour means courage, and I think it does.’

  Boone said slowly, ‘Is that what attracts Henry?’

  ‘It’s some of what attracts Henry.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘Does it attract you?’

  ‘Does what attract me?’

  ‘Does my being candid about how I feel, what I fear, attract you to me?’

  He said, slightly awkwardly, ‘It’s not how I was raised to see women.’

  ‘No. But you’ve been married to me thirty-two years.’

  Boone took his ankle off his knee and leaned forward.

  ‘I thought I could think differently. I thought, when I met you, that I wanted to think differently, that I could do it. But – well, honey, I’m struggling.’

  ‘Me too.’

  He turned his head towards her.

  ‘I thought,’ Martha said, ‘that I’d get to a place where I was reconciled to what other people wanted of me, what you wanted, what Mother wanted. It wasn’t that I wished not to care about what you wanted, but just to be able not to be conditioned by it, not to have to pacify, conciliate, all the time. One of the things I love about my work is that I can be certain of my role there, I know how to do what I do. But I’m a woman, Boone, and women don’t, as a rule, identify themselves primarily by what they do, what their career is. That’s very satisfactory, a career, to a lot of women, but women measure themselves by their relationships, they identify themselves that way.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, when things go wrong with relationships, work becomes the consolation, where control is still possible.’

  He put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. He said, looking at his linked hands, ‘Has our relationship gone wrong?’

  ‘You seem to think so. You seem to think I am not fulfilling my side of the bargain.’

  ‘Thing is,’ Boone said, ‘I’ve lost you. And when I lose things I get scared. And mad. You know that.’

  Martha didn’t touch him.

  She said, ‘You haven’t lost me. You might not have got quite what you wanted or expected, but you still have me.’

  Boone grunted.

  ‘Are we,’ he said, ‘as screwed up as our children?’

  ‘In a way. Our parents told us life would be settled.’

  ‘And it hasn’t been.’

  ‘Sure hasn’t.’

  ‘But you haven’t lost me,’ Martha said. ‘There’s a big difference between being lost and just hiding.’ Boone bowed his head. ‘I’m not sure I can do all this.’

  ‘All what?’

  ‘All this – kind of looking and empathizing.’

  ‘Do you want to?’ Martha said. ‘Do you want to try?’

  He gave her a quick glance. ‘You going to try too?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You mean that? You mean you’re going to make some changes? You’re not going to go on talking down to me like I was some dumb kid?’

  Martha took a quick breath.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Boone looked at her tea glass.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘you need something stronger than that.’

  There was a sharp wind tugging along the quayside in front of the Yacht Club. It was a northerly, a northeasterly, bringing the clear, cool air that Charleston longed for – and seldom got – during the breathless, sultry summers. It was a wind Henry recognized, a brisk North European sort of wind, bracing and cleansing and, after a while, abrasive and exhausting. He stood by the rail, waiting for Cooper, and watched the wind chop up the water in the harbour into little, quick waves. It was the sort of spring day that made him remember, for some reason, the spaniel that he and Paula had had, when they were children – the only dog he’d ever owned – which went mad on days like these, racing round the garden, ears flying, barking rapturously at everything and nothing.

  Waiting for drinks at the bar, Cooper looked out through the Club’s glass doors and saw Henry there, down by the rail. He was in American clothes now, American shoes, he had – to Gillon’s despair – an American haircut, but he still didn’t, to Cooper’s eye, look anything other than a Brit. The way he moved, the way he held himself, the way that everything he did, despite his size, had a small edge of diffidence to it, almost apology, was, to Cooper’s eye, very, very British. But if Henry had been other than British, if Henry had been one of Cooper’s Charleston buddies, then Cooper would not have been able to confide in him that he had lost his job, that he had been fired for too many no-shows, for slacking. The barman pushed two double shots of whisky towards him.

  ‘Thanks,’ Cooper said.
He did not catch the barman’s eye. The barman at the Yacht Club was used to serving Boone, approved of serving Boone, and had unexpressed but entirely evident views about serving Cooper.

  Cooper picked up the glasses and pushed his way out through the doors and down the steps into the windy sunlight. Henry turned from the rail and watched him approach. He looked at the whisky.

  ‘I thought we were drinking beer—’

  ‘I need this,’ Cooper said.

  ‘I need some soda—’

  ‘Aw,’ Cooper said irritably, ‘just drink it, will you?’

  Henry took a sip of his whisky.

  ‘Don’t take it out on me, mate.’

  Cooper shook his head.

  ‘Sorry.’ He glanced at Henry. ‘How’m I going to tell Mother and Daddy?’

  ‘Like you told me.’

  ‘I was wondering,’ Cooper said, ‘if I wouldn’t tell them anything until I’d found another job.’

  Henry leaned on the rail. He swirled the whisky around in his glass.

  ‘That’s what I’d do. But I’m not you. Given my family situation, nobody’d give a damn either way anyway. I shouldn’t think my father could even tell you how old I am. But it’s not the same for you. You’re all intertwined with one another, you’re all involved, you don’t do anything that everyone else doesn’t know about. So I don’t think you can do anything except come clean.’

  Cooper came to lean beside Henry, his elbows on the rail, his hands cradling his whisky glass. He said, gazing out into the harbour, ‘Do you really have that much freedom, in England?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Boy,’ Cooper said, ‘could I use some of that right now.’

  ‘Some of us’, Henry said, ‘have so much freedom we don’t know where we’ve come from and we don’t know where we’re going. If we have freedom like that, you see, we can’t have security as well.’

  Cooper turned his head to look at Henry.

  ‘You get looked after, here,’ Henry said. ‘You get looked after in families and schools and colleges. The average English student would look like a dangerous, nihilistic anarchist on the average American campus. The average English student hasn’t got this great raft of parents and teachers behind them, this support structure. But you’ve always got something to fall back on here. You’ve got somewhere to go to, people who just won’t give up on you, whatever.’

  Cooper looked away.

  ‘Right now, all that’s just suffocating me.’

  ‘Get away then,’ Henry said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me. Get away. Go away. Get a job in Seattle or Tucson or Milwaukee. Step out of the cage and see.’

  Cooper stared at him.

  ‘Did you do that?’

  Henry shrugged. ‘Mine was a different cage.’

  Cooper said sadly, ‘I’ve let them down.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’m not what Daddy—’ He stopped.

  Henry said, ‘Are you sure that your father is so decided?’

  ‘Isn’t he?’

  ‘May I quote Gillon?’

  Cooper shrugged.

  ‘If you must.’

  ‘Gillon thinks your father thought everything would always be fixed, fixed like it was when he was growing up here. And that he’s realizing now that we’re all learning, all the time. And that everything’s always changing.’

  ‘She should speak for herself,’ Cooper said angrily.

  ‘All she means,’ Henry said, ‘is that your father isn’t set in stone. Any more than she is. Or you are.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Cooper said. He took a gulp of whisky.

  ‘I mean’, Henry said, ‘that you can go on thinking Charleston is a safe playground for well-off white boys like you, or you can have a look at something else.’

  ‘Who,’ Cooper said furiously, ‘are you to tell me?’

  ‘The person who’s listening to you. The person you confided in.’

  ‘No need to goddamn preach.’

  Henry finished his whisky. ‘I’ll stop then.’

  ‘You sure will.’

  ‘I’ll talk practicalities.’

  ‘Like what? Like I’ve no job, no money, mortgage payments due on the apartment—’

  ‘I’ll take those over,’ Henry said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll take over the apartment,’ Henry said. ‘I’ll take over the payments, in lieu of rental. Then you can go. Go anywhere. Do anything.’

  Cooper straightened. He looked out to sea and then he looked at Henry.

  ‘Yo, man,’ he said.

  Martha came down the post office steps and turned to look along Meeting Street. The Gullah women were there, as usual, weaving their complicated, delicate sweetgrass baskets, the finished ones displayed at their feet on coloured cloths spread across the sidewalk. A group of tourists stood watching from a tentative distance: there was something decided, almost formidable, about the Gullah women that might deter a northern tourist, disconcerted at the unpredictable notion of bargaining.

  Martha hesitated. She had intended to walk east along Broad Street, as far as Boone’s office, in order to see if he was free to have lunch with her. She wasn’t at all sure that she had ever attempted, spontaneously, to have lunch with Boone in twenty years or more, but something in her both seemed to want reassurance as well as to want to give it. She took her cellphone out of her pocket book and dialled Boone’s office number. Boone’s assistant, Cindy, answered the call with the long and elaborate response she had carefully devised as sounding both charming and professional. So Southern, Martha always thought, so very, very Southern.

  ‘Cindy, it’s Martha.’

  ‘Why,’ Cindy said, not deflected for a moment from the character of her performance, ‘Martha. How are you?’

  ‘Just fine,’ Martha said. Cindy’s hair – long – would be perfect, as would her nails, and the state of her lipstick. ‘Could I speak to Boone?’

  ‘Oh Martha,’ Cindy said – she’d be holding the telephone in the fastidious way you have to, if your nails are as long as a Chinese mandarin’s—‘I’m so sorry, but Boone went out to lunch ten minutes ago. He’s lunching with Nat Dooney, at Magnolia’s. You want to call him there?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Martha said. ‘It wasn’t important. Could-could you tell him I called?’

  ‘You don’t want to call him?’

  ‘No,’ Martha said, suddenly not caring what Cindy was thinking. ‘No. I just want him to know I called. Tell him I’ll see him later.’

  ‘Sure,’ Cindy said. ‘Sure, Martha. I’ll tell him.’

  Martha dropped her cellphone back in her pocket book and turned to walk back west along Broad Street. She walked quickly, as if she had a purpose, until she reached the plate-glass windows of the gallery where Gillon worked. There was a new spring exhibition, an exhibition themed on paintings of water: sea and swamps and rivers and lakes. Martha peered in. On the round table inside the window she could see small sculptures of shells and fossils. Beyond the table, pushing a mop or a broom rhythmically across the floor, she could see Gillon.

  She pushed open the street door. Gillon stopped what she was doing and looked round.

  ‘Mama!’

  ‘Hello, dear,’ Martha said.

  Gillon leaned the waxing mop against a wall beside a huge grey picture of either sky or sea, and came hurrying forward.

  ‘What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at the clinic? Are you OK?’

  Martha inclined her face for a kiss.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I had two patients cancel. It almost never happens and when it does I usually catch up with paperwork. But this time – well, I’d suddenly got two hours and I thought – I just thought maybe I’d lunch with Daddy.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He’s lunching with Nat Dooney.’

  Gillon watched her mother.

  She said, ‘I can’t leave here, Mama, but you’re welcome to share a
tuna sandwich.’

  ‘It wasn’t really the food. I’m not hungry—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I’d like,’ Martha said carefully, ‘a moment to talk to you.’

  Gillon put a hand under Martha’s elbow. She guided her back towards the rear of the gallery and two ladderback chairs beside a table where gallery orders were meticulously taken in a handwritten ledger. Gillon pulled a chair forward. The seat bore a pad made artistically from a folkweave blanket.

  ‘Here, Mama.’

  Martha sat down. She looked round her.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘How much longer are you going to work here?’

  Gillon took the second chair.

  She said composedly, ‘Two more weeks.’

  Martha flinched a little.

  ‘Two weeks—’

  Gillon leaned forward.

  ‘I was going to tell you. I was going to tell you and Daddy. I already told Ashley. I’m going to California.’

  Martha looked at her.

  ‘California?’

  ‘I’m going to work at the Getty On the database at the Provenance Index. For six months.’

  Martha put her hands together in her lap and interlaced the fingers.

  ‘And – and Henry?’

  ‘Henry helped me find the job.’

  Martha looked down at her hands.

  ‘Ashley told me that Henry has said to you that he will – he will wait for you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long will he wait? How long will you ask him to wait?’

  Gillon said steadily, ‘I don’t know, Mother.’

  Martha gripped her fingers together. The bones shone white.

  ‘And Cooper’s going—’

  ‘Yes. Cooper’s going to Cleveland.’

  ‘And now you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You too—’

  ‘Yes.’

  Martha tore her fingers apart and flung her hands out.

  She cried, ‘Ashley needs you!’

  ‘Oh Mother—’

  ‘I’m not sure I can—’

  Gillon slipped off her chair and knelt beside Martha. Martha didn’t look at her.

  She said, in her normal, neutral voice, ‘We all need you.’

  ‘No,’ Gillon said quietly.

  ‘And here you are, running away again—’

  ‘No,’ Gillon said, ‘not running. Going. Going away. And coming home.’ She put a hand on one of Martha’s.