Thanksgiving

by Michael Dibdin

  I got the Peugeot we kept at La Sauvette out of the garage and drove down to the sea, out to a promontory called Bec de l’Aigle, where I stood with the wind at my back threatening to pitch me down into the waters below. I wondered how deep they were, what sort of creatures lived down there and what they fed on.

  On the way back I bought supplies for dinner. I’d planned a classic winter meal, a cassoulet with a green salad followed by a selection of cheeses. I got to work as soon as I got home. Cassoulet is straightforward enough to make, given the right ingredients, but the preparation takes a lot of time. According to the clocks, it was almost four in the morning when the dish finally came out of the oven, but by then I wasn’t hungry any more. The thought of food made me sick. It made me cry, too.

  When the knock at the door I’d been expecting finally arrived, it turned out to be Robert Allier, a neighbour who keeps an eye on La Sauvette when my parents are away, in exchange for using the barn at the rear of our property as a chicken-coop and general storage area. There were no eggs at this time of year, so Robert had brought a bottle of the cherries preserved in kirsch which his wife made each summer.

  I think what he really wanted was to find out what on earth I was doing there, but as soon as he saw me he remembered that he had other urgent business. I hadn’t shaved since my arrival, and now had quite a creditable beard. I was wearing my father’s dressing gown, a scarf, a woolly hat and two pairs of thick socks, eating cold cassoulet out of the dish and drinking Ricard 51 cut with warm water. The clocks said it was ten in the morning.

  Robert backed rapidly away, lapsing into the thick local patois he employed when he didn’t want to be understood. I tried to entice him to stay, but the only language which would emerge from my mouth was German, which I had learned at school and almost never used since. As the sound of Robert’s boots on the gravel drive faded, I realized that word of my condition would be all round the community in a few hours.

  This ended any further inclination I had to go out. I locked the doors and hunkered down inside. My real fear now was not so much of the police as of Lucy. She hadn’t finished with me yet, of that I felt sure. One of her stock phrases, when she left the room or the house, was ‘I shall return.’ She said it in a campy, theatrical tone with a heavy emphasis on ‘shall’ and a husky trill on the final syllable. And she would return, that I knew. She’d already destroyed Darryl Bob. She could certainly destroy me. In fact she’d already done quite a good job.

  The first time the phone rang, I ignored it. The second time too. No one had called me since my arrival, for I had been careful to give no hint as to my whereabouts. It was mid-afternoon. The wind had shifted to the south, bringing in a skittish rain from the sea. The sky was drab and overcast.

  The phone fell silent. It could have been my parents, I supposed, but they were of the generation that regarded international calls as a luxury to be used only in times of life-threatening emergency. The only other innocuous possibility was Robert, but whatever he thought of my present state of mind, he would never call me. If he had something to say, he’d walk over and knock at the door. Speaking on the phone to a neighbour, or even the demented son of one, would have been a discourtesy.

  That left only the police.

  The third call was later. Outside the closed shutters, the sky was starting to darken.

  ‘Hi, it’s me,’ said a familiar voice.

  I paused, trying to control my hyperventilation.

  ‘Lucy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Rome.’

  ‘What’s the matter? Is everything okay?’

  By now I had recognized Claire’s voice, similar to her mother’s, but marginally flatter and less modulated.

  ‘We’re fine. How are things with you?’

  ‘How did you know where I am?’

  ‘I called your parents. They gave me the number.’

  ‘Oh, right. So I guess you’ve told the police.’

  ‘I’ve talked to the police, yeah.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘It’s kind of a long story.’

  ‘Is that why you’re calling? It must be the middle of the night there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You said you were at home. It’s like 3 a.m. or something there, right?’

  She laughed.

  ‘I love the way you start to do teenspeak whenever you talk to me.’

  ‘Do I? Sorry, I didn’t know.’

  ‘That’s what makes it so charming. But what I said was, we’re in Rome.’

  ‘You’re in Italy?’

  She laughed again.

  ‘No. Rome, Idaho. Of course I mean Italy.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Basically it looks like Dad was worth a lot more than he was letting on. There’s a house in California we haven’t figured out what to do with yet, plus a bunch of retro neon signs that are turning out to be worth a fortune. Frank got on the Internet and found this collector who wants to have them restored and arrange them into a neon sculpture park on his estate in Florida. We haven’t actually seen any money yet, but I’ve basically got the green light to max out my Visa card. So what with everything I’ve been through recently, I figured I deserved a break to take some time off and decide what to do next. Everything’s changed so fast. You remember I did that student trip to Europe when I was at college? Just a couple of weeks. I’ve always wanted to come back and see the place properly. And here I am. Here we are, I should say.’

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘Daniel and me.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘We’ve been to Amsterdam and then to Paris and Vienna and now we’re in Italy.’

  ‘Fabulous.’

  ‘Yeah. So anyway, here’s the thing. It’s Thanksgiving in a couple of days, right?’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Thursday. So what I was wondering was, seeing as it’s kind of tough travelling around with a three-year-old, and it’s going to be pretty lonely . . .’

  ‘Do you want to come here?’

  ‘Could we?’

  ‘Of course you can. I mean, I don’t know if I can get a turkey. The French aren’t big into turkeys, and the pumpkin pie’s definitely out. But I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘Oh, that would be so great. Don’t worry about the food. I never cared much about that. But it would be really nice to have like a family day together, you know? And you’re about all the family I have left.’

  ‘How are you travelling?’

  ‘Trains, mostly.’

  ‘Okay. We’re on the line from Nice to Marseilles, but there are also a few through trains from Italy, I think. Come whenever you want. Just give me a call from the station when you get in, and I’ll come down and pick you up.’

  ‘Great. We’ll be there on Wednesday sometime.’

  ‘When is that?’

  ‘When’s what?’

  ‘I mean, what day is it today? I’ve sort of lost track, being here all alone.’

  ‘It’s Monday.’

  ‘Oh, right. Listen, Claire.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What were you going to say about the police?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I see you. I’ve got to go now, there’s a line of people waiting to use the phone.’

  I hung up before releasing the loud groan I had been repressing like a fart. I’d tried to sound chirpy, but the truth was that the last thing I needed right now was Claire and her son descending on me for an indefinite period on the pretext that Thanksgiving was coming up. Even after all my years in America, I could never remember when Thanksgiving was, let alone the point of the whole thing. I recalled being given some long explanation by a friend of Lucy’s, all about pilgrim settlers and friendly Indians and a bunch of other pseudo-mythological junk which instantly produced what journalists call a MEGO attack, an acronym neatly combining the symptoms (My Eyes Glaze Over) and the cure (I’m out of here). Even Lucy had taken a dim view of this
‘traditional American holiday’ and, once the children left, took her mild revenge by refusing to serve anything more than sliced turkey breast and a salad followed by pumpkin ice-cream.

  I’d been happy in my solitude at La Sauvette, I realized. Well, not happy, but content. I couldn’t be with Lucy, and I had no wish to see anyone else until the police came to take me into custody. The last thing I needed was to have a twenty-something with ‘grievance issues’ and her demanding toddler as house guests, with the excuse that I was about all the family she had left.

  The fact of the matter was that my relations with Claire had never been easy. As the elder of the two children, she had assumed the lead role in making me feel an unwelcome intruder into the post–Darryl Bob ménage. Not only didn’t they have their dad around any more, but Mom was hanging out with this like really weird English guy with a snotty accent and ideas that were like just way out there. Plus, as if this wasn’t enough, they were doing it. At all hours. Loudly. I remembered Lucy telling me Claire’s devastatingly accurate assessment of the situation: ‘You used to keep this stuff for the road, Mom. Now you’ve brought the road home.’

  That phase had passed by the time Claire moved out to go to college. There she’d met Jeff, a deceptively pleasant young man who never seemed quite able to focus either his physical or mental gaze, and eventually walked off with another woman, leaving an incoherent note about the pressures of premature parenthood attached to the fridge with one of the plastic letters from Daniel’s magnetic alphabet set.

  After that I saw Claire very infrequently. Lucy, sensing my lack of interest, mostly went to visit on her own, and when we did meet she failed to make any particular impression on me. Both Lucy’s children had been late developers in every respect, and Claire’s personality still seemed almost adolescently amorphous and derivative, a recognizable version of her mother’s but lacking the indefinable quality which brought it to sparkling life. I felt sorry for Claire, but there was something about her which reminded me of a glass of champagne gone flat in the sun.

  Perhaps it was thinking about this which triggered the insight I had the next day. I was pacing up and down the kitchen in my dressing gown and socks, smoking and drinking. I was well aware that in preparation for Claire’s arrival I should be cleaning up the squalid mess I’d made of the place, but I just couldn’t seem to get started. Everything was too much effort.

  My father wouldn’t allow a television in the house, and the radio reception was intermittent at best. The only station I could pull in that evening would not have been my first choice – just when you think popular music can’t get any worse, along comes French rap – but the silence in the house had become too scary for me to endure any longer.

  It was then that I glimpsed for the first time an idea so monumentally depressing that I immediately shied away from it, childishly putting my hand over my face so that I would not have to see what had been obvious all along. It was simply this: my obsession with the person Lucy had been before we met, her looks and her lovers and all the rest of it, was nothing but a diversionary tactic designed to shield me from an insight too bitter to bear. I had not loved Lucy for those things, which might still consolingly linger on in some archive of photographs, videos or tape recordings, but for something that could not be captured and had now vanished for ever.

  I had never really been that interested in seeing pictures of the twenty-year-old Lucy, or finding out what she’d been like in bed, or even speculating about the children and the life we might have had together if I’d taken up Alexis Levinger’s invitation. That wasn’t the Lucy I was grieving for; it was the one I’d fallen in love with, just as she was, no substitutions accepted.

  In my agony, I tried to invoke the power of words to pin down exactly what this quality had been. You gain control of things by naming them, but I couldn’t put a name to this. The closest I could come was ‘quick’. In every aspect of her being – her intelligence, her humour, her lovemaking – Lucy had been effortlessly swift and accurate. That was what her children, for all their qualities, fatally lacked. The quick and the dead. She had been quick, now she was dead. End of story.

  In the middle of the night I awoke, fully alert. Something had summoned me, but I had no idea what. I consulted my bladder without result. As far as I remembered, I’d had no memorable or disturbing dreams. Everything else seemed normal. The room was completely dark. Outside, the wind was still whittling away at the house.

  Then I realized two things which made my skin crawl. The room shouldn’t have been completely dark. When I’d gone to bed, I’d turned on the light outside the front door as usual, a basic security measure which my father insisted on. The bedroom was above and slightly to one side of the doorway, and normally a very faint iridescence was in evidence on the walls and ceiling, filtering up through the shutters. Now there was nothing.

  But it was the second thing which really scared me. The mistral had ceased the day before with the change in the weather. There was no wind. The sound I was hearing was similar but different, deeper and more constant, but also more intimate, more domestic. It took me another moment to realize that this was because it was coming from inside the house.

  I’ve never thought of myself as particularly brave, but sometimes curiosity is more powerful than fear, and I was curious. I unwrapped the covers, which had twisted themselves around my legs, and stood up.

  The first shock was purely physical. My feet were cold and wet. The floor seemed to be covered in a thin layer of some icy fluid. I reached for the bedside lamp and switched it on. Nothing happened. I felt my way across the room, arms extended in front of me, to the wall opposite the bed, then along that to the door. The current of liquid was stronger here. I could sense it moving past my feet. I opened the door and groped for the light switch. Nothing. The noise was clearer and louder now. It seemed to be coming from the bathroom, on the other side of the corridor midway between my room and the guest bedroom next door. It sounded like someone taking a shower.

  I felt my way along the corridor and groped about until I found the handle of the bathroom door. And there I stopped, trembling, at the end of my curiosity and courage. I knew, with the implacable logic of a dream, what I would see if I opened the door. Once, years before, when we were still exploratory lovers, Lucy and I had rented a cabin on an island near the city where she lived. I’d gone out one morning to retrieve some things from our car. Amongst other things, I’d taken the camera we’d brought. Then I’d turned back to the house to see her standing naked at the window, reaching up, her whole beautiful body curved in perfect proportion, her heavy breasts responding to the fine, friendly hair of her pubis, her sweet face framed by her upstretched arms.

  By the time I’d got the camera out of its case, she was gone. She’d been removing a spider’s web, she told me later. That untaken picture was what I was going to see now, if I opened the bathroom door. Lucy standing naked under a shower as cold as the water she had died in, showing herself off to me one last time to drive me to despair as she had driven Darryl Bob Allen. There were no guns in this house, but there were knives.

  I was still there when the lights came on again. From my bedroom, I could hear the beeping of the clock radio in my room, alerting me to the fact that its displayed time could no longer be relied on. The tiled floor was covered in a mobile film of water, but the door was now just a door. I opened it and turned on the bathroom light. Water was pouring in a steady stream through a long slit in the plastered ceiling, flowing out into the hallway and down the stairs.

  After a fruitless search in all the likely places, I finally had to call and wake my father to ask him where the mains tap was located. That stopped the flow, but just about every room in the house was flooded, and it took me the rest of the night to mop up the water and get the carpets out on to the balconies to drip dry. I didn’t resent this at all. On the contrary, it was exhilarating to have some simple, purposeful tasks to perform. In the morning, a phone call to Jean Pallet
, the local plumber and general handyman, elicited the information that he already had three frozen pipes and a backed-up washing machine to deal with, but that seeing as it was me and I had guests arriving he would try and get there before lunch.

  Rather to my surprise, he was as good as his word. He mended the length of pipe which had frozen earlier and then sprung a leak when the thaw came, and lagged it properly. Apparently the cold weather was forecast to return overnight. ‘There might even be snow,’ he said, in the monitory tones of someone announcing an imminent hurricane. After paying him, I asked if he knew anywhere I might be able to get a fresh turkey. He gave me one of those ‘Sont fous, les Anglais’ looks, but said he’d make enquiries and call me later.

  In the event, it wasn’t Jean who called but a small-holding farmer he had contacted who raised a few turkeys. He named an exorbitant price, which I agreed to, on condition that the bird be delivered to La Sauvette plucked, gutted and oven-ready. I didn’t know when Claire’s train might arrive, but I knew that she and Daniel would be tired after their journey, and I didn’t want to risk leaving the house and missing her call, leaving them shivering on the platform listening to an endless ringing tone.

  It had been raining all day, but when Claire finally called at around seven, the downpour had intensified into a deluge which reminded me of the scene in the house the night before. The steep hill roads had turned into torrents, the habitually arid soil looked unpleasantly greasy and liable to landslips, while in the station parking lot rain-drops plashed back up off the asphalt surface like shot.

  There they were, standing waiting under the eaves of the station building. Claire looked even more exhausted and defeated than I had anticipated. Daniel was whining continually and seemed confused. We all greeted each other briefly and drove off, making strained conversation. I stopped at a couple of shops in town to pick up further supplies, then headed reluctantly back to the car where mother and son were already snapping at each other. I had the horrible feeling that we all knew that this had been a big mistake, but could not of course admit it to each other.