by Patrick Gale
‘Time enough for that,’ he said kissing her. ‘Listen. I had a call from some new clients who want me to go see them. There’s a place near them I helped build three years back and it’s time I paid it a visit. See if everything’s okay. It’s a special place. Real peaceful. We can just lie in a tub and look at the trees or curl up by a fire and watch the stars. It’s turning cold again and I want to take you for some sunshine.’ He squeezed her again. ‘You mustn’t apologize,’ he said. ‘I just want you to– ’
‘I know,’ she mumbled.
‘ –find some peace,’ he finished.
She stroked his thick hair, felt his stubble on her cheek. With Lawrence it had so often been she who gave the solace, as if he were a second child. Craig only had to hold her and she felt safe. She wondered if it was dangerous to place so much trust in a man. What if he were to have a crisis and need her? It would be like God asking a favour. She felt the bony contours of his spine beneath his shirt and breathed deeply, breathed in the workaday cars and coffee maleness of him. She wondered if she should let him make her pregnant and whether that promise of new life, stretching before her as well as growing within, might change everything to the good or send her running, defenceless and self-destructive, back to the battle zone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Lawrence was on his last task of the day. Watering the saplings was best left until the sun was well down towards the sea’s horizon. Earlier on, the heat evaporated the precious moisture before the new roots could draw it in. He enjoyed the slow rhythm of the work, the repeated walk to and from the water truck to fill the can. It was repetitive, tedious even, but this meant that it freed his mind. He liked the sense that the saplings were thirsty. Of course he knew that it was really the bone-dry soil which absorbed the water, but he liked to pretend that the saplings sucked the fluid in. Each sapling wore an identical tall collar of rigid plastic to protect it from the deer and ground squirrels and he used these to measure a plant’s water share, filling each collar to the brim. Often the water gurgled as it sank down around the skinny stem, as though a mouth were actually at work below ground level.
A stick snapped in the mature woods a few yards behind him. He turned in time to see a motion of leaves and undergrowth where something had scurried out of sight. He frowned and turned back to watching the stream of water from the truck splashing into his can. He was often haunted here by the sensation that someone was watching him, that Lucy, in fact, was watching him. She was always standing on the wood’s edge, never in the sun’s full glare, her skin white against the black-green gloom, absentmindedly clutching something she had brought for his inspection – a stick, a beetle’s wing case, a sweet paper. Finding him had made her shy, however, and initiated a new game, more stimulating than nature study and she would always dart out of sight the moment he did more than view her from the corners of his eye. It was deer of course, just as it was racoons and gophers and not Lala’s ghost, who shadowed him through the trees by night. The woods were alive with their thin, seemingly vulnerable legs and great, shocked eyes. They were used to him by now and drew closer to him than to any of the camera-wielding guests, but it was policy never to feed them, so they remained wild and continued to flee at the sound of his saw or striding boots.
An unsympathetic 1950s bungalow had stood here. It had been demolished and the rubble cleared as infill for where the service drive was to be extended. The plot was to be reclaimed as forest, an impossibly optimistic and far-sighted undertaking, given that the local redwoods were well beyond a thousand years old. Lawrence had ploughed it back and forth with a mechanical digger, enriching the compacted clay with spadefuls of the compost heaps all the staff were trained to maintain. Then he brought redwood saplings – or sequoias as the locals called them – collared them and erected a temporary fence to protect them further both from animals and the blundering legs of guests.
His work over, he drove the water truck back to its shady place beside the waste water reservoir. Not a drop of water was discarded here. Sewage was filtered through a system of reed beds and the resulting run-off ‘grey water’ stored in a covered reservoir from which the gardeners and estate fire truck could draw. All but the most organic cleaning products were banned. Guests were easily seduced by the delicious scents of the estate-produced honey soaps and lavender, pine and mint extract shampoos with which their bathrooms were stocked. Lawrence had never noticed shampoo or soap before, merely using whatever came to hand. With surprising swiftness however he had become sensitized by this additive-free environment. Now, when he stood near someone who used hair lacquer or fabric conditioner, the inside of his nose buzzed with the unfamiliar harshness that lingered in the air about them.
By the time they disembarked in Miami, Martha and George had already said their farewells and were looking forward to a return to their quiet, uncrowded life. But Martha saw the drawn, elegant woman with Lawrence’s face, guessed on the instant that she brought bad news, and tugged George’s sleeve indicating that he should wait on the quayside with the luggage while she lingered a moment or two in the customs hall. She saw Lawrence sink to his suitcase as though his mother had cut his strings, saw the mother talk and talk without ever touching him, as though words could make do for flesh and blood contact, saw her bite her lip and throw her brother a glance of covert desperation across her son’s bowed head. Martha saw an ugly little scene break out as another man, tough-looking yet somehow broken, was pushed by Lawrence. She knew at once what must have happened, since Lawrence had been so determined and eager to find his daughter – he had talked of nothing else since Lala’s death. She drew closer until she could feel the distress and discomfort radiating like heat from the little group. She stood quietly and waited.
When Lawrence looked up at last, sensing her presence, he met her level gaze and made a minute gesture towards her with one hand. That was all Martha needed. Ignoring Darius and the mother, she stepped forward and took his hand in both of hers and kissed it. The mother, who talked a bit like the Queen of England, was saying something about coming home and taking things one step at a time. She broke off, surprised by Martha’s approach.
‘You can come and stay with us, if you like,’ Martha told him. ‘It’s very peaceful. Just the sea and the hills and miles of forest.’
He had travelled to California with them and had yet to leave. It had been a long journey – a six-hour flight to San Francisco then a two-hour drive down the coast to near Big Sur. Even in his state of shock, he was amazed at the ease with which the old couple accommodated his brooding presence. When he tried to apologize during the flight for saying so little, George told him,
‘It’s alright, son. You don’t have to talk if you don’t have a mind to.’
While George was absorbed in watching a film after lunch, Martha slipped Lawrence a pill with a wink.
‘Make things a little easier,’ she said and he passed the rest of the journey drifting in and out of a thoughtless doze. They arrived after dark so that Lawrence, who went directly to bed, woke in an entirely new place with little sense of where it was or how he had come there.
Their house was an unpretentious three-bedroom bungalow tucked away down a steep drive off the coastal road; a house for people who had spent most of their lives out of doors. It was surrounded by coastal pine, juniper and tamarisk – native varieties Lawrence had only seen as cultivated specimens at home – which gave way to a flat rocky outcrop where one could sit looking out to sea or take a narrow path down to a tiny beach where icy waves thumped on the sand.
For a long-married couple, George and Martha spent little time together. She passed her days in the second garage, where she had rigged up her potter’s wheel and kiln and an ad hoc shop where, very occasionally, she sold her work to a driver lured down by her hand-painted sign at the roadside. George spent his daylight hours fishing off the rocks or poring over celestial charts and books in preparation for his nightly stargazing sessions from the loft window. They handed
Lawrence a set of car keys, gave him occasional errands, and left him to his own devices. He swam, bruising his feet on the stones. He took drives up and down their dramatic stretch of coastline and he spent whole hungry days following paths across the woods and hills with a battered map in one pocket and his only photograph of Lucy in the other.
He could not weep at first. He could not, in fact, acknowledge her death. It was impossible to accept so overwhelming a thing merely on trust. It was as if someone had informed him that Britain had sunk without trace during his absence; he needed proof, news footage, eloquent details. Poor, strange Lala had left a bloodstained scarf for him to grasp and sniff at and stow in his luggage – that at least helped him grieve for her. All that he had of Lucy were small proofs of her existence, the photograph, his memories, a small, coloured scribble she had done which was meant to be him up a tree. The knowledge of her being had lodged like a warm nugget in his belly on the day of her birth. It grew cold as steel when she was in danger, it beat like a second heart each time she reclaimed him as hers. It would not now dissolve to order but continued to pulse, to chill over, to ache like a phantom limb.
He lost all desire to see Bonnie again. Not only had the reason for seeking her been taken from him, but he sensed that, against all rational argument, tarring her possibly with the brush that had so spectacularly blackened her father, he was beginning to blame her. Perhaps the flight had made the child’s asthma worse, or the change of home. Perhaps she was allergic to the McBugger’s house. Perhaps she was afraid. He began to cry occasionally, thinking of her, thinking of Lala. He cried, shut in the guest room while Martha threw pots and George stood flicking his line across the surf. He cried at the wheel of the car or walking in the untouched forests. He made a sound like forced laughter and did not care that anyone hearing it would think he had lost his mind.
His reason for lingering in America had gone but so had his reason for rebuilding his life in England. The remote beauty of the Californian coast surprised him. After the oppressively artificial community life on the Paulina, he was happy to be in a place seemingly without community, where the few inhabitants were strung in pockets of privacy along a wavering coastal line, not bunched unnaturally together. Even allowing for the intrusion of the road (PCH as George called it) and the Big Sur campsites and woodland lodges, nature had the upper hand here and man felt like a transitory presence, admitted on sufferance. There were no true locals here. The nearest maternity hospitals and schools were an hour away to the north or south. Everyone had been born and raised somewhere else. Lawrence, however, felt oddly at home. The simple three-colour landscape of red earth, blue Pacific, green-black forests, seemed to claim him as kin and he sensed a deep stirring of recognition as though he had passed time here as a small boy.
‘That’ll be the sequoias,’ Martha said when he mentioned this. ‘You must have seen them as a baby in Yosemite. They’re the spirits that watched over your birth, if you believe all that stuff. We remember everything from the day we’re born, you know, but memories from before we can walk are kinda passive, like pictures in a book that someone has to open for us.’
Maybe she sensed his profound regret at the prospect of leaving, for two days before the end of his stay she interrupted George’s planning of how much time they should leave to drive Lawrence the thirty miles to the bus depot up in Carmel.
‘There’s a job going,’ she said, ‘if you’d like it.’
‘Where?’ Lawrence asked.
‘Down the coast a few miles. Some friends of Lu– of our daughter run a kind of ranch-stroke-health spa place. Two gay guys, but that needn’t bother you none. I met Scott at the stores this morning and got talking about you. They’re looking for a new groundsman, someone who can look after trees and deal with the machinery. It’s not what you’re used to, I expect, but you get to live on the job and it’s real pretty there. We’d love to have you join the neighbourhood. Wouldn’t we, George?’
The Cliff Ranch was the brainchild of Scott Christie and Jules Lynch, a couple who had made a fortune as LA restaurateurs and decided to seek a quieter life when Jules discovered he was HIV positive. Spread around the site of a derelict farm on towering cliff tops, it was unlike most hotels in that it had only twenty bedrooms and, instead of one large building, was made up of numerous small ones which were designed to disappear into the landscape rather than be seen for miles around. The largest was the restaurant, with wrap-around views of mountains and sea. The twenty rooms were individual structures, some high on stilts among the treetops, some cut down into the cliffs with Hebridean-style turf-covered roofs. Faced in local rock or wood, disguised as trees, stony outcrops or grassy hillocks, they were so harmonious that guests found themselves nose to nose with the local fauna – gophers, racoons, bobcats, coyote, numerous birds and the occasional basking rattlesnake. The rooms were discreetly luxurious, with huge beds, log fires, massage tubs and sound systems, but there was no television or radio to intrude on the anti-urban atmosphere. There was a hot basking pool where vitamin-rich drinks were served, overlooking a dizzying thousand-foot drop to the ocean, a cooler pool for swimming, hidden in a woodland clearing, and a serene health deck where massage and classes in tai chi and yoga were offered. Staff were housed in a no less idyllic cluster of log cabins in the woods and, such was the blissed out ethos of the place, employees came to feel as cherished as the handsomely paying guests they served.
Apart from Alix, the star chef coaxed up from LA by Scott, most of the staff had come into their posts from other careers and were refugees from bad cities, sad marriages, broken homes or thwarted hopes. Scott and Jules made a tidy profit but, since taking up Buddhism, seemed hell bent on ploughing the profit back into the lives of others. Twice yearly they set aside the whole place free of charge for San Franciscans or Angelenos referred to them by the AIDS support networks. Now that he had put down a year’s roots in the place, Lawrence could see how seamlessly he fitted in, how he had been hired as much for what he had been through as for any skills he might have with chain saw or pruning hook. At times, wheeling the jeep through the woods or pottering around the orchard, he would see a masseur in a white Mao uniform or a chambermaid in her blue, and imagine himself the inmate of some pioneering psychiatric institution. He freely confessed the irony of he and his murderous father-in-law ending up in such contrasting but equally controlled environments.
He showered off the day’s grime in the men’s wash house, keeping a weather eye open as usual for creepy-crawlies that skulked out of the water’s reach or dangled from the rafters. Quite apart from omnipresent poison oak, an irritant weed Lawrence discovered the uncomfortable way in his first month, the woods teemed with spiders – many of which slung their thick webs horizontally at head height over the lower twigs, hungry for tumbling bugs rather than wing-borne flies. They treated the bleach-free cabins as an extension of their domain. It was Cliff Ranch policy to kill nothing, but several of the local species could deliver nasty bites – as Lawrence’s arms and neck could testify – so he washed warily and while he lived at peace with his fellow beasts, the truce was armed. Towel-skirted, he padded back along the grass to his cabin, which lay in a clearing a little beyond the others, and sat out on its rudimentary porch to cool off with a beer.
There was a whistle. He looked up and saw Laurie, one of the masseurs, rolling down from the guest area on her bicycle. Many guests preferred to be treated in the privacy of their rooms rather than pounded on the health deck, so each room’s bed concealed a foldaway massage table. She used the bike to transport towels and oils for her work.
‘Spare me one of those?’ she called out. ‘My fridge is dry.’
‘Sure. Come on up.’
While he fetched another beer, she slung the bike against a tree and sauntered onto the porch, stretching and flexing her arms. When he handed her the can, she used it to chill her palms then rubbed them across her close-cropped scalp with a sigh.
‘Hard day?’ he asked.
> She grunted assent and pulled up a chair, cracking open the can. She pushed off her sneakers and swung her small bare feet up on the rail before her.
‘Some days they’re just so needy. Half an hour of back work gets stretched into an hour and half of emotional outpour. Jeez. I should get Scott to pay for me to have some counselling training.’
‘Is it people with– you know?’
She grinned at his awkwardness.
‘No. No HIV this week. Just the needy rich. There’s one woman. God’s she’s so cute. Ass like a peach and face like Meg Ryan. Guy with her’s twice her age. Strong and silent cowpoke type only richer. Anyway, I start to do her. Nice long strokes to begin with, nothing deep, just to get her used to the feel of my hands, and then she just cries. Cries and cries. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she says. ‘Don’t mind me.’ So I keep massaging and she just lies there with tears pouring down onto the towel. It happens a lot – something to do with relaxation. Guys worry they’re going to get a hard-on and then they cry instead, which is, like, so much more embarrassing! But she was, Jesus!’ Laurie gave him one of her straight, laddish looks, ‘She was one of the saddest women I’ve ever seen. And so cute! Jesus.’ She swigged her beer. ‘How about you? Good day?’
‘Okay. Grass mowing mainly. And I watered those new trees.’
One of the reasons the job suited Lawrence so well was its lack of human interaction. He had no clients to deal with, no bills to prepare. He had to speak with Scott occasionally, when there was something new – like the tree planting – to be done, otherwise his was a routine maintenance job. He kept the rooms stocked with firewood, he maintained the forest paths, he mowed grass, he watered plants. His wages were paid into an American bank account but he needed little spending money. They bought bargain beers and upstate wine on credit. He rarely went beyond the estate’s confines. Generously subsidized meals were provided.