‘I’m sorry to take you out of your way,’ I said as the boat curved back on its track and nosed across the river towards the throng of Midtown towers.
‘No sweat, we’re not going any place, just cruising, aren’t we boys?’
‘That’s right, Mr Rawston,’ said the couple of young men in white ducks freshening the drinks and laughing as they freshened them.
‘Tara – Mrs Rawston – will be sorry to have missed you. She’s still down in Key West, waiting for the next hurricane,’ Rawston said. He was still laughing as he shook my hand and repeated his promise to call me.
It was small comfort that he hadn’t got my number.
As I walked along the deck behind the boy with my case, which suddenly looked cheap and shoddy, a hand gripped my elbow and Jane came out from behind the bridgehouse.
‘You’re so right, to get off the boat now.’
‘Well, I have to –’
‘These are bad men, you don’t want to have anything to do with them.’
‘No, I –’
‘Goodbye. Friends after all?’
And before I could say friends back, she reached up and gave me an awkward firm kiss, which reminded me of the times in France just as her warning reminded me of the warning she had given me against my father’s old racing friends. The advice wasn’t much use then, even less use now.
They threw out the gangplank to the pier (only a few hundred yards from the pier we had set out from) and I stumbled down it with the black briefcase under my arm and the big blue case knocking against my calves. When I reached the quay, I put the case down to catch my breath and looked back up at the Sting Ray towering above me. Leaning over the side I could see a sallow figure in a yachting cap. As the boat reversed engines and began to slide out of the berth, the sallow figure raised his hand in one of those casual US Navy salutes and I waved back.
This was a bad beginning. My first hours in New York had been spent on a cruise round the harbour with a known associate of the late Senator McCarthy on the associate’s yacht, no doubt bought with drug money, discussing a scheme to evade UN sanctions, a scheme which moreover I had been (to say the least) in contact with in another continent, where a mysterious plane crash . . . all this would look bad enough for a private citizen, but for a government official on a mission to burnish his country’s image it was a disaster.
Then it also came to me, but not until I was safe in my comfortable old room at the Hotel Roosevelt with its huge gold taps and 1930s furniture, that Wilmot had his own reasons for welcoming me into his unsavoury circle. The more he entangled me, the less inclined I might be to discuss with others his strange treatment of his first wife, if she was his first wife and if indeed I knew the half of it. There was only Jane’s word for it that Tucker had shot herself and scarcely a disinterested word at that. They might not have thought the whole calculation through, Dodo seemed to operate by instinct half the time, but instinct would surely tell him that he didn’t want me running around letting off my mouth about his affairs, business or personal. Then, besides, they were such friendly people that it would come so naturally to them to keep in touch that they would not need to think of it as keeping tabs. But I knew they would not leave me alone.
All the same, it was hard to brood too much as I walked up Fifth and stretched my neck to look at the steepling cliffs of the Rockefeller Center and the massive renaissance palazzos of the Ivy League clubs and the Avenue stretching away to the Plaza and the Pierre and the beginning of Central Park and that feeling not to be repeated anywhere else that life was bursting with a promise you couldn’t exactly define – the vagueness being part of the promise, perhaps the best part because if you had known what the promise was you could also see how it could be broken. I found a permanent room in an apartment hotel over on the West Side just behind the Mayflower, on a street where old ladies from Central Europe sat on the benches looking exhausted to be still alive after enduring so much, and secretaries staggered home with big brown bags of groceries from Zabar’s, and there was always the smell of coffee brewing. Somebody had said that you could become an American in a day. Well, you could become a New Yorker after a cup of coffee.
That instant immersion in the city gave me a false sense of security and a false sense of time too, so that Dodo seemed to have left an interval which I might call almost decent before contacting me, and it came as quite a shock when a message from the office of Waldo R. Wilmot, President, turned up in the middle of a pile of otherwise useless memos, briefing papers and invitations to launches, celebrations and symposia organised by people trying to burnish the image of their own nations, corporations and institutes. It came somewhat curiously in the form of a letter to the British Consul, my boss. They had set up down in Virginia, Dodo wrote, a small group of leading industrialists who met regularly to discuss world economic prospects and developments, and who would be particularly eager to have an update on the UK from his old friend Gus Cotton whom he understood to be a recent recruit to the team.
‘This is just the sort of thing we are after,’ the Consul said. ‘Well done.’
The Consul was a mild man with a sudden smile which creased his whole face but left me feeling somehow sad and depleted. His upper lip had that naked quivering look which demanded a moustache but I could see he was not the kind of man who would grow one.
‘Well done,’ he said again. ‘Some of us have been trying for years to make that sort of contact. Hilary spake sooth when he commended you to us.’
It took me some time to work out why Dodo had written to the Consul and not directly to me. Then I saw that by writing to the Consul he would make it impossible for me to refuse and at the same time he could claim he was giving my career a leg-up.
‘You’ll be our house-guest at Turkey Creek,’ he boomed over the phone. ‘I’ll send the Gulfstream up Friday. You happy with Laguardia? It’ll be great, just a downhome family kinda thing.’
There were only a dozen or so seats spaced out around the cabin of Dodo’s Grumman Gulfstream. At first it seemed I was going to be the only passenger, and the soothing peach and eau-de-nil colour scheme failed to keep down a swelling sense of embarrassment as Barbara, the hostess, pulled out the side-tables attached to my seat and dotted salvers of pistachios and olives and pretzels around them, not to mention a whisky sour which she insisted I must have because Mr Wilmot said she made them better than any bartend on the Eastern seaboard.
Just as the pilot began to rev the engines, a gawky young man in black spectacles with floppy black hair ducked in through the open door.
‘Brainerd, you don’t know what you do to my blood pressure, cutting it so fine every time.’
‘Sorry Barbie doll.’
‘If you call me that again, the bar stays closed.’
‘Who cares? I’m on the wagon anyway, so just fix me a tomato juice, will you?’
His banter sounded a little grudging as though he had been pressed into playing the part of the unreliable son of the house who could always get round the old retainer, but Barbara seemed pleased to see him and the smile fixed on her big mouth seemed to relax.
‘Remember me, the tutor from the Ville?’ I leant across and he took my extended hand.
‘Gus, hi, I heard you were coming.’
He was not unfriendly but he didn’t put a lot into it. We might have met on the same flight a week ago instead of not having seen each other for fifteen years.
‘You been to Turkey Creek before?’
‘No.’
‘It’s pretty, very pretty. Mom likes it.’
‘And you?’
‘Oh they leave me alone. I try to get some work done.’
‘What is your work?’
‘Oh analysis, trends, it’s hard to explain. You won’t mind if I –’ He gestured at the squashy shoulder-bag beside him which had papers spilling out through the open zip.
‘Of course not.’
He pulled out a handful of papers and spread them across his lap,
not bothering to extract the table from the arm-rest. He was too far across the aisle for me to see what sort of papers they were. But he seemed to be murmuring to them as though they were pets he was stroking rather than studying them with the close attention he had implied was involved. It was an abstractedness that seemed close to day-dreaming, not unlike the way he had played with his tin can collection as a child. Perhaps both occupations were simply a polite escape route from unwelcome company, not so polite though in the adult version. He took out a pocket calculator and pressed a few buttons, then smiled to himself.
Barbara offered me another whisky sour and I resigned myself to getting pickled. Every now and then, I nipped a glance across at Brainerd. He was now hardly focusing on the papers at all and the smile had lodged on his face almost as though he had gone to sleep in mid-smile, but he was not asleep. He began to unnerve me and I could see he was unnerving Barbara who was not holding back from her own whisky sours.
‘Mr Wilmot says if you can’t drink on duty when can you drink,’ she said when she saw me looking at her glass.
‘That apply to the pilot too?’
‘No sir,’ she said, ‘he’s as sober as a judge, though if you look at some of the judges in Terence County, that don’t count for much.’
As the plane droned on through the night, a feeling somewhere between impatience and anxiety took hold of me. It began to seem important to rouse Brainerd.
‘How’s Timmy?’
‘Timmy, my little brother? Oh he’ll be there. You’ll see him.’
‘What’s he up to these days?’
‘Up to? You mean, like work?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh I don’t know really.’
‘Timmy’s going to law school in the fall,’ Barbara broke in, she was sitting sideways in the seat in front of us with her brown legs swinging over the arm of the chair.
‘That’s right, I guess, law school.’
‘You don’t know what your own brother’s doing? You’re weird, Brainerd.’
‘Do you think so? Do you like weird people?’
For the first time, he seemed interested in what someone had said to him.
‘You were quite weird as a little boy, weird but nice,’ I said.
‘Weird but nice. That’s neat, I like that.’
Now you could see the connecting line between the infant Brainerd and the present version. Although his teeth had been fixed and the front centrals no longer hung over his lower lip, I recognised that vacant, self-absorbed look.
‘You used to collect tin cans, set them out like an art exhibition.’
‘Tin cans, that is weird.’
Turkey Creek
BARBARA OPENED THE door and let in a blast of night air, hot and scented heavily.
‘Don’t you just love that honeysuckle fragrance? Ah only have to open the door to know Ah’m home.’
As I was hefting my bag towards the exit, I looked at Brainerd. My ex-charge had not moved, and had not wiped the smile off his face either. That mild rictus suggested he might have been drugged or knocked out by some undetectable poison gas.
‘Brainerd, you’re ho-ome,’ Barbara trilled.
A minute or two later, slowly enough to make it clear that it was not her wake-up call he was responding to, Brainerd shrugged, swept the papers off his knees into his bag and slung it over his shoulder without bothering to fasten the zip.
‘Bye Barbie,’ he murmured, scarcely troubling his lip muscles, and shambled out ahead of me into the warm southern night. He submitted to the greetings of Charles the chauffeur in the same underpowered style before flopping down beside me in the back seat as though he had just run a marathon.
‘You see Mr Wilmot bought the new Lincoln after all.’
‘Yeah, I see,’ Brainerd said, gazing indifferently at the roof.
‘How’re you keeping, sir? It seems a long time since those days at the Ville. Mr Wilmot don’t go there any more, keeps his horses down here now, says France is too expensive, but I reckon there’s too many memories over there. And Miss Helen, you see anything of her? I like that girl. She had a good word for everyone.’
Brainerd came suddenly to life with a cackle.
‘That’s not what my Mom thinks. She hates Helen, says she’s a two-faced bitch and if she didn’t have that blonde hair everyone would see her for what she was.’
‘That right?’ crooned Charles, delighted by this response. ‘And Mr Wilmot, what’d he think about her?’
‘Charles, don’t play dumb. You know what he thinks about her.’
I could see Charles was giggling by the way the umber rolls of fat above his collar trembled.
The big car rumbled along a gravel drive that circled the low farmhouse at about fifty yards’ range. Across the lawn, I saw three figures sitting in rocking chairs on the creeper-clad verandah. They were lit from above like people on a stage. A dance band was playing 1940s dance music, could be Tommy Dorsey.
‘You go say hallo,’ Charles said, ‘I’ll take the bags round the back.’
Brainerd and I walked across the lawn, my town shoes sinking in the crab grass. Suddenly, with a peculiar sound half-way between a roar and a sigh, jets of water began to drench us from all angles. We dashed the last few yards through a fusillade of sprinklers.
‘Oh Dodo, you shouldn’t have.’
‘Five seconds they said, from hitting the switch. I reckon that was just about on the button. How ya doing, Gus? How’d ya like our good old southern welcome?’
‘You’re soaking. Oh Dodo.’ Jane embraced me with anxious vigour as though the tighter she squeezed the more of the water she could wring off me. I felt her tremble.
Dodo Wilmot was up and pouring drinks. The third figure remained in a wicker chair, almost without moving. For a terrible moment, I thought it was John Stilwell come back to life to haunt his wife: the dark neat figure, the odd pursed lips, that air of containment which made him seem prissy rather than good-looking. It was John Stilwell, eerily so, but with a couple of differences which dawned on me slowly one after the other: this man was twenty years younger than the John Stilwell I had known, and he was stonkingly drunk. Then Jane reminded him who I was and he waved a hand in a friendly way and had a shot at saying ‘Remember me? Little Timmy?’ with only mediocre success.
We sat down, those of us who were standing up, and at the same time Timmy made an effort to sit up, perhaps with getting to his feet as a long-term project, but had no luck here either. As he sank back into the wicker rocker, he jabbed a finger at me vaguely, if you can jab vaguely, which is what he could do, and said with a pleasurable, almost sensual, effort of recollection: ‘You gave me the ice-lolly, right?’
‘Ice-lolly?’
‘The ice-lolly she wouldn’t let me have when Brainerd broke his ankle.’
‘Oh yes, so I did.’
‘I hail thee, amigo,’ he said with a huge goofy grin, ‘Sorry I can’t get up. Too many ice-lollies.’
‘Timmy’s going to law school in the fall,’ Jane said.
‘So I heard. That’s great.’
‘Isn’t that great,’ Dodo intervened as though insisting on rights to his signature tune. ‘A lawyer, and a stock market analyst. Great kids.’
Brainerd had taken off his jacket and his shoes and socks and was ambling off through the french windows.
‘Honey, not through the sitting-room, go round the back, please.’
He paid no attention and walked on through the lighted sitting-room behind us, at the pace of a visitor come to admire the pictures.
‘Don’t worry, baby, the Aubusson can take it.’
The sprinklers were still sighing on the lawn, tracing tremulous arcs against the old trees beyond, which seemed floodlit too.
‘You better go change, Gus, you’ll catch cold else.’
It came to me now that when we had embraced it had been me trembling, not Jane.
‘Would you mind,’ I said haltingly, ‘I suddenly feel rather trembly. I thi
nk I’ll –’
‘You go upstairs and turn in. I’ll send Charles up with a hot drink. We want you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for tomorrow.’
‘Oh tomorrow,’ I said weakly, not wanting to think about the fifty leading industrialists assembling to hear my remarks on the British Economic Recovery.
‘Hey sorry to wake you up like this.’
The dimity blue curtains were still drawn in the little attic bedroom (surprising how small it was) but the light was coming in strongly, and through my rheumy eyes – there was no doubt about it, I had a cold, not helped by Dodo’s sprinklers – it was easy enough to make out my visitor, a hefty girl in jeans and grubby T-shirt with writing on it. She was bending over the chest of drawers and tossing out clothes into a big open hold-all.
‘Hi, I’m Dodona,’ she said, twisting her neck to look at me and shaking the hair out of her eyes at the same time.
‘Dodona?’
‘Yeah, a chip off the old block or my little acorn, as my father likes to say.’
‘Acorn?’
‘You don’t get it? You are the boys’ old tutor, aren’t you, for Chrissake? Dodona, sacred oak, biggest oracle in ancient Greece. Dodo, Dodona. Oh forget it, you look pretty rough. Bad flight?’
‘I came down with Brainerd.’
‘That is a bad trip. They’re weird, my step-brothers, don’t you think?’
‘Brainerd seemed to like the idea of being weird.’
‘That’s how weird he is.’
Now that I focused on her more, it was easy to see the likeness, not as eerie as the likeness between Timmy and his father but unhappier because Dodo’s bulbous features were never meant to be planted on a woman, or on a man, come to that. She was friendly but somehow ill at ease. At any rate, she made me uneasy, not least because she seemed to be stashing away all the moveables in the room, including a set of silver-backed hairbrushes and matching hand-mirror and two small rustic water-colours.
‘You’re moving out then?’
‘Yup, clearing out my stuff and Mom’s. I got the U-haul round the back.’
‘Where are you taking it?’
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