Coming Ashore

by Catherine Gildiner

  — William Shakespeare, “Sonnet III”

  Within the next few weeks, the winter frost was threatening, yet the flowers still held their heads high. We needed to wear our sweaters as we crossed the deer park in the morning. Clive was getting ready to sit his exams. I have to say, he was a pretty cool cucumber. He never missed buzzing out to the Trout Inn when we all went; however, he was fairly preoccupied for months on the most important test he’d ever take. Of course, he’d get a first with distinctions and whatever other accolades they could dig up from the sixteenth century. He had mostly put our relationship on the back burner because he had to study, which was fine with me. I needed time to think.

  The day after he finished writing his finals, he said, “Well, ­before the cold sets into Cornwall, we should probably get out to Cherry Run. I’ve told my parents all about you. Actually that’s not technically true; I’ve told them a bit, which is more than I’ve ever told them about anyone else. Anyway, they must meet you.”

  “Uh, okay. Is Cherry Run the name of your town?”

  “No. It’s the name of our estate in Cornwall.”

  “Oh my God! It’s the old Manderley estate. Your mother was Rebecca and Mrs. Danvers raised you. No wonder you’re so cruel.”

  “Don’t be potty. My parents won’t know what hit them.” As I wound up my stairwell, he shouted, “You do know you’re marrying me, right?”

  “Not until you’ve come to see Clapboard, my home in ­America.”

  Meet his parents? Marry?

  When I wrote to my mother about my upcoming visit to ­Cherry Run, I expected her to be her usual blasé self. However, just when you think you know people, they step out of character, reminding you that humans are essentially unpredictable. She was, in her words, “tickled pink” about my upcoming estate visit; she sent me reams of advice for the first time in her life, which she ­labelled estate planning. She even drew little pictures on graph paper showing me possible silver settings that included oyster forks and which to use first. This from a woman who said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” while continuing to page through her National Geographic, when I went over the Niagara Escarpment and nearly fell into the Niagara River on my sled in the dead of winter. Stumpy, who was known as Trent before he went sledding with me, was less fortunate that day — his sled went airborne into the river, which gave him frostbite that claimed his fingers. Her sudden estate ­enthusiasm reminded me that she had in fact been on a downward mobility trajectory since she’d married my father. Her relatively well-off family died young and to her credit she never once in my entire life mentioned what her family “had been.”

  >> <<

  A week later, I had a break, so Clive and I sped out into the countryside in what I described as a “green sports car” and he called his “roadster.” It was a British racing-green Austin-Healey two-seater convertible. We wound along a road in Cornwall flanked by a white cliff with black veins on one side and the ocean crashing on rocks on the other. The ocean looked like white clouds rushing toward the shore then breaking into rain upon the rocks. I actually felt the spray from the ocean at a few points. The mist on my face reminded me of Niagara Falls, and I felt almost at home.

  We were singing along with the Animals, when we turned onto a long drive cutting through huge expanses of green lawn dotted with wild-flower gardens and circular English tea rose gardens. Clematis, trumpet vine and climbing hydrangea intertwined over fences leading up a gently rising slope to a massive yellow-brick house. It had wings for Christ’s sake! Richard Adams had designed it in 1762, and it was grand in a way that nothing in America could ever be as grand. We continued up the driveway lined with arching cherry trees with burnished orange leaves just beginning to drop. I thought it must be magical in the spring with the millions of white blossoms in a row. You could have a wedding here and never need confetti. We passed a ruddy-faced gardener in old wellies perilously perched on an ancient ladder. He leaned back while holding huge, cast-iron pruning shears, which must have been about six feet in length, and waved to us, and then snipped off a branch.

  A pretty woman, somewhere on the dark side of forty, tall with pale blond hair pulled back severely into a French twist, was waiting as we pulled into the semicircular drive under a portico that must have originally been for carriages. The arch had a magnificent leaded-glass lantern that hung down on ancient wrought-iron chains. The woman wore sensible Ferragamo flats, a linen blouse with flat pearl buttons and a navy linen skirt. Draped loosley around her neck was a Hermès scarf with a horse head and horseshoes pattern. The outfit was casual, yet elegant. As she walked toward the car and smiled, I could see she had once been very beautiful, but something had happened to one of her eyes. It was a bit cloudy and didn’t scan as fast as it should. It pierced her otherwise Grace Kelly–perfect looks. I’ll bet her dance card had rarely been empty.

  The father was something in the British hierarchy but I didn’t know what. (Duke? Earl? Viscount? Baronet? Lord? Knight?) God knows what she was supposed to be called. I couldn’t call her “Lady”; it was too much like Lady and the Tramp. I decided to never call her anything.

  Even though Clive was an only child, I assumed he couldn’t be that close to his mother since he went to boarding school practically the day he left the nursery. That was the first mistake I made at Cherry Run. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the last. In retrospect, I think it should have been named Cherry Run as Fast as You Can.

  I could tell from the way she wonderingly eyed me, she was trouble. She hugged her son and tears came to her eyes. Clive said only, “Steady on, Mother.” A man who looked distinguished but older than Clive’s mother stood in the giant double-door entrance. He had grey hair combed straight back and bushy black eyebrows. He wore khaki pants, a grey plaid Viyella shirt — an homage to country-casual Americana — and a navy sports jacket with some sort of gold braided letters on the pocket.

  He said, “Wiggles!” Believe it or not the name “Wiggles” had been Clive’s mother’s name since childhood. “My dear, really, ­unhand the boy so he may fulfill his social obligations,” he said, eyeing me as I stood ignored and leaning against the car door.

  “Oh, of course. How discourteous of me,” she said.

  “Mother,” said Clive, and then he looked up the stairs to the bushy-eyebrowed man who was rapidly descending, “Father, this is Cathy McClure.”

  “McClure, what sort of name is that?” the mother asked.

  “American,” I said. She looked expectant so I felt I had to further delineate myself. “I guess Irish American.” I had never really thought of myself as Irish, but I could see that just plain American wasn’t enough information.

  “Isn’t America marvellous, how everyone simply arrives and feels such a great part of it,” Wiggles said.

  Into the portico came another woman, looking nearly as old as the wrought-iron lantern and wearing a black blouse and skirt and really strange shoes that looked like lunar walking gear. They were rounded in front and laced up the side. She had stringy, greasy salt-and-pepper hair and a leathery face.

  Clive’s face lit up. He hugged her for a full minute and said, “Titty, how are you?”

  Had he said “Titty”? No! He couldn’t have. That would be ­beyond the pale. He must have said Tatty.

  “Cathy, this is my nanny, Titty.”

  “And mine, lest you forget,” his mother added.

  “Ah … Cathy the American,” Titty said. “We’ve heard so much about you. You’re a lucky girl to have caught our Clivester. He’s a real fine chap, he is.” Titty was still holding him and flattening his hair with her fingers. “Oh, I’m so glad my Clive boy is home — and brought an American. My, my. I’m ready to take on my third generation,” she said, the first person to look directly at me.

  “Titty, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” the father said, jumping down the stairs to help fetch the bags.

 
“Where is Henderson?” the father asked the mother.

  “Archie, he’s trimming the fruit trees before there’s a frost,” she answered as though he should have already known that.

  “Whose rucksack is this?” he asked, holding it up at arm’s length with two fingers. It was at this precise moment that I ­noticed, for the first time, that I had never washed it in all the years I’d owned it. It was slick with baked-on dirt and grease.

  “I can carry it,” I said, taking it off his pinky.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t hear of it,” he said taking it back. Clive had his head in the trunk of the car and was sorting out bags when his mother said, “Archie, let … Cathy here, carry it. You’ll throw out your back. People in America are used to doing things on their own. They think it’s their personal right, isn’t that so, Cathy? May I call you Cathy?”

  “Sure.”

  I grabbed my backpack and Archie, his head in the trunk, said, “Where is your luggage?”

  “On my back,” I replied over my shoulder as I walked up the stairs and into the house with my filthy rucksack hanging off one shoulder. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t even stepped over the threshold yet and already my lineage had been questioned.

  When I went in, a woman who seemed at least openly hostile said, “Your room will be in the west wing. Would you like me to escort you?” Looking me up and down, she added, “I assume you want to freshen up.”

  Clive said, “Hello, Mrs. Clifford.” She smiled slightly, almost shyly, and said, “Welcome home, Young Clive.”

  I could just imagine someone in Buffalo saying, “Welcome home, Young Cathy,” or how about “The Cathster.”

  “She is in the bluebird room, sir,” Mrs. Clifford said to Clive.

  “Why there? It’s so far away,” Clive said.

  “I was given the guest floor plan and prepared the rooms,” she said, as though she had only been following orders.

  I wondered who else was coming since they needed a floor plan for all the guests. I hoped someone, anyone besides me, was visiting.

  Clive led me upstairs and along a wide, dark hallway that turned and then led up another flight of more narrow stairs. We made a ninety-degree turn and began going down another hallway. The room I was staying in had beautiful hand-stenciled blue wallpaper with birds standing on twigs. It had twin beds with the same fabric on the bedspreads and on the drapes and even on the window seat that accented the beautiful bay window, which was divided into hundreds of diamond-shaped leaded-glass pieces. As the afternoon sun sat in the west, the light shone through the window, turning the blue birds on the seat and on the bedspread almost orange. The floorboards were wide and waxed and strewn with hooked rugs in bird themes. There was a huge vanity that had the same blue bird fabric as a skirt. When I sat down, I ­realized you could move the fabric away and there were all kinds of drawers behind it. One drawer was a built-in jewellery box all lined in pale blue velvet with six separate rows. There was a reti­cule holder and collar box. I stuffed my bikini underpants into the collar box.

  The bathroom, which was connected to the bedroom, was a scream. It had the same blue-bird shower curtain and drapes and a needlepoint rug that looked like a series of Audubon prints all meticulously embroidered to show various species of blue birds. There was rich dark wood and all kinds of built-in cupboards from the ceiling to the floor. The odd thing was that although I could find the sink and huge tub, I couldn’t find the toilet. I mean how many places can you hide a toilet? I checked for another room. My mother had warned me about this British nonsense called a water closet. There could be another small room, which housed only the toilet. In these old houses, toilets were added later. It would be just like the cyclopean mother, Wiggles, to force me to the rooftops with the gargoyles in search of a toilet. Then days later when they found me, I would be as insane as Mr. Rochester’s wife and have wet pants.

  After going over every square inch, I finally decided to follow the plumbing from the ceiling. At long last, I found an unobtrusive flush cord hanging from the ceiling above a flat, highly polished mahogany wooden linen or blanket box, which had three deep drawers. I attempted to pull open the drawers but realized they were fake. I jogged the top slab of the trunk and found it moved. When I picked up the lid of the box I found a hole in the middle, which presumably was a toilet. You had to make sure you sat in just the right spot on the wood. I guess this room was attempting to make the point that really no one in the aristocracy in England excretes waste material. Only a few even know where to find the toilet. The Hunter-Parsons hid their toilets and had a nanny in the nursery named Titty for two generations. Freud could have had a field day.

  I have to say the grounds were the most beautiful I had ever seen. They had the perfect combination of manicuring and wildness. As we walked around, Clive showed me what flowered and when. It was organized so that something in each grouping was flowering at some point from early spring to late fall. It was times like this when I liked Clive most. He shared the love his parents had for flora and fauna. No wonder he knew so much about the farm in Wales. No one ever left the house without taking one of their drooling dogs with them. Clive showed me the plants that were chosen for colour and texture and their reaction to sunlight at specific times of the day. We sat down on an eighteenth-­century stone seat to admire the aster and lily borders. The lilies, now on the wane, were in colours and combinations I’d never seen before. I said to Clive, “Your mother doesn’t seem thrilled by me.”

  “Oh, she is, or she will be in time. She is the type who likes to get her bearings first.”

  “Then there’ll be no holding her back?”

  “She’s concerned with who you are in that annoying English way that we’ve talked about. I’m not doing any more imitations of her as I used to. She is my mother and has her foibles just as I’m sure yours has.”

  “You’re right, of course. If you met my father now, you’d find him doing a bad imitation of Nietzsche in his last year.” I should not have added but did, “He has an excuse.”

  “So does she. She has been raised to believe in all her hang-ups just as you and I have. I have had you to bludgeon me about my assumptions and elitist behaviour, even as satire. She never sees anyone who has ever questioned her beliefs.”

  “What about the BBC?”

  “She thinks they’re communists.”

  Clive, of course, was right. It never went anywhere to criticize anyone’s parents. I was being far too touchy. In a way, I admired Clive’s defence of his mother. He was now twenty-six and had outgrown finding fault with her. I remember my mother saying once that the way a man treats his mother will be how he will eventually treat you — that was such a terrifying statement that it always stayed with me.

  >> <<

  I was down for breakfast the next morning at 5:30 a.m., partly because I’m an early riser and mostly because it was so cold I could see my breath and thought I should move before frostbite set in. (I had no idea at the time that you could ring down for tea.) While at Oxford, I had already realized that there was a direct correlation between how much cold you could handle and your social class. The upper crust always called it “exhilarating” or “­refreshing” when it was freezing. Clive warned me that it got cold at night and remained “bracing” through the early morning, but it could be as hot as blazes in midday in Cornwall.

  When I got downstairs, there was already a fire blazing in the main hall or whatever it was called. As I sat by the fire, I had such chills I could hardly feel the heat. My ankles felt itchy. That nineteenth-century bane, chilblains, was taking on real meaning. I needed a game plan before I was relegated to do some needlepoint in a back parlour. This Wiggles woman was trying to kill me.

  I decided that the best thing to do was to out-English them. Never act cold, tired or sick of the hairy stupid, yappy mutts they kissed on the mouth. I also realized a lot of social messages were del
ivered through the dogs. In terms of delineating my social standing, I would be ingenuously honest, even outrageous. That should just about cover my battle plan.

  I decided to find the library and get a volume of poetry and read while I waited for everyone to thaw out and get going. Christ, if I were in a real house, I could just make myself a coffee. Who even knew where the kitchen was? I wandered around but never found it. If you lived in a one-room shack, you could have a cup of coffee when you woke up, something that I considered to be an inalienable human right.

  I found a door ajar and discovered a library. Not just any ­library, but one that was as large as one of the college libraries at Oxford. Built-in bookcases with bevelled-glass gothic doors lined the room. Each cupboard had green felt on its shelves so as not to damage the books, and each shelf had recessed lighting so the books shone in a beatific light. It had a cathedral beamed ceiling, and a circular wrought-iron staircase led to a balcony lined with another full set of bookcases. A large table in the centre of the room was piled with books, most of them with bookmarks in them. In the far corner near the windows that looked out on a courtyard sat a high-backed leather chair and ottoman. By then, the dawning sun was casting a thin magenta glow along the treetops and would momentarily shine through the open casement window. To my surprise, there sat Clive’s father, Archie, hunched over some small, decrepit book.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you. I thought you were part of the furniture,” I said, realizing that didn’t sound quite as I’d meant it.

  “Old enough to be. How was your sleep? Stimulating air cleared your head after all that petrol?”

  “It was perfect. I’ve never felt so refreshed,” I said as I walked around the room, looking at his collected works. The books ­almost all had leather covers. A humidifier hummed, a dozen little gauges and indicators fluctuating like those on a life-support machine in an intensive care unit. I was really in awe. If I had this library, I would never leave it. I swore that with these reference books and these perfect surroundings I’d write the great American novel.