Coming Ashore

by Catherine Gildiner

  “Look at the collected Jane Austen!” I exclaimed.

  “Oh, they are not first editions, but they are beautifully illustrated,” he said.

  I sank into a chair that looked as though it had been upholstered with a Persian rug and eagerly pulled myself up to the big table. Archie opened collection after collection for me. He had the keys for all the glass bookcases on a large oval ring. Some of the keys were over six inches long.

  While looking through the bookshelves, I found a first edition of Middlemarch, when it was serialized in eight half-volume books. I just couldn’t be quiet when I found Bleak House. I bubbled over in amazement when I saw the first edition with the original illustrations. “Wow, this is a great illustration of Mr. Guppy when he declares his intentions for Esther! This is exactly how I pictured him.”

  Archie did a perfect comic imitation of the unctuous upstart Mr. Guppy, preparing the ground for his proposal to Miss Summerson. “My mother has a little property … She is eminently calcu­lated for a mother-in-law … She has her failings for who has not — but I never knew her to do it when company was present …” I mentioned other illustrations, and Archie quoted the relevant scene in perfect accents. As I looked around the room, I could see from the cracked spines the books had been read. Even the books on the shelves had all kinds of papers stuck in them with tiny notes neatly sketched in fountain pen.

  “Now I know why Clive can quote from almost anything.”

  “Wiggles has upbraided me for what she refers to as my ‘wanton quoting,’ but to me there always seems to be someone else who has said what I was thinking so much better than I could have ever said it.”

  In a large folio box, I found another illustration of Mr. Guppy from Bleak House; this was one of Mr. Guppy rejecting Esther after she is scarred by smallpox. The illustration wisely does not show Esther’s face but only Guppy’s repulsion. The viewer is left to imagine the disfigurement. Archie picked up an expression on my face that I’d let slip and said, “Cathy, my dear, is something troubling you? I hope it isn’t anything I said.” He looked into my eyes in a really caring way. I realized how sensitive this man was. Only a slight, I thought, imperceptible glimmer of distress had shadowed my demeanour, yet he’d caught it. I decided to be honest and let my guard down, for there was something I liked about Clive’s father.

  “No, not at all. I remember this passage so clearly when Mr. Guppy rejects Esther due to her facial scars. I too have facial scars from acne and this passage leapt out at me a few years ago — I knew exactly how Esther felt. Losing Mr. Guppy was no sacrifice, but having to endure the disfigurement hit so close to home.”

  “Women are so unnecessarily cruel to themselves.” He placed his hand on mine and looked genuinely puzzled and upset. I could see where Clive got his sensitivity and kindness. Who knows? Maybe my scarring was almost gone. The beholder is the worst judge of his or her own disfigurement, for perfectionism wreaks havoc with reality. “I have not seen any scars on your face. In fact, when you smile, this entire wormwood library looks to me to be a multicoloured carousel.”

  At that moment, Mrs. Clifford appeared at the door to mutter that food was on the buffet in the morning room and was getting cold.

  “Why, thank you, Mrs. Clifford. That is most kind,” he said as though she had said, “Good morning! Breakfast is served.”

  “Why not show me the Thomas Hardy before we go?” I suggested.

  “Oh, I was saving them for tea time. They are really my favourites.”

  I was in heaven as he opened each book. I had pictures in my mind of all the characters in the books. It was wonderful to see a true artist’s rendition of psychological traits. “Take a gander at Arabella. How risqué. Amazing!” I could tell, by the rise in my voice, I was getting way too excited, or as my mother called it, “rambunctious.” Clive thankfully called it “alive.”

  “It is astonishing, isn’t it? You know, Hardy actually saw these and approved of them.” He was gathering illustrations of Hardy’s poems and taking things off shelves in a great rush. He was a bit doddering on foot, but he really knew how to leap around the library. It’s wonderful to share an interest with another, especially when neither of you are feigning enthusiasm. We went on at length about how we interpreted each character and how we would have drawn them. We were totally engrossed when Mrs. Clifford came and began pacing before the door like a golden retriever that was barred from the stick she was meant to recover. Finally she said, “I was sent with a message, sir.”

  He jumped up and said, “Oh quite. I’m dreadfully sorry.” As he dashed around, locking the bookcase doors at breakneck speed, he said to me over his shoulder, “Cathy, we have been dawdling.” He used the same intonation for “dawdling” as one would use for “murdering.”

  I wondered who ran the place. Couldn’t you have breakfast when you wanted? As he locked the last cabinet, he said, with his back to me, “Cathy, I realize I am egregiously overstepping the bounds of a polite host, but may I ask for your indulgence or, as you say in America, to ‘go easy’ on Wiggles. Clive is her only son. Whatever she appears, well … it’s just fright.”

  While rushing to breakfast, which took five minutes to walk to, Archie explained that in the summer and early fall they ate in the morning room, which gets all the morning sun and opens onto one of the prettiest gardens. It was once the vestry — I guess there was once a chapel as well. We turned the corner to the morning room, and there sat Clive, all showered and shaved, and his slim mother looking pert in her sweater set and flesh-coloured riding pants.

  We sat down to the quilted tablecloth and Waterford goblets, and we were told the food was on the sideboard. I started enthusing about the books and the illustrations. Instead of joining in, Clive looked pained. I got up to get my cold, dry, crustless toast that I wouldn’t give a teething baby, and he got up as well. As he stood behind his mother, he pointed to the fresh flowers that festooned the room and then pointed at the back of her coiffed head.

  When we got back to our seats, I waited a minute so she wouldn’t think I’d been prompted and said, “The flowers are gorgeous. They still have dew on them. The colours are exquisite. No wonder you have kept the walls white. They couldn’t take any competition.”

  As she bit into her rusk, she said, “I like to catch the morning dew because the blossoms last so much longer.”

  The arrangements were stunning and were clearly done with an artistic eye. “I had actually thought they were done by a florist.”

  “No. I bring in about eight dozen a day and, of course, some greenery as well. The season is so short and now drawing to a close.”

  “I can’t think of anything more wonderful than picking all those flowers in the morning. Do you oversee the gardens or is it all done by gardeners?”

  “I have a landscape man, of course, but I would say I devote the better part of the day to the garden in the spring and summer — wouldn’t you, Archiekins?”

  “Yes, and it would be a shambles without you.”

  She got her old evil glint back and Archie and Clive relaxed, having shovelled in the fuel that fed her insatiable narcissistic ­engine.

  I was beginning to get the picture. You did it her way, or complimented her on how she’d done it, then she settled down enough to make the day run relatively smoothly, until it needed to be stoked up. If the fuel ran low, then she went on her merry path of destruction.

  “Now,” she hesitated as though searching for a word, “Cathy. I don’t know why I have trouble with that name; it is not as though it is foreign. Remember that girl you brought home called Natasha? Now that was foreign.”

  “It was Natashaanlova and it was in third form. We billeted her brother for a cricket match,” Clive said evenly but letting her know he was not playing that game. It was a relief to see that he was willing to let her know what was out of bounds.

  “Quite right. Now … C
athy.” She looked over at Clive and said, “See I’ve got it,” then she looked at me and continued, “Tell us a bit about yourself.”

  “Well, I came to Oxford last year.”

  “On scholarship?” Wiggles said the word scholarship the way an American would say “on welfare.”

  “Partly.” I deliberately remained obscure.

  “What about your people?” she asked.

  “My people?” Who are they? I wondered.

  “Relations?” She said as though I had trouble comprehending any basic conversation.

  “My father is a pharmacist who owned a drugstore in ­Niagara Falls for many years and now lives in Buffalo, New York, and works in research and development for a drug company.”

  “Is your mother alive?”

  “I was getting to her.” Before you rudely interrupted. “She graduated from college, what you call university, as a Math major, ­studied for a Master’s in Math and then taught. In fact, she only taught for one day since she said didn’t know she’d be teaching children.”

  Archie laughed. “One day. I say, I like that. It sounds like my career in the foreign service.”

  “She worked during the war doing the accounts for a munitions factory, but then once the war was over she stayed home.”

  “Now you’re Irish Catholic, as is Darby,” she said, glancing at her adoring drooling dog, which I later learned from Clive was an Irish wolfhound, “so I assume you have a large family.”

  “I assumed Darby was Irish. I had no idea he was Catholic,” I said.

  “Lapsed,” said Archie.

  I continued with my illustrious lineage. “Actually, I’m an only child, as is my father. My mother has one sister and her children have mostly entered the religious orders.”

  “That is singular in this day and age,” Archie said.

  “So you are from a devoutly religious family?” Wiggles asked. She said the word devout as though it was the word pervert.

  “Yes. All except me.”

  “Were you adopted?”

  “No.”

  “Often only children are adopted,” she said to Clive in response to his long, exasperated sigh. She thundered on, ignoring his blue glacial stare. “Now, let me see. Your father was a pharmacist — a sort of tradesman?”

  “I like to say my father was a drug dealer.”

  “Did your grandparents come from Ireland?”

  “No. Both families were in America long before the potato famine. The only one I knew was my paternal grandmother. She was a Math teacher as well. Then eventually in the ’20s she was a stockbroker.”

  “Not a great job for the ’20s in America,” Archie said. “Though it must have been exciting for a woman.”

  “I used to go down to the stock exchange with her.”

  “How novel,” Wiggles said with absolutely no expression. “You certainly must know what makes capitalism work — all that wailing for money as the ticker tapes roll.”

  “Oh I think we all have a fair idea what makes capitalism work,” I said, looking around at my sumptuous surroundings.

  After a bit of a silence, I added, “Later in her life she was an investor in inventions. She made a fortune investing in Kleenex. She knew just the right moment when America was moving to the disposable. However, she and my father lost everything when they jointly invested in paper underpants. They were both ahead of their time on that one.” Wiggles was looking utterly blank, but Archie and Clive were laughing, so I continued. “My mother and I had to wear the paper underpants even though they ripped in half when we genuflected at mass on Sunday.” As Archie was howling, Clive leaned over to him and said, “I knew you’d like her, Father.”

  Then I decided to change tacks and said, “Now enough about me. Tell me a bit about you.” Clive shot me a please-don’t-go-there look. But I figured two can play the same game. I preferred conversation to interrogation.

  “Archie, what do you do?”

  “Oh, nothing really.”

  “Oh really, Archie. Don’t be such a silly sausage,” Wiggles said, folding her napkin along its original fold line. “You know that is not true.”

  Clive said, “You’ve written thirteen books and you run a large manor and estate.”

  “Quite right. That’s what I do,” Archie said with a perfect tone of mock discovery. I had heard that same lovable tone from Clive, and now I knew where it came from.

  “What do you do?” I asked Wiggles.

  “Do?” she asked as though I had posed the most ­thoroughly ­taboo question imaginable. This personal violation was compounded by the fact that she had no idea how to answer it. I actually think no one had ever asked her this question before. She stammered a bit and then announced in a frosty tone, “I run the horse farm, ride, breed and jump horses. I don’t know if Clive told you or not, but we show and hunt.” She concluded with “and I used to race, before the accident.” She hastily added, “I also run this home and do volunteer work for the National Trust.”

  “Where did you go to university?” I asked with false innocence. I knew her ilk went to finishing school and then some horse-­jumping academy. By the way, wily little Wiggles, don’t ever interrogate me again or call my father “a tradesman” with that derisive tone or you’ll get it again — double-barrelled.

  “I went to what I believe you would call finishing school, worked as a sister in the war, then fortunately married into one of the finest families in England.”

  Archie said, “That was her first husband.”

  I looked over at him, smiled and said, “Well, it certainly is one of the nicest.” Archie glanced my way with a conspiratorial smile that led me to understand he knew what I was up against.

  CHAPTER 11

  eye to eye

  And there came to him a sign of man’s true home. Beyond the ­ominous and cloud-engulfed horizon of the here and now, in the green and hopeful and still-virgin meadows of the future.

  — Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

  One morning at breakfast, Mrs. Clifford said, “When the Taylor-­Deeks come tonight, should I serve the consommé first?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Clive said. “The Taylor-Deeks? Here?” I had learned about a year ago that among the English “I beg your pardon?” translated to “What the hell are you doing or saying? And whatever it is — it is totally unacceptable to me.” When I’d first arrived in England, I had no idea of the English connotation of the phrase. Assuming they had not heard me, I would repeat whatever it was that had already enraged whomever I was talking to.

  Darby picked up the emotional timbre and began barking to warn of the danger that he felt in the room. (Not bad for an Irish Catholic watchdog.)

  “You see, now you’ve all got Darby going.” Wiggles turned to the scowling housekeeper. “Mrs. Clifford, you’ve given away our little surprise.” Mrs. Clifford just looked at her as though she were speaking a foreign language. “Philomena is home from school, as is Noddy, and they are coming en famille.”

  I hadn’t seen Clive angry since we were near the top of the mountain in Snowdonia, but I could see the same storm cloud rising behind those blue eyes that were getting darker by the second.

  She twittered on, “Well, you’ve grown up with them. I thought it would be nice to see them and for them to meet … our Little Yankee Doodle.” She’d clearly forgotten my name again but managed to remember “Philomena,” which tripped off the tongue.

  “Mother,” Clive said with an exhausted sigh, “it is all so unnecessary, so totally gormless.” After a minute or two in which you could hear people swallow their tea, he added, “I dare say we’ll make the best of it.” He addressed the doorway. “Thank you, Mrs. Clifford.” I had learned that that meant “Get the hell out of here, Mrs. Clifford.”

  There was a silence at the table. I excused myself, saying I had mad
e a personal vow to read forty pages of Dryden before noon.

  As I walked to the library, I wondered what they were saying. I would have eavesdropped if I could have, but the walls were too thick. Anyway, I was up for company of any sort. No matter how bad the Taylor-Deeks were, they couldn’t be worse than ­consommé, the world’s worst soup with nothing in it, alone with Wiggles writhing up my family tree.

  I had grown quite fond of Archie. I could see that Clive got his great looks from his mother, but his kindness and erudition from his father. Archie was one of those typical Brits who pretended he didn’t know anything; however, I hadn’t found any topic on which he didn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge.

  After riding with his mother, Clive popped his head into the study, saying it was a heat wave today and tomorrow. It was what we call “Indian summer” in America. In a freak accident of nature, it was over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and England just couldn’t cope. Clive said, “The horses took themselves back to the stall and were foaming.”

  “Sounds appealing.”

  At lunch the gardener came to the door and said that the men were coming to fix the slate roof and lay some new tiles the following morning. I said, “Tomorrow the temperature will be in the hundreds up there with the slate holding the heat.”

  The gardener responded, “The telly weather is suggesting not to be out tomorrow unless necessary, but they say they have work up north next week and starting tomorrow suits ’em.”

  “At their own peril,” Archie said. “The job has to get done sometime because there is moss building up on the back wing and the stable needs lead flashing.”

  “Right then,” the gardener said and backed out of the room.

  Wiggles said, “Archie, why tomorrow? Chauncey” (one of their pointer dogs — only slightly less slobbery than Darby and probably an Irish Protestant) “absolutely can’t abide those men and the poor dear will have to be locked up in this heat. You know he’ll bark himself into a lather.”