Property

by Lionel Shriver

  “Deirdre!” Gordon tried to imbue his clasp with the confidence she’d admired in her schoolmate. “Figured you might not recognize me after all these years.”

  “Erskine,” she stressed, gaze aglitter. “I might not have recognized you at that.”

  They ordered tea. Formerly a functionary in Swindon’s Building Control and Planning, Deirdre had taken early retirement, the better to pursue a range of outside interests. After Gordon shared his anxiety about rumors that the Royal might be privatized, the two commiserated. Scandalously, these days the whole nation seemed to resent its public workforce. “As if we’re parasites,” Deirdre said. “There’s no appreciation. Would people in the vaunted ‘private sector’ want these jobs? I don’t think so. The term is civil servant. So I got out while I could still get a proper pension. Having sacrificed so much, a body has to take advantage of the few perquisites.”

  “Right you are,” Gordon—or Erskine—agreed heartily. “The punters take us for granted. You wouldn’t credit the rudeness—mums with strollers going head-to-head with my trolley on the pavement, expecting an agent of the state to give way! Deliver one letter to the wrong address, and it’s heaps of abuse. Are they glad for the hundreds of items delivered to the right address? Never.”

  Deirdre invited him along to the cinema, where Gordon was in such fine humor that he overcame his aversion to subtitles. Indeed, for the rest of the week, Gordon joined her for afternoon screenings, his attendance facilitated by stashing the majority of his morning’s postal delivery unceremoniously in his vestibule. They took walks on the coastal path (his knee having uncannily improved), caught sunsets on Fistral Beach, and dined with views of the sea. He wooed her with thoughtful little presents from his postal trove: a packet of exotic dried mushrooms, a restaurant guide to Cornwall, and, by a stroke of fabulous good fortune thanks to some biddy with time on her hands in Yorkshire, a hand-knit woolen watch cap in red.

  Of course, there was awkwardness. Gordon would forget to look round when his date called him Erskine. Settling bills, he rushed the credit card into his wallet, lest she glimpse the account holder. A Google search on “Bergen Grammar Peterborough” may have enabled wistful remembrance of an ivy-covered amphitheater, but when Deirdre reminisced about particular teachers and fellow students, Gordon could only nod. He’d had to scramble, too, when one of his few customers who actually knew it hailed him by name—a nickname, he explained afterwards, from his fondness for gin. Gordon was subsequently obliged to order G&Ts, though he preferred lager.

  Yet when she hinted that for her last evening it would be nice to eat at his house, the whole charade was in danger of collapse. Dining in was a reasonable request, but he’d be hard-pressed to justify the gordon bosky on his bell or the disparity between his address and the one to which she’d sent her query. His home was riddled with tiny details that would betray him, like the name on the prescription pain medication for his knee. Most of all, how could he rationalize the mountains of bin bags? In truth, he had come to fancy her madly, but sooner or later with this “Erskine Espadrille” palaver some slip would do him in. They had no future.

  So he acceded to her wishes, and welcomed her that evening with a funereally hung head. If she noticed any anomalies, Deirdre politely refrained from observing them aloud. Stepping over a bin bag, she did ask decorously if he had a penchant for hoarding.

  “Of a sort,” he said miserably. The merest glimpse in one bag would give the game away, and there’s some who would take a less than charitable view of his customers’ involuntary tithe. It was over—a week hitherto the finest of his life.

  At dinner—candlelight minimizing bin-liner glare—Gordon had little appetite, and finally came clean. “Deirdre, love. I’m not Erskine Espadrille.”

  “Of course not,” she said readily.

  “You knew?”

  “Erskine was born without a right hand. Prosthetics have advanced, but they’re not that lifelike. I’ve been captivated by your enterprising spirit. Though I’m curious. However did you gain possession of my letter?”

  With nothing to lose, Gordon confessed.

  As Deirdre laughed, that chime of mischief pealed into full-tilt naughtiness. “What good fun! I’m a dreadful snoop, and can’t think of anything more delightful than poking through other people’s post. But from the looks of this place, you’re not up to the job alone. What say we take on that bag by the door after pudding?”

  Thereafter, deploying the same efficiency with which Deirdre St. James had denied planning permission for sheds in back gardens, the operation became more professional, and they cleared the backlog. Gordon would tackle the recycling as his wife-to-be read out belligerent passages in correspondence. Both tenderly reserved premium discoveries for what would prove a cracking Christmas. Sensibly, they unearthed the occasional object so improbably ugly or useless that the easiest means of its disposal was to deliver the packet, albeit belatedly, to the hapless addressee. Gordon Bosky’s efforts having schooled his customers in the art of appreciation, they never groused over the delay, but acted suitably grateful to have got any post at all.

  Exchange Rates

  Keen to select a profoundly British venue, Elliot had arranged to meet his visiting father at a funky gastropub on the Cut, a London street name that itself embodied his adoptive country’s quirky nomenclatural charm. (Elliot collected oddball street names. A recent business trip to Beverley had netted the beguiling byways Old Waste and North Bar Within. The penchant was an economy. A collection of Victorian teapots, say, would have run to thousands of quid; street names were free.) The Anchor & Hope was within walking distance of his Bermondsey flat, but the slog was just long enough to discourage his father from strolling back for coffee to discover that his son, at the humiliating age of forty-three, was living with roommates like some scraping grad student. His father wouldn’t understand that single adults with full-time jobs teaming up to share a flat was commonplace in this city, where in Elliot’s conversation the adjectives exorbitant, larcenous, and extortionate had grown impotent from overuse.

  Still, while straining to read the specials on the chalkboard, Elliot’s father, Harold Ivy, though a retired history professor whose specialty was seventeenth-century England, didn’t wax eloquent on how the Thames once froze so solid that merchants sold their wares in “frost fares” on its surface. No, he couldn’t stop talking about what everything cost. Like every American who’d visited Elliot in London the last few years, Harold remarked in indignation on the fact that, while the exchange rate was two-to-one, a pound and a dollar bought roughly the same thing. “This ‘baby beet-leaf salad’ with duck ‘shreds,’” Harold said, pointing. “Eight pounds—that’s sixteen dollars! In a bar! For an appetizer!”

  “They’d call it a starter.” Elliot felt at once responsible for the prices, and proud of himself for surviving them. In his head, he now routinely doubled the cost of British goods into dollars, to heighten the outraged sticker-shock; on visits back home, he halved $18.99 into pounds to make the most recent Coldplay CD, X&Y, seem cheerfully cheap.

  “It’s not just restaurants, it’s everything,” Harold fumed. “When I was in Oxford making some last-minute notes on my guest lecture, my roller-ball went dry. I pick up a little packet of three at a stationery store—six pounds! That’s four bucks apiece!”

  “Welcome to my world,” Elliot said. “There are only two bargains in the UK: marmalade, and breakfast cereal. Meanwhile, everyone here is taking buying-binge trips to New York. They think everything is half price.”

  “Never mind a few shopping sprees, I don’t know why the whole population of Britain doesn’t pick up and move to the United States. We may have an idiot president, who keeps sending the US army on walkabout in Middle Eastern quicksand. But at least you don’t have to take out a second mortgage to buy a sandwich.”

  Harold opined about how relieved he was that Oxford was covering his London overnight, especially once he got a look at the hotel’s rates. “
Still,” he added, puffing up a bit, “they put your old dad in some pretty fancy digs! Lavender-whatnot shampoo, heated towel racks. And carte blanche on the minibar! Feels good to be on expenses again.”

  There was a note in his father’s voice that Elliot would retrieve only weeks later, but at the time he was distracted by the image of Harold stuffing all the chic hotel toiletries into his luggage, and washing his hands with plain water so he didn’t have to unwrap the soap, the better to spirit the booty back home. Maybe he’d even remember to haul back a swag bag of Rose’s thin-cut lemon-lime and Weetabix.

  Naturally Elliot joined his cheapskate father in declining to order a starter, and a full bottle of wine was out of the question. It went without saying as well that they’d skip dessert. This had always been the form when eating out with his parents: one main course, tap water, maybe a glass of wine if they were feeling extravagant, and then the bill, ensuring that at least these oppressively scrimping occasions were short.

  It wasn’t that Elliot didn’t like his father, a vigorous seventy-three with a full head of knurling white hair that gave Elliot hope for his own unruly mop in old age. Granted, the guy’s having put on some serious weight in the last few years was concerning; the elderly—a word that Elliot applied to his father with something between disquiet and consternation—were prone to becoming bizarrely obsessed with food. Nevertheless, among the student body his father’s passion for “the real Civil War” had been famously infectious, and he still pronounced commandingly on issues of the day as if the whole world were perched on the edge of its collective chair, waiting to hear the final verdict from Professor Ivy. Teaching conferred the arbitrary yet absolute authority of tin-pot dictatorships, and was bound to go to anyone’s head eventually. Besides, Elliot was glad that his father hadn’t slid into the passive apathy of so many seniors, who take refuge in bewilderment, or who revel in a grim satisfaction that the likes of climate change and desertification would wreak their worst destruction on someone else. Harold Ivy had retired from Amherst; he had not retired from planet Earth.

  No, the trouble was Elliot’s sense of filial inadequacy, made doubly shameful for being trite. Harold didn’t condescend to his younger son exactly, and Elliot hated to think that he might still be yearning for his father’s approval (though he probably was). It was more that Elliot’s life didn’t interest his father much. Whereas his father had been bent on becoming a scholar by his freshman year at Princeton, Elliot had never enjoyed a strong sense of occupational calling. After an aimless major in history at Brandeis that in retrospect was sycophantic, he’d cofounded a catering company that went bankrupt after a client sued over an alleged food-poisoning incident. He’d taught English to unsalvageables in South Boston; when one of his own students held him up at knifepoint, he’d rebelled against thankless do-gooding for next to nothing, and spent three years in middle management with AT&T—which was as boring as it sounds. Making the mistake of many of his fellow seekers in the same department at Boston U, he began a master’s in clinical psychology under the illusion that the aim was to sort out his own confusions, rather than to become an assured, well-adjusted graduate capable of sorting out the confusions of other people. Little matter, since he aborted his second year, having fallen hard and helplessly for a sly, sarky British tourist he’d met at the Plough in Cambridge—the copycat Cambridge—who was heading home to London the following month.

  Personally, Elliot could see a pattern: a pendulum swing between finding meaning and making money. But that structure had to be imposed on a narrative that to his father was simply incoherent. In Harold Ivy’s terms, about the only half-intriguing thing that Elliot had ever done was move to the UK, although the initial motivation—to marry Caitlin, who was from Barnes—didn’t seem quite respectable for a guy. Elliot did feel that he’d found his professional footing at last; everyone at the engineering society for which he worked said he was a natural at events planning. But his father could never come up with anything to ask about his job. Harold’s idea of proper “events planning” was preparation for the Battle of Marston Moor.

  Fortunately, their single course of wild boar and salsify stew (not altogether distinguishable from pork roast and parsnips) was readily occupied with family news—his mother’s successful hip replacement, his brother’s latest coup (a big commission to install solar panels on a public library; it was irksome how Robert managed to conceal with a cloak of virtue that he was really just a salesman), and an awkward inquiry about Caitlin, to which Elliot was obliged to reply that he had no idea. Harold pored over the bill before paying in cash. Elliot didn’t need to see the printout to be sure that the tip was puny.

  “By the way,” Harold appended, pulling several twenty-pound notes from his wallet. “You know, I’m flying back to Logan tomorrow morning. But just to keep the bureaucracy down, Oxford paid my honorarium and per diem out of petty cash. No use to me in Massachusetts, and I’ve got most of it left. I stopped in a bank, and they charge a five-pound commission. Ten bucks! Seemed like throwing money away. I thought, since you spend sterling all the time …”

  Cheered, Elliot mentally retracted his unkind exasperation with his father’s parsimonious approach to dining out. The sheaf looked like well over £100—not enough to have an improving effect on his thus-far apocryphal property deposit, but a little extra pocket money never went amiss. He’d just arranged a surprised-but-grateful expression when his father kept talking.

  “And you still have an American bank account, right? So I thought you could change the money for me, and I could skip that scandalous fee.”

  Elliot’s face twitched from surprised-but-grateful to plain surprised. “Well, I don’t have any dollars on me …”

  “That’s okay, just slip a check in the mail.” Harold counted the bills. “I make that one-sixty. Don’t worry, I trust you. No receipt required!”

  “Yes, but do you trust me not to charge you a five-pound fee?”

  The humor felt strained. When they parted outside, Elliot’s elaborate instructions for how to get to the tube stop at Waterloo right around the corner were meant to cover for an abrupt irritability. The evening felt spoiled, and when he hugged his burly father good-bye his heart wasn’t in it. He’d remember the embrace later: its inattention, its merely gesturing back pat, the tense, lopsided twist of his own insincere smile.

  Hunching home, hands jammed in his pockets, braced against a chill far too sharp for spring, Elliot considered why, exactly, his father using his son as a bureau de change was quite so irksome. Since exchange rates were always rigged in the bank’s favor, he himself maintained a hard-and-fast policy of never changing currencies. Modest birthday and Christmas checks from his parents (they wouldn’t spring for international postage on presents) and commercial rebates from his own spending sprees Stateside (only a moron bought a computer in the UK) he always deposited in his Boston Citibank account, which also held his savings from that lucrative stint with AT&T. Especially since the value of American currency had plummeted—Britons now regarded a dollar as a small green rectangle for wiping one’s bum—he wasn’t about to effectively halve its buying power by transferring his precious $37K and change to NatWest. Instead, he was hoarding his few spare pounds for a deposit on a flat. And now he was expected to do on his father’s account what he never, ever did on his own: trade dollars for pounds.

  Moreover, his father doubtless expected Elliot to pony up the exchange rate quoted on the evening news—recently, about $1.97 to the pound, give or take. But peons didn’t get anywhere near $1.97 at banks, whose exchange rates’ relation to the currency market was capricious to nonexistent. At NatWest, his father would have been lucky to get $1.85. Instead, Elliot would be expected to write his father a check for $320—rounding up the rate to a tidy 2:1.

  All right, it wasn’t that much money. Yet there was a principle at stake. On however miniature a scale, his own father was taking advantage of him, all in the interest of saving five miserable quid. Elliot
wasn’t too clear on the details, but Harold Ivy’s financial circumstances had to be healthy. If nothing else, his parents owned their own home, free and clear, which they had bought in that sane era when a house was still a normal acquisition purchased by normally salaried people that they paid off in a normal time frame of perhaps twenty years. These days even a poky two-bedroom walk-up in a dubious “transitional neighborhood” had become an unimaginable luxury that lowly wage earners like himself would own outright only by moonlighting until age 159. As for a proper house, well, that was a pipe dream, like a private trip to the moon, within the means only of lottery winners, Arab sheiks, and City of London shysters.

  Hunkering down Webber Street, Elliot glared at the smug yellow-bricked terraces with their prissy white curtains and self-congratulatory flowerpots. Before he moved to Britain, his reigning ambition had never been to own property. Nevertheless, he’d lived for the last ten years amid an unprecedented real estate frenzy, and he felt left out. All around him people were making fortunes by flipping one hovel after another, and meantime he was numbly forking out £800 a month for a single room (okay, the largest room) of a shared three-bedroom, and he felt like a sucker. For all its postclass pretentions, modern Britain was just as feudally cleaved into serfs and landowning gentry as it had been in the Middle Ages, and entering his own middle age Elliot was still a serf. Gleaming brass escutcheons seemed to be locking Elliot Ivy personally out, while gloating facades on either side of the road rose implacably against this poor asshole American who hadn’t the brains to have swung onto the much-vaunted “housing ladder” when he’d had the chance. Now the end of that ladder was dangling a hundred feet in the air, and all the slaphappy homeowners carousing on the bottom rung were pointing down at him and cackling.