The View from Here

by Deborah McKinlay

  The only part of the party plan that had not gone well was the apricot dress. I tried it on, with Chloe’s help, two Saturdays in advance, and we had both agreed that it wasn’t right. I don’t know what Chloe’s reasons were, but I thought it made me look jaundiced. I had begun to imagine that I looked jaundiced a lot of the time. I didn’t, not then, but I knew what looking jaundiced signified for somebody in my condition, and fear can make you see things. Chloe said, “Would you like something new?” I wanted to answer, No, what was the point of something new when I was unlikely to see the crocuses? Because the failure of the apricot dress was a blow, and I had felt deflated just then. But I knew that Chloe could not take it. Her face warned off all talk of endings, or last times, so I said that perhaps I would.

  Chloe drove me, carefully, into Grantham in her father’s car; it was too big for her, but comfortable for me. We parked just outside a little shop that a woman named Judith runs off the high street. Judith is overly tanned and talkative to match, and she has run that shop for the whole eighteen years that we’ve lived here. It is the kind of ladies’ dress shop that most English market towns offer, lots of good cloth skirts and too-floaty outfits for more formal occasions—nieces’ weddings, say. I didn’t hold out much hope. But the universe can smile in the smallest and most surprising corners, can’t it? Judith produced, with a flourish, of course, and a flush of advice, a dove gray sheath dress with three-quarter sleeves and a funnel neck.

  “It would look lovely with your pearls,” Chloe said.

  Pearls for tears, I thought. My mother used to say that. My mother who’d had so many more tears in her life than pearls, but so many more pearls, I reflected, than she’d ever acknowledged.

  I looked at Chloe, so eager, so keen for our little excursion to be a success, and back at the beaming Judith, who was holding the gray dress by the hanger, spread across her other arm like a tablecloth.

  It was a very nice dress. We bought it. Then, pleased with ourselves, we went into the coffee shop in the alley. The coffee shop in the alley suffers from lack of passing trade and changes hands on a regular basis. It was under new management again, judging by the fresh décor, which seemed to be an attempt at a Caribbean theme, uncomfortably laid over the Olde English oaky style of the previous incarnation. But I was ready to sit down so we went in anyway and ordered muffins and coffee from the new young owner, whose enthusiasm for the muffins was painful and all the more poignant given that we were the only customers.

  The muffins, though, like the dress, turned out to be a surprise and did taste of banana. I was about to comment on this to Chloe when she said, “Ed has asked me to marry him.”

  I looked at her. She was not looking at me but fussing with her paper napkin. It was pink, candy pink like a child’s bridesmaid’s dress.

  “Do you want to marry Ed?” I asked.

  “I hadn’t really thought about it very much before he asked me,” she said, meeting my eyes then, “but now I think maybe I do. I don’t know. I mean, is there a way that you know? I don’t mean all that daft stuff about wanting a wedding and having a husband and everything. I can see the appeal of all that, and I do…I really do love Ed; he’s a wonderful man, but it is big, isn’t it? It’s a big thing to do, and I don’t want to make a mistake. I suppose I always thought I would just know, and there’d be no doubts.”

  “And it would all be happily ever after,” I said.

  She nodded, smiling at herself.

  “It won’t matter who you marry, sweetheart. You’ll have doubts. At some point you’ll have doubts.”

  She seemed a bit surprised, and perhaps my tone had been overly sober, lacking in the reassuring tenor that has been a constant in my dealings with her. Her father and I have always gone to such lengths to protect her from things. Our own arguments, petty as they seem now, were always kept at a distance. We have presented her with a terribly hopeful picture of marriage. Perhaps we shouldn’t have.

  I reached over and laid a hand on hers on the small table, amongst the tinkly array of coffee-shop paraphernalia.

  “It won’t be perfect, Chloe. No marriage can ever be perfect because no two people are perfect. You just have to do your best and hope that you choose someone who will do theirs. There isn’t a magic formula or a magic time. You have to decide if this is what you want and what Ed wants and then you just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I wish I could give you something better, some sort of universal golden rule, but I can’t.”

  She didn’t reply for a moment, just watched me, and then she said, “You like Ed, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. It was true. I liked Ed very much. “And Ed might make a wonderful husband, but I don’t want you to marry because of me.”

  She understood what I meant, and did not hedge it, though she avoided direct reference to the obvious—that I would not be around to meet the next man she fell in love with.

  “I know, and I don’t think it would be because of you exactly, but I do like that he knows you. And you know him.”

  I squeezed her hand and she turned it palm upward to mine.

  “I like that too,” I said.

  Ed came to the party, of course, and played the young man about the place in a very charming way, refreshing ladies’ drinks, dancing with Catherine and Sonia, being helpful to Phillip and attentive to me, like a son-in-law in the making. And why not? He is thirty-one, after all, and well educated and steadily employed. Why shouldn’t he marry? And why wouldn’t he want Chloe for his bride? Darling Chloe, wondrously lovely that night in a delicate dress that defied the season.

  I won’t detail who else came because the names as a body carry meaning only for me, but there were seventy-two affirmative RSVPs and seventy-two of those came. Plus one more.

  It was all just as I imagined it would be, just as I had planned: musicians in the conservatory, barmen serving champagne, pleasant women circulating with silver trays full of all the delicious things that Catherine had recommended. The furniture had been rearranged so that there was a natural passage between rooms and enough places for people to stand and to sit, and in the kitchen there was pheasant casserole and mashed potatoes to be served at ten thirty. I felt, as it all began, and the liquor oiled the voices and the music struck up, not happy, because that can convey an element of deliriousness, more like content. I felt that everything was in its place.

  We had had parties before of course, and I thought of many of them that night and in the weeks leading up to it. Parties and dinners and whole weekends full of guests that had left us with a litter of partially empty glasses and overflowing ashtrays and new sets of inexplicable marks on the carpet. We had sat in that sort of debris often enough, Phillip and I, dissecting an evening’s events, the talk, the jokes, the arguments, and more than once in those talks, from that safe distance, we had analyzed the state of other people’s marriages.

  Had other people been analyzing ours? Were there signs? Perhaps there had been a turning point that I’d missed during the years when the parties grew smaller, when the same faces always appeared at them, and the same jokes and arguments reared. The years when Phillip and I no longer automatically took the opportunity to make love in the mornings afterward before we fetched Chloe from Emily’s or Joan’s. Perhaps it was then that whatever had seemed to me so robust had begun to crumble.

  People had started to dance, and the noise had risen to that bubbly level that signals the true beginning of a party when Chloe wandered past me and smiled and kissed my cheek, and I thought, if there were signs, she did not see them, does not still. And then watching her walk away again, back into the thickness of the crowd, and seeing her settle on the arm of a chair that Ed was sitting in, I felt very deeply that all my losses were bound up in her. In the beginning I had thought often of things that I wished I had done, places I had not seen, experiences I had missed and would never have, but Chloe was the only thing now that represented an unfulfilled future to me. Chloe was all.

&
nbsp; Catherine, my protector, perhaps concerned by my dreamlike state, took my arm and asked quietly if I was all right. I did not reply, because through the double arch that leads from the room where I was standing to the one that opens onto the front hallway, I saw Josee.

  NINE

  THERE WERE TWO or three days then that were the last days. The end of things, though I didn’t know it at the time. Still, looking back, that’s how they seemed. A little autumnal despite the heat. I remember that we ate cold soup one night, thick and creamy green as Patsy’s eye shadow, and that the children organized a relay race around the perimeter of the house, using rolled-up magazines for batons. But what I remember most is the shift in the players. Sally, who had until then, apart from her one stab of girlishness the day of the moonlight picnic, been more or less a background figure, at least as far as I was concerned, was now firmly established at the center of everything.

  Christina was fashioning a protection cover, with plastic wrap and tape, for Sally’s bandage.

  “Does it hurt, Mommy?” Jessica asked.

  “A little.”

  Christina tsked, tender in her ministrations. Sally acknowledged her concern with a small smile.

  “Is it smashed?” Howie enthused.

  “No, dear.” Patsy’s voice came unexpectedly, lightly from the glass doors. “Nothing so serious as that.”

  When the bandage was covered, Christina tucked in the neat ends of tape.

  “Couldn’t you just take it off?” Patsy suggested dryly. “It isn’t as if it’s really doing anything, is it?”

  Sally slipped her arm into the gold-patterned silk scarf that Christina was tying at her neck, like a sling.

  “Thank you, Christina,” she said, smiling. Then, gingerly nestling her damaged wrist into its stylish cradle, she said to Patsy, “I think it’s best to keep it on,” as if there had been no interval between question and reply.

  “You’d think she was really hurt, wouldn’t you?” Patsy said to me in a low voice later. Sally had persevered all day with a fragile-eyed weariness, gasping stagily at one point when Howie had bounced a ball too near to where she was sitting on a carefully arranged beach mat. Now Christina would not quit her fussing. I was beginning to find the whole business irksome, not least because Mason, despite the hospital’s assurance regarding the minor nature of Sally’s injury, remained extremely attentive to his wife.

  I watched, horrified, as he lifted a candied cherry from a drink and held it to her lips. I turned my eyes decisively back to Patsy, and giggled, pleased, when she took the cherry from her own drink and sucked at it with an exaggerated pout.

  If Mason became rather attentive to his wife, he offset this behavior with his pronounced ardor toward me. He was, by then, exceptionally opportunistic. He cornered me in hallways, shadows, and once, determinedly, in a downstairs bathroom. These bold exertions lit in me a shivery state of constant desire. I was, like any addict, hostage to it.

  That morning he whisked an orange juice from my hand and swept me, with a flexed arm, into the brief seclusion offered by the corner of the house. There he leaned me against the Buick’s sun-warmed bonnet and pressed his hips to mine. I kissed him, my hands on his face, enveloped by my own emotions and the peaceful tremble of insect song.

  A little later, Patsy and Richard and I were settled on the patio when Mason, host again, nobody’s frenzied lover, came to the door and asked mildly if we’d seen Sally. The name might have passed over me, so much feathery nothingness, had I not noticed, behind him, Christina’s dark eyes, stirred with alarm.

  “I took the tray, sir,” she said.

  “And she’s not in the bath?” Mason asked.

  “No, sir. I am worried,” Christina replied.

  Mason spoke placatingly, “I’m sure we’ll find her.”

  “She always waits for me to come with the tray, sir,” Christina insisted as he followed her into the house. “Always.”

  I watched them go. The contrasting dark of the indoors swallowed them.

  “Looks like Mrs. Severance has got another little show planned,” Patsy said.

  I hoped not. I had to leave soon for the makeup lesson with Letty and I wanted Mason to come with me. But Sally wasn’t in the house. The search gathered momentum. The children’s rooms were checked. Bee Bee and Ned’s door was knocked on. Maids were enlisted. Mason reappeared at the glass doors with Ned, fastening the tie of his polka dot dressing gown, behind him.

  “She must have gone for a walk,” Ned said.

  “Sally?” Mason answered.

  Ned shrugged.

  “Sally is not the go-for-a-walk type,” Mason went on. His voice, I realized with a lurch of disappointment, had suddenly taken on the same feeble taint it had had at the hospital. “Anyway,” he continued, “her arm.”

  “It’s bruised, sprained at best,” Patsy said. She was wearing a full-skirted yellow dress. It suited her. Her appearance, together with the shiny jut of her lower lip as she tipped the last of her orange juice to it, added a tinge of bright offhandedness to her comment.

  “Are both cars there?” Richard asked sensibly.

  Ned went to check. I already knew.

  “Yes,” Ned confirmed, returning.

  “Anyway,” Mason said, looking at Patsy, “she certainly wouldn’t be able to drive with that arm.”

  Patsy, holding his gaze in the sunshine, replied, “Oh, I’d say she could do whatever she wanted, when she wanted, that wife of yours.”

  I had never seen Mason angry before, but he was angry then.

  “Back off, Patsy. Just back right off!” His face, leaning close to hers, was livid.

  I stared. Patsy’s cocky expression dissolved. She was shaken; she looked, momentarily, as if she might cry. Richard, next to me, was on his feet and Ned took a step forward.

  I got up too. “If she has walked, she’ll have gone down the hill to the beach,” I said, the words coming fast and stern. I was trying to take hold of the situation, to restore some sort of normal boundaries. Mason was frightening me.

  “I suppose she could have,” he said, grasping at this, spinning his attention from Patsy to me.

  “Yes.” I was relieved. For a steady half second I thought the matter was concluded. I thought Mason would relax again, apologize to Patsy, calm down, and drive me into town.

  Mason nodded once and headed hurriedly for the gate that led to the beach path. It swung shut behind him with a bang. We all watched. The latch didn’t quite engage and the gate rebounded and clacked again. Patsy, across from me, was still clearly shaken by his outburst.

  “Everyone’s been thrown off by that accident,” Ned said in a pacifying tone.

  “Yes,” Richard agreed, getting up, offering to fetch fresh coffee.

  When he had gone, I turned to Patsy and said, “He didn’t mean it,” meaning Mason.

  She knew who I meant.

  “Oh, you don’t think so?” she replied.

  Taken aback, I picked up a fork from an unused plate setting and began to toy with the prongs.

  “Sorry,” she said then.

  I put the fork down and smiled. “Forget it.” We were becoming very good friends.

  Richard came back with the coffee. Patsy poured some and asked, “Are you going into town, Frankie?”

  “Yes, I have a lesson at eleven thirty.”

  She fingered the crocodile strap on her slim wrist, checking her watch. “I’ll take you if you like.”

  I hesitated.

  “That’s a good idea,” Richard encouraged. “You girls have a run into town. Pick me up something fresh to read.” He dropped his paper, with a little flap, onto the ground beside him.

  “I need to get my things,” I answered. I was thinking, I’ll take my time, give Mason a chance to get back.

  From my room I watched the corner where the gate was, expecting him. He didn’t come. I looked at my little clock. I would have to go.

  “Let’s take the Buick,” Patsy suggested.

>   “I thought you liked driving the jeep.”

  “Just for a change.” The keys were dangling from her fingers.

  During the drive in she was quiet. She smiled when I told her what Bee Bee had said about Cactus Roy’s hat, but she didn’t seem to think it very funny. Then she asked, “What do you make of her? Bee Bee?”

  Her tone made me wary. “You know her better than I do.”

  “Not that much better,” she answered. “We’re all the same, you know, social set I guess you’d call it. We meet at parties and things.”

  I was surprised. I had assumed that they were all closer than that. That perhaps they had all been away together before.

  “I think they’re both pretty…tough,” she said thoughtfully after a while, “Bee Bee and Sally. Same mold.”

  Patsy dropped me off and I told her I’d walk down to the square to meet her an hour or so later. “We can have lunch,” she suggested.

  “Don’t you think they’ll be expecting us?” I said. I had it in mind to hurry back in case Mason, fretful as I was at the lost opportunity, had conjured some new plan.

  “I don’t care if they are,” Patsy replied.

  And I decided, watching her put her dark glasses on, not to argue. Recently there had been a hint of hysteria about her.

  “What is a slut?” Letty asked at the end of the lesson.

  I stared. “Where did you hear that word?”

  “I read it,” she said. “In a book.”

  She was such an innocent-looking girl, fawnlike, hopeful.

  “Show me the book.”

  It was an American paperback. I recognized it. There had been several copies in the store on the square the previous week. I tried not to smile. I had recommended to Letty that she try to read some English-language books.