by Rose Tremain
‘I’m a qualified landscape architect,’ said the girl. ‘I got fired when I had my baby. Gardener was all I could get.’
‘Um,’ said George, uneasily, ‘there’s a lot of that happening.’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Well, that kind of thing. People over-qualified for the jobs they’re doing.’
The girl didn’t comment. George allowed himself to look up at her arm, slim but seemingly strong, moving the pool vac. The vigorous brown hair she chose to display in her armpit gave him a feeling both of excitement and of disquiet. Everything, he thought, in this country is utterly unfamiliar to me. I will go home an altered man.
‘So you’ve got a baby?’
‘Yeah. She’s three months now.’
‘A daughter? I have a daughter, Jennifer. She got married this year.’
‘So you miss her, uhn?’
‘Yes. In a way. My wife does.’
‘Your wife with you out here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Great. Well have a nice stay.’
George recognised this as a dismissal. He began to walk slowly towards the pool exit, disappointed that the encounter had had a dull shape. Without identifying what, he knew that the minute he saw the girl he had hoped for something more. He stood, hands in his stiff new pockets, and stared at the roman end of the pool.
‘Bet no one much gets up this early.’ he said.
‘No. We do, the gardeners and cleaners.’
‘If I’m not being rude,’ George began, ‘I’d very much, I mean very much like to know –’
‘Know what?’
‘Your name.’
The girl held the pool vac still and stared accusingly at George.
‘Want to fly me, or something?’
‘What did you say?’
‘Never mind. I don’t give my name, though. Not to strangers.’
*
‘The telephone went,’ said a brightly dressed Beryl, who had decided bravely that she wouldn’t mention her cold to George. ‘It was Brewer.’
‘Brewer?’
‘Yes, Brewer. We’re invited onto Mr Weissmann’s boat for the day.’
‘Which day?’
‘Today. Now please let me have the key, George, and I’ll go and buy us some bread and what they call jelly for breakfast.’
‘How was Brewer?’
‘Very cock-a-hoop. He said Monica was a changed woman.’
‘Did you agree?’
‘I haven’t seen her yet, dear, so how could I agree or disagree?’
‘No. To go on the boat.’
‘Yes. It’s very kind of Mr Weissmann.’
‘It’s our first day, Beryl.’
‘Well, I know, but Brewer said there’s a trip to some fish restaurant and I know you’d like that.’
‘Suppose we can get in a game of golf this evening.’
‘If we feel like it. I mean, after cocktails and lunch and all that, we may want a little sleep.’
‘Oh I won’t. We’ve only got a month, Beryl. We shouldn’t waste a second.’
‘Well, we’ll see. I’ll go and get the breakfast on Square 3, wherever that is.’
‘Easy, dear. Just follow the map.’
When Beryl had gone, George opened the sliding window and sat down on the balcony under the white parasol. Here I am, he thought, like the man in the brochure. In the picture, though, there didn’t seem to be any wind. Everything seemed hotter and calmer and much safer than it feels. Slightly breathless from what had been a long walk, he noticed in himself a mildly disturbing sense of unease, a feeling of fright. He slowed his breathing, took gulps of warm air. Careful never to lie to himself about his states of mind, he asked himself, was it the girl, her presence by the pool, her misunderstanding of an innocent, yes innocent question? Had the girl got in the way of contentment? He’d tried to forget her as he’d trod the lush turf of the Palmetto Golf Course, saying to himself she doesn’t belong, she’s a fugitive from the city, that’s it, the Fugitive Kind, giving birth on Greyhound buses, breastfeeding on the freeway, in the subway, no matter where, never belonging with her provoking underarm hair, belonging nowhere, particularly not here, in a guarded village where no one passes without a pass, where the marble maps reassure you every few yards, YOU ARE HERE. Yet he hadn’t been able to forget her. The girl and the great wind blowing from the east, they buffeted him and made him feel small.
George got up, crossed to the louvered bedroom cupboards and dragged out the leather bag of golf clubs. He carried them to the balcony and sat for a moment with his arms around them.
*
Brewer Smythe drove a Cadillac. George and Beryl sat beside him in the wide front seat, both wondering but not asking whether the car was Brewer’s or Weissmann’s.
Brewer was immensely fatter than when last glimpsed, trailing fatigue and failure around his Woodbridge boatyard. But he wore his new flesh proudly, like he might have worn a new suit, set it off with the whiteness of his naval shirt, topped it with a grinning, ruddy face and a naval-style cap gold-inscribed Nadar III. Body and uniform said, I’ve prospered. Freckles had formed on his arms so densely, they merged into a blotchy, chestnut coloured tan. On his wrist, an oversized platinum digital watch seemed put there as a reminder that here was a man to whom time had behaved kindly. Fifty-five now, this was Brewer’s fourth year in Florida, working for the rich boat-owners of the most expensive waterways in the world, transforming years of worthless nautical knowledge into a sudden bonanza.
‘Well, Monica’s falling over herself!’ said Brewer, simultaneously pressing a knob marked ‘window lock’ and another marked ‘air’. ‘Faces from Suffolk in our very own Boca Raton! It’s hard to believe, honestly it is.’
‘You look ever so well, Brewer,’ said Beryl.
‘Me? I’m in the pink. Never happier. Honestly. Best years of my life out here. You wait and see.’
‘What’s this Weissmann like?’ asked George.
Brewer drew effortlessly into the fast lane of the freeway and accelerated.
‘He’s rich, George. I’d never seen wealth like his till I came out here. You wait till you see Nadar. And his house. Jesus! I’m not fooling when I say he’s got a Picasso in his hallway.’
‘Good to work for, is he?’
‘Man of the world. Married three times. Knows how to treat people. We’d be nowhere, Mon and me, without someone like him.’
‘What do you do for him exactly, Brewer?’ asked Beryl. ‘I mean, I know you’re his kind of captain, but is all you do is look after his boat?’
‘I provide a service, Beryl,’ announced Brewer. ‘I think today will give you a fair impression of the service I provide. Men like Weissmann, people in the art and business field, don’t have the time or the knowledge for practicalities; they want leisure to run smoothly, you understand what I mean? So he relies on me. Total trust. Absolute round-the-clock responsibility. And that’s what I’m paid for.’
Off the freeway after a few miles, the Cadillac was ambling now along a series of identical avenues of houses, low, detached and white, or built of sandstone blocks, each with a sloping front garden, tarmac driveway and wrought-iron gates leading to patios and swimming pools. Palms dwarfed the houses everywhere. ‘You can travel,’ Brewer informed George and Beryl, ‘from your back garden to the ocean through the Florida canals. Unique in the world, and we’ve done it in Nadar III. Extraordinary, eh?’
‘Cracking,’ said George.
Their arrival at Nadar’s mooring was awkward. Monica, in slacks and shocking-pink silk shirt and rattling with charm bracelets, mouthed an enthusiastic silent welcome to George and Beryl, while Weissmann, perched like a beady little penguin at the forward controls of the bulky boat, stared at them sullenly. Near to the thrice-married, sixty-year-old Weissmann was a fat, huge-eyed boy of ten, who also stared, sucking gum, with the brazen stare of the uniquely pampered.
Beryl looked up cautiously and smiled at Weissmann. His face remained impas
sive. Beryl turned to Brewer for help. Brewer, dwarfed by the boat, seemed momentarily to have lost both bulk and bounce.
‘Mr Weissmann,’ he said politely, ‘may I present my good friends from England, Mr and Mrs Dawes – George and Beryl.’
‘Welcome aboard,’ said Weissmann, flatly. His accent was pure Germanic, almost unmixed with Yankee. He put a hirsute arm on the boy’s rounded shoulder and announced, still unsmiling: ‘This is my son, Daren. You see my boat is named Nadar. Daren is one half of Nadar. Daren is Dar. The Na piece of it comes from my wife’s name. Nadia. Unfortunately, Nadia is in Paris, so Daren is stuck with his old Daddy, aren’t you, Choots?’
‘Choots’ didn’t reply at once, but continued to gaze blankly at George and Beryl.
‘It’s very kind of you, Mr Weissmann,’ began Beryl.
‘No, no,’ said Weissmann, ‘friends of Brewer’s from England, this is the least we can do, eh Choots?’
‘Daddy,’ said Choots, ‘are you going to pay for their lunch?’
*
‘Do you want to handle her today, Mr Weissmann?’ called Brewer from the aft controls, as he swung the boat out into the wide canal.
From the front cabin, where George and Beryl waited silently with Monica, you could just glimpse the enormous metal and plastic chair on the upper deck where Weissmann sat, a complex control panel laid out in front of him. Choots stood disconsolately beside him.
Monica whispered, ‘Brewer has to be ever so careful. It’s a new boat, you see, and Mr Weissmann hasn’t quite got the hang.’
‘I’ll handle her,’ Weissmann called back to Brewer, ‘then when we get to River Kingdom, you take her in.’
‘Okay, Sir. She’s all yours, then. I’ll do the cocktails.’
‘Good. No cocktail for Choots today,’ and here began a tremor of a smile in Weissmann’s voice, ‘he’s too young.’
Brewer turned to George and Beryl who were now both looking at Monica. Monica was indeed a changed person. Like Brewer, she seemed to have undergone a colour metamorphosis. They remembered a faded, brown-shod woman with greying hair and an illusive, apologetic smile. What now confronted them was a blonde with shiny, tanned face, wearing Italian white sandals and azure eye shadow. The smile had broadened, found confidence. The voice, when she eventually began to talk to them, had taken on enough American vowel-richness to alter it greatly. It was, in fact, difficult to believe that this was Monica. Brewer put his arm round his wife and offered her proudly for inspection. ‘Looking neat, eh? Looking terrific, isn’t she?’
‘I wouldn’t have recognised you, Monica,’ said Beryl.
Monica beamed, let Brewer smack a kiss on her blonde head.
‘What can I say?’ she said. ‘That’s what Florida does.’
‘You look great, Mon,’ said George.
‘Thanks, George. Well, it’s great to see you, isn’t it, Brewer? And on your first day. You just wait till you’ve been here a week. You’ll never want to go home.’
‘So Brewer says,’ said George.
‘What’s it to be?’ asked Brewer, opening a polished drinks cabinet, ‘bloody marys, whisky sours . . .?’
‘Heavens,’ said Beryl, ‘we don’t normally drink this early, do we George?’
‘That’s the whole point of it, Beryl,’ said Brewer, ‘to start doing what you don’t usually do. We’ve learned that, haven’t we, Monica? Only then will you get in tune with Florida life.’
‘I’ll have my usual,’ said Monica.
‘Oh, what’s your usual?’ asked Beryl.
‘Make one for Beryl, Brewer,’ said Monica, ‘then she’ll see.’
Every room and compartment on Nadar III appeared to have been designed to accommodate what George had heard was called Cocktail Hour. Little veneered glass holders were clamped to chair arms, recessed into walls, bolted even to the lavatory tiles. You could not move on Nadar without finding a convenient place to set down your drink. Noting this, George thought, being rich is the art of forethought. I am too random a person, despite my ability with figures, to predict accurately where I or my guests might want to set down their cocktails. Everything on this boat is in precisely the right place with regard to its function, but I have none of the skills I recognise in this kind of planning. He stared up at Weissmann’s seat of power, wondered what it would be like to stare at it almost every day, as Brewer did, and to know that all one possessed emanated from there, from a German art dealer who was fond of bankers. He looked at Brewer, expertly shaking and mixing cocktails. He’s grown fat, he thought suddenly, to protect himself. But then George berated himself for this idiotic tendency he’d failed to leave behind in England – his tendency to analyse and question and seek the comfort of certainties. It impedes, he thought, my positive response to whatever happens, and the only important thing, here, is to enjoy myself.
*
River Kingdom, a flat-roofed, blue-painted building with its own substantial mooring, was, George decided, rather like a fish theatre. Models of lobsters and crayfish and crabs and blue-fin sharks busked up the walls and across the ceiling, netting hung down in carefully arranged loops, tanks of living eels were spotlit, menus were like programmes: Act One, shrimp-crab-mussel-prawn-clam-oyster, Act Two, brill-striped bass-eel-mullet-lobster-shark fin and so on through a dramatis personae of water meat George had never in his life encountered. Waitresses in usherette black brought unasked-for salads as an overture to the meal. Outside the sun went in, as if the house lights had suddenly been turned down.
George was seated between Weissmann and Monica. Daren sat between his father and Brewer, which left the two women next to each other. But Weissmann, who had arranged the seating, had deliberately placed Beryl and Monica in seats where he wouldn’t have to talk to them. Duty called on him to tolerate his captain and his friend as lunch guests, but not their wives. The elaborate courtesies he reserved for the women of his own elite weren’t available for the likes of Beryl: patronage went only so far.
Beryl and Monica talked about England and Suffolk in particular and Woodbridge and Wakelin All Saints. At one moment, George heard Monica say, ‘I’ve forgotten to ask him, I suppose George is manager by now?’ and cast an anxious look at Beryl, who seemed defeated both by her gigantic shark steak and by the question. He looked away.
‘So,’ said Weissmann, turning an indifferent eye upon George, ‘you like America.’
This was neither question nor statement, but something in between. George looked at Brewer, who was grinning encouragingly, then coughed.
‘It’s our first time,’ he said. ‘We flew from Gatwick yesterday. I’m quite surprised by everything I’ve seen.’
‘Surprised? In what way surprised?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said George, ‘it’s very hard to pinpoint precisely where the differences occur. Everything seems unlike England in a way I can’t yet explain. I thought it might just be a question of size and climate, but it isn’t.’
‘Well,’ said Weissmann, portentously, ‘this is the United States.’
‘Right, Sir!’ said Brewer. ‘I’ve been saying to George, now that he’s here, he’ll never want to go back. We haven’t. We’ve never had a moment’s regret.’
‘You like Europe?’ asked Weissmann, blackly. And George felt an irritating panic rise in him. Europe. The images conjured by Weissmann’s use of the word, the images to which he was expected to respond, were all, all as alien to George as words like quatrocento and surréaliste and schadenfreude and Auschwitz. Weissmann, American, Jew, knew ‘Europe’; George, Englishman and part of Europe, did not.
‘I’m fond of the country,’ said George, taking up the wine one of the usherettes had poured for him.
‘Which country?’ said Weissmann.
‘The countryside,’ stammered George, ‘the countryside of England.’
‘But Brewer said you were a banker.’
‘Yes. I am. I’m with Mercantile and General.’
‘In the City, no?’
&nbs
p; ‘What, London? Oh no, I’m not in London.’
‘So you’re not a real banker, then.’
George was saved from having to comment on his own reality by the nagging of Choots who, with the underwater world spread out for his delectation, had ordered cold roast beef and pickles.
‘This isn’t nice, Daddy,’ said Choots.
‘No?’ said Weissmann.
‘No.’
‘Why did you choose it, then?’
‘I didn’t choose it. Brewer chose it for me.’
Brewer smiled. ‘It’s what he asked for, Sir.’
‘Don’t eat it,’ Weissmann said, ‘give it to Brewer.’
Choots went off to the serve-yourself sweet table and helped himself to a wedge of chocolate gateau. Brewer good-naturedly crammed the thick slices of red beef onto his lobster plateau and proceeded to eat both simultaneously.
Weissmann smiled.
‘He’s a good man, Brewer, your friend,’ he said to George, ‘he does what I ask, eh Brewer?’
‘Yes, Sir!’
‘I spoil my son, you are thinking. In Europe, children are not spoiled. I was not spoiled. I was kicked and bullied. Now, I’m the one with the boots, you see? But not for my son. He will have what he wants because I am too old to be a good father and this is punishment enough. So you’re not really a banker?’
George found Weissmann’s twists and turns of thought vexing; he invited you to enter a conversation, then left you no room to participate in it.
‘I’ve been in banking all my life,’ said George quietly.
‘You know money?’
This was like the Europe question. It reverberated cavernously with meaning inaccessible to the likes of George. He sighed. This was the first sigh he had heard himself breathe since landing at Miami airport. To his own astonishment, he heard himself say angrily, ‘I know, Mr Weissmann, what this holiday is costing me.’
*
Monica’s special cocktail hadn’t agreed with Beryl’s stomach. Back at Palmetto, she was lying in the large bed (lying, she realised, rather stiff and straight so as not to rumple the sheets an unseen maid had so carefully smoothed) feeling pale and drowsy. George, perched by the Man Copulating With Hoop, stared anxiously at his wife.