American Stranger

by David Plante

  In the high distance, the castle, as they walked back to it, appeared to have a cloud gathering about it in the sunlight. Tim and Nancy joined Hilary and James in the hall to wait for their guests. Hilary kept twisting her pearl necklace. She said, “I hear a car,” and quickly went to the door and opened it. An elderly woman in a cardigan and a high-necked jersey and woolen trousers came in and Hilary kissed her on both cheeks, and then an elderly gentleman, in a pullover that looked too big for him, one of the wings of his tie-less collar under the V neck and one out, and Hilary kissed him on both cheeks. And after James and Tim kissed the woman and shook the hand of the man, Hilary, smiling more widely and gesturing with one hand to present her grandly, said, “This is Tim’s wife.” Hilary did not call the woman and man anything. They both said to Nancy, “How do you do,” and Nancy held out her hand, but as soon as she did she realized it hadn’t occurred to the woman and man to do the same, perhaps because they’d assumed it wouldn’t have been expected, and just as Nancy was lowering her hand they stepped forward with their hands extended toward her. Embarrassed, Hilary laughed.

  She said, “Now that we’re all happily together, we’ll go into the drawing room for sherry, which I’m sure you’re all passionate for.”

  Why now, in the drawing room rather than the hall, Nancy wondered, except, perhaps, for a fire in the fireplace that heated the room, while a fire in the hall would not have heated even the hearth.

  At a table set with bottles and glasses under another frayed tapestry, James did the honors with the drinks. No one had sherry except Nancy, who, because Hilary had said they would have sherry, supposed that that was what she should have.

  Hilary said to Sir George and Lady Plummerton, “You really are noble, braving this dreary day to come to us.”

  “Isn’t it sunny today?” Lady Plummerton asked.

  “It won’t last,” Hilary said. “We’ll see, only too sadly, how dreary the day will get.”

  Tim asked the couple how Augusta was, and they said she was having a delightful time, and they should, really, have been annoyed at her ringing every day from so far away, which was frightfully expensive, but they were, after all, reassured to know she was quite all right out there.

  “Who’s Augusta?” Nancy asked.

  “Our daughter,” replied Lady Plummerton, not quite looking at Nancy, maybe, Nancy thought, because she was shy.

  “And where is she?”

  “Mombasa,” Sir George said, and he also seemed too shy to look at Nancy as he spoke. “Africa, you know.”

  “Remember that story about Africa Lord Fairley used to tell,” Tim said, “about an uncle of his coming back to England from some African colony with a lion cub, which, on the high seas, fell overboard, and, as the captain refused to stop for a lion cub, the uncle jumped over the railing to save it, knowing he would stop for a marquis.”

  Blinking rapidly, Lady Plummerton said, “No, I don’t remember.”

  Tim laughed and said, “And then the cub grew up into a fully developed lion, which the family kept on the grounds of their country house, and one day it ate the uncle.” Tim drank. “Well, the lion was given to the London Zoo, and Lord Fairley remembered being taken by his aunt to see the lion that ate his uncle.”

  Sir George said, “We didn’t know Lord Fairley.”

  “I am sorry,” Tim said.

  “Not at all,” Sir George said.

  Nancy asked him, “What is your daughter doing in Mombasa?”

  Lady Plummerton said, “She did something rather silly—we never understood why—and after she recovered a bit and thought she’d like to get away, she chose Mombasa.”

  Looking into the distance, Sir George said quietly, “She can be very silly.”

  Nancy thought she hadn’t understood them—they couldn’t be so open and blithe that they were telling her, someone they hadn’t even been introduced to, that their daughter had tried to kill herself. Repeating the expression Lady Plummerton had used, but with a tone of incredulity that asked, please, for an explanation of something she couldn’t have understood, she asked, “She tried to do herself in?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Lady Plummerton said, blinking, not looking directly at Nancy.

  Nancy saw Tim frowning at her, and she knew that she mustn’t ask anything more about Augusta. Maybe, she thought, their being so open about their daughter precluded anyone asking anything more than what they had stated.

  Sir George tried to smile when he said, “We hope she doesn’t return with a lion cub that will grow up to eat us.”

  Hilary said, “I should think we’re all desperate to eat,” and suggested they go to the dining room.

  Lunch was at a round table in the dining room, not at the table in the kitchen. Sir George sat on Hilary’s right, next to him sat Nancy, and then James, then Lady Plummerton, and, completing the circle, Tim, on Hilary’s left. Tim smiled at Nancy across the table, and there was some expectation from her in the smile.

  Hilary rang a little bell, and an old man wearing black tie came in carrying a bowl of rice and mushrooms. Sir George leaned back in his chair and, raising his hand in a salute, said, “How are you, Arthur?” to which the old man said, “Keeping well, sir.” Arthur held the bowl, a little shakily, for the guests, all casual in their sweaters, not one man wearing a tie.

  When he left, Hilary said, “Without any kind of permanent help, I don’t know what I’d do without Arthur coming in from time to time.”

  “What would any of us do?” Lady Plummerton asked.

  “Last week, he helped me hang the curtains in my sitting room.”

  “He’s especially good with hanging curtains,” Hilary said.

  “Who is Arthur?” Nancy asked.

  Sir George said, “Arthur? You mean, there is someone in the world who doesn’t know who Arthur is? Arthur is a Polish refugee from the war who landed in the village, and has been here longer than any of us.”

  “And we’re all dependent on him,” James said.

  Arthur came in with the bowl of rice and mushrooms again for second helpings.

  Nancy listened to the others at the table talk and laugh about people she had never heard of; no one bothered to explain to her who they were. She heard names—Clarissa and Robert and Alicia and Humphrey—but she had no idea how these names related to one another, and the conversation was too involved for her to break in and ask who was who, or if, she wondered, she should break in and ask. No one addressed her or even looked at her to include her in what was being said, with such hilarity, about Clarissa and Robert and Alicia and Humphrey.

  Nancy thought it was up to her to take part, but the only way she could, without spoiling the fun by asking for explanations, was to laugh when they laughed, though she didn’t know what she was laughing about. Tim, who had pleaded with her to help him in social gatherings, appeared to be just where he wanted to be.

  Nancy kept thinking of their daughter Augusta.

  Hilary said, “We’ll go back to the drawing room for coffee, which I’m sure you’re all frantic for.”

  No, Nancy thought, Hilary can’t be English.

  The drawing room had French windows that gave onto a lawn and a stone wall; beyond the stone wall the land rose and fell, gray-green, under a gray sky. As they entered the room, Hilary, drawn to the windows, said, “Hounds.” Nancy, too, went to the windows and saw a pack of hounds, their noses to the ground and their tongues out, running across a gray-green misty field toward a row of dark pines. Hilary said, “You see, the hounds are tonguing the air. I’ve learned all this sort of thing, not that I ever get it right, but I go along, making my way.” After the hounds came the mounted hunters. “We’ll know when they’ve killed the fox,” Hilary said. “We’ll hear it.”

  Wild barking came from beyond the pines.

  Nancy heard herself say, “How horrible,” and it was only w
hen the room went silent that she realized everyone had heard her.

  When the barking stopped, Hilary turned away from Nancy and, looking about the room, folded her hands together and said, “Well now, more coffee for anyone?”

  Sir George said he would, and Lady Plummerton said she wouldn’t, but that they really should be going. However, Sir George held out his cup to Hilary, and, with it filled, he went to Nancy, still standing at the windows. She looked out as he approached her.

  Quietly, he said to her, “If I didn’t think I had to, I wouldn’t do it. Fox hunting is barbaric, but, then, the British are barbaric.”

  She said, “Sir George, I’m a foreigner here.”

  “Please call me George,” he said, “if you’ll allow me to call you—” He paused.

  “Nancy.”

  “Yes, of course—Nancy.”

  After Sir George and Lady Plummerton left, James said Hilary must have a rest, she absolutely must, and Hilary, laughing as if she must give in to him, said to Tim and Nancy, “What can I do now but have a rest?”

  “We’ll see you for tea,” James said.

  As soon as James and Hilary went, leaving Tim and Nancy alone in the drawing room, Tim frowned at Nancy in a way that made her draw back a little. But she followed him up to their room, and as soon as their door was shut, Tim’s entire body, and particularly his head, expanded with sudden rage. He shouted, “What the fuck do you know about fox hunting? You humiliated me before my friends.”

  Nancy sat on the bed. “Your bloody friends.”

  “And I’ll thank you not to use the word bloody, which, you obviously do not know, is offensive in this country. You shouldn’t use offensive language to describe people in whose company you should considered yourself honored to be.”

  “What you don’t know is Sir George came up to me and agreed and said it was barbaric and that if he weren’t English he wouldn’t hunt.”

  “There you see. He was being polite. A gentleman.”

  “Anyway, Sir George and Lady Plummerton did not ask me one direct question, not one.”

  Tim breathed in deeply. “You need to understand why they didn’t ask you questions.” Tim put on a professional voice to explain. “Because, by the mere fact of your being among us at an intimate luncheon party, everyone’s assumption is that you are known to everyone, and such questions could only make you feel you don’t belong.”

  “But they didn’t know anything about me.”

  “Let me try again. I realize it’s rather subtle. They didn’t ask you questions about your life because your being among us meant they should have known everything, and they didn’t want to offend you by asking questions that would have revealed they didn’t. Do you understand anything of what I’m saying?”

  She asked, “Why are you trying to make stupid excuses for the English?”

  “What do you know about being English?”

  “What do you know?” she shouted. “You yourself told me, you’re a Jew.”

  Tim swung his arm out and back and hit her with the back of his hand on the side of her face, and she fell backward onto the bed.

  The blow did not leave a mark, but James and Hilary knew from Nancy’s stunned look that something had happened, and at tea, the elderly couple were attentive to her.

  When Hilary left her side on the sofa James took her place. He seemed to have had his little talk prepared when he said to Nancy, “I want to tell you something about London.” James leaned toward her and smiled a little. “Many people, the British included, imagine there is a center to London where, if they can only get to it, they will be established forever. They may think that being invited to dine at the Coffees’ house puts them at the center, but they find, when, at another dinner party at the Teas, they let it be known that just last week they dined at the house of the Coffees, that the Teas will say, ‘My God, you didn’t! The Coffees are the most boring people in the world,’ and they will think they made a terrible mistake and the center was not at the Coffees but at the Teas. And then, the next week, when, at the Cocoas, they let it drop that they are on such good terms with the Teas that they have been invited for the weekend, the Cocoas will say, ‘Not the Teas! My God, how can you bear the Teas?’ and they will think, again, that they have made a terrible mistake, and, really, the center is at the Cocoas. And this will go on and on in that way until they are invited to Buckingham Palace to dine with the queen, who they are absolutely sure is the center, and will drop this bit of information when they meet the Horlickses at a reception, and the Horlickses tell them they consider the queen a Hanoverian arriviste and they won’t have anything to do with her socially.”

  Tim, holding a cup of tea, laughed.

  Without looking at him, James continued to Nancy, “I think this is something even Tim, who purports to understand everything about London, does not understand.”

  Tim put down his cup and laughed louder.

  In bed, waiting for Tim, Nancy felt grief, grief for whom or for what she didn’t know, come over her again, and she rose from the bed and went to the window and watched the crows in the pine trees.

  Nancy became pregnant again, then had another miscarriage. Tim was made very anxious by this, and said over and over that something had to be done. In his anxiety he blamed their doctor, and threatened to bring a suit for malpractice. She said sadly but calmly, “Please don’t,” and he set his jaw. She was made deeply sad by the miscarriage, sad not only because the choice to be a mother was taken away from her, but because she believed she would have been a good mother.

  She put on weight, more than when she’d been pregnant. Her white, finely freckled breasts bulged in her bra, and her hips expanded and rounded.

  She thought she must, for Tim’s sake, become pregnant again. She did, and Tim’s anxiety left him, but she had another miscarriage. Again he shouted that something would be done, something had to be done. She stood calmly and listened to him. She would do anything, anything he said she must do, but, in herself, as though accepting what she knew was beyond her control, she accepted that she wouldn’t be a mother. Her sadness made her calm. After a hysterectomy, for which her mother came to care for her, she grew a little more plump. She was aware that not being able to have children changed the way Tim felt for her, although because this was not her fault, she was also aware that he wanted to be fair toward her. After they made love, he still said thank you, and his thank you was a statement, even a tender statement, of his appreciation of her, however disappointed he was.

  In the space of a year, Tim’s mother died. Shortly after, his father died, and at his cremation in Golders Green crematorium Tim introduced to Nancy his father’s mistress, Helen Phillips, whom he insisted stand by his side. Nancy had not known that Mr. Arbib had a mistress, as Tim did and accepted, and she wondered if Mrs. Arbib had known. Yes, Tim said, she had known, she had known, and that was all he said.

  Anxiety always made Tim work, with determination, to put right what was wrong. She knew that he would never give in and accept that wrongs could not be put right, and she admired him for this. And yet she felt pity, if pity was the word, for him, because she knew that his insisting that what was impossibly wrong be put right would not put the wrong right, any more than she could be made to have children for him. She felt tender towards him for what he wanted and what she couldn’t give him.

  His father’s collection of old-master prints was sold at a Christie’s auction, with a catalogue devoted to it that reproduced each work, giving its provenance and details of its condition. With his inheritance and the money from the sale, Tim was, after taxes, able to buy a house in upper Hampstead with a white façade and a portico over the black street door. The anxiety of having work done on the house and having it decorated and furnished—the builders never did what they were supposed to in the way Tim wanted it and on time, the decorators’ drop cloths didn’t cover the parquet floors
so paint was splattered on them, the wrong pieces of furniture were delivered—made Tim so agitated that Nancy worried about him.

  He assembled his remaining collection—the paintings and brass vessels and glass vials and ancient oil lamps and statuettes—in his new study, propping the smaller paintings against books in the bookshelves where he also placed the objects, and he stacked the larger paintings against a wall. The Torah case he placed on the table in the middle of the study. He kept the door to his study shut, so Nancy glimpsed inside only when he went in or came out and she was nearby. She was aware that this was where he must go for whatever reason he had to withdraw there—to be alone, she thought, and deal with the disorder that made him anxious, and she never entered.

  She wanted to allay Tim’s anxiety. If she could not make him a father, she could, she thought help him in his professional life. If he was determined, so could she be. When the house was in order, Nancy thought of asking James and Hilary Kess to come for a weekend, and she would give what she had learned to call a drinks party for them. She would ask whom they’d like to have invited, hoping to bring together for Tim a house full of judges.

  The Kesses said the weather in the Lowlands had been so bad they hadn’t left their kitchen in weeks, except to run, run, through the cold rooms to their bedroom at night to get quickly into bed, and in the morning from bed to the Aga in the kitchen. They’d love to come to London to stay with Nancy and Tim, and it was princely of the young couple to invite them. As for the drinks party, it was royal of them to want to have it. Hilary suggested a few guests, but she must really leave it to them to invite whomever they would like to have. As Nancy didn’t know who the right people would be, she left the guest list up to Tim. He made it out carefully, and gave it to her to do the inviting.

  “Who is Gabriella Almansi?” Nancy asked.

  “An Italian lawyer,” Tim answered.

  In the early autumn evening, the rooms were becoming dark and Nancy was lighting the lamps when the doorbell rang, and the young woman hired for the party went to open the door for the first guest. A slender woman with a slender neck and short auburn hair and blue eye makeup but no lipstick came in. She was wearing a dark, double-breasted, pin-striped business suit, the skirt narrow and long, with a white blouse, and she went quickly to Nancy to say, with an accent that was like a deep shadow to her clear English, “I am sorry to arrive in my work clothes, but I thought that if I went home to change I would be very late. Now I see I’m early.” She held out a slender hand and said, “I am Almansi, Gabriella.”