Going Ashore (37 page)

I wonder, the man thought, if she
can
be mine? She had none of the qualities he recognized in himself, and for which he had been loved: warmth, tenacity, a sense of justice. Perhaps his desire to educate covered a profound unease, but he had never deserted the weak, never betrayed a friend. He was flooded with a great grievance all at once, as if he had been laughed at, his kindness solicited, his charity betrayed, for the sake of someone to whom he owed nothing. Perhaps, he thought – and this was even darker – perhaps she is not her mother’s; for where were her qualities? Charm over shyness; gaiety over anxiousness; camouflage, dissimulation, myth-making to make life easier – myths explain the dark corners of life. Not even those! The child was the bottom of a pool from which both their characters had been drained away. She had nothing, except obstinacy, which he did not admire, and shallow judgment. Of course she was shallow; she had proved it: she did not love her father.

“If you do not love me,” he wanted to say, “you will never care about anyone,” but he felt so much pain at the possibility of not being loved that he added quickly, “I forgive you.” Instantly the pain receded.

“Look here,” he said. “How old are you, exactly?”

“Six and a half,” said the child, without surprise.

“That would be it, that would be the right age,” he said. She could be ours. With that, the pain returned.

He could not remember what they had been saying during much of the drive, but he must have been using the wrong language, or, worse, have allowed the insertion of silence. Everything had been a mistake. The child sat, perfectly self-contained, protected by an innocence that transformed her feelings and made them neutral. We must make a joke of this, her father thought, or the pain will make me so hideous, so disfigured, that she will be frightened of me. He opened his mouth, meaning to
describe, objectively, what anguish was like, giving as examples the dupe on his way to be sacrificed, the runner overtaken by a tank, the loathed bearer of a disease, but he said instead, “I can’t understand you,” in a reasonable voice. “I was interested in you, I never neglected you. If you’d had more experience, you’d know when you were well off. You just don’t know what other men can be like.”

As if pleased with the effect she had produced, the child played with the monster’s collar and bell. He heard the bell tinkle, and saw a flash of her small hands. She had not warned him, or prepared him, or even asked his advice. He could have stopped driving, flung himself down, appealed in the name of their past; but he had heard in his own last words a deliberate whine, which rendered any plea disgraceful.

He was dealing with a
child
, he suddenly recalled; it was not a father’s business to plead for justice but to dispense it. Pride, yes, pride was important, but he was not to give up his role. He resumed reasonableness; he said, “I suppose you find me tiresome, sometimes.”

“Yes, I did,” said the child. “That was one of the things.”

He was in the little girl’s past, and she was so young that the past was removed from life. This is my fault, he said to himself. I’ve let her believe she was grown up; I have been too respectful. She thinks her life is her own; she doesn’t know that she can’t plan and think and provide for herself. He said, jokingly, as if they had been playing a game all along, “All right, who do you want to live with?,” thinking she would laugh at the question, but instead she said at once, “With Mr. Mountford.”

“Mountford? Are you sure that’s the person you mean? You’ve hardly met him.”

“I know,” said the child, “but he’s so much richer, and he has such lovely conversation.”

It was further proof of shallowness, but also of her dismal innocence: If Mountford had been capable of saying one civil word to the child, it was only because he knew the little brat would not be in his house longer than an hour; she would eat her cake and drink her milk and be led away. He was the totality of everything the child’s father despised; at the very sight of Mountford, his scorn for amateurs – amateur painters, actors, singers, poets, playwrights – rose and choked him. Any exchange was out
of the question; they could not have discussed a crossword puzzle. Obviously, he could not translate such feelings into a child’s language, while words such as “hypocrisy,” “coldness,” “greed” would convey nothing except a tone of adult spitefulness. She smiled to herself, perhaps remembering a “lovely conversation” in which she had mistaken a fatuous compliment for a promise. What did she mean by “richer,” he wondered. It couldn’t be money; not at that age. Meanwhile he saw Mountford clearly, with his slack mouth and light eyes. He did not seem like a man but like a discontented woman.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll take you to his house. We’ll see if he can keep you. Remember,” he added needlessly, “it was your decision.”

Now he had relinquished her; they had put each other in the past. He wanted to say, “I didn’t mean it,” but she was beyond taking the slightest notice of anything he meant, or said, or did, or was. He went on, “You must do as you are told, for the last time. You are to stay in the car while I speak to Mr. Mountford.” She seemed astonished, perhaps at her own power; and, after a brief gesture that might have been rebellious, sat quite still.

I WAS NOT THE ONE
who pushed things to the limit, he said to himself, as he walked up to Mountford’s door. Did I abdicate? Let go too soon? It seemed settled in her mind; what else could I have done? Beside him trotted the monster with its collar and bell. She had thrust it out of the car, slyly, and sent it along to be her witness, to see if her father lied, later, about his conversation with Mountford. As though I would lie to the child, he said to himself, in despair at this new misunderstanding. But when the door was opened for him he stepped aside and let the creature scuttle through.

Mountford was dressed in his waffly felt gardening hat; a battered cream-colored corduroy jacket; dark-green hairy shirt with a hairy tie, woven for a Cottage Industry shop; trousers perpetually kneeling; shoes to which clay from a dreary promenade accrued.

How can I allow this child to live in a house where there are no flowers, no paintings, no books, and (this seemed the most miserly of all
deprivations) no cigarettes? He knew there would be no musical instrument, and no records – it was a theory of Mountford’s that right-thinking people went to concerts. If you lived in a provincial part of the world, in a resort, a watering place where you had to depend on military tunes played in the casino garden, then you did without. When you have heard an opera once in your life, it is up to you to remember it; it saves time, and any amount of money. The child’s father supposed Mountford had said all of this to him once. He found he had a store of information concerning Mountford; how he felt about climates, sonnets, the sea, other people, the passage of time, the importance of pleasure; he possessed this knowledge, condensed, like a summary he had been given to read. He knew that Mountford went into the kitchen to see if his cook was using too much olive oil. Perhaps this was only gossip – but no, Mountford now held the bottle of oil up to the light of the kitchen window.

“You don’t need all those ingredients for a simple
poulet chasseur,”
Mountford said to the cook. “White wine, bouillon, brandy, butter, oil, flour, tomatoes, tarragon, chervil, shallots, salt and pepper … ridiculous. You can use a bouillon cube,” he said, putting the bottle down. “Vinegar instead of wine. Cooking fat. No one will ever know. Go easy, now,” he said, in his jovial way. “Go easy with the brandy and the flour. You know how things are…. You can stay for lunch,” he said, turning to the child’s father, “but you understand I can’t keep
her
. I scarcely know her. She’s more of a stranger, if you know what I mean. We’ve had a few words together, nothing more. Tell her she has made a mistake, I don’t know her and that’s that.”

That much is settled, the man thought. She will not live in a house where she can hear “No one will ever know.” She will not he infected by meanness. As for himself, he had come out of it well. He had not bullied, or shown authority, or imposed a decision. He had not even suggested a course! She had been given free choice all the way.

“If I were you,” said Mountford as they went into the front part of the house, “I would just give her to old Bertha in the kitchen.”

“It isn’t a matter of giving her away,” he said. “I’m not
giving
her.”

“Well, old Bertha would be one solution. We ought to repopulate those empty peasant areas – fill them with new stock, good blood.”

“Not with
my
child,” he said. He knew exactly how he ought to murder Mountford. He saw the place between his eyes, and his own hand flat, like a plate skimming. Mountford’s eyes would start, fall out nearly, while the skin around them went black as ink. That was the way to show Mountford what he thought of him. He saw the kitchen again, the large stove, and the hag who must be old Bertha. Mountford, untouched, was still pink of face and smiling.

THE CHILD HAD DISOBEYED
. She stood in the hall, fragile, composed, her hands bright in a shaft of light. This is her first shock, he remembered; I must tell her gently. She was so confident, so certain she would always be wanted. He thought, She
must
be mine – she is so independent. He spoke tenderly, but the small, resolute face did not alter. He felt the hopeless frustration of talking to someone whose mind is made up, and understood how difficult it must have been, sometimes, for someone to deal with him. He had a living memory of having once been secure in his ideas and utterly convinced. She has courage, too, he decided. But it was not courage – she was simply pretending not to mind. Perhaps she is stupid, he thought. All that acting, that pretending nothing matters. She must be her mother’s, after all. “There,” he wanted to say to the child’s mother, “do you see how patient I had to be?”

As they walked away from the house, he heard the reptile. He recognized the frantic note of the creature abandoned; there was no mistaking the hysteria and terror, the fear that no one would ever come for it again.

“Go back and get him,” he said.

“I don’t want him.”

“You can’t leave him,” said the man. “You’ve taken him out of his own life and made a pet of him. You can’t abandon him now. You’re responsible for him.”

“I don’t want him,” the child said without emphasis.

Why, he thought, she is cruel. How horrible this has become – she can’t belong to either of us, for surely we were never guilty of cruelty? The child sat in the car now, confident she would never he made to account for anything, that she had another choice, that her chances were eternal.

He stood with his hand on the door of the car and said once again, “Look here, how old are you exactly?”

“Six and a half.”

“Then that’s it,” he said. “That would be the age. There’s no getting away from it.” He had to give in; he had to accept her.

Well,
she
will have to help me then, he decided, and an access of fierce and joyous hostility toward the child’s mother made him think he was seeing clearly for the first time. I may have made some mistake, he said, but she got away with murder. Look at the pain and grief I thought were finished;
she
had nothing to remind her.

But then, he remembered, she does not know the child exists. I must have forgotten to tell her. How can I suddenly say, “Here is the result, the product, the thing we have left?” She could say, “Why didn’t you mention it sooner?”

“I would like to take you to your mother,” he said, “but it will take a little planning. She may not know anything about you. You are quite like her, I am afraid, though also like me. She may not want to admit who you are like. If she knew you had abandoned that creature, she might tell you there are two sorts of people, that the world is divided …” He thundered on, as if making himself heard, “People who give up … who destroy … though her own position is not all that good. Still, I’m certain she would say you are on the wrong side.”

“Who do you think you’re shouting at?” the calm child seemed to be saying. “And why are you bothering
me
?”

THE MORNING OF
Madeline Farr’s seventeenth birthday, Mrs. Tracy awoke remembering that she had forgotten to order a cake. It was doubtful if this would matter to Madeline, who would probably make a point of not caring. But it does matter to me, Mrs. Tracy thought. Observances are important and it is, after all, my house.

She did not spring up at once but lay in a wash of morning sunlight, surveying her tanned arms, stretched overhead, while her mind opened doors and went from room to room of the eighteenth-century Connecticut farmhouse. She knew exactly how the curtains blew into Madeline’s room, which had once been hers, and why there was silence on one floor and sound on the other. It was a house, she told herself, in which she had never known an unhappy moment.

“I cannot cope with it here,” Madeline had written to her father shortly after she arrived. “One at a time would be all right but not all the Tracys and this German.” “Cope” was a word Madeline had learned from her mother, who had divorced Madeline’s father because she could not cope with him, and then had fled to Europe because she could not cope with the idea of his remarriage. “Can you take Madeline for the summer?” she had written to Anna Tracy, who was a girlhood friend. “You are so much better able to cope.”

In the kitchen, directly beneath Mrs. Tracy’s bedroom, Doris, who came in every day from the village, had turned on the radio. “McIntoshes were lively yesterday,” the announcer said, “but Roman Beauties were quiet.” Propelled out of the house to the orchard by this statement, Mrs. Tracy brought herself back to hear Doris’s deliberate tread across the kitchen. She heard the refrigerator door slam and then, together with a sharp bite of static, the whir of the electric mixer. That would be Madeline’s cake, which must, after all, have been mentioned. Or else
Doris, her imagination uncommonly fired, had decided to make waffles for breakfast. The cake was more probable. Satisfied, Mrs. Tracy turned her thoughts to the upper floor.