Home Truths (10 page)

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. I shall say – let me think – I shall say I’ve had a mishap, lost my wallet, pension check not due for another week, postal strike delaying it even more –”

“That won’t work. They’ll send you to the welfare. You should see how we hand out welfare around here.”

“I’m counting on seeing it,” I said.

“You can’t. It would look –” She narrowed her eyes and said, “If you’re trying to shame me, forget it. Someone comes and says, ‘That poor old blind bum says he’s your father,’ I’ll just answer, ‘Yes, what about it?’ ”

“My sight
is
failing, actually.”

“There’s welfare for that, too.”

“We’re at cross-purposes,” I said. “I’m not looking for money.”

“Then waja come here for?”

“Because Regan sent me on to Goneril, I suppose.”

“That’s a lie. Don’t try to make yourself big. Nothing’s ever happened to you.”

“Well, in my uneventful life,” I began, but my mind answered for me, “No, nothing.” There are substitutes for incest but none whatever for love. What I needed now was someone who knew nothing about me and would never measure me against a promise or a past. I blamed myself, not for anything I had said but for having remembered too late what Rhoda was like. She was positively savage as an infant, though her school tamed her later on. I remember sitting opposite her when she was nine – she in an unbecoming tartan coat – while she slowly and seriously ate a large plate of ice cream. She was in London on a holiday with her mother, and as I happened to be there with my new family I gave her a day.

“Every Monday we have Thinking Day,” she had said, of her school. “We think about the Brownies and the Baden-Powells and sometimes Jesus and all.”

“Do you, really?”

“I can’t
really,”
Rhoda had said. “I never met any of them.”

“Are you happy, at least?” I said, to justify my belief that no one was ever needed. But the savage little girl had become an extremely careful one.

That afternoon, at a matinée performance of
Peter Pan
, I went to sleep. The slaughter of the pirates woke me, and as I turned, confident, expecting her to be rapt, I encountered a face of refusal. She tucked her lips in, folded her hands, and shrugged away when I helped her into a taxi.

“I’m sorry, I should not have slept in your company,” I said. “It was impolite.”

“It wasn’t that,” she burst out. “It was
Peter Pan
. I hated it. It wasn’t what I expected. You could see the wires. Mrs. Darling didn’t look right. She didn’t have a lovely dress on – only an old pink thing like a nightgown. Nana wasn’t a real dog, it was
a lady. I couldn’t understand anything they said. Peter Pan wasn’t a boy, he had bosoms.”

“I noticed that, too,” I said. “There must be a sound traditional reason for it. Perhaps Peter is really a mother figure.”

“No, he’s a
boy.”

I intercepted, again, a glance of stony denial – of me? We had scarcely met.

“I couldn’t understand. They all had English accents,” she complained.

For some reason that irritated me. “What the hell did you expect them to have?” I said.

“When I was little,” said the nine-year-old, close to tears now, “I thought they were all Canadian.”

T
he old car Joanne had given me was down on the beach, on the hard sand, with ribbons of tire tracks behind it as a sign of life, and my luggage locked inside. It had been there a few hours and already it looked abandoned – an old heap someone had left to rust among the lava rock. The sky was lighter than it had seemed from the porch. I picked up a sand dollar, chalky and white, with the tree of life on its underside, and as I slid it in my pocket, for luck, I felt between my fingers a rush of sand. I had spoken the truth, in part; the landscape through which I had recently travelled still shuddered before my eyes and I would not go back. I heard, then saw, Rhoda running down to where I stood. Her hair, which she wore gathered up in a bun, was half down, and she breathed, running, with her lips apart. For the first time I remembered something of the way she had seemed as a child, something more than an anecdote. She
clutched my arm and said, “Why did you say I should ditch him?
Why?”

I disengaged my arm, because she was hurting me, and said, “He can only give you bad habits.”

“At my age?”

“Any age. Dissimulation. Voluntary barrenness – someone else has had his children. Playing house, a Peter-and-Wendy game, a life he would never dare try at home. There’s the real meaning of Peter, by the way.” But she had forgotten.

She clutched me again, to steady herself, and said, “I’m old enough to know everything. I’ll soon be in my thirties. That’s all I care to say.”

It seemed to me I had only recently begun making grave mistakes. I had until now accepted all my children, regardless of who their mothers were. The immortality I had imagined had not been in them but on the faces of women in love. I saw, on the dark beach, Rhoda’s mother, the soft hysterical girl whose fatal “I am pregnant” might have enmeshed me for life.

I said, “I wish they would find a substitute for immortality.”

“I’m working on it,” said Rhoda, grimly, seeming herself again. She let go my arm and watched me unlock the car door. “You’d have hated it here,” she said, then, pleading, “You wouldn’t want to live here like some charity case – have me support you?”

“I’d be enchanted,” I said.

“No, no, you’d hate it,” she said. “I couldn’t look after you. I haven’t got time. And you’d keep thinking I should do better than
him
, and the truth is I can’t. You wouldn’t want to end up like some old relation, fed in the kitchen and all.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It would be new.”

“Oh,” she cried, with what seemed unnecessary despair, “what did you come for? All right,” she said. “I give up. You asked for it. You can stay. I mean, I’m inviting you. You can sit around and say, ‘Oxbow was a Cheswick charmer,’ all day and when someone says to me, ‘Where jer father get his accent?’ I’ll say, ‘It was a whole way of life.’ But remember, you’re not a prisoner or anything, around here. You can go whenever you don’t like the food. I mean, if you don’t like it, don’t come to me and say, ‘I don’t like the food.’ You’re not my prisoner,” she yelled, though her face was only a few inches from mine. “You’re only my father. That’s all you are.”

S
arah’s father was a born widower. As she had no memory of a mother, it was as though Mr. Holmes had none of a wife and had been created perpetually bereaved and knowing best. His conviction that he must act for two gave him a jocular heaviness that made the girl react for a dozen, but his jokes rode a limitless tide of concern. He thought Sarah was subjective and passionate, as small children are. She knew she was detached and could prove it. A certain kind of conversation between them was bound to run down, wind up, run down again: you are, I’m not, yes, no, you should, I won’t, you’ll be sorry. Between eighteen and twenty, Sarah kept meaning to become a psychosociologist. Life would then be a tribal village through
which she would stalk soft-footed and disguised: that would show him who was subjective. But she was also a natural
amoureuse
, as some girls were natural actresses, and she soon discovered that love refused all forms of fancy dress. In love she had to show her own face, and speak in a true voice, and she was visible from all directions.

One summer, after a particularly stormy spring, her father sent her to Grenoble to learn about French civilization – actually, to get her away from a man he always pretended to think was called Professor Downcast. Sarah raged mostly over the harm her father had brought to Professor Downcast’s career, for she had been helping with his “Urban and Regional Studies of the Less Privileged in British Columbia,” and she knew he could not manage without her. She did not stay long in Grenoble; she had never intended to. She had decided beforehand that the Alps were shabby, the cultural atmosphere in France was morbid and stifling, and that every girl she met would be taking the civilization course for the wrong reason. She packed and caught a bus down the Napoleon Route to the Mediterranean.

Professor Downcast had been forced to promise he would not write, and so, of course, Sarah would not write her father. She wanted to have new friends and a life that was none of his business. The word “Riviera” had predicted yellow mornings and snowy boats, and crowds filling the streets in the way dancers fill a stage. Her mind’s eye had kept them at a distance so that they shimmered and might have been plumed, like peacocks. Up close, her moralist’s eye selected whatever was bound to disappoint: a stone beach skirted with sewage, a promenade that was really a through speedway, an eerie bar. For the first time she recognized prostitutes; they clustered outside her
hotel, gossiping, with faces like dead letters. For friends she had a pair of middle-aged tourists who took her sightseeing and warned her not to go out at night by herself. Grenoble had been better after all. Who was to blame? She sent her father a letter of reproach, of abuse, of cold reason, and also of apology – the postmark was bound to be a shock. She then began waiting round American Express for an answer. She was hoping it would be a cable saying “Come on home.”

His feelings, when he got round to describing them, filled no more than one flimsy typewritten page. She thought she was worth more than that. What now? She walked out of American Express, still reading her letter. A shadow fell over the page. At the same time a man’s soft voice said, “Don’t be frightened.”

She looked up, not frightened – appraising. The man was about twice her age, and not very tall. He was dressed in clean, not too new summer whites, perhaps the remains of a naval officer’s uniform. His accent was English. His eyes were light brown. Once he had Sarah’s attention, and had given her time to decide what her attention would be, he said his name was Roy Cooper and asked if she wouldn’t like to have lunch with him somewhere along the port.

Of course, she answered: it was broad daylight and there were policemen everywhere – polite, old-fashioned, and wearing white, just like Roy Cooper. She was always hungry, and out of laziness had been living on pizzas and ice cream. Her father had never told her to keep experience at bay. For mystery and horror he had tried to substitute common sense, which may have been why Sarah did not always understand him. She and Roy Cooper crossed the promenade together. He held her arm to guide her through traffic, but let go the
minute they reached the curb. “I’ve been trying to talk to you for days now,” he said. “I was hoping you might know someone I knew, who could introduce us.”

“Oh, I don’t know anyone
here,”
said Sarah. “I met a couple of Americans in my hotel. We went to see this sort of abandoned chapel. It has frescoes of Jesus and Judas and …” He was silent. “Their name was Hayes?”

He answered that his car was parked over near the port in the shade. It was faster to walk than drive, down here. He was staying outside Nice; otherwise he wouldn’t bother driving at all.

They moved slowly along to the port, dragging this shapeless conversation between them, and Sarah was just beginning to wonder if he wasn’t a friend of her father’s, and if this might be one of her father’s large concrete jokes, when he took her bare arm in a way no family friend would have dared and said look here, what about this restaurant? Again he quickly dropped her arm before she could tug away. They sat down under an awning with a blue tablecloth between them. Sarah frowned, lowered her eyes, and muttered something. It might have been a grace before eating had she not seemed so determined; but her words were completely muffled by the traffic grinding by. She leaned forward and repeated, “I’d like to know what your motives are, exactly.” She did not mean anything like “What do you want?” but “What is it? Why Roy Cooper? Why me?” At the back of her mind was the idea that he deserved a lesson: she would eat her lunch, get up, coolly stroll away.

His answer, again miles away from Sarah’s question, was that he knew where Sarah was staying and had twice followed her to the door of the hotel. He hadn’t dared to speak up.