Home Truths (11 page)

“Well, it’s a good thing you finally did,” she said. “I was only waiting for a letter, and now I’m going back to Grenoble. I don’t like it here.”

“Don’t do that, don’t leave.” He had a quiet voice for a man, and he knew how to slide it under another level of sound and make himself plain. He broke off to order their meal. He seemed so at ease, so certain of other people and their reactions – at any moment he would say he was the ambassador of a place where nothing mattered but charm and freedom. Sarah was not used to cold wine at noon. She touched the misty decanter with her fingertips and wet her forehead with the drops. She wanted to ask his motives again but found he was questioning hers – laughing at Sarah, in fact. Who was she to frown and cross-examine, she who wandered around eating pizzas alone? She told him about Professor Downcast and her father – she had to, to explain what she was doing here – and even let him look at her father’s letter. Part of it said, “My poor Sarah, no one ever seems to interest you unless he is

no good at his job

small in stature, I wonder why?

‘Marxist-Leninist’ (since you sneer at ‘Communist’ and will not allow its use around the house)

married or just about to be

in debt to God and humanity.

I am not saying you should look for the opposite in every case, only for some person who doesn’t combine all these qualities at one time.”

“I’m your father’s man,” said Roy Cooper, and he might well have been, except for the problem of height. He was a bachelor, and certainly the opposite of a Marxist-Leninist: he was a former prison inspector whose career had been spent in
an Asian colony. He had been retired early when the Empire faded out and the New Democracy that followed no longer required inspection. As for “debt to God and humanity,” he said he had his own religion, which made Sarah stare sharply at him, wondering if his idea of being funny was the same as her father’s. Their conversation suddenly became locked; an effort would be needed to pull it in two, almost a tug-of-war. I could stay a couple of days or so, she said to herself. She saw the south that day as she would see it finally, as if she had picked up an old dress and first wondered, then knew, how it could be changed to suit her.

They spent that night talking on a stony beach. Sarah half lay, propped on an elbow. He sat with his arms around his knees. Behind him, a party of boys had made a bonfire. By its light Sarah told him all her life, every season of it, and he listened with the silent attention that honored her newness. She had scarcely reached the end when a fresh day opened, streaky and white. She could see him clearly: even unshaven and dying for sleep he was the ambassador from that easy place. She tossed a stone, a puppy asking for a game. He smiled, but still kept space between them, about the distance of the blue tablecloth.

They began meeting every day. They seemed to Sarah to be moving toward each other without ever quite touching; then she thought they were travelling in the same direction, but still apart. They could not turn back, for there was nothing to go back to. She felt a pause, a hesitation. The conversation began to unlock; once Sarah had told all her life she could not think of anything to say. One afternoon he came to the beach nearly two hours late. She sensed he had something to tell her, and waited to hear that he had a wife, or was engaged, or on drugs,
or had no money. In the most casual voice imaginable he asked Sarah if she would spend the rest of her holiday with him. He had rented a place up behind Nice. She would know all his friends, quite openly; he did not want to let her in for anything squalid or mean. She could come for a weekend. If she hated it, no hard feelings. It was up to her.

This was new, for of course she had never
lived
with anyone. Well, why not? In her mind she told her father, After all, it was a bachelor you wanted for me. She abandoned her textbooks and packed instead four wooden bowls she had bought for her father’s sister and an out-of-print Matisse poster intended for Professor Downcast. Now it would be Roy’s. He came to fetch her that day in the car that was always parked somewhere in shade – it was a small open thing, a bachelor’s car. They rolled out of Nice with an escort of trucks and buses. She thought there should have been carnival floats spilling yellow roses. Until now, this was her most important decision, for it supposed a way of living, a style. She reflected on how no girl she knew had ever done quite this, and on what her father would say. He might not hear of it; at least not right away. Meanwhile, they made a triumphant passage through blank white suburbs. Their witnesses were souvenir shops, a village or two, a bright solitary supermarket, the walls and hedges of villas. Along one of these flowering barriers they came to a stop and got out of the car. The fence wire looked tense and new; the plumbago it supported leaned every way, as if its life had been spared but only barely. It was late evening. She heard the squeaky barking of small dogs, and glimpsed, through an iron gate, one of those stucco bungalows that seem to beget their own palm trees. They went straight past it, down four shallow garden steps, and came upon a low building that
Sarah thought looked like an Indian lodge. It was half under a plane tree. Perhaps it was the tree, whose leaves were like plates, that made the house and its terrace seem microscopic. One table and four thin chairs was all the terrace would hold. A lavender hedge surrounded it.

“They call this place The Tunnel,” Roy said. She wondered if he was already regretting their adventure; if so, all he had to do was drive her back at once, or even let her down at a bus stop. But then he lit a candle on the table, which at once made everything dark, and she could see he was smiling as if in wonder at himself. The Tunnel was a long windowless room with an arched whitewashed ceiling. In daytime the light must have come in from the door, which was protected by a soft white curtain of mosquito netting. He groped for a switch on the wall, and she saw there was next to no furniture. “It used to be a storage place for wine and olives,” he said. “The Reeves fixed it up. They let it to friends.”

“What are Reeves?”

“People – nice people. They live in the bungalow.”

She was now in this man’s house. She wondered about procedure: whether to unpack or wait until she was asked, and whether she had any domestic duties and was expected to cook. Concealed by a screen was a shower bath; the stove was in a cupboard. The lavatory, he told her, was behind the house in a garden shed. She would find it full of pictures of Labour leaders. The only Socialist the Reeves could bear was Hugh Dalton (Sarah had never heard of him, or most of the others, either), because Dalton had paid for the Queen’s wedding out of his own pocket when she was a slip of a girl without a bean of her own. Sarah said, “What did he want to do that for?” She saw, too late, that he meant to be funny.

He sat down on the bed and looked at her. “The Reeves versus Labour,” he said. “Why should you care? You weren’t even born.” She was used to hearing that every interesting thing had taken place before her birth. She had a deadly serious question waiting: “What shall I do if you feel remorseful?”

“If I am,” he said, “you’ll never know. That’s a promise.”

I
t was not remorse that overcame him but respectability: first thing next day, Sarah was taken to meet his friends, landlords, and neighbors, Tim and Meg Reeve. “I want them to like you,” he said. Wishing to be liked by total strangers was outside anything that mattered to Sarah; all the same, quickened by the new situation and its demands, she dressed and brushed her hair and took the path between the two cottages. The garden seemed a dry, cracked sort of place. The remains of daffodils lay in brown ribbons on the soil. She looked all round her, at an olive tree, and yesterday’s iron gate, and at the sky, which was fiercely azure. She was not as innocent as her father still hoped she might turn out to be, but not as experienced as Roy thought, either. There was a world of knowledge between last night and what had gone before. She wondered, already, if violent feelings were going to define the rest of her life, or simply limit it. Roy gathered her long hair in his hand and turned her head around. They’d had other nights, or attempts at nights, but this was their first morning. Whatever he read on her face made him say, “You know, it won’t always be as lovely as this.” She nodded. Professor Downcast had a wife and children, and she was used to fair warnings. Roy could not guess how sturdy her emotions were. Her only antagonist had been her father, who had not touched her self-confidence.
She accepted Roy’s caution as a tribute:
he
, at least, could see that Sarah was objective.

Roy rang the doorbell, which set off a gunburst of barking. The Reeves’ hall smelled of toast, carpets, and insect spray. She wanted southern houses to smell of jasmine. “Here, Roy,” someone called, and Roy led her by the hand into a small sitting room where two people, an old man and an old woman, sat in armchairs eating breakfast. The man removed a tray from his knees and stood up. He was gaunt and tall, and looked oddly starched, like a nurse coming on duty. “Jack Sprat could eat no fat” came to Sarah’s mind. Mrs. Reeve was – she supposed – obese. Sarah stared at her; she did not know how to be furtive. Was the poor woman ill?
No
, answered the judge who was part of Sarah too.
Mrs. Reeve is just greedy. Look at the jam she’s shovelled on her plate
.

“Well, this is Sarah Holmes,” said Roy, stroking her hair, as if he was proving at the outset there was to be no hypocrisy. “We’d adore coffee.”

“You’d better do something about it, then,” said the fat woman. “We’ve got tea here. You know where the kitchen is, Roy.” She had a deep voice, like a moo. “You, Sarah Holmes, sit down. Find a pew with no dog hair, if you can. Of course, if you’re going to be fussy, you won’t last long around
here
– eh, boys? You can make toast if you like. No, never mind. I’ll make it for you.”

It seemed to Sarah a pretty casual way for people their age to behave. Roy was older by a long start, but the Reeves were old. They seemed to find it natural to have Roy and Sarah drift over for breakfast after a night in the guesthouse. Mr. Reeve even asked quite kindly, “Did you sleep well? The plane tree draws mosquitoes, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll have that tree down yet,” said Mrs. Reeve. “Oh, I’ll have it down one of these days. I can promise you that.” She was dressed in a bathrobe that looked like a dark parachute. “We decided not to have eggs,” she said, as though Sarah had asked. “Have ’em later. You and Roy must come back for lunch. We’ll have a good old fry-up.” Here she attended to toast, which meant shaking and tapping an antique wire toaster set on the table before her. “When Tim’s gone – bless him – I shall never cook a meal again,” she said. “Just bits and pieces on a tray for the boys and me.” The boys were dogs, Sarah guessed – two little yappers up on the sofa, the color of Teddy-bear stuffing.

“I make a lot of work for Meg,” Mr. Reeve said to Sarah. “The breakfasts – breakfast every day, you know – and she is the one who looks after the Christmas cards. Marriage has been a bind for her. She did a marvellous job with evacuees in the war. And poor old Meg loathed kids, still does. You’ll never hear her say so. I’ve never known Meg to complain.”

Mrs. Reeve had not waited for her husband to die before starting her widow’s diet of tea and toast and jam and gin (the bottle was there, by the toaster, along with a can of orange juice). Sarah knew about this, for not only was her father a widower but they had often spent summers with a widowed aunt. The Reeves seemed like her father and her aunt grown elderly and distorted. Mrs. Reeve now unwrapped a chocolate bar, which caused a fit of snorting and jostling on the sofa. “No chockie bits for boys with bad manners,” she said, feeding them just the same. Yes, there she sat, a widow with two dogs for company. Mr. Reeve, delicately buttering and eating the toast meant for Sarah, murmured that when he
did
go he did not want poor Meg to have any fuss. He seemed to be planning
his own modest gravestone; in a heightened moment of telepathy Sarah was sure she could see it too. To Sarah, the tall old man had already ceased to be. He was not Mr. Reeve, Roy’s friend and landlord, but an ectoplasmic impression of somebody like him, leaning forward, lips slightly parted, lifting a piece of toast that was caving in like a hammock with a weight of strawberry jam. Panic was in the room, but only Sarah felt it. She had been better off, safer, perhaps happier even, up in Grenoble, trying not to yawn over
“Tout m’afflige, et me nuit, et conspire à me nuire.”
What was she doing here, indoors, on this glowing day, with these two snivelly dogs and these gluttonous old persons? She turned swiftly, hearing Roy, and in her heart she said, in a quavering spoiled child’s voice, “I want to go home.” (How many outings had she ruined for her father. How many picnics, circuses, puppet shows, boat rides. From how many attempted holidays had he been fetched back with a telegram from whichever relation had been trying to hold Sarah down for a week. The strong brass chords of “I want my own life” had always been followed by this dismal piping.)

Roy poured their coffee into pottery mugs and his eyes met Sarah’s. His said, Yes, these are the Reeves. They don’t matter. I only want one thing, and that’s to get back to where we were a few hours ago.

So they were to be conspirators: she liked that.

The Reeves had now done with chewing, feeding, swallowing, and brushing crumbs, and began placing Sarah. Who was she? Sarah Holmes, a little transatlantic pickup, a student slumming round for a summer? What had she studied? Sociology, psychology, and some economics, she told them.

“Sounds Labour” was Mr. Reeve’s comment.

She simplified her story and mentioned the thesis. “Urban and Regional Studies of the Less Privileged in British Columbia,” as far as Mr. Reeve was concerned, contained only one reassuring word, and that was “British.” Being the youngest in the room, Sarah felt like the daughter of the house. She piled cups and plates on one of the trays and took them out to the kitchen. The Reeves were not the sort of people who would ever bother to whisper: she heard that she was “a little on the tall side” and that her proportions made Roy seem slight and small, “like a bloody dago.” Her hair was too long; the fringe on her forehead looked sparse and pasted down with soap. She also heard that she had a cast in one eye, which she did not believe.