The Canterbury Sisters (25 page)

The spell of Silvia’s story is broken in the bustle. I hope it doesn’t hurt her feelings that we don’t talk about it. She doesn’t seem perturbed and, in fact, she has that same clean-washed quality all the women have assumed the minute their stories are finished. But I suspect that for me Silvia’s story may linger the longest of them all. Because that would have been Ned and me, wouldn’t it, if we’d stayed together? If we’d let ourselves just drift into marriage because it seemed like the logical thing to do? We would have become Silvia and Steven, disgustingly perfect for each other but never really happy, and he would have been nothing more than my first husband. The one who left me, the one I left—it hardly matters, and it took guts for Ned to pull the trigger before things got to that point. I duck my head down. The wind is brutal, cold and salty. It would make conversation impossible even if one of us had anything to say.

Twelve

T
ess wasn’t kidding when she said the descent to the bottom of the cliff was steep. We skid uneasily along the gravel road built for cars, which is one switchback after another, until my shins are screaming with the effort of trying to stop each step from picking up momentum. I have images of losing my footing and rolling all the way into the English Channel.

Tess shouts out bits of history as we descend, saying that Dover endured merciless bombing during the Second World War. If the German pilots had any ammunition left after blitzing London, they didn’t want to land with the explosives still attached and it would have been a waste of firepower to drop them in the sea. So they released all their excess bombs over tiny defenseless Dover, casually destroying the last vestige of British soil they’d pass before heading home.

“There was horrific damage for a town of this size,” Tess says, pointing vaguely into the fog. I guess the town is that direction, back the way we’ve come. “And a high civilian casualty count.”

When we finally reach the bottom, the beach is narrow and ugly, a stony gray crescent of sand cupping a flat sea. A school class is there on a field trip, the children paying no attention to their teacher, who is droning on about the difference between sedimentary and igneous rocks. There are tourists with cameras. Baby boomers mostly, possibly the descendants of World War II soldiers, visiting the places where their fathers fought and died. But the cliffs are indeed as white as they’ve been claimed to be, and when the sun momentarily breaks through the clouds and hits the expanse of chalk, we all turn away, blinking, shielding our eyes. Beyond the beach lies a working port, full of oil tankers and cargo ships. The actual town of Dover is perfectly quaint, Tess hastens to assure us, and I’m sure it is. She has misrepresented nothing so far. But this shoreline isn’t anything like the broad sandy American beaches I’m used to, and my mind goes to Cape May and sticks there for a minute.

“It seems so unfair,” Jean says. “A nice little town bombed to rubble just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” A couple of the women pull out their phones and aim them toward the cliffs, but it’s all so big, white, and close that I can’t imagine the pictures will come out.

If the walk down was slow and painful, the walk back up would likely be worse, so Tess calls Tim and he appears within minutes with the van. It carries us back to the top of the cliff, the tires shrieking in protest with every hairpin turn. The lighthouse perched there is old but whitewashed so that it’s nearly as blinding as the chalk of Dover. We climb out of the van and run through the mist, entering through an arched red door that looks like it could have come from a book of fairy tales. The café inside is small and round, and so overheated that I pull my scarf off immediately.

The room holds a half dozen tables of elderly women in sweater sets. They all look exactly like Angela Lansbury . . . except, that is, for the ones who look exactly like Maggie Smith. The waitress is well-cast too, blonde and buxom and rosy-cheeked, and without asking what we want, she brings us a three-tiered tray crammed with clever little desserts. Tess goes through the descriptions, quoting names like “syllabub” and “trifle” and “fool.” This is the first time we have stopped for dessert in the afternoon—I suppose this is “tea”?—and everyone seems to like the idea. We eat too much, chat and linger, aware that the van waits to carry us to the next inn. Not one of us is straining to get back on the trail. The time for proving things has passed. “I hope you don’t feel like we blew your story off,” Valerie is saying to Silvia. “It was a good story. Maybe the most hopeful one we’ve had so far.”

“Thank you for saying that,” Silvia says. “So many people seem to think my situation is sad and that pisses me off. Nothing is worse than being perfectly happy and having people always telling you to hang in there because things are bound to get better. Besides,” she adds, boldly reaching for the last pastry on the tray, “we need to pick up the storytelling pace a bit, don’t we?”

“Indeed, for I’m afraid we must tell all three of the remaining stories tomorrow,” Tess says, wiping a bit of clotted cream from her lower lip. “Steffi, Becca, and Che. I’m sorry if that makes you feel mashed together but I want to keep the very last morning free for our walk into Canterbury. There are quite a few tidbits about Chaucer and the Cathedral that I always share with groups as we enter the city, and of course Saturday night we shall have our grand meal at my favorite restaurant in town. It’s called Deeson’s, and it’s quite posh. No more pub grub for the likes of us, as I suspect a few of you will be happy to hear.”

By this she probably means Steffi, who bemoans the lack of fresh produce at every stop, who is appalled by the pub menus that so cheerfully announce they are about to serve us “tinned tomatoes” and “mushy peas.” Steffi, who makes a great show of taking her multivitamin every morning, holding it up and saying, “Usually this is a precaution, but on this trip, it’s a necessity.” As if six days off her usual regime of broccoli and quinoa might cause a woman to succumb to scurvy. Steffi, who has fretted her way through every meal since we became companions, always interrogating the poor waitress on how everything is prepared. The answer is always baked, boiled, or fried, so I don’t know why she bothers asking. And she never fails to point out the irony that for a land so green, in fact the greenest place she’s ever been, the British never seem to manage to get anything green on their dinner plates.

But, on the other hand, Tess could just as easily be talking of me and my own affectations, my stupid insistence that we should let each wine breathe before tasting it, even those that are clearly dead on arrival. Or she might be talking about Becca, who is chafing after so much time spent in the company of her elders, who bolts from the table the minute she swallows her last bite, disappearing God knows where, and never deigning to take pudding or chamomile with the rest of us. We three people who have yet to tell our stories . . . we are all of us pains in the ass, each in her own way. The cards have chosen us to go last, and it’s rather fitting, but I wonder if the other women dread tomorrow, when we’ll come charging at them like the three storytellers of the apocalypse.

And here’s the kicker: I still don’t know what I’m going to say. I could tell one of the stories of my mother, I suppose. I know the other women are wondering about her. Today when I dropped the ashes on the trail and panicked, enough of the truth came out that everyone now knows why I’ve come to Canterbury. It was just enough information to intrigue them, I could tell, but yet . . . Shoot. I should have sprinkled her on Dover too. She would have liked it, its defiant ugliness, that poor put-upon little beach with the smell of oil and tar. Maybe there’s still time for me to slip away from the others and toss a bit of her over the cliff.

But anyway, now that they know why I joined the group at the last minute, they’re clearly curious about the woman causing such bother and it’s not like there aren’t a hundred good stories starring Diana de Milan. She was a storied creature—she once danced with Elvis Presley, back in college, when he was making a tour of campuses to promote one of his musicals. She hitchhiked the length of Route 66, burned her bra in front of the White House, wrote a book with an entire chapter on how a woman might find her own clitoris, took an immersion course and claimed to have learned serviceable Russian in a single weekend. Grew pears in bottle trees and played the drums and could hold her breath underwater for two straight minutes and being her daughter was exhausting. More exhausting than navigating the cliffs of Dover, and, come to think of it, my mom got bombed on a regular basis too. She was a master of rebuilding after trouble, pulling herself from the dust and reinventing her life time and time again. I should have paid more attention to how she did it. But it never once occurred to me that I could have learned something from Diana, not until after she was dead. And now it’s too late to ask her anything.

TESS SAYS the lighthouse café has one bathroom with a single toilet, which we know from past experience means a twenty-minute departure ceremony. So I decide to take advantage of the fact that women pee slowly to slip into the little gift shop. It’s an alcove, really, in what must have once been the lighthouse keeper’s pantry. They have pretty bits of pottery, which cards inform me is made by a local artisan. I pick up a small curved dish, shaped like a slender leaf but light blue in color, hefting it in my hand. It’s the sort of thing Ned would like. Understated, solid, well-crafted. We could use it for soap in the guest bath at the beach cottage or for olive oil in the kitchen.

We were both judicious in stores, slow to spend our money, and Ned had once laughed and said that nothing made us so proud as to shop all day and then return home empty-handed. Yet he would have found beauty in this little bowl, I’m sure of it. If he were still my boyfriend, I would take it home to him as a souvenir. I picture it in his hand, his long, slim fingers curled around its delicate oval shape . . . and it’s strange, isn’t it, that I have automatically wondered if Ned would like the bowl but I haven’t wondered if I like it? I think I do. And even though he’s gone and I’m alone, the world still has soap and olive oil, does it not? I might need places to put them. I hand a wispy ten-pound note to the girl behind the register, wave away the mysterious British change, and look over at the bathroom. We are moving even more slowly than I predicted. Jean, Becca, and Steffi are still waiting outside the door.

It’s a chance to have a few minutes unobserved and I zip my new dish into my backpack, put on my coat and hat, and slip out the door without anyone seeming to notice. For Diana needs to be here too. Who knows, a bit of her might even blow across the channel, find her way to France, another place she always intended to visit. Stranger things have happened, and once I’d gotten used to the idea that she’d been falling out along the trail while I walked, it had seemed exactly right. The broken zipper was maybe one of those preordained kinds of accidents. An incinerated human body creates a lot of ash. I can afford to scatter some of her willy-nilly along the way and still have plenty left for Canterbury.

A broad lawn leads to the cliff. The fog, far heavier from this vantage point, swallows my view of France, and the wind is so strong here on the point that it threatens to pull the breath from my body. I don’t go close to the edge. It feels as if I could be swept right over, plunging down Psyche-like onto the rocks, and there has been enough drama on this trip already. I pull off my gloves and my fingertips almost immediately go numb in the cold. I dig into the fish-and-chips bag, ripping one of the Band-Aids and getting a proper pinch of Diana this time. Toss the ashes into the air and say, “Fly away to France,” but the instant that I do, another gust of wind hits and she blows back, right at my face, a few grains of her going in my mouth just as I say “France.”

Of course. What else? I cough her up and turn back toward the van, where Tim is sitting patiently in the driver’s seat watching me, probably wondering if I’m about to attempt suicide. I bet Dover gets its fair share of them, with the setting so gloomy and the history so bleak. But I’m anything but suicidal. I’m whatever the opposite of suicidal must be.
Hello, cruel world.
That’s my new motto.
Move over, make a space, because maybe I want to come along with you after all.
I spit out the rest of Diana and head back to the van.

OUR INN for that evening is located in the village of Dover proper and, unlike the others, it isn’t an old house that has been converted into a B&B, but rather a series of small cottages. The women seem charmed by the notion that each of us will have her own tiny house. But the check-in process takes forever, with the desk clerk gathering us all around what appears to be the inn’s only map, and tracing the route to the various rooms, saying, “And then you are here,” over and over.

She is making it seem horribly complicated, more complicated than nine tiny houses should be. I take my large brass key and step out into the cobblestone courtyard, running into Tim in the process of delivering the bags. His life must feel like a bloody treadmill. He asks me which cottage is mine—I doubt I’ve heard his voice more than three or four times all week—and I tell him “Eden,” then begin weaving my way among the buildings. They are laid out in a rambling manner, evidently each one turned to take advantage of some particular view, should the sun ever manage to shine on Dover. Claire’s cottage is the first one I pass and through the broad, low window I can see that Tim has already brought her at least the first of her bags. She could never be accused of traveling light, that one, but she waves me in.

The name on her door is “Churchill,” so the cottages must be named after prime ministers, not utopias. I sit down in the room’s only chair, white wicker with a nautical-print cushion, and watch her move clothes from her suitcase to the drawers of her bedside table.

“You do that every night?” I ask, although I know she does. It makes no sense to me.

“Just one of my little tics,” she says, with her high, pealing laugh. “I can’t rest until I feel properly settled, and for me being properly settled means not living out of bags.” She frowns down at the black cashmere turtleneck in her hands and says softly to herself, “This one’s past its prime.” And then, to my horror, she tosses it toward the wastebasket beside the bed.