The View from Here (4 page)

“It's wonderful,” I said.

It was.

We were interrupted by Jenny yelling from the patio doors, “Who's going to take us to the beach?”

Christina, passing, shushed the child mildly and told her not to disturb her father.

Jenny held still for an instant, and then shouted again, “Who is?”

Jessica and Howie joined her.

“Yeah,” Howie called. “Who is?”

Richard, his back to the clamor, ignored it. “Where can I buy a U.S. paper, Frankie?”

I told him about the little store on the square in the middle of the town where they sold English-language paperbacks and postcards and candy.

“They sometimes have them. But they're usually out of date.”

“Worth a try.” He put his cup down. “Do you need a lift back?”

I paused, buttering the toast that Christina had brought, the prospect of the rest of the day unreeling before me suddenly, in limitless empty hours.

“Nooo,” Jenny moaned theatrically. She was bouncing at the tableside now, like a cartoon, lurid in pink stretch swimming things.

“Nooo,” Jessica echoed, although her actions and voice were milder versions of her sister's. “Come to the beach with us, Frankie. And Daddy.”

Richard stood and hitched his waistband. “Howie, do you want to ride into town?” Howie sniffed and shifted his weight. Richard, ready to go, half raised his eyebrows—at me, at then at his son. Howie's nose wrinkled.

“It's okay,” Mason said, his chin in Jessica's hair. “Frankie and I can keep an eye on him.”

You could walk to the beach from the house, but the children wanted a ride in the jeep. It was one of three cars, Mason explained, supplied with the house. In addition to the Buick there was a big old Chevrolet that had been designated for staff use. Howie, jittery with excitement, sat on my knees and Lesley, who had just come downstairs, shared the back with the twins. The engine turned over on the second try.

“Byeee!” the girls called as we left, waving at the receding bank of glittering windows without looking back.

“Have you been to this beach before?” Jessica asked a few minutes later when we'd pulled up on the flat end of the dirt track and clambered down from the jeep.

“Yes, but I always came here by boat.”

“Howie says there are sharks.”

“I've never seen any,” I said.

Howie looked downcast.

“But I saw a whale once,” I added.

“Up close?”

“Quite close.”

“Did it crash into your boat?”

“ No.”

He looked downcast again.

“But we rocked a lot.” I grabbed his shoulders and rocked him to make up for the lack of a crash. Then we all stood still for a minute, looking out at the horizon, as if the whale might suddenly break the clean line of blue.

“I think Frankie has had a lot of adventures,” Mason said.

The children turned and looked up at me. I had a lot of pale hair, a heart-shaped face, and I was five foot six inches tall. My dress was hopelessly creased from two days' wear. They squinted suspiciously. Then Lesley pulled her T-shirt over her head and broke, loose-kneed, for the sea. The other three followed her.

Mason and I sat on the sand and watched.

“They're like puppies,” I said, and he laughed. He was an easy person to be alone with. He leaned back on his elbows, and we listened companionably for a while to the children's shouts, drifting back to us through the condensing warmth of the late morning.

“Where's the boyfriend now then?” he asked eventually. He must have remembered from the party.

“Spain,” I said. I lifted my hands and made them fly. “Adios…”

He smiled. “Adios,” he repeated, and closed his blue eyes.

When we got back to the house Paige was sunbathing by the pool, lying on her stomach in a red swimsuit. She pretended not to notice our arrival. Jenny, flapping a towel, sent a scatter of sand in her sister's direction and Paige, dramatizing her annoyance, brushed briskly at her oiled shoulders.

“We went to the beach,” Jenny said. “That's why we're sandy.” She gave the towel another flap.

Lesley, as if keen to dissociate herself from anything so childish, sat down next to Paige.

“Frankie saw a whale,” Howie announced.

Paige looked at him and then at me.

“Not today,” I explained, “another time, when I came to the beach by boat.”

“I thought it was our
private
beach,” she said, sitting up and wiping her dark glasses with the corner of her towel.

“Perhaps it is,” I said. She glanced up and stared at me for a moment, almond eyed, then picked up her magazine. Lesley, stretching out beside her, reached for a plastic tub of coconut oil, unscrewed the lid, and began spreading the stuff, with intense concentration, on her scrawny arms.

“Good morning. Good morning,” Ned sang when Mason and I went inside. They were all sitting around the room amid a scattering of coffee cups. Patsy, one leg bent under her against the calico of a summery chair, raised her milliondollar face and asked evenly, “Where did you two get to?”

“We took the children to the beach,” I answered, aware as I did that I had spoken too quickly. She was looking at Mason.

“I know,” she said, without breaking her gaze.

“They're nice in theory, children,” Bee Bee cut in, “but their zest for life is depressing.”

Taking the drink Ned handed her, Sally glanced down at the floor and said, “And they're tracking sand all through the house.” But her expression, when she looked up again, registered no particular annoyance.

Christina nodded, apparently indicating that lunch was ready, and we all stood to follow Sally to the table.

“I met a guy in town who said he'd take us fishing,” Richard said, pulling Sally's chair out for her. “You get all kinds of stuff down this coast, evidently. Marlin maybe. Wanna catch a marlin, Howie?”

“Or a whale,” Howie suggested.

Richard tugged my chair out too, automatically, before taking his own and flapping a napkin into his lap while, at the other end of the table, Mason performed these same rituals with Patsy and Bee Bee.

“We're not going to catch any whales, Howie,” Richard said.

“We might,” Howie returned, petulant. He tore at a lump of bread.

“You don't go fishing for whales, Howie,” Richard emphasized.

“Frankie did.”

“I wasn't fishing for the whale, Howie,” I said. I felt bad, siding against him. “I just saw it.” I winked to soften the contradiction.

“Did you?” asked Ned.

“Yeah, and it rooocked the boat.” Vindicated, Howie rocked wildly in his chair, watching his father for a reaction.

Richard looked thoughtful. “Really?” he asked. “Around here?”

“Right here, off the beach,” Mason said, picking up the story as if it belonged to him. “Three of them in an outboard came across a mother and a calf.” I had told him that part when the children were swimming.

They all turned then and looked at me, the way the children had at the beach.

“My,” Sally crooned into the pause, “won't it be exciting having Frankie staying with us?”

TWO

P
HILLIP OFTEN TAKES
the train to London. It is difficult, he says, to park the car. Anyway he can read on the train, catch up on paperwork, that type of thing. After he and Chloe had left me that Sunday, had hugged me and promised to call, I imagined him, in some brief absence of Chloe's, some trek of hers to fetch coffee or cellophane-wrapped biscuits from the tiny coffee shop at the station, phoning his mistress from the booth outside, framed in a grid of damp glass.

I imagined this while I put a load of washing in the machine and treated Hobo to a small dish of leftover chicken, and ran the bath, and then I stood for a while staring into space imagining it all over again until the telephone rang. It was Sonia confirming our arrangements, asking how I was, how Italy had been. Talking to her was soothing, grounding somehow, and so after my bath I got into bed and was able to go to sleep almost immediately. I awoke at five a.m. and lay a long time, blankets bound around me, feeling cold, and afraid, and terribly alone.

For the first time in many years that story—my own story, though it had seemed for such a long time to belong to someone else—really came to me in its entirety. During the comfort years with Phillip and Chloe and Hobo, and a number of goldfish and a short-lived spaniel, during the years when I had become a good cook and a reasonable gardener and learned to drive and honed my drawing skills and played a lot of tennis at summer house parties, only splinters of it had pricked my consciousness, and I had had plenty to salve the punctures with.

The past cannot be controlled of course; it is too woven into us. But we try denial, don't we, as a defense? That night, despite the relentless march of the memory ghost, its muted tread seeming to build to an eerie clatter, I made a determined effort to convince myself that all my concerns were in the present and, what's more, external to me. I decided, in that fear-filled predawn, that the important thing was to know, to know absolutely about Phillip and Josee. I decided that having some sort of incontrovertible evidence to hand would generate a solution. I decided that, after my lunch with Sonia, I would go on to London, and I would spy on my husband.

The next day I met Sonia in Grantham as planned at a small restaurant with a flagstone floor and wooden slat blinds on the windows. It is the kind of restaurant that only Grantham, of the local towns, offers. The others, too far from the A roads and the motorways, have only pubs and fish-and-chip places and a hodgepodge of tea shops and hotel dining rooms. This restaurant is run by a Dutch couple, and I wish that they would put a rug on the floor, but the food is good.

Sonia did not say that I looked tired, though I knew I did, and I was glad that she let it pass unremarked, kissing me effusively instead and calling me darling. We sat and both ordered the same lunch, baked cod with some kind of topping, and twin glasses of French white wine, though we both knew without saying that Sonia's would be refilled before mine was half drunk.

“How's himself coping?” she asked as soon as the wine had been set before us. She meant coping with my illness of course and was referring to Phillip. She often calls him things like that, “himself,” “his lordship.” I was suddenly aware, in my new more sensitive state, that these labels were tinged with sarcasm.

It occurred to me that Sonia did not like Phillip very much, that she never had, though in the past I had put any negativity of hers down to a general distrust of men. Sonia has been married twice, and neither relationship ended happily. Now, though, I caught something more specific. It was a surprise. I had always thought of Phillip as a mild man, likeable. Had she seen something that I had missed, missed for years?

“It's hard for him too,” I said, knowing as I did that any possibility of talking to Sonia about Josee had evaporated. Sonia would despise Phillip if she knew, and a scene would be inevitable. She would come, in her dramatic way, charging to my defense, a rally I did not deserve. Sonia and I know an awful lot about each other, and we have loved each other for a long time, but she is nevertheless ignorant of that key aspect of my past. That thing that makes me not who I am.

“Oh, I'm sure,” she offered, not about to argue this point, and then she asked after Chloe, and I asked after her son, Ollie, and we talked a little about Catherine and her children, and we went on and had a pleasant lunch. And if I was a little volatile, talked a little faster or a little more or even a little less than I might have done some other time, well, there were circumstances enough to put that down to without the disclosure of new confidences.

There are very few people who, having attained more than forty years, can keep all normality, all mundane run-of-the-millness from intruding on a drama. At twenty, even thirty, you can do it. Women particularly subsume themselves in heartache, miss the bus in the midst of elation. But it changes. Commonplace things become the more powerful stuff of existence. The drive from Grantham to London took just over two hours, and, listening to the radio to distract myself from the dull hum of the motorway and my own bleak thoughts, I heard myself at one point commenting on the pompous pronouncement of some politician. Just as if I were on an ordinary drive on an ordinary day.

I had made a reservation at a hotel that morning before I left, and I went there directly and checked in and left my overnight bag. It was only five so I sat in my room for a while, watching television, distracted. At six I drove to Phillip's office, which is located in a beautiful thirties-era building on the north side of one of those lovely squares that makes London London. The trees were in early bud.

I parked on the far side of the square, having circled twice, and put a lot of money in the meter, and then I watched, through the passenger window, across the spring green of the central grassed area, until eventually he came out. He was with Tom. They spoke briefly on the wide steps at the front doorway, and other people coming out and passing nodded and said things to them. Then they parted and Phillip turned away and walked toward the tube station, which was on the corner nearest to where I was parked, and I got out of the car, and I followed him.

It was, of course, all faintly ridiculous. What if he had seen me? What if he had simply gone back to the flat and stayed there? He did neither of these things. I was able to track him unobserved quite easily thanks to the after-work crowd and his distraction. He seemed, even at the distance I was careful to maintain, weighted by his thoughts.

In the station he stood on the platform looking down at the tracks, and after a few minutes he boarded a train that would not take him toward the flat. I got on too, two carriages behind him. The difficulty then was to stay near to the exit despite the crush of people, people with normal, sensible plans to go home, or to the pictures, or to meet their friends, people whose lack of agitation I envied.

At the third stop, when I leaned toward the open doors, I saw Phillip get off and head for the exit escalator. I think perhaps I might have abandoned my grim mission at that point, given in to the warning voice in my head, or somewhere lower, my gut, if I had not realized that the stop that he had alighted at was the one nearest to Josee's office.

I pressed on, surrendering my thumbed ticket to the turnstile, knowing that if he was going where I thought he was going, he would take the pedestrian tunnel to the south side. There was a boy in the tunnel singing “Nessun Dorma” in a voice too meaty for his slight frame. On a different day I might have stopped for a moment, and listened, and put a cheerful pound in the boater at his feet.

At the corner of Arundel Street my husband met his lover, but he did not kiss her. He simply touched her hand and looked into her eyes, holding her gaze for a moment, for a heartbeat. Then they turned together, synchronized, and walked three, four blocks until, perhaps by arrangement, they went into a small dark bar on a side street where they could be alone. London is like that: there are secret places everywhere.

My onward progress was interrupted then. If I went into the bar they would see me, and although I had, I suppose, entertained vague notions up until that point of confronting them, of making my presence known in some bold way, I suddenly did not want to. I felt tired, from the day, from the drive, from the lack of sleep the night before. I realized, too, that I must look dreadful. Strange, these little vanities; I could not face my husband's beautiful young mistress with uncombed hair and faded lipstick. I went into a coffee shop and ordered a cup of strong tea and sat at a plastic table on a plastic chair near the window and thought about the letter that had set me on this trail.

The letter had said:
Here is the response from Ellis & Co. Just F.Y.I., H.H., Josee
. Not much, was it? Not much to have taken me there, more than a hundred miles from home, not much to have concealed from my closest friends. But you see, it is not always the physical realities that matter most, not just the words, the letters, the ink on the page that carries the power. It is the great swathe of meaning behind them. I had seen in that flimsy script, beneath the yellow, desk-lamp light, force enough to send a shudder to the very foundations of my world.

When they came out of the side street it startled me. I had sat for an hour over the tea, ordering a second one and a small dry cake that I did not eat in order to justify my place. It was a kind of delicatessen. People had been coming in to buy salads and tuna fish in plastic containers to take back to their flats, and a man was asking for a carton of orange juice when I saw Phillip. I got up quickly, took some cash from my handbag, and tucked it against the plate with the uneaten cake on it. Then I held back for a moment; Phillip and Josee were right across from the coffee shop on the other side of the street.

They walked back to their meeting corner—I guessed that they had met there many times. And if in fact it was not so many, it would still seem as though it was to them. Love affairs are like that, things take on significance, time becomes protracted—events are multiplied.

I followed them, twenty paces or so behind, on the other side of the road. At their corner they stopped, and this time they did kiss. It was not the kiss of melodrama, offered as proof of infidelity, nor the kind of kiss that two tipsy people, who in fact care little for each other, might indulge in on the street after a party. Instead my husband put his hands on another woman's shoulders and pulled her toward him with a tenderness that was palpable. Then one hand strayed to the hairline at the nape of her neck and he touched his lips to her forehead and held them there, as if to a rose.

I cannot say that it was the most shocking thing that I have ever seen, but it was shocking enough. For a moment I felt that my legs might give way under me, that I might lose whatever dignity I still had and bend over the curb and retch. I clutched my handbag to my chest like a shield and stared as Phillip and Josee parted. He turned and walked with a steady stride and a flat expression back toward the underground, after a half dozen steps twisting momentarily and looking back at the point where they had stood holding each other. I was too stunned to move. He might have seen me, but he didn't. Nor did she.

She had watched him, motionless, almost to the point when he had turned. She had missed that. In a film it would have been a poignant moment. The moment when you felt the burn in your throat in the dark. I watched it with no such distinct emotions.

Somewhere in my mental disarray some instinct took over and my feet began to move, one after the other—which in the end is all that is required, isn't it?—toward the end of the street. I was following Josee. She did not walk far. There was one of those car park, the kind that is a flat lot with a man in a booth at the front, around the corner. She went in there and unlocked the second car in the row closest to me, and as she did I saw that she was trembling. She got into the car and leaned her head on the steering wheel, and she began to sob. I could see her shoulders shaking. The man in the booth was reading his newspaper.

I don't know how long Josee sat in that car weeping, how long it was till she pulled herself up and forced herself to start the engine and drive home, but of course she would have eventually. At some point we do those things even when the circumstances seem to constrict us so much that all movement is impossible. We manage. But I was not there to see it. I went back to my own car and moved it to a parking garage with the same robot mechanisms that no doubt had got Josee home. Then I spent a restless night in the hotel. At six a.m. I got up, ate no breakfast, and left. I wanted to be back before Phillip.

• • •

I had arrived in Mexico almost a year before I met the Severances with four hundred Australian dollars and a Welsh boyfriend. By the time I met them I was living alone and eating a lot of melon, which was what teaching English four or five hours a month bought, after rent and coffee. My visa had been extended, thanks to Arturo Rodriguez's influence and, particularly, his wife's need for an English teacher, but that was the extent of the organized aspects of my life. I had no reason to refuse Sally Severance's invitation, which had crystallized quickly into a formal one, and even less to question it.

“What about your teaching?” Mason was driving me into town to collect some things. It was midafternoon.

“I only have a few students now.” I had two. Maria and a sweet teenager named Letty. “Since Adam left,” I added. I wished I hadn't. His name felt strange in my mouth. Like cotton wool.

“Adam,” Mason repeated, taking his eyes from the road for a second. “The boyfriend?”

“Yes.” It seemed like a long time ago.

I lived in a two-story concrete strip of apartments near the town's only supermarket. They were painted the kind of color that looks as if it has been mixed from lots of other colors, an unwanted sort of ochre. Some children were playing out front with a half-deflated ball. They stopped when Mason parked the car.