Ben had been amused, on their first visit together, penetrating parts that he had never seen on his previous brief scholarly visits, attending some conference or plunging into libraries. He had remembered that Mark Twain comment on the English countryside: “Too pretty to be left out in the rain.” Suburban landscape made him laugh: “Why does everyone fence themselves off from everyone else?”—staring at the ranks of firmly segmented front gardens. They thought of the communal greensward of their own prosperous neighborhood back home.
“But look at all the roses,” she said. And yes, the whole place was rampant, explosive with silken blooms.
In earlier years, when she had come back with her young first husband, then with babies, then with growing children, it felt each time as though she visited her own past. This place was not now, but then—the then of her childhood and adolescence, of her early youth. There it still was, a landscape that seemed to be less and less connected with her. She had left it behind, but it continued, impervious to her defection. It carried on, with its red London buses and its familiar accents and its Sunday roasts and its cups of tea; it did not seem to realize that it was somehow stuck, that it existed in some other time frame. At first, this had been endearing; she drank it all in, eagerly identifying sights and practices that she had half forgotten. They were comforting; they seemed to put her in touch with a lost version of herself.
And then, over time, something happened. What had been engaging and reassuring became vaguely threatening, even hostile. It was she who was out of step, who could not cope with changed circumstances. At some point there had been a subtle shift in the relationship; where once she had been the benign nostalgic visitor, the lamb back in the fold, now she was the outsider, someone who received the polite treatment meted out to any transient. An invisible door had closed, and she did not know if it was she who had conjured it up or those others in that now-distanced place through which she moved, a world in which things were done differently.
With both relatives and old friends, she often felt herself wrong-footed. People’s expressions were opaque, but told her that something was amiss. She labored to speak as they spoke, to say “pavement” and “tap” and “flat.” Yet this was a culture that had embraced McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken and Levi’s and Coke, whose television screens were filled with Hollywood movies, in which people said “Hi!” as often as they said “Hello.” It was as though some double standard were in operation, one so elusive that she was incapable of identifying it. And, in a further twist, it seemed applicable less to either of her husbands than to herself. She did not see these shuttered looks in response to something that Ben said or did. She found herself always a little on edge, with those she had known since childhood, with those she had been at college with, as though she might be measured and found wanting. It made her behave expansively, urgently, like some propitiating puppy. She jumped up at people, she rolled on her back with all four paws in the air.
Equally, she felt constricted. It was as though she wore some restraining garment, as though she squeezed into a wet bathing suit each time she touched down at Heathrow. When she caught herself reaching out to put a hand on someone’s arm, she held back. She would fall suddenly silent, conscious of having talked too much. She could not be herself, because of this disconcerting sense that her real self was likely to step out of line, to be incorrect in some way that was both unpredictable and uncontrollable.
She said to Ben, “What is it that I do? Did you see how they looked at me?”
He had considered this. He was a man who gave careful thought to other people’s difficulties, and she loved him for it.
“Maybe they’re not sure now who you are.”
In her early days on the other side of the Atlantic, she had been fascinated by those visible physical mutations, by the way in which those graceful, brilliantly white New England churches echoed the spires at home—as she still thought of it—but were also newly minted, entirely indigenous. Wandering through gleaming displays of colonial interiors in museums, she saw that same delicate sea change in chairs, tables, mirrors, chests of drawers. They waved a hand at English antique furniture but had gone their own way—lighter, brighter, independent.
She had become an avid reader of accounts of early settlement. In imagination, she made that stupefying crossing of the ocean, battened down in some tiny, tossing ship. She endured those first winters at Plymouth Plantation, she cleared the land and grew crops and made a home in the wilderness. Again and again, she had arrived, she had established a new way of life, she had stepped westward, she had turned her back on the Old World. She thought that she had some appreciation of how those people must have understood the implications of that great divide, the thousands of miles that stood between one way of life and another.
But now she herself had crossed and recrossed the ocean, time and time again, and saw that today we abuse distance. Those few hours in an overcrowded metal cylinder made a mockery of space, they kicked aside the great sobriety of the Atlantic and pitched people without consideration from one set of circumstances to another, complaining about the food and the choice of movie. For her too, arrival was associated with the dishevelment of an aircraft cabin at the end of a flight, awash with blankets and discarded headphones, dawn staining the sky, lines of yawning people waiting for the toilets. She had lost any sense of awe, of wonder. Instead, the realization that there is still a crossing to be made came with something invisible and insidious, that unease that she now felt with people whom she thought she knew.
And now they would shortly be with Aunt Margaret and Uncle Clive, both of them unknown quantities. Her mother’s younger sister, and her husband. She had written to Aunt Margaret proposing a visit several weeks before she and Ben were due to leave for this trip, which was centered around some work he needed to do with a colleague in Oxford. The card received in response to her letter had given pause for thought: “Dear Carol,” Aunt Margaret had begun, following up with some anodyne comments on her own roundup of family news, and then “. . . Do by all means call in if you are going to be in our part of the world.”
Ben read this. “ ‘Our part of the world’ . . . I never heard that expression before.”
She realized that she had not heard it for a long while. It had a musty whiff to it; at the same time, there was a familiar chime—yes, people had talked like that.
Ben was still examining the card. There was a neat strip of letterhead across the top: Colonel and Mrs. Clive Baseley, followed by the address. Ben was chuckling: “ ‘Our part of the world’ . . . I love it. The sense of ownership. Military guy, is he, your uncle?”
“Well . . . ,” she said. “Was. During the war, not since. I think he was something called a land agent. Retired now, of course.”
“Once a colonel, always a colonel,” said Ben. “Just as well to make your position clear.” He studied the card again. “We are not being offered a bed for the night. Possibly not even a meal. Never mind, we are nothing if not resourceful.”
Indeed, yes. They had a shelf of guides to farmhouse holidays and good bed-and-breakfasts and were now booked at a pub a few miles from the address on the postcard. At the last town through which they passed, Ben had said, “You know, I think maybe we need to ingratiate ourselves a little with your relatives. Show we’re nice folk.”
Carol had been initially dampened by the card, had felt somehow mortified. Now, she found herself sharing his amusement. They had taken to referring to Uncle Clive as the Colonel.
“How?”
“I dunno. We’ll go shopping and come up with something.”
In the event, he came up with a bottle of whiskey from a supermarket. “All colonels drink whiskey.”
She hovered over the cosmetics. Some perfume for Aunt Margaret? But perhaps she was not a perfume kind of person. In the end she bought a lavish bunch of lilies.
Back in the car, Ben looked at her. “I have to tell you that you’ve got an orange nose. Those things are
evidently meant for looking at, not for smelling. Better warn your aunt.”
She said, “I’m beginning to wonder what I have gotten us into.”
Her father had died, and then, within a year, her mother. It was because of that that they were here. Indirectly, obscurely because of that. After her mother’s death, something had happened to her perception of the past. Or rather, some latent need had been aroused.
She had said to Ben, “I don’t know anything about my great-grandparents. I don’t even know their names.” She was thinking of her mother’s parents.
Ben knew a good deal about his own great-grandparents. He was of Scandinavian descent. His grandfather had emigrated to the Midwest from Norway in 1909 with a young wife and Ben’s two-year-old father. Ben had visited the small ancestral agricultural community, had identified the graves of his forebears, had sought out relatives and checked family trees. He knew from whence he came.
“And this matters?” said Ben.
“Yes. For some reason. I’ve never thought about it before. It’s to do with my mother. Her dying.”
He nodded. “Then we better find out.”
Most Americans know who they are, to a greater or lesser degree. Moreover, they signal myriad identities; they define the nation. They are Greek-American or Italian-American or Latino or black, they propose China, Japan, the Philippines—they echo the globe. They are a walking, talking mnemonic system, remembering arrivals and survivals, the Atlantic passage, the trek west, settlement and dispersal, calamity and prosperity, whispering still of the other place that is hidden in each person—the shtetls of Russia, Poland, Lithuania, the fishing villages and the farms, the fetid slums of cities, the plantations and the slave quarters. She and Ben had a friend called Mary Dixon, as Anglo-Saxon a name as you could find, but Mary herself was a figure from Greek tragedy, she was Electra, she was Clytemnestra, she was dark, dark, with great Byzantine eyes and rich black hair. And yes, indeed, Mary’s great-grandfather arrived at Staten Island from Piraeus, with extended family and not a word of English, so that the recording clerk, defeated by the accent and the names, put down Mary’s father simply as Dick’s son, to have done with it. And Dixon the family became and remained, but Mary’s face said otherwise.
“I must be American now,” said Carol. “I need to know these things. When I was British, I wasn’t particularly interested. The British know where they come from. They’ve been there all along.”
She did know, up to a point. She had an image of the grand-parental home in Henley, the large complacent house with the generous garden, from which her grandfather traveled daily half a mile to his solicitor’s practice, five days a week for half a century, unimpeded even by two world wars, being rendered unfit for military service by extreme myopia. She remembered him, vaguely. She remembered also her grandmother, a person drowned in domesticity, her horizons restricted to family and neighborhood. Carol saw her yet, in a series of freeze-frames, static, unemphatic, attending to some task, in comfortable accord with her circumstances.
Carol had access also to her other grandparents, minimal data establishing only a seafront apartment in Hove, where her other grandmother first ministered to a husband sidelined by some unidentified disability and then lived out a long widowhood, walking a pair of Scottish terriers on the promenade and playing bridge with cronies.
Further back, there is nothing. No names, no faces. The family tree is leafless, its branches without labels. And now her mother was dead, one of her uncles too was gone, while the other brother was spending a sunny old age in the Algarve. There was no one available to question. Except for Aunt Margaret.
She said to Ben, “It’s odd, but I hardly know this aunt. She and my mother never really got on. They saw less and less of each other. Of course, Aunt Margaret always lived in the country, and my parents were Londoners.”
“That signifies?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “You’ll see.”
And now they were about to do so. “Stop!” she cried. “We’re there! The Old Rectory . . .”
They turned into an entrance between high hedges. There was a sweep of gravel in front of the house, bordered by copiously flowering shrubs. A lawn to one side, leading away to more glimpsed garden—paths, pergolas, beds brimming with flowers. The supermarket lilies on the backseat suddenly seemed tawdry.
The house was extravagant with period interest: mullioned windows, portico, weathered honey-colored stone. “Definitely too pretty to leave out . . . ,” said Ben. “I hope they put a tarpaulin over it at night.”
They parked the car. She tidied her hair, reached over the seat for the lilies, doubtfully.
“Here we go, then,” said Ben.
The room reminded Carol of expensive inns in Vermont or New Hampshire: plump chintz-covered sofas and armchairs, ruched and pleated lampshades, piles of shiny magazines on low tables, sporting prints on the walls. Of course, this kind of place is the ancestry of such outfits. A flattering portrait of Aunt Margaret when younger over the mantelpiece; sparsely filled bookshelves. A large dog lumbered occasionally from one resting place to another.
They sat facing each other on two of the deep sofas, Carol and Ben side by side, as though lined up for consideration. Aunt Margaret dispensed tea from a little trolley. The timing proposed for the visit would seem to have allowed for this: hospitality, but not on a significant scale.
“Things seem to be going well down in the South Atlantic,” said Uncle Clive.
Two days before, British missiles had sunk the Belgrano. Lives had been lost; there was controversy about the action. The Argentine fleet appeared to be in retreat.
“We’ve taken to watching the news,” said Aunt Margaret, with a laugh, as though this were some kind of weakness. “Every day.” She somehow matched her furnishings: floral, feminine, resolutely decorative. She would have been a pretty girl, time was. Carol could find no echo whatsoever of her mother. Uncle Clive was large, weatherbeaten, tweed-jacketed. The reception accorded to Carol and Ben had been politely adequate, without being effusive; there was something automatic about it. The peck on each cheek from Aunt Margaret; Uncle Clive’s firm handshake. They knew what should be done, and were doing it, you felt. They didn’t particularly want to see us, thought Carol, but since they’re stuck with it they’ll go through the motions. She was intensely grateful for Ben’s presence, for his reassuring lanky form alongside her, the glimpses of his profile, with that keen, half-amused look. He was not saying much; the occasional courteous comment.
“Mrs. Thatcher is a remarkable woman, in my view,” continued Uncle Clive. He had his eye on Ben.
“Indeed yes,” said Ben. “That I would not dispute.”
The Baseleys evidently took this as a statement of approval, and looked complacent, as though she were their personal responsibility.
“I understand that she gets on well with your president,” said Uncle Clive.
“I’m afraid so.”
The Baseleys stared at Ben, baffled, it would seem, rather than alerted to any views that he might have. Uncle Clive cleared his throat. He seemed to decide that perhaps Ben was not following his line of thought, in which case it was not worth pursuing the matter. “Yes, well . . . Anyway, it’s good to be showing a bit of muscle over this nonsense. Get the Argies out in a matter of weeks, you’ll see.”
Ever since she had stepped into this house Carol had been thinking of her parents and of their untidy, book-filled north London home, a world away from this. It still seemed incredible that they were gone. As others had become less reachable, they had remained constant. They did not change, except to grow older; unlike the landscape, they had not become smaller, or unexpected. And she did not catch from them that opaque glance, or feel that she had committed some solecism. Occasionally, her mother would say, “Goodness, you sound so American . . . ,” or would laugh about some different way of doing things. When they crossed the Atlantic on visits, they were briskly adaptable. Her father approved of the more sedate f
reeway speed limits; her mother relished summer spells on Cape Cod as the children grew up. Over the years of such visits, each developed a transatlantic persona, without losing any of their essential cultural integrity. Carol was impressed by this; the rigidities that she found elsewhere were made the more apparent. She asked herself how they had been able to be thus, when clearly she had been unable to do so herself, but somehow she never asked them, or even thought to, until they died within a year of each other, and then it was too late.
They were metropolitan people, dug decades deep into the capital. Her father was a museum administrator, her mother engaged herself in a slew of voluntary activities. In Aunt Margaret’s house, sunk amid fields and deep lanes, Carol felt as though she had crossed over into some other state, where the government was of a different complexion and the laws were otherwise. The divide between these sisters seemed now one sanctioned also by systems. But which had come first—inclination, or a way of living? Had this apposition been latent since their infancies, these lurking directives that would eventually propel one to college, political commitments, and an urban life, the other to a tranquil half century of gardening?
When the sisters were younger, there had been sporadic meetings; a statutory exchange of visits every year or so, Aunt Margaret making a disdainful trip to London, Carol’s mother loading up the family for a determined foray west. As the cultural divide widened, these efforts became more and more sporadic until they petered out altogether. Christmas cards became the only solder to the relationship. Occasionally Carol’s mother would say, “I really should try to see more of Margaret”—pause—“but we have less and less to say to each other”—sigh.
Carol’s relationship with her own brother was more robust, and had successfully weathered the Atlantic crossing—indeed, had perhaps prospered from it. She sensed that Robert had come to see her as someone vaguely esoteric, a familiar feature of his landscape but one that had assumed added significance. They were not exactly close, but welcomed each other’s news and company. He was not among those with whom she felt she walked on eggshells. He would tease her about some Americanism, refer to her as “my Yankee sister,” but without that sense of distance, of alienation.