Maureen leaned toward Paul. “That’s ‘Gone Away,’ what he just played. It’s when the hounds have caught the line and taken off full tilt.”
“How do you know that?” Paul said.
She shrugged. “Grow up in the country, you learn a few things.”
BY THE TIME they reach Mykonos, the sky has curdled, and the captain of the boat tells the passengers that he will want to leave an hour earlier than planned. Marjorie rallies a shopping group in record time.
Jack, Paul, and Fern walk through the streets until they reach a taverna that juts on stilts toward the water. As the waiter serves their lunch, the rain begins: large, ominous drops like the crystals that dangle from chandeliers. Jack winks at Fern and says, “So much for your delighted sailors, love.”
“Sailors in Greece,” she says, “probably go by different rules.”
Jack nods. “All the rules are different. It’s a turned-around place.”
“Widdershins,” says Fern. “Like in the fairy tales.”
Briefly, Jack sets a hand on top of her head. “Girl, if you aren’t a stitch.”
They eat quickly, without much talk. Jack looks repeatedly at the sky. Fern pushes away her plate after just a few bites of lamb. She takes out her book and a pencil, begins a sketch of the tossing boats.
When the rain lets up, Jack stands and gives Paul some money. “I’ll head over now, round up the souvenir hounds.”
As Paul counts out drachmas, Fern continues to draw. Only after they have left and are walking along the water does he speak. All that comes into his head is “You must love Paris.”
Fern doesn’t seem to find this pathetic. She says, “Oh, well, love is a tricky word, even in that context. But yes, I love it. At least, in all the ways you’re supposed to. As anyone would, right?”
“But in others . . .”
She looks at Paul, puzzled.
“In other ways, you’re not so sure?”
“All I meant was that people take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that. And some places have a way of magnifying your demons, or of, I don’t know, giving them pep pills. And there I’d better stop.” She laughs, but the humor is forced.
What, Paul wonders, is a “same old life” to Fern? What could even be “old” to someone so young? When Fenno left for New York at her age, was he out to strip himself of some life he perceived as too same, too old?
“But you’re happy to be there.”
“To be somewhere that lives up so exactly to its reputation, it’s so outrageously beautiful—it’s fabulous and paralyzing all at once. Anna says the paralyzing’s self-inflicted, my fault entirely. But right now, I doubt I could be happier anywhere else. Or luckier. Most of my friends back home are in punch-the-clock jobs. I guess that’s the fate I’m just putting off, right?” She laughs awkwardly again. “So what do you go back to, after this trip?”
“Quiet. Domestic peace and quiet. My same old life.” They are almost at the quay, and Marjorie has spotted them. Paul stops. “Listen. I’m thinking of going over to Naoussa for dinner tonight, on my own. But I wouldn’t mind a companion.” She does not look up in response, and he adds, “Tomorrow we leave for Santorini.”
“Tomorrow? That’s quick.” She looks up now. She looks alarmed.
“Tours,” says Paul. “That’s tours for you. No stopping to savor anything, just a taste here and there, a sampling . . .”
“Antipasto,” says Fern, her nervous young way of deflecting unwanted silence, just as Marjorie pulls them both toward the queue at the gangway.
THE SAME AUTUMN they were invited to Conkers, Betsey had her second litter. The night she whelped, Paul sat in bed reading. Downstairs, he could hear Maureen coaxing the bitch. Now and then he heard whining. He had been through a dozen such nights and still could not sleep when a bitch was whelping. He’d think of Maureen when she had Fenno: the long labor; Maureen’s gasping—more like a prolonged seething of air between her teeth, over and over—from the other side of the bedroom door. He was sure that if she were dying, no one would tell him. All he’d been told was that Fenno had turned around in the womb (as if, at the last minute, he’d decided to run for the hills) and was entering life backwards. “A nonconformist, just you wait,” the doctor joked once the baby was cleaned and swaddled.
Sometimes now, while Maureen sat with a bitch giving birth, Paul would go down and make tea. She’d scold him for losing a good night’s sleep. He’d lose it no matter what, he told her.
He waited this time until he could no longer stand it, till he’d read the same unturned page in his book half a dozen times. He had heard nothing for a while, then running water.
Maureen stood at the scullery sink. She jumped when he said her name. “Paul! It’s past two.” She looked at him over her shoulder but did not turn around.
He could see the red glow of the heat lamp over the whelping box, where Betsey nosed among the indistinct creatures that shivered and writhed between her legs. “Good girl there, Bets,” he said. Betsey did not thrash her tail to greet him as usual but stiffened and warned him away with her eyes.
“Let her be,” whispered Maureen. “She’s had a hard time. Thirteen all together.”
Paul came up behind her. Under his hands, her body felt like a barricade of muscle. There was a pail of pinkish water in the sink; she held her hands under the surface and did not move when Paul touched her.
He stepped back when she pulled her hands out of the pail. He’d thought she was washing them, but she held in each one a newborn black puppy. She laid their bodies on the drainboard. “A mongol,” she said as she emptied the pail down the drain. “And this little one, no tail.”
“No tail? Why kill that one? You could have found it a home.”
“Paul. Paul.” She spoke soothingly, as if he were one of the boys, acting up over a lost toy. “Something else is bound to be wrong with it, you can’t be soft.” She faced him. “Go back to your book, Paul.” She might as well have said, Go back to your cave.
Maureen wrapped the drowned puppies in sheafs of yesterday’s Yeoman. She went about cleaning up as she always did after a whelping, as if Paul were not there. Without offering to make tea, he went upstairs. In an hour, she lay down beside him and fell fast asleep.
The rest of the puppies were healthy and bright. When they were eight weeks old, they were let out to play with the older dogs. Colin Swift rode over from Conkers to see them. Working upstairs, Paul watched the dogs race loops around the lawn, leaving behind them a maze in the snow. When they were put away, he joined Maureen and Colin in the kitchen. She toweled the pups dry while Paul made the tea. Colin chose a small bitch with a white blaze, the one he claimed had chosen him.
“Her name’s Flora,” said Maureen. “None of your swish foxhound names. No crown princes or movie starlets bred here.”
Colin laughed and saluted her.
At the beginning of January, Paul was scheduled to go on a trip to Mexico and Guatemala with a group of editors, most of them from America. He’d accepted two tickets, but Maureen told him that now, with puppies to watch, there was no way she could go. Why not take Fenno? It was his first year away at school. He was doing well, and his masters liked him, but Maureen thought he needed a little adventure. He seemed so awfully serious, she said, not at all his old bombardier self. If he went with Paul, he would miss just a few days of school after the Christmas holiday.
Fenno was the only child on the trip, but he did not need playmates. He replied politely, even learnedly, to everything he was asked, and he never complained when Paul sent him to bed by himself after dinner. Later, when Paul retired, he would often find Fenno doubled over, asleep on the pages of a notebook. After unfurling his son’s body back onto the pillows, Paul would close the book and set it on a table, resisting the urge to read it. Not because he was so discreet but because he was afraid of the imagination he might uncover—one he might wish had been his.
The other
editors and their husbands and wives told Paul to count his lucky stars for having such a son. They took Fenno’s presence as an invitation to complain and then boast about their own children.
In his few months away from home, Fenno had become assertively self-sufficient; this must be what Maureen saw as so “awfully serious.” But when Paul looked at Fenno, he saw a fledgling intellectual with interests all his own. He loved the jungle, especially the parrots and the monstrous insects; in Mexico City, Paul bought him a pair of high-powered binoculars. Paul was genuinely proud, but he was sad, too, when he noticed a new habit in Fenno, a habit of maintaining a solitary distance even in company—quietly, not belligerently—for half an hour or more. Paul felt his own presence erased at such times. At Tikal, when they emerged together behind the guide from the hot green tangle into the clearing around the pyramid, Paul realized how much he missed Maureen, how much he wished that she were here to share his amazements; Maureen with her quick eye and tongue, her capering passions. She would lower her voice to a whisper in awe but probably never stop talking. He knew that she embroidered silences for both of them, but not till he spent so much time alone with Fenno did he feel what it must be like for someone to be alone with him, with Paul.
Returning home, Paul saw Maureen as livelier, younger than ever. This was the way he felt about her when he returned from any trip, but now the extreme distance he had traveled made the illusion that much more acute. That winter and spring, he noticed for the first time how frequently she was away from home. If she wasn’t driving the twins to some sporting event or lesson, she was over at the farm. Colin Swift’s foreman had chosen a second pup, Rodney, to keep for himself and train with Flora.
In the evenings, Maureen spoke effusively about her new arrangement, how the collies were progressing. She spoke about them respectfully, each as an individual with, already, full-blown talents, tics, unique ways of thinking. A breeder of Australian shepherds had written to say he’d like to visit in May; he’d like to watch her work the dogs. A farmer up north had called to ask the stud fee for Roy, who’d placed well at the nationals last summer. Colin, she said, was working hard with his flock. She had misjudged him; he was anything but a snob. “Nauseatingly posh exterior, I’ll give you that. But under all that varnish a heart of gold. And entertaining. He tells the most extraordinary stories—mostly about the war. In Africa . . . just imagine.” She stared pointedly at Paul. “You never do, you know. I hadn’t realized, but you never talk about the war—tell stories.”
“Maybe I haven’t got stories.”
Maureen looked at him as she would look at one of the boys when he made a flimsy excuse to get out of a chore. “Paul, everyone with a mouth and a memory has stories.”
“Colin Swift wears the war by not replacing his arm. You see the wound a mile away. Make that choice and you’re compelling the world to ask, ‘Dunkirk? Sicily?’ Compelling them to hear your stories.”
“I’m talking about you,” said Maureen angrily. “It’s almost like you were never there.”
Paul looked into the fire. “Maybe I wasn’t dismembered, Maureen, but I believe I was there.”
“That was rude, I’m sorry.” She took their plates to the kitchen. He listened to her rinse them in the sink, listened to her, slowly, take out new plates for the pudding. When she brought it out, she said, as if they’d never mentioned the war, “Colin’s a good student. I have to say I’m surprised. But then Flora’s a keen little bitch. We’re working her on the get-by, with her dad of course, and Rodney. But Flora—she’s caught on like it’s in her blood. Well it is, of course . . . but for a pup she’s so sure: she trusts you completely, she looks at you as if she reads your mind, she knows. You can see it in her ears . . . I had Roy part a ewe, and the way that girl watched, listened . . .” Maureen talked quickly, on and on, without touching her cake.
“Colin’s good to her?” asked Paul, thinking of the foxhounds lined up in Napoleonic ranks. If the collies were Paul’s, they’d live a fat, indolent life of lolling about by the fire, eating biscuits under the table, spending their nights at the foot of a bed. Paul’s childhood dogs had been nothing more than freeloading eager-to-please companions.
“For now he spoils her—keeps her in the house with those deranged terriers. But once it’s warm, she’ll go to the farm with her brother.”
When Maureen retreated to the kitchen again, Paul realized that they had passed an entire evening without speaking once of their children; most of her maternal instincts seemed to have turned toward the collies since his return, toward Betsey’s pups. Perhaps this was just because the boys were so seldom at home now; sometimes it felt as if David and Dennis came back to the house only to sleep. And it seemed truer than ever, as they grew older, that having each other rendered their parents obsolete except as providers.
It was not unusual for Paul to come home each evening to an empty house. If he walked out behind, he would see Maureen’s footprints, mingled with the dogs’, pointing left toward the farm or right toward Conkers. If he was home early, he might hear her whistle in the distance. Later, sometimes not until after dark, he’d see her returning along the path by the wall. She would come in exhausted, and Paul would rub her feet by the fire. Then the twins would come home and gallop around like ponies, fired up from football or cricket.
THE CAPTAIN ORDERS THEM BELOW, where the air is hot, rancid, and smells of burning petrol. An hour out, they hear the rain turn to hail: the clattering overhead becomes a roar that drowns out all attempts at conversation. Now, except for the boat’s crew and Jack, everyone is sick. Even Jack looks gray. He sits on the other side of Fern, who leans down between her knees. The reeling of the boat throws her back and forth between the two men. Paul feels the heat of her legs through her skirt and wishes desperately for sun and calm. His lunch is long gone; to steady himself, he focuses on one of Fern’s white sneakers and her bare ankle above it.
There is something so girlish, so ingenuous, about her simple sneaker; without daughters, Paul has no idea what other shoes might seem more her age, but these do not. He saw shoes of various kinds, six months ago, at the Lockerbie crash site; shoes are so ubiquitous at catastrophic accidents that their image has become a cliché of pathos. That week, Paul vetoed at least half a dozen photographs of shoes. In the same week, he was asked to choose shoes for his wife to wear in her coffin (David’s wife did the actual choosing: something formal and black is all Paul remembers).
How often do Fern’s parents back in the reportedly pastoral Cornwall, Connecticut, stop to worry about her, consciously? When Fenno first went overseas—not the same as going to boarding school, where other parental people watched him, or to university, where hard studies were expected to keep him from harm—Paul would habitually subtract six or seven hours when he was going to bed each night and wonder what Fenno was doing in that foreign late afternoon. Would he, exactly now, be in the library (a good, safe place), or out on the streets marketing for dinner, or choosing a shirt to please a lover? And if Paul woke in the middle of the night, what he hated was imagining Fenno anywhere but dully in bed like his father.
In Connecticut, where it is now midmorning on a Saturday, whatever those other parents are doing, they couldn’t possibly be thinking that a man probably ten years their senior longs to spirit their daughter away, alone, take off her clothes, lie down beside her equally naked and forget every other need but this one. “Take advantage of her”? “Seduce her”? How would they think of it? When he pictures it that way, his desire for Fern becomes ridiculous. But her company, he argues with himself—that’s reasonable to want, simply that. He will start with that.
Abruptly, the hail stops. Gradually, the boat slows its feverish tilting. Jack climbs to the deck. He comes back down in a moment and stands over Paul and Fern, grinning. “You still alive there, girl?”
She gives him an impatient look. “I’m going up. I don’t care what the captain says.”
“All clear is what he says,” says
Jack, and follows her up the steep stairs.
Paul sits alone a long time, perhaps fifteen minutes. He waits for his stomach to settle. He breathes deeply. He takes out a comb and runs it through his salt-stiffened hair.
When at last he goes up, he is surprised by the brightness. He shades his eyes and sighs with relief. The air is like a drug, fresh as new leaves. The deck shines, and a few unmelted hailstones lie about like jewels from a broken necklace. Several passengers, none from Paul’s group, are gathered at the bow, taking pictures of Paros against the retreating storm. One by one, they take turns standing in front of this view, posing. Paul does not see Fern. Heading back toward the captain’s cabin, he recognizes her laughter. He hears her say, “You’re an octopus,” and then sees her, behind the cabin, kissing Jack like a prodigal lover she thought she had lost for all time.
THE YEAR THE TWINS followed their brother to boarding school, Flora placed first at an important trial in Ayrshire. Colin Swift’s foreman was her handler. Maureen took a younger dog to show, and Colin drove her up. They left at dawn and did not return until midnight. Maureen woke Paul to come downstairs and drink brandy. She and Colin had been celebrating already, out with their competitors. Paul could smell the cigarettes and whisky on her breath; in the mossy dark, he saw the shape of her lips after she kissed him and tasted fresh lipstick, its familiar mixture of talcum and fruit.
In the kitchen, they were heady with conceit, tripping over each other’s words to tell how the day had gone.
“The outrun was wretched, wretched—”
“A crooked course like a closed elbow, with two steep dips—”
“She came around fast as a cheetah.” Colin lifted his glass.
“But then the sheep closed up in a blinking knot.” Maureen squeezed one hand into a fist and brought it in toward her chest like a punch. “Made for the gate like they could taste it.”