‘For the time being, at least,’ someone else put in.
‘Except our Australian friends.’
‘One of whom is not Australian, but American,’ Silver pointed out.
‘Are we
all
expatriates, then?’ asked the female half of the diplomat couple (Italian), and they all looked around the table at each other. ‘Do none of us live in our country of birth?’
There was a round of confirming nods; only James shook his head and said, ‘Well, except me, then. And I continue to live not only in the same country I was born in, but the same city. I can only boast an immigrant mother – and a highly unsuccessful one at that.’
‘What, unsuccessful as a mother? Or an immigrant?’ asked Alice.
‘Well, both, I suppose.’ And then suddenly James was telling this roomful of strangers about his mother, and how she had walked out on her family and fled back to England one Christmas Eve, never to be seen again. He was astonished at himself but once started he couldn’t just stop, since that would surely make it seem even odder.
Am I very drunk?
he wondered, and took extra care not to slur his words, or ramble, or sound too emotional. Not to sound as though he were suffering from some still-raw wound. Like a victim.
A professional bloody victim
: he could hear Deborah’s scathing tone so clearly, sneering at Meredith, the only one of them who talked about their mother’s departure to outsiders. He made sure the point of the story was the difficulty of adjusting to another country. Not the abandonment; not the image of the children and their father, unwrapping their presents so joylessly the next morning around the Christmas tree. Which still had no lights.
Silver watched him, chin on her hand and a gently encouraging
smile on her face. Once his tale was done she let the silence be for a few moments, then deftly picked up that thread of emigration and added to it and handed it on, so that those around the stilled table, each sensing they’d heard something charged with meaning and previously unrevealed, were able to become animated again, though in a kindlier way than before, and the evening was not brought to a darkened close by James’s revelation but allowed a further hour of conviviality.
But one person, the Irishwoman in her low-cut dress, stayed quiet. Several times before they all went home James felt her eyes intently on him, but he didn’t feel like flirting any more, and dreaded that she might give him a deep and meaningful look. Or worse, try to engage him with some story of her own childhood damage. But when he did risk a glance, Margot was nibbling at her thumbnail and staring off into space, or more precisely at a point a little to her left. She looked neither flirtatious nor overwhelmed with emotion, he realised, but more like… like someone trying to finish a crossword puzzle.
In the cab on the way back to their apartment on the Thames, James and Silver held hands as they exchanged companionably inconsequential remarks. But as they were preparing for bed she said to him, ‘Hon? You know what’s occurred to me?’
James answered with a look of enquiry.
‘I was just thinking,’ Silver said, ‘that in all the years I’ve known you, you’ve hardly ever talked about your mom. Not
really
. I mean, you’ve told me what happened, and we talked about that memory thing. But I don’t know
why
she left. Or what you think about her now…’
He pulled back the covers and climbed into bed, not answering.
Do I have to go there?
he asked himself.
I don’t even know where
there
is!
‘I guess I’ll never know why she left,’ he said finally, shrugging. ‘I can’t. Simple as that. I mean, she was English, that’s all I really
know for sure. Australia must’ve been too big an adventure for her, you know, too raw or something…’
‘Do you ever think about what she’s like now?’ Silver asked, lying on her side with one elbow propped on her pillow, watching him. ‘Do you wonder about that?’
‘No.’ James made a mildly considering face, lying back and crossing his arms above his head. ‘If I had to speculate, then… I guess she could be one of those hearty landed Englishwomen… burberry and foxhounds… or maybe some wispy old lady like a little brown wren, sitting in her bedsit and doing good works for the church… but those are just clichés. I don’t know. She’s just a… kind of a
blank
to me. An unknown quantity.’
‘Does that make you sad?’
‘No,’ he answered definitely. ‘What would be the point?’
‘The point?’
‘Yeah. I’ve got a great life, Sil. I couldn’t be happier. What would be the point of turning myself inside out over something I can’t change?’
‘I don’t know, hon. Just to… understand, I guess.’
‘I
can’t
understand it, though. That’s just how it is. I’m going to turn the light out now, okay?’
Over the next day or so James caught himself thinking not about his mother, but rather about the Irishwoman, Margot. There was something about the way she’d looked at the end of the dinner that made him uneasy. Was it that he’d found her attractive, in her glimmering blue dress? Had he flirted excessively, perhaps, under the unaccustomed influence of alcohol? Given her the wrong signals? He hoped not. But if not that, then what? What was it about her that seemed to be… hovering?
Unfinished business.
Hearing her voice on the answering machine a couple of days later, James jumped guiltily. He had an instant image of her leaning forward across the table – enticingly, it seemed.
Uh-oh
, he thought uncomfortably. Her message was addressed solely to him. There was
no fabricated excuse, just the request that he call her. He felt sure she wanted to follow up on the other night.
If she thinks there’s something going on between us, I’ve got to knock that idea on the head straightaway
, he decided. He picked up the phone and dialled the number she’d left. Margot answered almost immediately. Once they’d exchanged greetings, she took a deep, determined breath, and hearing this James winced, anticipating an embarrassment of some kind.
‘James,’ she said, ‘I wanted to talk to you about that story you told us all the other night. About your mother and how she left Australia so suddenly.’
‘Yes?’ he answered, startled by this tangent, but realising in the same moment that he was glad she’d said ‘left Australia’ and not ‘left you’ or ‘left her family’. He didn’t want anyone to make too big a deal out of the story he’d told the other night. It was just a dinner party anecdote.
‘The thing is, James, when you told us about her, I suddenly thought, I know that woman.’
‘Oh?’ he said.
Unlikely. Surely.
‘Actually, she’s my mother’s best friend. I’ve known her for, oh, ages.’ He realised that although the warm tones of her voice disguised it, Margot was nervous. ‘She’s been a huge influence on me, really. In terms of… erm, I don’t know.
Style.
But that sounds so shallow, and she’s not…Ah, no matter… But the story… Rose’s story’s a bit of a secret.’
Rose
, James thought, but said nothing.
‘I didn’t know whether to say something to you the other night. But then I thought I should talk to Rose first.’
‘Talk to her.’
‘Yes. Because I thought of those things, like adopted children contacting their parents, the shock, and right to know and so on. Not that you were adopted.’ Margot gave a soft laugh.
‘No, right,’ James said, and laughed, too, but his laugh sounded foolish, inappropriate, so he cut it short.
‘So I talked to my mum first, and she talked to Rose, and now I’ve talked to her, too. And she’s… well, if you wanted to, erm, call her, she’d be… she’d be happy for you to do that. If you want to. She lives in Somerset, by the way, near Bristol. Between Bristol and Bath. I… I’ve got the phone number here. If you want it.’
They didn’t talk much longer. James wrote down the phone number and his hand as he did so looked odd, like someone else’s. After he and Margot said goodbye he found himself walking to and fro around the flat.
I’m pacing
, he thought.
This is ridiculous
. He wished Silver was with him, not in Chicago.
I’ll wait till I’ve talked to her about it.
But then somehow the phone was in his hand again.
He dialled the number. A man answered. He had a Caribbean accent, and James thought momentarily that it was a mistake, a wrong number. But when he asked to speak to Rose, please, the man said pleasantly that he would just get her for him, she was in the studio, and then James could hear him calling distantly, ‘Rose! Pick up da phone!’, sounding as though he was calling up a flight of stairs, and then a different sound as another phone was picked up, and a woman’s voice saying, ‘Hello?’
He could remember her voice. He had never thought of that. He knew her face only from the photographs, but he had never thought about her voice. His eyes were fixed on the small vase crammed with white roses sitting on the desk beside the telephone, and there was the big window and the brown Thames beyond, but he saw all this without seeing it because his head was completely filled by that one word,
hello?
, in this voice that he knew, that he’d always known and didn’t know he knew.
‘Mummy?’ he said, and the tears burst so violently from his eyes that they splashed onto the desk in a rain of fat drops, blurring the number he had written there, on the little notepad right at his fingertips.
CHAPTER 9
There was no way she could keep still, she was so nervous. Already she’d been for a long brisk walk around the fields and over into the woods at the far side of their neighbour’s farm, scuffling through the drifts of autumn leaves and muddying her boots as she crossed the little stream, and back home again, mind still fizzing. There was plenty of work to do in her studio but she was too restless to settle to it. She went out into the garden, tore out the straggling skeletons of last summer’s tomato plants from the vegetable beds and wrestled some pots into the greenhouse. She heard a car pull up and her heart started hammering –
Oh no! I look a fright!
– but peeping around the corner Rose saw that it was her husband, Roland, home early from Bristol to be there when her – her
son
arrived.
‘Not here yet?’ he asked as she came up to him.
Rose shook her head and hugged him tight, wriggling in so that his coat was around her and her face was well hidden. He held her close, stroking the sleek silver helmet of her hair with one big hand.
‘Nervous, my queen?’ he asked gently.
She moved her face up and down against him, nodding.
Roland started singing softly, an old Bob Marley song:
‘Every little thing, is gonna be all right…’
Rose giggled and lifted her face up toward his. ‘Don’t you go telling James those stories about you smoking giant spliffs with the Wailers, now,’ she said.
‘Why not?’ Roland teased. ‘All true, you know.’
‘Even if they are! You’re a respectable businessman now, and my husband, and for all I know this young man could be a… a Christian fundamentalist minister!’
‘Nah,’ said Roland comfortably, taking his wife by the hand and leading her in to their stone farmhouse. ‘Didn’t he tell you on the phone he’s a painter? And how young is he, this “young man” so-called?’
‘Oh lord,’ Rose said. ‘I don’t want to think! It makes me so ancient. Younger than you, at any rate.’
‘By just a little bit, eh? By just a few weeks maybe…’
‘Don’t be so cheeky, you! By ten years!’ Rose, halfway up the stairs – she was going to change her clothes and at least put on a bit of lipstick before this scary visitor arrived – turned back toward him for a moment. ‘Well, nearly ten years.’
‘You want me to come up there with you?’ Roland asked suggestively. ‘I know something that’ll settle you right down, y’know. Make you all serene, and smilin’…’
‘
No!
’ said Rose, tossing her head, but she had a big smile on her face now.
Roland watched her corduroy-clad backside appreciatively as she continued up the stairs. ‘If you live to be one hundred,’ he called, ‘you still be the sexiest damn woman in England!’
‘Huh!’ her voice floated down as she disappeared. Roland went into the kitchen, grinning, and while he was still debating whether to put on the kettle or get out the sherry decanter, an unfamiliar car, a nippy black BMW, pulled in at the farmhouse gate and rolled slowly, hesitantly, up to the door.
Roland was curious to meet this stranger, and happy to play the role of icebreaker if needed. But as he saw the man who emerged from the car and approached him, smiling, ducking his head uncertainly even as he extended his hand with apparent confidence, Roland was startled almost into wordlessness. The resemblance was extraordinary! He restrained an exclamation, greeting the visitor warmly, and then Rose was approaching (he smelt her perfume), then beside him, and she gasped. James, on the threshold, looked thunderstruck, too. Rose trod on Roland’s foot as she stepped forward, James’s shoulder collided with the doorframe. They managed, barely, to shake hands, murmuring indistinct greetings.
It was nearly thirty-seven years since these two, mother and son, had seen each other. It was no wonder, Roland thought, they should be at a loss, especially when faced with this: the height, the build, the features, the colouring and, most strikingly, the eyes, together declaring unequivocally: we are family; we are blood.
They went into Rose’s favourite room: small, mostly glass, with a view of the garden. Rose sank down as though pole-axed into her favourite pink-upholstered chair, and James, hesitating, sat in the green one opposite. Roland brought coffee – their vistor’s nomination, though he’d noticed his wife’s desperate glance toward the decanter – and kept up the flow of small talk for a while. Then he announced that he had a bit of work to catch up with, if they would excuse him.
Good luck
, he wished Rose with his eyes, and she gave him a strained smile.
After Roland left there was a long moment’s silence in the small, pretty room. James looked out through the tall glass doors.