They set off down a track, the two older children racing ahead. Rooker carried the folding chairs and the cold box and a plaid blanket. Frankie was holding Sammy the baby’s hand, her head bent as she listened to whatever he was urgently telling her. Rooker wondered what it would be like to be locked into a family like this, instead of just visiting. There were houses on either side of this track, with sandboxes in their yards and bicycles propped against fences. What would it be like to live in a house like one of these, to go to work every day and come home every night? It was her only just-offbeam version of this, wasn’t it, that Edith had offered him down in Ushuaia?
They reached the shore. It was a wide crescent of shingly sand backed by rough grass. There was a stone jetty with boats moored along its length, a converted boathouse calling itself the Coffee Plantation and sunlight winking on the water. After the nomadic weeks he had just spent, this vista looked so ordinary that it became hyper-real in every detail, like a Rockwell picture. He stared at the painted sign on the roof of the coffee shop and the way the flat primary colours of the lettering stood out against the azure depth of the sky.
Frankie stood with her fists on her hips, her head on one
side, smiling at him. She wore a bandanna over her long straight hair, a Sixties chick born twenty years too late.
‘You don’t say much, Rook, do you? But you know, I’m still pretty pleased you came by.’
Jackson clamoured, ‘Can we go in a sailboat now, Rook? You said we could.’
‘I need a beer first.’
‘Awww.’ But all three children were already running towards the water. Rook unfolded the chairs and set them in place.
Frankie took a can of beer out of the cooler and put it into his hand. ‘What’s with you?’ she asked, her tolerance shaded by exasperation. Rook sat down, burrowing his feet into the pebbly sand. In the two days since he had arrived at the house in upstate New York, this was about the first word that he and Frankie had had alone together. There had always been Ross, or some permutation of kids hanging off her arms, or a neighbour dropping in and staying. Frankie was like that. ‘How bad is it?’ she pressed him.
Frankie had seen some bad times, that was true. There were times when he had been drinking, with Edith and before Edith came along, that he was glad he couldn’t recall himself.
‘It isn’t bad.’
‘It doesn’t look good to me.’
The children were silhouetted against the glittering water. Jackson and Corinna were walking in the wet sand, and the baby was trying to stretch his legs to match his brother’s footprints. Rooker closed his eyes on a sudden clutch of pain and greenish suns swam and merged behind his eyelids. He heard Frankie pop the ring on a can of beer for herself and take a long swallow.
‘What happened to you, down at the South Pole?’
Automatically he corrected her, ‘We weren’t anywhere
near the Pole.’ Then he added, ‘A woman had a baby down there, can you imagine that? I delivered it.’
He was surprised. Once the first words were out, he felt a dam ready to break behind his tongue. There was a huge weight of water, words, history, waiting to pour out of him.
‘Go on,’ Frankie said softly.
He told her what had happened. He tried to explain about the innocence and how amazed he had been to hold it in his hands. Meg’s birth had made him feel used up and polluted, with the dirt of a lifetime ingrained in the pores of his skin and the furls of his brain. It was too late to clean up. All he could do was keep away from them. Stay away from them.
‘Rooker, you aren’t seeing straight. You’ve lived tough, but you’re no worse than most people who’ve been in this world four decades or more. What’s so bad in the past that you think you’re going to pollute a newborn just by being near to her?’
He wouldn’t tell Frankie what. There was only one person he might have told – he had already blurted out the words, so he could have filled in the details – but she was nowhere near this sunny-day picture of a lake shore. He held up his hands instead, cupping them round empty air. ‘She was so tiny. Folded, crimson, wet. And yet as soon as she took a breath she was a complete being. It was as though I had never seen anything in my life before, never opened my eyes on anything that mattered. And after I had seen it nothing really mattered except the two of them. Look at me. In the long term, how much better will it be for Alice and Meg if I’m not there? I can give up anything in the world for them, easily. Even the chance of being with them.’
They were both watching the two bigger children as they ran into the shallow water, sending up glittering cages of
spray. Sammy hesitated, wobbling as the wavelets ran around his ankles.
‘But children don’t judge you, or ask for your history. They take you as you are. Mine do, don’t they, and you let them? Tell me how you know that you
are
doing the right thing by giving these people up, if that’s what drifting around the world like this means. Did you ask the mother – Alice – if she wanted you to be quite so nobly considerate? Or are you just being selfish and listening to your own inside voice?’
Jackson waded deeper, holding up his skinny arms like chicken wings to keep them out of the cold water for as long as possible, and Corinna shivered on his heels so as not to be left behind or outdone.
It was more than two years since he had last seen Frankie, but even so he counted her as his closest friend. He had come up here to find her, hadn’t he, in the end? He had told her some of the truth; he should listen to her now. He guessed that if he didn’t there was nothing left for him to do and nowhere else to turn.
‘No, I didn’t ask.’
‘Do you love her?’
‘Jesus, Frankie. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now.’
‘I think it does matter. Maybe it matters more than anything. Do you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does she know?’
‘Yes.’
Frankie tipped her head back to drain her beer. Then she stood up and walked almost to the water’s edge where she scraped up a mound of gritty sand around the can. She stooped to collect a handful of pebbles, then came back to give half of them to Rooker. They took it in turns to aim at the can. Four out of five of Rook’s pebbles pinged, and all five of Frankie’s.
‘Does she love you?’ she asked at last.
‘Perhaps.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘She’s English.’
Frankie laughed. ‘So are you.’
‘Not in quite the same way, Frank. I’m just passport-English, she’s Oxford and educated and classy, and she doesn’t say much, but when she does believe me it counts. The answer to your question is I would have to find that out.’
Frankie let her long arms hang over the arms of the chair. She had a tattoo on her right bicep, a rose with an exaggeratedly thorny stem.
‘Then
find
out.’
‘I might discover she’s gone back to Meg’s father. I might screw things up for her in a hundred different ways. Or she might see things differently, now we’re not on the ice any longer.’
‘Is that how little you think of her?’
Shamed, Rook murmured, ‘No.’
Frankie picked out another fistful of pebbles, this time keeping them all for herself. She sat up very straight and aimed a savage volley at the beer can. She didn’t trust herself to look at him.
Jackson and Corinna were trying to coax Sammy into the water. They each took one of his hands and swung him between them so his feet churned the surface while he yelled with the pleasure of fear.
Frankie snapped, ‘Go to England, Rook. You think you’re strong but you’re not; you’ve got more cracks in you than grandaddy’s whip. You never will be really strong either, not until you’ve had the courage to make yourself vulnerable, and if you don’t do it soon you’ll be so stiffened up that you’ll never be able to. Fuck.
Listen to me
, you asshole.’
She shouted these last words, making him jump. She leaped to her feet and pushed him so hard that his flimsy chair overbalanced and sent him sprawling in the sand. Corinna let go of Sam’s hand and he clawed briefly at his brother, then slid into the water. Frankie was already sprinting across the strip of sand as Rooker sat up. She ploughed straight into the water and swept Sammy into her arms, and the other two children clung to her as she waded out again. They lurched back together, a misshapen eight-legged creature that spattered the sand with drips. Frankie’s long skirt clung to her legs.
Corinna was blue-lipped and her teeth were chattering. Rooker wrapped a towel round her and rubbed her dry. ‘Corinna Corinna,’ he sang as he did it.
‘I hate that tune. Everyone always sings it when I’m around. It sucks.’
‘Why’s that?’
She shrugged and he saw the way her skin slid so smoothly over the planes of her shoulder blades. A kind of pain that was now knotted with anticipation suddenly gathered in him again.
‘Be
cause
.’ Corinna put her head on one side and he saw her mother in her once more. He couldn’t detect much of Ross.
‘Rook, c’n we go in a boat now? You said,’ Jackson called out from inside his towel.
‘Sure. You coming, Frankie?’
‘No.’ She shook her head, still not looking at him. ‘Sammy and I’ll stay here. Eh, Sam? You and me?’
They stayed late at the shore and it was already dark as they made their way home. All three children were asleep in the back and Frankie stared into the oncoming lights as Rook drove. She had been quiet all afternoon and he had left her to herself. There was enough talk from the kids.
But now she put her hand on his arm. ‘Rooker?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you going?’
He sighed. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you scared to? You could phone first or mail her or something.’
‘Yes, I’m scared. And if I’m going to see her I’d rather it was face to face to start with. It’s easier to see the truth that way.’
There was a silence.
After a while Frankie said, ‘Edith called me last week.’
‘What did she want?’
‘To find out where you were.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘That I had no more idea than she did. It was true, then.’
‘Yeah,’ Rooker said.
Two days later he was still at Frankie’s place. A weight of uncertainty and indecision pressed on him, and he tried to work it off by painting the yard fences and taking down the storm shutters to replace the old frames.
He watched the patients coming and going from Frankie’s husband’s chiropractic clinic adjoining the house, and in the evenings he shared a beer with Ross while he talked about the Iraq war. On the third evening he helped Frankie to carry in the grocery bags after she came back from the store.
‘I’ve got something to show you,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’
She took the rolled-up baton of a magazine out of one of the bags and pitched it at him. The glossy pages flipped in a coloured blur. Rook bent slowly and picked it up, and it fell open at a big picture. He stared down into Alice’s face. She was holding Meg on her lap and a fierce-looking old woman stood very straight beside them.
‘That’s her, isn’t it?’
Rook felt a hammering inside him. ‘Yes.’ He couldn’t read the text. The words jumped around in front of his eyes.
‘So, are you going to England?’
All he could see was Alice’s face, he could hear nothing but her voice in his ears. ‘No,’ he said wretchedly. ‘How can I?’
Ross went out that evening to a football game. Once the children were in bed, Frankie and Rooker sat on the sofa together in front of the television. She curled up with her feet tucked under the folds of her skirt, her head resting on his chest. Rooker lightly stroked her hair, disentangling loose strands from her long earring and tucking them behind her ear. A glint of light on her cheek caught his eye and he saw that she was crying.
‘Frank?’ He drew her upright and cupped her face in his hands. She sniffed and tried to smile. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I want…’ she began. ‘Well, shit, it doesn’t matter what I want. I want you to be happy. Go to England, find your Alice. Why can’t you? Why are you so…so rigid? It’s as if you’ve made up your mind not to be happy. If she loves you, what right do you have to make
her
miserable?’
Frankie’s wet face was flushed. He looked into her eyes. Was that true? he wondered. Had he decided on the day that Lester died that happiness was not for him?
‘You saw the picture. Her mother, her child. A whole life that I don’t know, don’t belong to. How can I walk into that?’
She stared at him. ‘
How
? By putting one foot in front of the other.’
Rooker let his head sink forward until their foreheads and noses touched. Frankie’s hot tears ran over his thumbs.
‘I love you,’ she whispered.
He nodded slowly. Their faces were pressed together, his
eyes were closed now. The dam holding back the buried words was close to breaking. Tears forced themselves between his eyelids and he clenched his teeth to hold everything in place. He loved Frankie too. Like a sister.
‘Go to England,’ she begged him. ‘Do it for me.’
That she should be so generous, so full of concern for him and not herself, made him cry properly. He kissed her forehead and she clung to him. It was a moment before he could speak.
‘I’ll go,’ he promised her at last.
‘You’re crazy,’ Jo protested.
‘Or else I’m totally sane.’
‘What about Meg?’
‘All Meg needs is me. And I will be there with her.’
Alice spoke with confidence. In the months since she had brought her home Meg had grown. She was still small compared with full-term babies of her age, but she was healthy and making good progress. Travelling with her now would be nothing like flying from Santiago to Patagonia in the first precarious week of her life.
They were in the house in Jericho and Jo was helping Alice to clear cupboards ready for it to be let yet again.
‘Where will you live?’
‘I don’t know yet. I don’t know how long I’ll be there. I can rent a house like this one, can’t I?’
‘What about the Department? Your research, your students? They used to mean everything to you and now it’s as if nothing except Rooker means anything at all. You’re uprooting your baby, carting her off to the middle of nowhere…’