The English American (2 page)

C
HARLOTTE’S SPENDING THE WEEKEND
with Rupert in Paris. She’s hurrying toward her light blue Saab because she doesn’t want to get her suitcase wet.

“He’s going to ask you to marry him, you know,” I tell her.

It really is bucketing down with rain now.

“Get in!” Charlotte says.

Her car is clean and dry and smells of leather and lavender.

I know that Charlotte will accept Rupert’s proposal, because he’s perfect for her. He loves going to dinner parties with his fellow commodity brokers in the City as much as Charlotte does. They’ll get married after a long engagement. Then she’ll give up her job, and they’ll move to somewhere like Bath. They’ll have at least two children, and go on annual skiing holidays to Verbier and Val d’Isere in the winter, and somewhere hot in the summer—as long as it has all-day child care and inexhaustible supplies of wine.

“So here’s to you, Mrs. Darrington!” I lift up an imaginary glass of champagne.

Charlotte laughs again. Her blue eyes light up just like Mum’s when she’s utterly happy.

From what I’ve told you so far, you’re probably thinking that Charlotte’s the grown-up in our relationship. The one who looks after me. But it also works the other way around. I’ve protected Charlotte for years. Without her knowing it. By not telling her what’s really going on with me.

Charlotte and I share the same parents, but we don’t share secrets. I actually don’t think Charlotte has any, and I hate to burden people. Which is why Charlotte doesn’t know the truth about Miles. She thinks I broke up with him because I’m being fickle, wanting to play the field, because that’s what I want her to think. She doesn’t know that, for me, falling in love is terrifying.

And I haven’t told her about the dream that’s started haunting me at night. The one about the mother who gave me birth. If I let anyone in my family know how much I’ve been wondering about my other mother, they might feel displaced. As if I don’t love them anymore. As if I don’t need them anymore. And I do.

Charlotte drops me off at the tube and kisses me on the cheek. “Don’t get into too much trouble while I’m gone, Pip!”

I always feel a tug when I say good-bye to people I care about. Even if it’s just for the weekend. Especially this time. Perhaps a part of me already knows that everything is about to change.

Half an hour later, I get off the tube at Embankment, stop at the newsstand to buy a packet of Maltesers, a box of Ribena, and some prawn cocktail crisps, and walk down the Strand to work. I work for Drury Lane Publications, selling advertising space on the telephone in
International CEO
magazine.

The setting isn’t exactly salubrious. Thirty salespeople sit in cubicles in a large room in a white building opposite the back wall of the Theatre Royal. But I don’t mind. It gives me flexibility, and I can dress however I want.

It’s probably a combination of what Charlotte calls my “absurdly un-English enthusiasm”—and the fact that I have a posh accent—that makes me the top salesperson in the company. The rest are men.

I call Europe in the morning and America in the afternoon: “Hallo. My name’s Pippa Dunn. I’m working with Tony Blair.”

This isn’t strictly true. Someone from Tony Blair’s office told our editor that of course we could reprint one of his speeches in the magazine, because it was already in the public domain. But it gets me through to the right person.

“Our current goal is to help American companies break into the European market.”

This isn’t true either. Our current goal is to make as much money in commissions as possible. But I get caught up in my own pitch and,
ping:
I’ve sold another double-page spread for nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine pounds.

Ever since I started calling America, I’ve wondered if I’m speaking to someone who knows the parents who gave me birth. Maybe my real father is the governor of Virginia? Or doing something to help the poor people in New Orleans? Or doing what he can to bring the soldiers back from Iraq? He’s a Democrat, of course. He must be. We share the same genes.

And my real mother? What about her? Maybe she’s a senator? Unlikely. There are more women in the Iranian parliament than there are in the U.S. Senate—but you never know.

In London, in 2007, people in their twenties are supposed to hate everything. Especially America. And American foreign policy. And British foreign policy. And optimistic, successful people, like Richard Branson, who I swear the British only tolerate because he consistently fails to get round the world in his hot-air balloon. But I love America. I always have done. And not just because, despite my British accent and upbringing, I am, myself, really an American. I’ve always known I was adopted. But I didn’t find out my birth parents were Americans until I was fifteen years old.

Charlotte and I were home on summer holidays from our separate boarding schools. Charlotte went to Pelsham Abbey, because she was good at sports. I went to St. Margaret’s, because I was good at music.

While sending your children off to boarding school is considered barbaric by every American I’ve ever met, in England it’s still considered a privilege. It’s especially common if your parents live abroad, as mine had ever since Dad joined the Foreign Office. Important to give the children a solid base in England while one’s moving from post to post, and all that.

Anyway, I’d gone upstairs to Dad’s office to try to find what the British call Sellotape and the Americans call Scotch tape. It wasn’t where Mum said it would be, so I started rummaging about in the drawers of Dad’s desk to look for it. In the lower right-hand drawer, I noticed a file with my name on it.

I took the file out, and, inside it, found my old school reports—the ones I used to take on the plane with me, when I traveled from England to Kenya, or Hong Kong, or wherever Mum and Dad were stationed at the end of each term.

Well, of course I was immature. I was ten.

The reports of my untidiness alarmed my neat-as-a-pin parents far more than anything else. Ashamed of myself for disappointing them so terribly, I’d return to school at the end of the holidays, determined to be tidy. No matter how hard I tried, I never managed it. Within days I’d be hauled up before the headmistress with ink on my hands, or my uniform, or both, and told, once again, that I was a grave disappointment to the school.

I blocked out memories of the aptly named Miss Steel and kept flipping through.

There were papers from the British school I went to in Hong Kong before boarding school, and from my prep school and nursery school in Zimbabwe. Then my baby weight, height, that sort of thing.

Then I came across a thin file with a label on it. It read: “As supplied by the adoption agency, non-identifying information about Phillippa’s biological parents.”

I’d always known I was adopted. But we’d never talked about who from. I held on to the file tightly. There, in my hands, fifteen years since I was born, I was holding a file that held the facts about my long-lost mother. I was holding the key to my true identity.

Feeling like a criminal, but unable to stop myself, I got up and shut the door. Then, guiltily, heart beating extra fast, I opened the file and I started to read.

For Phillippa when she is ready:

Non-identifying information about Pippa’s biological parents

I held my hands to my heart, which was still beating at double speed. I shut my eyes.

I knew it. I just knew it. My real parents were brilliant people. They were remarkable people. They were famous people.

And they were American!

I took a deep breath.

“Relinquished baby so as not to ruin father’s political career.”

Of course. This explained everything. No wonder I had been given up for adoption. Why, if the press found out about me, it could cause a nationwide scandal, maybe even bring down an entire American administration! Why else would the adoption agency black out all the details?

I carefully put the file back in the drawer, exactly as I had found it, left Dad’s office, and ran down the stairs.

“Couldn’t find the Sellotape anywhere,” I said, in as casual a tone as I could manage.

“I’ll go and look,” Mum said. She returned a minute later. “Oh Pip, you are a silly billy. It was on top of the desk. Right under your nose!”