The English American (5 page)

I stare down at the paper and then up at the reflection of myself in the mirror on the back of my bedroom door. I see a young woman with a pale face, large green eyes, and long, wet, unbrushed copper hair. She is naked—apart from a towel wrapped around her bottom half.

She’s holding a letter. Her cheeks are wet with tears, and her body is shaking. We stand there, the young woman and I, staring at each other, for what seems like an age.

Then the young woman and I smile ever so slightly, still shaking, still rooted to the spot, and speak together, in perfect unison.

“Blimey,” we say, at exactly the same time.

I
READ THE LETTER OVER AND OVER AGAIN
.
Even though she wrote most of it before I was born, and she doesn’t even know me, I feel understood. Connected. To my own kind. “I believe that the most important thing for a woman is to be engaged in work she loves. I believe that the most important thing…”

I haven’t done work I love in seven years, since I was twenty-one, just out of university, when I tried to write a play. The moment I had written a rough first draft, I rushed home to Little Tew and, over a Sunday lunch of roast lamb, roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, rhubarb crumble, and custard, I told Mum and Dad that I had found my true vocation. I just knew it. I was going to be a writer.

“What have you actually written?” Dad said, eyebrows raised, cutting into a piece of Brie with military precision.

“Loads of things, Dad. Poems, plays, music. I’m writing a play at the moment,” I said.

“What’s it about?”

“Well, it’s a two-handed comedy-drama, set in a womb,” I said, thrilled that he’d asked. “I’ve got all sorts of ideas for the next draft. It’s going to include a lot of satire. About politics.”

Despite—or perhaps because of—his top-notch education, Dad has never been a supporter of the Conservative Party in England. He’s not really a Labour Party supporter either. He thinks all politicians are crooks and says so whenever a politician appears on the telly, regardless of whether or not there’s anyone else in the room.

“Lots of people want to be artists,” Dad said. “They end up disillusioned and broke. Even the talented ones. Look at poor Van Gogh!”

Sometimes I really wonder.

“I haven’t shown it to anybody yet,” I said, taking my play out of a plastic blue and white Tesco’s bag and handing it to Dad. “You will be the first.”

I knew that when Mum and Dad read the play later that night, they would understand that playwriting was something I was meant to do.

The next morning I went downstairs to the kitchen at 10:05. Time for Mum and Dad to take their milky coffees out of the microwave.
Ping
went the microwave. Up Mum got. I waited for her to put a spoon of Nescafé into each mug, one with sugar, one without. Then I came to the point.

“I’ve decided to go on the dole, so I can devote myself to my writing.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Dad said, not looking up from his crossword.

“I’m not being ridiculous!” I said. “If I go on the dole for a month I can take the time I need to finish the play. Then I can submit it to the BBC.”

Dad stopped doing his crossword and looked up at me, utterly perplexed.

“But your play is set in someone’s tummy!”

“It’s set in a womb, Dad. Not a tummy.”

“No one’s going to want to pay good money to sit in a theater for an hour and a half looking at someone’s tummy!”

“It probably won’t have a set.”

“No set!”

Mum and Dad looked at each other.

“What would the BBC pay, anyway? If they did accept something like this.”

I had no idea. “Two thousand pounds,” I said, plucking a figure out of the air. “And that’s just to develop it! If it becomes a television play I’d get much more.”

“And how long could you live on that?”

It was the end of the conversation. Or it was supposed to be. Dad picked up the
Peaseminster Post
and started reading. Mum started putting the dishes away. I got up to help.

“Oh, Pip,” Mum said, “how many times do I have to tell you? Scrape the remains of the Weetabix into the bin before putting the bowl in the dishwasher.”

Mum sounded tired. Of me.

Dad’s favorite hobby—after Scottish dancing, crosswords, and Sudoku—is writing letters to the newspaper, complaining about various things. At the time, he was on a crusade against litter.

“They’ve put up the littering fines in Fenhurst,” Dad said. “About time too.”

“I wonder if they got your letter?” Mum said.

“Must have done. Now that’s the kind of writing that makes a difference,” Dad said, looking at me pointedly from behind his half-moon glasses.

I wasn’t going to give up. Not this time.

“But did you like the play?” I said. “Did you?”

Mum stifled a sigh. Dad didn’t look up from his crossword. Mum turned to me with candor in her pale blue eyes.

“No,” Mum said.

“Not really our sort of thing,” Dad said. Then he looked up at me impatiently and said, “I like playing golf, but I don’t delude myself that I can make a living at it. I spent years doing a job I hated in order to earn the money to do what I wanted to do. It’s called
work!
”

I wanted to shout, You don’t understand! I’d rather be broke for the rest of my life and spend my life doing something I love than spend my life trapped in a job I hate! It’s part of who I am!

But I couldn’t. We don’t shout in our family. It’s just not done. So I picked the blue and white striped milk jug off the breakfast table and filled with a sudden, irrepressible fury, poured the milk onto the kitchen table. It splashed off Mum’s blue and white checked tablecloth and onto the floor.

All was quiet, apart from the sound of the dripping milk.

“I’m sorry,” I said, finally. Utterly ashamed. “But I just—well—I just. We just…We’re so different. Who we are. What we’re like in every way…Everything…everything’s different. I’m different. We just don’t like doing the same things.”

Mum and Dad were completely still.

“What do you mean?” Dad said finally. “What don’t you like doing?” He looked like he really wanted to know.

“Scottish dancing, Dad,” I said, unable to stop the words from tumbling out. “I don’t like the dancing, or the music. I especially hate the bagpipes.”

“You hate the bagpipes?” Dad said, astonished. To the Scots the bagpipes are sacred. But the truth was on its way out.

“Yes,” I said. “I’d—I’d rather listen to fingernails scraped against a blackboard!”

Shocked, Dad and I stared at each other from either side of the kitchen. Charlotte had come down the stairs and was standing stock still, watching Dad and me. She looked utterly stricken. She followed me to the car.

“You okay, Pip?”

“No,” I said, my face crumbling.

“Just go,” she said. “I’ll talk to them.”

And nobody said anything more about it.

But Dad’s words about not deluding myself kept ringing louder and louder in my head until I could no longer hear the voice inside me that had been urging me to write.

So finally I put my play back in the Tesco’s bag and put it in a box under my bed. And the next day I got a job selling advertising space over the telephone.

The night I get the letter from my mother, I take the Tesco’s bag out from under the bed again and take the coffee-stained script out for the first time in seven years. After I have read the letter from my mother ten more times, I read my play all the way through.

My mother loved writing too.

With the first flicker of confidence I’ve felt in years, I start the rewrite I’d planned to make seven years earlier.

When I’m concentrating on something I’m interested in, a bomb could go off in my bedroom and I wouldn’t notice.

I stop work at six o’clock in the morning when I fall asleep at my desk, cradling the script in my arms. Not because it’s particularly good. But because it’s a part of me.

I
T’S BEEN A MONTH
since I got the letter from my mother and told Judy I’d love to meet her, and I have heard nothing. All sorts of unwelcome thoughts have been crashing violently through my brain.

Perhaps my mother called the agency and told them she changed her mind and doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. Perhaps she died in a sudden, tragic accident? What if all the papers and files in the agency burned in a fire, before they had the chance to contact her, meaning that I will never, ever find out who she is? Ever?

In my mind she goes from being the most successful businesswoman in New York, to being a brilliant playwright, to being a drunk, obese, one-eared artist, disillusioned and broke, lank hair plastered to the side of her face, rolling around in a pile of empty beer bottles, muttering incoherently about how much promise she had in her youth. If only she’d known she would never make it as a writer, she’d have pursued a sensible career selling advertising over the telephone.

I’ve been going through the motions at work, but my sales figures are at an all-time low, and my boss is less charmed than usual by the origami elephants I make out of yellow Post-it stickers and place in rows along the top of my cubicle.

I make just enough sales to justify my presence there. When my boss is in the other part of the room, I sit in my cubicle, furtively working on my play and dreaming about my mother.

The invisible Judy is the only person in the world who can grant me the key to my identity. Even though my mind is churning and I’m feeling desperate, I know I must be careful not to piss her off. And so, on Friday mornings, when the sales manager meets with the managing director, I call New York, casually, just for a chat, to keep her up to date with what is going on with me.

“Pippa,” she says again, rather sternly, “there are only two of us here at post-adoption services, and we’re getting more and more requests like yours every day. We will inform your birth mother of your interest in meeting her by letter, as protocol dictates, and we will write that letter as soon as we have time.”

“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” I say. “I’m sorry…well, in general. I do appreciate your help.”

My heart hurts and I stop eating and shake a lot as I wait for Judy to write to the mother who gave me birth.

It’s odd how the mind works. Memory, I mean. When you’re feeling utterly desperate, and you can’t think of what do to, sometimes you remember someone you haven’t thought about in ages. And if you’re desperate enough, or religious in some way, you’ll half-believe that person has come into your head for a reason. And, so, on impulse, you’ll get in touch with them again. Which is why I decide to contact Nick.

Nick and I only met a handful of times, when I was twenty-one, but Nick is not the kind of man you forget. Particularly when you connect in the way we did.

But it’s not just the memory of our intense mutual attraction that’s pulling me to find Nick again now. Or the fact that he’s been visiting me in my dreams at night. It’s the fact that we share something I’ve never shared with anyone before.

Now that I might be about to find my mother—well, Nick could be the one person I know who will truly understand.

I google “Bank Global” and learn that Nick’s still with them. Nick’s a high-flying international banker. He works in India and the Middle East mostly—and is rarely in one place. But, thanks to the Internet, time differences and schedules no longer stop people reaching out to each other from across the world.

I
N THE TWO MONTHS
since I made the first call to Judy, I’ve been in a daze, treading water, waiting. Needing to get away from London, one glorious Saturday morning in June, I drive down to Peaseminster to spend the weekend with my parents.

Dad stopped smoking when we lived in Singapore. He now considers people who smoke to be unutterably weak and coughs dramatically whenever he thinks he can smell cigarette smoke. This is why he absolutely refuses to set foot in France. This is also why I have to lean two feet out of my bedroom window if I want to smoke a cigarette indoors.

Dad is safely upwind at the bottom of the garden, so I can take a puff of my Silk Cut and inhale deeply before blowing the smoke far away from him. Unfortunately the wind changes. Seconds later, Dad’s standing at my bedroom door in his floppy gardening hat, sniffing like a furious beagle. I stub my cigarette out on the wall of the house and pretend to be closing the window.

“Where are they?” Dad says, breathless from having run up the stairs at top speed. “Come on. Where are they?”

He prowls around the room, searching for my cigarettes.

He spies them out on the window ledge.

“Got ’em!” he says. He crushes the packet in his hands. Then he holds them above his head, like he’s the Statue of Liberty or something, and says, “I’m going to throw these in the rubbish.”

Then he storms out of my room.

Later, I overhear him talking to Mum. They’re sitting on the porch. The skylight is open, to let in the sweet summer air. From the room above I can hear everything.

“Ever since Pip decided to go on this ridiculous quest she’s fallen to pieces. Did you know she was smoking again?”

“She certainly didn’t eat much lunch,” Mum says. “And she usually loves Scotch egg.”

“It’s just an excuse, that’s what I think. For not getting on with things. She’s completely incomprehensible.”

In truth, any understanding Dad ever had of what’s important to me ended the day I turned down his invitation to go on a family sailing holiday in Greece when I was eighteen. Mum, Dad, and Charlotte spent three weeks swimming in the sea, sailing from island to island, sunbathing and relaxing on a yacht. I chose to spend the summer playing a troll in a new opera at the Edinburgh Festival, which involved writhing around on the floor in a body suit for a month for no pay.

“She should be building her career in advertising sales! Not airy-fairying about writing letters to America! And what if she doesn’t come back? Hmm?” A slight pause and then, “Goodness knows what she’ll find.”

There’s an ominous silence.

“More tea?” Mum says.

More silence.

“Why can’t she bloody well leave it alone?”

“I think she would if she could.” Mum’s voice is calm. “But I don’t think she can.”

“It’s typical bloody Pippa,” Dad says. “Drops a bomb and leaves us to deal with the debris.”

I can hear Dad stand up and march back into the house.

“Make sure you put the right crossword in the right envelope Alasdair,” Mum calls after him. “You don’t want to send the
Times
crossword off to the
Independent
!”

My parents still laugh at the memory of Dad’s Great Crossword Sending Mistake six years earlier. He’s been sending the
Times
crossword off to the weekly competition for fourteen years. So far he’s won a bottle of olive oil and two tickets to
The Pirates of Penzance
. It made him very happy and I understand why perfectly. How I wish he could at least try to understand me.

The hum of the swimming pool heater reaches me through the porch window.

“And what if she doesn’t come back? Hmm?”

The guilt is heavy and thick and instant. I want to run to Dad and reassure him that of course I’ll come back. Of course I will. I love him fiercely and always have done. I’ve just never known how to talk to him honestly about things that really matter.

So it’s going to have to be Mum who reassures him. And she will. She’s good at that.

As afternoon turns to evening, a light English rain starts to fall.

“Bring the deck chair in from the garden before you go, darling!” Mum says.

I listen to the sound of the raindrops splashing on the corrugated plastic roof of the swimming pool, and when I hear the sound of Dad’s car driving away from the house, I get out my secret supply of cigarettes from behind the bookcase and head into the rain.

As I walk up the path to the top of the hill behind Little Tew, I turn my face to the sky. I’ve always loved the feel of rain on my face. This time it takes me back to my first real rainstorm.

When I was eight years old, we lived a few miles outside Nairobi, Kenya, in a yellow house on loan to us from the embassy. We called it the upside-down house because the bedrooms were downstairs and the kitchen and dining room were upstairs. We had a cook, and an ayah, and a day guard, and a night guard. It was during the few years I spent with Mum and Dad before boarding school.

One Saturday morning, when I was riding my bicycle to the local shop to spend my weekly pocket money on a giant bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut and a
Bunty
, I met a little Kikuyu girl called Agnes. She was about my age and height, with a round, shiny face and hair braided in a hundred little braids. I thought she was beautiful. When she learned that we lived opposite each other, she invited me to come and visit her at any time, and I said I would. Agnes lived in a hut made out of leaves and sticks, in the banana plantation on the other side of the dirt road from our house.

The drought was unusually long that year, and there wasn’t a green blade of grass or leaf in sight. All you could see along the murum roads was brown dirt and, occasionally, a dead or dying animal.

Charlotte and Mum had taken to lying down in the heat of the day. On the day the rains finally hit they were asleep in their respective bedrooms, with the ceiling fans whirring above them.

I didn’t ever want to lie down, in case I missed something. A dung beetle pushing dirt laboriously up the hill behind the kitchen door. A chameleon scuttling up the pawpaw tree, stopping suddenly on a leaf, and turning yellow. The cat on the wall, trying to catch lizards.

That afternoon, I stood on the veranda, looking up at the darkening sky. The wind was strong, and black and blue clouds were blocking the sun. I was watching the skies the moment they broke for the first time in months, with a violent crash. Lightning and thunder tore through the air, and torrential rain came pouring down, suddenly, on the hard, dry ground.

Rain like this is incredibly loud and hits the ground like long silver bullets. I just had to feel it against my skin, so I ran outside, held out my arms, and threw back my head. As the hard raindrops hit my skin, I marveled at how different they felt from English rain, which, to me, seemed insipid by comparison. Then I heard drums beating and music coming from the direction of the banana plantation, where Agnes lived.

I ran down the long dirt drive to the bottom of our property, across the road and up the path that led to the banana plantation. Agnes had pointed her hut out to me many times. I knew it was the third tallest hut from the left. The music was coming from that direction, so I headed straight for it.

As I ran toward the music, I saw Agnes and what must have been her entire family dancing together in the rain. They wore rows and rows of orange, blue, red, and yellow beads around their necks, and brightly colored cloths, and they were holding one another’s hands and dancing and shouting with joy. Agnes’s face was thrown back so she could drink the rain, just like I had, and she was laughing with the others.

When she saw me standing completely drenched in my yellow sundress and flip-flops, she held out her hands. Before I knew it I was dancing with Agnes and the others—children, grown-ups—about twenty people with open faces, who welcomed me with much laughter. And we all danced in the rain, in a big circle, Agnes, her family, and me.

“It is called a rain dance!” Agnes said.

The drum beat faster and faster and I whirled faster and faster. I had never felt so free or so alive.

After about half an hour, we stopped dancing and sat under the eaves of one of the huts. Agnes had taken my wet clothes and wrapped me in a rough orange cloth, which smelled of must and dung. I know that might sound unpleasant, but it wasn’t. The combination of cloth and dung smelled sweet.

Agnes sat me down and started braiding my hair in tiny little plaits, just like hers. Several children stood around touching my hair.

“Ngumba santi mtoto mari!”
they said. “Her hair is made of red and gold.”

I was sitting on a wooden stool eating a banana, Agnes’s swift hands working on the last of my braids, when I heard my mother’s voice.

“Pippa! Pippa!” There was Mum, her blond hair tied neatly back in a black velvet scrunchy, completely dry, thanks to the large black umbrella a worried-looking Juma was holding over her.

“Here Mummy!” I said, waving at her. “Come and meet everybody! I’m over here!”

In perfect Swahili, Mum graciously thanked Agnes for looking after me. Then she grabbed me by the hand and pulled me away from my new friends.

Later, much later, after I’d been given a hot bath, scrubbed down, lectured for hours about not going off on my own, and sent to bed, I heard my parents’ voices, hushed and low.

“Charlotte would never go off like that and play with the Africans. Charlotte is perfectly happy indoors, playing Snap and drinking mango juice with the Morton-Pecks. You know how much I love Pip,” Mum was saying. “But sometimes—well, sometimes I just don’t understand her at all.”

The crickets were high pitched and cricketing away at top volume. I heard a howl in the night. And more rain. Then my mother’s voice, clear and matter-of-fact, seemed to echo throughout the house.

“You don’t know what you’re getting when you adopt a child.”

Twenty years later, the English rain is still cold and light and it still spits. As I walk to the top of the hill behind Little Tew and look out over Peaseminster, with its dark gray cathedral and tidy little houses nestled in the valley below, my tears mingle with the rain.

That night I get an e-mail from Nick.