The English American (7 page)

F
IVE DAYS LATER
,
Dad is driving at top speed down the narrow country roads that, after an hour or so, will lead to the M25 and Heathrow Airport. He doesn’t speak. Mum is reminding me to keep my passport zipped inside my purse, so it doesn’t get stolen, like it did when I came back from Rajasthan.

Dad switches on Radio 4. Libby Purves is interviewing a man who crossed the North Pole on his own.

“Must have been bloody cold,” Dad says.

“Yes,” Mum says.

We whiz past the post office in Pease Pottage, where I used to buy large round sherbet lollipops that lasted for hours.

“I might hate her,” I say.

“Libby Purves?” Mum says.

“No, Mum,” I say. “Billie.”

“Nonsense,” Mum says. “Of course you won’t hate her.”

Libby Purves’s end-of-program theme tune fills the car.

“I hope Marjory stops patting you on the back,” I say, trying to make a joke of it. Ever since Mum told her friends at the sewing club that I was about to meet my birth mother, people have been cornering her in odd places and asking in low tones if Mum’s “all right.”

Mum’s voice has an unusual edge to it. “I think it’s best if we don’t tell anybody else. Do you know, Jilly actually came up to me in Waitrose and said, ‘You’ve been a terrific mother to Pippa, she’ll be back.’ I wanted to clock her!”

I need some fresh air. I open the window a crack.

“Don’t open the window!” Dad says. “You’ll let the cool air out!”

Dad’s finally bought a car with air-conditioning.

“Sorry.” I close the window again. Hedges, trees, green fields with cows and sheep in them seem to zoom past the window, like a film in fast-forward.

“Everybody seems to think I’m feeling hurt and rejected,” Mum says. “Including you, Pippa. But I’m not! Honestly, darling. I’m not. You need to go and do this. You’re in a terrible muddle, and if going to find this woman helps you sort this muddle out, I’m all for it. Besides, you’re only going for two weeks! You traveled around India for six months!”

“Ssssssh!” Dad says. “I want to hear the cricket!”

If you think cricket is dull on television, try listening to it on the radio. Mum and I shut up anyway.

The plane is delayed, so Mum, Dad, and I sit at the airport drinking lukewarm tea from Burger King cardboard cups. A man lights up in the smoking section, twenty feet away. Dad wrinkles his nose and coughs, loudly.

“Alasdair!” Mum warns.

It’s too late. Dad’s up and moving. He marches over to the smoking section, heads straight for the young man with a crew cut, cigarette, and face that looks like a bulldog, and says, “Can’t you point that thing in the other direction? We’re choking in here!”

The man is capable of knocking Dad into the next room. Instead, a kind of miracle happens and he stubs out his cigarette.

Then, as if it’s news, Dad barks, “Don’t you know those things cause cancer?” and marches triumphantly back to our table.

We drink half our tea and then carry my bags over to the check-in counter. My squashy red suitcase bursts open as soon as I put it down.

“For God’s sake, Pippa,” Dad says. “How many times have I told you? If you pack your suitcase too full, the zip will break!”

“Never mind, Dad,” I say, in a merry voice. Rummaging about in the bag I bring out a pair of striped tights. “These’ll do the trick.” I tie the tights around the bag and lift it back onto the scale.

Mum takes Dad aside and talks to him quietly.

Fifteen minutes later, we’re standing at the customs gate on opposite sides of the metal barrier.

I turn to Mum, kiss her on the cheek, and pat her on the back. I can’t speak. She responds by kissing me on the cheek, patting me on the back, and saying, “Good luck, darling.”

Dad is trying to smile. He reaches into the pocket of his maroon shirt with the lion on it and, patting me on the shoulder, hands me a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut chocolate. “Here you are,” he says.

“Thanks, Dad.”

“It’s for the flight, darling.” Dad’s voice is gentle. “And Pippadee,” he says, “try not to eat it all at once.”

His eyes are twinkling and he’s smiling now. He knows the chances of the chocolate bar lasting for more than ten minutes after take-off are nil. I smile back.

“Thanks, Dad.”

With a lump in my throat, I sling my handbag over my shoulder. I turn around to blow them a kiss, but they’re already walking toward the car park, with their arms criss-crossed behind each other’s backs.

I watch them go. They’re so happy with each other, Mum and Dad. They only met four times before they got married, and they’re still happily married after thirty-four years.

Lasting love. Isn’t that what everyone longs for?

I once asked Dad if he thought he and Mum are soul mates. It amused him immensely. He doesn’t believe in soul mates.

But I do. And I hope, more than anything, that the journey I have just embarked on will somehow make it possible for me to recognize and truly love mine. I find myself thinking about Nick as I head toward the plane.

I met Nick in the summer of 1999. Neville had somehow made Steeplehurst School’s first eleven cricket team and Mum, Dad, Charlotte, and I were summoned to cheer him on.

Women in lovely dresses and large English hats sat on blankets, next to wicker picnic hampers and teenaged boys in scarlet uniforms, devouring Marmite and cress sandwiches, with the crusts cut off. And sponge finger biscuits with strawberries and cream.

I get restless if I have to sit still for too long, so after a respectable amount of time, I took off my shoes and my hat and headed off on my own down the path to the left of the ivy-covered school building that has housed the sons of Britain’s most privileged families for generations.

I walked past a lush green field and into a wood. I passed a stream with a waterfall on one side and green bracken and endless bluebells on the other.

Through a gap in the trees I noticed a man leaning against a fence on the other side of the wood. I watched him put out a cigarette as he stared out at an empty paddock. He was wearing an expensive-looking brown leather jacket and a pair of blue jeans, and he was about thirty or so. I was wearing what Charlotte called my “wood nymph dress”—a light, sleeveless green cotton number, with a swirly skirt, which I liked because it was soft and comfy.

I walked up to the fence he was leaning over and leaned over it with him.

“Hallo,” I said.

The man was shockingly handsome, with dark skin that made me wonder if he might be half Indian. He was taller than me, and when he stood up straight, he held himself with absolute confidence, like a prince. He had an extra energy coming out of him that made it hard to look away. There was something about him that I recognized, I wasn’t sure what.

I bent down, picked a buttercup from the thick green grass at our feet, and handed it to him.

He took the buttercup in one hand and smiled. Then, without saying a word, he lifted my chin, cupping my face with the palm of his other hand, and stared at me. I couldn’t look away.

“You do like butter,” he said finally. I was surprised to hear that his accent was as English as mine. He was holding the buttercup under my chin. I couldn’t move.

If he had been anyone else, I would have said something witty and pulled away. But I couldn’t. It’s hard to explain, but it felt as if the man could see me. All of me. And I wanted to lay my face in his palm and rest it there, breathing in the smell of him.

“Who are you?” he said, finally.

“I’m Pippa,” I said.

I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I couldn’t stop looking at him.

Slowly, he bent down and kissed me on the mouth. His lips were soft at first, and he tasted of Polos.

And then the kiss, which began gently, became something else. Within seconds my body was pressed hard against this complete stranger who I somehow knew. I wanted to make love with him for hours. The rest of the world had already gone away.

His arm was pressing hard against the small of my back. He was leading me toward the trees, and I was going with him.

And then I wasn’t.

If I let myself love a man like this, surrounded by bluebells, in the wood, I knew I would experience the greatest passion I had ever known. But that kind of connection could only bring heartbreak when he left me, as a man like this inevitably would. And that would destroy me. I needed to protect myself. And so I did.

I managed to pull away from him. I managed to hide everything I was feeling. I managed to step aside, tap my watch, smile, and—giving the impression that I was amused, but indifferent—walk back through the woods to the safety of what I knew.

A shot of adrenaline hits me as I walk onto the plane. I wonder again if this journey to meet Billie will finally free me to love someone at a level that’s soul deep. Without any kind of fear.

An hour later, I curl up under my blanket on seat 23B and pretend to be asleep. These are the last eight hours of my life as I know it, and I must savor them.

I
AM HIT BY A WAVE
of intense heat and humidity as I step across the gap between the air-conditioned plane and the air-conditioned terminal building at JFK. These are my first footsteps in America, and I am taking them toward my mother.

After twenty-eight years, it isn’t the agonizing red tape, or the guilt, or comments like “But why would you want to
do
something like this? Did you have a bad adoption?” that brings me closest to breaking point. It’s something as mundane as a delayed suitcase at the airport.

My mother is less than forty feet away, and my luggage doesn’t come through and doesn’t come through. I watch every other passenger pick up their bags and head toward the exit. Mine still doesn’t come through. I try taking deep breaths to calm myself down, but it doesn’t work. I’m terrified my bag will take so long she’ll think I changed my mind about coming.

I leave my body. I’m watching myself from afar. I’m wearing a baseball cap with my hair pulled through the back as identification. It doesn’t exactly go with the Laura Ashley dress, but Charlotte isn’t around to be upset by this. I watch myself, waiting to pounce at the first sight of my luggage, like an impatient hawk.

Finally, a red squashy bag tied together with a pair of tights comes bumping through the hatch. I watch myself run toward it and walk at top speed toward the gate.

As I walk through customs, and the final barrier between us comes down, I return to my body again. The adrenaline has subsided. Nothing can stop us now.

A tall, extremely pretty woman with short, curly strawberry-blond hair is waving enthusiastically at me from amid a five-foot-deep wall of men holding up taxi signs. From a distance she looks about thirty-five. She’s wearing a T-shirt and overalls.

Now she’s coming toward me at top speed.

Now she’s standing in front of me. Her perfume is strong and sweet. She’s got a gorgeous smile and the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen.

First she says, “You didn’t need the hat.”

Then she says, “My God. I didn’t expect this! You look exactly like your father.”

“Thanks,” I say, grinning. “I travel all this way, across the years, and the first thing you say to me is that I look like a fifty-year-old man.”

Billie laughs loud and long.

“That, dear daughter, is exactly the kind of thing your father would say.”

Her accent is soft and pretty, and sounds even more southern than it did during our one brief phone call. I like it.

Billie picks up one of the handles of my bag and, with me holding the other handle, starts walking quickly toward the gate. “We’ve got to hurry,” she says. “I overshot temporary parking and parked the car in the tow-away zone.”

She catches sight of the tights holding my bag together.

“Pantyhose tied around your bag!” she says. “What a brilliant use of your resources!”

She gets it. We grin at each other.

We arrive at her red Chevrolet seconds before the traffic cop, who shakes his head and waves his pad and pencil at us as if to say “Next time!”

Billie ignores him and looks at me.

“Same eyes as your father,” she’s saying, shaking her head. “I didn’t expect this.”

We climb into her car. And I do mean climb. Not having been in America since I was a baby, I don’t yet know that, in America, a car you don’t have to climb into is probably French.

When the engine turns on, so does the music, at top volume. I know it well.

“The Bach fugues,” I say, surprised.

“Yes,” she says. “They help me think. They’ve done research. People of our nature are real right-brained; it’s good for us to listen to Bach. It helps us develop our left.”

People of our nature. At last.

The lady at the exit barrier smiles at us and we head out onto the road that leads north from JFK to Adler-on-Hudson, where Billie has lived for the past twenty years.

I’m thinking: She’s real. And she’s here. I can reach over and touch her if I want. She’s not a phantom anymore. Oh Nick, I tell him in my heart, I know what you meant.

I watch my hands at the end of her arms turning the steering wheel.

“Your brother Ralphie wanted to come with me, but I said, ‘No, honey, this is something I need to do on my own. I waited until he turned eighteen before I told him about you. Weird, that you should show up less than a year later.”

“Yes.”

I have never heard the word “weird” uttered by anyone over the age of eleven before.

While talking, Billie looks at me and then back at the road and whoops loudly. “Honey, I did not expect this! You look like your father in a Laura Ashley dress!” And then she laughs. It’s my laugh, coming out of someone else.

Billie turns to the right, at top speed, down a big American freeway. She drives even faster than Dad, and that’s saying something.

“Ralphie spent the whole day vacuuming in your honor. He’s never picked up a vacuum before in his life.”

We drive for an hour, my long-lost-mother-now-found. And me. By the time we turn off Route 10, we’re the only car on a country road with enormous trees on either side of it. Billie tells me we’re going to spend the night at her house in Adler-on-Hudson. I’ll meet Ralphie, and then tomorrow we’ll hit the road for Georgia.

People love to ask, “Yes, but how did you
feel
when you met your birth mother?” And they clearly expect a satisfying answer.

The truth is, I went completely numb. People do go numb, I’ve been told, when they’re in shock. In order to protect themselves from the intensity of what they’re feeling.

So what feelings was the numbness protecting me from? Part of me is hoping that as I finally tell the truth about all of this—the truth that has been trapped inside me for years—somehow I’ll be able to figure it out.

There are people who don’t want me to tell the truth about any of this. There’s a lot at stake. But you can’t stop the truth from coming out, any more than you can stop kin from finding kin.

There’s a natural law with secrets. It’s the same law that applies to kettles. If you block the ventilation hole, there will, eventually, be an explosion.