The Shelter of Neighbours (6 page)

Far from being soothed by this, I was terrified. My heart froze and I waited for some terrible shock: the lion would appear now; I knew it in my blood. In the beam of the headlights the amber eyes would shine and the great mouth open and the roar shatter the quiet of the night.

But no lion roared. No coyotes, or racoons, or bobcats. Not even an owl hooted.

‘Good night.'

The door clicked, and I realised I'd been locked into the jeep.

‘See you soon!'

The drive had taken about five minutes.

I was relieved to enter the safe ordinariness of the lodge, with its smell of herbs and garlic, its comfortable old sofas and shelves of well-thumbed books. Relieved. Also subtly disappointed.

Li had discovered something about the family. They were called the Klarstads. They had lived in the house in the forest, Moss Lodge, for fifty years. Ramalina's husband's family had built the place as a holiday home; he had died fifteen years ago and since then she had lived there all the year round. It was known that Marcus was some sort of musician but he had the reputation of being a recluse; he gave no interviews and disliked being televised while performing, and he had not performed locally. Kim had not heard of the daughter, Isabel, but that was probably just an oversight: she was not known for anything, and did not leave home, so who would know about her?

‘They're
ok
. They probably just need a bit of company,' Li said.

I called in in the early afternoon a few days later. The scene was exactly as it had been on my first visit. I walked down the drive between the fir trees, and sighed with pleasure when the low white house came into view. Isabel reclined and Ramalina sat by the pool, and Marcus swam languidly in the cool water.

The fragrance from the roses was stronger than before, something I attributed to the heat of the day. Even here, in this paradise, where the climate is temperate and invariably perfect, it was slightly too hot, while the rest of the nation sweltered in a terrible heat wave.

‘Hello! Great to see you!' Ramalina called, as I approached the poolside.

Isabel smiled and nodded, but as usual said little.

I could hear Marcus's body plashing in the water, a sound as natural as the whirring of the hummingbird or the shiver of the breeze in the leaves.

Ramalina offered me tea, and cucumber sandwiches, in some sort of misguided deference to my native tastes. Isabel, who had put on her yellow silk robe soon after I appeared, glided across the lawn and brought this snack from the house on wicker tray. We talked about ‘my day'.

‘How was your day?' Ramalina's manner was as poised as that of a television presenter, it now seemed to me. She smiled and I felt penetrated by the look in her slanted, golden eyes; she was as controlled as if she were reading her questions from a monitor.

‘Did you go to finishing school?' I asked rudely.

Isabel raised her eyebrows – an exceptional show of emotion for her – and there was a loud
whoosh
in the pool as Marcus pulled himself out of the water.

‘Why yes, I did,' said Ramalina, with her wide smile. ‘How clever of you to guess. As a matter of fact, when I was nineteen, I spent a year in a finishing school in Lausanne.'

‘I didn't know they still existed,' I said.

‘They existed then!' she laughed. ‘It was a wonderful year. I met so many interesting people from all over the world, and I saw so much of Europe. We travelled extensively, on the train, to Paris and Rome and Trieste and London and Copenhagen. Yes, it was a truly magical year for me.'

‘When was that?' I asked.

‘Oh, long ago,' she said, and smiled her rejection of the question.

‘Did you visit Dublin?' I asked.

‘No, alas,' she said, smiling. ‘And I would so love to visit your beautiful city. I feel as if I had been there, I have heard and read so much about it.'

Marcus came then, and we talked about
Ulysses
and
Dubliners
, while he dried off in the sunshine. Ramalina and Isabel left the pool and went into the house. He asked me to stay for dinner but I refused, and then said I would come the next evening, if I could get a lift home.

And every day or two for weeks I visited their house in the woods, and had tea or lemonade or dinner, and a pleasant, easy conversation with Ramalina about my day and my work and what I was reading, and a long, intense conversation with Marcus about literature and life.

Every day I believed I was on the brink of finding out something wonderful, something radically important about the meaning of life and the meaning of fiction. I felt, as I walked through the redwood forest, through the whispering glades, the shifting pools of sunlight dappling through the long, trailing branches, the promising ferns, that today an amazing truth would be revealed, a moment of illumination would come, and that it would provide me with the answer I was seeking, the breakthrough I longed for, and needed.

I was not thinking of the kind of epiphany we talked of all the time, as we sat by the log fire after the dinners Isabel had cooked (for it was she who did all the work in the house). Not the Joycean moment of epiphany, where some ordinary Joe Bloggs realises that life is often sad, that we are mortal and lose the people we love, that loss must be tolerated, that compromise is the name of the game. I did not want one of those epiphanies that really just confirmed the truths that most sensible people know anyway, instinctively, and do not make much of a fuss about.

Nor yet did I hope for some big revelation about the nature of the universe. God exists. God does not exist. We will end. We will live on in some other form; our spirit will migrate to some other being; there is an afterlife; there is not an afterlife. The world will survive; the world will end; love matters; the world is beautiful and that is why we go on, and at the same time everything we know is doomed to extinction.

Maybe that last line was close to it, but it was not what I was looking for, not only that.

Some answer about writing is what I wanted. What is it for? Not just to entertain people with stories about other people very like themselves. It must have some more profound and important purpose, surely, even in the context of our knowledge of our imminent extinction, perhaps especially in that context.

Every day I felt I was on the brink. That the next day my brain, my self, would fill with light; that something wonderful would happen.

My period of residence in the lodge was drawing to an end. I had not said this, specifically, to the Klarstads. But they knew, as they knew most things.

‘Stay on with us,' said Ramalina, with her most persuasive smile.

‘Yes, do,' said Marcus. ‘You can live here for as long as you like. It's easy to write here. You know that already.'

‘Yes, I know that,' I said.

We were by the swimming pool, where they always were in the afternoons. Isabel was not there. In fact, I had not seen her for a few days, but since I seldom talked to her I had not liked to enquire where she was. I knew such an enquiry would not be welcome, and would be met with a blank stare.

Ramalina and Marcus showed me the room I would have if I stayed – at the end of the house, with a long window opening to a balcony, facing the rising sun, and another window to the south, directly onto the garden, with its oleanders and wisteria, and the branches of the redwoods like the drooping arms of ballerinas right behind. I loved my plain room in the lodge but this room was just as tranquil and at the same time much more beautiful. I could not imagine, I could not design, I could not conceive of a room that more perfectly matched my taste, my requirements. Indeed, when I stepped inside, I felt I had been there many, many times before, and I knew it was a room I had dreamt of, in the dreams I often have of houses and castles, about which I wander, from room to room, in search of the perfect one.

‘You'll write well here,' said Marcus.

He pulled me aside, and whispered, as his warm arm caressed my neck and an electric bolt of pleasure ran through my body. ‘You'll make a breakthrough here. Here, you will be enlightened.'

And, as if in response, outside the window the lawn sprinkler went on, shooting a delicate fountain of raindrops into the air, and the sunlight caught them and transformed them to a rainbow, dancing there in a myriad diamond droplets outside the window of my dreamed-of room.

We went back to the drawing room, where Marcus played a new piece on the piano, and never had he played so well, and nothing he had composed was as moving and harmonious, and at the same time unlike any music that had ever been composed before on this earth. The sun dappled the polished floor and the rugs shone like soft jewels from some bazaar of the
Thousand and One Nights
, when the Orient was the land of magic and mystery beyond all imagining. The glass bowl of pink roses scented the air with a promise as tantalising, and true, as that of the music. They said, here is the answer you have been waiting for. Tomorrow you will learn what you were born to know.

And then we had dinner, the most delicious dinner yet. We served ourselves from the bowls and dishes on the sideboard, and I dared to ask where Isabel was.

Ramalina's yellowish eyes sparkled at my question, but her voice was as soft as a cat's fur when she answered.

‘She's indisposed.'

I knew from the way she flicked her golden braid that I would learn nothing further.

Well.

There is only one ending, as you who read stories know.

The next day I woke later than usual, and when I opened my eyes, something had changed. The sun was not shining, and the hummingbird was not whirring, and a grey fog filled the valley and blotted out the hills and the trees and the skyline.

Li said, ‘Kim is picking me up at ten to go to the airport. What time is your flight?'

‘One o'clock.'

‘It won't take more than forty minutes to get down there. You should be
ok
. What time is your connection?'

‘It's at 11 p.m.'

‘So you'll land at what time?' Li always said ‘what time?' Never ‘when?'

‘Six o'clock tomorrow morning.'

That is when the flights come in, to Ireland, after the Atlantic crossing.

And as I said it I could see the west coast of Ireland as you see it from the plane at dawn, moist and green as lime jelly, and I could see, as well, the grey rain on the runway at Dublin, and I could feel the cold grey air on my skin, even as we sat and ate granola at the sun-bleached table. And I knew I would go back to the fogbound, beloved island, and struggle on towards an answer, like a woman who has stepped on the stray sod, and will wander around in one field for the rest of her life.

Berry pulled my skirt and pleaded in a mock-sweet voice: ‘Time for my story!' I was washing the dishes after tea – or supper, as they called it here. Her parents, Morgan and Warren Roley, had gone out for a walk by the lake. So they said.

I turned with a wet plate in my hand and let a few suds drip onto the top of her head, accidentally on purpose.

‘Just give me two minutes, sweetie pie!'

‘Now!' She didn't exactly stamp her foot, but she positioned it in readiness for stamping. Berry could throw the mother and father of a tantrum at the drop of a popsicle. Well, to be fair to her, it was past her bedtime. She was tired – according to the philosophy of the Roley school of child-rearing, this would excuse anything up to and including murder. ‘Hansel and Gretel! Hansel and Gretel! Hansel and Gretel!'

She made me tell the same story every night. We had half a dozen new endings, some that involved the eating of the children by the witch, some the eating of the witch by the children. Berry (Beryl the Peril, I called her in my letters home) was bloodthirsty. Cannibalism enthralled her. More to the point, it sent her to sleep. To my knowledge, she was not troubled by nightmares.

I grabbed her middle finger and scrutinised it.

‘Darn and double darn!' Morgan said that when she was cross. It sounded absolutely ridiculous, but I had enough sense not to use the curses we had at home, even when she wasn't around to hear them. ‘This little girl is still much too skinny!' I glanced meaningfully at the cooker. ‘My sweet little child, you must eat lots and lots and lots of candy, so you'll grow big and juicy and fat … oops, I mean, big and strong!' And I gave my version of a witch's chuckle.
Hargh Hargh Hargh
. A bit like a donkey's braying. (Do they bray? Or do they neigh? What's the difference?)

Berry was five years old, sweet as a biscuit, with blueberry eyes and skin like maple syrup. I was her au pair. Just for the summer. I'd come over after the Leaving to take the job, which a teacher at home had fixed up for me. The first six weeks I spent at the Roleys' gingerbread house in Morristown, New Jersey, minding Berry while her parents were at work. Now it was August and we were on holiday, at a lake somewhere in Upper New York State. Lake Elizabeth. It was very nice: a long sliver of blue water with enormous rocky mountains as a background and black spiky trees all around the edges, like eyelashes. It wasn't like anywhere I'd ever been or even heard tell of. Morgan just called it ‘Lake Elizabeth', and once or twice Warren referred to it as a resort. ‘Resort' meant somewhere like Kilkee, to me, or Ballybunion. Blackpool. Seaside towns, real places. This was more like a boarding school, or monastery, even if its only purpose was pleasure. (It had its own little white chapel, mind you, discreetly tucked away in the woods.) There was a big house like a hotel down by the canoe harbour, where we ate sometimes, fabulous feeds of chowder and crab bakes. Pancakes and waffles and maple syrup. You could stay in this big house if you wanted to, but we lived in a log cabin. That was considered a cut above the hotel, to my surprise. I'd never stayed in a hotel; I would have loved to try it. But the cabins cost more, apparently.

I got along well with the Roleys, or as well as it's possible to get along with people whose servant you are, even if the au-pair label lifted my job out of the absolute mud; I told myself again and again that I wasn't really a maid or a servant. I was a student, or soon would be. After this summer I'd be starting college, I'd be studying anthropology and English, I'd be a free person. But even though I knew this, and believed that being a student was an occupation that carried plenty of dignity with it, plenty of
class
, and even though I made sure everyone knew that I was a student doing a holiday job, not some Irish lowlife immigrant, it was impossible to convince myself of this. That is a most peculiar thing: after less than week with the Roleys, I started to feel like a slavey in a James Joyce short story or one of those maids in frilly white caps in
Upstairs, Downstairs
. I stopped reading the books I had brought with me: Margaret Mead's
Coming of Age in Samoa
, and Claude Lévi-Strauss's
Tristes Tropiques
. Nietzsche's
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(a long shot, anyway). Instead, I started browsing through Morgan's
Cosmopolitans
and
Vogues
, and began to eye hungrily the paperbacks she'd stocked up with for the holidays and which so far she hadn't opened.

Morgan wasn't the one to dispel my low self-esteem. She was a medical doctor, and anthropology students probably weren't much higher up the social scale than hired help, as far as she was concerned. The day after we moved up to Lake Elizabeth, she asked me what my father did for a living. I considered redeploying him there and then – he was a plumber, but I could say, ‘He's a chemist', for how would she know, ever, one way or the other? But I didn't have the guts to lie.

‘Eoow!' she said, with a little smile. ‘Interesting!'

Before this conversation I had only babysat, but after it, I was asked to do some little chores – wash the clothes and put them in the dryer, and clean up the kitchen. Vacuum. Morgan didn't even ask ‘Do you mind?' She just said, ‘Ew! Rosemary! Um could you just um vacuum the bedrooms, and maybe the living room? They've gotten so dusty I can hardly breathe!' And she wafted her hand in front of her nose like Lady Bracknell when she hears about the handbag. I was to do the dusting and the rest of the housework when the Roleys were down at the lake swimming, or playing in the woods. But I was happy enough to be left alone in the cabin, even if it meant doing chores.

Anyway, I'd get through the hoovering or whatever it was I was supposed to do as fast as I could – which was pretty fast – and then I'd sit on the porch and delve into Morgan's holiday reading. As well as women's magazines, they had the
New Yorker
and
Time Magazine
. And her books were brand new ones, just out – Marilyn French's
The Women's Room
and Alice Munro's
The Beggar Maid
. I started with Marilyn French because it was a novel, which I always liked better than short stories because you can get right into a novel and live in it, sort of, whereas a short story is, I don't know, sort of in and out before you've really got used to it. Lost in it, which is what I wanted then, when I was reading. I pulled a deck chair out of the shade, where the Roleys usually sat. They hated the sun and were always trying to escape from it, but I sat where the sun was strongest, because more than anything I wanted to get a tan that would make me look more American, make me smooth and suave. Like them. I ignored the fact that my lines would never be right: I had a potato face and a blob of black curls like a crop of blackberries on top of my head. Everything about me was round. That was my problem. I was a racoon, whereas the Roleys were racehorses: fine-boned, narrow, their brown limbs like sticks of cinnamon.

Out on the porch I pulled up my skirt – Morgan liked me to wear a skirt, more maidy – so the sun could get at my blancmange legs, and I started reading, letting the sun and the breeze from the lake wash over me. I loved that, the feel of the warm air on my skin. It set things stirring, deep inside me, vague but powerful feelings and longings that I couldn't identify. Before I came here, to America, the name I put on all those yearnings was just that: America. But here I was, with as much America as anyone would ever want, and the yearnings hadn't gone away. Now they seemed to be a hunger for warm breezes, for silky water, for happiness, which was still just out of reach, just around the corner. If only I knew what it was.

So I was sitting there, my legs in the air, engrossed in an article on how to examine your genitalia with the aid of a hand mirror – it was absolutely disgusting – when Trish and Chip found me. I pushed the magazine under a cushion and pretended to be reading the novel, but she saw, all right.

They were neighbours, from the next cabin. Morgan knew them – their father was a big shot from somewhere near Morristown. They'd brought Berry for a walk once or twice.

‘Oops! Beg pardon!' he said. He was already on the porch.

‘We dropped by to say hello to Berry,' she said, in a raspy, dry voice, much more confident than his.

‘Oh,' I said. ‘She's not here. They're all out. They're down at the lake swimming. They usually go swimming at this time, before their lunch.'

I had a tendency to tell people much more than they needed to know. I was pretty sure this pair were up to no good, that they'd come to snoop around, maybe even to steal something, but all the same, I was deferring to them. It wasn't that they
looked
super-rich or anything. They dressed like most of the teenagers at Lake Elizabeth, in shorts and T-shirts. Flip-flops. She was stocky, almost fat, not one of the svelte, smooth-skinned model types. She looked rather Irish, actually, although she wasn't. He was averagely tall, with curly, reddish hair, and fair skin. Intense blue eyes, the same as Berry's. Navy blue. Even so, I didn't think he was especially handsome. Most of the young men around here were like gods, and he looked more ordinary, like a nice-enough-looking Irish boy, not like a basketball player from somewhere off the Garden State Turnpike or Route Nine Oh One. (I loved the names they had on their roads: they made them sound so important.)

‘Who are you?' she asked peremptorily. She'd no manners. And she should have known who I was because she'd been introduced to me once, down in the restaurant.

‘Rosemary.' I felt the heat of the day pressing in on me suddenly.

‘Hm,' she said, with an enigmatic pursing of her lips that was almost a sneer.

‘Uh, I'm Chip,' Chip said hurriedly. ‘Chip Johnson. And this is my sister, Trish.'

I pretended not to know. It struck me that they looked more like boyfriend and girlfriend than brother and sister. Although who'd have wanted Trish as a girlfriend?

‘What're ya reading?' Chip pointed at the book.

I told him.

Trish's eyebrows shot up. ‘I've heard of that.'

Most of the women I'd met over here spoke in hilly lines, their voices rising and falling, then rising like a ski slope at the end of the line, open and hopeful. Trish's sentences were downhill all the way, and when she finished one, it was shut and locked up for good.

She picked up the book without asking if she could and riffled through the pages.

Probably to cover his embarrassment, Chip asked me if I'd like to go canoeing with them sometime.

Trish stopped snooping in my book the minute he said this and looked as cross as a bobcat. I said I'd love to go out in a canoe, which was the truth.

In the books I'd had at home, on the sofa in our kitchen in Dublin I'd read of children who messed about in boats, who rode horses, who ice-skated, and who did a myriad other things which were off limits so completely for me that I never dreamt of asking my mother if I could do them, even though I longed to. Actually, we didn't know anybody who went out in a boat, or rode a horse.

Here at the lake they did all that stuff. Canoeing was just one of the dozens of desirable activities on offer, free to guests at the resort. Free to me. There was a harbour where all the silver canoes were lined up: they were long, with those nice turned-up pointy ends, like the shoes the prince wears in pantomimes. Smooth as silver herrings, they glided along the lakewater and it had not even crossed my mind that I could actually go out in one. But now that Chip had planted the notion in my head, I thought of it all the time. Plus, I was picking up courage from
The Women's Room
, seeing myself as an exploited female, although that I was exploited mainly by Morgan somewhat messed up the theory. Still, I asked my oppressor if I could have an hour or two to go to the canoes some afternoon when she was swimming with Berry. I'd never had the chance to do it before, I added, to strengthen my case.

‘Don't you have canoes in Ireland?' It sounded like an anthropological question. She was genuinely curious about the customs of my tribe.

‘No,' I said, although we did, naturally. I had seen them at Seapoint when I went to swim there in the summer. And on the Liffey, racing down past Islandbridge.

‘Well …' She looked at Warren, puzzled, and he shrugged. ‘If you get through your chores, I guess it's
ok
.'

‘Oh thank you!' I was amazingly happy. To be given an hour off out of twenty-four. How lucky I was!

The next afternoon I called over to Chip's cabin, which was identical to ours. He was on the porch, in the swing chair, reading. He looked up when he heard me coming up the steps.

I said hi and he looked at me in a confused way for a few seconds before he remembered.

‘Oh yeah! Canoeing, right?'

‘If that suits you,' I said, in my meek hired-girl voice.

‘Sure!' He got up slowly, and the chair creaked. ‘Give me a minute while I get my stuff.'

He was back in five minutes, in shorts and a vest, carrying a towel.

I wondered where Trish was.

‘Um,' he hesitated and then said, ‘Shopping with the folks, I think.'

My timing couldn't have been better, then.

When I remember that time, what I see is a photograph – although I haven't got a photograph of this or any of the experiences I had with Chip, since I couldn't afford a camera. He had one, of course, but he never took snaps of me. The photo in my head shows the two of us in the long silver-coloured canoe, out on the glimmering blue lake, with the bottle green trees and sombre mountains in the background. It's a lovely picture – you can't see the struggle I had to manage the paddle, Chip's disbelief that I was making such a bags of it. Or my fear that the canoe would overturn and that I'd have to clamber back onto it out of the deep water and would fail and drown. Because, as with many things that I yearned for, especially sporty things, canoeing was much harder and much less enjoyable than I'd anticipated.