Untold Story (11 page)

“September, my brother and his family are visiting,” said Tevis. “If it doesn’t clash with them . . .”

It had taken Lydia a while to realize it but she’d been wrong about this country. People moved around, lived far from families, invented new lives, but they didn’t forget their pasts. This was a transient society. But there was an invisible glue that held it together in ways she hadn’t seen at first, when she herself had been drifting from town to town. Suzie had her high school reunion. Lydia knew she would move mountains to get there. It gave her a warm, sad feeling in her chest. She crossed her eyes at Oscar, still sitting on her knee, and he stuck out his tongue, which was coated with quiche.

“Oh now, listen,” said Amber. “What happened to that frog you were playing with?”

“Oops,” said Oscar.

The other kids took a sharp intake of breath and looked at each other.

“Maya?” said Suzie.

“Serena?” said Amber.

Oscar slid off Lydia’s lap and ran for the stairs. “Don’t none of you guys remember?” he called back. “We left it in Mom’s bedroom.”

Back at home Lydia looked in the mirror in the bedroom. She tipped her head forward to examine the roots of her hair. They were brown but not as dark as the rest. If she let it all grow out she would end up mousy, not blond. She’d always had it colored and highlighted before. She examined her nose. Were the nostrils uneven? Amber had said it was a “telltale sign” of cosmetic surgery. Surely nature was asymmetrical sometimes. There were wrinkles around her eyes, not crow’s-feet, maybe more like sparrow’s or wren’s. Her upper eyelids, which were puffy in the mornings, looked fine by the afternoon. It was great to have her old eyes back. When she’d moved to Kensington she’d decided not to wear the brown lenses anymore. Ridiculous how long she’d persisted with those. Maybe it was time to go blond again.

But she shouldn’t get too careless. The ten-year anniversary was coming up. She hadn’t seen anything yet in the magazines but she’d hardly looked. Only that one time at Amber’s store. There would be some commemoration, surely, and it would involve her boys. She had tried her best to do as Lawrence said and not follow them obsessively. (Dear, sweet Lawrence, your advice lives on, through the long decade!) She had checked on their progress, knew all their milestones, pictures from the sports field, the last day of school, the first day of university, graduation, how handsome they looked in their military uniforms. Year by year she had seen how they had thrived, those motherless boys.

She had a fantasy. She lived it over and over again. They would be here in this house and she would pick their clothes off the floor, intervene in their squabbles, tell them off for drinking out of the milk carton. No butler. No maid. No boarding school. No Balmoral to keep them from her in the holidays. They’d come in late and raid the refrigerator and put their arms around her and lift her clean off the floor. She’d roll her eyes and say, now one of you turn on the dishwasher when you’re done, I’m going up to bed. It was only a fantasy. When she left, and in the early days, she had thought she would be able to make it come true eventually. Now she knew she couldn’t, although sometimes she pretended not to know. It was more bearable that way.

Lydia went out of the bedroom and down to the kitchen and stared at the computer, which wasn’t turned on. She’d find what she wanted on there. She would never stop. The deal she had made with herself was that she would receive the bulletins when they came her way, like a distant aunt receiving a round-robin letter twice a year. To stalk them over the Internet would be unhealthy, and of no benefit to them. Maybe it was a stupid rule still to be following, as pointless as the brown lenses that she’d worn for years longer than she’d needed to.

When she was feeling this way she knew that what she should do was go for a swim. She checked the time. Five o’clock. Half an hour until the drugstore closed. She could make it in time to buy up an armful of magazines. There was bound to be a photograph or two.

She picked up her car keys, and Rufus, at the sound of them, headed for the front door.

“Clever boy,” she said.

A sense of dread came over her like a clammy hand pressed over her nose and mouth. She had to sit down on a stool. How could she have left them? She was inhuman, despicable.

Judgment Day. Again.

Rufus trotted back and gave her a look, as if to say, that wasn’t funny.

Mothers didn’t leave their children. It was some kind of deformity she had. An abnormality of the soul. Maybe it just ran in the family. Hadn’t her own mother left? She hadn’t been able to take the children, which wasn’t her fault. But Mummy was a bolter, anyway.

Stop it, she told herself, stop it. “Rufus,” she said, “we’re going right now.”

Why had she bought this car? It was too big. She’d thought it would be useful for picking up supplies for the shelter, but most everything got delivered and it was just another bad judgment she’d made. If she couldn’t get the small things right, how could she judge the big things in life?

Rufus draped himself over the hand brake and pushed his head onto her knee.

She walked up Albert Street toward the drugstore, counting her blessings, even though she knew that never worked. It never worked in the old days either, when she’d had everything, the world at her feet, supposedly. She browsed through the books above the magazine shelves to see if there was anything new. Most of it was rubbish—thrillers, horror, true crime, and swaths of cheap romance. She was going to buy one anyway, and chose a paperback with a picture of a young woman with a flower behind her ear. It had gold embossing on the cover which, she had discovered, was always a terrible sign. But it was like having a sweet tooth. Fine to give in to the cravings now and then. It would see her through this evening, no worse than sitting down with a big bar of chocolate.

There were twelve magazines she could buy and she stacked them all up. The cashier said, “Treating yourself today?”

“I suppose I am, Mrs. Deaver,” said Lydia.

Mrs. Deaver wore horn-rimmed glasses and a knitted skirt and jacket. She looked more like a retired schoolmistress than a store clerk. “Is it the time of the month? Lot of girls come in here and buy a stack, along with a box of Tampax.”

“Just going to curl up for the evening,” said Lydia.

“You do that, my dear. That’ll be seventy dollars and twenty-five cents. Are you sure you want them all? You’ll find it’s the same stories over again.”

Lydia paid and went out. Carson was walking along on the other side of the road. If he saw her, would he stop? Would he see her? Her heart was racing. How pathetic. She was going to walk straight to the car and drive home.

Rufus darted out across the road before she could stop him.

Carson picked him up and got a big lick on the nose.

“I have something that belongs to you,” he said, when he’d come over to her side of the street.

“Thank you,” said Lydia. “He’s pretty keen on you.”

“I know. I thought maybe you were as well.”

“Maybe I am,” she said.

“Has anyone ever told you how astoundingly beautiful your eyes are?” He put Rufus down. “That’s one question I already know the answer to.” He rubbed the back of his neck. Lydia wanted him to rub hers too. He said, “I think I overreacted this morning. I’m sorry.”

She had been horrible to him this morning, and now he was apologizing to her.

“It was my fault,” she said. “As soon as I said it I wanted to take it back.”

“We could have discussed it, if I hadn’t gone off into my Iron John act. . . . That’s a lot of magazines you’ve got there. Thought you didn’t like those things.”

Lydia looked down at the stack in the crook of her arm. “I was thinking about a different hairstyle. I might get some ideas.”

Carson reached out and stroked her hair. “Really? I think it suits you as it is.” He pulled her gently toward him and she rested her head on his shoulder. It wasn’t a problem that he asked her questions. The problem was that she wanted to answer them.

Chapter Nine

31 January 1998

Here is a conundrum. My days are numbered. I am wishing these days away. They do drag on. I know that is because I am waiting to see her again. I have thought many times of bringing the trip forward but I believe that would not be right, dictated by my needs and desires and not hers.

What I ought to do is work. But I have scant appetite for it and what will the world be missing without my belabored pontifications on the dodge and feint of diplomacy across the pond? I remember when I first started lecturing, an undergraduate put up his hand toward the end of the seminar. “What would you say is the point of history? I mean, what is your personal view? Do we, like, learn from it so the same mistakes aren’t made over again?” I smiled at that. I doubtless gave some fatuous reply about the telling of truth and the historian’s role as mere impartial observer. The naive question is often the most telling, which is why we brush it aside. The point of my book? No one, thank goodness, will ask me that.

I had thought, when I began it, that this diary would allow me to clear my head, so that I could get back to work on the magnum opus. I write these pages and then reflect, and reflect again. March does seem a long way off. But only to me. I must remind myself that she is not sitting there in North Carolina waiting anxiously for me to arrive.

1 February 1998

We remained ten hours or so in the motel. The entire place was designed so that the clients and staff never set eyes on each other. We ordered a meal, chicken and salad, that was left behind a service hatch in the anteroom. After that we again drove on in the dark. I half expected roadblocks, and to see billboard signs, reading
Princess of Wales kidnapped.
Of course there was no such thing. I tuned in to the radio, my Portuguese is passable, and it was the headline news. “They’re talking about me,” she said, “aren’t they?” I said I would switch it off just as soon as I knew the situation. She turned her head to the window.

I had caught her expression, though, and it wasn’t tears in her eyes, it was defiance.

The most difficult judgment of my life has been whether this “little plan” of ours should be implemented. Would it be the most extreme expression of her recklessness, one from which there would be no possible recovery? At what exact point would the line be crossed? Even as we were driving it occurred to me that we could turn around and go back. Say she had kept a rendezvous with me, wanting to explore a little of the country away from the media glare. There would be an uproar of course, more questions about her mental health, a storm of comment and fury about the conduct of the mother of the future monarch and those with whom she chose to consort. But it wasn’t too late. I said as much.

She shook her head. “This wasn’t a game.”

She is simply the most extraordinary woman. The strictures of royalty, of motherhood, of overbearing fame—those things that should have kept her behavior in check—made her progressively more reckless. I remember a few years ago when she was on an Austrian ski trip (Lech, I think it was), getting a call from her bodyguard. He pleaded with me to make her see reason. How could he do his job? The princess had disappeared from the hotel by jumping from a first-floor balcony into the snow, a drop of at least twenty feet. She had stayed out all night, one presumes with her paramour. I think she herself feared how far she would go, how extreme she would become, if she didn’t extricate herself from that life.

2 February 1998

I was compelled to leave her in Belo Horizonte after two days—despite the fact that she had begun to unravel somewhat. I had to travel back to Pernambuco and return the boat that I had hired, as just another tourist, for a week. It doesn’t do to leave loose ends. From there I went back to Washington, where I was supposed to be buried in the Library of Congress, hard at work. I picked up, as I knew I would, a dozen or more messages.

My headache was intense. I spent the day lying down in the dark. The change in air pressure on the flight was only partly responsible. The first time I flew after the diagnosis—it was a short hop to Rome—I thought perhaps I would die on the plane. After all, my physician had said she could not advise it. Though neither had she advised against. Will it make the tumor worse? I asked. “There is no evidence,” she said, “that air travel will predispose such tumors to grow or bleed. The risk is one of medical isolation. I’d be inclined to stay on the ground.” Always hedging her bets. She possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of the brain and its malignant growths, does Dr. Patel. When she is able to speak in the abstract, as sometimes I encourage her to do, she can grow quite animated—the joy of speaking to a fellow PhD holder, though our fields are worlds apart. But ask her anything practical as it relates to my own condition and she grows rather sullen, as if I am trying to catch her out.

I thought it would be politic not to mention my anaplastic oligodendroglioma (what anagrammatic charms!) to the airlines when booking the flights. Naturally I would be mortified if I caused any inconvenience by keeling over in midair, but needs must, as the saying goes. I’d read up on civil litigations about passengers who had made similar disclosures and were subsequently denied the right to board.