Kitabı oku: «A Simple Life»

ONE

It was a pretty street in a good neighbourhood. The Stewards had seen that right away, as soon as they turned the corner from Pleasant Street into Kendrick, at the beginning of their first year in New England. The houses were a friendly distance apart, with mown grass and tidy trees between them. There were basketball hoops over the garage doors and children’s bicycles on the open porches.

‘Looks okay,’ Jack said from the back of the car. ‘Looks good, in fact.’

In fact was one of his sayings. You see was another of them, and both were copied directly from his father. Jack used them in his careful explanations of the world for his younger brother’s benefit.

‘I know that already, you don’t have to tell me that,’ Merlin would retort, conscious as always of his position as the youngest and least well-informed of his family.

‘It’s kind of neat-looking,’ was Merlin’s verdict on the house as they drew up. From the beginning he was the most determined to fit into this new world. He spooned up the language as if it were ice-cream.

‘So, what do you think?’ Matthew Steward asked his wife, after they had seen around. He was eager for her to like it. They needed a home to settle into in Franklin, a real home not a rented apartment, and Matthew wanted to have all this fixed up so that he could be free and comfortable to concentrate on his work.

‘Oh. Ye-es, I think it’s the best we’re likely to find,’ Dinah answered.

They had moved only a week ago from home in England to this stately tree-canopied college town in Massachusetts. Matthew was a scientist, a molecular biochemist. He had been invited here by the university to set up a prestigious new department and his wife and children followed behind him, bobbing in faint bewilderment in the wake of his latest success.

Dinah stood on the porch steps of the house on Kendrick Street, her head tilted as she squinted upwards. She could see snug-fitting window frames and solid timbers. Even so, the house appeared to slide out of focus and then, when she stared harder, it took on an insubstantial quality, two-dimensional, like a family home mocked up for a film set.

Jack looked from one parent to the other. ‘I like it. I really, really like it. There’s room for everything, all our stuff.’

‘Me too.’ For once Merlin did not try to argue the opposite case. The boys also wanted to feel that the decisions were safely made and that they were fixed, taking root in a place where they could leave their bikes and skateboards on the porch like these other as-yet-unknown children.

Matthew nodded his satisfaction. ‘Good. That’s settled.’

They drove back across Franklin to the realtor’s office. Dinah trailed her arm out of the window and felt the concentrated sun hot on her skin. The street had an exhausted, end-of-summer air and the cars and shops were veiled with pale dust.

The house was nice. It was white clapboard, with green shutters at the windows and a raised porch that ran all the way round. Inside there were wide pine floorboards and the family room had an open hearth. They could take their belongings out of storage. Their English furniture would look well in the house.

The Stewards became the new family on Kendrick Street.

The Kerrigans next door gave a welcome party for the Stewards, and everyone in the street came, even old Mr Dershowitz from the end house and the quartet of postgraduate students who were renting for the year while the Berkmanns were in France.

Matthew was introduced over and over as the new professor at the university.

‘What is it you do, exactly?’ Dee Kerrigan asked him.

‘I’m a molecular biochemist. My particular field is protein engineering.’

Matt grinned, the way he did. He talked about his work to Todd Pinkham from across the street and George Kuznik, their neighbour on the other side, telling them what a privilege it was to be here to set up the programme for the university.

Dinah ate the chicken with black-eye beans that Linda Kuznik had brought, and listened and smiled. There was a lot of smiling to do, and she felt the kernel of herself shifting within this shell of politeness. These people were so friendly, with their warm questions and welcoming explanations, and in return all she could feel was isolated and estranged. Home was a long way away.

No, she reminded herself, this was not like her, that was not the way to think; this is home. She could make it so.

She tried harder to be responsive. There must be a way to direct herself into the current of goodwill on which everyone else was happily sailing.

‘I did have a job, back in England,’ she said in answer to a question of Linda’s. ‘In advertising, I don’t know yet what I’ll do here. Get the house fixed up, the boys into school, do the domestic map-reading for all of us. Matt’s going to be too busy.’

‘I hear that your husband is very brilliant.’

They both looked across the room to Matthew. He was describing something to the postgraduates, and making decisive chopping gestures in the air with his capable hands as he did so. There was a ripple of laughter. At the same time Dinah noticed a rushing stream of children headed by the largest Kerrigan child. Jack was watching a little to one side, rubbing at the frame of his spectacles, where they rested on his nose.

‘Yes,’ Dinah agreed. ‘He is.’

Brilliant was the word that went with Matthew.

‘Matthew Steward is exceptional,’ people said, colleagues and supervisors and professors. ‘He is an unusually brilliant young scientist.’

Dinah had once been eager to hear this praise and had treasured it, adding it grain by polished grain to the glowing heap of her love and admiration for him. She looked down at her empty glass.

‘Have you got enough liquor over here?’ Nancy Pinkham enquired. Without waiting for an answer she sloshed out more white wine from the bottle she was carrying, and then refilled her own tumbler. She blinked at Dinah over the rim as she drank.

‘So. Settling in?’

Dinah could see without looking too hard that Nancy was getting pissed, not angry as the word would mean here and at home would need the added off, but simply and eagerly pouring wine down her throat. The distinguishing of terms and the homely associations of the expression itself cheered her up, and so did Nancy’s relaxed way with the bottle.

‘Yes, thanks. I’ve found the way to the mall and I know where to buy coffee and the best bagels.’

‘And your kids?’ Nancy asked.

Merlin had appeared at Matthew’s side. His father’s hand rested on his shoulder as he talked, but Merlin was looking around for Jack.

‘When they get into school, they’ll be fine.’ That was next week. Dinah and Matthew had already met the elementary school head, and the boys’ class teachers.

‘Sure. Listen, come over one morning and have a drink. Coffee, even.’

‘I’d like that.’

‘Mm. D’you know what?’ Nancy moved closer, so that Dinah smelt her perfume and the wine on her breath. ‘One of the graduate students said to me that you were kind of surprising-looking. For a professor’s wife.’

The disclosure implied a potential for intimacy between Nancy and herself that Dinah welcomed. The room seemed to change shape, becoming more familiar, enclosing her with all these well-meaning strangers. She forgot her separateness and found that she was laughing.

‘No pince-nez or grey hair in a pleat, you mean?’

Nancy pursed her lips. ‘Evidently.’

‘Which postgrad?’

‘Sorry. Not the cute one. One of the others.’

‘Well, just my luck.’

Nancy regarded her. She held her glass rakishly tilted.

‘I guess you make your own luck, don’t you?’

‘I suppose.’ Dinah directed her thoughts away into a vacuum, and then, once they were neutralised, let them slowly return to here and now. It was a long-practised technique.

‘Have some of this carrot cake, Dinah, won’t you?’ Dee Kerrigan asked.

‘Oh, Dee’s carrot cake is famous.’ Nancy wobbled on her high heels.

The party was slowly coming to an end. Mr Dershowitz had fallen asleep with his mouth open and his knobbed hands splayed on the arms of the chair, and there was an ominous absence of children except for the Steward boys. Jack was reading a book in the corner.

Matthew came to Dinah’s side. His hand rested on her hip, transmitting the semaphore of partners: time to leave now, wouldn’t you say? I’m ready if you are …

Dinah felt her physical connectedness to him. At that moment he was utterly familiar, solid and intelligible. Her husband. He was her anchor, her compass needle steadily indicating magnetic north. Her signals went back to him: yes, we should go now. Home to our very, very, very nice house on Kendrick Street …

They summoned the boys and said their joint goodbyes. The Kerrigans’ hospitality pursued them out of the front door and into the mild afternoon with offers of sitters and recipes and telephone numbers. As the Stewards walked the few steps across the grass beneath the sugar maple to their own door, Dinah thought that they must look like a neat, bright family in a commercial. For what? Something safe – medical insurance, breakfast cereal, building society? She played with copy lines in her head: one small step, a big jump, how many miles, miles to go before we sleep, dum dum deedum. Then she remembered with a shock that she didn’t do that any more. No more copywriting, no niche of her own. She was Matt’s wife, Jack and Merlin’s mother, this was Franklin, Massachusetts. Not London. Not Sheldon, the village in Hertfordshire where they had lived.

The heat had drained out of the air at last. The end of the summer, and the afternoon was cool with a seductive, resinous breath of autumn.

‘Enjoy yourself?’ Matthew asked her.

‘Yes. Yes, I did. I liked Nancy Pinkham.’

‘Joey Kerrigan’s a schmuck,’ Merlin said.

‘Is he? Why’s that? What does it mean, exactly?’

‘Dad, he just is, I can tell.’

Merlin’s eyesight was better than his brother’s, but the two of them were very alike. Both boys were small for their age, inwardly assertive, externally wary, inquisitive and critical. They were clever, like their father, but as yet without his practised charm. Their hair kinked at the crown in the same way. Their close resemblance and their vulnerability touched Dinah, and made her heart twist with a determination that all should be made well for her children.

The front door banged shut. It had an annoying spring closure that Matthew would have to fix. Packing cases and boxes lined the hallway.

‘Can we get a dog?’ It was Jack who asked, from halfway up the stairs.

‘No,’ Dinah said, and Matthew, simultaneously, ‘I should think so, why not?’

Because a dog is permanent. A dog says this is where we stay. I don’t want that, to be so far away, we’ve talked about it and yet not talked, and Matthew always evades me.

‘Yesss.’ Triumphant Jack punched the air with his fist. ‘Did you hear, Mer? Dad says we can get a dog.’

Only a dog, what difference will it make? We’re here now, with this house, neighbours, school for the boys, Matt’s big job. What did I tell myself, back at the Kerrigans’? That he’s my anchor, my compass needle …

Or not?

‘I’m not walking it. Not once. Not a single bloody step. Nor cleaning up after it. Right?’

Matthew leaned and affectionately kissed Dinah behind the ear.

‘Absolutely right. My lady dog-lover.’ Then he wandered away, picking up a stack of scientific journals from one of the half-emptied boxes.

Dinah walked on into the kitchen. The sun shone into this room. There was a view from the window beyond the pine table all the way up the street to Mr Dershowitz’s. The boys’ footsteps clunked on the uncarpeted boards overhead.

Dinah stood at the window, her hands resting on the sill, looking out at Kendrick Street. Matthew’s work had brought him here, and so naturally she and the boys were with him. And in truth it made no difference, did it, wherever they lived?

Using the familiar strategy, she told herself that she had her husband and two children, the promise of novelty and the possibility of new friendships. There were boxes to be unpacked, and books and pictures and familiar pieces of furniture to be arranged in rooms that would accumulate their memories, given time.

And it might even turn out that Matthew and she were not running away at all. That their paths were parallel, not divergent, not leading away into a future she was unable to decipher.

The academic year turned with the seasons through fall and the long New England winter to spring, at last, and the heat of summer. The pattern and measure of university life as it revolved around Matthew was familiar to each member of the Steward family. Matthew appointed his team and began his ambitious research programme. Work took up much of his time, as it had done in England. The boys settled into their school, accepting or rejecting the various customs of this new place with their usual clarity. It was only Dinah, with no niche of her own beyond the house and the family, who still felt an outsider as the months passed. With an oblique view of herself that somehow did not take account of her good looks or good humour, she envisaged a tall, spare and awkwardly reserved Englishwoman who seemed to move through the unmapped thickets and coverts of Franklin in the wrong camouflage, anxious to blend in for everyone’s sake, but never quite managing to do so.

And then, twelve months after they had bought the house on Kendrick, at the same turning point of the year after the summer vacation but before the fall semester began, there was another party.

The Berkmanns were back from their year abroad, and the Pinkhams were having a barbecue evening to welcome them home. Dinah had offered to help Nancy make some desserts. In the morning she drove to the Stop’n’Shop and prowled the aisles, moving deliberately out of sync with the remorseless muzak that washed over her like nausea. From time to time a disembodied voice thanked her for shopping at Stop’n’Shop and begged her to check out the week’s supersaves. Dinah read the shelf-screamers and placards and found herself thinking of grocery campaigns she had worked on in the past. It seemed very long ago, and distant, and exotic. As she stood at the checkout she wondered if she wore the same drugged look as the other shoppers.

Back home the boys pitched balls outside in the yard while she made lemon tarts and meringues for Nancy.

The house was quiet except for the dog, Ape. Matthew and the boys had chosen a barrel-bodied creature with a rough coat and beady eyes. His toenails clicked on the pine boards as he roamed the house and occasionally his tail thumped meatily against a door. Dinah knew that he stared expectantly at her back as she worked.

‘No,’ she told him without looking round. ‘Go away.’

Her voice cracked the silence. The solitude was oppressive. She looked around; the kitchen was orderly with utensils stacked in the sink and the finished desserts were laid out waiting for the evening. Dinah longed for company, for the solace of talk, with a longing that dried her throat like thirst. But Nancy would be busy with her two little girls and Dee would also be occupied with children. All the children in the neighbourhood flocked to the Kerrigans’, even Jack and Merlin. Dinah knew plenty of other people in Franklin now, but there were none she could count on in just this moment of need.

It was three-thirty.

She could drive over and call in on Matt at the lab. She smiled at the thought of surprising him. It was a while since she had dropped in there. She heard his accounts of how the research was progressing, but she wasn’t quite sure of the latest developments.

The idea took hold. She could say hi to the team, most of whom she knew, and then perhaps Matt and she might even go for a coffee. Years ago, before the children, she sometimes used to look in on him at his lab in London. Through one of the portholes in the swing doors she would catch sight of the back of his head and his shoulders hunched over a rack of test-tubes or a set of DNA sequences. He would look up and see her and wave her over. Then they would walk downstairs to a canteen, and laugh and drink urn tea at a table decorated with chipped formica and a crinkled tin ashtray.

Outside, Dinah called across to the boys.

‘I’m going over to see Daddy for an hour. Don’t leave the street, will you?’

‘Yeah, Mom.’

They were old enough now. Jack was ten and Merlin nearly nine.

She drove her Jeep along Pleasant and turned across Main under the traffic lights, and from there swung into the central square. There was a wide green with handsome trees enclosed by solid, pinkish brick buildings. Franklin was proud of its history, and there were a number of tasteful shops on the green selling souvenirs and pamphlets about the original settlers and notable sons of the town. The campus of the University of Massachusetts at Franklin extended from the far side of the green, beyond a pair of tall stone pillars and a ponderous statue of the Founder. The buildings were dignified, with stone steps and massive doors and pediments with clocks that reflected the sun in discs of gold. There were libraries and chapels and memorial theatres facing each other across inevitable smooth lawns; this was the face of the university that was featured in prospectus photographs.

Matthew’s part of the foundation was housed in one of a series of big, glassy blocks discreetly separated from the photogenic old buildings by a belt of trees. These newer facilities were a world away from the mousy warren of stairs and ancient cubbyholes where he had worked in London, although Matthew seemed barely to notice the difference.

Defiantly she left the Cherokee in a convenient space labelled faculty members only, and strolled across the grass towards the science blocks. The steps and lawns and student parking lots were deserted and somnolent in the sun. It would be another week before the students came crowding back in time for Registration Day. The clock on the James Randall Hallett Library struck four behind her, triggering a series of associations. The church clock in the village, back at home. Vicarages and English tea. Gardens with roses and honeysuckle. Fields with gates, and white-laced hawthorn hedges.

Dinah walked faster, digging her hands deeper into the pockets of her skirt. Her hair was pulled into a thick plait that felt weighty and hot at the nape of her neck. No, not plait, braid. Bangs. She marshalled the different words, distracting herself by doing so.

The road curved through the shadow of the trees. There were huge, elegant conifers here with branches like trailing skirts that looked black in the bright light.

There was more grass in front of the new buildings, a curving bank of it, and across the grass a scatter of people. The senior members of the various faculties pursued their research throughout the year, so there were more parked cars here, and the doors of the dining commons were open.

Dinah headed diagonally across the lawns. In front of Matthew’s building a handful of people were playing frisbee. She watched a boy in a baggy white shirt leap up and twist in the air to make a catch. Several voices called out and then the disc floated on from his hand in a smooth arc. All the figures were leaping now, their hair and clothes rippling and Dinah imagined how a director might freeze the frame to capture a single image, a blurred smiling face in a swathe of hair and an outstretched hand to signify, what, youthful abandon, confidence, freedom?

For the life that you live.

Perfume, trainers – sneakers – or low-fat yoghurt?

She was smiling with pleasure at the sight of the frisbee players when she realised that one of them was Matthew.

He was wearing khakis and a blue shirt that had pulled loose, and a peaked baseball cap she had never seen before. It was jammed low over his forehead to keep the sun out of his eyes and his hand was reaching up in a salute as he called out.

‘Sean! Over here, look.’

Sean Rader had been part of Matthew’s old team in London. It was part of the agreement Matt had made that he should be able to bring two of his key people over to New England with him. Dinah had met Sean often, back in London. He was a small, tense man with a corrugated frown. And now he was out in the four o’clock sunshine playing frisbee and shouting. These were all people who worked with Matthew. The boy in the white shirt was a technician, and there was a little dark-haired woman PhD and Jon Liu, Matt’s deputy director, and half a dozen others.

The frisbee skimmed again on a long curving path towards Matt. He caught it two-handed and as he leapt in triumph he looked to Dinah so taut and springy, and so unquestionably comfortable within himself and in his place, that the coloured lenses of familiarity fell from her eyes.

The naked vision made her shiver in the afternoon’s heat.

How was it that she had driven across town needing to talk to this man rather than that one, or another altogether? She was gazing at a stranger, a man she didn’t know in any way, who lived a life with which she was unacquainted.

Disorientation rocked her. She put out a hand to steady herself in the rushing air.

Someone had sent the disc spinning away on the wrong trajectory. There was a chorus of jeers and the players ran after it in an eager pack. The woman PhD stumbled on the bank and landed on her outstretched hands, but she pushed herself up again and ran on, anxious not to be left out. The shadow of his cap’s peak cut sharply across Matt’s face.

Dinah did not want him to see her here. She could only think of getting away before anyone noticed her. She shrank backwards, two or three steps, then turned and fled for the shelter of the trees.

‘It was only a frisbee game,’ Nancy said. ‘Why are you so angry?’

They were in the Pinkhams’ yard, laying out cutlery and paper napkins. Nancy had had her hair cut in the summer and it stood out in a cottony floss around her face, making her look not many years older than her little girls. ‘Even Todd plays it.’

‘It wasn’t the game. I’m not angry.’ Dinah couldn’t express to Nancy the failure of recognition and the confusion that had come with it, or the sense of loss at being excluded from a closed circle of shared interest and common purpose that mocked what her marriage had become.

Matt was happy here.

How had that obvious fact somehow escaped her? She was lonely; Matthew was considerate and careful of her, almost as if she were an invalid, but on his own account he was happy.

‘Damn it. Nancy, I sound a miserable shrew, don’t I?’

‘Uh-huh. You don’t deserve him. And oh boy, are you a misery. You never come over here and make me laugh when I’m ready to scream, do you? You aren’t funny or cute or a great mom or anything?’

‘Aren’t I?’

‘Shit, Dinah, what’s wrong? You know you are.’

Simple. On the face of it.

Dinah shook out a gingham cloth and twirled it like a matador cape. The boys were up in the trees hanging candle lanterns from the branches. Todd had lit the barbecue and there was the scent of charcoal. Later there would be a full moon.

‘I miss home,’ she offered pathetically, trying to explain something away. She patted the cloth over a table and smoothed the wrinkles.

‘Sure you do. Anyone would.’

‘About Matt, you know? There’s all this talk of how busy he is, and the research, and all the other administration work to keep up with and the travelling to lectures and conferences and the pursuit of funds. And then I go round there and they’re all playing bloody frisbee?’

‘Listen up. That’s the way it is. You have to let them have their importance. It’s the same with Todd, the hospital hours and the crises and being the only one who can do anything right. They have to show us they’re out there hunting and gathering. They’re men, aren’t they?’ Todd was an intern at the local hospital.

Nancy’s plump-cheeked face was smooth and shining within the halo of hair. Dinah felt a surge of affection for her and ashamed of deflecting her friendly concern with only a sliver of the truth.

They had not become close friends. Nancy made Dinah feel cynical and partial and foreign. They spent a good deal of time in and out of each other’s houses, and Dinah was sparky and ironic in her company, but it was as if with her clothes and manners and eccentric theories of motherhood she was playing the role of a certain kind of Englishwoman to meet Nancy’s expectations.

‘You’re right, darling. Men are men and all too explicable, and woman are supreme beings full of wit and insight and beauty. Now then, where shall we put all this bread?’

‘French loaves, if you don’t mind. Maria Berkmann has only been back for four days but I think if I have to listen to any more about Lyon and Côtes-du-Rhone and TGV pronounced tay jay vay, I shall start hollering.’

‘Thanks for the warning. Otherwise I might have put the noise down to the hopelessly unGallic Californian Chardonnay.’

Laughing together, the two women went on laying out plates and knives.

When they finished Nancy said, ‘You don’t want to worry about Matt. Just let him get on with what he wants to do because he’ll do it anyway, regardless.’

That much was true. Matt always got what he wanted. He worked out in his methodical way precisely what it was, and as soon as he had identified it he went ahead and got it. He was never blurred, never impetuous or unconsidered. Dinah knew him so well, and yet he could reveal himself to her as a total stranger.

‘You’re probably right.’

‘I know I’m right.’ Pleased with herself, Nancy gave a little affirming nod. ‘I’ll tell you something else. You should do something for yourself, instead of just for your husband and kids. You should get yourself a job.’

‘Right. Hillary Clinton could probably use a little help. I’ll call her.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘Nancy, I know you are. Thank you.’

Todd appeared dressed in a lemon-yellow Ralph Lauren Polo shirt. Nancy turned to him at once.

‘Todd, are you planning to barbecue tonight or do I have to do everything?’

Dinah went home to change her clothes and tidy the boys.

‘Clean T-shirt, Jack.’

‘I don’t want to change. I don’t think it’s necessary, in fact. This one’s good enough.’

‘All right.’

‘So if Jack doesn’t have to, then I shouldn’t have to either.’

‘All right.’

‘When’s Dad getting home?’

A minute later they heard his Toyota drawing up, and Matthew banged through the front door. The spring was still not fixed. His blue shirt was tucked in again and he was bare-headed. The boys leapt at him and he looked over their heads to Dinah.

‘I like that dress.’

She smoothed the bright yellow linen with one hand. She had dressed carefully, but Matt had seen the outfit a dozen times before.

‘Busy day?’ she asked.

‘Yep, pretty busy. The usual.’

‘You’ve got time to shower before the party.’

We are so careful of each other, Dinah thought. Solicitous, as if we have some sickness between us that is never mentioned, even though the pain gnaws.

Matt groaned. ‘I’d forgotten the party.’

He made for the stairs, with a child hopping on either side. Watching him, Dinah saw that his shoulders were hunched and there was a prickle of grey in his hair. She remembered the lithe man across the grass who had seemed a total stranger to her, and tried to knit together the two images. They made an uncomfortable hybrid. We are Matt’s responsibility, she thought. He shoulders the weight dutifully. And work is his resort and comfort. When did it happen, this switch?